Russia has invaded Ukraine, with multiple cities waking to air horns and explosions this morning. Thousands of people are evacuating the area, causing gridlock around the capital city of Kyiv.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been regularly addressing his country, both prior to the attack and now as the situation is developing. Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss told hosts Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel on Morning Edition that communication is essential to Ukraine's defense, because the countries have been in conflict for much of the last decade and Ukrainians have become accustomed to Russian aggression.
"What the Ukrainian president has been trying to do over the last several weeks is ratchet up awareness of the threat coming from Russia. And now that that threat has arrived, he is trying to rally the sense of Ukrainian nationhood and the will to fight — because they are going to need to fight," said Auchincloss, a former Marine who represents the 4th Congressional District.
The Russian military is one of the most powerful in the world. It has about four times the number of active-duty troops as Ukraine, as well as more tanks, artillery, reservists and combat aircraft.
But military size is not the only factor in this conflict. Russia is unlikely to deploy its entire military to the Ukrainian border for logistical reasons, including national security and defending its other borders. And Ukraine, meanwhile, has a population of about 40 million and the ability to arm its civilians. Auchincloss believes Russia's attack will lead to an insurgency that could prove difficult to fight.
"I think many great nations — the United States included — have seen that you can have all the material, you can have all the technical firepower in the world, but a committed, organic insurgency can become demoralizing, exhausting, draining and at the end, really impossible to solve with a military solution," he said. "Russia is trying to take a military approach to what is really a political situation, and I think it's going to be an absolute disaster for them."
Zelenskyy is asking for global aid and support in defending Ukraine. Auchincloss said the United States will continue to provide Ukraine's military with technical support, but that President Joe Biden's most important role in this conflict will be to keep NATO unified.
"This president has done a terrific job over the last several months of uncertainty of using selective intelligence leaks and of using diplomacy to really present a united front across Germany and Italy and Britain and France and the United States at a time when, actually, there has not been always huge consensus about the scale and weight of sanctions that should be the consequence of Russian aggression," he said. "So we need to continue to do that."
Auchincloss also stressed the importance of moving away from global dependence on Russian oil and gas, and isolate the country from the world's economy so others no longer "rely on dictators to keep the lights on."
"This needs to be the final wake up call for the world," he said. "We cannot have a global economy that relies on Russian oil and gas."
