What are the driving motives in Washington and Europe to constantly pump weapons into Ukraine and push for a war that will mainly affect the livelihoods of civilian populations?

In an article in The Atlantic, a former official for the US State Department, Eliot Cohen, called for killing as many Russian soldiers as possible: "the more and faster, the better." He also openly asserted that the conflict in Ukraine is NATO's "proxy war with Russia."

Cohen also served as a counselor for Condoleezza Rice when she was Secretary of State during George W. Bush's reign. The official is known for his strong advocacy for extremist neoconservative foreign policy where he praised the Biden administration for waging an indirect war on Russia on a number of fronts, namely in the information law, economic war, and proxy war in Ukraine. He even complained that Biden should do more and escalate the conflict even more. 

The Biden administration has already sent Ukraine more than 17,000 anti-tank weapons, including Javelin missiles, as well as 2,000 stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Some of these went directly to the neo-Nazi Azov battalion. 

“The stream of arms going into Ukraine needs to be a flood,” he said in an article in The Atlantic, stating that the weapons were not enough. 

“The United States and its NATO allies are engaged in a proxy war with Russia,” he wrote clearly. “They are supplying thousands of munitions and hopefully doing much else—sharing intelligence, for example—with the intent of killing Russian soldiers.”

Cohen added on an equally explicit note: “we must face a fact: To break the will of Russia and free Ukraine from conquest and subjugation, many Russian soldiers have to flee, surrender, or die, and the more and faster the better.”

“Thus far the Biden administration has done an admirable job of winning the information war, mobilizing the NATO alliance, and imposing crippling sanctions on the Russian economy,” he continued. “It has, it appears, sped the delivery of some weapon systems to Ukrainian forces.”

Furthermore, he called on the Biden administration to send fighter planes to Ukraine, claiming that sending MiG-29 jets will not escalate the war into WWIII - officials and leaders in both the Pentagon and US intelligence disagree.

Cohen staunchly supported the devastating 2003 Iraq War and a war on Iran. 

The article provides a perspective into how elite thinkers close to Washington perceive the war in Ukraine.