A Ukrainian military victory, not Western legal action and a negotiated settlement, is what is needed now.
The gruesome images of mass graves and murder coming out of Bucha, Ukraine, have inspired calls for war criminal investigations and war crimes tribunals.
This is, obviously, necessary and appropriate. But what is conspicuously missing are calls for Russia’s military defeat and expulsion from Ukraine.
President Biden, for instance, called Putin a war criminal, who needs to stand trial; however, he did not call upon the West to redouble its efforts to ensure a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield. Instead, the President was silent and noncommittal about Western war aims in Ukraine.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stolenberg, likewise, said that “targeting and murdering civilians is a war crime. All the facts must be established and all those responsible for these atrocities must be brought to justice.”
True, but how can justice be served if Putin wins the war? Russia, obviously, must be defeated first before any war crimes tribunals can be convened.
Yet, like President Biden, in the wake of Bucha, NATO had nothing to say about altering the military balance of power to ensure Putin’s defeat.
Unfortunately, this is part of a troubling pattern or trend. Since this conflict began in February, Mr .Biden and his counterparts in Western Europe have been more worried about provoking Putin than in ensuring a Ukrainian win.
Consequently, they have been slow-walking military aid and assistance to Ukraine, while denying Ukrainian requests for heavy military equipment: tanks, armored vehicles, artillery systems, anti-ship missiles, military aircraft, et al.
“The [Biden] administration is not moving quickly enough,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, in an interview with Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot.
There is more we can do to help [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and put him in the strongest possible position going forward…
[But] the administration just continues to be guided by a fear of provoking Putin. That’s really what’s guided their efforts from the start. I think that’s why we’re somewhat behind the curve.
“The concern among Ukraine’s supporters on Capitol Hill and the Pentagon,” reports the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
is that the Biden Administration doesn’t want Ukraine to go on offense. It wants a negotiated settlement as soon as possible.
France and Germany, the doves in the NATO coalition, are in a similar place. They worry that if Russia suffers even greater losses, Mr. Putin might escalate again and perhaps in more dangerous ways that drag NATO directly into the war.
In a sense, Mr. Putin with his threats is defining the limits of U.S. assistance to Ukraine.
‘World War III’. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin sums up the conventional wisdom: “The bitter truth is that we will not risk a third world war to insist Russia fully retreat from all of Ukraine and purge itself of Putin.”
In truth, though, a wider war and a more dangerous conflagration—in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East—is more likely if Putin wins in Ukraine.
Dictators and bad actors—including China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and Iran’s Ali Khamenei—will learn that the West can be rolled and that aggression pays.
An emboldened Putin, meanwhile, will continue to threaten nearby NATO countries, such as Poland and the Baltic states, but from a far stronger military position in Ukraine.
The bottom line: war crimes can be punished only after a war ends, and only after those responsible have been defeated on the battlefield.
Calling Putin a war criminal and insisting that he and his generals be tried in a war crimes tribunal is all well and good, but it mustn’t obscure the more immediate and pressing wartime exigency, which is to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.
Bucha should stiffen the spines of Western leaders to ensure that Ukraine wins and Russia loses. Punishing Putin and his generals for war crimes is no substitute for military victory and is impossible in any case without a military victory.
Feature photo credit: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, grief stricken after seeing the carnage caused by Russian war crimes in Bucha, courtesy of the New York Post.
