Biden Must Counter Putin’s Ukraine Threat

B y all indications, Russia is preparing a winter assault on parts of Ukraine that it left untouched when it annexed the Crimean peninsula and launched a hybrid-warfare campaign against the Eastern Donbas region.

Vladimir Putin and his ideological allies have spent the past several months making the case for absorbing Ukraine. Per the head of Ukraine’s defense-intelligence service, Moscow had, as of mid November, placed some 92,000 troops on its border with Ukraine. That’s fewer than the over 100,000 soldiers it moved there during a similar buildup in the spring, but this time, there’s much more military equipment positioned for a potential invasion, and these forces have also taken new positions. Russian troops are thought to be capable of flooding into launching points already equipped with heavy weaponry to begin an assault, all within one or two weeks’ time.

An attack would likely come early next year, around January or February. That’s what multiple Ukrainian officials have told outlets, including National Review, and it’s what the U.S. intelligence community has predicted. Ukrainian officials have also said that a conventional military assault will only follow a successful political-destabilization campaign on the inside — and such an effort might well be underway. In recent days, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that Kremlin agents are working with a prominent oligarch to carry out a coup, and the domestic political situation could well get uglier over the next two months as Russia ramps up its hybrid-warfare campaigns within the country.

There’s still time to force the Kremlin to back down and abandon this gambit, but only if the U.S. and its allies take steps to prove that a Russian invasion would be met with severe consequences.

Some say that Ukraine’s security is of no concern to Americans and that it’s time to leave the fate of Ukraine to Russia. But the consequences of a full Russian military campaign against the country would sow chaos across Eastern Europe, potentially also destabilizing NATO allies in the region. Those countries are already grappling with a migration crisis manufactured by Putin and the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. If those leaders had it their way, Poland and other Eastern-flank countries would be hosts to a massive humanitarian catastrophe not unlike what Europe experienced a few years ago. In threatening an invasion of Ukraine, Russia is not just undermining a free country’s sovereignty; it’s dialing up the chaos across a European continent in the grip of a gas-supply crisis. This turmoil would be a disaster in its own right, not to say a major distraction as Washington faces down the threat emanating from Beijing.

The first priority should be President Biden abandoning the feckless glide path toward appeasement on which he’s been the past several months.

Slowly, deliberately, and surely, the White House has eased U.S. pressure on the Russian government on multiple fronts. The administration denounces the Nord Stream 2 Russian-backed pipeline that threatens to make existing gas-transit routes through Ukraine obsolete (therefore removing a major obstacle to an invasion), while defending its decision to waive sanctions on entities involved in the pipeline’s construction and while lobbying members of Congress to abandon plans to reverse those waivers. The president has courted his Russian counterpart, meeting him in a summit that initiated a “strategic stability” dialogue, and reports say that an additional summit might be in the offing. And officials talk about “placing human rights at the center” of U.S. foreign policy, while only imposing pinprick sanctions targeting the Russian regime.

Now, as U.S. officials consult with their Ukrainian counterparts about what they need to stare down the Russian threat, they’ve been reluctant to provide them with the air-defense systems and other advanced equipment that they’re requesting. The logic, apparently, is that doing so would be an escalation. In the same vein, the White House pressured the Pentagon to cancel a previously scheduled hypersonic-missile test ahead of the Biden–Putin summit in June.

But instead of waiting for a Russian invasion to strip Kyiv of more Ukrainian territory, Biden should opt for a maximalist sanctions package tomorrow. In an ideal world, the White House wouldn’t just drop its objections to a proposed National Defense Authorization Act amendment that would prevent Nord Stream 2 from ever becoming operational through tough sanctions; the administration would impose those measures under its own authority. Similarly, the White House should impose an additional sanctions package targeting the people closest to the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the Pentagon should work closely with the Ukrainians to provide them with just the sort of weapons that they need to convince Moscow that they’re capable of inflicting heavy costs on Russian forces — helicopters, Stinger missiles, and more.

Ukrainians are the first to say that they don’t want U.S. troops fighting on their territory, even if that possibility were in the offing. They’re already fighting for themselves in the Donbas, and they’re preparing for what could be another front in this battle, in the hopes that they’ll prevent it from happening in the first place. We have every incentive to work with them to try to deter what would be a naked and cynical act of aggression even by Vladimir Putin’s standards.