Should we intervene to help Ukraine

From a Twitter thread by Jussi Halla-aho, a member of Finland's Parliament.

Russia is terror-bombing Ukraine with missiles, fired from a safe distance, purposefully selecting civilian targets with no military value. At the same time, we are reluctant to give Ukraine weapons with enough range to hit targets on Russian soil. For fear of escalation.

This is a very silly way of thinking, for many reasons. As has been pointed out, you can hit targets on Russian soil with a hand-grenade if you go close enough to the border. Ukraine does not need range to attack Russia but to hit Russian military targets.

Secondly, Russia is a country waging a war of aggression. If Russia, for example, launches missiles against Ukraine from its own territory, those launch facilities are relevant and legitimate targets from any perspective, moral, legal, or otherwise.

What exactly is the "escalation" that we fear? That Russia would start bombing Ukrainian cities or infrastructure outside of the war-zone proper? That they would try to hit the Western supplies? Wake up. There is not much that they could do that they are not doing already.

Or do we still respect Mr Putin's "red lines", the crossing of which would lead to WW3? How would that happen? Russia can afford a nuclear war just as little as everyone else, and it can afford a conventional conflict much LESS than the West.

It is a bit late to try and not antagonize Russia. They are already antagonized by the aid that has been and is being given to Ukraine. There is also no specific reason not to antagonize them more. They will not risk a conflict they would certainly lose.

The biggest mistake the West has made during the conflict is that we declare publicly what we are not going to do. "We will not send troops to Ukraine." "We will not send fighters." "We will not send long-range missiles." "We will not send modern tanks."

The effect of these declarations is that they give Mr Putin limits WITHIN WHICH he can do whatever he likes without having to fear a direct confrontation with the West. He has been effectively told that he can bomb and destroy Ukraine for as long as he feels like it.

Earlier in the spring I tweeted my opinion that the civilized world should intervene preferably sooner than later. I was heavily rebuked by pretty much everyone in Finland for "war-mongering", and my resignation was demanded from many corners.

In the spirit of not making the same mistake twice, I will not make such a proposal again. I totally understand why nobody wants to intervene, and it would be politically much more difficult to do so now, after all the declarations that I referred to above.

One should, nonetheless, consider the consequences of a declarational non-intervention, on the one hand, and of keeping that possibility open, on the other.

The war in Ukraine has very many similarities with the "Winter War" of 1939-1940. The Red Army suffered horrible losses but this did not decide the outcome of the war. Stalin did not make peace in March 1940 because of having been beaten on the ground.

The disparity in resources was so gigantic that sooner or later we would have run out of men and material. Stalin could absorb his losses much better than Finland could. We were on the brink of collapse in March 1940.

Stalin made peace because of the growing and imminent threat that the Western powers, UK and France, would intervene and send troops to Finland. (They had their own reasons to plan that, but this is irrelevant.) That would have meant a war Stalin could not afford.

We will never know if UK and France would indeed have joined the fight. But Stalin certainly took that possibility seriously and this is what matters. If they had repeatedly declared that they will under no circumstances intervene, our world would probably look different.

Mr Putin, like Stalin, does not have to care about his image abroad or his popularity at home. Anyway, the majority of the Russian population is zombified and wants war, regardless of its consequences for others or even themselves.

Mr Putin may run out of modern weaponry but he has endless stores of vintage equipment and ammunition that is sufficient for continuing a war of attrition forever. He has no incentive to stop the war, as the rest of the world has made it clear that they will not intervene.

Mr Putin is in his essence a bully who despises the weak and the small but has a lot of respect for strength. He is not a kind of person who would start or even risk a war with his peers.

Conclusion: We must stop asking the invader what kind of and how much aid we should provide to his victim. We must give to Ukraine everything we can to help them stop the invasion. And then we must do some serious thinking on how to incentivize Mr Putin to make peace.

We should also ask ourselves: Even if we do not really care about the future of Ukraine per se, can we afford to lose this battle after everything we have invested so far to win it?