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If Russia’s military looks like the Keystone Cops in its invasion of Ukraine, why are Western nations working so hard to arm a nation under siege? Let me explain what in the world is going on here and why it’s all about keeping nuclear weapons out of the equation.
Early in the conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned foreign powers he would use nuclear weapons against anyone who would meddle in Moscow’s attempt to bring Kyiv back into its sphere of influence.
My contacts in the Defense Department are not overly concerned that the Russians are going to escalate their attack to that point, but there is worry about Russian weakness.
The Russians have underperformed throughout this entire war, and it’s like they’ve unlearned all of the lessons that they learned from World War II and especially the Chechen conflict.
On March 16, the Ukrainians launched a very successful attack on the Kherson Airport and blew up all kinds of Russian aircraft on the ground. The Russians should have achieved air superiority in the first 48 hours of this conflict. There should be no Ukrainian jets in the air whatsoever. There shouldn’t be any drones flying. They have air defense coverage over almost the entirety of Ukraine in all of the conflict zones. And yet the Ukrainians are able to hit them with conventional forces over and over and over and over and over. This should not be happening.
And then there was that giant 40-mile long Russian convoy that was coming north from Belarus down to Kyiv but stalled because the vehicles ran out of fuel in one day, and then Russian soldiers ran out of food in three days. They had to leave on foot to go back to Belarus to find fuel trucks.
I mean, this is like Keystone Cops-level of logistics.
This level of just complete ineptitude across the entire military space for the Russians signals that they’re not nearly the threat that we always thought that they were.
If the Russians are showing themselves to be this weak, we now know that in any direct confrontation between American forces and Russian forces, the Russian forces are just gonna be obliterated. And that will leave the Russians with a very difficult choice to make.
Humiliating, horrible, strategic surrender, and withdrawal or escalate to the nuclear question?
And so the de facto position of the American military, the American government, and NATO in general is now that we have to shove as many weapons as we possibly can into Ukraine so that the Russians never can advance past Ukraine. We have to turn Ukraine into a killing zone so that American and Russian forces never actually face off. And so that the nuclear question is off the table.
