4 Times Opinion Writers Analyze Russia’s Attack on Ukraine

Russian troops invaded Ukraine on Thursday, attacking over a dozen major cities and towns, including the capital, Kyiv. The attacks began the first major land war in Europe in decades. “This aggression cannot go unanswered,” President Biden said as he announced harsh sanctions against Russia, including blocking major Russian banks and “corrupt billionaires” from access to the U.S. financial system as well as deploying troops to NATO’s eastern flank. Times Opinion writers Farah Stockman, Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat discuss what’s to come with Times Opinion podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Russian forces are pouring into Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin is warning that any country attempting to interfere will create “consequences you have never seen.” That’s a reminder of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The Ukrainian military has mobilized to defend the country. There have been scenes of chaos in major Ukrainian cities, as civilians have flooded shelters or tried to flee on clogged roads. And Belgium’s prime minister is calling this Europe’s darkest hour since World War II.

As European leaders vow to punish Russia for launching this conflict on their continent, what happens now? This is enormously consequential. It is not an understatement to say the world has changed overnight, I think.

Farah Stockman: I really worry that Americans aren’t ready for the consequences of this. What we’re going to be faced with is the increasing bifurcation of the world between East and West. And it’s time now for the United States and Europe to really think about how — well, to really act, right? We have to make this mean something. We have to meaningfully stand up at this time. And I fear that a lot of Americans are embroiled in fights with each other. And we have a lot of work to do.

Garcia-Navarro: Ross, Farah thinks that this is a fight between the East and the West. Do you see it the same way?

Ross Douthat: I mean, I certainly agree it’s an incredibly consequential and kind of astonishing moment. It’s been clear for a while that the invasion was a live possibility, that Putin and the Russian government were taking it seriously as a scenario. But it is a really, really radical move that carries dramatic downstream consequences for, obviously, the United States and the Western world, but also dramatic consequences for Russia.

It is a tremendous gamble that Putin has taken. And I think there are short-term and long-term questions here.

Short-term, there’s the question of: We’re not going to go to war ourselves for Ukraine. That’s been clear for a while. And I think we’ve honestly had a somewhat failed strategy vis-à-vis Ukraine, and this has brought that to a head. But we have to have a response, and there’s questions about what is the immediate response, how far can you go with sanctions, what will European countries be willing to do and what kind of pain will everyone be willing to bear at the gas pump in particular.

But then longer term, this will reorient defense postures and energy policies substantially for NATO and for the European Union, again, in ways that will not be good for Russia. There will be some kind of sustained push for energy independence in Europe, I think on a scale we haven’t seen before. There will be a realignment of NATO forces in the East. It’s possible that Finland and Sweden will join NATO. All of this — I think those long-term responses are ultimately going to be more important than the decisions we make about sanctions today. But obviously, those decisions are the ones that are immediate and necessary right now.

Garcia-Navarro: OK, lots to consider there. But fundamentally, what we’re looking at is a sort of reorganization of the post-World War II consensus. Is that the way you see it, Frank?

Frank Bruni: Yes, absolutely. And I’m struck, listening to both Farah and Ross, at this sense of disbelief that all of us seem to feel. And I feel it. I see it all around me. Farah said Americans aren’t ready for this. I think she’s absolutely right. Ross called this “astonishing.” I think that’s absolutely right. This feels like a page from the 20th century. And here we are in the 21st century. And I’m struck by this sense I pick up in everyone around me that the world, we were somehow past this, that war in Europe was something that we wouldn’t see.

And so I don’t think we’re ready for this. I think people don’t know how to process this. I don’t even think they’ve gotten to the point of fear and terror yet because they’re still in that state of shock. And I wanted to also follow up on something Ross said. He talked about the incredible risk Putin is taking here. I think when people mention that, they’re usually thinking of the risk he’s taking internationally. But he has taken an enormous, enormous risk internally, too. The Russian people are going to feel this gravely in their economy. They’re going to feel this in terms of lost lives. And he is betting — and it is fascinating and terrifying — he’s betting that this flexing of might and the stoking of national pride is somehow going to transcend and compensate for all of that. I don’t know that we know that to be the case.

Garcia-Navarro: Farah, what does the very audacity of this act say about Putin’s plans?

Stockman: Well, look, Putin’s been taking bites out of Ukraine since 2014. And before Ukraine, there was Georgia. So we might be in disbelief, but there are people living there who have seen what’s happening. So I think he has nothing to stop him. He is not accountable to a democratically elected congress. He doesn’t have an opposition. His biggest opposition is in prison. And so what’s stopping him from doing this?

A lot of people consider this to be a personal obsession of his. He has a personal obsession with Ukraine. It has a lot of historical meaning to him. But I also see this as a bigger deal. It’s bigger than Ukraine because he’s been watching for the last, I don’t know, 20 years — he’s been watching the United States do things like this, in his mind. He hated what we did in Libya. He was furious. He hated the Iraq war invasion. He has been seeing us throw our might around and call it international law.

And I think he’s just saying, well, I can play that game, too. And this is really about telling the United States that it’s no longer the sole superpower and showing that we are weak. He went to Beijing before this and basically got some kind of agreement from President Xi that somehow China was going to back them up with economic deals so that they could live maybe without Europe for a while. I worry about where this is all going.

Garcia-Navarro: Putin wants this, of course, because he sees what happened after the Soviet Union fell as a huge mistake. And so that is one of the reasons why he’s fixated on Ukraine.

Douthat: The irony of Farah’s point is that, of course, most of the interventions that she’s describing that the United States made from its own position of greater strength 10 or 15 years ago have ended very badly, with Afghanistan, obviously, being the most recent exception. The Iraq war was not exactly a sterling story of American success. The Libya intervention left that country in a state of civil war that has remained off and on to the present day.

So for a long time, Putin wasn’t just angry at America about those unilateral interventions, those symbols of American might. He also had this sort of reasonable critique of how they went badly, how they didn’t work, how America was reckless and destructive and smashing things up and leaving things in pieces. And at some point, seemingly in his own vision of what’s possible for Russia, he has abandoned that part of his critique of the U.S., or he has the idea that Ukraine is close enough to Russia culturally and weak enough in its own state capacity that he can succeed in conquest there in a way that all of America’s efforts at nation building and so on have ended badly.

But there is a real shift there from saying America is reckless and destructive and its wars have failed to saying we can succeed. We can do what George W. Bush was unable to do in Iraq. We can conquer Ukraine in a heartbeat and reintegrate them into our own imperium. That’s what’s so distinctive — and distinctive, too, relative to what he had done previously. It’s true that he had been taking bits and pieces and creating frozen conflicts around Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, elsewhere.

Garcia-Navarro: And Syria.

Douthat: And Syria. But all of those were limited efforts, often in areas that had sympatric populations, that you could pull back from if anything went wrong. And the scale is just different. The gamble is just different here.

Garcia-Navarro: Frank, we don’t know yet if this will be an occupation, but it seems clear to me that the intention is to overthrow Zelensky and, in some way “reclaim” Ukraine.

Bruni: It does, indeed. And at every step of the way for the last couple of days and weeks, things have gone beyond what people feared. We’re seeing and reading reports now of explosions and aggressions throughout the country of Ukraine, not just in the areas that are closest to Russia.

And I wanted to follow up on something Ross said because I think it’s interesting. There’s a difference between Putin and Russia doing what he’s doing right now and some of our foreign misadventures that I think is striking, and it has a lot to do with how we ended up in this place. He has much greater control over the information that Russians receive, over the story that they’re told. When our foreign adventures become misadventures, when we end up in spots that we were assured we wouldn’t and everything goes wrong, we Americans get that information. We are the beneficiaries of a free press. I think for the Russians, whatever they’re thinking about all of this is colored mightily by a very selective and distorted version of the truth. And I think that will hold true going forward, and that’s a real problem in terms of coming to any kind of solution here.

Garcia-Navarro: Farah, when you look at this in terms of what Ukraine has symbolized in the region, for certain Russians, Ukraine has represented hope. Ukraine bolstered its democracy in 2014 when it overthrew its pro-Russian autocrat. And for those living in autocratic countries in the region, the Ukrainian revolution signaled that there could potentially be a different path. And that hope has now been shattered. Basically, the message here is self-determination will not be tolerated.

Stockman: I think that’s true. I’ve been very worried about this because you can’t just pick up Ukraine and move it somewhere else. It shares a border with Russia. Russia was always going to have the ability to influence what was going on in Ukraine either by buying off its politicians or having its pro-Russian propaganda TV channels. And basically what triggered this buildup of troops was that the pro-Russian TV channels were turned off.

So I think Putin decided, hey, he can’t keep Ukraine by influencing its politics, so he’s going to go with a military invasion. He’s going to get Ukraine no matter what. That’s what he thinks, and he might be right. That’s the real worry. I wonder about how we can protect Zelensky. What are we going to do if they arrest the entire Ukrainian government and throw them in jail forever? Putin’s good at this. He has done this to Russia. He knows how to do this.

I’ve always worried that we might be giving them a little bit of false hope that they can just do a total break with Russia and not have to think about what Putin’s able to do with his giant army. I guess maybe I’m a bit of a realist, but I think that the Ukrainian people have such — they deserve to choose their own path. And they deserve the democracy that they’re fighting for. But they’re always going to have to deal with that very powerful neighbor. And I worry that we cannot protect Zelensky. I don’t know what the plan is right now.

When it comes to how we can punish Putin for doing this, we’re going to have to also go through some serious pain. Fifty percent of Germany’s natural gas comes from Russia, right? London has been rolling in Russian money for years now. So if Europe wants to stop Putin, we’re going to have to go cold turkey in ways that are really hard. And they’re going to be hard on Europeans, too. This is going to be a suck-it-up situation, where people are going to have to say, we are going to have to quit Putin. We’re going to have to quit the Russian gas and oil that we’re addicted to. And I just hope that we’re ready for that.

Garcia-Navarro: Ross, was this a massive miscalculation by Europe and Ukraine that they could even flirt with the idea of forming an alliance? Zelensky had explicitly said Ukraine wanted to join NATO. And Farah believes that possibly this was all really a grave miscalculation that led to this.

Douthat: I think that it was a grave miscalculation. I think, in some ways, an understandable one, precisely because the steps Putin has taken are so extraordinary and so fraught with risk for himself and his regime that you could always tell yourself that he would continue to sort of pick away at Ukraine’s borders but it wouldn’t come to this.

But even down to the last few weeks, there’s been this very strange dynamic where the United States — which does, for all our intelligence failures, seem to have pretty good intel on what the Russians are up to — kept issuing warnings of, it’s really happening. The Russians are really planning to invade. And the Ukrainian government will say, oh, stop sowing panic, and we don’t think an invasion is imminent and so on. I do think that for very idealistic reasons, some Ukrainian nationalists talked themselves into the idea that Putin would never move like this or the idea that in the extreme event, the West would come to their aid more than was ever quite reasonable and plausible.

There is also the question of to what extent — what is actually driving Putin’s decision-making here, right? Is it NATO? Is it his sort of mystical idea of the Ukrainian-Russian connection and the idea that you can’t detach Ukraine from Russia? Is it sort of immediate things — the crackdowns on pro-Russian parties and Russian language education and stuff in Ukraine? Presumably, it’s all of those at some level. But you can’t say definitively that if there hadn’t been this one provocative step, it wouldn’t have come to this.

But what’s clear is that the United States’ and the West’s policy toward Ukraine in general was conditioned on this sense that we could invest there on a scale that wouldn’t deter Putin. We knew it wouldn’t deter Putin, but it would all work out, nonetheless. And now that we invested heavily in a government that we can’t defend and is in danger of being destroyed, that is the sort of reality of power politics right now.

Garcia-Navarro: Frank, Putin has seized this opportunity in my view because he sees the West as weak and divided, and there’s certainly an argument to be made that that is indeed the case. And that has huge implications for the United States and for our political system here. Many people are asking, why hasn’t President Biden done more? He obviously can’t send troops into Ukraine, as two nuclear powers facing off would escalate things even further. But how do you see his handling of this crisis so far?

Bruni: Well, I think he has limited options, as you’ve just said. And there are weird ways in which we feel backed into a corner, even though we are and have long thought of ourselves as being this superpower. We’re not going to be sending troops. We’ve made that very clear. Putin knows that, and he seems to be treating that as a kind of green light. It’s unclear what at this point will deter him. I don’t think the sanctions are any surprise to him. I think they do need to be as severe as possible, as severe as they can be in terms of the effect they’re going to end up having on Western European nations and whether they’re willing to tolerate the consequences there.

But part of what makes this so difficult to process and so impossible to predict is there are certain responses that we’ve taken off the table, and we’ve taken them off the table for very good reasons. But now that they’re off the table, what happens? Where is our leverage? Where is our pressure? And how does this end? And if Putin gets away with this, and it looks like he very well may, given his personality, given his megalomania, what comes after that? I think these are real questions, and they’re scary ones.

Garcia-Navarro: There was just a poll out showing that Putin was more popular among Republicans than any senior Democratic leader, including the American president. We heard that former President Donald Trump seemingly praised Putin’s actions, calling them an act of genius. Ross, Republicans seem to be all over the place in regard to Russia. And on the one hand, there are decisions that President Biden will have to make. But we also have to look at what the American political landscape is.

Douthat: I don’t think that poll quite captured what was going on. What it captures is that you have polarization in this country where Republicans don’t think well of any Democratic leader at all. But the number of Republicans who actually said they were favorably disposed to Putin was small, too, right? So you’re sort of conflating two different kinds of attitudes. If you polled liberals about Donald Trump at the height of the pandemic, they would have given him 5 percent approval ratings, too. So I’m a little skeptical of that.

I think what you see from Republicans is there’s a mixture of things in play. There’s a faction in the Republican Party that is sort of shaped by the Iraq experience, shaped by the failures of U.S. foreign policy that has become distinctly noninterventionist in a way that shades into a kind of excuse-making for Putin, a kind of attitude of, why should we care? Basically what you get from Tucker Carlson’s broadcasts, right?

But that’s not at all the dominant attitude in the Republican Party. The dominant attitude in the Republican Party is this more of a partisan-inflected view that says, this is really bad, and the problem is Joe Biden was weak and wasn’t tough enough. And Putin didn’t attack while Trump was president because he knew that Trump wouldn’t let him get away with it.

Then there’s Trump himself, who clearly admires authoritarian leaders. That’s not in question, right? So when Putin does something like this, you get the immediate Trump sound bite of, he’s being very smart and very tough. But then Trump also wants to say, this never would have happened had I been president, right? So it’s a complicated mixture, but fundamentally, there isn’t a strong pro-Russian contingent in the Republican Party, outside of, you know, something Steve Bannon says on his —

Garcia-Navarro: People though with pretty big megaphones.

Douthat: Right, there are some people with big megaphones. But if you look at polls, there was a poll of how involved should the U.S. be in Ukraine. And what was striking, most people said not deeply involved, somewhat involved. The partisan breakdown was actually totally similar. Republicans, Democrats and independents looked quite similar. So I think there’s actually a fairly strong American consensus that this is bad. There’s also a fairly strong American consensus that we don’t want to send in ground troops. And most of our politicians, Republicans and Democrats, are going to operate within that consensus, at least until the next presidential cycle gets going, and then things could get a little crazier.

Garcia-Navarro: So where does that leave President Biden, Farah, in your view?

Stockman: He’s in a really tough space. This is the second big foreign policy crisis. And a lot of people will say, well, the way the U.S. got out of Afghanistan is partly responsible for this. Look, we need to show that NATO is going to be stronger and more united and more active along its actual borders than ever before and show Putin that whatever he’s doing right now is going to produce the exact opposite results of what he wants to achieve. I think that’s the best outcome we can get right now.

But longer term, I think this idea that we can just buy gas from anyone, no matter whether they share our values, that we can just rely on other countries to produce our medicines. And as long as it’s the cheapest, it doesn’t matter. I think Biden has got eyes wide open about how vulnerable that makes us and makes our allies and that he’s, from day one, been working on how to make the United States more self-sufficient and more able to protect allies.

Because this is a long war. It’s not going to begin and end with Ukraine. So I just think this is a big moment, and it should be a wake-up call for us to really think about how we want to interact with the world and how we need to be with our allies in order to prepare for a future that most Americans aren’t even aware is coming.

Garcia-Navarro: Frank, I’m going to end with what I started with. I’m going to ask you, what now?

Bruni: [CHUCKLES] Boy, Lulu, do I wish I had the answer. For now, we wait. We listen very carefully to what Farah just said about the magnitude of this moment and the fact that in a world where we like our gratification quick and we tend to lose track of and lose interest in things very, very rapidly, we better hunker down and realize that we’re going to be living with what happened today and what happens in the coming days for a long time. We’re going to be living with it in any number of ways. And if we tell ourselves anything different, we are being dangerously naïve.

Douthat: We’ve been talking a lot about the long term, and this is a huge change for the long term. But we are recording this podcast on the first day of hostilities. And a great deal of that long term will be determined in the very short term by what kind of resistance Ukrainians put up to this invasion. Grand strategy questions aside, we should all be hoping that they put up some pretty fierce resistance.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a Times Opinion podcast host. Farah Stockman is a member of the editorial board. Ross Douthat is a Times columnist. Frank Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer.

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Times Opinion audio produced by Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Alison Bruzek. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kristina Samulewski. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones and mixing by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kaari Pitkin and Patrick Healy.