Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces invade a sovereign country, target civilian buildings on the thinnest possible pretexts, and now twice violate a ceasefire intended to help civilians flee a city under heavy Russian bombardment. So you would think we would have learned our lesson about Russia by now, but we haven’t.
One of the things former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley brought up in her Meet the Press interview this morning is that Joe Biden’s State Department is still sitting around the Iran nuclear deal table with Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. Setting aside the dubious merits of restoring that deal in the first place, Russia’s continued involvement is an embarrassment that should end now. If Russia cannot be practically removed from the room, talks should at least be halted until this invasion is abandoned. Or perhaps the entire framework of the talks needs to be revisited.
Putin has demonstrated not only aggression but also extreme deceit. This has been true in Ukraine since at least 2014, in his bombing of hospitals and aid convoys in Syria and in his assassination attempts against British nationals, to name just a few of many transgressions that predate this one. Any involvement on Russia’s part in Iran should be considered hostile — an effort to skew whatever deal emerges in order to improve Putin’s position globally in whatever way he can. Given his recent actions, there is no argument left for including Russia so as to placate it or avoid creating ill feelings. Putin thinks we’re already at war with him — perhaps we should start treating him as if we were.
Second, if Russia is really to become a pariah (as Biden promised) as a consequence of its brazen violations of the laws of warfare, this sort of diplomatic exclusion seems like one of the easiest steps we could possibly take in that direction.
We have already isolated Russian banks from SWIFT and sanctioned Russia’s Central Bank, and Visa and Mastercard have ended services in Russia. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this morning, we are now likely to provide planes to Ukraine (indirectly, through Poland) and impose a multilateral ban on imports of oil from Russia.
In other words, we have already taken the more difficult and extreme (and also fully justified) measures — so why not this easy and obvious one? Why keep pretending we care about Russia’s voice in world affairs when all its involvement can do is make matters worse? Is Biden really so desperate for a bad deal with Iran that he is willing to play nice with Putin in this regard?
