The Risks of Delay Loom Large

Putin is ready to destroy the village in order to save it.

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Putin’s war in Ukraine has entered its Grozny Phase, where the village is destroyed in order to save it.  We now see the Russians escalating use of large-scale and indiscriminate artillery barrages against civilian targets—and there should be no doubt that this is intentional, not accidental—and “thermobaric,” “vacuum,” or fuel-air explosives. If the charge about the employment of thermobaric weapons is true, it “would potentially be a war crime,” as White House press secretary Jen Psaki acknowledged.

There are situations where the use of such weapons has a legitimate military purpose. They can be highly effective against deeply entrenched fortifications such as underground command posts or cave complexes, or against large armored formations in the open. They work by first dispensing a cloud of aerosol gas or tiny metallic fragments, then setting them alight with a second explosion.  This produces tremendous overpressures and sucks the oxygen out of a large area, in effect vaporizing the area. Used against apartment blocks, it both vaporizes and terrorizes. The Russian military has been the most profligate in using both artillery- and aircraft-delivered fuel-air explosives, notably in Chechnya and Syria, where it faced resilient insurgencies. In both cases, it snatched a brutal victory from the jaws of defeat, not only rescuing the Assad regime but catapulting Vladimir Putin to the throne in Moscow in 2000.

At the moment, there is very little the Ukrainians can do to prevent or respond to this onslaught.  The immediate task for Russian ground forces is simply to protect their artillery parks outside Kyiv, Kharkiv and other cities. As the weight of the Russian air force becomes felt—these need not be precision-guided weapons—not even the dogfighting “Ghost of Kyiv” can rescue the situation.

Nor are even the most aggressive economic sanctions really responsive to this immediate moment. Nor are short-range air-defense weapons such as the Stinger or anti-armor missiles like the Javelin nor the provision of excess Sukhoi fighters from neighboring ex-Warsaw Pact militaries. Both sanctions and defensive weaponry are necessary and welcome but not sufficient.

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  1. Paul K

    I also believe military intervention by a NATO alliance, including the US, is needed. I think we’re mistaken in our attempt to avoid war; war is happening and it cannot be avoided. We are delaying the inevitable. NATO needs to defeat the Russian army in Ukraine and teach Putin this kind of aggression is unacceptable. What, exactly, is the alternative? This is what it is: Ukraine will be leveled like Chechnya (look at the pictures), rebuilt as a Russian vassal state, and Putin will look to Moldova and eventually Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Without military intervention, NATO is giving Ukraine to Putin as a sacrifice to appease him. I’m sorry but how else to describe it? Putin has turned Russia into a terror state in which there is no meaningful resistance. Change will not occur from within Russia. Putin does not care about sanctions: he will live like a czar inside Russian for the rest of his life. He does not care about the Russian people. We are going to weaken already weak internal Russian resistance by making all the Russians care more about where their next meal is coming from than marching on Putin’s dacha and throwing him out in the street. The problem is Putin; when he is gone, the problem is gone.

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    Evan Donovan

    As others already said, what does this article ask us to do? It says all of what we are doing won't work, which may be true.

    However, it doesn't call directly for a no-fly zone. Is that because the author knows that would mean direct war between the US and Russia?

    That's a risk we cannot take.

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      Narwhal

      In her previous article Giselle was overtly calling for US naval forces deploying into the Black Sea. I see a pattern developing from her takes.

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  3. Tim Hollingsworth

    I agree with the comments below that regime change really has to be the strategic end goal. Direct confrontation even without the risk of nukes would only galvanize support for Putin. This is cold comfort for the heroic Ukrainians however. In my heart I would love nothing more than to see NATO jets vaporize the Russians' stalled convey but I am afraid that would ultimately create a worse situation.

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  4. CatoTheElder

    The author commits a major sin of written communication—a complete failure to clearly state the thesis. That said, let’s make what seems a reasonable assumption: the author wishes to see direct military intervention by NATO forces, sufficient to change the balance of forces and power within the theater of battle.

    What would that look like? I suppose it could take on any of a fair number of forms/flavors. Most obvious, judging by what is most commonly tossed about in discussions of the matter, would be use of NATO air and air defense forces to prevent the Russians from being able to freely fly about the invaded country. This—or anything of similar magnitude and having any whiff of offensive capacity about it—would be seen by pretty much everyone as a step forward in the evolution of full-fledged engagement in the war.

    There are those who will immediately throw their arms into the air and say we can’t do such a thing, for this reason, that reason, both this and that, and because of another whole pile of reasons over there. Some will say that Putin will be “pushed” into using nuclear weapons, and then the whole world pays in horrible ways.

    For those that posit that any active war-fighting involvement by US/NATO/EU forces will “push” Putin to using nukes, and thus make the West complicit in the world’s destruction, I ask them to step aside. They’ve already conceded that Putin can do whatever he wants, and, no matter how heinous, we’ll do nothing, because “we can’t risk causing a nuclear war”.

    With all due respect, I say, “Poppycock.” We’re already risking nuclear war, and have been for decades. It’s just that most people have for a while now perceived the risk of such as being almost infinitesimal. Yet there are still missiles in silos, nuclear warheads on cruise missiles and the like, and so on.

    But now that Russia has invaded a peaceful neighbor who has shown unacceptable temerity just by considering teaming up more actively with western Europe, we’re struck by the fact that *if we ever actually get in a fight with Putin, it’s possible he could use nukes*. And many are quick to say that we can never act in such a way that might stimulate Putin to act as the heartless, cruel, psychopathic tyrant he is.

    This is the psychology that tells a battered woman not to make her batterer mad. That says, well, if I step in, it’ll just get worse. This kind of thinking in essence absolves the Putins of the world from responsibility for their heinous crimes against humanity, and lashes the burden for such onto those who actually fought against him.

    We live in a world where, if a crazy person gets the authority and has a bad day, any day could see disaster on a scale incomprehensible. That does not mean we cower in our homes and abandon our rights and responsibilities.

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    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    If you commit troops to Ukraine, they’ll be there a very long time. If you have to pursue troops into Russia, you’ll have to occupy, which will mean our troops over there for a very long time. Are you sure you want that?

    Regime change in Russia sounds good, until you ask who replaces Rat Putin? There’s a poir chance the cutthroat villain who survives the infighting to take over will be better than Putin.

    Sometimes all the options suck

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  6. Pohl

    It’s a bit disappointing that these guest writers are so gung-ho. What with dialing sanctions to 11, turning them all against China next, and now fixing bayonets against a warring nuclear power, it’s like expressing a death-wish is an editorial demand. Makes me long for the relative inanity of Aron’s “nation of hunters.”

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    DougCLE

    I disagree with the author's apparent belief that it's "troops or nothing". There is a lot more we can do without putting boots on the ground.

    However, can we also please dispense with the nonsense that any U.S. or NATO involvement beyond sanctions will immediately lead to WWIII? The very fact that we are all still standing here after roughly 45 years of Cold War brinksmanship puts lie to this. The truth is, no one knows what is going to happen, and to pretend that any hard block on Putin's ambitions will lead to nuclear annihilation is to hand him the keys to Eastern Europe right now.

    After all, if we would not "trade NYC for Kyiv", then would we trade it for Riga? Tallinn? Vilnius? Warsaw? Prague? "Oh," you say, "but NATO countries are different." Really? When balanced against an America of smoking craters? Seems to me that, if we're talking about "trades", then there's not a lot of cities I would trade for my own Mistake On The Lake; and if little kiddies are going to die, then far better someone else's than mine, right? Right?

    If you think we should build a wall around America and cower behind it because nukes exist, then by all means, say so. If not, then can we please just accept that there are risks to *everything* we do, and the threat of nuclear war did not suddenly quadruple simply because Russia invaded Ukraine. I don't know exactly what the right path is here, but I do know we can't make our decisions based on irrational fears, or we are done for.

    We will simply have to hope that, as Sting once sang, the Russians love their children, too.

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    Todd T

    The simple fact is, if we were going to wage war, and defend Ukraine, we would have admitted them into NATO. We all knew that Putin could possibly invade Ukraine. He’s basically been saying (and doing) it for years. So why is it now that it’s implicit for us to defend a non-NATO country? It may be that it has been morally wrong to use Ukraine as some quasi buffer zone. Putin annexed Crimea for gods sake. He’s doing this and we have nobody to blame but ourselves for not seeing exactly what was going on.

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    Tmcke

    One of the problems we face is that we don't know how far Putin will go if we really force the issue. Do we truly want a wider war? We certainly did not create the Soviet block and Biden did not ever suggest that the Ukraine deserves a place under our nuclear umbrella. In 1914 a host of European leaders guessed wrong. Biden does not want to risk a wrong guess. Sorry the Ukraine is not in our sphere of influence.

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    Dan

    I wonder if anyone in America is willing to trade NYC, or LA, or Dallas, for Kyiv? Would the UK be willing to lose London or Birmingham? France, lose Paris or Marseilles? That would be the calculus in even a limited nuclear exchange. This war is criminal, no doubt, but sacrificing millions more lives to end it is madness. We didnt send troops into Hungary in 1968, after all.

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