There Is No ‘Ukraine Crisis’

T he Biden administration is threatening Moscow — and Vladimir Putin personally — with purportedly unprecedented economic sanctions should Russia invade Ukraine.

Why wait? We should impose the sanctions now.

For one thing, Russia already has invaded Ukraine. Russian forces poured into the country and took over a part of it in 2014, sparking a still-active conflict that has killed thousands of people. There are Russian troops in Ukraine right now, contrary to Moscow’s denials. Russian cyberattacks already are under way. President Joe Biden says the Russians already are involved in “false flag” operations to secure for themselves a pretext for another invasion.

The war has already started. Now, it is time for us to decide what, if anything, we are going to do about it.

After the occupation of Crimea, the United States responded with sanctions that proved ineffective. Senator Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) now threatens the “mother of all sanctions” against Moscow, proposing to cut Russian firms off from SWIFT, a key part of the global digital financial infrastructure. That might be an effective measure if enacted, but it is far from clear that the U.S. government could pull it off even if Congress passed legislation demanding it: SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium, and EU laws forbid European companies from imposing sanctions on behalf of the United States without being directed to by the European Union, which does not have much faith in the Biden administration and worries that using SWIFT as a sanctions tool would only encourage the development of an alternative financial-infrastructure network, perhaps one under the thumb of Moscow or Beijing.

So, don’t count on that magic bullet. But the United States does have access to some very old-fashioned measures, and we should start using them — immediately.

The first step should be revoking nonresident visas for Russian nationals in the United States — beginning with those belonging to students. It isn’t enough to blacklist the oligarchs. There is a great demand among the children of Moscow’s elite for studying abroad, and their preferred destinations are Germany, the United States, and the Czech Republic. Give them two weeks to pack, and then expel them. There are not very many of them, but the symbolic gesture would be felt. It would be felt even more strongly if our European allies could be persuaded to join us by ceasing to issue travel and study visas to Russian nationals for as long as this made-in-Moscow crisis remains alive.

Joe Biden might even consider picking up the telephone and asking Boris Johnson if he could please stop allowing Russian oligarchs to use high-end London real estate as a covert bank — even the money-loving Swiss have managed to do that.

In response to earlier Russian aggression against Ukraine, some European leaders (among them Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, now the former German defense minister) suggested barring Russian ships from U.S. and EU ports. That would be a meaningful step. A more significant step would be prohibiting any ship owned by a firm that services Russian ports, and any vessel that has docked at a Russian port in the past twelve months, from entering U.S. waters, and perhaps persuading the European Union to follow suit. But Washington would have to provide the leadership on that, not Brussels.

The United States runs a modest trade deficit with Russia, and U.S.–Russia trade is far more important to Russia than it is to the United States. Our main imports from Russia are oil and petroleum derivatives, including chemicals and fertilizers. We are reasonably well-positioned to do without these imports, though we would be even better-positioned if Democrats, including President Biden and former governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, hadn’t done so much to prevent the development of energy infrastructure, including pipelines, in our own country. Americans on the East Coast buy Russian natural gas and European gasoline because our government has made it so expensive and difficult for Gulf Coast–based producers to serve those markets that importing fuel often is the more economical option.

U.S. exports to Russia amount to only a few billions dollars a year (less than $6 billion in 2018), but the absence of these U.S. products — industrial machinery, aircraft, vehicles, medical instruments, and agricultural goods — would be felt keenly in Russian markets. Beyond physical goods, Russian firms should be denied access to U.S.-based providers of financial services and professional services such as engineering, architecture, and business consulting. The Russians love their online shenanigans, so we should cut them off from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and, especially, from the cloud services provided by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Though many of these firms already have a strained relationship with the Kremlin, their services would still be missed in Russia.

But before any of that, we should get our own thinking straight: There is no Ukraine crisis. There is a Russia crisis, and more specifically a Putin crisis. The first rule of civilized international relations is that a country does not seize another country’s territory by force. Putin has violated that rule and intends to violate it further still. There is some quiet wishful thinking in Washington which holds that we can just let him have Ukraine and then count on NATO to provide a firewall from there, because he would not dare attack a NATO member. This is mistaken. Putin will dare what he dares, because there is no retirement plan for men such as him. And he won’t stop at Ukraine unless we stop him there.