President Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian warriors and his courageous people fight on. Against all odds, they defeated Vladimir Putin’s army in the Battle of Kyiv. But one inspiring victory does not win a war. They are now bracing for what promises to be an even larger Battle of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, which Ukrainian officials believe could determine the outcome of the war. They still need help from the West — and the West must respond without caving to Russian threats. The Ukrainians don’t only need Soviet-era heavy weapons. They also need more modern and effective weapons from the West, even if soldiers would have to train for their use off the battlefield. As Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has argued, “The more weapons we get, and the sooner they arrive in Ukraine, the more human lives will be saved.” He’s right. But Western leaders are still concerned about Russian threats of escalation. Western intelligence assessments say that delivering fighter jets, for example, will be unacceptable to Putin. Few in Washington, Berlin, Brussels or London want to escalate this war. This threat of escalation, however, is cheap talk. Putin is bluffing. He is deliberately allowing the U.S. intelligence community to discover data about escalation in order to scare us away from helping Ukrainians win.
Putin’s first bluff was his scariest. Several weeks ago, he threatened consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history” against countries that interfered in Ukraine, and vowed to put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. We now know that these words were empty threats, described by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg as “nuclear saber-rattling.” Russia has also been making non-nuclear threats. Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov similarly commented that Western armaments shipments to Kyiv were “not just a dangerous move” but turned “these convoys into legitimate military targets.” Yet here, too, there is little substance to the bluster. Russia’s army is struggling mightily in a war against a smaller and lesser-armed Ukrainian army. Under such circumstances, Putin is highly unlikely to attack the largest military alliance in the world, anchored by the most powerful military in the world, the United States. Putin is angry and unhinged, but not suicidal. A Ukrainian win or stalemate in that battle will make us and our NATO allies more secure. A loss will produce the opposite.
