President Biden has refused to allow Ukraine to use long-range Western missiles on Russian military targets, but he appears to be wavering.
A deadly uptick of Russian guided glide bombs slamming into Ukrainian cities — as many as 800 in a single week this summer — has injected new urgency into a long-running debate over whether Ukraine should be allowed to launch missiles supplied by the West at military targets deep in Russian territory.
Amid signs that President Biden is wavering, the issue will be on the table when he meets in Washington on Friday with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, after the two leaders dispatched their top diplomats to Kyiv on Wednesday to hear out the latest pleas from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ukraine has for months asked to use Western long-range weapons to attack more of the military sites that Russia uses to launch missiles and house the warplanes that drop the large, free-fall glide bombs that are wreaking havoc on Ukrainian forces and cities.
And that’s precisely the sort of logic that Putin is incredibly good at taking advantage of.
Appeasement harms far more people in the long run.
Sometimes, decisive - and yes, violent - action is genuinely the best option in the larger geopolitical context.
The lead-up to the invasion of Poland before WW2 is a highly appropriate context to use as a comparison - if Chamberlain had been able to successfully rally the UK’s allies (including the US) and convince them to forcibly oppose the Anschluss, the whole goddamn war might not have even happened as it did in history. Of course, the possibility of Stalin becoming the Big Bad of that conflict as a result instead of Hitler (vacuum of power and all that) can’t be dismissed, but at the same time, that’s all hypothetical, and similar logic could have been applied to that potential conflict as well. I am, of course, taking a HUGE amount of creative and historical liberty - there are tons of reasons why things unfolded as they did, and why what I’m saying here was deeply unlikely, if not outright impossible at the time… but still, thought experiments like this can be useful to consider sometimes.