Five sentences sum up the war in Ukraine as it is now.
The Russians are running out of precision guided weapons.
The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition from the Soviet era.
The world is running out of patience for war.
The Biden administration is running out of ideas on how to get rid of it.
Flowers inside the wreckage of a burned-out van that detonated an anti-tank mine, killing all three occupants, lies beside a dirt road in Andriyivka, on the outskirts of kyiv. AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
And the Chinese are watching.
Moscow’s shortcomings with its arsenal, which have been apparent on the battlefield for weeks, are cause for relief in the long term and horror short term.
Relief, because the Russian war machine, on the modernization of which he spent a lot Vladimir Putinhas been exposed as a paper tiger that could not seriously challenge NATO in a conventional conflict.
Horror, because an army that cannot fight a high-tech war, with relatively low collateral damage, will fight a low tech warfareterribly high in such damage.
Ukraine, according to its own estimates, suffers 20,000 casualties per month.
In contrast, the US suffered about 36,000 casualties in Iraq during seven years of war.
For all its bravery and resolve, kyiv can contain, but not defeat, a neighbor of more than three times its size in a war of attrition.
That means Ukraine needs to do more than rein in the Russian military.
You need to break his spine as fast as possible.
But that can’t happen in an artillery war when Russia can fire a few 60,000 shells per day against approximately 5.000 that the Ukrainians have said they can shoot.
The amount, As the saying goes, it has a quality of its own.
The Biden administration is providing Ukraine with advanced howitzers, rocket launchers and ammunition, but they are not arriving fast enough.
Now is the time that Joe Biden tell your national security team what Richard Nixon he told his when Israel was recovering from its losses in the Yom Kippur War:
after asking what weapons Jerusalem was asking for, the 37th president ordered his staff to “had doubled“. “, and I add:
“Now get out of here and do the job.”
The urgency to win soon, or at least to put Russian forces in retreat on a broad front, so that it is Moscow, not kyiv, that sues for peace, is compounded by the fact that time is not necessarily on the west side.
Sanctions against Russia may damage its ability to grow in the long term.
But sanctions cannot do much in the short term to dent Russia’s capacity for destruction.
Those same sanctions also take a toll on the rest of the world, and the price the world is willing to pay for solidarity with Ukraine is not limitless.
The critical shortages of food, energy and fertilizersalong with the supply disruptions and price increases that inevitably follow, cannot be sustained forever in democratic societies with limited pain tolerance.
Meanwhile, Putin does not appear to be paying a big price for his war, either in energy revenues (which are up thanks to price increases) or in public support (also up, thanks to a combination of nationalism, propaganda and fear).
Hoping that he may die soon of whatever disease may be afflicting him, is it Parkinson’s? A “blood cancer”? Or just a Napoleon complex? – is not a strategy.
What else can the Biden administration do?
need to take two calculated risksbased on a conceptual breakthrough.
calculated risks
First, as retired Admiral James Stavridis has proposed, the US must be prepared to defy the russian sea blockade of Odessa escorting cargo ships to and from the port.
That will mean first getting Turkey allow NATO warships to transit the Turkish straits to the Black Sea, which could mean some uncomfortable diplomatic concessions for Ankara.
More dangerous still, it could result in close encounters between NATO and Russian warships.
But Russia has no legal right to blockade Ukraine’s last major port, no moral right to prevent Ukrainian agricultural products from reaching world markets and does not have enough sea power to take on the US Navy
Second, the US should seize Russian central bank assets estimated at $300 billion abroad to finance Ukraine’s military and reconstruction needs.
I first proposed this in early April, and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and Jeremy Lewin made a compelling legal case several days later in an invited essay for The New York Times.
The administration has cold feet because it could break US law and set a bad financial precedent, which would be good arguments in less serious circumstances.
Right now, what is urgently needed is the kind of financial hit Russia that other sanctions have failed to inflict.
Which brings us to the conceptual breakthrough:
the fighting in the Ukraine will have a greater effect in Asia than in Europe.
The administration can make sure that it has bloodied the Russian army enough to don’t invade anyone Coming Soon.
That is true as far as it can be.
But if the war ends with Putin comfortably in power and Russia in possession of a fifth of Ukraine, then Beijing will draw the lesson that aggression works.
And we’ll have a fight for Taiwan, with its staggering human and economic cost, much sooner than we think.
The end result: the war in Ukraine is a prelude or an ending.
President Biden needs to do even more than he’s already done to make sure it’s the last thing.
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