Yes, the Ukrainians will put up a fight and, yes, as America sadly learned in Iraq, taking a country is one thing; holding it is quite another. But fierce resistance from its citizens notwithstanding, Putin will eventually succeed in snuffing out the largest democracy in eastern Europe.
Sanctions? Even in a country as economically backward as Russia, they are the equivalent of a hotfoot. Short of kicking them off SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) that connects more than 11,000 financial institutions globally, Putin has likely amassed a sufficient enough slush fund to mitigate any potential short-term harm to him and his crony oligarchs.
And booting Russia off SWIFT - which Europe was not on board with anyway - comes with its own set of risks. While it would deprive Russia of the markets it needs to sell its gas and oil - which accounts for 40 percent of the Russian economy - it could trigger a global recession. With Europe getting nearly half its energy from Russia, it would mean severe rationing on the continent. Global markets would plummet. In the end, it would be like spitting in the wind.
But while the world rightly focuses all its attention on the fate of more than 40 million Ukrainians, a piece in The Atlantic by Yasmeen Serhan warns of an even greater threat that could potentially lead to World War III.
A narrow stretch of land known as the Suwałki Corridor that connects western Belarus to Kaliningrad Oblasta, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea, serves as the border between Poland and Lithuania. As Serhan observes, if Putin were to send troops into that corridor under the false pretense that Russians in that enclave were being threatened, he would effectively cutoff NATO access to the Baltic states, thus leaving Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia vulnerable to an all-out Russian assault.
With all three Baltic states in tow, along with Belarus and Ukraine, Putin would go a long way towards realizing his dream of reconstructing the Warsaw Pack, sans Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. And make no mistake about it: that's his goal. For thirty years, the man has nursed a grudge against the West for the way his beloved Soviet Union imploded. All this crap about NATO encroaching on his turf is just a smoke screen. He's been looking for an excuse to make his move ever since his rise to power twenty-two years ago, and four U.S. presidents - Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump - were simply too blind to see it.
Would Putin really be foolish enough to invade a NATO country knowing what that would mean? Certainly that would be the actions of a madman, right? And Putin is no madman. We can tell ourselves that all we want, but just a few weeks ago, the so called "experts" scoffed at the idea that this supposed rational man would launch a full-scale invasion of a country the size of Texas. The conventional wisdom was that he would go after the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and leave the rest of the country alone. So much for conventional wisdom.
We've seen this movie before, though not since the late 1930s. Back then, Adolph Hitler was the sociopath looking to parlay his grievances into military conquests. It would take six long years and millions of lives lost before he was finally defeated. This time around, an all-out war in Europe might not be limited to conventional weapons. Both the United States and Russia have enough nukes in their arsenals to end life as we know it on this planet. The slightest miscalculation could lead to Armageddon.
Whether it was Georgia in 2008 or Crimea in '14, Putin has been incredibly transparent in his intentions. That's why it is imperative that President Biden move as many American troops as possible into Poland and the Baltic states, and convey to this dictator in the strongest possible language what the consequences will be should he move against NATO.
Look, Ukraine is lost; it's just a matter of when, not if. The next domino cannot be allowed to fall. The fate of 7.9 billion people hangs in the balance.
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