S?bastien Roblin: Biden and Putin hold call over Russia-Ukraine ...

Nothing is more likely to spur U.S. and European defense spending and global military deployments than a Russian attack on Ukraine — not U.S. actions to forestall an invasion.It has been incumbent on Biden, therefore, to make military action in Ukraine as unappealing as possible to Putin, while making restraint more tolerable. At the same time, such threats risk reinforcing Putin’s logic that he must strike soon to prevent a more robust NATO military presence on his border.Instead, the U.S. must concretely lay out the expensive costs Putin is likely to face should he invade: tighter sanctions and lost economic opportunities, including the Nord Stream 2 pipeline’s delivering cheap natural gas for heating to Western Europe.Biden must also look for ways to assuage Moscow’s anxieties that Ukraine may become a hostile military staging ground on its border without compromising U.S. and European security or legitimizing its actions in Ukraine.That’s no easy task, as on Dec. 17 Russia published sweeping demands it was making of Washington and NATO that are widely recognized as unacceptable nonstarters, such as restricting NATO from ever adding new members and banning U.S. bombers and ships from patrolling international airspace and waters that lie within weapons’ range (i.e. hundreds of miles or even more) of Russian territory.Biden couldn’t, and surely didn’t, give in to the Kremlin’s ultimatums in the conversation Thursday afternoon, and he shouldn’t be cajoled into making pledges that weaken Kyiv’s sovereignty, especially when it’s not even in the room.