Never underestimate the Ukrainians – it turns out they have a lot of cards to play.
On Sunday, Ukrainian military and security services launched Operation Spiderweb, which involved innovative drone strikes against Russian airbases from trucks smuggled covertly deep inside Russian territory, destroying a multitude of long-range bombers (the exact number remains unconfirmed). This occurred on the same weekend that Russia launched its largest missile and drone attack against Ukraine – the difference being that Ukraine targets Russian military facilities and the aircraft that is used to bomb Ukrainian cities, whereas Russia goes after Ukrainian civilian areas.
Then on Tuesday, Ukraine’s forces struck the Crimean Bridge, a key connector between mainland Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea. Together these strikes by Ukrainian forces marked a huge military and morale boost for Ukraine and were a staggering military and intelligence failure for Russia.
On Monday, Russian and Ukrainian delegations met for the second time in the past few weeks in Istanbul. In a meeting lasting barely an hour, they agreed on a further prisoner exchange and not much else. The proposal the Russian delegation brought to Istanbul amounted to nothing more than another call for Ukraine’s capitulation and permanent dismemberment. Ukraine has consistently demonstrated its readiness for a ceasefire as the first step toward ending the fighting and killing. Russian leader Vladimir Putin, by contrast, shows no such willingness to end the war he started.
Instead, he and his lackeys consistently raise the need to address the “root causes” behind the invasion. This is code for Russia’s insistence on controlling large parts of Ukraine (including parts Russia doesn’t even currently occupy), de-Nazification (a change in Ukraine’s government, whose president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish), permanent neutrality for Ukraine (no NATO membership), demilitarization of Ukraine, and no foreign forces stationed on Ukrainian territory (ironic given that Russian forces on Ukrainian territory are “foreign”). Putin, quite simply, has repeatedly rejected calls for a ceasefire unless it would amount to Ukraine’s total surrender.
What does this mean for the United States? In an extraordinary display of bipartisan support for Ukraine, 82 U.S. senators back legislation that would impose crippling tariffs on countries (notably India and China) that import Russian energy and uranium, sales of which generate vital income for Russia’s war machine, and impose other secondary sanctions on any entities around the globe assisting the Russian war effort or aiding Moscow’s sanctions circumvention activities. House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled his support for the bill, but the White House has been silent on it. This legislation would be a key part of tightening sanctions on Russia, choking off desperately needed revenue at a time of increasing economic peril for the Kremlin. In addition, the United States should either sell or provide additional military assistance to Ukraine, especially for missile defense, and continue critical intelligence-sharing.
We should move from freezing the $300 billion in Russian assets in Western financial institutions to seizing those funds and using them to pay for additional military assistance to Ukraine and the country’s rehabilitation. Moscow should never see the return of those funds. That requires working closely with our European allies, who hold the bulk of those frozen assets, while pressing them to do more, which they have been doing. We also need to keep the possibility of holding Putin and other Russian officials responsible for what they have done to Ukraine, from war crimes and crimes against humanity to genocide, on the table. Especially important is the issue of the return of kidnapped Ukrainian children, a grave international war crime under the Geneva Conventions. The need for accountability should serve as a break against those who harbor illusions of a normalization of U.S.-Russian relations anytime soon.
Nobody wants the war to end sooner than the Ukrainians. But if Putin refuses to stop the fighting, the Ukrainians have shown they have plenty of cards up their sleeve.
