Ukraine War Sanctions— Abandon Incrementalism.

Putin ratchets up civilian casualties as the West ratchets up sanctions.

The sane world hopes the brutal and, frankly, criminal war being waged by Putin against Ukraine will be a limited war, or as Putin likes to say, a special military operation. Putin’s aggression isn’t going to end with Ukraine. Should Ukraine (which is not a member of NATO) fall, Russia will find its nearby NATO-member neighbors intolerable. For example, should Putin succeed in breaking the back of Ukraine (population 44+ million), it is improbable that he will, or can, tolerate Estonia (population 1.3 million and a NATO-member country. He isn’t going to tolerate Latvia either, a NATO member with a population under 1.9 million, or Lithuania, a NATO member, with less than 2.7 million people.

None of these nations have or would threaten Russia. Still, by joining NATO, they have taken steps to discourage Putin from reclaiming them as Russia’s inheritance from the now-deceased Soviet Union. Make no mistake about it, the current attack on Ukrainian civilian targets is also Putin’s intended Coming Attractions for the Baltic NATO members. None of these nations ever want to be part of Russia again. None! And none will be intimidated by Putin’s Coming Attractions. NATO is a purely defensive construct. It isn’t going to attack or threaten anyone unless one of its members is attacked.

Regarding Ukraine, the incremental ramp-up of sanctions against Russia is apt to grow less, not more, effective. As we ramp up sanctions, step by step, so do the Russians. We, essentially, squeeze Russia’s economy. Russia’s response is to squeeze the life out of Ukraine by exerting ever-growing savagery against Ukrainian civilians. Given that there was no Ukrainian provocation for this war, we are all watching an immense war crime in real-time.

Just about every relevant political leader in the world has condemned Putin’s absurd justification for the attack on Ukraine, with the notable exception, of course, of one former head-of-state who has embraced Putin’s rationale for aggression as “genius… he’s going to go in and be a liberator…how smart is that,” but I digress. For Ukraine and its people, sanction-incrementalism is a long-term losing strategy. Now is the time for the total weight of available sanctions, short of boots on the ground or planes in the air. The sooner we complete the isolation of Russia from the family of nations, the better.

Measures that could be taken immediately:

1. A temporary suspension of diplomatic relations with Russia until the Zelensky government and Russia have re-established diplomatic relations. Ukrainian President Zelensky is a dead man walking if the West doesn’t make his survival a prerequisite to Russia rejoining the family of civilized nations. Diplomatic relations between Russia and a Ukrainian, pro-Russian, installed puppet government should be a non-starter.

            2. Cessation of oil and gas imports from Russia by the U.S. and the E.U. This will inflict temporary but diminishing pain on the free world as nations scramble to replace much of Russia’s oil and gas.

The US imports Russian oil, but it is not highly dependent on the country for its supplies.

In 2021, the US imported an average of 209,000 barrels per day of crude oil and 500,000 of other petroleum products from Russia, according to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers trade association.

That’s three percent of US crude oil imports and one percent of the total crude oil processed by US refineries. By contrast, the US imported 61 percent of its crude oil from Canada, 10 percent from Mexico, and six percent from Saudi Arabia in the same year, according to Aljazeera.

The decision to terminate imports of petroleum products from Russia is a bullet we’re going to have to bite sooner or later. Sooner would be better than later. China will not be a reliable long-term, off-setting purchaser of Russian petroleum products. China will not tie its long-term vitality to Russian petroleum and natural gas availability, and certainly not to Russian reliability. The Chinese economy requires an ongoing market relationship with the E.U., America, and Japan.

            3. Cessation of all banking protocols between Russia and the United States, European Union, Switzerland, and Japan.

       4. Substantially strengthen NATO’s readiness to defend its Baltic members bordering Russia (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). This is imperative because  Russia will no more respect a free Baltic region than a free Ukraine. Russia will test one or more of its neighboring NATO countries when it is through with Ukraine. Putin will not be as inept in military ground attacks in the Baltics as in  Ukraine. The Baltic nations need to know that their membership in NATO assures that their independence will be defended.

These are the measures that will, sooner or later, drive a wedge between Putin and the Russian people he purports to lead, the military on which he depends, and the oligarchs who run the economy and pay enormous tribute to Putin. While time is not on Ukraine’s side, the winter thaw promises some significant headaches for Russia too. The Russian generals are all quite familiar with the winter thaw and what they call the Raputitsia, literally, the sea of mud. I researched this phenomenon when writing the last book of the Eden Trilogy, “Cry Eden.” The Raputitsia, what the Russians call the mud season, immobilized the Nazi panzers during the Second World War, stopping German tanks in their tracks. It stopped the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, the French in the nineteenth century, and the Germans in the 20^th century. It will be no less a headache to Russian armor.

If Putin is allowed to get away with the rape of Ukraine, attacks against neighboring NATO nations will not be far behind. Putin will not stop with Ukraine. He can’t. That would leave him weaker, not stronger, relative to NATO. He has caused NATO to beef up its presence in neighboring NATO-member countries. He will have conquered a non-existent threat from Ukraine while simultaneously creating a substantially more serious NATO defensive threat in the neighboring Baltic countries and Poland to the immediate West.

Apologists for Russia like to draw comparisons between Russia’s intolerance of NATO in the Baltics and America’s intolerance of foreign adventurists in our hemisphere. They point to our response to the Cuban Missile Crisis and our Monroe Doctrine as an example of American hypocrisy. It is a weak crutch on which they prop up their case. Essentially, the Monroe Doctrine was America’s response to the threat of European nations continuing to carve out colonies in our hemisphere. The Cuban Missile Crisis resulted from the Soviet Union trying to erect offensive ballistic missiles 90 miles from the United States. As most of us can remember, those missiles were in transit when President John F. Kennedy sent an armada of warships to intercept the Soviet fleet transporting them.

Putin’s massive attacks against Ukraine, a non-NATO nation that represents no offensive threat to Russia, have left him with a coalition of newly reinforced NATO countries on his borders. It is only a short matter of time before he demands that these nations exit NATO. They will not.

The world has become an exceedingly dangerous place, the most dangerous since World War Two. Putin is playing with fire. He has brought the hostility of the civilized world to his nation. This human tragedy is a crisis of his making. The civilized world, including the Russian people, deserve better.