OPINION:
President Eisenhower is said to have counseled that if a problem cannot be solved, you should enlarge it.
Is Russian ruler Vladimir Putin now applying that maxim perversely? I will bet you a ruble that the CIA thinks so.
The problem Mr. Putin cannot solve is, of course, Ukraine. In 2014, the Russian strongman invaded, occupied and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. The “international community” merely tut-tutted.
In August 2021, Mr. Putin witnessed President Biden’s shambolic and shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan. I am convinced that led him to believe the U.S. was in retreat and posed no obstacle to his neo-imperialist ambitions.
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian troops and tanks staged a multi-axis assault on Ukraine. Conquest was the goal, and most military analysts expected Mr. Putin would quickly achieve it.
Washington offered to exfiltrate Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president famously responded: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
Ukrainians have fought tooth and nail ever since, understanding that were they to surrender — or even set foot on a slippery “exit ramp” — their independence would soon be extinguished. The “international community” would merely tut-tut.
That alone does not explain the survival of the Ukrainian David despite 4½ years of war crimes committed by the Russian Goliath.
Ukrainians have also, miraculously, become the world’s experts in a high-tech version of David’s sling: the fast-evolving science of drone warfare. Their defense industry produced more than 4 million drones in 2025. The Defense Ministry’s goal for this year is at least 7 million.
That brings us to the cost of this war.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that Russian forces have suffered roughly 1.4 million casualties, meaning killed, wounded and missing, from February 2022 to June of this year, including as many as 450,000 dead.
Russian fatalities in Ukraine are more than four times U.S. fatalities in all wars combined since World War II.
Ukraine’s military losses are grievous too: 525,000 to 625,000 troop casualties. However, the exchange rate has moved sharply in its favor. For most of the war, two or three Russian soldiers fell for every Ukrainian soldier. In the first half of 2026, that ratio came close to 8-to-1.
Last week, CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced visit to Moscow, where he met with Sergei Naryshkin, director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, and Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service, whose operations extend deep into Ukraine.
The last time a CIA director went to Moscow, as far as we know, was November 2021, when William J. Burns attempted to convince Mr. Bortnikov and other Kremlin leaders that Russia should not invade Ukraine.
That attempt obviously failed. In the years since, Russia has increased its gray-zone activity in Europe, or hostilities that stay just below the threshold of open war, including cyber operations, sabotage, GPS interference, infrastructure threats, political interference and drone “incidents.”
So, what did Mr. Ratcliffe say to Russia’s top spies? Media accounts, based mostly on anonymous sources who might be spinning rather than revealing, have been sketchy.
I think he likely pointed out that NATO, before 2022, represented no military threat to Russia.
Since then, thanks to Russian aggression, Poland, the Baltics and other European nations have sharply increased their defensive capabilities. Finland and Sweden abandoned long traditions of nonalignment and joined the alliance, more than doubling NATO’s land border with Russia.
Perhaps Mr. Ratcliffe suggested that widening the war would not serve Russia’s interests.
Why might the Russians have found that unpersuasive?
They know that under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an attack on one NATO member is to be regarded as an attack on all. They also know — and this is the part Americans tend to forget — that the clause commits each member to “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”
Note those four words: as it deems necessary. The treaty’s teeth are supplied by expectation, not by obligation.
So, the Kremlin may reason, if we now take a bite out of tiny Latvia or Lithuania, would President Trump really honor the pledge? Or would he decide the game is not worth the candle, given his frustration with NATO members he regards as freeloaders, the longer-and-tougher-than-expected conflict with Tehran, depleted munitions stockpiles, and a Pentagon posture review that could thin American forces in Europe?
Should Washington decline to defend even a single NATO ally, the alliance would almost certainly collapse. Mr. Putin would be heartily congratulated by Xi Jinping in Beijing, Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang and Mojtaba Khamenei in Tehran.
America’s friends in the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific and even Latin America would start hedging their bets. Who could blame them?
That may be what Mr. Putin now has in mind. He cannot win the war he started, but he can enlarge it. A wider war would let him redefine victory.
Deterrence requires more than saying “Don’t!” (Just ask Mr. Biden.) It requires that Mr. Putin believe Mr. Trump has both the capability and the will to defend America’s NATO allies.
Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister, is unimpressed. Reports of the meeting, he noted on social media, have Mr. Putin’s spies assuring Mr. Ratcliffe that Russia will not provoke NATO — much as Mr. Putin assured Mr. Burns that he would not invade Ukraine. His conclusion: “We should accelerate defense preparations.”
In 2021, Mr. Putin bet that an American president lacked the will to stop him. He was right about Washington. He was wrong about Ukraine. If he places a new and bigger bet, President Trump should make him regret it.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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