We need five sentences to sum up the war in Ukraine at the moment. Russia is running out of precision weapons. The world is running out of patience. The Joe Biden administration is running out of ideas on what to do about the Russian war. And China is watching.

Bret Stevens, an American journalist and Pulitzer laureate, writes about this on the pages of the New York Times.. The limitations of the Moscow arsenal have been evident for weeks. And it gives a feeling of relief in the long run and horror in the short term.. The relief is due to the fact that the Russian military machine, on which Vladimir Putin spent a lot of time to modernize, turned out to be a paper tiger that could not become a serious rival for NATO in the event of a conflict using conventional methods.. And the feeling of horror arises because an army that is not capable of waging high-precision warfare with relatively low collateral damage will wage a low-tech war, destroying more. Ukraine, according to its own calculations, loses up to 20 thousand soldiers a month. For comparison, the United States lost 36,000 soldiers during the 7 years of the war in Iraq.. Despite all the courage and determination, Kyiv can contain, but not win in a war of attrition three times its neighbor. This means that Ukraine needs to do more than slow down the Russian army.. It is necessary as soon as possible to "

But this will not happen in an artillery war, during which Russia is able to launch 60,000 shells a day, and Ukraine only 5,000.. Quantity, as they say, sometimes turns into quality.. Biden administration supplies Ukraine with advanced howitzers and multiple rocket launchers. But these weapons don't come fast enough. So now is the time for President Joe Biden to tell his national security team what Richard Nixon said to his when Israel suffered losses in the Yom Kippur War.. After asking what weapons the Israeli army was asking for, the 37th US President ordered his subordinates to "

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The urgency of an early victory, or at least a retreat of Russian troops, so that Moscow, and not Kyiv, begins to ask for peace, is complicated by the fact that time is not necessarily on the side of the West.. Sanctions against Russia could undermine its ability to grow in the long run. But all restrictions do not greatly weaken the Russian ability to destroy. At the same time, these same sanctions are hurting the whole world.. And the pain that the world can endure in solidarity with Ukraine has its limits.. Critical shortages of food, energy and mineral fertilizers, as well as disruption of supply chains and rising prices cannot last forever. Democratic societies with limited pain tolerance won't endure forever.

Meanwhile, it does not appear that Putin has paid a big price for his behaviour: neither in the case of energy revenues (actually boosted by price hikes), nor in the case of public support (again boosted by propaganda, nationalism and fear). Hoping for him to die from Parkinson's, cancer, or a Napoleon complex is not a strategy..

What else can the Biden administration do She needs to take two calculated risks based on one conceptual breakthrough.. The first risk is what retired admiral James Stavridis suggested.. In his opinion, the United States should challenge the Russian naval blockade of Odessa by escorting merchant ships to and from the Ukrainian port.. This means that first you need to convince Turkey to let NATO ships through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea.. This may result in certain uncomfortable concessions in favor of Ankara.. More dangerously, the NATO and Russian fleets could come into close contact.. But Russia has neither the legal right to block the last major Ukrainian port, nor the moral right to deprive world markets of Ukrainian food.. Also, she doesn't have the naval power to counter the US Navy..

The second risk is the US decision to confiscate $300 billion of assets belonging to the Russian Central Bank of the Russian Federation, directing this money to finance the needs of the Ukrainian army, as well as reconstruction projects. The author recalls that he himself proposed to do this back in early April. And Harvard University experts Lawrence Tribe and Jeremy Levin described the legal conditions for how this can be done.. The administration is shying away from the move, fearing it could set a bad financial precedent.. And that would be a good argument under other circumstances.. But now we need such a powerful and quick financial blow to Russia that other sanctions have not been able to inflict so far..

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And this leads to a conceptual breakthrough. The war that is going on in Ukraine will have a greater impact on Asia than on Europe.

The Biden administration may soon convince itself that it has already effectively bled the Russian military out of its ability to start a new war somewhere else.. It's true to some extent. But if the war ends with Putin remaining in power and Russia retaining control of part of Ukraine, then Beijing will decide that aggression works.. And then the United States will have to go to war for Taiwan, incurring much greater economic and human losses..

The conclusion is simple: the war in Ukraine can be either a prelude or a final. President Biden needs to do everything possible to make the second option come true.