Rubin: Summit and moment of truth

This geopolitical game of chicken will probably play out in the next few weeks, when the number of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border is expected to rise to at least 175,000. Europe’s future depends on whether Biden and European allies can persuade Putin the cost of an invasion would be too high. However, the Russian leader has manufactured this crisis out of personal paranoia and unappeased anger over the collapse of the Soviet Union. He insists the West wants to use Ukraine as a “springboard against Russia.”

This mentality was behind Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Now Putin wants a legal guarantee that Ukraine will never become a member of NATO.

In fact, NATO has no interest in having Kyiv as a full member in the foreseeable future, nor in deploying weapons systems to Ukraine that would target Moscow, a threat about which Putin openly fantasizes. What the Kremlin leader refuses to see is that increased NATO support for its current Eastern European members is precisely because the Kremlin threatens force to achieve its aims.

In tense talks, Biden warned Putin that an invasion of Ukraine would trigger massive economic penalties that go well beyond the sanctions imposed after the invasion of Crimea. The new penalties could block Russian companies from capital markets and target Russia’s economic elite. Most drastic, they could even cut Russia off from the global financial system, called SWIFT, that enables international money transfers.

Sullivan also made clear that the administration would finally work to block activation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline intended to bring gas from Russia to Germany. “If Vladimir Putin wants to see gas flow through that pipeline, he may not want to take the risk of invading Ukraine,” the security adviser said.

Yet all these economic penalties are geared to blocking a full-scale invasion. It is not clear whether NATO members will stand together if Putin mounts a lesser incursion. Nor is it clear whether the Europeans will split with the White House if Putin’s price is the “Finlandization” of Ukraine — meaning the consignment of Ukraine to formal Russian domination. Call it a repeat of the infamous Yalta conference, where Josef Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt split up control of Europe.

“I believe Putin’s intention is to extort concessions,” the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, John Herbst, said. “He is hoping the White House will be weak kneed, or Brussels, or Germany or Ukraine.”

That analysis makes sense, when I recall my weeks in Ukraine in 2014 after Russian proxies fomented violence in the Donbas. At the time, Russia was reportedly planning to seize all of southern Ukraine — where Russian speakers predominate. But as I heard when traversing that territory, most Russian-speaking Ukrainians had no desire to be ruled by Moscow and would have put up a hard fight.

The Ukrainian army is far better armed and trained now, and Putin is likely reluctant to take heavy casualties. But, after all this drama, he is also unlikely to do nothing. So the real test for Biden and European leaders is whether they can hold together on truly tough sanctions if Putin avoids a mass invasion, but bites off another piece of Ukraine. Or pushes the West to squeeze Ukraine’s leaders into accepting a role as a Russian satellite.

“This is a moment of truth for NATO,” I was told by Alexander Vershbow, the former Deputy Secretary General of the organization. And for Biden as well.