Why Ukraine keeps calling for a no-fly zone.
Less than 10 miles. A missile strike on a military base close to the Polish border follows Russian declaration that supply lines from Ukraine’s western border are legitimate targets in an invasion it insists is only a “special military operation.” The attack killed on the arms transit point 35 and injured 134, says the governor of the Lviv region.
Russian aircraft fired over 30 cruise missiles at the base.
Allies supply Ukraine with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles via country’s western reaches. Russian ground forces are concentrated for now to the east and south.
Large explosions were seen on Sunday at the base in Yavoriv, a garrison city less than 10 miles from the Polish border. The rocket attack took place at 5.45am.
“My windows shook. The whole house vibrated. It was dark. The sky lit up with two explosions,” said Stepan Chuma, 27, an emergency worker, who hurried to the scene with his colleagues.
The facility has previously hosted foreign military trainers from the UK, US and other countries but it is not clear that any were at the base. Ukraine held most of its drills with Nato countries there before the invasion with the last major exercises in September.
“Russia has attacked the International Centre for Peacekeeping & Security near Lviv. Foreign instructors work here. Information about the victims is being clarified,” the Ukrainian defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said in an online post.
ODESSA, Ukraine — A Russian airstrike killed nine civilians on Sunday in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, the region’s governor, Vitaliy Kim, said in a video statement, making it one of the deadliest attacks on a residential area in the city since the war began more than two weeks ago.
Details about the strike were not immediately available. Mr. Kim said the attack on a residential area in the north of the city appeared to have been carried out by Russian fighter jets.
“These scum are bombing our city to seed panic,” he said of the Russian forces.
CNN:
Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Sunday that if Russian President Vladimir Putin uses any weapons of mass destruction, it would be a “game-changer” and NATO would have to think seriously about what to do.
Speaking in an interview with the BBC, Duda said: “Of course, everybody hopes that he will not dare do that, that he will not use weapons of mass destruction, neither chemical weapons nor biological weapons, nor any form of nuclear weapons. Everybody is hoping that this is not going to happen.”
Would targeting civilians with chemical or biological weapons be a red line for NATO that bombing and shelling them is not? Duda said NATO leaders would have to sit down and talk about it.
Evelyn Farkas, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Ukraine and the region argues in the Washington Post that there is more Europe can do to aid Ukraine without escalating to World War III. If supplying Ukraine with shoulder-launched Javelin and Stinger missiles to kill Russians is not crossing a red line, why is supplying aircraft riskier, Farkas asks:
Russia is fully aware that lethal weapons furnished by the NATO powers are being used to kill Russian troops and destroy their equipment, quite effectively in some cases. And those weapons travel over borders from NATO countries to Ukraine, just as any new donations of aircraft would. Russian President Vladimir Putin hasn’t responded to those arms deliveries as if the United States were entering the war directly, even though Pentagon officials estimate conservatively that at least 3,000 Russian troops have died already. Moreover, Putin and his advisers have their own reasons not to engage in a war with a militarily superior NATO. That suggests there is an opportunity to do more to help Ukraine — and to more quickly end the war with a stalemate or a Russian retreat.
Fighter aircraft or surface-to-air missile systems would help without upsetting the balance of power “and therefore shouldn’t be viewed as escalatory — but it would save lives.” At least, civilian ones.
And, Farkas does not say, perhaps further delay Russian conquest long enough for western economic sanctions to bite deeply and for mounting Russian casualties to alter the calculus in Moscow.
Ultimately, we must weigh the dangers of escalation against what is at stake: the real possibility — given the brutal nature of the war so far — of the slaughter of civilians that could rise to the level of genocide. And we should weigh those dangers against what the United Nations calls the “responsibility to protect.” While there are risks in helping Ukraine survive the Russian onslaught, there are also risks in letting Putin’s expansionist aggression go unchecked. If he sees that NATO will sit back and let him take Ukraine, he is likely to turn next to other neighboring former Soviet republics that aren’t in the alliance, such as Moldova and Georgia (which he already invaded once, in 2008).
Like the early ratcheting of economic sanctions, there is still room for expanded military aid without direct conflit between NATO and Russian forces, Farkas argues. Doing too little is itself a risk.
“By publicly dithering about providing fighter jets, and rejecting out of hand even limited humanitarian no-fly zones, we are setting unnecessary limits on ourselves and deferring to Putin — while the Russian army remorselessly kills Ukrainian civilians,” Farkas writes.
Sometimes all your options are bad ones. I’m not buying MREs and iodine pills quite yet, but the unease deepens. Escalation might be in the eye of the guy seeing his dreams of being the next Catherine the Great slipping away.
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