Biden is still right about Russia. Putin has to go
Horrific scenes of mass murder on the outskirts of Kyiv should appall everybody and surprise nobody.
The brutalization of civilians has been the Putin regime's calling card since its inception — from the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999, where the weight of circumstantial evidence points the finger at Vladimir Putin and his security service henchmen, to the murders of Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Magnitsky and Boris Nemtsov to Russia's atrocities in Grozny, eastern Ukraine, Aleppo and now Bucha.
Mostly, the world has found it easier to make excuses to get along with Putin than to work against him. One example: In 2015, Germany got about 35% of its natural gas from Russia. In 2021, the figure had jumped to 55%. Berlin is now a major diplomatic obstacle to imposing stiffer sanctions on Russia, and Germany continues to buy Russian gas, oil and coal, to the tune of $2 billion a month.
But this requires a clear articulation of Western aims in this crisis. Do we want peace now — or at least as soon as possible? Do we want Ukraine to achieve an unmistakable victory over Russia? And do we want Putin to go?
The advantage of peace now — a cease-fire followed by a negotiated settlement — is that it would end both the immediate fighting and the risk of a wider war. These are not small things, and the temptation to seize them will be great, especially if Putin hints at an escalation that terrifies the West.
Problems with this course of action? It would consolidate most of Russia's territorial gains in the war. It would allow Russian forces to continue terrorizing their captive Ukrainian subjects. It would give Putin the chance to present himself as a victor to his domestic audience. And it would provide him with the option to restart the conflict at a future date — an exact replay of what happened after Russia's first Ukraine invasion, in 2014.
The second option is to help Ukraine seek a decisive military victory. That would mean more than simply beating back Russian troops in the vicinity of Kyiv. It would also mean clearing them out of every other area they've seized since February, if not of what Russia seized in 2014.
This would require months of bloody fighting, a small but real risk of wider war and the longterm economic consequences of trying to wean the West from Russian energy.
Critics will argue that this option would put Ukraine's long-term interests ahead of the West's immediate ones. But the West also has a profound interest in seeing Russia lose decisively. It would salvage the principle that sovereign borders cannot be changed by force.
It could also seriously undermine Putin's political grip. To argue that the West has no compelling interest in wanting to see him fall is to pretend that this time, he will slink back into his corner and leave the world alone.
There is a range of options the West has not yet touched when it comes to Putin. We could turn Russia's frozen foreign reserves and other assets into an escrow account for Ukrainian reconstruction, rearmament and refugee resettlement. Brussels could invite Kyiv into a formal accession process into the European Union as a sign of moral solidarity.
None of these may be a silver bullet when it comes to toppling Putin's regime. But regimes that face military defeat, economic impoverishment and global pariahdom are the ones likeliest to fall. The task for the Biden administration is to persuade our allies to pursue all three while the horrors of Bucha remain fresh in our minds