Any attempt to establish a no-fly zone in Ukraine would guarantee a war between Europe’s great powers. EricLevitz writes
Photo: Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images In less than two weeks of war, the Russian military has killed at least 406 Ukrainian civilians. That official United Nations tally is almost certainly a dramatic undercount. And the bloodletting has just begun.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Zelenskyy’s chief-of-staff, Andriy Yermak, acknowledged that a no-fly zone could function as a warm-up for a wider war but insisted that such a conflagration is inevitable in any case. “We are calling on the West to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine,” Yermak wrote. “We recognize that this would be a serious escalation in the war and that it could bring NATO into direct conflict with Russia.
It is not hard to understand why the no-fly-zone argument has evolved in this way. The hazards of a war between NATO and Russia are vast and undeniable. Great-power conflicts in Eurasia claimed the lives of over 100 million people last century, and nearly all of those deaths came in the preatomic age. Today, war between Russia and Western Europe would jeopardize nothing less than humanity’s long-term survival.
This analogy, however, is specious, and the broader argument is weak. Putin’s invasion still poses a threat to Ukraine’s sovereignty and citizenry. But it no longer threatens to increase Russia’s geopolitical strength nor to serve as an encouraging example to other revanchist powers.