Putin threatened “escalation” if US-supplied weapons enabled Ukraine to kill any of his invading Russians. More ominously, he warned he would use all means at his disposal if Ukraine even threatened Russia’s territorial integrity, implying a willingness to use nuclear weapons. He insisted this was a red line, claiming “it’s not a bluff”—as if Russia is the only country with nukes.
Yet, the defining feature of this ill-fated invasion has been Zelensky prevailing upon Biden to help him call Putin’s bluff. As a result, US/NATO-supplied missiles, tanks, and fighter jets have enabled Ukraine to kill hundreds of thousands of invading Russian soldiers.
Ukraine has even used homemade drones to cross Putin’s red line, landing a glancing strike on the Kremlin. Ukraine has consistently outmaneuvered and bedeviled Russia — from fending off its blitzkrieg to take Kyiv in the war’s opening days to blitzing into the Kursk region of Russia just days ago. Arguably, not since the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 has a smaller army used superior tactics to “defeat” a much larger one.
But I’ve argued that Ukraine could have won this war in six months. It only needed US-led NATO to supply the weapons it kept pleading for in a timely manner. But fear of Putin’s idle threats of escalation made Biden adopt a drip-drip strategy for supplying weapons and prohibit Ukraine from using US weapons to hit Russian soil.
Frankly, Ukraine’s retaliatory invasion has made a mockery not only of Putin’s idle threats but also of Biden’s irrational fear. Ultimately, it’s Putin’s bluffing or Biden’s cowering that will go down as the biggest blunder of this war. Slava Ukraini!
