The US and NATO should be doing a lot more to help Ukraine

When you watch the war in Ukraine, I think if you have any sense of history in any sense of military capabilities, your heart has to go out to the Ukrainians. They have courage, they’re standing and fighting. They’re taking on a much bigger army from a much bigger country. The Russians have all the advantages and yet, the Ukrainians have done very well so far. The tragedy is, if the Americans, the British, the Germans and others had supplied them with weapons back when this war started, had gotten them the best most current equipment, they would probably be winning the war.

But they’re not. And they’re not because the Western allies who’ve made lots of diplomatic noise have applied sanctions, have been sanctimonious, but they’ve sent a trickle of weapons. 

The Russians currently can outrange Ukrainian artillery. The Russians have capabilities to just grind them up and the Russians learned in trying to take Kieve that in fact, they can’t win a mobile war. So what they’re doing is they’re going to a grinding, tough system, where they use enormous amounts of artillery, and they just chew up the next couple miles, move forward, then chew up the next couple miles and move forward again. It’s almost recreating world war I.

We could stop it, but it would require us to have the courage to send the Ukrainians, not American troops, but just solid equipment. The kind of equipment that actually could outrange the Russians. Meanwhile, in the Black Sea, because we have not supplied Ukrainians with enough anti-ship missiles, the Russian Black Sea fleet still dominates. And that means that Ukrainian ships filled with wheat aren’t getting to leave and go to where they need to be for people to eat. 

Egypt for example, gets 85% of its wheat from Ukraine. There are gonna be people starving to death around the world in poor countries because we’ve allowed the Russians to bottle up Ukraine on the Black Sea. As retired Admiral Stavridis has pointed out, we could easily send an American and NATO fleet escort, just humanitarian ships… filled with wheat, save millions of lives around the world and stop the Russians from strangling Ukraine. We ought to be doing a lot more.