Nato

Mid-afternoon Tuesday, a missile struck the town of Przewodow in eastern Poland close to the Ukrainian border, killing two. The incident immediately set off alarm bells around NATO and the world, as Poland, a member of the military alliance, could invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, bringing all 30 members to its defense. The Polish government is considering invoking Article 4 of the treaty, which allows any member state to call a meeting of all members to discern if "territorial integrity, political independence or security… is threatened." NATO was due to meet on Wednesday anyway, but the tragedy in Poland has superseded the gathering’s planned lineup.

For centuries before Vladimir Putin arrived on the scene, Russian foreign policy has been shaped by the country’s need for warm-water ports. To be a great power in Europe and the Near East, Russia must have access to the Mediterranean. Commercial as well as military considerations dictate this. In the eighteenth century Russia conquered the khanate of Crimea and acquired a splendid location for a new Black Sea port — what is now the city of Sevastopol. The Crimean peninsula had been a gateway from Asia to the Mediterranean since the days of the ancient Greeks, who built some of their northernmost colonies there. Russia made Sevastopol the permanent home of its Black Sea Fleet.

There is an open tug-of-war going on right now over the direction of foreign policy on the right. The attempts by various factions and individuals to seize and define the principles of an “America First” foreign policy has led to politicians and institutions using similar language and labels to defend very different positions. Yet the overarching direction of foreign policy on the right seems clearer in the results than in the conversations. Even as there are disagreements among Republicans in Washington — on Ukraine funding, for instance — they seem to have much more in common when it comes time to actually take a vote or make a decision.

Our administration would have us believe that Joe Biden is the leader of the free world. But he isn’t — and our relative inaction on Ukraine should firmly put to rest the idea of “American exceptionalism.” While Ukrainians were heartened by British prime minister Boris Johnson’s April trip to Kyiv, our commander-in-chief has adopted a different strategy for this active war zone: send in the women. Security concerns are ostensibly to blame for Biden being MIA, but sending in three of the country’s most important ladies — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Kyiv, First Lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to neighboring countries in Eastern Europe — seems an odd way to demonstrate that the administration is worried about security.

“Victory Day” is one of the most solemn events on the Russian calendar. Every year on May 9, the country gets together to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany in what Russians call “the Great Patriotic War,” in which as many as 26 million Soviet troops and civilians perished. It’s a time for reflection, for an appreciation of history, and, yes, for pomp and circumstance, with Russian troops decorated in dazzling uniforms marching in unison throughout Moscow's Red Square. This year’s Victory Day celebrations, however, had much of the world on edge. In next-door Ukraine, Russian forces were taking a beating, with smaller but nimbler and more determined Ukrainian units continuing to mount stiff resistance against a Russian military offensive in the Donbas.

After an embarrassing two-month start to its war in Ukraine marked by pictures of abandoned armored personnel carriers, destroyed tanks and stalled armored columns outside Ukraine’s major cities, the Russian army is re-tooling and re-arming itself for a more manageable fight in the east. I use the word “manageable” not because the battle in the Donbas will be easy for Russian forces, but because the objective of expanding Russian control over the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk is more realistic than overthrowing the Ukrainian government and occupying the entire country. Capturing, let alone holding, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Chernihiv would have entailed a massive number of personnel and a long-term commitment Russia doesn't have the resources to sustain.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the best thing to happen to NATO since 1989. No amount of cajoling by American presidents could get the Germans to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, as the alliance asks. The Russian president found a way to persuade them. Putin has also persuaded Finns and Swedes that joining NATO is a good idea. Not for the first time, a war is having the opposite of the effect its instigator intended. Putin may yet get what he demanded from Ukraine and the West right before his invasion. NATO membership may be on the table for everyone else but not for Ukraine. Russia wants its possession of Crimea to be acknowledged by Kyiv, and that too is within Putin’s reach.

The beginning of the year has not gone as well as it could have for Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Mostly because he is now dead, but also because Zhirinovsky, a Russian politician of the “managed” (pro-Kremlin) opposition, predicted and vigorously supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If Zhirinovsky were able to follow the campaign from his hospital bed, it could not have met his expectations. The imperial Russia of his imagination ought to have come into glorious existence, but its armed forces instead suffered reversal and humiliation. Zhirinovsky was the long-time leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party — a grouping that, as many wags have separately concluded, was under his leadership neither liberal nor democratic nor, in some lights, a party.

The fog of war doesn’t just apply to generals, sergeants, and privates. It applies to strategists and outside observers, including the best-informed journalists on the ground. All are swamped by a confusing barrage of information, some accurate, some not, none of it complete or definitive. That’s why, after over a month of fighting in Ukraine, it helps to step back, consider the basic outcomes, and try to project what will happen next. Remember, though, the “fog of war” applies to these assessments, too. First, let’s clear away Russian misinformation. The Kremlin’s recent claim that their main goal was never to seize Kyiv but always to take eastern Ukraine is simply false.