Can NATO, Biden stop Putin from taking Ukraine by force?

The video summit between President Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin didn’t resolve the most dangerous foreign policy crisis so far for the Biden presidency: Can the United States and its NATO partners prevent Russia from taking over Ukraine by force?

Amazingly, no one is yet certain whether Putin has massed nearly 100,000 Russian troops on three borders of Ukraine with the intent to invade — or is using them to pressure the West into consigning that country to Russian domination.

“We still do not believe President Putin has made a decision,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the press after the video call on Tuesday.

But the fact that the video call was held on Dec. 7 — the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — is truly symbolic. If Putin can take control of a European country by threatening or using force, it will erase the principles of international conduct that have kept peace in Europe since World War II. “The international system will be set back decades,” Admiral James Stavridis told MSNBC.

China would certainly take keen notice in deciding whether to move on Taiwan. And NATO’s remaining cache, following on the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, would be gone.

This geopolitical game of chicken will probably play out in the next few weeks, when the number of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border is expected to rise to at least 175,000.

Europe’s future depends on whether Biden and European allies can persuade Putin the cost of an invasion would be too high.

However, the Russian leader has manufactured this crisis out of personal paranoia and unappeased anger over the collapse of the Soviet Union. He insists the West wants to use Ukraine as a “springboard against Russia.”

Now Putin wants a legal guarantee that Ukraine will never become a member of NATO. (Biden has rightly ruled out this Kremlin effort to control NATO — or sovereign Ukrainian — decisions.)

In tense talks, Biden warned Putin that an invasion of Ukraine would trigger massive economic penalties that go well beyond the sanctions imposed after the invasion of Crimea. The new penalties could block Russian companies from capital markets and target Russia’s economic elite. Most drastic, they could even cut Russia off from the global financial system, called SWIFT, that enables international money transfers.

Yet all these economic penalties are geared to blocking a full scale invasion. It is not clear whether NATO members will stand together firmly if Putin mounts a lesser incursion — say to link Russia by land with Crimea by seizing another chunk of Ukraine.

Nor is it clear whether the Europeans will split with the White House if Putin’s price is the “Finlandization” of Ukraine — meaning the consignment of Ukraine to formal Russian domination. Call it a repeat of the infamous Yalta conference, where Josef Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt split up control of Europe between them.

“I believe Putin’s intention is to extort concessions,” the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, John Herbst, told me. “He is hoping the White House will be weak kneed, or Brussels, or Germany or Ukraine.”

That analysis makes sense, when I recall my weeks in Ukraine in 2014 after Russian proxies fomented violence in the Donbas. At the time, Russia was reportedly planning to seize all of southern Ukraine — where Russian speakers predominate. But as I heard when traversing that territory, most Russian-speaking Ukrainians had no desire to be ruled by Moscow and would have put up a hard fight.

The Ukrainian army is far better armed and trained now, and Putin is likely reluctant to take heavy casualties. But, after all this drama, he is also unlikely to do nothing.

So the real test for Biden and European leaders is whether they can hold together on truly tough sanctions if Putin avoids a mass invasion, but bites off another piece of Ukraine. Or pushes the West to squeeze Ukraine’s leaders into accepting a role as a Russian satellite.

“This is a moment of truth for NATO,” I was told by Alexander Vershbow, the former Deputy Secretary General of the organization. And for Biden as well. Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for The Philadelphia Inquirer.