Fourth phase of Ukraine war with Russia could be decisive — if the U.S. sends more weapons
The war in Ukraine has now entered its third phase. Phase 1, beginning on Feb. 24, was Russia’s pellmell attempt to take Kyiv. That resulted in failure thanks to terrible Russian logistics (remember the 40-mile convoy?) and a skillful Ukrainian defense making use of handheld weapons such as Stingers and Javelins supplied by the West.
Phase 2 began in mid-April, when Russian dictator Vladimir Putin concentrated his forces on Luhansk province in the eastern Donbas region. That phase, characterized by relentless Russian artillery bombardment, ended in early July with the retreat of Ukrainian forces from Luhansk.
In the third phase of the war, Ukrainian troops are holding a strong defensive position in neighboring Donetsk province (also part of Donbas) and effectively hitting back with High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and other longerrange weapons supplied by the West. The HIMARS, in particular, have been a game changer by allowing the Ukrainians to destroy more than 100 high-value targets such as Russian ammunition depots and command posts.
A Ukrainian battalion commander told The Post that since the HIMARS strikes began, Russian shelling has been “10 times less.” Another Ukrainian officer told the Wall Street Journal: “It was hell over here. Now, it’s like paradise. Super quiet. Everything changed when we got the HIMARS.” President Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukrainian fatalities are down from between 100 and 200 a day to 30 a day.
If Ukraine is able to fight back so effectively with only 12 HIMARS (soon to be 16), imagine what it could do with dozens more and, better still, Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), which use the same platform but have nearly quadruple the range. These rocket systems should be supplemented by Western tanks and fighter aircraft. If the West were to supply all these weapons, Ukraine could mount a counteroffensive to take back lost land in the south and east and help end the war.
NO THIRD WORLD WAR
The Biden administration is slowly supplying more HIMARS and, for the first time, is even discussing the provision of Western fighter aircraft (after nixing a Polish plan to send MiG-29s in March). But ATACMS appear to be off the table because, as national security adviser Jake Sullivan explained last week, the administration does not want to head “down the road towards a third world war.” Ukraine isn’t even allowed to use its HIMARS to end the shelling of its second-largest city, Kharkiv, because the Russian artillery batteries are located on Russian soil.
This strategic calculus makes no sense. Does Sullivan really believe that Putin will launch World War III if the United States supplies rockets with a range of about 180 miles but will hold off as long as we’re supplying only rockets with a range of about 50 miles? Or that the provision of HIMARS,
NASAMS air-defense systems, 155mm howitzers, Phoenix Ghost drones, Javelins and Stingers isn’t too provocative — but fighter aircraft and tanks would be?
President Biden is right not to send U.S. forces into direct combat with the Russians, but everything else should be fair game, from ATACMS to F-16s to Abrams tanks. The Soviets didn’t hesitate to supply North Korea and North Vietnam with fighter aircraft to shoot down U.S. warplanes. (Soviet pilots even flew for North Korea.) Why shouldn’t we return the favor?
At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, some feared that Putin was acting so irrationally that he might resort to nuclear weapons. But if the past five months have taught us anything, it is that, while the Butcher of Bucha is evil, he is not suicidal or irrational.
Putin pulled back from Kyiv when it was revealed to be a losing cause and made sensible, if brutal, use of Russian artillery in Luhansk. Putin has basically ignored rumored Ukrainian strikes on military targets inside Russia. He hasn’t attacked Poland, which has become the main staging ground for weapons to Ukraine. He hasn’t lashed out since Finland and Sweden set about joining NATO, thereby putting more NATO troops on Russia’s border.
This is of a piece with Putin’s history. He is a classic bully who picks on the weak (Georgia, Ukraine, the Syrian rebels) while shying away from direct confrontations with the strong (the United States, NATO). Putin is rational enough to realize that if his military is having trouble handling Ukraine, it would have no chance in a war with the Atlantic alliance.
The United States matches Russia in nuclear forces and far exceeds it in conventional capabilities. Biden is in a far stronger position than Putin, but he is acting as if he were weaker. Stop letting Putin deter us from doing everything we can to aid Ukraine. Putin should be more afraid of us than we are of him.
The war has already proved costly to Russia: It has lost about 1,000 tanks, and roughly 60,000 soldiers have been killed or wounded. There won’t be much left of the Russian military if the Ukrainians are armed with lots more HIMARS and ATACMS, along with tanks and fighter aircraft. The fourth phase of the war could prove decisive — but only if the United States finally makes a commitment to help Ukraine win.
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.”
(c)2022 The Washington Post
We have won the battle of ideas, but we have lost the battle of stories.” The quote is not mine. It is from Rodrigo Arenas, owner of the conservative Guatemalan digital media outlet República. But I asked permission to use it with the promise to always credit the author of the original quote.
And here we continue, lamenting how time and time again the moral superiority of the left is imposed in Europe, Latin America and, more recently, in the United States. At this point, it is difficult to defend with data and facts that capitalism is not the least bad of systems and not hurt feelings.
Nor is it reasonable to believe that communism functions as a form of government after the innumerable failures experienced, whether in the Russian steppes or the beaches of Cuba, to give just two examples.
The data, always the data. The right overwhelms with data, macroeconomics, microeconomics and indices of wealth and well-being, while the left, far from surrendering to the evidence, counterattacks with emotions, its stories, its fables directed at people’s hearts.
So we find, for example, that in the cosmopolitan bars of prosperous Europe, young students and professionals, speaking several languages, toast each other with beer while wearing T-shirts bearing the image of Che Guevara. But behind the face of the bearded revolutionary hides a violent character, who had no qualms about apologizing for deaths at the United Nations and who is also documented to have been a homophobe. Who cares about data if you can weave together an epic story of the hero who fought against the powerful and died defending the most favored against an evil army in Bolivia? Heedless journalists use the phrase. “don’t let the facts spoil a good story” and this is what left-wing propagandists have done since the middle of the 20th century.
We have come to accept that a right-wing dictatorship is always reprehensible while always able to justify left-wing dictatorship. Something like, “Pinochet is detestable, but Fidel has his grace.” For Sen. Bernie Sanders, “It would be unfair” to affirm that “everything is bad” in Cuba’s communist regime, and he praises the hospitality of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, a place he chose to enjoy his honeymoon with his wife. Can you imagine if a Republican leader spoke about the wonders of Pinochet’s Chile and proudly displayed his photo album of his honeymoon in the Argentina of the military junta?
We also see countries governed by social democrats in Europe or the different Democratic administrations in the United States shamelessly endorse the socialist governments of Latin America. Maduro, Correa, Ortega, Morales and company are not equated with the moderate European left. They do not respect the separation of powers, they do not respect human rights, they persecute the press and they stifle private initiative. But, once again, we have accepted the story of the fight against the powerful and evil businessmen.
For this struggle of principles between conservatives and progressives, which takes place mainly in the media, ideologues have to keep the data in a drawer and play the story card.
The story of a humble worker who prefers to live on his efforts than on government aid. The story of a family that wants to watch television series that show them different ways of living life and choose the one they like best. Stories of women, of the environment, of solidarity. Stories that don’t need political correctness to be attractive.
The war is not yet lost. The time has come to confront the left in the battle of the narrative.
Manuel Aguilera is founder and CEO of the HispanoPost Media Group. He is a former executive editor of Univision’s online platform.