Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo
People examine the damage after the shelling of a shopping center, in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 21, 2022. Eight people were killed in the attack.
The purely military part of Russia’s invasion has hit a stalemate. The Russian advance has stalled, thanks to heroic resistance by Ukrainians and defensive weapons supplied by NATO. But this is small comfort.
The West, out of fear of wider war, has allowed Putin to define what counts as a NATO war with Russia. Thus, the Biden administration has gotten into hair-splitting exercises, in which supplying the West’s most sophisticated anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons does not count as a war with Russia, but supplying planes does.
This is dangerous sophistry. It has led to a proxy war between NATO and Russia, in which the West is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, but in a limited way that doesn’t allow Ukraine to prevail or even to survive.
Achieving a stalemate has demonstrated the weakness of Russia’s vaunted military in a conventional land war. Having thrown 70 percent of its combat-ready units into this invasion, Russia cannot even conquer a neighbor with a military one-eighth Russia’s size.
But what U.S. officials are now describing as Putin’s Plan B has been evident for at least a week, and it was the same plan Putin used in Chechnya and Syria. Russia, unable to prevail via invasion, is destroying Ukraine’s cities, murdering its population, and denying civilians food and water. We are now just days away from mass starvation in Ukraine, and a wider crisis for the world’s food supply.
Despite Ukraine’s battlefield successes, NATO’s strategy has been behind the curve at every stage of Putin’s escalation. The West has provided Ukraine with just enough defensive weaponry to prevent an outright Russian military victory, but not enough to stave off a humanitarian catastrophe.
Even with combat setbacks, Putin is winning because the West has allowed him to define the terms of engagement. Meanwhile, in sham negotiations to end the war that drag on and on, it’s also clear that Putin is playing Ukraine and NATO for fools and trying to play Ukraine’s President Zelensky off against Biden.
Anonymous Biden officials were quoted as expressing bewilderment that Zelensky is sending “mixed signals.” He is asking for more sophisticated weapons while expressing some hope that negotiations might succeed. Well, of course he is. Only if Ukraine inflicts more humiliation on Russia might we get real negotiations.
It is appalling that the West keeps lionizing Zelensky, giving him standing ovations after he addresses national parliaments, but denying him what he needs to save his country.
What does he need? He needs warplanes.
Sooner or later, NATO will have to give Ukraine planes powerful enough to annihilate Russia’s invading armies. It might as well be sooner.
Otherwise, we will reach a level of disaster where even more direct military engagement against Putin will be necessary. And that will be even riskier.
By supplying sophisticated defensive weapons to Ukraine, NATO is already at war with Russia, but not in a way that will save Ukraine. Putin has already declared that he considers NATO’s supply of weapons to Ukraine as an act of war. And it is.
Sooner or later, NATO will have to give Ukraine planes powerful enough to annihilate Russia’s invading armies. It might as well be sooner.
That doesn’t mean NATO combat troops need to be engaged in Ukraine or that we should have NATO pilots engage Russian ones in air combat to enforce a no-fly zone. But that could well come if the West keeps allowing Putin to obliterate Ukraine.
It does mean Ukraine needs planes. It is also sophistry to debate whether Putin would view it as an escalation putting Poland at risk of war if Poland supplied Ukraine with MiGs that would then be replaced by U.S. warplanes. Biden killed such plans more than a week ago, but they deserve a second look.
One thing this war has proven so far is that Russia’s capacity to wage land war is far inferior to that of the West. The Biden administration is concerned that Putin, in retaliation, might invade Poland or the Baltics. But that would engage Russia in a direct war with NATO that he can’t win and would make Russia’s own soil fair game for combat.
The West is engaging in magical thinking. Maybe the generals and the oligarchs will remove Putin in a coup. Maybe Putin will come to his senses and negotiate a cease-fire. Maybe giving Ukraine offensive weapons will only make Putin angrier.
But either the West is serious about defeating Putin or it isn’t. The point of arming Ukraine is to defeat Putin’s invasion. NATO is already at war with Russia, and it is self-defeating to pretend otherwise.
There is one other potential war casualty at stake, and that is the Biden presidency. Biden began well, by smoking out and publicizing Putin’s game well before the invasion. In terms of domestic politics, Putin’s appalling actions also wrong-footed the Republicans who were divided between Trump loyalists who were Putin apologists and traditional national-security conservatives.
While Republicans are still somewhat divided, the longer the war drags on, the greater the risk that they will unite as the more hawkish party, however outlandish the specifics, and we will get into a game of recriminations about Who Lost Ukraine, namely Joe Biden. And the longer the stalemate drags on, the worse the economic impact at home and globally.
If Biden can get this war over by late spring, he will be a great wartime president, Ukraine can begin to recover, and so can the economy. If the stalemate drags on, Biden and Ukraine lose.
Biden and his advisers are right to worry about a cornered Putin resorting to nuclear weapons. He might do so, for instance, if the West crosses some line of his own definition. Or he might use nuclear weapons as an act of desperation, if it is clear that he has lost his war.
But if that is the West’s logic, then the only way to be sure that Putin won’t use nukes is to lose the war. It would be grotesque if historians were to record that Putin, despite a weaker hand and the outrage of the civilized world, outplayed the West at every step and succeeded in destroying Ukraine—and Biden.
