President Biden and his top aides acknowledge they are risking American credibility as they constantly renew the alarm that Russia is only “several days” away from triggering an unprovoked land war in Europe that could kill tens of thousands of Ukrainians in its opening hours, and plunge the world back into something resembling the Cold War.
But Biden’s aides say they are willing to take that risk.
They would rather be accused of hyperbole and fearmongering than be proven right, they say, if that’s what it takes to deter Russian President Vladimir V. Putin from pursuing an invasion that they worry will not stop at Ukraine’s borders.
“If Russia doesn’t invade Ukraine, then we will be relieved that Russia changed course and proved our predictions wrong,’’ secretary of state Antony J. Blinken said at the UN Security Council on Thursday morning, in a speech that Biden had asked him to give only hours before. “That would be a far better outcome than the course we are currently on. And we will gladly accept any criticism that anyone directs at us.’’
“I am here today not to start a war, but to prevent one,’’ he declared, an oblique reference to Colin L. Powell’s famous but false case, also made to the UN, about why the US and its allies had to disarm Saddam Hussein.
Biden and Blinken make no secret of their suspicion that their increasingly desperate-sounding, last-ditch efforts to deter calamity will likely fail. Their pessimism was reinforced Thursday by a series of escalations. Russian-backed forces in the Donbas region appeared responsible for shelling a school, and later claimed they had come under fire from Ukrainian forces, exactly the kind of incident Blinken warned might be used as a pretext to justify an invasion.
Biden will hold a phone call Friday afternoon with trans-Atlantic leaders about Russia’s buildup of military troops on the border of Ukraine and continued efforts to pursue deterrence and diplomacy.
Russia acknowledged on Thursday having expelled the No. 2 diplomat in the American embassy in Moscow, and sent Washington a contradictory-sounding note in which it mocked the claims that it was planning to invade.
It said no such action was being planned, and then warned that it would use “measures of a “military-technical character” if the West did not meet its security demands with “legally binding guarantees”.
(It is not entirely clear what “military-technical” means to Putin, but officials in Washington speculate it could encompass everything from cyberweapons to relocating nuclear weapons closer to western Europe or the US.)
While Biden insisted that “every indication we have is they’re prepared to go into Ukraine’’, a growing number of diplomats and leaders pouring into Munich for an annual security conference said they thought the best they could hope for was no invasion — but a long siege of Ukraine.
Under that scenario, Putin might do everything short of sending his troops over the border — cyberattacks, assassinations, coup plots, cutting off trade — in hopes of toppling the government without triggering sanctions.
New York Times News Service
