Five sentences summarize the war in Ukraine as it stands today.
The Russians run out of precision guided weapons. The Ukrainians are running out of Soviet-era ammunition. The world is running out of patience for war. The Biden administration is running out of ideas about how it should be implemented. And the Chinese are watching.
Moscow’s arsenal’s shortcomings, which have been evident on the battlefield for weeks, are cause for long-term relief and short-term horror. Relief, because the Russian war machine, whose modernization Vladimir Putin spent much time on, has been exposed as a paper tiger that NATO could not seriously challenge in a conventional conflict.
Horror, because an army that can’t wage a high-tech war, relatively little collateral damage, will wage a low-tech war, terribly high on such damage. Ukraine suffers an estimated 20,000 victims one month† In contrast, the US suffered about 36,000 casualties in Iraq more than seven years of war. For all its courage and determination, Kiev can hold back – but not beat – a neighbor more than three times its size in a war of attrition.
That means Ukraine needs to do more than slow down the Russian military. It must break its spine as soon as possible.
But that can’t happen in an artillery war when Russia can fire some 60,000 shells a day against the roughly 5,000 the Ukrainians have said they can fire. Quantity, as the saying goes, has a quality all its own. The Biden administration is supplying Ukraine with advanced howitzers, rocket launchers and ammunition, but they are not arriving soon enough.
Now is the time for Joe Biden to tell his national security team what Richard Nixon told him as Israel was reeling from its losses in the Yom Kippur War: After asking what weapons Jerusalem was asking for, the 37th president ordered his staff to “double it,” adding, “Now the fuck get out and finish the job.”
The urgency to win quickly – or at least to withdraw Russian troops across a broad front so that Moscow and not Kiev plead for peace – is compounded by the fact that time is not necessarily on the side of the West. .
Sanctions against Russia could damage its growth potential in the long term. But sanctions cannot do much in the short term to affect Russia’s destructive capacity. Those same sanctions are also taking their toll on the rest of the world, and the toll the world is willing to pay for solidarity with Ukraine is not unlimited. Critical shortages of food, energy and fertilizer, along with the supply disruptions and price hikes that inevitably follow, cannot be sustained forever in democratic societies with limited tolerance for pain.
Meanwhile, Putin doesn’t seem to be paying a high price, whether in energy revenues (which are rising thanks to price hikes) or public support (also thanks to a combination of nationalism, propaganda and fear), for his war. Hoping he would soon die from whatever disease might afflict him – is it Parkinson’s? A “blood cancer”? Or just a Napoleon complex? – is not a strategy.
What else can the Biden administration do? It must take two calculated risks, based on one conceptual breakthrough.
The calculated risks: First, as retired Admiral James Stavridis has suggested, the US must be prepared to challenge the Russian naval blockade of Odessa by escorting cargo ships to and from port.
That means first and foremost that Turkey must ensure that NATO warships can navigate through the Turkish straits to the Black Sea, which could entail some uneasy diplomatic concessions to Ankara. More dangerously, it could lead to close encounters between NATO and Russian warships. But Russia has no legal right to blockade Ukraine’s last major port, no moral right to prevent Ukrainian agricultural products from reaching global markets, and not enough naval power to take on the US navy.
Second, the US must seize the estimated $300 billion in Russian central bank assets held abroad to fund Ukraine’s military and reconstruction needs.
I first suggested this in early April, and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and Jeremy Lewin laid out a compelling legal case in a guest essay for the Times a few days later. The government is cold as it could be violating US law and setting a bad financial precedent – which would make good arguments in less dire circumstances. What is urgently needed right now is the kind of financial blow to Russia that other sanctions have not caused.
Which brings us to the conceptual breakthrough: the struggle in Ukraine will have a greater effect in Asia than in Europe. The government can reassure itself that it has bloodied the Russian military enough that it won’t invade anyone else anytime soon. That’s true as far as it goes.
But if the war ends with Putin comfortably in power and Russia holding a fifth of Ukraine, Beijing will learn the lesson that aggression works. And we will be in a fight over Taiwan – with its overwhelming human and economic toll – much sooner than we think.
The bottom line: The war in Ukraine is either a prelude or a finale. President Biden needs to do even more than he already has to make sure this is the last.