With Vladimir Putin setting in motion a massive military campaign against Ukraine, the U.S. response has failed to meet the moment.
Putin recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist governments — the two pro-Russia enclaves in Ukraine’s Donbas region — after a carefully staged political pageant Monday. One by one, earlier in the day, top Russian officials declared their support of the move, obviously under pressure, during a cinematic meeting of Russia’s Security Council. The verdict from these officials was unsurprisingly unanimous, urging Putin to recognize the breakaway territories.
Then, after a disturbing, hour-long speech running through Russia’s purported claims over Ukraine, Putin signed orders to officially recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and offer security assistance.
Those two breakaway regions claim the rest of the territory that had been part of the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, beyond what they hold now up to the so-called line of control. This means that Russia may launch the latest stage of this military assault against other parts of Ukraine claiming to help the separatists take what they say is rightly theirs. Thus far, Putin says he’s urging negotiations between his Ukrainian puppets and the government in Kyiv. But he might not refrain from moving against territory beyond the immediate control of his Kremlin-backed clients for long — he has already asked the Russian Duma to authorize force abroad.
Indeed, during his address on Monday, he laid out a fanciful version of history and a litany of grievances that only an ideological fanatic could consider legitimate, reprising an essay he published this summer laying out his historical case for absorbing Ukraine.
He expanded on that delusional theme, claiming that the U.S. embassy gave pro-democracy demonstrators in Ukraine $1 million per day and that Ukraine is carrying out genocide in the Donbas. But most important was his false claim that Ukraine has no legitimate claim to statehood — that it’s a Bolshevik construction that Russia could take back at any time. To the contrary, Ukraine’s national identity has been widely acknowledged for a long time, the country strove for and intermittently achieved some form of independence amid the chaos prior to the establishment of the Soviet Union, and the structure of the USSR itself was a kind of recognition of Ukrainian nationality.
Calling Vladimir Lenin Ukraine’s founder, Putin said that he’s ready to take “decommunization” all the way, meaning the total dissolution of Ukraine. This rewrite of history is dangerous, and not just to Ukrainians. Putin’s insistence that post-Soviet republics are illegitimate hinted at a further attempt to delegitimize the sovereignty of the Baltic States, all of which, unlike Ukraine, are NATO members and were, of course, independent in the interwar years.
The U.S. and its allies are pursuing a feckless response. To its credit, the Biden administration has in recent weeks deftly shored up U.S. alliances in Europe and consistently revealed potential Russian plots, thus making a false-flag pretext for war marginally more difficult. But the administration has never had any interest in taking the initiative in the crisis.
For months, the Biden administration declined to impose sanctions on Russia and, incredibly, fought off congressional attempts to kill the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and go after Russian oligarchs. The president made a major misstep with his infamous “minor incursion” comment.
So, it wasn’t shocking that in the immediate aftermath of Putin’s move, the White House equivocated. A senior administration official declined to say that Russian orders to move peacekeepers into Donetsk and Luhansk amounted to the very invasion Washington pledged to retaliate against with severe sanctions. And the first round of measures punishing the Kremlin’s recognition of the independence of the two territories was laughably weak, only authorizing sanctions against pro-Russia officials in Donetsk and Luhansk and preventing Americans from doing business there.
A slightly more extensive response started to shape up yesterday, but that also put the White House’s restraint on full display. Deputy national-security adviser Jon Finer cleaned up the White House’s initial comments, calling the invasion just that — an invasion.
Then, Biden announced a new round of sanctions targeting Russia’s VEB bank, its military bank, and Russian sovereign debt. “That means we’ve cut off financing. It can no longer raise money from the West and cannot trade in its new debt on our markets or European markets either,” he said, adding that his administration would unleash new measures punishing Russian elites and their family members.
The U.S., Biden also said, is shoring up the Baltic States with a larger U.S. presence and more military equipment.
But these are small-scale measures, and represent a graduated approach that will probably only advertise how ineffectual our response is each step of the way.
It’s unlikely that the West can do anything to keep Putin from pursuing his deeply held designs on Ukraine, but it can make it as painful as possible. If nothing else, we should want to send a message of seriousness that China takes note of. Germany’s welcome suspension of the certification process for Nord Stream 2 needs to become permanent, and the EU needs to go all in on sanctions targeting Russia’s ability to access European markets and its oligarchs.
The White House should implement all of the measures it has prepared in recent months right now. It needs to make public all the lists of Putin-aligned oligarchs it has and take measures to cripple Russia’s military-industrial base through sanctions on high-tech imports. And it needs to accelerate the effort to arm the Ukrainians to the teeth, increasing the military price that Russia will pay for its invasion.
More broadly, it should ask Congress for massive increases in defense spending, continue to shore up frontline NATO members, and unleash the American oil and gas industry so we aren’t in the position of begging OPEC+, including Russia, to increase production.
Putin’s vision for Europe and his willingness to act on it heralds a new, more dangerous chapter in the history of the West, one that the U.S. and its allies will have to meet with urgency and resolve.