“I sure hope to hell you know what you’re doing.”
This is what U. S. President Joe Biden told Hunter Biden when his son told him in 2015 that he will join the board of directors of the corruption-stained Burisma energy company in Ukraine, run by ex-Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky.
The same could be said to Biden and all European leaders today when it comes to Russian policy.
Biden imposed some tougher sanctions on April 15 and declared Russia’s actions against the US — including hacking and election interference — a “national emergency,” a step that gives the president a freer hand to impose more sanctions in the future.
Biden declared on April 15: “I hereby report that I have issued an executive order declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States posed by specified harmful foreign activities of the government of the Russian Federation.”
Strong words, but stronger actions are still needed. The US and the European Union’s attempts to stop the Kremlin are still too weak.
Perhaps the best sanction announced on April 15 was the prohibition on U.S. institutions from buying Russian sovereign bonds on the primary market, an attempt to cripple Russia’s ability to borrow. But as London-based analyst Timothy Ash pointed out, the ban didn’t apply to the secondary market, where debt is re-traded. He made this analogy: “It would be like a 16-year-old getting an adult to buy alcohol from the liquor store and giving it to the teen around the back.”
In any case, fortress Russia is not likely to buckle because it can’t borrow.
Swedish economist Anders Aslund pointed out some of the missing elements: sanctions against oligarchs and big Russian state companies in finance or energy.
Western leaders still don’t understand that Vladimir Putin is a rogue dictator guilty of war crimes and untrustworthy. He deserves the most crushing sanctions and diplomatic isolation. Until then, he will continue his destructive ways. Western weakness is why, seven years after Russia invaded Ukraine and took Crimea and a chunk of the Donbas, we’re at an impasse.
We’ll say this about Putin: He plays a weak hand well. The Kremlin kleptocracy has a small economy, represses its citizens, muzzles its press, kills its opponents and is a malevolent influence globally. Its twin aims are to destroy democracies and reassemble as much of the Soviet Union as it can. Putin, a tiny man with a big inferiority complex, has been threatening Ukraine by amassing nearly 100,000 troops and advanced weapons near the borders.
The Kremlin propaganda machine has also set the stage for more war by dehumanizing Ukrainians as Nazis whose state should be destroyed, by handing out Russian citizenship to residents in the eastern Donbas and even by threatening the U.S. if it sent warships to the Black Sea. (The U.S. announced on April 15 that it wouldn’t.)
Instead of shunning Putin and pushing for harder sanctions — a SWIFT ban on Russia on financial transactions, sanctions against oligarchs, an end to most trade relationships, the imposition of Congress-approved sanctions to stop Nord Stream 2 and a push to oust Russia from international institutions for violating its democratic commitments — the Biden administration gave Putin the legitimacy he doesn’t deserve.
The US president responded to Putin’s belligerence by calling him and inviting him to a personal summit in a few months. Kremlin media gleefully portrayed this as American weakness. Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelensky does not get his calls answered by Putin.
Another perversion is the Kremlin’s ability to turn the victim into the aggressor. Russian officials threatened to destroy Ukraine if it does not stop its “provocations.” Keep in mind: these are Ukrainians on Ukrainian soil. How is defending the homeland a provocation? Russia, get out.
Those who call the shots in the West still have no backbone, with the exceptions of the Baltics, Scandinavians and Poles. Germany and France seem to want to do as little as possible, besides issue tiresome statements of “deep concern.” They respond with annoyance to Ukraine’s urgent calls for action and NATO membership.
Even Turkey, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on April 10 called for the return of Crimea and Donbas to Ukraine and for Ukrainian membership in NATO, softened on April 15, with its foreign minister saying the nation is not taking any side in the conflict.
“Why is America pussyfooting around this megalomaniac who openly wants to destroy Ukraine, the European Union and democracy everywhere?” asks Atlantic Council fellow Diane Francis. “The West’s reticence is bizarre given that NATO’s 30 countries have five times the population and 10 times the economy of Russia.”
To respond to Putin, Francis writes, the West has to start thinking like Putin: Give NATO membership to Ukraine, place American and NATO troops there to protect it; shut down the gas pipeline to Germany, slap punitive tariffs on all Russian exports.
Ukrainian leaders are not going to complain too loudly about Western inaction because they need all the friends they can get. Zelensky has gamely been putting on a diplomatic offensive that will include a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on April 16 in Paris.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba got meetings on April 13 with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. But he appeared to come away empty-handed, despite his eloquent pleas: “At the operational level, we need measures which will deter Russia, and which will contain its aggressive intentions. This could be, as the secretary-general mentioned, a new round of sanctions, which would raise the price of Russian aggression. This could be direct support, aimed at strengthening Ukraine’s defense capabilities, because we do know that Russia spares no effort to prevent third countries from cooperating with Ukraine, in the defense sector. Russia is working hard to undermine our defense capabilities.”
Kuleba went on: “There is only one thing that I really would like to highlight here. The price, some measures, which we are talking about, may look costly, but the price of prevention, will still be lower than the price of stopping the war and mitigating its consequences. So it’s better to act now to prevent Russia from further escalating the situation.”
