The war in Ukraine is going badly for the West. Russia is suffering very heavy losses in eastern Ukraine but is making slow, steady progress toward what appears to be the goal of slicing off about 20% of Ukraine's territory and annexing it outright.
According to the 2001 census, 38% of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine is made up of ethnic Russians. Moscow has been able to recruit a sizable number of them and form partisan units to fight alongside Russian troops.
I hasten to point out that just because some people are ethnic Russians and fight for Russia doesn't mean that all or even a majority of ethnic Russians in Donbas are supporting the Russian invasion. In fact, there are far more Ukrainians fighting against Russia in Donbas than ethnic Russians fighting for Moscow.
Much of the Donbas is a ghost town. Like many war zones of the 20th century, they will be finding landmines in the ground for 100 years. The destruction has depopulated the region and denuded it of industry.
But Ukraine hasn't given it up yet. And as long as they fight, Moscow will continue to pour troops into the meat grinder.
Fortunately for Russian President Vladimir Putin, his mercenary ally, North Korea, has come to his aid by reportedly committing 100,000 troops to the war. Ukraine has to find a way to hit back to maintain the strategic balance. That's where U.S.-built ATACMS missiles come into play.
The very accurate missiles have a range of about 300 miles and can hit Russian bases from which many drones and bombers are launched. The ATACMS and British Storm Shadow missiles have forced a reevaluation of Russian priorities and possibly a strategic reset.
Russia slightly altered its nuclear doctrine and launched a new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) into Ukraine. It was an escalation by Putin, but he reportedly gave the U.S. a 30-minute warning.
So it appears that once again, Vladimir Putin has ignored his own "red line" and swallowed the U.S. escalation.
How much longer can he continue to do that?
The closer Joe Biden gets to leaving office, the more reckless he is becoming. He recently authorized the shipment of anti-personnel land mines to Ukraine. These indiscriminate weapons are likely to kill as many Ukrainians in the next 50 years as they kill Russians now.
But Biden says he has to authorize the use of missiles to attack Russian territory and the deployment of mines that rip human beings to shreds because Donald Trump is coming to town. And that means Ukraine is doomed, doomed I say.
Before he left office, Trump authorized the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. It was those missiles that blunted Moscow's assault on Kyiv in the first days of the war.
Trump wants peace in Ukraine, but he's not just going to give Putin an easy victory. He will try to get our NATO allies to put their money where their mouth is on Ukraine and ante up to fill Ukraine's war chest. It's a certainty that Europe can't send much in the way of equipment.
"The British military—the leading U.S. military ally and Europe's biggest defense spender—has only around 150 deployable tanks and perhaps a dozen serviceable long-range artillery pieces," Max Colchester, David Luhnow, and Bojan Pancevski of The Wall Street Journal reported last December. "France, the next biggest spender, has fewer than 90 heavy artillery pieces, equivalent to what Russia loses roughly every month on the Ukraine battlefield. Denmark has no heavy artillery, submarines or air-defense systems. Germany's army has enough ammunition for two days of battle."
NATO leadership is well aware of this problem, noting last month that "the combined wealth of the non-US Allies, measured in GDP, is almost equal to that of the United States. However, non-US Allies together spend less than half of what the United States spends on defence."
Biden is using Trump's imminent ascension as an excuse to allow Ukraine to threaten the peace of the world by giving it the means to target Russian population centers. It's a cynical ploy by Biden that might make it more difficult for Trump to get the two sides to the table.
That would be just fine with Biden.
