146 - "We Will Stand with You as Long as it Takes:" Saving Freedom and Ukraine
Those were President Biden’s strong words, an existential promise to Ukraine. As a brief foray Tuesday evening in a long State of the Union address devoted almost entirely to domestic policies and problems – even to micro-improving airline travel and hotel experiences – listeners might mistakenly have construed Biden’s promise as mere rhetoric.
Instead, those carefully chosen words represent President Biden finally acknowledging that the United States is in an all-out struggle to the end with Putin’s Russia, a wannabe resuscitated Soviet Union. The war in Ukraine has always been about freedom and justice in the world, not only in eastern Europe. But, until now, President Biden has tried to avoid committing the United States (and, as he said Tuesday) NATO, Europe, and the West to an uncompromising full-scale struggle against tyranny that echoes the titanic battle against Hitler and the contest against Stalinism.
President Biden has wanted to avoid World War III and anything that resembled or initiated a fight in which nuclear weapons widened hostilities well beyond Ukraine. He hesitated to supply anti-tank missiles, medium- and then longer-range howitzers, ammunition, anti-aircraft batteries, and finally modern tanks. But Ukraine’s remarkable resilience and adaptable ability to take advantage of abundant Russian military mistakes ultimately persuaded the Pentagon and President Biden that the U. S. could do much more to help. After all, Washington finally appreciated, the Ukrainians are putting themselves on the line not only for the sake of their continued existence, their language, their culture, and their determination to overcome imposed tyranny but also in order to sustain the very meaning of Western democracy.
Once the fact that resisting and now possibly defeating Putin became more than a pious hope and the full import of Ukraine’s opposition to the Russian onslaught became apparent, President Biden was able (as he said Tuesday night) to unify Europe against Putin and for the kinds of freedoms and democratic pursuits that Putin has successfully denied his own people and vainly expected to be able to take back from Ukrainians and, afterwards, from Moldovans and – if successful – from places like Latvia and Lithuania.
Not having been halted in Crimea in 2014, Putin imagined that he could re-establish the Bolshevik empire and elevate himself to a czarist place of international prominence. But, thanks to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s steady and superb leadership and his fellow Ukrainians’ courage and resourcefulness, Putin cannot achieve such goals. Even if he escapes being overthrown in an internal coup or never has to face a widespread Russian urban insurrection, he has succeeded in becoming a global outlaw.
Nevertheless, Russia is much more populous than Ukraine. It has hundreds of thousands of men, including released criminals, to throw endlessly into the perishing pits of eastern Ukraine. It can crush adverse public opinion, at least for now. Thanks to critical backing by Iran, North Korea, and even Turkey, and the successful sale of vast amounts of discounted petroleum to India and China, Putin may be able to continue warring for many months.
The war shows no signs of a near-term victory by Russia or Ukraine. Even if Russia breaks through the doughty Ukrainian defenses in the Donbas, the war will extend well into its second year and, horrible thought, even beyond. Putin cannot achieve his original goal of subjugating Ukraine and ruling over it as a revived potentate. He should realize that fact by now and begin to seek a truce.
But because he will not, and because ultimately the Ukrainian forces will gain German Leopard II, British Challenger 2, and American Abrams 1 tanks (as we wrote in recent weeks), the war will escalate and finding a way in which Putin can save face will become more and more difficult.
The next phase of President Biden’s “We Will Stand with You” will involve transferring aircraft, probably American F-16s, British Typhoons, and French Rafales. (Britain yesterday agreed to train Ukranian pilots for the jets that it intended to convey to Zelensky’s troops.) When Ukraine has these kinds of air equipment it should be able to deter the incoming missile and drone attacks that are now making life in Ukraine particularly miserable. It can also take the war into Crimea as well as deeper into Donetsk and Luhansk, attacking drone bases and missile launching pads. The Russian fleet in the Black Sea could become vulnerable.
As Zelensky told the British cabinet yesterday, “We have freedom. Give us wings to protect it.”
These scenarios mean that a valiant but better armed defense will more fully be confronting Putin’s attacking armada head on, and for many months into the war’s second year. The wider conflagration that President Biden originally sought to avoid will be with us, and enduringly, until the Russians can be pushed back across the national border.
Washington (London, Paris, Warsaw. Bucharest, Sofia, Helsinki, and the rest) cannot now turn away from a widened conflict. If Putin is desperate or foolish, he could enlarge the conflict beyond the West’s using Ukraine as a proxy force against Russia. President Biden has now – rightly and past time – established the war in Ukraine as the twenty-first century’s first crucial struggle between good and evil. President Biden could become the savior of the free world in the twenty-first century.