Will The Ukraine War Escalate If The U.S. Sends Arms?

Ukrainian serviceman guards an area on front line at industrial zone of Avdiyivka. Reuters

Brian Milakovsky, National Interest: The Real Danger of Sending U.S. Arms to Ukraine

Putin could regard U.S. arms transfers as a symbolic test of who dictates conditions in the Donbass warzone.

In 2015, after spending several months in the frontline zone I wrote that Ukraine desperately needs a “lousy peace” and not an arms race. Two years and several thousand deaths later, the idea of supplying Ukraine with U.S. arms has resurfaced.

As a humanitarian worker whose greatest desire is to see the intolerable misery of Ukrainian civilians come to an end, I grapple with these questions: Would American arms increase the price of Russian aggression, causing Moscow to scale back its military project in the Donbass and saving civilian lives? Or would they incite a new round of escalation and a flood of new arms into the region?

The stakes of this question are incredibly high for Donbass civilians. With both sides placing their heavy artillery adjacent to residential areas (according to the head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring mission in the region), every escalation means more death and destruction for a population already traumatized by three years of war and civil strife.

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WNU editor: From what I have been reading in the past few months .... there is now a strong desire from both sides to resume the war. But what has stopped such a conflict from exploding into a full scale war is the lack of confidence in Kiev that they would not receive the support from the West to sustain such a conflict over a period of time. The same can be said about the Russian Ukrainians in the east, and their uncertainty on how Putin will react if they start a new war. That is why I am worried that if the U.S. starts shipping arms .... the government of President Poroshenko will see this as a green light to resume the war ....  and considering how he has behaved in the past, Poroshenko will order a new offensive. Will this resumption in the war favour the Kiev government? I personally doubt it. The rebel regions of eastern Ukraine are now heavily militarised .... a resumption in the conflict will only bring massive casualties, and it will not change the dynamics on the ground The big impact will be political .... a new war will terminate any hope for peace talks for generations, and the bitterness (as bad as it is now) .... will intensify on both sides making any compromise or reconciliation impossible for decades.