Russian President Vladimir Putin is escalating his war against the West. Putin is directly targeting the United States itself, not just U.S. allies. The Russian dictator is probing for weakness, and America must respond.
To restore deterrence and prevent a wider war against the West, the Trump administration must finally end its delusional thinking that commercial ventures will sate Putin’s imperial ambitions or influence him to adopt a more moderate course.
Appeasement will lead to more war, not less, and for an important reason.
Putin is an ideologue who explicitly seeks the end of the U.S.-led international order. It’s time for the whole of the Trump administration, the president first and foremost, to recognize as much and begin to fight back.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against five individuals and accused them of conducting attacks and murders around the world on behalf of Russia and its intelligence services. The charges are noteworthy and show a Russia that is both emboldened and fearful.
Moscow’s spy network “paid and attempted to pay individuals within the United States and elsewhere to conduct pre-operational surveillance and carry out targeted killings, and commissioned associates to commit and attempt to commit acts of terrorism against civilian and military infrastructure in European countries that are aligned with, or perceived to be aligned with, Ukraine.”
The RIS Network carries out external attacks on behalf of the Russian Federation. The network tends to target dissidents and defectors and has increasingly expanded its scope to include targeting those nations that support Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia.
More recently, Russian-backed agents have attempted to recruit multiple individuals within the U.S. itself to carry out surveillance — even murder — on American soil, the unsealed indictment observes.
During the Cold War, the KGB and other Soviet spy agencies were noted for their aggressive, forward-leaning tactics. Moscow thoroughly penetrated all levels of Western society, including the U.S. government.
But even at the Cold War’s height, the KGB was generally reluctant to commit murder in the United States. Under its longtime ruler, Putin, that hesitancy has all but disappeared.
Putin’s men have targeted and murdered dissidents abroad before, perhaps most notably Alexander Litvinenko, a Putin critic who was poisoned in the United Kingdom in 2006.
As Ivana Stradner, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, noted, Litvinenko’s murder was meant to send a message that Russian dissidents couldn’t escape Putin’s reach. Two decades later, Putin feels emboldened enough to send a similar message to the U.S.
“The United States is a beacon of free speech,” Stradner said, “and trying to murder someone on American soil because they oppose Putin is an attack not just on an individual but on the principles that America stands for.”
On Sept. 13, a Russian drone struck a train engine near the Ukraine-Poland border, shortly after high-profile Western officials, including former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former CIA Director David Petraeus, passed through the area. This, too, was certainly a message from Putin, as was Russia’s decision to provide Iran with satellite imagery to help murder U.S. troops in the Middle East.
“It’s past time to call a spade a spade,” Stradner pointed out. “Putin is already at war with the West.”
In 2023, for example, troops from Russia-aligned Serbia attacked 90 NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo, an incident that some in the West tried to minimize and sweep under the rug. But this only emboldened Putin. The Trump administration can’t afford to repeat the mistakes of its predecessor. But this hasn’t stopped some from trying.
According to recent reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, the Trump administration is considering opening up commercial ties between the U.S. and Russia with the hope that it will show Russian elites that Washington is “serious about a reset relationship” with Moscow.
IMMIGRANTS SHOULD BE SELF-SUFFICIENT
This has it backward. The burden of proof rests with Putin’s Russia, not America. And an ever-expanding body of evidence leaves no doubt about his murderous intent.
American businesses shouldn’t be breaking ground with a nation that subverts the sovereignty of other nations, the U.S. included, and plots murder on our land. Bullets and bombs, not billions of American dollars, are the best way to push back against Putin’s appetites.