Russian President Vladimir Putin declared de facto war on Ukraine shortly before 10 p.m. EST on Wednesday.
Shortly after he spoke, Russian warplanes and missile forces began striking cities across Ukraine, Kyiv included. In what was likely a prerecorded speech (it aired at 05:40 a.m. Moscow time), the Russian president announced a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it of Nazis while also preventing a “massacre” of ethnic Russians in that nation.
Absurd as it is, this is Putin’s moment of existentialism and destiny. Putin has evidently decided that he is the heir to the Stalin of 1941 and the heroes of medieval Rus who defeated the Mongols. Putin is telling the Russian people and the West that he views securing his objectives in Ukraine as just as critical to Russia today as the defeat of the Nazis was in the 1940s. There is weight to these words: The losses in World War II were immense and defined by a very real struggle for the survival of the Russian people.
Ukraine poses no such threat to Russia, of course. Its only threat is to Putin’s understanding of a greater Russia that holds dominion over the lives of all those within and on its periphery.
Oscillating between theatrical rage and cold sobriety, Putin threw down the gauntlet. He urged Ukrainian soldiers to cease resistance and said Volodymyr Zelensky’s government would be entirely to blame for any bloodletting that followed. Putin pledged that Russia had no interest in occupying Ukraine and only sought to ensure its own security. And he warned NATO that Russia was ready for any interference in the conflict. Such intervention would meet “dire consequences” for those pursuing it, Putin said. This rhetoric is designed to exploit Western fears over Russian escalation and widen existing fissures over the measure of sanctions response to his aggression.
Regardless, the appropriate Western response is now clear.
NATO should activate its high readiness response forces and forward deploy them to Estonia, Poland, Lithuania, and Romania with expediency. France should follow through on its pledge to deploy ground forces to Romania. The Biden administration, with allied support, should immediately introduce sanctions targeting the full gamut of Russian energy, financial, and export industries. Oligarchs and their families associated with Putin’s regime, however peripherally, should also face cutting sanctions.
This U.S. action should be unilateral where necessary. If, for example, Italy refuses to support energy sanctions, President Joe Biden should sanction Italian multinationals who continue doing business with Moscow. If the British government is unwilling to sanction top Putin cronies such as Roman Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov, the United States should impose unilateral sanctions on their British corporate enablers. If, six months from now, Germany reactivates its Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline, the U.S. should sanction every element of the German government and private sector that is complicit in that action.
But the basic truth of this sad day is clear.
For all his references to history and Nazism, Putin is now doing exactly what the Nazis did so brutally so many years ago: shredding the peace of Europe in the pursuit of territorial imperialism and nationalist bigotry. This challenge to the post-WWII international order must be met with the full diplomatic and economic force that can be mustered. Ukraine must be enabled with the fullest range of targeting intelligence and lethal means of defense. And in the very worst-case scenario, should Putin extend war to NATO, the U.S. and its allies must defeat the Russian Federation.
