Putin Fell into Biden’s Trap

Russia was unaware of how the U.S. was preparing for war.

The second month of the Russian-Ukrainian war is coming to an end, and observers have not clearly figured out why Vladimir Putin instigated the invasion. Perhaps he wanted to restore the Soviet empire, perhaps he wanted to gain control over the natural resources in the Donbas, or perhaps he wanted to demonstrate his contempt for Ukraine and humiliate their charismatic leader. We can’t rule any of these explanations out, although it seems that we are ignoring the fact that the key to understanding the nature of this conflict lies not in Moscow, but in Washington.

I suggest that the fundamental reason for the Russian-Ukrainian war, and at the same time the logical explanation for many of the events related to it, is that the U.S. has set a trap for Russia, and Russia has walked into it.

An Unsuspecting Russia

After taking office, President Joe Biden failed to make the best impression, and frequently appeared lost and confused. He quickly walked away from an effort to stop Putin’s flagship project, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, intended to make European economies dependent on Moscow for many years to come. For these and similar reasons, the Russian leader had grounds to think that whatever he did would merely incur a mild reprimand.

Putin also saw no reason to hide the fact he was preparing to invade Ukraine, and he practically implemented his plans demonstratively in plain sight of the whole world. He realized that the U.S. knew the details of Russia’s preparations quite well and deliberately publicized American intelligence on the buildup. Yet, Putin did not realize, and neither did we, that Russia was unaware of American preparations for an invasion, which it coordinated with Poland to a large extent.

Two months of fighting has brought Ukraine many tragedies, although at the same time, it has produced many examples of incredible heroism, acts that certainly bear great nation-building value. Ukraine would not have been able to put up such resistance without huge support from the U.S. and other NATO members.

The great superpowers tend to divide countries into those that are crucial to their interests, and those that are peripheral. Ukraine is crucial for Russia, yet it is peripheral to U.S. interests, and there was every reason to believe that Washington would recognize Russia’s right to the territory that Russia felt was crucial.

Yet, it turned out that the seemingly anemic Biden misled Putin. While all eyes were on the Russian troops at the Ukrainian border, the U.S. was preparing for a huge logistical operation, amassing considerable supplies of military equipment and developing routes and methods of delivering them to Ukraine. Its mission has been to consistently destroy Russian equipment that cannot be reproduced. Moscow didn’t anticipate this kind of strategy from Washington, although it should have.

A Major US Operation

Sufficient to say, there is a historical parallel we can draw on. At the beginning of the 1950s, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson delivered a speech outlining the limits of Washington’s strategic interests in Asia. He left out Korea, which many observers saw as a mistake. However, it was a trap.

Less than six months after Acheson’s appearance, the puppet leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, attacked his southern neighbor. To his surprise, as well as the surprise of those who were pulling strings from Moscow and Beijing, Washington immediately revealed a ready-made plan to intervene on behalf of Seoul. The conflict lasted three years, and though it did not always go to plan, it tied up a less than wealthy communist military in a completely peripheral region, thus decreasing the threat of a Soviet attack in Europe.

There is also another historical analogy, namely when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in December 1979, an act that was also virtually inexplicable because it was meant to support one left-wing group against another. Even though President Jimmy Carter and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzeziński, had no part in provoking Moscow to make this move, the U.S. immediately understood that supporting Moscow’s enemies offered a great opportunity to weaken the Soviet arsenal.

It looks like Biden and his team have made creative use of this history. The war in Ukraine is a unique opportunity to dramatically reduce Russia’s military potential, something that could not have been achieved in any other way. It doesn’t matter how exaggerated the loss of Russian military equipment is, something that Kyiv likes to publicize. What’s important is that such losses are considerable, and that they are real. What’s more, the U.S. has imposed exceptionally harsh sanctions on Russia and persuaded European countries to do the same. The entire set of sanctions impoverishes Russia and cripples additional sectors of its economy, including the arms industry.

Russia is losing planes, helicopters, tanks, combat vehicles, and has even lost a cruiser—and it will be unable to replace them with new equipment. It cannot afford to do so, and it has no capacity to produce what it has lost. The war in Ukraine is a major operation that aims to weaken Russia for many years, if not decades. And it will continue for a while, that is, until Washington decides it has achieved its goal.

The Cost of Ukraine

There is no other justification for the powerful support amounting to at least hundreds of billions of dollars that Washington is providing to a peripheral country not allied with the U.S., and at a moment when the security of the U.S. itself is not threatened.

Ukraine and its people are paying the price for this operation. The only thing is, that it is not the U.S., or Europe that have attacked Ukraine, and it’s not the U.S. or Europe that is at war with Ukraine. Putin would have attacked this country anyway, and we can’t delude ourselves that the soldiers who are now killing children and defenseless women would have behaved in a more civilized manner had they more easily achieved their plans to occupy Ukraine. Scars will remain in the national consciousness of the Ukrainians, but so will the justifiable belief that their sacrifice was for a truly just cause.