In Sen. Marco Rubio’s assessment, Russian President Vladimir Putin is no longer able to “win” the conflict with Ukraine.
The senator’s statements, which he gave on CNN Sunday morning, came a week and a half after Putin launched the invasion into Russia’s smaller neighbor.
“You see a person that’s now engaged himself in a conflict that he can’t win,” the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence explained. “He is now engaged in a conflict where he’s either going to have a costly military victory followed by a costly occupation that he can’t afford, or he’s going to get caught in a long-term military quagmire at the same time as he’s facing a second front which is an economy in free fall in his own country.”
ZELENSKY BEGS US FOR FIGHTER JETS AND A RUSSIAN OIL EMBARGO
“The combination of these two things, I think, puts us in a very dangerous place, and that is, he’s going to have to do something, some escalation, some amplification of this crisis in order to restore strategic balance, in his view, with the West,” Rubio warned.
Within Ukraine, Russian forces have had more success in the south than in the north.
Some Russian troops invaded from Belarus, which borders Ukraine to the north and provides a closer path to Kyiv, and they have faced resistance from Ukrainian forces. The Russian military remains roughly 15 miles outside the city, and a senior defense official told reporters on Thursday that the Pentagon had not seen them make “appreciable” gains in “2-3 days” while affirming that this analysis had not changed by the same time Friday.
The official attributed the Russians’ stunted progress to “direct attacks” from Ukrainian resistance forces, in addition to logistical problems such as a lack of fuel and food, though they may have paused operations in order for them to start “regrouping, rethinking, and reevaluating.”
Russian forces have had an easier time in the southern parts of the country. Russia invaded Crimea, a peninsula along the northern coast of the Black Sea, in 2014, which provides it with an existing infrastructure to support those troops.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Sunday that Russian forces are planning on bombing Odessa, a key port city on the Black Sea coast.
“Russian people always used to come to Odessa, and they only knew warmth and generosity, and what’s now? Artillery, bombs against Odessa. This will be a war crime. This will be a historic crime,” Zelensky said in a broadcast address on Facebook.
Russian forces have allegedly used cluster munitions, and a thermobaric rocket launcher was transported into Ukraine, both of which have resulted in allegations of war crimes.
The firefight at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, Ukraine, was “a war crime,” according to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, though the State Department and White House did not affirm that view.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked about the contradictory statements in a separate interview on CNN Sunday morning.
“We’ve seen very credible reports of deliberate attacks on civilians, which would constitute a war crime. We’ve seen very credible reports about the use of certain weapons,” Blinken explained. “And what we’re doing right now is documenting all of this, putting it all together, looking at it and making sure that, as people and the appropriate organizations and institutions investigate whether war crimes have been or are being committed, that we can support whatever — whatever they’re doing.”
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NATO has provided significant military resources to help Ukraine defend itself. Its member states have also imposed significant sanctions on Russian leaders, elites, and financial institutions.
President Joe Biden’s administration has attempted to strike a balance between imposing “severe” economic punishments on Russia and permitting the flow of Russian oil and gas for fear of energy shortages in Europe and skyrocketing gas prices in the United States if the Russian exports are cut off, though Blinken said during the interview, “We are now talking to our European partners and allies to look in a coordinated way at the prospect of banning the import of Russian oil while making sure that there is still an appropriate supply of oil on the world market.”
