The US consensus: fight Russia to the last person in Ukraine, and maybe earth

There is bipartisan agreement that the US should use Ukraine to fight Russia to the last person in Ukraine. The only dispute is over whether the US should increasingly risk every last person on earth.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine hit the one-year mark last month, John Sullivan, the now former US ambassador to Russia, shared a corrective with his new employer CBS News. The Kremlin, Sullivan complained, asserts that the “United States is already waging” a war on Russia “through its Ukrainian proxies.” Worse, Moscow even dares to suggest that the “United States wants to fight against Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

To Sullivan, such talk is nothing more than Russian disinformation. “It's all made up,” he said.

Perhaps unbeknownst to him, one of the Ukraine effort’s most vocal champions in Washington had already celebrated what the US diplomat now dismisses as “made up.”

“I like the structural path we’re on here,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham declared in July 2022. “As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.”

Graham’s enthusiasm for using Ukraine to fight Russia to the last person offers a stark contrast to the lofty rhetoric emanating from the Oval Office. Officials like Ambassador Sullivan stick to the official White House script about a “struggle for democracy” and “defending sovereignty and territorial integrity” (void in Syria, as Gen. Mark Milley’s surprise visit to cheer on the US military occupation newly underscores). Meanwhile, their more candid neoconservative compatriots have no need for such pleasantries.