Soldiers from the Ukrainian special operations unit lay anti-tank mines on a forest road in the potential path of Russian troops in Ukraine’s Donetsk region (Photo AP / Efrem Lukatsky)
Five sentences summarize the war in Ukraine as it is now.
The Russians are running out of precision guided weapons.
Ukrainians are running out of Soviet-era ammunition.
The world is running out of patience for war.
The Biden administration is running out of ideas on how to get rid of it.
Flowers inside the wreck of a burned-out van that detonated an anti-tank mine, killing all three occupants, lies beside a dirt road in Andriyivka on the outskirts of Kyiv. AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko)
And the Chinese are watching.
Moscow’s shortcomings with its arsenal, which have been evident on the battlefield for weeks, are the reason relief long-term e horror short term.
Relief, because the Russian war machine, for the modernization of which he spent a lot Vladimir Putinit has been exposed as a paper tiger who could not seriously challenge NATO in a conventional conflict.
Horror, because an army that cannot fight a high-tech war, with relatively low collateral damage, will fight a low-tech warfareawfully high in such damage.
Ukraine, according to its own estimates, is suffering 20,000 victims per month.
On the contrary, the United States suffered 36,000 victims in Iraq during seven years of war.
For all his courage and determination, kyiv can contain, but not defeat, a neighbor of more than three times its size in a war of attrition.
This means that Ukraine needs to do more than just keep the Russian military in check.
You have to break his backbone as fast as possible.
But this cannot happen in an artillery war when Russia can fire some 60,000 bullets per day against approx 5,000 that the Ukrainians said they could shoot.
The Quantity, As they say, it has its own quality.
The Biden administration is supplying Ukraine with advanced howitzers, rocket launchers and ammunition, but they are not arriving fast enough.
Now is the time Joe Biden tell your national security team what Richard Nixon told him when Israel was recovering from its losses in the Yom Kippur war:
after asking what weapons Jerusalem was asking for, the 37th president ordered his staff to “will double“.”, and I add:
“Now get out of here and do the work.”
The urge to win early, or at least to retreat Russian forces on a broad front, so that Moscow, not Kiev, is calling for peace, is compounded by the fact that the weather is not necessarily on the west side.
Sanctions against Russia could damage its long-term growth capacity.
But sanctions cannot do much in the short term to undermine Russia’s capacity for destruction.
Those same sanctions also impact the rest of the world, and the price the world is willing to pay for solidarity with Ukraine is not unlimited.
The critical shortages of food, energy and fertilizerscoupled with supply disruptions and the inevitably ensuing price increases, cannot be sustained forever in democratic societies with limited pain tolerance.
Meanwhile, Putin does not seem to pay a big price for his war, neither in energy revenues (which grow thanks to the increase in prices) nor in public support (also on the rise, thanks to a combination of nationalism, propaganda and fear).
Hoping he can die soon from whatever ailment he is, is it Parkinson’s? A “blood cancer”? Or just a Napoleonic complex? – it is not a strategy.
What else can the Biden administration do?
you have to take two calculated risksbased on a conceptual twist.
calculated risks
First, as retired Admiral James Stavridis has proposed, the United States must be prepared to do so challenge the Russian maritime blockade of Odessa escort merchant ships to and from the port.
This will mean getting first Turkey allow NATO warships to transit from the Turkish Strait to the Black Sea, which could mean some uncomfortable diplomatic concessions for Ankara.
Even more dangerous, it could lead to close encounters between NATO and Russian warships.
But Russia has no legal right to block Ukraine’s last major port, no moral right to prevent Ukrainian agricultural products from reaching world markets, and it does not have enough maritime power to face the United States Navy
Second, the United States should to take Assets of the Russian central bank estimated at 300 billion dollars overseas to finance Ukraine’s military and reconstruction needs.
I first proposed it in early April, and the Laurence tribe of Harvard and Jeremy Lewin filed a compelling lawsuit several days later in an invitation-only essay for The New York Times.
The administration has cold feet because it could break US law and set a bad financial precedent, which would be a good argument. less serious circumstances.
Right now, what is urgently needed is the type of financial blow Russia that other sanctions have failed to inflict.
Which brings us to the conceptual twist:
fighting in Ukraine will have a greater effect in Asia than in Europe.
The administration can make sure that it has bloodied the Russian army enough do not invade anyone Coming soon.
This is true as far as it can be.
But if the war ends with Putin comfortably in power and Russia owning a fifth of Ukraine, then Beijing will learn the lesson. aggression works.
And we will fight for Taiwan, with its incredible human and economic cost, much sooner than we think.
The end result: the war in Ukraine is a prelude or a conclusion.
President Biden has to do even more than he already has to make sure it’s the last thing.
c.2022 The New York Times Company
Brett Stephens
Source: Clarin
