David Von Drehle

I can’t fault anyone who objects to the idea of a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war. Russia started with an unprovoked invasion and moved quickly to war crimes. So why do I advocate negotiation if certain terms can be achieved?

Readers angered by my position equate a settlement with Russian President Vladimir Putin to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler. By this analogy, “appeasement” of Putin will only encourage him to invade more countries and seize more land, much as Hitler grabbed Poland in 1939, touching off World War II in Europe.

The comparison, once apt, is now past its shelf life.…  Seguir leyendo »

Less than a week into Ukraine’s latest counteroffensive against Russian forces, there’s a natural desire to pronounce success or failure, but the nature of the fighting and the fog of war don’t allow that. It’s simply too soon to tell whether Ukraine will, in the swaggering language of President Volodymyr Zelensky, drive Russia beyond his nation’s borders.

In the larger picture, however, the fact that Ukraine is counterattacking in organized, well-supplied columns is another mark of Russia’s costly and disastrous failure. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s self-made war was intended to decapitate Ukraine, occupy the capital and install a puppet government in a single multi-front blitz this past February.…  Seguir leyendo »

Let’s put the best face possible on French whispers that the United States is too aggressive toward Russia. Let’s avoid the easy (and tempting) jokes about a Gallic flair for surrender. Likewise with any observation that it’s easy — perhaps a bit decadent — to take a moderate view concerning Russia from behind a barrier of Eastern European democracies that find Moscow’s ravaging of their neighbor Ukraine to be an immediate and urgent threat to their own safety.

Let’s assume that France is trying to play good cop to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s bad cop in a joint effort to bring Vladimir Putin’s brutal war to the earliest possible conclusion.…  Seguir leyendo »

The words “welcome to hell” have a particular resonance in the long-troubled lands around the Black and Caspian seas. The story goes that, a quarter-century ago, a lumbering, poorly trained battalion of Russian conscripts managed to capture the train station in Grozny, an ancient fortress city in the Chechen Republic. No sooner had they gained their prize on New Year’s Eve 1994 than a voice was heard on their radios. “Welcome to hell!” it announced, and rebels hidden in the upper floors of nearby buildings rained grenades, machine-gun fire and sniper bullets onto the trapped column.

In 1999, on orders of Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, a new assault on Grozny began — and this time, the Russians brought hell with them.…  Seguir leyendo »

Russia’s terror bombing of Ukrainian cities may look like strength. Millions of people are refugees, and buildings have been reduced to rubble. But three weeks into Vladimir Putin’s disastrous error, the real story is Russia’s weakness.

The lack of blitz in Putin’s blitzkrieg no longer appears to be a failure of deployment. Instead, it seems to be a deficit of military power. True, the Russian leader miscalculated in thinking that the Zelensky government in Ukraine would cut and run, allowing Kyiv to fall into his hands. But the revised tactics the Kremlin is using now are emphatically not the tactics of a 21st-century fighting force.…  Seguir leyendo »