Ukraine is a big country. To maintain a no-fly zone over it would require aircraft to fly in from air bases in countries adjoining Ukraine, or bases hastily erected at airfields in West Ukraine and they would be severely limited in the amount of time they could loiter in that airspace. Even if this didn’t precipitate a general war in Europe, these facilities would be vulnerable to ground and air attack from Russian forces. The same goes for refueling tankers, AWACs (radar scout planes), not to mention all the other paraphernalia needed to support a major air campaign of this type. Fuel, munitions, maintenance crews, ground radar, communications and command–in other words, everything the Russians have had months to do. Their infrastructure is already in place, the forces and support concentrated, and it hasn’t had to be negotiated and coordinated between several governments. In short, we’re outnumbered and outgunned.
The Ukrainian war will be over before we can assemble any kind of no-fly force realistically capable of challenging the Russians. If we had started putting this together a year or two ago, it might have been in place by now. We didn’t. There it is.
Putin saw that our response to his meddling in Eastern Ukraine signaled that we never expected him to go all the way to the Dniepr, so he used the time to prepare. If we had known he was planning this, Obama could have started getting ready. But neither he nor the rest of us could guess how bold Putin would be a few years later. And no matter how spot-on my analysis here may appear now, I certainly didn’t see any of this coming. Still, Trump had 4 long years to do something about it, but of course, HE was too busy trying to dismantle NATO–not to mention trading European security for election assistance from the Kremlin.
So there is no way, short of risking all-out war, we can take any steps of a military nature to force Putin out of Ukraine. My guess is the Russians will occupy Kyiv and put in a puppet government, or negotiate a humiliating surrender from the surviving fragments of the Ukrainian government. The best we can hope for is a partitioned Ukraine, like Korea, or the old Vietnam and Germany. And of course, we will be forced to spend a fortune economically supporting and defending “Free Ukraine” west of the river while Putin turns his attention somewhere else. And we will have to start the expensive and difficult process to fortify and extend NATO as much as possible. Fortunately, it appears the border states may be more amenable to this now…but Europe has a short memory, and its greedy for Russian energy and markets. War is bad for business, and apparently, so is freedom.
On the bright side, we have been fortunate in getting a punishing suite of sanctions and unprecedented global unity on this, and hopefully this may cause Putin severe problems in the long run. But I wouldn’t count on that. He may have miscalculated the ability of the Ukrainians to resist militarily. But Trump is right about one thing; Putin is smarter than we are.