National Review Online
Wednesday, December 01, 2021
By all indications, Russia is preparing a winter
assault on parts of Ukraine that it left untouched when it annexed the Crimean
peninsula and launched a hybrid-warfare campaign against the Eastern Donbas
region.
Vladimir Putin and his ideological allies have spent the
past several months making the case for absorbing Ukraine. Per the head of
Ukraine’s defense-intelligence service, Moscow had, as of mid November, placed
some 92,000 troops on its border with Ukraine. That’s fewer than the over
100,000 soldiers it moved there during a similar buildup in the spring, but
this time, there’s much more military equipment positioned for a potential
invasion, and these forces have also taken new positions. Russian troops are
thought to be capable of flooding into launching points already equipped with
heavy weaponry to begin an assault, all within one or two weeks’ time.
An attack would likely come early next year, around
January or February. That’s what multiple Ukrainian officials have told
outlets, including National Review, and it’s what the
U.S. intelligence community has predicted. Ukrainian officials have also said
that a conventional military assault will only follow a successful
political-destabilization campaign on the inside — and such an effort might
well be underway. In recent days, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has
claimed that Kremlin agents are working with a prominent oligarch to carry out
a coup, and the domestic political situation could well get uglier over the
next two months as Russia ramps up its hybrid-warfare campaigns within the
country.
There’s still time to force the Kremlin to back down and
abandon this gambit, but only if the U.S. and its allies take steps to prove
that a Russian invasion would be met with severe consequences.
Some say that Ukraine’s security is of no concern to
Americans and that it’s time to leave the fate of Ukraine to Russia. But the
consequences of a full Russian military campaign against the country would sow
chaos across Eastern Europe, potentially also destabilizing NATO allies in the
region. Those countries are already grappling with a migration crisis
manufactured by Putin and the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. If
those leaders had it their way, Poland and other Eastern-flank countries would
be hosts to a massive humanitarian catastrophe not unlike what Europe
experienced a few years ago. In threatening an invasion of Ukraine, Russia is
not just undermining a free country’s sovereignty; it’s dialing up the chaos
across a European continent in the grip of a gas-supply crisis. This turmoil
would be a disaster in its own right, not to say a major distraction as
Washington faces down the threat emanating from Beijing.
The first priority should be President Biden abandoning
the feckless glide path toward appeasement on which he’s been the past several
months.
Slowly, deliberately, and surely, the White House has
eased U.S. pressure on the Russian government on multiple fronts. The
administration denounces the Nord Stream 2 Russian-backed pipeline that
threatens to make existing gas-transit routes through Ukraine obsolete
(therefore removing a major obstacle to an invasion), while defending its
decision to waive sanctions on entities involved in the pipeline’s construction
and while lobbying members of Congress to abandon plans to reverse those
waivers. The president has courted his Russian counterpart, meeting him in a
summit that initiated a “strategic stability” dialogue, and reports say that an
additional summit might be in the offing. And officials talk about “placing
human rights at the center” of U.S. foreign policy, while only imposing
pinprick sanctions targeting the Russian regime.
Now, as U.S. officials consult with their Ukrainian
counterparts about what they need to stare down the Russian threat, they’ve
been reluctant to provide them with the air-defense systems and other advanced
equipment that they’re requesting. The logic, apparently, is that doing so
would be an escalation. In the same vein, the White House pressured the
Pentagon to cancel a previously scheduled hypersonic-missile test ahead of the
Biden–Putin summit in June.
But instead of waiting for a Russian invasion to strip
Kyiv of more Ukrainian territory, Biden should opt for a maximalist sanctions
package tomorrow. In an ideal world, the White House wouldn’t just drop its
objections to a proposed National Defense Authorization Act amendment that
would prevent Nord Stream 2 from ever becoming operational through tough
sanctions; the administration would impose those measures under its own
authority. Similarly, the White House should impose an additional sanctions
package targeting the people closest to the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the Pentagon
should work closely with the Ukrainians to provide them with just the sort of
weapons that they need to convince Moscow that they’re capable of inflicting
heavy costs on Russian forces — helicopters, Stinger missiles, and more.
Ukrainians are the first to say that they don’t want U.S.
troops fighting on their territory, even if that possibility were in the
offing. They’re already fighting for themselves in the Donbas, and they’re
preparing for what could be another front in this battle, in the hopes that
they’ll prevent it from happening in the first place. We have every incentive
to work with them to try to deter what would be a naked and cynical act of
aggression even by Vladimir Putin’s standards.
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