“The language of escalation is the language of excuse.” That’s how Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, dismisses anxiety that assistance to Ukraine could provoke Russia to either expand the war to NATO countries or cross the nuclear threshold. The country most concerned about Russia expanding its aggression beyond Ukraine is the country least likely to be the victim of it: the United States.

The Biden administration has been unequivocal in its policy declarations. The president has said, repeatedly and in public, that the U.S. will provide Ukraine “whatever it takes, as long as it takes.” The president wants the political benefits of heroically assisting the good of Ukraine against the evil of Russia, but his administration’s policy is much more hesitant than its bold declarations would suggest.

I spoke to Ukrainians both in and outside of government during a recent trip to Kyiv with the Renew Democracy Initiative. Those I met were keenly aware that Ukraine relies on U.S. weapons, U.S. financial assistance, and U.S. leadership to pull together international support, and they expressed gratitude for all that the United States is doing. Most know very well that Ukraine would have lost the war without the U.S. rallying support to keep its economy from collapsing, arm its soldiers, and provide essential intelligence to protect its leaders and blunt Russian attacks. Ukrainian government officials are careful to speak only of the United States as a whole, without singling out the Biden administration or delving into U.S. domestic politics.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Biden just destroyed Ukraine’s last hope]

Yet Ukraine’s foreign and defense ministers acknowledged that “the first answer the U.S. gives to any request is no.” That was America’s answer across the past three presidential administrations: no to javelin missiles, no to stinger missiles, no to NATO membership, no to F-16s, no to weapons that can reach Russian territory, no to tanks, no to Patriot air defenses, no to HIMARs, no to ATACMs, and—until this week—again no to F-16s, even if they aren’t U.S. F-16s.  

The Biden administration has made three arguments against Ukrainian requests. The first and most condescending was, to quote the president, that “Ukraine doesn’t need F-16s now.” This came at a time when Russia’s strategy had shifted to long-range missile strikes on civilian populations and infrastructure that air dominance could better resist. Kyiv may now be well protected, but Kharkiv and other major cities continue to be at greater risk.

The Pentagon has further insisted that mastering the desired weapons systems would be prohibitively difficult and time-consuming. That argument weakened when Ukrainians, on a wartime footing, blew through the training curricula in a fraction of the time it took to train U.S. soldiers who had been in regular rotations on other systems. The Ukrainians have successfully sustained battlefield operability of an extensive array of internationally donated weapons systems.

The administration does make one argument against Ukrainian requests that should carry greater weight. Despite the president’s claims of unlimited assistance for as long as it takes, U.S. assistance isn’t endless, and Ukraine is asking for expensive items that are often in short supply. For example, having provided Ukraine with 20 HIMARs, the U.S. has only 410 remaining and 220 M270 MLRS (a tracked variant). That number may seem large, but not when you consider the intensity of fighting and the size of the U.S. forces that a war against China would entail. Nor are the costs inconsequential, even for the United States: An F-16 of the model Kyiv seeks costs about $15 million, and Ukraine wants 120 to protect its airspace. One reason the F-16 is Ukraine’s fighter of choice is that it exists in large supply in allied arsenals, not solely in the U.S. inventory.

The sweeping declaration that Washington will give Ukraine what it needs for as long as it takes is part of a pattern of presidential rhetorical largesse. It’s of a piece with committing U.S. troops to fight for Taiwan without providing the military budget to produce a war-winning military for that fight, or designing a national-security strategy that commits to allied solidarity while producing exclusionary economic policies that allies resent.

The escalation concern that looms largest for the Biden administration in Ukraine, understandably, is Russian nuclear use. Ukrainians remain admirably stalwart about this prospect, suggesting that a nuclear battlefield strike would not serve Russian objectives. To be more concerned about nuclear use than the likely victims of it are—or to push Ukraine toward untenable outcomes in the name of avoiding that risk—is to actually encourage nuclear threats. The United States can strengthen deterrence instead by publicly committing that if we see any sign that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon, we’ll share the intelligence widely and provide Ukraine with weapons to preempt the attack. We can put Russia on notice that if it uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, we will send NATO radiological teams—NATO forces—there to assist Ukraine’s recovery, and we will ensure that any Russian involved in the decision or its execution ends up dead or in the Hague.

[Eric Schlosser: The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory]

The true cost of the Biden administration’s focus on escalation may be one of prolonging the war. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has assessed that F-16s are “a decision that could have been made six months ago. Truth is, if they had begun training pilots on F-16s six months ago, then those pilots would be able to get into those airplanes this spring.” Our hesitance telegraphs to Russia that by continuing to assault Ukraine, it can wait us out—a lesson consistent with the course of the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the leader of the free world to be more worried than the leaders of Poland, Denmark, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom is not a great look. Those countries are already considering offering fighters or training to Ukraine—and are at greater risk of Russian retaliation than the United States is.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has signed an agreement with Russia to base Russian nuclear weapons in his country. The strategic impact of such a move is negligible, but a lot can go wrong with this foolish plan.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The play that explains Succession (and everything else) The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet. COVID shots are still one giant experiment. AI is unlocking the human brain’s secrets. A Tense Summer

Russia has taken another step toward nuclearizing its satrapy in neighboring Belarus. This is bad news but not a crisis (yet). But first, I want to add a note to what I wrote a few weeks ago about the drone attack on the Kremlin.

I suggested that the weird strike on a Kremlin building was unlikely to be an act sanctioned or carried out by the Ukrainian government. My best guess at the time was that the Russians might be pulling some kind of false-flag stunt to justify more repression and violence against Ukraine as well as internal dissent in Russia. I didn’t think the Ukrainians would attack an empty building in the middle of the night.
The U.S. intelligence community, however, now thinks the strike could have been some kind of Ukrainian special operation. Those same American analysts, according to The New York Times, are not exactly sure who authorized action against the Russian capital:

U.S. intelligence agencies do not know which unit carried out the attack and it was unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation, though some officials believe Mr. Zelensky was not.

That’s not much to go on, especially because the intelligence community’s confidence in this view is “low,” meaning there is at least some general, but not specific, evidence for it. The Americans suggest the attack may have been “orchestrated” by the Ukrainian security services, but that could mean any number of possibilities, including civilians, a small militia, a few people loosely affiliated with the Ukrainians, or even a commando team.

The best evidence, however, that this was not a false flag is that with the exception of firing a wave of missiles, the Russian government has said and done almost nothing in response either in Ukraine or in Russia. If Vladimir Putin’s security forces had engineered the incident, they’d almost certainly be taking advantage of it, but they’re not. Instead, the Kremlin seems paralyzed and has clamped down on any further reporting about the whole business; if the Ukrainian goal was to rattle Russian leaders, mission accomplished. So my theory has gone up in smoke—a hazard of trying to piece together an explanation while waiting for better evidence—but I thought it important to update you here.

Now, about those Belarus nukes.

Putin announced back in March that he intended to station nuclear arms in Belarus, a move that had Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko doing a bit of uneasy throat-clearing as he tried to stay in Putin’s good graces while being understandably nervous about hosting weapons of mass destruction in his fiefdom. The hesitation is over: Belarusian Defense Minister Victor Khrenin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu yesterday signed a formal agreement allowing the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus.

This would be the first time post-Soviet Russia has stationed nuclear weapons outside its own territory, but the bombs aren’t in Belarus yet. Lukashenko was in Moscow yesterday to attend a summit of the Eurasian Economic Forum, and although he claimed that the complicated process of relocating Russian nuclear bombs has already begun, I don’t believe him. (There I go again, theorizing in the absence of evidence. But Western intelligence agencies watch the movement of Russian nuclear weapons pretty closely, and so far, none of them has indicated that they see anything happening.) Besides, Lukashenko’s assertion wasn’t exactly definitive; when asked in Moscow if the weapons had already arrived, he said, “Maybe. I will go and take a look.”

Now, without getting too far over my skis, I will say that the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons in their territory know without exception whether they have them or not, and don’t need to “go and take a look.” Lukashenko’s flip comment suggests to me that he knows that nothing has been moved yet, and that he understands that his role in this dangerous sideshow is to play along with the Kremlin’s attempt to jangle Western nerves about nuclear war.

Putin, for his part, has said that storage facilities for Russian nuclear arms will be complete by July 1. Nuclear weapons, of course, require highly secure military installations and personnel trained in dealing with such systems, such as how to load them onto their delivery vehicles, and the unique safety precautions that surround them. Even in the best of times, nuclear weapons are a high-maintenance proposition, and accidents do happen: In 2007, an American B-52 flew across the United States with six nuclear bombs that the crew didn’t realize were mounted on the wings.

It’s also possible that Putin is squeezing political impact of a nuclear agreement while he still can, given recent questions about Lukashenko’s health. The Belarus strongman has looked weak lately. It would be very much Putin’s gangland style to make sure he gets Belarus as a stage for his nuclear threats as soon as possible, if he thinks the grim reaper is about to step in.

Putin’s July deadline is also important because it means the Russians will be moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what looks to be a summer of intense fighting. Such a timetable is probably intentional. The Kremlin boss believes that the West is deeply afraid of nuclear war, and he intends to play on that fear. Western leaders, of course, are deeply afraid of nuclear war, because they are not utter psychopaths. Putin and his generals, although brutal and vicious men, are afraid of it, too, no matter what they might say, because they are not suicidal. (So were Soviet leaders and their generals, as we learned after the Cold War.)

What Putin fails to understand, however, is that years of struggling with the Soviet Union taught the United States and its allies how to contend with an aggressive Kremlin and the dangers of escalation at the same time. Putin, as I often note, is a Soviet nostalgist who longs for the old Soviet empire and who still seems to believe that a weak and decadent West will not continue to oppose him.

As ever, I worry not about Putin’s deliberate move to start World War III, but about some kind of error or accident when transferring nuclear weapons from one paranoid authoritarian country to another. Putin may well place nuclear weapons close to Ukraine and then claim that NATO is threatening Russia’s nuclear deterrent, thus provoking a crisis he thinks will induce the West to back away from supporting Kyiv. This would be yet another harebrained blunder in a series of poor moves, but Putin, as we know, is not exactly a master strategist. It’s going to be a tense summer.

Related:

“Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin.” The irreversible change in Belarus Today’s News A South Carolina circuit-court judge has temporarily blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban, one day after Governor Henry McMaster signed it into law. A House committee led by Texas Republicans recommended the impeachment of State Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday, citing years of alleged lawbreaking and misconduct. The Mississippi police officer who shot Aderrien Murry, an unarmed 11-year-old Black boy, has been suspended with pay as the shooting is investigated. Dispatches Work in Progress: The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham, James Surowiecki writes.

The Books Briefing: Books editor Gal Beckerman breaks down what you should be reading this summer—just in time for the season’s unofficial start.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Carlos Lopez-Calleja / Disney

A Chinese American Show That Doesn’t Bother to Explain Itself

By Shirley Li

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable. We have this taped to the wall because it’s the Chinese character for fortune! These hard-boiled eggs are brown because they’ve been soaked in tea! In an attempt to prove that my surroundings were perfectly normal, I turned myself into a tour guide, and my own home into a sideshow.

American Born Chinese doesn’t bother with such disclaimers. The Disney+ show, now streaming, is exuberant and unabashed about its hyper-specific focus on the Chinese American experience.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Jennifer Egan: Martin Amis taught me how to be funny.

How America can avoid the next debt-ceiling showdown

Ozempic in teens is a mess.

Culture Break Kailey Schwerman / Showtime

Watch. Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale (streaming on Showtime) made a terrible mistake.

Listen. To the first episode of the newly launched Radio Atlantic podcast with host Hanna Rosin, on whether the war in Ukraine can recapture the world’s attention at a crucial moment.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This is my last Daily for the next week or so, as I am headed off for some sunshine and downtime, but senior editor Isabel Fattal and our colleagues at The Atlantic will keep things as lively here as ever. (This newsletter will be off on Monday for Memorial Day, so look for the next edition on Tuesday.)

With vacation on my mind, I want to recommend a gem of a movie about Las Vegas that has lived in the shadow of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an undeniable masterpiece) for too long. Twenty years ago, William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin starred in The Cooler, one of the bleakest movies about Sin City since Leaving Las Vegas. Macy plays a “cooler,” a guy whose bad luck is so contagious that the casinos hire him to stand near people who win too much money at the tables.

It’s a love story and a crime story, but it’s also about old Vegas becoming a new (and sillier) Vegas. Back then, developers were making an inane attempt to transform an industry mostly devoted to gambling, booze, and sex into a theme park for families. Alec Baldwin—who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor—rails against it all in a rant about the Strip circa 2002: “You mean that Disneyland mook fest out there? Huh? That’s a fucking violation is what that is. Something that used to be beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced hooker with an exclusive clientele … It makes me want to cry, because I remember the way she used to be.”

I cheer him on every time. See you in a few weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Two months before invading Ukraine, Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on its neighbor’s border and sent NATO a bill of demands. Moscow’s list—structured as a treaty—required that the alliance close itself off to new members. It declared that NATO states “shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine as well as other States” in Eastern Europe. It insisted that NATO remove all its forces from the 14 countries that joined after the Soviet Union collapsed. And it asserted that the alliance “shall not deploy land-based” missiles in areas “allowing them to reach the territory” of Russia.

Moscow suggested that the treaty was a pathway for lowering tensions with the West. Yet according to U.S. intelligence officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin had decided to invade Ukraine months earlier. In reality, the treaty was just a diplomatic pretext for the war: a laundry list of things that Putin hated about NATO, wanted changed, and would kill Ukrainians to protest.

But if Putin thought that invading Russia’s neighbor would get the West to accede to his demands, he was wildly mistaken. Rather than pulling troops from its east, NATO responded to Russia’s aggression by deploying more soldiers in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The alliance did not close its doors; instead, it expanded, adding Finland this April, with Sweden possibly close behind. Ukraine is not part of NATO, but the invasion has pushed the United States and Europe to send remarkable amounts of military assistance to Kyiv, including rockets, tanks, and Soviet-era fighter jets. Most recently, Washington signaled that it will let Europe provide Ukraine with U.S.-made F-16s. The West has effectively flouted all of the draft treaty’s demands.

And yet there’s one line Washington hasn’t crossed. Despite repeated pleas, the United States has not given Kyiv land-based missiles capable of hitting Russia.

“We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters in September. He hasn’t budged since.

Brynn Tannehill: What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine

To many analysts, Biden’s decision—and implicit reasoning—is perceptive. Sustained Ukrainian attacks inside Russia’s territory could violate Putin’s red lines in a way that previous strikes haven’t. So could repeatedly hitting Crimea, the peninsula that the Kremlin illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014. “It’s Crimea and Russian territory,” Austin Carson, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago who studies escalation, told me. “I would worry about crossing one of those bedrock limits.”

But to Ukrainians, these concerns are detached from reality. Kyiv has made isolated attacks on Crimea and Russia before, none of which has widened the conflict. In fact, none of Moscow’s wartime escalations has touched NATO land. And the United Kingdom has already given Kyiv some missiles, fired from planes, that can reach into Russia. France may do so as well. Britain’s provision did not prompt the Kremlin to go berserk.

“People are quite confused,” the former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk told me when I asked what Ukrainians thought about Washington’s reticence. “They just don’t understand.”

They are also tremendously frustrated, because Kyiv may need long-range U.S. missiles to win the conflict. “It’s just impossible to be on the battlefield and continuing to fight with the weapons that Ukraine already has,” Polina Beliakova, a Ukrainian political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies civil-military relations, told me. Ukrainian soldiers, she said, are performing admirably. But without superior weapons, even the most motivated military will struggle to defeat a much larger enemy. To liberate more provinces, Ukrainians could have to strike hard, far, and again and again. Washington will have to decide just how much it is prepared to help them.

The United States Army Tactical Missile System is a formidable weapon. Developed in the late Cold War and first used in Operation Desert Storm, ATACMS are launched straight out of the back of vehicles that Washington has already given to Kyiv. (Washington, afraid of escalation, modified the vehicles it sent so that Ukraine couldn’t use them to fire long-range missiles.) Once airborne, the missiles can reach more than three times the speed of sound, making them very difficult to intercept. They can travel up to 186 miles.

These specifications give ATACMS—pronounced “attack-ems”—certain advantages over Britain’s missiles. The latter weapons, although very powerful in their own right, do not move as fast or go quite the same distance as ATACMS. They must be fired out of fighter jets, and Ukraine’s fleet is overtaxed. The radars on Ukrainian jets are also not as powerful as the ones on many Western aircraft, making it tricky for the crew to accurately target each missile. Britain’s provision will become more useful if Kyiv receives F-16s, but Ukrainians won’t be able to fly the U.S. jets for at least several months. And by then, Kyiv may not have many of the missiles left.

“There is no analogue for ATACMS,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There is no alternative.”

Zagorodnyuk said that, if received, ATACMS could give Ukraine major advantages. For starters, the missiles would make it much easier for Kyiv to hit most of Russia’s command posts and wartime weapons depots, which typically lie beyond the front lines but within 186 miles. ATACMS would also help the Ukrainian military sever the so-called land bridge to Crimea: the thin strip of occupied territory that connects Russia with the peninsula’s isthmus. Similarly, the missiles could hit the bridge that directly links Crimea with Russia. Together, these attacks would substantially weaken Moscow’s forces in southern Ukraine, helping with Kyiv’s counteroffensive. They could even pave the way for Ukraine to take back the peninsula, which is widely considered Kyiv’s hardest military target.

For Ukrainians, taking Crimea may be essential to ending the war and protecting their country, especially given that the peninsula is now a giant staging ground for Russia’s forces. But for Washington, a campaign to take Crimea would be deeply unsettling. Putin views Crimea as perhaps his most prized asset. After Russia seized it in 2014, his approval ratings soared to record highs. The Biden administration has publicly said that Ukraine has the right to liberate all of its occupied territory, Crimea included, yet senior U.S. officials have repeatedly insinuated that going after the peninsula would be too dangerous. In February, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told experts that an operation for Crimea would be a “red line” for the Kremlin.

In theory, the United States could provide ATACMS on the condition that Ukraine not use them to hit the peninsula. But Kyiv is unlikely to accept such an arrangement. “That would set a massive precedent of treating Crimea as a special case, and that’s exactly what the Russians want,” Zagorodnyuk told me. Ukraine could even be tempted to use the missiles to strike Russia proper. According to The Washington Post, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky privately proposed attacking Russian villages in order to gain leverage over the Kremlin. And on Monday, pro-Ukrainian militias launched an assault across Russia’s border. They appear to have used U.S.-made vehicles in their incursion.

Publicly, Kyiv has assured Washington that it will not hit Russia with U.S. rockets. But no matter the conditions, guaranteeing that the missiles would not cross one of Moscow’s trip wires is impossible.

“The risk is that you think you’re okay and then you hit that red line and then things escalate really fast out of control,” Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. In the worst-case scenario, that spiral could lead to Russia using nuclear weapons. But Kavanagh pointed out that Moscow could escalate in many ways without going nuclear. It could, for instance, carpet-bomb Ukrainian cities. It could also launch cyberattacks on NATO states.

From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive

The odds of Russia attacking NATO, digitally or otherwise, might seem long. But they are not outlandish, especially considering Moscow’s perspective. “Russia doesn’t see itself fighting Ukraine,” Margarita Konaev, the deputy director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told me. “It sees itself fighting NATO.”

The Kremlin’s reasoning, she explained, makes some sense. Moscow is battling against NATO weapons systems. Its troops are being hit with NATO members’ ammunition. Ukraine is operating based off U.S. intelligence. “The only thing they’re not fighting are NATO troops on the ground,” Konaev said. If Ukraine begins regularly shelling Crimea or Russian territory with U.S.-made weapons, Russia could respond as if NATO was attacking the homeland.

Almost no one knows exactly how many soldiers Ukraine has lost fighting against Russia. But the number is large. According to the classified documents leaked on Discord last month, the U.S. government estimates that Ukraine has suffered somewhere from 124,500 to 131,000 casualties. The figure is lower than Russia’s estimated 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, but Ukraine’s population is about a third the size of its adversary’s. If the war turns into a pure battle of attrition, Kyiv will struggle to hold out.

It’s not surprising, then, that Ukrainians have little patience for Washington’s escalation concerns.

“Not providing better weapons would basically throw Ukraine under the bus in slow motion,” said Beliakova. She described the frustration of sitting through meetings where Western policy makers theorized about what a long war would look like, and how they can help sustain Kyiv. “They go, ‘Oh, well the West can easily supplement this, supplement that, provide this, provide that,’” Beliakova said. “I’m like, ‘Ukraine will run out of people!’” The country, she told me, needs more long-range weapons if it is going to overcome Russia’s enormous demographic advantage.

Some analysts went even further, wondering if Washington’s reluctance was designed to stop Ukraine from winning. “If you’ve noticed, the [Department of Defense], the White House, they never talk about victory,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “They’re still talking about an unknown ending to this story. And so the political goal of the Western coalition is unclear.”

Giving long-range missiles to Kyiv, he said, would help eliminate the ambiguity. Doing so would be a boost to Ukrainian morale—one that might be needed if the forthcoming counteroffensive does not succeed. Providing ATACMS would also signal to the rest of the Western alliance that the United States supports going to the max to help Kyiv, possibly easing hesitations in European capitals about supplying other Ukrainian needs.

Ukrainians do not think that Russia would escalate if the United States sent long-range missiles. “I don’t believe the escalation story,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There have been tons of other weapons supplied for tens of billions of dollars. ATACMS is not going to make a big difference.” Even if it did prompt Russian anger, Ukrainians are unsure as to why NATO should care. Moscow has escalated in the past: it responded to Kyiv’s astonishingly successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv by mobilizing 300,000 new troops, and it began indiscriminately bombing Ukrainian cities after an explosion damaged the Crimean-Russian bridge. But these steps hurt Ukrainians, not NATO members. Unless Russia uses a nuclear weapon, breaking a nearly 78-year taboo and endangering the entire planet, the West is unlikely to directly enter the conflict because of Russia’s atrocities. And so long as they believe they can win, Ukrainians appear prepared to endure a whole lot.

The country’s hawks have grown pessimistic about getting the missiles. Yes, they said, Washington and its allies have changed their mind in the past. But with tanks and F-16s, Western claims were as much about technical concerns as they were about the security risks. These weapons, policy makers argued, would take too much time and energy for Ukrainians to receive and learn how to use. There are technical risks with ATACMS too: Many American experts worry about depleting the United States’ limited supply, or that Russia could capture a missile, copy its design, and send China a mock-up.

Still, such hurdles can be overcome. Ukraine’s battlefield performance, and its success in Western training programs, helped convince NATO states that the country could handle more sophisticated weapons. If Ukrainians use Britain’s long-range missiles successfully, and in ways the U.S. approves of, Kyiv could convince Washington that it should get ATACMS as well.

But not if Washington is too afraid of how Russia will respond.

“With ATACMS, I don’t see these coming,” Zagorodnyuk said. Then he paused. “Yet.”

There might be some Americans who, a year-plus into the Ukraine war, might be growing numb to it. Some of those Americans might include me, the new host of Radio Atlantic. In my first episode, I confess this to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and staff writer Anne Applebaum, who have just returned from a trip to Ukraine. We talk about their interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, why continued American support is necessary, and why my flagging attention doesn’t matter.

Applebaum, who has covered the war from start, clarifies the confusing but potentially critical recent developments. Anti-Putin forces conducted a raid inside Russia. And after months of a bloody battle, Bakhmut, Ukraine, is for the moment under Russian control, while Ukrainian forces push at the flanks of the city. We analyze whether this is the start of the much-discussed spring offensive, and where the war might be headed.

The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. My colleagues, Atlantic staff, writer Anne Applebaum and editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg just got back from Ukraine. They returned with a sense that something big was going to happen, and now it seems to be starting. This week, it looks like Russia has taken Bakhmut, a city where the fighting has been vicious and sustained, although the Ukrainians haven't surrendered yet. At the same time, there’s been a raid inside Russia by anti-Putin forces. Now, I have to admit: I’ve become a little numb to this war. I’m just not following it as closely as I used to. So, I got Anne in the studio to bring this moment into focus.

Rosin: All right, I think maybe let’s start with the attacks behind the Russian border. What do we know about what happened?

Anne Applebaum: We know that a small group of people describing themselves as “Free Russian” forces crossed the border from Ukraine into Russia near a city called Belgorod and occupied several villages. They seemed to have frightened people enough to cause a major evacuation.

They stayed for some period of time, so it wasn’t just that they crossed over for an hour and came back. And they described themselves as wanting to use this as a way to provoke Putin or unseat Putin.

Rosin: It’s really hard for me to tell how big a deal this is in the context of the war, because partly you’re describing it as almost like a political stunt.

Applebaum: It’s a political move. My guess—and I’m just guessing; I can’t prove it—is that part of the point is to show that Putin is weaker than people think he is. It’s also clearly designed to show ordinary Russians that they aren’t as safe as they think they are, and that the war isn’t going as well as the Kremlin says it is going. Maybe it also has greater military significance, but that we can’t know right now.

Rosin: It feels like a piece with the generally unconventional nature of tactics that the Ukrainians have been trying.

Applebaum: It’s part of a series of events and random explosions and actions that are designed to unnerve the Russians, unsettle Putin, unsettle the Russian elite, and convince ordinary Russians eventually that the war isn’t worth it, that they aren’t safe, and that the war is coming toward them.

Rosin: Got it. So the point is not necessarily “We are invading Russia.” The point is “This war is not worth your time.”

Applebaum: Yes.

Rosin: Like, it’s a psychological move.

Applebaum: Yes,remember, the Ukrainians do not have to occupy Moscow. They do not have to occupy any Russian territory. They don’t have to conquer anything.

All they have to do in order to win is get the Russians to go home.

Rosin: So this was happening at the same time that Bakhmut seems to be falling under Russian control.

Applebaum: But the Ukrainians haven’t surrendered Bakhmut. So it’s not the end of that piece of the conflict.

Rosin: These two things happened this week. Is this the beginning of what they’ve been talking about—the spring offensive?

Applebaum: It’s not gonna be like, there’s a moment when, you know, someone puts up a big banner and says, right, “Spring offensive has now begun.”

It just isn’t gonna look like that. Somebody quite senior in the U.S. military said to me a few days ago that what you’re likely to see over the next few weeks is lots of small things.

Rosin: This could be like a successful, isolated incident, or it could be the beginning—

Applebaum: —Or it could be the beginning of a different phase of the war. Yes.

So that's an update on where we are in this war. Now, I want to bring you a conversation I had with Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum when they were fresh from visiting Ukraine because they had a real point of view on how we should think about this war..and I didn't. And it really helped me see what they see.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I wanted to see if Ukraine could win without the more concentrated help of the United States. That answer is abundantly clear. The United States in this conflict is the indispensable nation. Ukraine can’t lose because of their own moxie and spirit and fighting ingenuity, and the help that they’ve been getting from NATO and the United States so far. But Ukraine can’t win without a much more concerted U.S. and NATO effort to provide the Ukrainians with weapons on the highest level of complexity and effectiveness and scale.

Rosin: Okay. So your question is: How necessary is American help?

Goldberg: Yeah. And the cloud hovering over all of this is the possibility that Donald Trump could become president once again. We know he will take the United States from the Ukrainian side over to the Russian side. So I want to understand what the Biden administration has to do in the next year and a half in order to guarantee a Ukrainian victory, because I’m extremely worried about what happens if Donald Trump becomes president again. And, by the way, I’m not saying that I believe that Donald Trump is going to win right now. But Donald Trump has a very good chance of being the Republican Party nominee. And anyone who says that Donald Trump can’t win the presidency obviously doesn’t remember what happened in November 2016.

Rosin: Okay. The clock is ticking. We have to figure this out now. And this might actually be a critical year. You know what question just popped into my head?

Goldberg: No.

Rosin: Why do you care?

Goldberg: Me?

Rosin: Yeah. Like I’m asking that sincerely. Like, you’re an American guy sitting over here in this lovely office. Why do you care? There’s a lot of atrocities, and a lot of people living outside freedom. So, yeah.

Goldberg: If [Russia’s] allowed to win, it’s a signal victory for the forces of cruelty, barbarism, and authoritarianism. Authoritarians are on the march. It’s a little bit on the nose that Russia is buying drones from Iran. Russia is at the center of a global authoritarian movement that murders, tortures, uses poison gas, rapes, commits genocide. And the United States, at its best, is the country that leads the forces of progressivism and liberalism and humanism against those darker forces.

Rosin: Anne? What do you think?

Applebaum: I would add something to that: namely that it’s pretty clear that Russia launched the war not only to conquer Ukraine, but also as a kind of “screw you” to the international system. We don’t care about your stupid borders; we don’t care about human rights. We’re not bothered about your rules, about the treatment of children. We’re fine kidnapping and deporting children. We’re not interested in the Geneva Convention and the laws on war. And we’re going to prove it to you and show it to you every single day.

Rosin: So was there any reason you guys decided to go now? Like, is this a critical moment when you thought, Okay, we’ve got to be there now?

Applebaum: Yes. This is a critical moment. Neither side is advancing very far. If the Ukrainians are going to win the war, that needs to change. And so the question is: What are the Ukrainians doing to change the way they fight in the next phase of the war? So, we’re actually at a real turning point.

Rosin: What did you think you’d see when you got there? Did you drive around? Was it easy to get around?

Applebaum: We went together with a colonel: a former colonel from the Ukrainian Special Services, who took us to see a group of drone operators.

Goldberg: Wait, explain to me something. So we’re—this is just an abandoned house.

Translator: [Ukrainian speech.]

Goldberg: A civilian house. And you move from house to house for safety?

Speaker 4: Sometimes, yes. Sometimes we change our position.

Translator: Yeah. So people allowed them to be here.

Goldberg: You ask permission?

Translator: Yes. They ask permission. Yes, that’s the thing.

Rosin: And this was the drone workshop?

Applebaum: We actually saw two drone workshops. And what they’re doing is reconfiguring commercial drones. I mean, you can buy them on the Internet. The defense minister described them as wedding-ceremony drones, because in Ukraine, lots of people have them at their weddings.

Goldberg: What do you call them?

Oleksii Reznikov: Wedding-ceremony drones.

Goldberg: Why?

Reznikov: Because you use small drones to making footage of your wedding. Or, your daughter or son. So for wedding ceremony, you will use that camera? Yeah.

Applebaum: You know, you also have to imagine in Ukraine, it’s as if all the clever engineers from Silicon Valley have come to work at the Pentagon to save the country. And that’s something like what’s happening in these drone workshops—of which I should say there are probably dozens.

Goldberg: Dozens, if not hundreds. A drone workshop ... three people in a village can decide that they’re going to invent a better drone and then go do it.

Applebaum: You know, you think of [the] “defense industry” as being billion-dollar companies, and, you know, you think of the military having this kind of strict chain of command. In fact, in Ukraine, what you have is these almost volunteer units, so people of their own volition decide they’re going to create a drone workshop. It’s actually this kind of grassroots, networked, half–civil society, half-military effort that is fighting in different ways.

Rosin: All right. Let’s move on to the Zelensky interview.

Rosin: Was there a moment in the room with Zelensky when you felt something, or were genuinely moved? I mean, like an unexpected moment where you really felt the urgency that he feels.

Applebaum: When Zelensky talks about the civilizational differences between Ukraine and Russia—and by “civilization,” he means Ukraine is a modern democracy. It’s a networked, grassroots society. It’s fighting a brutal autocracy. And when he talks about that, he becomes unusually animated.

Goldberg: So the goal is to teach Russia to behave just like everybody else. Not better or worse, just like everybody.

Volodymyr Zelensky: To show everybody else, including Russia, that to respect sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity. To respect people, not to kill people, not to rape women, not to kill animals, not to take which is not yours.

Applebaum: And, you know, even when we asked him some questions about technology, he also clearly really liked talking about the tech university that he hopes to build one day. The achievements of Ukraine’s digital ministry, which has created this amazing app that every Ukrainian has: all their documents in their phone. Which has been, you know, hugely important for refugees and for people moving around the country. He becomes kind of expansive and enthusiastic.

And I think the reason for that is that those are the things that will make Ukraine this, you know, networked democracy that he wants it to be. So he has a very clear vision of what kind of country it is, and where it’s going. In order to achieve those things, he has to win the war. So it’s not so much that, you know, he becomes excited saying, I need this kind of weapon and that kind of weapon. He becomes excited when he’s talking about what he wants to build: you know, his dreams for the Ukraine of the future.

Rosin: And why does that matter to you?

Applebaum: Because it echoes with what so many other people I know in so many other parts of the world want also. Right before I went to Ukraine, I had a conversation with an Iranian friend of mine.

And he said to me, “We in Iran are waiting for the results of this war, because it will be so inspiring to us if a society like Ukraine can defeat a society like Russia. Because that’s what the Iranian human-rights movement, the Iranian democracy movement wants to do, too.”

And the conversations I’ve had with Venezuelans, with Belarusians, even with Poles—all of them find this war unbelievably inspiring. And it’s because it’s a war for a civilization that they also aspire to. So, there is a universal aspect of it.

Rosin: It’s really very basic. It’s: What kind of world are we gonna live in?

Applebaum: Yes. Are we going to live in a world, you know, where we talk about tech universities and new ways of making people’s lives better?

Or are we going to live in the kind of world that Russia wants to create, where the powerful can rape and murder and kidnap the weak? And those really are two choices in front of us.

Goldberg: [Zelensky] has this domino theory that goes like this: If the West allows Ukraine to fall, or to come under even partial permanent control of Russia, Russia does not stop. Russia goes into Moldova.

Zelensky: If they will occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova, and they will occupy Moldova. When they will occupy Moldova through Belarus, they will occupy Baltic countries, which are members of NATO. Of course they are brave people and they will fight—but they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapon. And when they will occupy NATO countries, the question is, will you send all your soldiers with weapons, all your pilots, all your ships? Will you send tanks and armored vehicles with your young people? Will you do? Because if you will not do it, you will have no NATO.

Rosin: Like, do we think Russia is going to invade Estonia?

Applebaum: Yes. I think Russia would invade Estonia. Putin, the interesting thing about him is, he always says what he’s going to do. He and others around him have made comments about Poland, you know, and the Baltic states as well. So I’m not as much in doubt of that. Remember, we just got through an American presidency during which, you know, Trump made it very clear several times on the record and multiple times off the record that he doesn’t like NATO. And the Russians heard that. And so I think this was the beginning of a kind of test. You know, if everybody caves on Ukraine, if they’re not going to defend Ukraine, why would they defend Poland?

Rosin: So the fact that it lands in my head like “foreign-policy chess game” is just because [of] a failure of imagination?

Applebaum: It’s a failure of imagination. And also, you’re not listening to Putin. I mean, he’s telling us all the time what he’s going to do. He’s telling us how he thinks.

Goldberg: That’s a failure of moral imagination. Because if somebody were being rounded up on the next street over to you and shot behind their houses and buried in a grave 100 feet from your house, you would be appalled, and you would rise up and fight them, even to your death. So there’s no difference between that and what’s happening in eastern Ukraine, except distance. Just keeps it just out of sight, out of mind. And that, by the way, I am being very, very careful and explicit to say that neither Anne or I or really anyone we know [is] advocating for the use of American troops in any combat situation. I mean, I think if there’s something that we’ve learned from previous American adventures—from Vietnam to Iraq and so on—is that if the people who are seeking liberation can’t do the physical fighting themselves, it’s not worth getting involved in that conflict. But here, you have a conflict that’s tailor-made for the U.S.’s strength. I don't think that Americans are anti-war. Americans are anti–“wars that you don’t win quickly.”

Rosin: I guess it’s that we have been, in the past, romanced by overseas narratives of freedom and democracy: gotten involved, spent a lot of money. And for what? Now you’re saying this is not one of those cases.

Applebaum: Well, we’re also not sending American soldiers there. You know, on the contrary, by investing in Ukrainians, you know, we might be saving American soldiers down the line. Again: The occupation of Ukraine, the presence of Russia on the borders of Poland or the Baltic states, these would then begin to be direct threats to people whom our treaties say we need to defend, ourselves. It would be very nice never to have to face that problem.

Rosin: I just want to end this episode sort of speaking to people who, you know, have stopped reading, basically. Like I’m a stand-in for those people.

Goldberg: You know what? We’ve been in Korea since 1950. The thing that allows us to stay in Korea that did not allow us to stay in Iraq or Afghanistan is that American soldiers aren’t dying. If the bullied, if the oppressed, if the invaded can defend themselves—if we provide them with some guns—isn’t that a better formula? And, by the way, it’s also a formula that Americans can live with, because Americans themselves are not in harm’s way.

Rosin: This is actually the perfect and correct kind of engagement for an age of limited attention span. Who cares if people don’t care? Who cares if people aren’t reading? Like, my question is not that relevant a question , because we’ve actually designed a form of engagement that’s effective, necessary…

Applebaum: But, you know, the point of this war isn’t to entertain Americans. The point of the war is to win. I actually have a Ukrainian friend who’s often outside the country, and she appears often on panels in conferences. And she says the most irritating question to her as a Ukrainian is, you know, “What will happen if everyone gets bored of the war?” And she’s like, well, “You know, I can’t afford to get bored of the war.”

The war is not there to entertain you. The point isn’t to be exciting.This is the moment when we’re making a principled stand in favor of Ukraine, but also in favor of a kind of world order and a set of rules that we believe in. Right now, there is political consensus.

Rosin: Mm hmm. That’s the T-shirt. Our war is not here to entertain you.

Goldberg: That actually is sort of an amazing statement.

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Russia’s war in Ukraine has been raging for more than a year. And for more than a year, various international leaders—including French President Emmanuel Macron and Chinese leader Xi Jinping—not to mention domestic pundits and politicians, have been calling for negotiations to end the bloodshed. Though well-intentioned, these appeals fail to take into account the fundamental nature of war, which requires the fighting to play out before a lasting peace can be a realistic possibility. At this moment in the conflict, any calls for talks are more likely to prolong the war and increase the suffering they seek to end.

War begins with a disagreement: Each side refuses to accept the terms the other is willing to offer, in the belief that fighting will lead to better ones. War ends with an agreement: Each side prefers to accept the terms offered, because it has come to believe that continuing to fight is unlikely to improve them. According to this logic, war is caused by conflicting expectations—about how troops and equipment will perform in battle, how competent the leadership will turn out to be, how ready society will be to bear the costs of war, how resilient the economy and industry will be in sustaining the war effort, how reliable allies and other third parties will prove to be.

All of these factors influence national leaders’ estimates of what can be achieved by military means, and those estimates remain hypothetical until tested in the real world. The fighting is therefore a process of learning, of gaining information that can lead to adjusted expectations. War is a harsh but honest teacher, and fighting furnishes the hard evidence that could create the conditions for peace.

Conflicting expectations about how a war will unfold cannot be resolved through diplomacy—only through fighting. Although most wars do end at the bargaining table, negotiations rarely begin before heavy fighting has taken place. If the West is genuinely committed to supporting Ukraine against Russia’s current war aims, then any calls for peace talks are counterproductive.

Once a conflict breaks out, expectations are confirmed or belied by events. Some corrections happen very quickly. Before the Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not considered a particularly strong leader by either the Russians or the West, or even by most Ukrainians. When Russia’s forces rushed toward Kyiv in an attempt to swiftly topple the government, many people expected Zelensky to flee. But the president astonished everyone by standing firm in Kyiv and rallying the population to defend its homeland against what at the time appeared to be insurmountable odds.

This sequence of events could easily have gone the other way, causing confusion, a collapse of Ukrainian morale, and the emergence of a Russian-controlled provisional government that would have undermined Ukraine’s war effort and devastated its prospects. This appears to have been the Russian expectation, and until Zelensky’s character and capability were tested by war, Moscow had no way to test its prior estimate of his worth as a wartime leader and reconcile conflicting expectations about how the invasion would actually unfold.

[Gil Barndollar: Ukraine has the battlefield edge]

The failure of the initial Blitzkrieg, and Russia’s withdrawal of its forces from Kyiv and Zhytomyr in early April 2022, revealed that the vaunted Russian military was considerably less competent than most observers—including, arguably, the Kremlin itself—had believed it to be. As one would expect, the underperformance of its military caused Russia’s leaders to revise some of their war aims. The partial withdrawal, which Moscow called a “gesture of goodwill,” was accompanied by a declaration that the main objective of the war was to secure the Donbas. This indicated that the Kremlin had abandoned regime change as a goal.

At the same time, because of Ukraine’s newly revealed battle-worthiness, the West shifted its military assistance to providing equipment more suitable for conventional rather than guerrilla war—HIMARS rockets, self-propelled artillery, air-defense systems. Aid began to flow at a greater volume. Ukraine itself became more optimistic and raised its own war aims. In place of Kyiv’s initial willingness, in March, to offer some concessions to Russia, such as neutrality in exchange for a Russian withdrawal to the pre-invasion line of control, the revised war expectations led Ukraine’s leaders to believe that they could eject the Russians by force—so they were no longer willing to offer such concessions.

The developments that followed over the summer initially seemed more consistent with Russia’s estimates, as its military made some progress, albeit at heavy cost. By the fall, though, these expectations were being shattered by a Ukrainian counteroffensive, which rapidly liberated large areas of the country’s northeast and south—the Kharkiv Oblast, Kherson, and Izyum. Once again, both sides revised their war expectations.

The Ukrainians began to talk openly about pushing Russian forces not just to the pre-invasion line of control but out of Ukraine altogether—an ambition that also included the liberation of Crimea, which had been annexed by Moscow in 2014. Confronted with incontrovertible proof that it was failing in its objectives, the Kremlin altered its strategy again in an effort to restore its fortunes, declaring a major mobilization of some 300,000 new recruits, putting parts of the economy on a war footing, and tightening domestic political control.

[Read: ‘An army of zombies is leading us to hell’]

None of this brought any nearer the prospect of a negotiated end to hostilities as the two sides’ expectations of the war’s outcome continued to diverge sharply. Strategic adjustments—possible only because each side still has untapped human and material resources to sustain the war effort—create new grounds for uncertainty. These unknowns then in effect require another round of fighting to resolve.

The Russian winter/spring offensive, currently winding down, revealed that even the newly mobilized forces were not capable of achieving significant advances and could obtain only local tactical victories at enormous cost. If the Kremlin had hoped by now to shatter Ukraine’s defenses and weaken the West’s commitment to supporting Kyiv, it must be severely disappointed by its military’s meager performance.

Russia’s current strategy is to demonstrate to Kyiv and the West that it can outlast their unity. Because that makes it imperative for Moscow to thwart Ukraine’s coming offensive, Russia has dug hundreds of miles of fortified defenses in the occupied territories and has at least 200,000 troops in reserve to hold those lines. Reportedly, it has also been rationing artillery shells to ensure sufficient stocks to repel an attempted Ukrainian breakthrough. Russian leaders hope that if their defensive strategy succeeds, Western support will begin to crumble, leaving a weakened Kyiv obliged to agree to Russian terms.

Contrary to this scenario, Ukraine’s strategy is to demonstrate that the Russians cannot retain their conquered territory. So the Ukrainians have to show that they can breach those defenses and liberate occupied zones in spite of Russia’s newly mobilized reinforcements. Although Ukraine’s dogged defense of Bakhmut has earned criticism from some observers, its purpose was to buy time while holding back most of its forces for more training in order to integrate additional Western-supplied weapon systems.

Ukrainian advances could persuade Moscow to lower its expectations again and force it to offer peace conditions that Kyiv might be willing to accept. Only then could negotiations work. But their success would still depend on finding terms that would lead to a stable peace rather than a brief ceasefire. And right now Ukraine has yet to test its new capabilities, so it has no reason to scale back its ambitions.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

Expectations of Ukraine must, however, remain realistic. Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov recently warned against assuming that the Ukrainian military will deliver “something huge.” “The expectation from our counteroffensive campaign is overestimated in the world,” he said. Such high hopes—especially if accompanied by ill-advised assertions that the West has given Ukraine everything it needs for victory—could lead to serious disappointment, even if Ukrainian forces do in fact perform well. That sort of disappointment might well prompt more Western voices to conclude that the war has stalemated and call for Ukraine to agree to concessions.

That, in turn, would suggest to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the West is pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances, is tiring of the war, and may be softening in its willingness to keep military aid flowing to Ukraine. Such an inflated Russian assessment of its position would only encourage the Kremlin to maintain its insistence on excessive terms.

Paradoxically, for those who seek an early cessation of hostilities, this messaging to Moscow may actually interfere with the convergence of expectations necessary to create an opening for talks, and thus postpone any possible peace settlement. The best way for the West to maintain solidarity with Kyiv and give peace a chance is to disabuse Russia of the notion that it can simply outlast Western unity with Ukraine.

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Russia is stepping up its campaign to terrorize Kyiv. But the Russians, for all their bluster, are now on the defensive and likely to stay there—if Ukraine gets the weapons it needs from the West.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The first year of AI college ends in ruin. Elon Musk among the anti-Semites Why Joe Biden caved What Ukraine Needs

The world, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is awaiting the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia’s occupying armies. Ukraine has survived a brutal winter and the destruction of yet another city, Bakhmut. But don’t expect the renewed Ukrainian push to be signaled with a whistle and a charge from the trenches; this isn’t World War I, even if the Russian commanders are fighting (and sacrificing their men) as if it’s 1914.

Indeed, the first moves of Ukraine’s counteroffensive operations are apparently already under way. Ukrainian forces have launched several counterattacks around Bakhmut in the past week, reclaiming territory from the Russians, who controlled most of the city (or what’s left of it). As The Wall Street Journal reported, the Ukrainians created a “Bakhmut trap” for Moscow; the Russians stupidly allowed themselves to be bled in inconclusive but brutal engagements, and now Ukraine is recapturing positions in days that Russia took many weeks to gain.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his high command know that their forces are in a tight spot, and so they’ve tried to fall back on their usual tactic of striking at civilians to try to break Ukrainian will. But even Russia’s attempt to attack a major city last night went haywire: The Ukrainians claim that the Russians fired 18 missiles at Kyiv, including Putin’s prized Kinzhals, and all 18 were shot down by Ukrainian air defenses. So far, this claim is unverified (and of course, the Russians churlishly disputed it).

The Ukrainian counteroffensive will pick up speed and intensity in the coming weeks, but the Russians had already been incurring immense casualties. The Wagner mercenaries, a private hypernationalist Russian army run by a wealthy warlord named Yevgeny Prigozhin, has suffered especially high losses. Prigozhin recently released a video in which he stood before a group of corpses and unleashed a barrage of curses—few people in the world can swear like the Russians—against the Russian government for starving Wagner’s forces of supplies.

(I do not know what to make of a report that Prigozhin was trying to cut a deal with the Ukrainians to sell out Russian military positions to save his men in Bakhmut. The story could be a clever psychological operation by Kyiv, and Prigozhin denies it, but he’s so awful—and he hates the Russian Defense Ministry so much for shorting his men on bullets—that it’s plausible. You can bet that Putin’s officials are pretty interested to know the truth and are working to find it.)

It’s time to make Prigozhin, Putin, and everyone else in the Kremlin start swearing even more. The Ukrainians have been asking for jets, longer-range systems, and more artillery. The United States has sent Patriot air-defense systems, the United Kingdom has provided the Storm Shadow missile system, and Germany has shipped more Leopard tanks. But it’s not enough. The Ukrainians are burning through ammunition at a high rate, and they still need help stopping Russia’s missile attacks. The West can do more to ensure that the Ukrainian counteroffensive succeeds.

Regular readers know that this is something of a shift in my thinking. Early on in this conflict, I advocated for a firm but cautious policy. I wanted the U.S. and NATO to provide weapons, money, and support, but I did not want free-world nations, in those first months, to provide systems that the Russians could use to claim direct Western involvement in the conflict. (I was especially opposed—and remain so—to irresponsible calls for NATO to patrol Ukraine’s skies.)

Both the military and the political situations, however, have changed significantly since the winter of 2022. First, at this point there is no way for Russia to lie about Western involvement, either to its own people or to anyone else in the world. The early fog of war has lifted, and there is no doubt about who is fighting whom in Europe.

Second, any hope that the Russians could be encouraged to show restraint evaporated months ago. At the outset, we might have expected that Russian failures would lead Putin to reassess his scheme, but instead, the Russians have descended into barbarism: War crimes and attempted genocide are now routine parts of Russian military operations. The Kremlin (wisely, for once) has avoided attacking NATO, and for the time being, Putin has chosen to stop making nuclear threats, but the Russian war plan in Ukraine has become little more than an operation to serve Putin’s rage and slaughter Ukrainians as retribution for their resistance.

Finally, although I will always remain concerned about Russian escalation against the West, I think those risks are less severe than they were a year ago. Putin is still who he was a year ago: vain, emotional, and a terrible strategist. But I am convinced that in the early days of the war, when the very best Russian forces were suffering one defeat after another, he and his toadies in the Kremlin were gripped by panic. I wanted the West to limit the chance that Putin would do something stupid and reckless—or more stupid and reckless than attacking Ukraine in the first place.

The shock of invasion has now passed in Kyiv, and the shock of defeat has, apparently, dissipated in Moscow. The recent Victory Day parade in front of the Kremlin was a sad and desultory affair, featuring tired old men saluting one another and somehow pretending that their forces were not being immolated on a battlefield only 1,000 kilometers away.

More to the point, the other part of the escalation equation relies on time: The longer this war drags on, the greater the chance of a black-swan event or another delusional miscalculation inside the Kremlin. Although the war cannot end until Putin decides to stop pouring men and metal into battle, the Ukrainians now have a chance to inflict so much damage, and retake so much territory, that Russian leaders will have to face failure, no matter what Putin or the ghouls who serve him on Russian television say. The sooner Putin and his coterie have no choice but to let go of the last shreds of their imperial fantasies, the better.

A summer of decision has arrived, if the West is willing to help Ukraine make it one.

Related:

Cover story: the counteroffensive Only NATO intervention in Ukraine can save Putin.

Today’s News The prosecutor John Durham wrapped up his four-year investigation into the origins of the FBI probe into ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, concluding that the agency was influenced by confirmation bias and operated with a “lack of analytical rigor.” A Florida teacher is under state investigation for showing a Disney movie with a gay character to her class. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, testified before Congress about the possibilities and risks of artificial intelligence. Dispatches Up for Debate: Readers tell Conor Friedersdorf what they think about the killing of Jordan Neely—and what they see as the heart of the debate surrounding the tragedy.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Illustration by Matthieu Bourel. Source: Katharina Behling.

Writing in the Ruins

By Gal Beckerman

If you grew up in East Germany, a country whose national anthem began, “Resurrected from the ruins, faces toward the future turned,” you might find a landscape covered in shards to be almost natural—the broken past coexisting alongside an emerging world of concrete and glass. Those ruins might even inspire an unabashed love, as they have in the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, born in that now-extinct country in 1967. “Steel girders. Charred beams. Walls with nothing behind them,” she writes in an essay. “Rooms where the rain falls on dead pigeons because there isn’t a roof overhead.” These are a few of her favorite things.

For Erpenbeck, who ranks among Germany’s most acclaimed writers (and is frequently mentioned as a future Nobel contender), this love comes with an ethic, one that suffuses her fiction.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Masha Gessen resigns in protest from PEN America board. No refuge from free Wi-Fi What the U.S. can learn about gun violence from Serbia Culture Break Illustration By Erik Carter / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Read. Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, which captures the defining emotion of modern life.

Listen. Check out a curated audio collection of some of our most popular articles from last month.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I promise this is the last thing I’ll say about it, but if you’re a Succession fan, “my” episode—the one where I had a tiny role as a pundit named Ben Stove—aired on Sunday night. I’ve been on television many times, but catching glimpses of myself standing behind Tom Wambsgans and Greg Hirsch, or glaring down from a big-screen television while Shiv and Roman Roy argue over the future of the American republic, is still surreal. If you’d like to know what it was like behind the scenes, I wrote about the experience, and what I learned from it about both entertainment and politics, for The Atlantic’s Culture section here.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Since the earliest days of the war in Ukraine, much of the Western world has become squeamish about Russian art. Tchaikovsky would not be played. Russian literature was kept high on the shelf. Moscow’s famous Bolshoi Ballet was disinvited from touring abroad.

Such boycotts have only increased in intensity, and in ways that demonstrate how wartime assaults on freedom can ripple far outside the conflict zone—where the sound of war is not that of bombs detonating but of piercing silence. Now the impulse to censor anyone Russian has arrived in the United States, at a venue that is designed to—of all things—champion and promote freedom of speech and expression: PEN America’s annual World Voices festival. It has also led, quite precipitously, to the writer Masha Gessen’s decision to resign as the vice president of PEN’s board of directors.

This past Saturday, as part of the festival, Gessen was set to moderate a panel showcasing writers in exile, two of them, like Gessen, Russian-born authors who had left their country in disgust. But a day before the event, ticket holders received an email saying that because of “unforeseen circumstances” the panel had been canceled. Their money would be refunded. No other explanation was offered and any trace of the event disappeared from PEN’s program online.

A small delegation of Ukrainian writers, who participated in a panel planned for the same day as the canceled Gessen event, had declared they could not attend a festival that included Russians. Because two of the writers, Artem Chapeye and Artem Chekh, are active-duty soldiers in the Ukrainian army, they argued that there were legal and ethical restrictions against their participation. Chapeye, a writer whose short story “The Ukraine” was recently published in The New Yorker, texted with me from a bus on his way back to Ukraine. He didn’t see himself as having boycotted the Russians. It was simply that their presence was incompatible with his. “The Russian participants decided to cancel their event themselves because we as active soldiers were not able to participate under the same umbrella,” he wrote.

Chapeye said he didn’t make distinctions between “good” Russians and “bad” Russians. “Until the war ends,” he wrote to me, “a soldier can not be seen with the ‘good Russians.’”

I spoke with Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN, who described the events of recent days as a “tough situation,” in which the Ukrainians presented themselves as being “imperiled” if they took part. Nossel told me she’d offered to have Gessen’s event take place under different auspices, not the World Voices festival, though at the same venue and at the same time. But in the end, as she put it, “that was not an option.”

To Gessen, it was abundantly clear that PEN had been “blackmailed” by the Ukrainians. And while Gessen empathized with the Ukrainians’ position and their cause, the proposed “rebranding” of the event seemed absurd. “I felt like I was being asked to tell these people that because they’re Russians they can’t sit at the big table; they have to sit at the little table off to the side,” Gessen told me. “Which felt distasteful.”

The organization, Gessen said, had already tried to anticipate certain sensitivities. The notion, for example, of doing any kind of Russian-Ukrainian dialogue was out of the question. Gessen understood that this would be akin to implying moral equivalency when one side is clearly the aggressor. For this reason, the two events were kept separate. For Ukrainians, who point out that Russia has been trying to extinguish their national identity for centuries, the war has been a chance to assert on an international stage that their voices need to be heard. Gessen was aware of how this urge had been expressed elsewhere in the literary world. Just a few days before, at a literary festival in Estonia, a Ukrainian writer, Olena Huseinova, had conveyed her distress at the presence of a Russian-born poet, writing an open letter suggesting what she would do in her place: “I find myself compelled to confess that were I to embody a Russian poet, my tongue and my language would sink into a weighty stillness, as if lifeless and bereft of motion deep within me. Probably, nowhere else would I belong, except within this silence and void.” The Russian poet was put on a plane and sent home from the festival.

Gessen, who uses they/them pronouns, said they could understand Ukrainians acting in this way. After all, the Ukrainians’ country had been invaded, hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens brutally murdered—the desire to be cruel to Russians was perfectly comprehensible. But Gessen expected a different response from PEN.

“It’s up to people whose country hasn’t been invaded, whose relatives haven’t been disappeared, whose houses are not being bombed, to say there are certain things we don’t do—we don’t silence people,” Gessen said. “We’re a freedom-of-expression organization. I’m not blaming the Ukrainians for this.”

“I can’t look my Russian colleagues in the eye,” they added. “I can’t serve on the board when I feel like this organization did something that it shouldn’t do.”

It’s not the first time that PEN has struggled with the question of how to balance a commitment to freedom of speech with other political pressures. The incident brings to mind a protest in 2015 from a couple dozen writers, including Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose, who took issue with PEN’s decision to give a free-speech award to Charlie Hebdo. The satirical French magazine had been the target of a terrorist attack that left 12 people dead and 11 more injured. But the dissenting writers didn’t think it was right to award a publication that had caricatured Muslims. “There is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression,” read the writers’ letter. The suggestion was that free speech should be supported—including Charlie Hebdo’s “anarchic expressions of disdain toward organized religion”—just not always so loudly. In the end, PEN stood by its award, presenting it to the surviving Charlie Hebdo editors, who were protected by armed guards.

Gessen said there is a lot of debate internally at PEN about the boundaries of free speech, and does not personally identify as a free-speech absolutist. “We regulate speech in this country all the time,” Gessen said. “We could have a much more meaningful discussion if we accepted that we regulate speech and talked about why and how we do it.”

The problem in this instance was that the decision to sideline the Russian participants came not as the result of deliberation, but rather in response to an ultimatum delivered by the Ukrainians, one that left no room for debate. In the end the Russian presence appeared as if it were a stain that had to be quickly covered up. “Even if the panel remained on the website with a canceled stamp on it or something, even that would be less tragic than what happened,” Gessen said. “But to just have it vanish? It’s almost a literal silencing.”

For PEN leadership, the entire situation felt “untenable,” Ayad Akhtar, the president of PEN’s board, told me. “The decision was made on the basis of certain human considerations,” he said. “Had we made the decision on the basis of principle, it would have meant a human cost that we certainly didn’t want to pay at this particular moment given what’s going on in Ukraine.”

But when asked about Gessen’s resignation, Akhtar simply sighed. “It’s a big loss for us,” he said. “A big loss.”

Before each decision to arm Ukraine with a new category of powerful arms, NATO partners progress through three stages of denial. First comes an outright dismissal of the country’s ability to effectively deploy the weapons in question against Russian invaders. Ukraine could never use these—the argument has been applied to multiple rocket-launch systems, anti-aircraft systems, and sophisticated tanks—because they are just too complex. Next comes a qualified dismissal. Ukrainian forces might be able to use these systems, but equipping and training them would take far too long. Then comes a desperate third stage. Yes, Ukraine can use these weapons, which could make a big difference in the war, but we worry about how Russia or China might respond. This view, though not always publicly voiced, almost certainly is the real reason the United States and other Western powers are holding back some arms.

On the question of whether the West will provide F-16s—a capable but relatively simple, lightweight fighter aircraft widely used by NATO members—the discussion is stuck somewhere between Stages 1 and 2. Ukraine clearly needs improved air-defense capabilities and so is constantly pleading for F-16s. The U.S. is rejecting these appeals primarily with technical and logistical arguments. Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, has repeatedly claimed in recent weeks that Ukraine would need 18 months to be able to deploy and operate F-16s. The suggestion is that people should stop pressuring the U.S. to provide these planes, because they could never arrive in time to make a difference.

[Read: The counteroffensive]

Yet Ukraine would not be educating F-16 pilots from scratch. It has a large number of experienced MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-27 pilots, who have the added benefit of many months of combat flying. Comments by some current and former senior officers from NATO air forces suggest that qualified, experienced fighter pilots might need only a few months of training. (Ukrainian officials have described a similar timetable.) From the Ukrainian armed forces’ strong record of accomplishment, we can assume that Ukraine would not find it any more difficult to maintain F-16s than to learn how to fly them.

Retired U.S. Air Force General Phil Breedlove, a former supreme allied commander for Europe who has also worked closely with the Ukrainian air force, expresses confidence in its abilities. “There are very few absolutes in this Russian War on Ukraine,” Breedlove told us in an email. “But one thing that is absolutely consistent is that we always overestimate how long it will take Ukraine to assimilate and learn to employ the western weapons given to them.” In the past, Breedlove pointed out, Ukrainians have even had certain lessons for NATO. “In the case of weapons such as counter battery radars we supplied in the 2014 Russian Invasions of Ukraine, they have taught us how to better use them!”

Having F-16s would broaden Ukraine’s ability to shoot down incoming Russian missiles and drones. During last year’s campaigns, the Russians relied on a wide range of attack platforms: relatively simple and inexpensive Iranian Shahed drones, repurposed S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, more advanced Kalibr cruise missiles, and even Russia’s latest Kinzhal hypersonic missiles. To shoot down just some of this weapony, the Ukrainians had to rely overwhelmingly on ground-based anti-air systems—to such a degree that rumors spread that Ukraine was or would soon be running short. Without an airborne defense—something F-16s would help provide—Ukraine is, to use a sports metaphor, defending on its own goal line. Instead of a systematic defense of its skies, the Ukrainians are fending off attacks on targeted infrastructure point by point. Any defense that relies on last-ditch saves is a notably poor one.

Granted, Ukraine would face some challenges in using F-16s to maximum effect. Any F-16 fleet would require a regular resupply of Western air-to-air missiles. The real problem here may well be that NATO fears exhausting its collective arsenal of such weapons. If so, the West needs to ramp up production in its own interests—rather than nervously guarding existing supplies when they could be put to good use in Ukraine.

Even with F-16s, Ukraine would not be able to use air power according to NATO doctrine, in which mutually complementary types of aircraft protect one another. But in the limited confines of the Ukrainian battle space, such high-end, airborne capabilities, designed to operate at long range and in enemy airspace, would be less important. Still, Ukraine’s primary need is to keep one step ahead of the Russian air forces to maintain primacy over the battlefield—that is, over Ukrainian territory. It must keep Russian aircraft on the defensive and prevent it from affecting any coming Ukrainian offensive. Ukrainian air power doesn’t need to attain NATO standards to serve that goal.

To that more limited end, Western allies should also consider expanding Ukraine’s ground-based electronic-warfare systems; continuing to reinforce its surface-to-air-missile capacity; enhancing its proven ability in “prototype warfare,” the deployment of experimental military technology primarily to shoot down Russian surface-to-air missiles along the front line; and integrating its various defenses via a ground-based communications network. With these improvements, the F-16 could operate in relative safety, and it would pose enough of a threat to thwart many Russian offensive missions before they could prosecute their attacks on Ukraine. This would reduce the emerging threat posed by Russia’s new glide bombs, launched at high speed from aircraft remaining behind Russia’s own lines—a big win for Ukraine’s strategic aims.

[Read: How and when the war in Ukraine will end]

Skeptics who argue that preparing Ukrainian forces to deploy and maintain F-16s will take too long to do much good are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The longer they draw out the process of getting a beleaguered country the weapons it needs, the more trouble that country will have in repelling the invaders. The sooner Ukraine has access to F-16s, the sooner it can fight the war far more effectively.

Already these delaying tactics mean it is too late to have any F-16s play a role in an expected Ukrainian spring-and-summer offensive. However, if the West moves soon, Ukraine could have essential assistance in place by the fall. It will need the help. Last winter the Russians embarked on a well-publicized strategic campaign against power plants and other Ukrainian infrastructure. Though the campaign failed, the Russians are very likely to attempt something similar this year, having learned from their previous failures.

For all of the West’s technical objections to giving F-16s to Ukraine, the real objection is likely based in fears of escalation. Never mind that Russia’s bloodcurdling threats of escalation have proved hollow again and again, and that Ukraine has abided by limits that skittish Western powers have put on the use of the weapons they are supplying.

In the end, providing Ukraine with F-16s as soon as possible would make a major difference in Ukraine’s ability to both wage defensive war and go on the offensive to reclaim its territory. It would allow Ukrainians, finally, to conduct ground operations in a comprehensive manner and to defend their cities and power-generation systems. It would help them win this war as quickly as possible with the fewest losses.