There are other ways for us to intervene in Ukraine without doing so militarily. Germany’s recent announcement that it would double its military spending is a start, a first step. Separating Germany from Russia should be an objective of the U. S.’s.

If we could encourage China to stop supporting the Russians even tacitly, we might win the war in Ukraine without firing a shot. China is Russia’s largest trading partner—more Russian exports go to China than the next three largest trading partners combined.

Furthermore, keeping the price of oil low would hurt Russia more than all of the sanctions we have announced. If the price of oil rises faster than the decrease in Russia’s exports, it’s possible that Russia could actually benefit from the war which is, presumably, not our intention.

Just a few thoughts.

Last night, nearly for the first time since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and I ate a decent New York strip steak. Saturday night is steak night in our household—nearly every Saturday we have steak, one of only two times a week we eat beef. The other time I prepare burgers.

But the steaks haven’t been very good. For well over a year the steaks have been tough, stringy, and lacking in flavor but last night’s was excellent. Not to mention expensive. Some of the credit might be due to the new (to me) way of preparing the steak. Here’s what I’m doing.

I season the steak and then sauté it in a non-stick pan. I cook it for two minutes, then flip it, cook for two more minutes, and repeat until the desired degree of doneness. For us that’s medium rare to rare which takes about 10-12 minutes. Something depends on the thickness of the steak.

If anyone is concerned about our health, my wife and share a small steak&mmdash;4 oz. per person. Same with the burger: 4 oz. I weigh practically everything that goes into our mouths. Over the period of the last two years my daily calorie intake has been about 1,400 calories/day. We mostly eat fish, chicken, and vegetables (eggs don’t agree with my wife).

Here’s the advice of the editors of the Washington Post:

Deterrence — the most time-tested of security concepts — warranted President Biden’s decision to dispatch fighter aircraft, attack helicopters and infantry to the Baltic states, and a 7,000-strong armored unit to Germany. NATO itself has for the first time activated a 40,000-member rapid response force, drawn heavily from the alliance’s non-U.S. members.

Now, though, for some new ideas: The United States must reconsider its focus on China in light of the renewed geopolitical challenge from Russia — and Moscow’s growing cooperation with Beijing. We must match military budget resources to the combination of threats. NATO should consider admitting Sweden and Finland. Today’s sanctions on Russia could harden into long-term blockages in global trade flows, which were already becoming less fluid because of protectionism and the pandemic. U.S. supply chains may henceforth have to take geopolitical criteria into account.

No commodity is more geopolitically significant than energy, including oil and gas, which the United States possesses in abundance — and which, along with low-carbon nuclear, solar and wind energy, can bolster our security and that of our allies. Europe buys 38 percent of its natural gas from Russia, which means — bluntly — that Europe’s businesses and consumers financed Mr. Putin’s military buildup. This must end.

No country must think anew more urgently than Germany, which took a big step in the right direction on Saturday when it announced its first-ever direct supply of lethal weapons to Kyiv. Over the longer term, it must address its hollowed-out military, the result of a historically rooted but strategically unsustainable aversion to investment in defense. After Russia attacked Ukraine, Germany’s top military commander, Lt. Gen. Alfons Mais lamented that his army was potentially unable “to successfully fulfill . . . our obligations in the alliance.”

My advice would be somewhat different: learn to walk and chew gum at the same time. Hearkening back to my post of yesterday, we need to identify our priorities and determine which are more important to us than others. We can’t ignore one priority in order to concentrate on another. That would especially be an error if the priority on which we choose to focus is actually the less significant one.

I think there’s a kernel of truth in Thomas Friedman’s most recent New York Times column. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bears some resemblance to the monarchical wars of conquest of 200 years ago but there’s a major difference: it’s being shown nearly in real tie in thousands, maybe millions of videos and that’s new:

Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world. This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones, so acts of brutality will be documented and broadcast worldwide without any editors or filters. On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams.

You have never seen this play before.

but I think he’s missing something basic. 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube per day. Let’s assume arguendo that the statistics for TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are about the same. Obviously, it’s impossible for any one person to watch all of that. How much can you rely on the veracity of any given video uploaded? I would say not very much. This goes back to the wisecrack represented in dozens, hundreds, or thousands of memes “you can’t put anything on the Internet that isn’t true”.

Whether it’s true or not has little relevance to whether people believe it or its ability to affect popular opinion. Assume everything is disinformation and propaganda.

Said another way the big difference between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and prior major conflicts is that we’re being deluged in a torrent of disinformation and propaganda and have little way of distinguishing what is true from what is false.

I think that raises risks unlike any we’ve ever seen before.

I found this report from Bojan Pancevski at the Wall Street Journal encouraging:

BERLIN—Germany will boost military spending above 2% of GDP and create a strategic natural-gas reserve, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Sunday, marking a significant shift in the country’s defense and energy policies in reaction to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The measures, all of which had long been resisted by successive governments and will now be reflected in this year’s budget, underline how profoundly Russia’s attack on Ukraine is upending European politics after almost eight decades of nearly uninterrupted peace on the continent.

“We have to ask ourselves: What capacities does Putin’s Russia have? And which capacities do we need to counter his threats?” Mr. Scholz told parliament, gathered for an extraordinary session on Sunday. “It’s clear, we will need to invest a lot more in the security of our country to defend our freedom and our democracy.”

“Putin wants to establish a Russian empire…the question is…whether we can summon the strength to set boundaries to warmongers like Putin,” Mr. Scholz said.

and

Mr. Scholz said that he would immediately invest 100 billion euros, equivalent to $113 billion, in weaponry. Starting now, he added, Germany’s military spending would exceed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s spending target of 2% of GDP, a goal that none of his predecessors managed since the end of the Cold War and that Germany had pledged to reach by 2024 as part of its commitments to NATO.

He said the government would create strategic gas reserves and finance the building of two liquefied natural gas import terminals on the country’s northern coast.

Mr. Scholz also announced concrete arms-systems procurements including the decision to buy state-of-the-art drones from Israel and F-35 warplanes from the U.S., which he said would be used to amplify NATO’s nuclear deterrent against Russia.

It’s one thing to announce something and another actually to do it. For years the Germans have been long on rhetoric and short on fulfillment. If true, it would be a dramatic shift in German policy and in my opinion steps in the right direction.

I think it was California Sen. Hiram Johnson who said “Truth is the first casualty of war” more than a century ago and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is no exception. I literally have no idea of what is happening there. The Russian news sites certainly aren’t reliable sources, some of the pro-Russian sites are clearly Russian information operations sites, while others have no more idea than I do.

The source of my confusion is that I don’t know to what degree American news sites are effectively information operations sites anymore.

If you pay attention to the Russian news sites and pro-Russian sources, the Russians are engaged in a police action, defending ethnic Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians from persecution by neo-Nazis in the Ukraine or responding to provocations from the West which intends to do to Russia what was done to Yugoslavia and the Russian forces are proceeding slowly and methodically, meeting stiff resistance from the Ukrainians. If you pay attention to the American news sites, the Russian troops are incompetent and demoralized, definitely losing to the Ukrainians, and Putin is losing political support in Russia.

My predisposition is to believe that the Russians are meeting with unexpected resistance from the Ukrainians and that that the war is far from over.

I also think that events have cast significant doubt on John Mearsheimer’s claim that Putin’s objective is to wreck Ukraine rather than see it join NATO and the EU.

My inclination is to avoid drawing any conclusions until more time has passed.

I hope that the Ukrainians succeed in defending their independence and are willing to accept a pluralistic society, accommodating both Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking citizens.

I commend this article, partially derived from Russian intelligence documents, at the Royal United Services Institute by Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling to your attention. Here’s a sample quote:

According to the polling data, Ukrainians in early February were, by and large, pessimistic about the future and apathetic about politics, and did not trust politicians, political parties or the majority of Ukraine’s domestic institutions. Their main concerns were overwhelmingly inflation and the cost of living, with both perceived to be rising.

Trust in the office of the president sat at 27%, with 67% distrustful of the presidency. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had poor approval ratings at −34, but a high proportion of Ukrainians polled still professed that they would vote for him over other candidates. The Ukrainian Army, both regular and reserve, was highly trusted, with 68% of the population supportive, as were military veterans, while regional and municipal governments were comparatively well-trusted with over 40% of the population having a favourable opinion of them. However, other institutions enjoyed approval figures that ranged from mediocre to poor, including the police at 28% and domestic security services at 23%. Trust in the Rada – the Ukrainian parliament – and in political parties was abysmal, at 11% and 8% respectively. And when it came to willingness to serve in the military or otherwise resist a foreign invasion, 40% of respondents stated that they would not defend Ukraine.

The population notably had a high opinion of the military’s capabilities, although this is worryingly divergent from the assessment of professional military analysts. 51% of respondents believed that the Ukrainian Army had the capacity to repel an invasion force, despite Ukrainian technical capabilities being decisively outmatched and outnumbered by those deployed by Russia. They also for the most part did not believe that the Russian military build-up – of which 90% of those surveyed were aware – would necessarily result in invasion. These expectations are in the process of being shattered.

The article goes on to suggest that Russia’s strategy may well backfire.

At Britain’s iNews Georgina Littlejohn reports that Ukraine’s president has asked NATO to impose a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for allies to help enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine and said his country is being left to fend for itself.

The UK and US have ruled out the move as they are seeking to avoid direct conflict with Russia.

But Mr Ellwood, who chairs the Commons Defence Committee, has said there are “many ways” Ukraine can be assisted other than “putting in boots on the ground”.

Speaking to ITV News, he said: “We need to reconsider this no-fly zone, let’s say west of the Dnieper River, because that would change the optics here.

“If we don’t stand our ground now, where will this go? And don’t forget there are other adversaries around the world, namely China, watching very carefully how the West reacts here.”

He said if the West is seen to be “timid” or “risk-averse” then China “will take full advantage of that weakness too”.

Vadym Prystaiko, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, has asked Nato for a “no-fly zone” over the country amid the Russian invasion.

Speaking from London, Mr Prystaiko said his request was “something only Nato can provide”.

Just before writing this post I heard an American legislator giving his support to the idea, claiming that NATO has air supremacy.

I can hardly think of anything more foolhardy than this. That our involvement would stop with a “no-fly zone” even if we were able to enforce one is not credible. I believe that our direct military involvement with the war in the Ukraine should be limited to negative reciprocity with respect to nuclear weapons.

As an acquaintance of mine once put it, don’t tell me your priorities—tell me your relative priorities. In the coming hours and days we will see what various countries’ including the United States’s relative priorities are. At present Germany depends on Russia for natural gas and unless things change that will increasingly be the case since the country is phasing out both nuclear and coal-fired power generation. It continues to block the shipment of arms to Ukraine. Germany is Russia’s fourth most important trading

Shockingly, the U. S. imports more gasoline from Russia than any other country and the ending or suspension of gas and oil imports from Russia are not yet included in the sanctions the U. S. has imposed Russia.

China has imposed no sanctions on Russia and is Russia’s most important trading partner both for imports, on which Russia is far less dependent than the United States, and exports on which it is more dependent than the U. S.