I’m finding it trying to follow the news of this “Putin’s War”. It’s not just the carnage and savagery we are able to witness each day, each hour, each minute, but it has provoked an immediacy, a visceral connection by putting images of the present to the stories of the past told by my parents and relatives. The coverage of crowds of women and children desperately pushing to board trains, frantic to flee the bombing, arouses the memories my cousin recalled of the mobs pressed in a WWII Leipzig train station. Seeing all those people jammed into the Kyiv subway station rekindled my mother’s stories of the terror she felt as an eleven-year old girl hiding in the London underground during the bombings. The Russian mothers calling a Ukrainian hot line desperate to find their missing sons corresponds to my great aunt waiting in the Kaiserslautern train station each time a troop carrier returned, to see if her sons would return from the eastern front. The reports that Putin is conscripting Chechens to fight the Ukrainians triggered my grandfather’s WWI story of when Cossacks replaced Russian Regulars and the ensuing carnage.
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My sense from news reports is that the NATO Alliance hopes that either the Ukrainians will prevail over the invading army, or sanctions will dry-up Putin’s war-making machine, preventing him from achieving his goal, and he will back off. In either case, Ukraine remains independent.
I can’t help but feel we are being blackmailed. Let me [Putin] take Ukraine or I’ll bomb every city and village, killing thousands or millions of people. Don’t get involved in the Ukraine conflict or I’ll start a nuclear war, which seems to be his strategy to keep NATO out. But if we give in, then we allow him to move on to Moldova, Georgia and then may be the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. So if we believe he will act on his claims to these other countries, do we wait until he crosses the line or do we bite the bullet and move now, beyond sanctions, to war (when it might be easier; when we might reduce he mass murder in Ukraine)?
Will sanctions take effect before we reach the tipping point? Will they cause an economic collapse such that Putin can no longer wage war? Will they cause regime change in Russia? Assuming for the moment that a victory in Ukraine will solidify Putin’s power, it thus becomes a race between sanctions taking hold and his victory in Ukraine.
Yet, an unexpected variable has been added to the equation: Ukrainian resolve. Will Ukrainians be able to slow Putin’s pace long enough to give sanctions more time to take their toll? Putin seems intent on breaking their resolve by bombing civilian populations. He seems impervious to the impact; the death and destruction do not seem to move him.
The NATO calculation seems to be: hold off on active participation in the war as long as possible and hope sanctions or Ukrainian resolve either prevent Putin from continuing with his war or he gets removed from power. The risk of sanctions working, or Ukrainian victory, is a preemptive nuclear strike before total defeat. Some have said Putin will push as far as he can go, but he’s not suicidal. That has yet to be proven.
If it is true that Putin is bringing in Chechens and Syrians to bolster his army, is this not a signal of failure? Has not the tenacity of the Ukrainians already defeated Putin? The inability of his armies to succeed seems to have diminish their stature, their perceived strength, and Putin’s as well. It’s hard to believe Putin would accept military defeat. A feeble victory could be worse, leaving him severely weakened and potentially more unstable. To protect the current world order we cannot let this example go unchallenged, otherwise other rogue nations will be emboldened. Ukraine has to have a clear and decisive victory, and Putin has to be removed; this is not a time for nuance; there seems to be no other option. We can only hope that some one better will replace him. We can only hope that the West takes the positive steps necessary to bring Russia back, out of the woods.
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