Never mind all those American news reports that Russian drone attacks are successfully weakening Ukraine and frightening Poland. The reality is that Ukraine actually is winning its defensive, existential war, and it just needs the United States to stop tying its hands.
That is the message from perhaps the United States’ most knowledgeable expert on Russia, who happens to be an adoptive New Orleanian of long standing — and he makes a compelling case.
S. Frederick Starr is perhaps best known as the founder and leader of the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble, as a prolific author on history and culture, as co-founder of the Greater New Orleans Foundation and as a former vice president of Tulane and president of Oberlin College. His academic field and decades of practical experience, though, always has involved Russian and central Asian affairs. He is the co-founder of the Kennan Institute for advanced Russian studies, and he has advised three presidents and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Basically, bluntly, Russia is definitely and unquestionably losing this war,” Starr told me last week. “And that’s why you see desperate acts like this attack by drones against Poland.”
Starr said the war has broken Russia’s economy, wrecked its military, greatly exacerbated its “huge demographic collapse” and weakened Russian President Vladmir Putin’s long-term hold on power.
“On the eve of Russia’s invasion,” Starr said, “Russia was riding high. It had $160 billion in its rainy-day fund; it appeared to be booming; and Putin had already seized part of Georgia … and he had also claimed Crimea.” Now, though, Russia has “completely spent that $160 billion … and the Russian state is literally bankrupt.” Some 1,200,000 young Russian men either have been killed in the war or “wounded to the extent that they can’t work,” and Putin “long since ran out of trained military … (In addition to the dead and wounded), tens of thousands are going over to the Ukrainian side. Meanwhile, he has had no money to repair roads, to keep the railroads going and so on … and there’s a huge gas crisis in Russia, enormous.”
With Russia’s trained troops mowed down, Putin has had to empty Russian prisons to feed the killing fields. If and when those criminals return from the front, they are resuming their bad ways and fomenting “mayhem” with a huge spike in Russian crime.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is inflicting serious damage, often unreported in the West, on Russian infrastructure. Prohibited by both the Biden and Trump administrations from using most U.S. arms to strike legitimate military targets inside Russia, Ukrainians “designed their own missiles, and they are very good: The latest one (was) just released a week ago, called the ‘flamingo,’ and it’s up to the highest worlds standards for long-range missiles.”
Ukraine has used those missiles successfully “deep in Russia” in “extraordinarily subtly planned attacks” to hit all the major refineries, and the Russian oil supply is down “profoundly.”
With all this occurring, Starr said the U.S. should change its policies to help Ukraine win more quickly — and he said we should not worry about Putin’s nuclear “bluffs” because Putin’s military leaders and the Russian business class know that would lead to the utter destruction of the Russian military.
Starr said the U.S. should be taking a series of steps. Provide more arms for Ukraine to defend itself. Lift all the “hand brakes” on how those arms can be used. Significantly ramp up sanctions on Russian energy exports, including putting any country that buys from Russia on a blacklist. Directly seize Russian financial assets in the West. And completely cut Russia off from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system, the world’s most important network for making international financial transactions.
He said if Russia were fully evicted from SWIFT“ tomorrow morning, it would change the game 180 degrees … with the stroke of a pen.”
Starr also said correct U.S. messaging is crucial. The U.S. should “make clear that our objective is the full restoration of Ukraine’s sovereign territory,” Not a land-for-peace deal, but full Russian withdrawal from Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders.
Putin, Starr said, is “no spring chicken,” and there are credible leaders in Russia who could replace Putin’s generation. Many of them are better educated than Putin’s entourage, and while he doesn’t believe the U.S. should meddle in Russia’s internal affairs, Starr says “we should me making contact with them, wishing them well.”