Today’s Russia/Ukraine Update

[The whole situation] underscores the urgency of continuing to supply Ukraine’s military, especially with heavy weapons such as long-range artillery, rocket-launch systems, tanks, fighter jets, and missile defenses. Off-the-shelf weapons stocks are running low, and Ukraine will soon need ammunition and missiles directly from Western military assembly lines.

President Biden announced another $800 million in weapons for Ukraine this week, and Congress will have to appropriate more in the coming weeks. Military officials from 20 countries will meet next week in Germany to assess Ukraine’s needs and coordinate aid. This is useful as long as it doesn’t default to the most risk-averse thinking.

This is the time to give Ukraine all it can handle to press for victory against Russia. The goal is to block Russian advances and inflict such losses that Mr. Putin is forced to reconsider his war aims again. He could escalate and try to draw in NATO more directly, but that carries risks of more severe Russian losses.

Ukraine has paid dearly to protect its homeland in a war it didn’t choose. The West’s interest is in a Ukrainian victory that pushes Russia out and lets its people decide their own destiny. Russia without Ukraine is a much less significant threat to NATO and the U.S.

Russia has long wielded its nuclear weapons coercively, threatening to employ them against Poland and other NATO nations, in response to perfectly reasonable actions, including deployment of defensive systems meant only to intercept incoming missiles. Missile defenses are perceived as threatening by nations that want a free shot at the defender, and Moscow is telling on itself when it protests…

Strategists inside the Trump administration were very concerned about Russia’s threats. Russia’s large arsenal of theater nuclear weapons, none of which are constrained by treaty, dramatically outnumber U.S. theater nuclear weapons. Strategists assessed that Russia was giving nuclear weapons a more prominent role in its military strategy and that it was lowering the “nuclear threshold” — a threshold that no nation has crossed since the United States did to end World War II…

As Russia’s brutal war drags on, the risk of Russian nuclear employment goes up. The Biden administration is of course right to want Russia to end this war and not to escalate, especially not to use nuclear weapons. But wanting is not enough. The Biden administration must make a rapid and obvious course correction and seek to convince Russia that the U.S. and NATO are not intimidated by their nuclear threats, that we have a proportional response on the ready, and that we are willing to employ it in defense of our vital interests. The grave implications of failing to do so cannot be overstated.