The world is entering the moment of maximum danger — and at the same time of maximum opportunity — in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, now in its seventh month.
It is the moment of maximum danger because Putin is so dramatically failing in the pursuit of his delusional obsession — which prompted him to launch a major invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 — that he could rebuild some modern notion of the Russian empire with Kyiv as its centerpiece and as his legacy.
As Ukrainian courage and resilience transform his hubris into humiliation, the danger is rising that he could turn to weapons of mass destruction, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons, to coerce Ukraine and confound its allies at a time when Putin’s influence is eroding and he is running out of options.
This presents a moment of maximum opportunity for world leaders at the gathering this week of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the first since Putin launched his war. It’s a chance for U.S. President Joe Biden, alongside his European and Asian allies, to openly discuss the dangers Putin’s war poses to any country that cares about national sovereignty, to condemn Putin’s indisputable war atrocities, and to sway those remaining fence-sitters around the world who have neither condemned Putin nor backed sanctions against him.
It’s disheartening that the UN, instead of focusing on how best to stop Russia’s despot now and before winter wages, has been wrestling with the technicality of whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should be allowed to speak via video link to this most significant gathering of world leaders. The good news is that UN general assembly members voted 101 to 7, with 19 abstentions, to provide the Ukrainians their stage.
Russia, a member of the UN Security Council, had been doing everything in its power to block the speech. That’s no surprise, for when Zelenskyy spoke virtually to the Security Council in April, he told the group that it should act for peace immediately or “dissolve” itself.
“We are dealing with a state that turns the right of veto in the UN Security Council into a right to kill,” he warned. Zelenskyy could not have been more prophetic, saying that if the UN failed to stop Putin, then for countries going forward it wouldn’t be international law that would define the future but rather the law of the jungle.
There has been some speculation that the chance that Putin will use tactical nukes against Ukraine — or order some other escalatory action involving chemical or biological agents — has grown in rough proportion to the Russian despot’s increasing military setbacks on the ground.
Scenes from Ukraine this week of Russian soldiers — who cast aside their rifles, fled the battlefield on bicycles, and ditched their uniforms to disguise themselves as locals — were all part of a mosaic of failure
The spectacular implosion of Putin’s military in the south and east of Ukraine, where Ukrainian troops have…
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