I’d like to post a direct link to the most important and frightening map that I’ve seen in a long while.
It is a projected military map of Eastern Europe with a fully Russian-occupied Ukraine and a nest of divisions poised at the border of Poland.
Poland understands best of all what this map means. It’s why Finland and Sweden ran to NATO.
Note Belarus does not get the benefit of an ‘occupied’ color; the red reflects the reality.
The Baltics were already exposed, but on this map, they look ripe. Would NATO honor its obligations if a Russian division crossed the border of Estonia? Putin has called every bluff of the West so far.
The image is part of a larger article entitled “The High Price of Losing Ukraine” by ISW, a hawkish thinktank. Subtract their default American-power-leveraging attitude, though, and they are dead right about Ukraine.
In early 2022, there was a resigned expectation in the West that Ukraine would crumble quickly and this hypothetical map was a done deal, meaning that the U.S. would have to fortify Europe again at great cost.
But Ukraine didn’t crumble, and Russia is now in a proverbial bear trap.
There’s only two reasons for a Western politician not to vote to send Ukraine every artillery shell and piece of equipment we can. The first is that such a person is a Russian asset, wittingly or not; the second is rank stupidity. Neither is mutually exclusive.
Isolationism isn’t a sane option in a world where we already have two fingers plugged into two different dikes – Taiwan and South Korea.
Putin will take what he wants unless he is physically stopped from doing so.