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Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Aug. 12, 2022 6:28 pm ET

Russia’s war is forcing a cornered Putin regime to bet on red lines it can’t afford to enforce.

Is the Biden administration afraid of victory in Ukraine? Such has been the accusation, but while it may come down to nearly the same thing, a truer statement is that the U.S. fears being dragged in if it puts its chips on Ukraine and Ukraine starts losing and also if Ukraine starts winning. In fact, almost any victory scenario might require NATO intervention to seal the deal—to draw a red line against a Vladimir Putin desperation play.
Lots of things short of victory or defeat also would make U.S. intervention hard to avoid if the U.S. bet big on victory or even if it didn’t. With the degree that the two countries interpenetrate each other’s elite and intelligence establishments, think the Russian military couldn’t get a kill shot on President Volodymyr Zelensky? But Mr. Zelensky is a hero to Western publics and Mr. Putin can’t be sure of the consequences of such an act. Every time his air force drops a bomb, Mr. Putin has to worry about it falling on an orphanage or a visiting celebrity. He has to worry every time a Western prime minister or parliamentary delegation sets out on the roads of Ukraine.

Mr. Putin fears also the things that Ukraine might do to which he might have to respond—as does the U.S., which is why it discourages strikes on Russia proper. The Kremlin has warned of ominous consequences if Ukraine bombs a vital bridge in Crimea. Monday’s special-forces attack on a Russian air base in Crimea may fall in the same category depending on how Mr. Putin chooses to react. And remember Mathias Rust, the German pilot who landed his Cessna on Red Square at the height of the Cold War? Neither the Kremlin nor the U.S. can have confidence in Russian air defense to stop a Ukrainian MiG bent on bombing Moscow’s onion domes or Mr. Putin’s private office.

None of this means the West shouldn’t up its support—just the opposite. But be ready for what it entails. The problem with some of the go-for-victory calls is their magical element—the unspoken stipulation that Ukraine can supply victory without NATO getting its feet wet. NATO will have to get its feet wet if it wants anything other than a frozen conflict that carries on without resolution (unfortunately the preferred outcome of many in the West). Mr. Putin can’t lose to Ukraine, he has to lose to NATO. In their separate recent war updates, the Atlantic Council and Rand Corp. both emphasize the possibility of the Kremlin leader seeking an armed confrontation with the U.S. to rescue his position at home.
For all the dubious arguments offered about an alleged NATO role in provoking today’s war, notice that NATO is less a military alliance than a demilitarization alliance, its arsenal having shrunk massively since the Cold War. Countries like Poland and the Czech Republic sought membership to avoid having to develop their own deterrents. The Western alliance is an alliance of countries that prefer to shelter behind the U.S. rather than spend on defense. And yet NATO, backed by a collective GDP 25 times as great as Russia’s, is still massively superior to Russia in conventional military power, and Mr. Putin knows it. Thanks to his expensively failed war, he also knows he has less and less with which to counter a Western intervention except the threat of nuclear armageddon, which isn’t what the billionaire sybarites who undergird his regime signed up for.

This is most obvious in his laborious seven-veils dance over whether to annex Ukrainian territory and bring it under Russia’s nuclear umbrella. Mr. Putin dithers because if he makes the declaration and the U.S. and Ukraine decline to be impressed, he could face a personally disastrous dilemma between climbing down and using a nuke.

Recall his pre-war fretting about what would happen if Ukraine were allowed to join NATO and then tried to reclaim Crimea. Mr. Putin is bedeviled by problematic bets on red lines he can’t afford to enforce (and, in some sense, has been begging Europe and the U.S. to bail him out of).
This doesn’t mean the war is already over except the shooting, as some European Metternichs would like to have it. But settled is whether Ukraine is an independent country: Mr. Putin now knows it won’t become an annexed satrapy of Russia. That ship has sailed. But Mr. Putin has something to fight for yet, to avoid the worst consequences of his own botched aggression, with Ukraine becoming a regional military superpower, getting stronger and stronger with Western backing, while Russia gets weaker and weaker under sanctions, its Chinese captivity, and a war it doesn’t know how to get out of.

There’s an obvious solution for Russia: Accept Ukraine’s existence and grow prosperous and secure together. But this solution would require the departure of Mr. Putin.