War looms in Europe

Vladimir Putin is a former KGB officer who has put his training in deception and disinformation to extensive use as president of Russia. A fog of cynical propaganda enshrouds his every move—and the current crisis in Ukraine is no different. Surrounding that neighboring country with a massive air, sea and land force is an “exercise,” his government insists, not an obvious prelude to invasion. The heavy shelling of civilian areas of Ukraine from Russian-backed separatist territory Thursday was a response to Ukrainian violations, not a blatant provocation. Ethnic Russians in the region are suffering from Ukrainian “genocide.” The biggest lie of all is that Russia is responding to a security threat from the United States and its NATO allies rather than pursuing Putin’s long-standing goal of a resurrected Russian empire.

And so Thursday was a day of much-needed clarity about this crisis— even if it was also a day on which hope for a diplomatic settlement diminished.

For its part, Russia published a dismissive response to U.S. offers of further security talks, suggesting that the Biden administration’s refusal to meet Russian demands for a veto over Ukraine’s NATO membership left Russia no choice but “to respond, including through the implementation of military-technical measures.” De-escalation, Moscow added, would require the removal of all Western-supplied arms and advisers not just from Ukraine but from every European nation in the former Soviet bloc, including NATO members such as Poland.

This was all but a declaration of war, as Russia’s deputy foreign minister made evident when he did not take up Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s simple challenge to forswear an invasion of Ukraine during a dramatic United Nations Security Council meeting.

Acknowledging potential comparisons of these intelligence-based warnings to the erroneous ones the Bush administration advanced at the Security Council before the Iraq War in 2003, Blinken noted, appropriately, that he would be only too happy to be proved wrong, since the U.S. goal is “not to start a war but to prevent one.”

Also clarifying at the Security Council meeting were allusions by representatives from other countries to the UN Charter and its provisions outlawing the use or threat of force against member states—basic tenets of international law that Russia is brazenly violating.

Putin believes that a superior military force gives him the advantage, but Ukraine and its friends are armed with the truth.