It’s not clear how any side intends to avert disaster, writes EricLevitz
Residents wait to be evacuated from the embattled city of Irpin, north of Kyiv, on March 10. Photo: Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images In less than two weeks, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone from regional conflagration to global crisis. The heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people, imperial intransigence of Vladimir Putin, and moral fervor of Western publics have collectively brought humanity to the brink of an economic disaster, if not World War III.
This escalation in economic conflict threatens to presage the military variety. Calls for the West to establish “a no-fly zone” — which is to say, to adopt a policy of shooting down any Russian plane that enters Ukrainian airspace — have spread from leaders in Kyiv to Western activists to American foreign-policy elites.
These miscalculations leave Putin with a pair of unpalatable options. He can either abandon his initial war aims and settle for concessions that don’t come close to offsetting his misadventure’s costs, or he can reduce Ukraine to rubble, build a reviled puppet government atop it, and squander his nation’s shrinking resources on a bloody perpetual counterinsurgency. Putin would be wise to opt for strategic retreat over the pursuit of that pyrrhic “victory.
In testimony before the House on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said that the speed and severity of the West’s sanctions had taken Moscow by surprise. Nevertheless, Haines continued, “Our analysts assess that Putin is unlikely to be deterred by such setbacks and instead may escalate, essentially doubling down.” This revelation — that draconian sanctions have done more to inflame Putin’s aggression than temper it — made little impression on the lawmakers.
In other words, judging by Schiff’s remarks, the objective of our government’s sanctions policy is to engineer a circumstance in which our government believes that Moscow would “probably” start a nuclear war.
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