Global Eyes
News and notes from around the world.
Russia and Ukraine
Desperation in cities under assault … France and Germany unsuccessfully pressed Moscow to agree to a cease-fire … cities and towns under sustained bombardment. Hundreds protest the kidnapping of mayor
Russian Foreign Ministry: the Russian army may consider as “legitimate targets” Western convoys with weapons for Ukraine. (In Russian)
Western arms supplies for Ukraine: How are they getting there?
All of this equipment is basically massing on the Polish border at the moment. Even if Slovakia, for example, wanted to, it’s not an easy route because of the geography of the mountain ranges that move from Slovakia down through Romania. So there are two routes: One is close to the Belarusian border, then there’s one slightly south.
Ukraine needs ground-based air defenses way more than MiGs. Here are the best options.
Rushing highly mobile and familiar air defense systems to Ukraine is the key to keeping Russian aircraft at bay and under threat.
Steven Kotkin responds to Mearsheimer:
It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.
I would even go further. I would say that NATO expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today. Where would we be now if Poland or the Baltic states were not in NATO? Quite so—Claire.
Putin the Gambler. Christopher Bort identifies the moment when Putin’s appetite for risk became insatiable. (He’s right—Claire.)
…. But to understand why he graduated from risky but limited interventions such as those in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 to gambling on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one must recall what happened in Syria between 2013 and 2015. This period, during which Moscow capitalized on Western indecision to alter the course of the Syrian conflict, was a turning point in Putin’s risk calculus. It was when Russia shifted from its back foot to its front foot. In August 2013, President Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons, crossing a U.S. redline and prompting Western plans to respond with airstrikes. But Moscow seized on an impromptu idea floated by US Secretary of State John Kerry and persuaded Assad to announce he was willing to give up his chemical weapons, clearing the way for an agreement that averted US military intervention. Overnight, Russia’s public narrative about Syria changed. …
Within three months, Putin had seized the initiative in Ukraine, as well.
Bunkers, survival guides and iodine pills are flying off the shelves in Europe. I’m remembering, uneasily, how I laughed at the people I thought were hysterics when I saw them stocking up on masks at the pharmacy, just after the reports came over the transom about some kind of weird pneumonia in Wuhan—Claire.
What if Russia wins? Truly grim reading.
Cold War analogies will not be helpful in a world with a Russianized Ukraine. The Cold War border in Europe had its flash points, but it was stabilized in a mutually acceptable fashion in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. By contrast, Russian suzerainty over Ukraine would open a vast zone of destabilization and insecurity from Estonia to Poland to Romania to Turkey. …
… The massive refugee flows arriving in Europe will exacerbate the EU’s unresolved refugee policy and provide fertile ground for populists. The holy grail of these informational, political, and cyberbattles will be the 2024 presidential election in the United States. Europe’s future will depend on this election. The election of Donald Trump or of a Trumpian candidate might destroy the transatlantic relationship at Europe’s hour of maximum peril, putting into question NATO’s position and its security guarantees for Europe.
Which is why we can’t allow that to happen. Ukrainians have blunted Russian momentum and captured their equipment; Russian forces are deserting; their population is fleeing Russia—this is no time to be going wobbly.
“Those who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union will finally learn what it was really like.”
There is certainly a visceral appeal to proposals that would have NATO forces directly help Ukraine. But these would dramatically heighten the risk that the war becomes a wider, potentially nuclear conflict. Western leaders should therefore reject them out of hand. Literally nothing else could be more dangerous.
Putin’s pre-war moves against US tech giants laid groundwork for crackdown on free expression. “Titans of American technology … brought to their knees by some of the most primitive intimidation tactics in the Kremlin playbook.”
The magnitude of the Russian threat. It’s the warmongering vanguard of a global anti-democracy axis.
Let us hope Ukraine can win this war and that this war can be contained, but let us acknowledge that as Putin tested, provoked, and confronted the West, the West missed countless opportunities to deter him.
Kherson: Life under Russian occupation.
The Russian soldiers told us they had not come as conquerors. But in the meantime, they have threatened us by saying if they're provoked, they'll raze the town to the ground.
Now this is going to be rich:
Javelin missiles. “A Javelin in itself is not going to be able to allow the Ukrainians to defeat the entire Russian army,” says an analyst at Janes. But it sure seems to me as if pound for pound, this is the best investment you can make if you’ve got a Russian army to defeat. Am I wrong?
On Javelins
This seems a good place to interject a question from a Faithful Reader to Tecumseh Court.
Faithful Reader: Is there any reason to build or possess tanks now that the Javelin exists? What’s the countermeasure? Is this whole war proving that tank advances are obsolete?
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