It’s time to show Putin a dead end in Ukraine, not an off-ramp: Otherwise there will be future invasions of post USSR fragments by Russian Federation
What is at stake is being able to dissuade Putin from further adventurism. I.e. Ukraine has had an excellent record in fighting back, but Putin will use any narrative as to incremental gains to justify his alleged rebuilding of USSR territories and we need to get into his mind set which is to spin victory out of a geo strategic defeat.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/inflection-points/its-time-to-show-putin-a-dead-end-in-ukraine-not-an-off-ramp/
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It’s time to show Putin a dead end in Ukraine, not an off-ramp
Ukraine must win. Vladimir Putin must lose. It’s really that simple.
So, Let’s first stipulate that you agree with that end goal, as has everyone from US?President Joe Biden?and?Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, to German Chancellor?Olaf Scholz?and European Commission President?Ursula von der Leyen.
To embrace anything less would be immoral, set a historical precedent with catastrophic costs, and unravel what remains of our fraying international order of rules and institutions.
Biden laid out the argument clearly in his?New York Times?op-ed?this week. His words should be read closely by all members of his administration and NATO allies who are still acting too tentatively in providing Ukraine the weaponry, and the freedom of action in using it, to ensure Ukraine’s victory.?
“Standing by Ukraine in its hour of need is not just the right thing to do,”?wrote?Biden. “It is in our vital national interests to ensure a peaceful and stable Europe and to make clear that might does not make right. If Russia does not pay a heavy price for its actions, it will send a message to other would-be aggressors that they too can seize territory and subjugate countries… And it could mark the end of the rules-based international order and open the door to aggression elsewhere, with catastrophic consequences the world over.”
Why write all this now, as Putin’s war in Ukraine passes its hundredth day? Put most simply, it’s because Putin is showing?grinding gains?after shifting tactics in response to Ukraine’s unexpected victories and resilience, and Russian troops’ heavy losses and abysmal performance in the war’s early stages.
Putin’s brutal new approach is to pulverize Ukrainian population centers in eastern and southern Ukraine with stand-off weapons—thus emptying them of their people through death or flight, with less risk to his own troops, replicating the brutal tactics he deployed in?Syria. Once these cities and towns are drained of their humanity, his troops can then “liberate” the rubble, seize the territory, and position Russia for the most advantageous peace deal possible, or a further offensive.
At the same time, Putin has been striking at Ukraine economically by?blockading its grain exports and either destroying or stealing its available supplies. Though Putin continues to choke on tough sanctions against him, he is willing to risk starvation elsewhere?while wagering that he can outlast Western support?for Kyiv through upcoming election cycles and other democratic distractions such as the recent US school shootings and Supreme Court battles.
“We need to discard Cold War mentality and seek peaceful coexistence and win-win outcomes,” he?said, just a matter of days before he signed a joint statement with Putin agreeing to a relationship “without limits.” That, in turn, was a little more than a month before Putin launched his war.
There is a way, however, to counter Putin’s new tactics. It will require the newly united West and its Asian partners to grow even more determined, creative, and proactive through a combined military, economic and public relations offensive that would again put Putin on his back foot.
The aim should not be to ensure a stalemate,?which has allowed Putin to take 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, nor pressure Ukraine into a self-defeating peace agreement, but rather give Ukraine the means to retake territory through a counteroffensive—perhaps most importantly to retake Kherson, which would ensure access to Odesa and to the Black Sea now and in any eventual peace agreement.?
Most important is for Ukraine’s potentially fatigued supporters, and even for those countries still sitting on the fence, not to lose sight of the barbarity of Putin’s atrocities and thus the moral responsibility to oppose them.
“It’s extremely important that we don’t forget the brutality,” Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general,?told the?Atlantic’s?Tom McTague in the most emotional of terms. “Of course, it is emotional. This is about people being killed; it’s about atrocities; it’s about children, women being raped, children being killed.”
With that in mind, it’s flat wrong for the United States or any arms supplier to limit Ukrainian fire to hitting only Russian targets on Ukrainian soil. In his otherwise excellent op-ed, Biden?wrote, “We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We do not want to prolong the war just to inflect pain on Russia.”
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Think about that for a moment. If someone is killing your family members by shooting across a fence from your neighbor’s yard, what good is a weapon that can only shoot as far as your side of the fence? If you don’t take out the shooter, the killing continues. It’s this kind of weakness that makes Putin so confident he can win through attrition.
At the same time, the collective West, working closely with Turkey,?needs to open Ukraine’s Black Sea ports,?particularly at Odessa, to address?a Putin-generated global food crisis?and enable Ukraine to ship the twenty-eight million tons of grain it has in storage.
For justification, one can call upon the?Montreux Convention of 1936?that regulates traffic through the Black Sea and guarantees “complete freedom” of passage for civilian vessels.
Said David Beasley, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, “Failure to open those ports in Odesa region will be a declaration of war on global food security.”
Historians point to the?Winter War?between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939-1940 to demonstrate that a smaller but more determined country with less military strength can outlast Moscow and retain its sovereignty.?
What’s true is that Moscow then, despite overwhelming strength in tanks and aircraft, suffered severe losses and made few gains initially following its November 1939 invasion, three months after the outbreak of World War II.??
Finland held off Soviet forces for more than two months, inflecting substantial losses before the Soviet Union adopted different tactics and overcame Finnish defenses in February. Finland reached a peace deal in March 1940 that ceded 9 percent of its territory to the Soviet Union. Though Moscow’s reputation suffered, and it was removed from the League of Nations, it came away with more territory than it had initially demanded.
On the negative side, Putin is every bit as determined now as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was then, and shares Stalin’s utter indifference to casualties and human suffering.
On the positive side, Ukraine is receiving dramatically more outside support than Finland did at the time.
Yet without even more Western resolve, Putin can still win, and Ukraine can still lose.?
Ukraine and the West need to show Putin a dead end and not an off-ramp.
This article originally appeared on?CNBC.com
Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.
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Bear in mind that Putin has referred to the breakup of the USSR as the biggest geopolitical fail of Russian history. Any incremental gains toward restoration of prior territories will be held as a successful restoration of Russian honor. What is in a sense worse is that Putin, as Stalin in 1940, cares not one whit as to suffering inflicted upon his troops not to mention the millions of Ukrainian citizens displaced by his attacks.
What is needed is a massive fail for Putin. Something so damning that there is no chance of spin which would minimize the loss. And in this sense, Western backing of Ukraine needs to stop being so timid. Putin senses the timidity , thrives off it, and it goads him into further outrages.
The psychology of what constitutes a decisive loss for Putin, is up for debate and speculation, but any rewarding of Putin with Ukrainian territory will mean, definitely, that Putin will be back again, maybe within a year, for yet another round.
Time to turn off the timidity and to get a decisive win.
Andrew Beckwith, PhD