Vladimir Putin’s Gamble

National Review Online

Friday, February 25, 2022

 

Vladimir Putin has initiated a new era in European history with his brazen lightning strike against Ukraine.

 

Despite Moscow’s dishonest denials that an attack was imminent every time the Biden administration predicted it, there was little doubt that Putin would launch some sort of invasion, given his oft-expressed belief that Ukraine has no right to an independent existence and the size, composition, and positioning of his forces around Ukraine.

 

The only question was when exactly and how big. Beginning early Thursday morning Kyiv time, the answer came in the form of a land, sea, and air assault across the board that looks as though it seeks to take Kyiv and depose the elected government of Ukraine.

 

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, an outsider and former comedian whose abilities were in doubt when he took office in 2019, has risen to the occasion. He gave a moving speech on the eve of the invasion, directly making the case to Russians, in Russian, that Ukraine wanted peace but would defend its sovereignty and honor if it came to that.

 

Reports suggest that Ukrainian troops are indeed putting up a spirited resistance, but there is no way that they will be able to resist the superior capabilities of the Russian forces for long.

 

President Biden announced the supposedly crushing sanctions that he’s been warning Putin of for months. They are tougher than any previous round of sanctions against Moscow and will exact real costs on Russia’s government, military, and state-dominated financial, energy, and tech sectors. Yet Biden made a telling concession. He said the sanctions will take time to bite and never were meant to deter Putin, despite repeated statements previously from him and his officials that that was exactly what we sought to do. Notably, we aren’t excluding Russia from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the cooperative that enables international financial transactions. This would have exacted enormous, immediate economic pain on Russia, but the Europeans blanched at the idea since it would surely lead Putin to stop exporting the oil and gas they’ve made themselves so reliant on. Meanwhile, Germany’s suspension of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is less than meets the eye, since the pipeline was not yet operative. And, bizarrely, we are not yet sanctioning Putin himself.

 

The Russian leader’s calculation clearly is that he can weather any sanctions that will inevitably weaken as European countries flake off and the initial shock of his act of naked aggression fades.

 

The U.S. needs to do all it can to try to prove him wrong. It should push for stronger sanctions now and maintain them over time. It should work to make Russia a pariah state, expelling its diplomats and excluding Russia from as many international institutions and meetings as possible. It should pour assistance into Ukraine, in the hopes of stoking armed resistance after the current conventional fight is over. It should seek a military budget commensurate with the growing, dual challenge from Russia and China. It should further fortify the frontline NATO states, which are in Putin’s crosshairs. And it should think of what new programs and institutions we need to prevail in a new Cold War taking shape in Europe and Asia.

 

Additionally, the U.S. needs to take note of the way that the Europeans were held back by their reliance on Russian energy. One way of reducing that will be to expand our own production of oil and gas. Environmentalists like to make the point that we have only one planet. That is true, but they would do well to remember that Putin’s Russia is currently fighting a war over a part of that planet.

 

Putin is going to win this round. But military victories often contain the seeds of failure and ultimate defeat. It will be easier to install a puppet government in Kyiv than to maintain it atop a population that will be largely hostile. Ukraine is suffering a grievous blow, but nations that are proud and have a strong sense of identity can survive imperial impositions, or there wouldn’t be a nation of Poland or, for that matter, Ukraine.

 

The new era heralded by Putin’s invasion needn’t be one that he dominates or that even works out for him.