Mike Sigov: High time U.S. saw Putin regime as enemy

Nov. 29—The Kremlin has amassed troops on the Ukrainian border, deployed ground forces in Belarus, and used that country's puppet regime to cause a European Union border crisis — by shipping migrants from the Middle East to the Polish border and forcing them to try and cross it.

An all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine appears imminent unless the United States and its NATO allies take a stand against Russian President Vladimir Putin right now.

Alternatively, the West could pressure Ukraine into conceding at least some of its jurisdiction over the de facto Russian-occupied parts of Eastern Ukraine to Mr. Putin's disciples there, effectively to him.

While the latter scenario may work to stave off the immediate Russian aggression, it will invite a worse escalation by Russia down the road as the Russo-Belorussian games on the Polish borders — those of a NATO member state — indicate.

The West, including the United States, in the meantime largely continues to look the other way, wishfully thinking that tough talk, threats of new sanctions, and token military aid to Ukraine would avert an all-out Russian invasion.

This wishful thinking has become a long-held tradition, since the start of the Putin regime 21 years ago, when he used government-staged bombings of Russian apartment buildings to justify a scorched-earth pacification of Chechnya to solidify his grip on power.

Mr. Putin then expanded his atrocities via his "little wars" in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria, escaping with nothing but economic sanctions that ordinary Russians have to bear in his place.

He even joined his propaganda machine by writing an article that denies Ukraine's right to statehood.

Mr. Putin needs a constant conflict with the West as an excuse to keep tightening the screws at home while he and his cronies continue to pillage the country — with the tacit approval of the West, which allows them to ship their families and their loot here.

Unless the United States leads the West in putting a stop to the Putin aggression right now in Ukraine, he will escalate it to Poland, and possibly beyond in the West.

It would be tragic if the U.S. allies in Europe repeated their mistake in Munich in 1938 when they allowed Nazi Germany to annex Czechoslovakia, which led to the Russo-German invasion of Poland in September of 1939 and to World War II.

To be sure, State Secretary Antony Blinken did host his Ukrainian counterpart earlier this month and signed a U.S.-Ukraine Charter for Strategic Partnership, in which the United States warns Russia against making a "serious mistake" and pledges an "ironclad commitment to Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity."

But the time is long past for pledges — now it is time to arm Ukraine to the teeth so it can serve as a bulwark against Russian expansion.

The United States and its allies should flood Ukraine with advanced if not cutting-edge weapons including anti-personnel, anti-tank, anti-aircraft, and anti-ship missiles, attack drones, and cruise missiles to act as a deterrent, or — failing that — to exact such a heavy cost on the invading force that it causes mass antiwar and anti-regime protests in Russia.

Alexander Vershbow, NATO deputy secretary general in 2012-2016 and previously U.S. ambassador to NATO, Russia, South Korea, and assistant secretary of defense, now a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, has it right in a recent article in the National Interest magazine where he calls for "maximizing Ukraine's capacity to impose significant costs on Russia for future aggression."

Calling for NATO to adopt a more strategic approach in that respect, he suggests the alliance adopt a Ukrainian Deterrence Initiative as an extension of its existing Enhanced Opportunity Partner program to "encompass not only military equipment and training, but measures to increase Ukraine's resilience against cyber-attacks, disinformation, economic warfare, and political subversion, recognizing that Ukraine has been Russia's number one target and laboratory for the dark arts of hybrid warfare."

The United States and the European Union may also want to revisit their current Russian sanctions and seize the assets of all Putin oligarchs to make sure the Kremlin lobby in Washington and in European capitals runs out of money and fades away.

Unless that happens, no consistent policy of Russian containment by the United States and its NATO allies is possible. It's high time we saw the Putin regime as an enemy as opposed to an errant partner.

Mike Sigov, a former Russian journalist in Moscow, is a U.S. citizen and a staff writer at The Blade.

First Published November 28, 2021, 12:00am