By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, March
01, 2022
You probably saw the video of the Ukrainian man carefully
moving a landmine that he found on a bridge with his bare hands, while smoking
a cigarette. (Note that Russia has not signed
the international treaty banning the use of land mines.)
That’s probably how a lot of world leaders
feel this week — there’s an unstable and delicate piece of ordnance in front of
them that must be dealt with, but one mistake could make the whole thing
explode.
Way behind schedule and frustrated by
heavy Ukrainian resistance and logistical problems, the Russian military
shifted to a new, more brutal approach that is a war crime: targeting
civilian areas. “Live-cam footage from Kharkiv’s central
Freedom Square showed a missile landing just outside the local government’s
headquarters, with a fireball charring nearby buildings and cars. Local
officials said there were fatalities.” You can see deeply unpleasant video of
the attack here — one moment there’s a stately government administration
building at an intersection, and the next there’s a giant orange fireball.
Beyond that, Human Rights
Watch has documented the Russians using “a 9M79-series
Tochka ballistic missile with a 9N123 cluster munition warhead” just outside a
hospital in Vuhledar, killing four civilians and wounding another ten.
Russia’s military has now assembled a
convoy of vehicles 40 miles long (!) that, as of this writing, is just 15 miles
from Kyiv.
When contemplating what that 40-mile-long
convoy of Russian tanks, artillery, and other vehicles could do to the city of
Kyiv, remember the
fate of the Chechen capital of Grozny in 2000:
Russian
soldiers did not capture Grozny. They obliterated it.
Apartment
houses along Lenin Prospekt have been pulverized. Minutka Square, once a
bustling plaza, has been blasted beyond recognition.
It is hard
to find a single structure in the city center that has not been wrecked by a
bomb, damaged by artillery or raked by gunfire. . . .
Russia’s
acting president, Vladimir V. Putin announced on Sunday, with fanfare, that
Russian forces had finally taken the city from rebels trying to break away from
Russia. What he did not say was what the government planned to do with the
ruined city and traumatized population. . . .
If new
city guides were to be issued, they would describe Grozny in terms of military
weaponry, not architecture.
The gaping
holes in apartment complexes are classic signs of artillery. Mounds of rubble
are remnants of large buildings collapsed by bombs. Gashes in the city streets,
which have disemboweled the city’s underground utilities and pushed severed gas
and water pipes toward the sky, seem to be the work of surface-to-surface
missiles. Even monuments have been blown off their pedestals.
Grozny
looks more like Stalingrad after World War II or Guernica after the Spanish
Civil War. There are hardly any residents on the streets, but Russian officials
say thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, remain.
Vladimir Putin has already demonstrated
that he’s willing to level a city and slaughter thousands of civilians to
achieve his objectives. And that was back when everyone felt he was sane, at
least by the standards of Russian leaders.
Which leads to the next landmine: the
state of Putin’s mind. If you’re freaked out at the thought that a man losing
his marbles commands the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, so is the U.S.
intelligence community. Figures
who have met with him before, such as Finnish president Sauli Niinistö, say
Putin is acting differently lately. The cold, calculating, stone-faced KGB man
is now offering angry tirades full of historical grievances. Some observers are
wondering if Putin really believes his own unhinged rhetoric that the Ukrainian
government is full of drug-addicted neo-Nazis. And Putin is keeping so
much distance from other people in his public meetings that I wonder if it is less fear of Covid-19 than fear of
assassination by underlings he does not trust.
So far, the Russian invasion is
demonstrating all kinds of miscalculations on the part of Russia’s leaders.
They drastically underestimated the Ukrainians’ will to resist conquest. They
believed their own fantasies about being greeted as liberators. The invading
troops were given little or no intelligence before the operation began. (There are
reports that Russian troops were given food rations that expired in 2015.) Logistics are always a challenge in war, but the Russians’ ability to
keep their vehicles fueled and moving is proving to be a consistent and
widespread problem. Putin either didn’t care about how the world would respond
or he counted on the world being more apathetic or sluggish in its response.
Are Putin and his military advisers getting
accurate assessments from Russian intelligence? Is Putin getting the full
picture from his own military leaders? Has Putin been surrounded by yes men for
so long that he can’t differentiate between what he wants to see and what’s
actually there?
Considering recent events, can anyone say,
with any real certainty, what Putin is and is not capable of anymore? As noted
yesterday, Russian military
doctrine calls for using nuclear weapons “in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional
weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian
Federation.” In other words, if Russian leaders fear they are about to experience
a critical defeat, they can use a battlefield nuke to “de-escalate” the
situation. Yes, Putin’s decision to put his nuclear forces on higher alert
might be saber-rattling to intimidate the West. Or . . . it might be a sign
we’re dealing with a man who thinks a mushroom cloud would finally put his
enemies in their place.
The easiest way out of this dire crisis is
for some other Russian leader to see the worsening calamity engulfing his
country, conclude that Putin will destroy the country in pursuit of lost Cold
War glory, and “retire” him in some suitably traditionally Russian way. But we
in the West can’t count on that, and while it’s hard to imagine a Russian
leader worse than Putin right now, there’s no guarantee that whoever replaces
him will be a considerable improvement. You don’t climb to the top of the food
chain in the Russian government by being a nice guy.
The other landmine is what’s going to be
left of Ukraine and Russia after this fierce conflict ends. No one can deny
that the Russian government deserves the fiercest retribution — and Western
sanctions are rapidly disconnecting the Russian economy from the rest of the
world.
Today in Europe, French finance minister Bruno Le
Maire made the implied threat explicit:
“We will
bring about the collapse of the Russian economy,” he told a French broadcaster.
“The economic and financial balance of power is totally in favor of the
European Union which is in the process of discovering its own economic power.
“We are
waging total economic and financial war on Russia,” he said. According to an
AFP news agency report of his interview, Mr Le Maire acknowledged that ordinary
Russians would also suffer from the impact of the sanctions, “but we don’t know
how we can handle this differently”.
For a long time, the deeply paranoid
and inherently oppositional Putin has contended that the West is out to destroy
his country. By invading Ukraine with such wanton brutality, he has made his
prophecy come true.
As of this writing, the value of the ruble is just above one penny. The Russian
stock markets remain closed today. BP and Shell
are divesting from partnerships with Russian oil companies. The Russian
government is trying to ban Western companies from abandoning investments in
Russia, but all that is going to do in the long
run is ensure no Western company invests in anything Russian again for a long,
long time.
With all of that said, Andrew
Stuttaford wonders if the average Russian will feel the pinch as much as the
wealthy; in short, the average Russian has less
distance to fall. Andrew wonders if the bank lines understate “the resilience
of the ‘silent majority’ (seemingly an important source of Putin’s support)
outside the biggest cities, who have missed out on much of the prosperity
enjoyed in a Moscow or St. Petersburg. Times have always been tough; if they
become a bit tougher, well. . . .”
No doubt we need to punish Russia
severely, but we’ve got to maximize the punishment on the regime and minimize
the punishment on the average Russian citizen. Yesterday, I wrote that “Forcibly
impoverishing the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the
world feels like a formula for more trouble down the road.” In response, the
foreign-policy geniuses of Twitter called me Neville Chamberlain and contended
I was being paid by the Russian government. What’s amazing is that the people who know about Neville Chamberlain
somehow didn’t read the history-book chapters about how the treatment of
Germany after World War I set the stage for the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Finally, I remain
surprised by the number of people who want NATO to establish a no-fly zone over
Ukraine. For a no-fly zone to mean anything, NATO
would have to enforce it, which would require NATO pilots to fly over Ukraine
and, presuming Russian jets and other planes did not leave Ukrainian airspace,
shoot them down. I have little doubt that the best NATO pilots could beat the
best Russian pilots in dogfights — or at least, our guys would win those fights
quite often. But the question then is how the Russians would respond against
NATO.
We want to help our friends the
Ukrainians and we want to avoid World War III with a
nuclear-armed enemy. Creating a NATO-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine
represents entering the war on Ukraine’s side — and then the battlefield
spreads all over Eastern Europe, to say nothing of cyberattacks hitting much
closer to home.
Now, if Russian forces cross over into
Poland, or Slovakia, or Hungary, or Romania, or any other NATO-member nation,
that’s a completely different story; NATO forces have the right to respond, and
I fully expect they would with lethal force.
In other words, our futures depend upon
Russian military forces knowing exactly where the borders are.
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