Putin’s Plan A in Ukraine has failed. We can’t let his Plan B succeed.

Ukraine’s brave and brilliant response to Russia’s attack is rightly being celebrated across the world. But it might be obscuring a growing danger. While the assault on Kyiv and the surrounding region has failed, Moscow’s strategy in the south and east of Ukraine could well succeed. If it does, Russia will have turned Ukraine into an economically crippled rump state, landlocked and threatened on three sides by Russian military power, always vulnerable to another incursion from Moscow. It will take much more military assistance from the West to ensure that this catastrophic outcome does not come to pass.

As Can Kasapoglu, a military scholar and strategist, presciently pointed out in the first few weeks of the war in an essay for the Hudson Institute, there are two distinct wars taking place in Ukraine, one in the north and one in the south, and the latter has been “radically more successful” for Moscow. Russia has been able to move forces and supplies out of its bases in Crimea and capture the cities of Melitopol and Kherson. Mariupol is now encircled and invaded by Russian troops, and Ukrainian forces trapped there cannot be resupplied. Ukraine’s access to the Sea of Azov has been blocked, and, Kasapoglu points out, Russian forces have a contiguous land corridor from Crimea deep into Donbas. They are also trying to move west, from Kherson to Odessa.

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