U.S. President Joe Biden leaves the White House March 4, 2022, in Washington.Win McNamee/Getty Images
U.S. President Joe Biden faces growing calls for tougher action on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with Kyiv requesting more military help and legislators in the U.S. pushing for an oil embargo on Moscow.
But the White House is reluctant to escalate amid fears of triggering a direct war between NATO and nuclear-armed Russia, and causing economic pain in the U.S. at a time of high inflation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this week appealed to NATO to either impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine or provide Kyiv with fighter jets. He reiterated this Friday after Russia attacked and captured Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant, starting a fire in the area that took hours to extinguish.
“Nuclear terrorism requires decisive action in response. At the UN Security Council meeting, we called for closing the sky over Ukraine and launching an operation to maintain peace and security,” he tweeted. “The world must not watch, but help!”
In a video message, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba warned his Western counterparts of the moral consequences of not stepping up military assistance to his country.
“I’m afraid you will have to share responsibility for the lives and suffering of civilian Ukrainians who died because of ruthless Russian pilots who throw bombs on them,” he said.
Efforts to shut down Russian oil and gas imports, meanwhile, are gaining momentum in the U.S. Congress. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski this week introduced a bipartisan bill to ban imports to the U.S.
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“If there was a poll being taken and they said, ‘Joe, would you pay 10 cents more per gallon to support the people of Ukraine and stop the support of Russia?’ I would gladly pay 10 cents more per gallon,” Mr. Manchin told reporters.
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed the measure. “I’m all for that,” she said. “Ban it.”
The U.S., European Union, Britain and Canada have hit Russia with unprecedented sanctions against its banks and treasury, cut off exports of high-tech goods and frozen foreign assets belonging to its politicians and oligarchs. They have also supplied anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons to the Ukrainian military.
The West, however, has held off on imposing either a full trade embargo, or a more limited one targeting only oil and gas, which provide nearly half of the Kremlin’s revenues. Not all Russian banks, meanwhile, are fully cut off from SWIFT, the system for processing international financial transactions.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has repeatedly declined to give Ukraine aircraft or institute a no-fly zone. Mr. Putin put his nuclear forces on alert in response to previous rounds of sanctions.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki this week dismissed an oil embargo, which would “raise prices at the gas pump for the American people.” And she again ruled out a no-fly zone.
“It would require, essentially, the U.S. military shooting down Russian planes and … prompting a potential direct war with Russia, the exact step that we want to avoid,” she said.
Inna Sovsun, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, said the country felt “betrayed” that the U.S. and Britain had not followed through on their 1994 promise to guarantee Ukraine’s security in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear arsenal.
If Mr. Putin is able to conquer Ukraine, he will next threaten NATO’s eastern flank, so it would be better for the alliance to fight him now, she said.
“He doesn’t like Hungary in NATO, he doesn’t like Poland in NATO, he doesn’t like the Baltic states in NATO. Does anyone truly believe he will stop in his delusions?” she said in an interview Friday from Kyiv. “If the West just allows him to conquer Ukraine, he will go further and the West will have to confront him.”
Given the horrors Mr. Putin is inflicting on Ukraine, she said, it was time for the West to at least accept the comparatively manageable fiscal pain of imposing a complete economic embargo on Russia.
“Putin has killed more than 2,000 civilians in Ukraine. He is shelling our cities and destroying buildings. And we are hearing about economic sacrifices?” she said.
Alexander Downes, an international-affairs professor at George Washington University, said a no-fly zone or fighter-jet shipments to Ukraine may not necessarily trigger an immediate nuclear war, but could result in a series of progressively worse scenarios, which might lead in that direction.
Russia, for instance, might react to the provision of planes to Ukraine by bombing a NATO base in Europe, which could lead NATO to hit back at Russia. “This escalatory process is dangerous and can get out of hand,” he said.
More likely, Mr. Biden could be pressed into far-less-risky economic moves despite the potential political consequences. His Democrats are trailing polls ahead of midterm elections later this year, with inflation at a 30-year high. Substituting for Russian oil and gas could also mean issuing more drilling and fracking permits in the U.S., which the Democrats are reluctant to do for climate reasons.
Maria Snegovaya, a political scientist who has studied the effect of Russia’s economy on its foreign-policy decisions, said such an embargo could put strong pressure on Moscow to end the war.
“The sanctions could force Putin to run out of resources, split the elites so they find it detrimental and toxic to side with him, and hit society to make them realize he is taking them to a catastrophe,” said Ms. Snegovaya, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.
The destruction of historical artifacts in Ukraine during the Russian invasion has drawn the attention of international cultural bodies, and three Canadian museums are warning about what could come next.