Do images still have the power to shock in such a moment of violent disruption in our politics? Post-January 6th Washington seems increasingly inured to the previously unthinkable, and yet, even in an America transformed by internal discord and a year of war in Europe, the pictures this week were head-snapping: drones exploding over Red Square, in Vladimir Putin’s seat of power. The Russian government immediately blamed Ukraine and, rather dramatically, considering the murder that it rains down on its neighbor daily, huffed about the strike being an “assassination attempt” on Putin himself.
While speculation ran rampant that it was actually a false-flag operation by Russia itself to justify further atrocities in Ukraine, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, on Thursday accused not only Ukraine but the United States of sending the drones, since “decisions about such actions and such terrorist acts are made not in Kyiv, but in Washington,” adding, “Kyiv then does what it’s told.” Both Ukraine and the United States quickly denied it—“lying, pure and simple,” a White House spokesman said—though leaked U.S.-intelligence documents suggested that Ukraine had previously considered hitting Putin’s capital and been convinced to hold off by the Americans. Whoever is responsible, the high-visibility strike in the heart of Moscow was genuinely a big deal, the first air attack on the Kremlin since the Luftwaffe bombed it in 1942. Few doubted that consequences would loom.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than fourteen months ago, continues to transform American foreign policy in astonishing ways. Washington under President Joe Biden has done so much to aid Ukraine, but in such incremental steps that it can be easy to forget that the United States is now effectively fighting a proxy war against Russia there, with its weapons, targeting, intelligence, and other assistance providing crucial support to keep Ukraine in the fight. The day of the attack on the Kremlin, a new round of up to three hundred million dollars in U.S. aid was released by the Pentagon, including 155-mm. howitzers, Hydra-70 aircraft rockets, tow missiles, and artillery and mortar rounds. Boosted by all these weapons from the West, there is the hope and the expectation that Kyiv’s forces will mount a major counteroffensive in the coming months to push Russia out of the approximately seventeen per cent of Ukrainian territory that it has managed to seize. But when? And how successfully? Will the gains be enough to force Russia and Ukraine into peace talks?
The costs imposed on Russia for its disastrous invasion, meanwhile, have already been enormous, measured in tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties. In a stark public statement this week, the National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the Russian military has suffered some twenty thousand dead and eighty thousand wounded in just the past few months, many of them in the battle for one Ukrainian city, Bakhmut. That’s more than the number of American casualties in the decisive Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. It was striking that the Biden Administration clearly made a calculated decision to put this declassified intelligence out. Given that Russia initially insisted that its war was merely a “special military operation,” releasing these gruesomely high death tolls seems like a potent form of information warfare.
The reality is that we have not yet seen major Russian retaliation against America and other allies for their part in insuring that Ukraine can keep fighting. What would that look like? If not drones flying over the U.S. Capitol, there are many chilling scenarios to consider, from explicit acts of terrorism to widespread cyberattacks and strikes on Western supply lines into Ukraine. Just this week, nato warned that Russia could seek to “disrupt Western life” by targeting undersea cables that help supply everything from Internet access to energy. Even before the Ukraine invasion, Russia had carried out targeted killings and poisonings on Western soil in recent years; imagine an expanded campaign of murder and mayhem far from the theatre of war. Putin’s isolated, embattled, and totalitarian Russia could yet wreak much damage on those he blames for his own catastrophic choices. What will it mean, going forward, if the world faces the long-term prospect of Russia joining North Korea and Iran on the list of global outlaw nations?
For much of the past year, Russia’s repeated threats to go nuclear in response to Western support for Ukraine have, understandably, dominated the discussion about the dangers of escalation. “Every day when they provide Ukraine with foreign weapons brings the nuclear apocalypse closer,” Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian President who has emerged as a particularly hysterical voice in this war, said in March. (This week, Medvedev said Russia should respond to the drones launched at the Kremlin by the “physical elimination” of Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky.) Russian-military doctrine specifically allows for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in battlefield situations, and there has been endless debate about what actions might trigger such a response: Would a full-out push by Ukraine to recapture the Crimean Peninsula cause Russia to launch a nuclear weapon? Or the prospect of actually losing the war?
Yet in a way those worries have overwhelmed discussion of other, more likely threats from Russia. Seeing the images of a fireball over the Kremlin this week brought that home to me, especially when the Kremlin quickly blamed the United States. Consider the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, in 2024, which could decide not only the trajectory of democracy in America but the fate of Russia and Ukraine as well. Russia has not hesitated to intervene aggressively in American politics before; many forget that, according to the Mueller report, the Russian-intelligence campaign to influence the 2016 U.S. election originated with the Kremlin’s anger over what it considered to be America’s role in toppling the Russia-backed leader of Ukraine in 2014. With Russia now embroiled in an existential war against Ukraine, and the United States today firmly on Ukraine’s side, Putin has far more incentive this time.
The current Republican front-runner for 2024 is the Putin-admiring Donald Trump, who has been outspoken in questioning U.S. support for Ukraine since last year’s Russian invasion. Were Trump to win, with or without Russia’s connivance, it would count as a dramatic win for Putin as well—a political concussion with far more boom to it than any number of drone attacks.
Given all that, it counted as modest good news for the supporters of Ukraine in Washington to hear the Republican Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, offer more full-throated support this week for continued U.S. assistance after his previous warning of no “blank check” for the war. “I support aid for Ukraine,” McCarthy said, rebuking a Russian reporter during a press conference in Jerusalem. “I do not support what your country has done to Ukraine; I do not support your killing of the children, either. And I think . . . you should pull out. And I don’t think it’s right. And we will continue to support, because the rest of the world sees it just as it is.”
Many wondered whether this tougher statement from McCarthy was a beneficial effect of Tucker Carlson, a frequent Ukraine basher who held great sway with some of the most isolationist Republicans in McCarthy’s caucus, having been booted off the Fox News airwaves. “Well, no one is more unhappy about Tucker’s departure than the Russians,” one congressional Republican told Axios. Another added, “Tucker being gone makes my life easier with many things, including Ukraine.”
But all the commentary also underscored for me the extreme fragility of the moment: the point is that Republican support for Ukraine, though robust and bipartisan enough in the polls and congressional votes so far, is not to be taken for granted. Trump’s return is too real of a possibility. The U.S. course cannot be considered irreversibly set in favor of Ukraine. That question will not be settled until the next Presidential election. Period. The battlefields in this awful war unleashed by Russia are many. ♦
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