On the menu today: The extraordinarily reckless Russian assault upon the Zaporizhzhia nuclear-power plant in Ukraine has ended without any radiation leak, but not before Russian shells started a fire at a training facility adjacent to the plant’s six reactors. The crisis is not merely that Russia is invading Ukraine; it is that Russia is invading Ukraine in particularly reckless, destructive, and catastrophic ways. It is as if Vladimir Putin is an obsessed and abusive lover, determined to destroy what he cannot possess.
The Russian Assult on Zaporizhzhia
The world watched and held its breath Thursday night as Russian forces gradually seized control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear-power plant in Ukraine, but not before firing shells at the plant and starting a fire at a training facility adjacent to the plant’s six reactors. Thankfully, at this hour, the plant has suffered no radiation leaks.
The International Atomic Energy Agency announced in the early morning hours that the Ukrainian government had informed them that Russian forces had taken control of the site, but that the nuclear power plant continued to be operated by its regular staff and there had been no release of radioactive material.
The IAEA stated that radiation-monitoring systems at the site are fully functional, but “The operator has reported that the situation remains very challenging and therefore it has not yet been possible to access the whole site to assess that all safety systems are fully functional. Of the plant’s reactor units, Unit 1 is shut down for maintenance, Units 2 and 3 have undergone a controlled shutdown, Unit 4 is operating at 60 percent power, and Units 5 and 6 are being held “in reserve” in low power mode.” The Ukrainians reported that two people were injured during the Russian assault.
“I’m extremely concerned about the situation at the Zaporizhzhia NPP and what happened there during the night,” IAEA director general Rafael Mario Grossi said in a released statement.
“Firing shells in the area of a nuclear power plant violates the fundamental principle that the physical integrity of nuclear facilities must be maintained and kept safe at all time.”
The U.S. embassy in Ukraine issued a statement declaring, “It is a war crime to attack a nuclear power plant. Putin’s shelling of Europe’s largest nuclear plant takes his reign of terror one step further.”
Indeed, the International Committee of the Red Cross’s study on customary international humanitarian law declares that:
Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population. Other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations shall not be made the object of attack if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces from the works or installations and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.
The crisis is not merely that Russia is invading Ukraine; it is that Russia is invading Ukraine in particularly reckless, destructive, and catastrophic ways, such as using cluster bombs in Kharkiv: “Cluster munitions open in the air and disperse dozens, or even hundreds, of small submunitions over a large area. They often fail to explode on initial impact, leaving unexploded submunition duds that act like landmines if they are touched.” It’s deploying — and perhaps using, depending upon whom you believe — thermobaric weapons. It’s targeting civilian infrastructure and creating serious health hazards; an explosion and fire tore through a fuel depot of the Ukrainian air base at Vasylkiv, south of Kyiv, on February 26; people in the area were warned to be on alert for toxic fumes. Russian forces have already destroyed the power plant in Okhtyrka, the main water-supply line in Horlivka in the Donetsk region, and the world’s largest airplane. An Estonian cargo ship sank in the Black Sea after an explosion, although the ship’s owner says he doesn’t think the blast was caused by a mine. (The crew was rescued.)
Yesterday, Putin publicly pledged to “destroy this ‘Anti-Russia’ created by the West. . . . Russians, Ukrainians are the same people.” Putin believes any Ukrainian who refuses to submit must be killed.
Once again, we’re left to wonder if Putin sees Ukraine from the perspective of an obsessed and abusive lover, determined to destroy what he cannot possess.
What can the rest of the world do? This morning NATO formally rejected Kiev’s request to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, declaring that there would be “no alliance aircraft in the skies of Ukraine and there should be no NATO soldiers on the territory of Ukraine.”
(I was always bothered by those who argued for airstrikes on a foreign target but insisted this stance was consistent with “no boots on the ground.” If a pilot gets shot down, that pilot becomes boots on the ground, and requires search and rescue operations. The rescue of Scott O’Grady in Bosnia comes to mind. Enforcing a no-fly zone doesn’t use nearly as many “boots on the ground” as a ground assault, but it does entail risk for U.S. forces, and it does no good to characterize no-fly-zones as risk-free.)
First, keep those Javelin anti-tank missiles coming: “U.S. Special Operations official monitoring the conflict in Ukraine told Connecting Vets that he had seen estimates of 280 Russian armored vehicles taken out by the Javelin as of this writing, out of 300 total missiles fired.”
Second, keep the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles coming; more than 200 were delivered Monday. Just knowing that the Ukrainians have a lot of stinger missiles will keep Russian air assets hesitant to fly low or slow, minimizing air support for troops on the ground.
The Ukrainians are enraged, desperate, and determined; the Russian forces include a lot of conscripts who just want to avoid getting killed and make it home. There’s also a fascinating analysis from Trent Telenko arguing that poor vehicle maintenance, particularly involving tires, is seriously hindering the Russian advance. “When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end, the side walls get rotted/brittle such that using low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail catastrophically via rips,” Telenko explains. “Given the demonstrated levels of corruption in truck maintenance, there is no way in h–l that there are enough tires in the Russian army logistical system. . . . The Crimea is a desert and the South Ukrainian coastal areas are dryer, so we are not seeing this there. But elsewhere the Russians have a huge problem for the next 4-to-6 weeks.”
The Ukrainians can inflict a lot of damage on minimally mobile tanks, trucks, and support vehicles over the next four to six weeks if they’ve got enough weapons and ammunition.
Right now, the Russian pounding of Ukraine is outpacing the Western pounding of the Russian economy. But how will things look in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in three weeks, or six weeks?
Barron’s quotes financial traders who estimate that there are 50-50 odds that the Russian government will default on its debts — meaning that Russia would find it much harder to borrow money from anyone for a long time and have to pay much higher interest rates when it can find someone willing to loan it money — and this kind of economic dead weight can last for decades. “The best that ordinary Russians can hope for could be rampaging inflation, a deep recession, and a vanished way of life for a middle class accustomed to vacations abroad and imported comforts, from cars to wine and cheese, at home,” Barron’s writes. And that’s the best-case scenario!
In the longer term, my boss Rich Lowry observes that a more dangerous and unpredictable world requires a larger and more capable U.S. military, which requires a larger defense budget:
Biden signed a $770 billion defense bill into law for 2022 after Congress bumped up his initial request by $25 billion. The next defense budget should be north of $800 billion, and we should be headed toward $1 trillion.
We’ll need to adjust to the new threats. The Army doesn’t necessarily need to be larger. It needs different tools, including many more anti-aircraft and anti-missile capabilities to protect its bases and tank brigades, and more of it will have to be deployed in Europe.
The Air Force should put an emphasis on long-range, stealthy planes to stay out of range of enemy missiles.
The Navy will have to be much larger, more like 500 ships than the current 296. The Navy’s shipyards, which currently fail to keep up to the task of repairing our submarines, desperately need to be upgraded.
A bigger U.S. defense budget won’t save Ukraine in the coming weeks, but it might help deter any Russian ambitions toward the Baltic States.
Elsewhere in the world, the Editors state that we should not sign a deal with Iran out of a desperation for oil; this is just trading one threat for another:
Gabriel Noronha, a former State Department official, reported that the Biden administration is planning to lift terrorism sanctions. It was irrational of Obama to cordon off Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism from its nuclear-weapons activities, but at least that meant terrorism-related sanctions remained in effect, despite the JCPOA. During his nomination hearing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that the U.S. had to do “everything possible . . . including the toughest possible sanctions,” to deal with Iranian-sponsored terrorism. Now, as the Iranians capitalize on a weak White House desperate for a deal, anything goes.
And our Charlie Cooke points out that we should not get distracted by dumb and counterproductive efforts to punish anything Russian, as opposed to taking action against the Russian government:
Assuming sufficient due process, there are excellent reasons to target well-connected Russian oligarchs, just as there are solid justifications for our having imposed harsh sanctions on the broader Russian economy. But vodka that is served in the United States? Norway wasn’t willing to boycott an Olympic Games that was being held in a country that is committing genocide, but it has the resolve to keep a dissident chess player from competing on its shores? None of this makes much sense.
ADDENDUM: Hey, remember Covid-19? The U.S. is averaging fewer than 52,000 new cases per day over the past two weeks; back in mid January, that figure was above 800,000.
And it’s all Omicron. No one has reported a case of the Delta variant since January, according to the CDC.