(Dobbs) WE'RE Adding Fuel To The Fire???

If we let Putin win, it might only get hotter.

I don’t know whether to call this a new high for audacity or a new low for hypocrisy.

Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, today complained that President Biden’s shipment to Ukraine of an advanced weapon called the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which fires satellite-guided rockets, goes beyond— remember, these are the words of one of the highest officials in Russia— “all limits of decency.”

As if he and his boss even know what “decency” means any more.

Lavrov then had the gall to call the shipment a “direct provocation,” as if his nation’s baldfaced invasion of Ukraine— after calling Western warnings just days before the attack “hysteria”— was anything less. And as if Putin needs further provocation to inflict further devastation on the nation he ambushed. He’s doing it anyway.

Meantime, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the U.S. is “adding fuel to the fire,” conveniently shrugging off the fact that this is a fire that Vladimir Putin set.

That’s what the world, and maybe Americans in particular, need to remember. Putin has invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation, we haven’t. He has bombarded its buildings and ruined its economy and stolen its riches and kidnapped its soldiers and deported its survivors and killed its citizens, we haven’t. He has raised the stakes with the mention of nuclear weapons, we haven’t. He has set the fires, we haven’t.

Yet former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued last week to the World Economic Forum that just as Russia demands, Ukraine should trade land for peace— in other words, concede land to Russia that it already illegally occupies in exchange for promises of peace from a despot who already has made clear that Ukraine has no right to exist. If Kissinger’s way of thinking prevails, that will give Putin the gift of every inch he has stolen. With no accountability for every city he has ravaged, every life he has taken.

That’s why Ukraine’s President Zelensky angrily snapped back that Kissinger is living in 1938, referring to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s naive belief that, after winning concessions he demanded, Adolf Hitler would abide by agreements at the Munich Conference and there would be no bigger war.

Hitler lied. The world paid the price.

With that in mind, Stephen Blank of the Foreign Policy Research Institute wrote for The Atlantic Council, “As any student of WWII will tell you, attempting to appease genocidal tyrants with territorial concessions is not only morally repugnant but also strategically nonsensical.”

But Kissinger isn’t the only one. In an essay titled “The war in Ukraine may be impossible to stop and the U.S. deserves much of the blame,” a former senior editor at the conservative Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell, argues about sending arms to Ukraine, “The West, led by the Biden administration, is giving the conflict a momentum that may be impossible to stop. Should bigger guns fail to dissuade…  they lead to bigger wars.”

Bigger wars? As if, allowed to get away with what he already has done, Putin won’t start “bigger wars” himself? It is not the conflict that may be impossible to stop. It’s Russia’s president who may be impossible to stop. 

Sweden and Finland seem to agree. They’re fearful enough to forsake their long-cherished neutrality to apply for military membership in NATO.

Former Weekly Standard editor Caldwell also writes— neglecting to notice that Russia has not tried to minimize the loss of human life from Day One— that “thousands of Ukrainians have died who likely would not have if the United States had stood aside.”

He confuses his culprits.

But why don’t we stand aside? Why don’t we just walk away and let Ukraine dissolve into a Russian state? President Biden answered that question in his Tuesday op-ed in The New York Times: “If Russia does not pay a heavy price for its actions, it will send a message to other would-be aggressors that they too can seize territory and subjugate other countries. It will put the survival of other peaceful democracies at risk. And it could mark the end of the rules-based international order and open the door to aggression elsewhere, with catastrophic consequences the world over.”

Those who would have us stand aside, as if it would pacify the killer in the Kremlin, not to mention those who blame us for making this war worse, need to remember a key fact: we haven’t fired a shot. We have provided everything from weaponry to intelligence to humanitarian aid to Ukraine, but we haven’t fired a shot.

We’ve been very careful about that. President Biden and the alliance he assembled are aware of the risk of escalation. They have struck a balance— delicate though it is— between helping Ukraine uphold its sovereignty, and “standing aside” to avoid “provoking” Putin. 

Because if we do stand aside and let Putin believe he can get away with this— mindful that this megalomaniac has called the loss of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”— he might not stop. And then, our allies have even more to worry about. When President Biden says in his op-ed that retarding Russia “is in our vital national interests,” he’s saying that weaker allies mean a weaker America.

But ultimately it’s up to Ukraine to decide whether to keep fighting back. It’s up to Ukraine to decide whether to keep its nation in one piece, or at least as much of it as it can.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov added this to his rant about the advanced American weapons system coming to Ukraine: “There are politicians who are ready to go into this madness in order to satisfy their ambitions.”

The man should look in the mirror, because maybe without meaning to, he underscored the audacity and hypocrisy that’s coming from the Kremlin, and underscored exactly what many of us fear: more madness instigated by Vladimir Putin to satisfy his ambitions. That’s why we have to oppose him now, and not give him an opening to satisfy even more.

Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.