How to Help Ukraine Now

Five weeks ago, I wrote a hopeful post about Ukraine entitled “A War to End War?” It analyzed two modern phenomena—(1) plenary economic sanctions in a globalized economy and (2) high-tech accurate weapons—that might make Putin’s Atrocity the last unprovoked invasion by a major power. It also analyzed the low risk of nuclear escalation and found it an acceptable cost to end this kind of atrocity.

Subsequent events have proved the analysis accurate. Plenary sanctions have indeed stalled Russia’s economy. They’ve caused thousands of its best and brightest (and youngest!) to flee the pariah state. After a brief resurgence of the ruble’s official exchange rate, the West is learning how to freeze more of Russia’s assets and bank accounts held abroad. The noose will only tighten as Europe absorbs yet one more good reason to accelerate its transformation away from fossil energy, including Russia’s.

Everyone knew from the outset that sanctions work slowly. They are too slow to make a difference on the battlefield. But as long as the West perseveres in applying them, their pressure on Russia will increase relentlessly. They will chasten its rogue leader and especially the military industries that support his vile war. If this is to be the last war of its kind, the West must be prepared to crush Russia’s economy as long as it takes to drive the lesson home.

As for modern accurate weapons, they are making a military miracle. Ukraine was supposed to succumb to quick decapitation, much as Poland did to Nazi blitzkrieg in 1939. (Funny, isn’t it, that Russian leaders are adopting Hitler’s war and battle tactics precisely, while decrying non-existent “Nazis” in Ukraine?) But after six weeks, not only is Ukraine still standing strong. It has stopped the decapitation and has driven some Russia forces into retreat.

Although Putin’s true goals are ever uncertain, Russian forces appear to be regrouping, in order to consolidate their hold on the Donbas region (Donetsk and Luhansk) and in Crimea, which Russia already controls, perhaps plus a land corridor between them. These were goals that, had Russia had good leadership, might have been by careful diplomacy, at least on a temporary basis, without bloodshed.

But the wars of defense and offense could not be more different. Ukraine is using a stiletto of Javelins and Stingers, shoulder-fired anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, respectively. They hit the mark, with minimal “collateral damage.” In contrast, the Russians are using a bludgeon of cluster bombs and Katyusha rockets. They are annihilating city squares, hospitals, theaters, and apartment blocks, turning Eurasia’s breadbasket into a replica of Syria. While Putin and his lackeys decry “Nazis” in Ukraine, Ukrainians suffer torture, murder and mass displacement in ways not seen since the Nazis conquered Europe.

The message here should be writ large in every military manual worldwide: small but accurate weapons work. Already they are turning the tide in what many observers once thought to be an unwinnable war. Unfortunately, they are also pushing Russia toward desperately brutal measures, including mass slaughter of civilians and what appears to be deliberate ethnic cleansing, displacing 11 million Ukrainians at home and abroad.

So how can we help Ukraine right now, without risking nuclear escalation? We can do what most doctors would do with a recovering patient: if the medicine appears to be working, try a little more. Give Ukraine more accurate weapons.

The Russian assault on the ground has stalled. But the brutality continues from the air. The reason is simple: Javelins and Stingers are accurate but short-range weapons. They don’t work well against high-altitude bombing or missiles, including cruise missiles. But we have missiles that do. So give Ukraine the missiles to protect themselves from bombers and offensive missiles. Get these defensive and accurate weapons in the hands of Ukraine’s defenders now.

What’s at stake is far more than just Ukraine’s sovereignty and freedom and the lives of its people—although they of course ought to be motivation enough. What’s at stake is the future of war itself.

If high-tech accurate weapons can take down enough tools of invasion to stall and reverse this brutal, unprovoked attack on Ukraine, maybe they can make invasions like this one obsolete. If every farmhouse on NATO’s border had a locked steel chest with a few Javelins and Stingers, and farmers trained to use them, Nazi- and Russian-style blitzkrieg might become a thing of the past. Then, someday, we might look back on this war as we do on Rome pulling down the city walls of Carthage and sowing its fields with salt.

That’s a consummation devoutly to be wished, a celebration of humanity and individual will. If a single man or woman can take down tools that rain death from the sky, what brutal invasion can succeed?

To realize this promise of human freedom from brutality, President Biden should use the Defense Production Act to proliferate these accurate weapons of freedom as if they were Teslas. Maybe he should put Elon Musk in charge of their crash-program production in giga-factories. But whatever the means or cost, we should get these weapons into Ukrainian hands ASAP, while we still have time to make this atrocity an utter rout for the Russians and thus, perhaps, the last war of this kind ever.

Supplying Ukraine with accurate anti-bombardment weapons has three advantages over using US or NATO planes to establish a “no-fly zone” over all or part of Ukraine. First, the defense would be manned entirely by Ukrainians; no American or NATO planes or pilots would be involved. Second, unlike planes, the defensive missiles would have limited range and so would not tempt Ukrainian pilots to bring the war into Russian territory, thereby providing a pretext for further Russian escalation. Third, at least at first, the weapons’ chief and perhaps exclusive use would be preventing mass civilian casualties—an endeavor evoking universal support and sympathy everywhere except perhaps inside the Kremlin.

The second big thing we should do is change our approach to cyber-warfare. Of course it’s smart to harden our own systems against penetration and cyber-invasion. It’s also good to have offensive cyber tools on tap, so we can, if need be, stall Russian aggression by non-lethal means, putting cyber-sand in the gears of Russia’s economy.

But in some ways our current approach to cyber-warfare is as misguided as were the 50-megaton hydrogen bombs that both we and the Soviets developed at the height of the Cold War. For those who want peace, the goal of war is not to make the biggest bang and wreak the widest destruction. It’s to stop the invader.

To that end, accurate information is one of the most powerful weapons we can wield. If just half the Russian people, including the oligarchs, could see clearly what Putin is doing in Ukraine in their names, this war would likely have a short end, just as did the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan that ended two decades before we started our own.

So we should multiply our efforts to get concise and accurate information (including video) about the war to anyone in Russia with curiosity and a modicum of technical skill. We should create a partnership between our government and our top private Internet media companies, with the mission of giving every Russian who wants one a private, unbreakable, untraceable link to accurate information about the war. We should also make Internet “Samizdat” (Soviet-era self-publishing) easy, so that those in Russia who are so inclined can spread the information among themselves. We should create something like a personal Virtual Private Network (VPN) that can appear, disappear and morph itself on command, or whenever probed by unknown persons.

In spring of 1993, I was a Fulbright Fellow teaching patent and licensing law at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (“MGIMO” in the Russian acronym), the same institution where Putin had trained years earlier. To improve my Russian language skills, I took every opportunity to read Russian newspapers and to listen to Russian radio news. To my surprise, I found that our own Voice of America radio (which the Russians had just recently stopped jamming) had by far the best news on Moscow’s airwaves. Not only was it the best source of comprehensive and accurate news; it was also the best technically. One Russian news program, for example, aired an interview of three people simultaneously, but I could hear only one of them clearly.

What we need today is a Voice of America on the Internet. We need an accurate, propaganda-free source of news to which any Russian (or anyone else) can turn with privacy, secrecy and security. We need clever technology by which to defeat any attempt by any state or private actor, including their or our oligarchs, to monitor, censor or block the news feed.

If we can build that, they will come. They will watch and listen, and the truth will set them free.

One of our chief human weaknesses is what I call the “megalo-mind.” We adore big things, the bigger the better. That’s why Edward Teller developed the hydrogen bomb. As if the A-bomb weren’t enough, he wanted a weapon capable of destroying whole counties, or small states like Rhode Island, not just cities.

Human life is more subtle than that. What promotes human welfare and happiness is littler things. Give a single individual the power to destroy a tank, a helicopter, or a fighter jet, bomber or cruise missile, and you can thwart a modern invasion force. Give that same individual the knowledge of what is actually happening in Ukraine, and you can motivate defenders and sap the invader’s will.

These things—accurate weapons and unstoppable accurate news—are a good plan for making wars like Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine obsolete. For us as supporters of human rights, individual freedom, and national sovereignty, there should be no higher military priority.


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