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The Growing Fear of a Wider War Between Russia and the West

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On his visit to Poland last weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken walked fifteen feet into Ukraine, as snow began to fall, to meet briefly with its foreign minister. It was symbolic of the Biden Administration’s deliberately calibrated policy—going up to the border, but not beyond—to avoid any move that the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, could perceive as provocative. “For everything we’re doing for Ukraine, the President also has a responsibility to not get us into a direct conflict, a direct war, with Russia, a nuclear power, and risk a war that expands even beyond Ukraine to Europe,” Blinken told “Meet the Press” the next day, from Moldova. Yet, just two weeks into the war, the U.S. increasingly fears being drawn into a war with Russia. The undercurrent to frantic diplomacy and waves of U.S. military deployments—thousands more troops dispatched to Europe, Patriot-missile batteries to Poland, and B-52 bombers flying over Central Europe—is the palpable fear that the unthinkable is now thinkable.

On Tuesday, a new U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that Russia will pursue its interests in “competitive and sometimes confrontational and provocative ways, including pressing to dominate Ukraine and other countries in its ‘near-abroad.’ ” In testimony on the Hill, William Burns, the C.I.A. director and a former Ambassador to Russia, was pressed about Vladimir Putin’s intent. “He’s not going to stop at Ukraine, correct?” asked Representative Jackie Speier, of California. Burns replied, “That’s what makes it more important than ever to demonstrate that he’s not going to succeed in Ukraine.” The stakes, Burns acknowledged, are bigger. “This is one of those pivotal points where we and all of our allies and partners need to act.”

Since Russia’s invasion, the besieged Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has repeatedly warned the West about the danger that Putin would target other European nations. “Everyone thinks that we are far away from America or Canada. No, we are in this zone of freedom,” Zelensky said in a television interview, on Monday. “And, when the limits of rights and freedoms are being violated and stepped on, then you have to protect us. Because we will come first. You will come second. Because, the more this beast will eat, he wants more, more, and more.”

The U.S., however, pushed back this week on key military requests from Ukraine, for fear of Russia’s reaction. Putin’s reckless offensive has forced the U.S. to adopt awkward policy positions. On March 5th, Zelensky made an impassioned appeal to members of the House and Senate for more military aid, notably help in obtaining Soviet-era warplanes that Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly and that could balance Russia’s air superiority. On Wednesday, the Pentagon rejected an offer from Poland to turn over twenty-eight MIG-29 fighter jets to U.S. custody—flying them to a base in Germany—for transfer to Ukraine. U.S. intelligence officials assessed that an American role in a transfer “may be mistaken as escalatory and could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO,” the Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, told reporters. U.S. involvement was deemed to be “high risk.” The majority of Ukraine’s warplanes are still intact, a senior Defense Department official added, while acknowledging that Russia’s surface-to-air missiles now have an “umbrella” that covers virtually all of Ukraine.

The Administration cited the same fears about Zelensky’s request for help from NATO in establishing a no-fly zone over part of Ukraine to protect civilians. “We also have to see to it that this war does not expand,” Blinken said on Wednesday, at a joint press conference with his British counterpart. “Our goal is to end the war, not to expand it, including potentially expand it to NATO territory.” Otherwise, he warned, “it’s going to turn even deadlier, involve more people, and I think potentially even make things harder to resolve in Ukraine itself.”

On Thursday, Avril Haines, the director of National Intelligence, acknowledged that the U.S. is now in a uniquely challenging position. “We are obviously providing enormous amounts of support to the Ukrainians, as we should and need to do,” she told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “But at the same time trying not to escalate the conflict into a full-on NATO or U.S. war with Russia. And that’s a challenging space to manage.”

Yet, at each of his four stops in NATO countries near Russia, Blinken heard dire predictions about the broader Russian threat beyond Ukraine—and the need for the U.S. to do more. In Riga, on Monday, the Latvian foreign minister, Edgars Rinkevics, lamented to Blinken, “We have no illusions about Putin’s Russia anymore.” In Vilnius, the Lithuanian President, Gitanas Nauseda, turned to Blinken and said, “Deterrence is no longer enough. We need more defense here, because otherwise it will be too late here, Mr. Secretary. Putin will not stop in Ukraine; he will not stop.” And in Tallinn, on Tuesday, the Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, said that NATO countries “need to adapt to the new reality” of a “very aggressive Russia” and permanently strengthen their defenses in the air, on land, and at sea. Pressed on what specifically countries on Russia’s borders needed, she replied, “Everything.”

Eastern European countries—notably those once allied with, or part of, the former Soviet Union’s empire—have long warned of the potential for Russian aggression. “We, the Poles, are already tired of reminding everyone: ‘We told ya so,’ ” Marek Magierowski, Poland’s Ambassador to the U.S., told me in an interview this week. He cited the forewarning by the late Polish President Lech Kaczynski during the Russian invasion of Georgia, in 2008. “Today Georgia, tomorrow Ukraine, the day after tomorrow—the Baltic states and later, perhaps, time will come for my country, Poland,” Kaczynski said.

Magierowski added, “We have never had any doubts whatsoever about Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperial ambitions.” Putin has been waiting for this “window of opportunity” for years, he said. “He convinced himself that the West is weak, divided, wallowing in a decadent mood. He thought the free world wouldn’t care about Ukraine’s fate, as it didn’t care about Czechoslovakia’s in 1938,” when Europe tolerated Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Putin, he told me, is similarly “emboldened” because the West was “tragically lenient” and “outrageously complacent” after Russia murdered the defector Alexander Litvinenko, in 2006, invaded and annexed Crimea, in 2014, helped destroy the Syrian city of Aleppo, in 2016, reportedly used chemical weapons to poison the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in 2018, and poisoned the opposition leader Alexey Navalny, in 2020. Over the past three decades, Eastern Europeans have often encountered skepticism as the U.S. and Western Europeans, notably the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, advocated dealing pragmatically with Russia.

During his European trip, Blinken repeatedly promised that NATO, this time, would prevent further Russian expansion. “We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of our collective power,” he vowed, in Estonia. But U.S. experts worry, too, about an unintended incident triggering a wider war, like the spark that ignited the First World War, a conflict that dragged on for four years and killed tens of millions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “could easily escalate into a larger conflict stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea and further west into Europe,” Thomas E. Graham, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, warned in a new report issued on Tuesday. It might not matter what the U.S. does, he said. Crippling sanctions “could provoke Putin to lash out with greater violence,” Graham wrote. But, if NATO appeared restrained, Moscow could be “tempted to press militarily even further into Europe” to enlarge its sphere of influence. The rippling impact of broader Russian aggression would stress “the geopolitical, economic, and institutional foundations” of the international order created after the Second World War, Graham wrote.

Given the Russian leader’s history, Angela Stent, a former national intelligence officer and the author of “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest,” is worried about a miscalculation. “The concern we have to have immediately is that the war in Ukraine doesn’t inadvertently spread to Poland or Romania by some unforeseen clash, which would then have to involve NATO in a war with Russia,” she told me. Stent also worries about Putin’s intentions short of war. “You can use nonmilitary means to disrupt societies. And he’s already been doing that for the past couple of decades.” As the Russian leader grows increasingly cornered, she added, he will seek to exploit popular sentiment in countries like Serbia, where a pro-Russia march to support the war was held last week. The new U.S. intelligence assessment warns that Russia will employ “an array of tools” to undermine the interests of the U.S. and its NATO allies. “We expect Moscow to insert itself into crises” whenever it sees an opportunity, it concludes.

On Wednesday, the Biden Administration issued a forceful denial after Russia’s bizarre claim that the U.S. and Ukraine were developing chemical and biological weapons. The State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, said that Moscow has a long track record of accusing the U.S. of the very crimes that Russia is perpetrating. These tactics are “an obvious ploy” by Russia to try to justify “further premeditated, unprovoked, and unjustified attacks,” he said.

Russia, as the aggressor, still has the upper hand. But, for the U.S. and its allies, the one positive sign is that the performance of the Ukrainian military has exceeded expectations. Russian forces have fallen far short of Putin’s goal of a swift seizure of Kyiv and the ouster of Zelensky’s government. The first two weeks have, instead, been grinding for Moscow. U.S. intelligence estimates that between two thousand and four thousand troops fighting for Russia—not all of them Russian—have died in the first two weeks. The bravery of Ukrainians, so far, has prevented the worst-case scenario.

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