What to do With Ukraine?

So it's looking more and more like Rootn' Tootn' Putin is going to go to war with Ukraine.

Everything is playing out just as it is scripted in the Soviet era KGB playbook.  The Olympic Games are closed and China is appreciative of the polite delay.  Besides, if Putin doesn't commence hostilities at some level he loses his tactical advantage of bluffing in the future.  Notably, the US and our NATO allies cannot militarily intervene directly.  Ukraine is not a NATO member and as far as the we're concerned serves no strategic purpose.

Consider this.

Having gotten rid of the last recent vestige of Stalinist puppet leadership most Ukrainians are reveling in their resurrected nationalist fervor.  And who can blame them?  Ukrainians, by and large, know their future is brighter with a political and economic alignment with the west.

There is no future with their neighbor to the east.  Russia is a failed state governed by a dictatorship kleptocracy with a mobster mentality. Their population and life expectancy is in decline.  Their economy is driven by natural resource extraction – not technology or innovation.  The ruble is barely a third world currency. 

Ukraine is a huge country – about the size of Germany, Austria and Switzerland combined. It takes 17 hours to drive from one border to the other. Ukraine is home to 41.5 million people.  How do you occupy and pacify something as large and populous with 190,000 troops? 

The United States and our NATO partners should generously arm and equip Ukraine with the means to bleed the Soviet Bear.  After-all, Ukraine is not flat desert landscape.  It is European.  And is historically suited to an insurgency and a proxy war. 

MANPAD Stinger missiles would drop Russian helicopters from the sky by the score. 

Javelin anti-tank missiles are state of the art "shoot and scoot” weapons. You point it, acquire and lock it on to the target and it does the rest with a soft launch after which you casually saunter to another location for a cup of coffee. 

The threat of Javelins make Russian tank commanders shit their pants as this weapon system in the hands of an insurgent force can singularly turn their armor into smoking, molten, Instant Pots.

Even a casual study of Ukrainian resistance fighters during and after WWII is telling. Ukraine fought the Nazis, followed by the Polish Communist and the Soviet Communist armies.  By the time 1949 rolled-around the mortality rate for Soviet troops fighting Ukrainian insurgents was significantly higher than the mortality rate for Soviet troops during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.  

Let's all agree that Ukrainians are adept at killing bad guys.

I wouldn’t expect that the Ukrainian people would do any less than we would do ourselves if faced with in invader seeking to occupy our country by means of force.

Stay-tuned......