BIDEN DECIDES THAT UKRAINE JUST MIGHT BEAT RUSSIA

 

           …Russia has continued to bomb the Ukraine city of Mariupol to no avail

 

Biden now believes that the U.S. should increase its aid to Ukraine.

 

Take a careful look at presidential statements from Russia and the United States this week.  You’ll see that the leaders of the two countries appear to be clarifying their goals in Ukraine, as the war shifts to a bitter fight for control of the eastern part of the country.

The latest statements by President Vladimir Putin and President Biden don’t preclude a dangerous escalation.  But they do offer public descriptions of each side’s goals in ways that may reduce the risk of miscalculation.  Perhaps setting parameters for what Cold War strategists would have called having an “agreed on battle.”

Putin’s new message, unmistakable, is retrenchment.  Having failed in his initial push to seize the capitol city, Kyiv, and topple the government.  He now speaks of controlling the Russian-speaking eastern part of the country, known as Donbas.  As well as the neighboring areas along the coast. 

Biden’s message, by contrast, has become more assertive: stepping up U.S. military aid to Ukraine and vowing to resist Putin’s hegemony over Kyiv, even as he quietly recognizes certain limits.

Putin focused in two statements this week on the priority of securing the Donbas region, which Russia views as independent of Kyiv.  Protecting the separatists in Donbas from the central government was Putin’s pretext for the invasion, when he launched the war on Feb. 24.  But in the opening weeks of the war, he also appeared to be seeking the overthrow of President Zelensky, with his stupid, nonsensical talk of the “denazification” of Ukraine. 

With Russia’s failure to capture Kyiv, that broader goal seems to have receded.

Putin emphasized the Donbas mission at a choreographed meeting with a group that included a 12-year-old girl from that region. “As I said at the very beginning, the purpose of this operation is exactly to help our people living in Donbas, people like you. We will act consistently and achieve a situation where life will gradually return to normal there,” he said.

Putin amplified this message in a meeting with his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Putin has claimed victory in the southern coastal city of Mariupol and praised the Russian troops there who have assaulted the city for weeks, asserting that they “sacrificed their lives so that our people in Donbas live in peace and to enable Russia, our country, to live in peace.”

But he ordered Defense Minister Shoigu not to storm Ukrainian fighters still entrenched beneath a steel complex outside Mariupol, telling his defense minister to instead “prioritize preserving the lives and health of our soldiers and officers.”  (He would have lost even more of his officers if he had his army continue to storm the Mariupol steel works.) 

That didn’t sound like a president ready to pay the butcher’s bill for a bloody campaign to capture all of Ukraine.

It appearing that President Putin’s Russian military has been more like the “Keystone Cops” when it comes to being the so called “great power they have been expected to be.”

Copyright G. Ater 2022