“People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity!” Zelensky said on his Telegram account after the attack Wednesday, as he questioned whether allies were “losing” their humanity. “How much longer will the world be an accomplice ignoring terror?”
‘Who are we as a country?’
What the democratic nations of the world are willing to do in the face of mounting Ukrainian casualties and millions of refugees fleeing the country is the most unnerving question now facing the US and its allies.
In a series of briefings Wednesday, US officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, White House press secretary Jen Psaki and Pentagon spokesman John Kirby all insisted that the US and allies are doing everything in their power to assist Ukrainians in their defenses — without taking provocative actions that would risk a wider war with Russia.
But there have been some emerging cracks in the unified front that the US is trying to present. Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois, the co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, forcefully questioned why allies remain so fixated on the fact that Ukraine is not a member of NATO, arguing that “the Ukrainian fight and the Ukrainian spirit are the very reasons embodied in why we formed NATO in the first place.”
“We can quibble over whether it really matters if someone takes off from Poland or Germany, but, at some point in time, we got to ask ourselves: Who are we as a country? Why did we form NATO? And are we going to allow this to happen?” Quigley told Kate Bolduan on CNN’s “At This Hour” on Wednesday. “If anyone imagines that this is going to get better anytime soon — this is going to be protracted hell on Earth.”
Kirby explained that the intelligence community believes that the US taking on an intermediary role could be viewed by Putin as an “escalatory step.” He underscored that the US believes the best way to support Ukraine is by providing the weapons and systems “they need most to defeat Russian aggression” and noted that the Ukrainian air force still has “several squadrons of fully mission-capable aircraft.”
“We need to be careful about every decision we make, that we aren’t making the potential for escalation worse,” Kirby told reporters during Wednesday’s Pentagon briefing. He added that further escalation could complicate the lives of the Ukrainian people, since there is the potential for “a destructive and terrible war” to get “even more destructive and terrible given the fact that Mr. Putin has other capabilities at his disposal.”
‘Our goal is to end the war, not to expand it’
Blinken, who had endorsed the idea of providing Soviet-era jets to Ukraine earlier this week, expressed similar sentiments earlier in the day during a joint news conference with British Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss, where Truss said the UK plans to help Ukraine protect the skies by sending “anti-air weaponry.”
When Blinken and Truss were pressed on how they would answer Zelensky’s persistent calls for a no-fly zone, Blinken stressed that “both of our countries, and so many others, have done extraordinary things to make sure that the Ukrainians have in their hands the means to effectively defend themselves against this war of choice from Russia.”
To prevent more “ceaseless, senseless bloodshed,” Blinken said, “our goal is to end the war, not to expand it.”
He acknowledged that despite the “possible off-ramps” that the US and allies have offered to Putin, his response has been to “press the accelerator and continue down this horrific road.” But Blinken said he was confident the “devastating sanctions” and pressures that the US and its allies have placed on Russia, in concert with the courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people, would lead to “a strategic defeat” of Putin regardless of any short-term tactical gains.
“Economically, the measures that we’ve taken have erased 30 years of progress integrating Russia into the world,” Blinken added. “This dramatic exodus of virtually every international company from Russia continues as we speak — and that is having a profound impact not just today, but over the long term. So I think what we’re looking at is whether or not President Putin will decide to try to finally cut the losses that he’s inflicted on himself and inflicted on the Russian people. We can’t decide that for him. All that we can do is to continue this extraordinary effort to increase the pressure on him.”
The US and other NATO members have so far provided Ukraine 17,000 anti-tank missiles and 2,000 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, according to a senior US official.
But she too rejected his call for a no-fly zone: “They know that we can’t go there. Putin is trying to bait the trap so that we go in, and that’s the beginning, could be the beginning, of World War III.”
Analysis: Ukrainian hospital bombing increases heat on US and allies to do more to stop Russia