On the menu today: I wish the news were better, but the situation is grim. The best news is that the Ukrainians are fighting hard, and in the first days of the invasion, the Russians are finding tough resistance almost everywhere. But no one knows how long they can hold on, and there are some ominous signs that President Biden is going wobbly — perhaps not even continuing arms shipments to the Ukrainians. This is a contest of wills.
The Ukrainians Are Standing Firm — For Now
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is in its early stages. In the coming days, the Russian military is likely going to throw a lot more forces into the arena; war is hell, the fighting is ugly, and it’s probably going to get uglier. But after the first day of fighting, the Ukrainians are largely holding off and repelling the Russians in key spots — at least, that’s what British intelligence sees:
Russia intends to take the whole of Ukraine but the Russian army failed to deliver it main objectives on the first day of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said on Friday. . . .
Wallace said the Russian army had failed to deliver any of its key objectives, directly contradicting the Russian defense ministry which said it had achieved all of its main aims on the first day of the military operation.
“Contrary to great Russian claims, and indeed President Putin’s sort of vision that somehow the Ukrainians would be liberated and would be flocking to his cause, he’s got that completely wrong, and the Russian army has failed to deliver, on day one, its main objective,” Wallace said.
Russia, Wallace said, had lost more than 450 personnel so far.
But this morning, word is that Russian troops are in Kyiv, and the Ukrainian government is instructing citizens to make Molotov cocktails. There are reports that the Russian strategy is to get control of those airports outside Kyiv, fly in light armored vehicles, launch a massive sabotage and cyberattack, and in the chaos, capture the highest-ranking officials in the Ukrainian government or kill them. Then some Ukrainian “leaders” hand-picked by Moscow will sign a “peace agreement” that will give Russia control of the eastern half of Ukraine. And if that comes to pass, Vladimir Putin will once again stare out defiantly at the Western world and ask, “What are you willing to do about it?”
My Twitter feed is full of photos and short videos from people on the ground in Ukraine: Matthew Chance, Matt Bradley, Mohammad Abbas, Luke Harding, Christopher Miller, Eleanor Beasley, Olga Rudenko, Anastasiia Lapatina, Illia Ponomarenko, Iryna Matviyishyn — and I’ll likely add more as I find them.
We have access to more video from the war zone than ever before, but that still doesn’t help clear up the fog of war. Post by post, video by video, it’s hard to get a clear sense of who’s “winning.” What is clear is that Russia is pounding its targets with just about everything it has — cruise missiles, jet fighters, helicopters, parachuting commandos, tank columns rolling across the border. The Ukrainians on the ground must be terrified — even if it is powerful to see a Ukrainian woman going up to a Russian soldier and telling him to put sunflower seeds in his pockets, because his decomposing body will fertilize the soil when he dies.
But . . . for all that firepower, the Russians haven’t seized key sites and are running into fierce resistance just about everywhere they go. The Ukrainians don’t have much space to retreat, and they know every inch of territory they concede will probably lost for a long time. The Ukrainians are fighting with everything they have — because they have no other choice, other than submission to oppression.
This Is No Time to Go Wobbly, Biden
The single most disturbing report in the past 24 hours comes from Foreign Policy, which ominously claims that the Biden administration may not want to send more weapons and ammunition to the Ukrainians now that the war has started:
The United States is debating plans to support armed Ukrainian resistance as Russia mounts a massive invasion that U.S. officials believe is aimed at toppling the Ukrainian government, underscoring fears in Washington that Ukraine’s military could buckle under an offensive from tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.
The administration’s internal debate, described by three officials and congressional aides, has heated up, with some officials expressing caution that arming Ukrainian resistance could make the United States legally a co-combatant to a wider war with Russia and escalate tensions between the two nuclear powers. . . .
Officials and congressional aides described plans to arm a Ukrainian resistance as in the nascent stages, with the Biden administration still discussing how to provide a pipeline for weapons to the resistance if needed. Officials briefed on the matter described an intense back-and-forth debate within the Biden administration’s ranks.
If the U.S. is not willing to help keep the weapons and ammunition flowing, then it’s game over for the Ukrainians. Russia just has more forces, more planes, more tanks, more artillery, and more men. In a battle of attrition, Russia wins.
The idea that the U.S. would stand back and wait for economic sanctions to work — as Biden infuriatingly said yesterday, “They are profound sanctions. Let’s have a conversation in another month or so to see if they’re working” — because of concerns that this could legally make the United States a co-combatant is a de facto surrender to Russian aggression. Garry Kasparov is beside himself: “Pathetic. You think Putin is concerned about the ‘legal implications’ of his actions?! This is a g****** war and Ukrainians are dying and need help. Sanctions don’t stop attack helicopters. Make up for the time you wasted not arming Ukraine properly for years.”
Nor is there much sign that the Biden administration can twist arms in Europe when it really counts. To me, it means absolutely nothing for Italy to light up the Colosseum in the colors of the Ukrainian flag or for Germany to do the same with Brandenburg Gate if those two countries are the ones holding out on barring Russian banks form the SWIFT international banking system. The Ukrainian people hiding in the subway system because bombs are detonating above them don’t need blue and yellow lights on landmarks. They need European governments to put the squeeze on the Russians in every manner possible. (As I put it yesterday, “Germany and Italy teaming up once again. Not a fan of their old work, not liking the new stuff, either.”) When the American president calls up the leader of a NATO member country and says, “I really need you to do this. It is a matter of life and death,” it needs to happen.
There are other deeply disturbing indications that the Biden administration is spectacularly naïve in its approach to foreign policy:
Over three months, senior Biden administration officials held half a dozen urgent meetings with top Chinese officials in which the Americans presented intelligence showing Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine and beseeched the Chinese to tell Russia not to invade, according to U.S. officials.
Each time, the Chinese officials, including the foreign minister and the ambassador to the United States, rebuffed the Americans, saying they did not think an invasion was in the works. After one diplomatic exchange in December, U.S. officials got intelligence showing Beijing had shared the information with Moscow, telling the Russians that the United States was trying to sow discord — and that China would not try to impede Russian plans and actions, the officials said.
Did anyone in the administration really think that Xi Jinping and the Chinese government wanted to play peacemaker between Russia and Ukraine?
This is one of those situations where I really don’t want the American president to fail, even though I didn’t vote for him and have never thought highly of him. I want my kids to inherit a safer and more stable world, not a world where Americans are abandoning a different international embassy every six months.
Hesitating on arms shipments, putting no restrictions on Russian energy exports or sanctions targeting Putin personally, looking to Beijing to avert the crisis — these all look like signs of an administration looking for a low-risk, “safe” path ahead. But there is no low-risk path from here on out. You either embrace the risks of conflict or embrace the risks of acquiescence to Putin’s will. Through several administrations, we’ve tried to enact carefully calibrated half-measures of disapproval and deterrence against Putin — and everyone can see where those measures have gotten us.
You may have noticed that here in the U.S., discussions of the Russian invasion quickly morph into a defense of Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, or Barack Obama, or Tucker Carlson, or whomever.
Attempting to understand the world — to really understand it, not just find a simple and satisfying narrative of heroes and villains where the people you like are always righteous and good, and the people you don’t like are irredeemably contemptable — is difficult and almost always unsatisfying. The world is complicated, strange, surprising, illogical, and ever-changing.
Even in this circumstance — where Russia is undoubtedly the aggressor and Ukraine and its people are the victims and morally justified in any form of resistance — has its inconvenient complications. Vladimir Putin is a brutal, ruthless thug, and yet a decent chunk of the Russian public supports him, even reveres him. Perhaps the West did ignore signals of how the Russian government would respond to expanding NATO into eastern Europe. Ukraine has its own corruption problems. Both Ukrainians and Russians can and have been vicious antisemites. The history of the region is messy and complicated, and most of us Americans were taught almost none of it — if we did, we got a quick glimpse of the events of World War II in the region, and that was about it.
What’s more, if you really look at foreign policy beyond the surface level, it’s rarely satisfying, with few clean wins for the country you see as the “good guys.” (The end of the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, and a few other late 1980s/early 1990s developments probably gave Americans unreasonable expectations.) Even the best-meaning policies will have unforeseen consequences. Foreign relationships that require no moral compromises are few and far between. Our enemies are ruthless, and our allies are often feckless. Every option carries its own risks; we’re often looking for the least-bad option because no good option exists. Justice is often delayed, when it is not denied outright, at least in this world. And mistakes are paid for in blood.
It is not surprising that people, confronted with such a complicated world with so few satisfying answers, retreat into seeing the world entirely through the lens of partisan politics — where you always know who the heroes and villains are, and the right answer is whatever your leader offered.
ADDENDUM: It was a delight to join Megyn Kelly yesterday — even if the topic was spectacularly grim.