By David Ignatius

Columnist

Rebuffing Ukrainian pleas for Western protection of its airspace, the United States’ top military commander said NATO has “no plans that I’m aware of to establish a no-fly zone” over the country.

The comments Saturday from Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for such an air embargo and Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that he would treat imposition of a no-fly zone as “participation in the armed conflict.”

“If a no-fly zone was declared, someone would have to enforce it, and that would mean someone would have to then go and fight against Russian air forces,” Milley explained. “That is not something that NATO Secretary [Jens] Stoltenberg, or member states’ political leadership, has indicated they want to do.”

Milley made his remarks in an interview Saturday with Latvian journalists at a military base here, as part of a visit to Europe to assess the Ukraine conflict. His rejection of the no-fly zone echoes comments by other Biden administration officials, who have argued for weeks that although the United States wants to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression, it won’t make any moves that might place U.S. military forces, including Air Force planes, in direct conflict with Russia.

Milley made another comment to journalists here that was perhaps meant to check rising tensions about Russian escalation, spawned by Putin’s announcement last Sunday that he was putting Russian nuclear forces on “special combat readiness” because of “aggressive comments” from the West.

Despite Putin’s threatening language about nuclear weapons, Milley said, “we are not now seeing anything out there in the alert postures of the actual nuclear forces of Russia that would indicate any increased set of alerts.” He said the United States was monitoring the situation closely.

The remarks here by America’s top military leader illustrate once again the delicate balance the United States and its NATO allies are trying to strike between supporting Ukraine with lethal weapons and other aid — but avoiding direct confrontation with Russian forces that could lead to a wider conflict and increase the cataclysmic risk of nuclear war.

Putin has appeared to want to keep these escalatory tensions high, as part of his psychological pressure campaign against the West to gain dominance in Ukraine. Milley and other U.S. officials, in contrast, want to check these anxieties. But that’s becoming increasingly difficult as Russia broadens its assault on a defiant Ukraine, whose people and the president have become heroes around the world.

Opinion by David Ignatius

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “The Paladin.”