How does the Ukraine conflict end?
We lack any strategy but hope
I’m back!
After a tough year both professionally and personally I’m relaunching the America Explained Substack and aiming to bring content at least a few times a month. For the first post I want to reflect on the course of the Ukraine/Russia conflict and what the implications are for U.S. foreign policy and international security. My last Substack post was a pretty provocative one titled “NATO should cut its losses in Ukraine,” and while I think in retrospect that post was somewhat off-base, it also raised a lot of questions and worries which to my mind are still not resolved nearly a year later.
The big question you need to ask about any war is “tell me how this ends” - what is your strategy for returning to a sustainable and just peace which achieves your goals? That question was famously asked by General David Petraeus during the war in Iraq, but in the case of Ukraine/Russia the stakes are much higher because one way the war might end is the nuclear annihilation of all life on Earth. I still think that the West has an unclear concept of victory and a public discourse which massively under-weighs the risks that this war ends very badly.
The military balance
The big thing my last post got wrong is that, in common with almost all Western analysts, I massively over-rated the Russian military and under-rated the Ukrainians. It’s difficult to remember now but the main split among analysts before the Russian invasion was not who would win the war if it happened, but whether it was going to happen at all. The U.S. government and many American analysts thought the evidence that an invasion was coming was a slam dunk, whereas most Western Europeans thought the war wasn’t going to happen or would be very limited. There was some debate in expert circles about the likely course of the war but it was overshadowed by this will they/won’t they question, and most debate participants expected an eventual Russian victory in the first phase even if the occupation eventually turned disastrous.
That is very much not what happened. Instead the Russian military turned out to be woefully unprepared and overconfident, and the Ukrainians turned out to be highly competent. A Russian attempt to take Kiev failed early on, seemingly forcing Russia to adopt the more limited goal of annexing Ukrainian territory in the east. Russia notched up some victories in pursuit of this goal but then were met with a stunning Ukrainian counteroffensive. As I’m writing this post, Russian forces in the strategic city of Lyman are apparently nearing defeat, perhaps presaging the collapse of an entire front. The situation might become more balanced over the winter, but by any measure Moscow’s invasion is going terribly.
This erroneous understanding of the likely course of the war led a lot of analysts to get things wrong. For my part, this assumption about a Ukrainian collapse meant I assumed that NATO would quite quickly face the choice of either dramatically intervening or watching Ukraine go down to defeat. This was the logic behind the “no-fly zone” debate of March 2022, in which some commentators - including very high-level former U.S. military officials - were proposing a military intervention with a high probability of leading to war between NATO and Russia. But that debate died down as the fall of Kiev began to seem implausible, and the risk of NATO stumbling into nuclear war seemed to diminish with it.
The other salient fact about the military situation which actually developed versus what we expected is that NATO didn’t need to intervene directly to make a big contribution to Ukraine’s defense. Advanced weaponry from NATO - which Russia seems to have made no serious attempt to interdict - has continued to reach Ukrainian forces on the front and played a large role in the humbling of Russia’s forces. And this level of support has been at a level which has avoided a direct Russian military response against NATO - at least for now.
Why I’m still worried
Despite all this, I continue to think that the underlying reasons that I had for worrying about how this ends remain valid. Nearly eight months in, NATO is now effectively in a proxy war with Russia over a matter which is highly important both (a) to Russian nationalist opinion generally and (b) to the Putin regime specifically. It seems difficult to imagine that Putin will accept a defeat in Ukraine, yet at the same time that appears to be what is unfolding. No off-ramp is visible, and the idea of putting pressure on Ukraine to moderate its successes is verboten in the West - understandably, given that no compromise with Putin appears possible. So Ukraine will keep marching on, but Putin can’t let them do that. This is a recipe for Russian escalation.
Indeed, in the past week or so, this is what we’ve seen. All of the following have happened:
Russia announced the annexation of four regions of Ukraine, declaring them “Russian forever” - even though he lacks a strong military grip on any of them;
Putin threatened nuclear war with the West in defense of the regions, which he now claims to consider Russian territory;
Russia announced a mobilization of 300,000 additional men into the military, sparking protests and resistance across Russia;
Russia sabotaged Nord Stream 1 gas pipelines, a signal that it foresees no return to sending gas to Europe anytime soon.
Each of these is what we call a “costly signal” - something that is difficult and painful for a leader to do, and hence designed to signal to an adversary that he really means business. The annexations and the nuke threats are costly because they reduce Putin’s scope for compromise and threaten to make him look weak if he doesn’t follow through. We have to assume they are a bluff, which is a dangerous thing to do given the fact that the survival of Putin’s regime probably depends on the outcome of this war. The mobilization was costly because it has come with political costs for the Kremlin, and increased the need to show the public that their sacrifices are worthwhile. And the sabotaging of the gas pipelines is not only costly but also demonstrates the willingness to act against Europe and NATO outside of Ukraine, which could presage a new wave of sabotage and cyberattacks.
These actions show that we in the West are at grave risk of underestimating Putin’s resolve and stumbling into a much more dangerous situation. There’s a reason that books about the outbreak of World War I have titles like The Sleepwalkers - the nature of this sort of misperception is that you don’t realize it is happening until it is too late. Our current policy is blithe assumption that Putin is bluffing combined with moral certainty that Ukraine’s cause is just and so we have no right to propose limits on its actions. But what if our assumption about Putin is wrong and Ukraine’s victories land us in a nuclear war? Would the obvious justness of Ukraine’s cause be of comfort then?
This is where, I think, the underlying logic of my last post still has something to it. My worry has always been that we have failed to recognize that Russia has a lot more at stake in Ukraine than we do, and so there are levels of escalation which Russia may be willing to pursue which we cannot fathom. This may be the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, or a demonstration blast over some uninhabited area. It may be a gradual ratcheting up of sabotage or cyber-operations against the West which provokes a tit-for-tat response. It may even be conventional military operations against a NATO country involved in supplying weapons to Ukraine.
In a sense, the situation is even more dangerous than it was during the “no-fly zone” debate, because at least then the ball was in our court. Now we are essentially reduced to wondering whether our ally’s inspiring and righteous victories will ultimately cause a madman to blow up the world, giving a whole new level of meaning to the term “catastrophic success”.
What is to be done?
An incredibly frustrating aspect of this situation - and why it inspires such a sense of helplessness - is that it’s not clear what we can do differently. My point a year ago was that the only way to avoid the situation that we are in now was to seek some diplomatic solution which neutralized Ukraine as an issue in NATO-Russia relations. Because this would likely involve some Russian involvement in Ukraine’s internal affairs, this is now impossible to imagine given the level of brutality and barbarism shown by Russian forces.
As war tends to do, the conflict has narrowed possibilities for the future, so that it is now hard to imagine how this increasingly-existential struggle to define the future of Russia and its role in the world can end absent the collapse of the government in either Kiev or Moscow (and not even then). Even if there is some sort of ceasefire or peace agreement soon, the likelihood is that the Kremlin will come back for more in the future, opening the dilemma up anew. Ukraine has become a giant, endless sore spot in NATO-Russia relations, more dangerous than Berlin or any other flashpoint in the Cold War because so much blood has already been spilled there, directly or by proxy.
With the idea of some sort of compromise off the table (if it was ever on it), we have no clear strategy for ending this conflict. Hoping that the Putin regime collapses is not a strategy, particularly given that he seems much more likely to be replaced by hardened militarists determined to finish the job than by liberals seeking brotherhood with the West. Hoping that Putin doesn’t take the decision to escalate isn’t a strategy either, especially given his recent costly signals, and how much is at stake for him. So we are in for a long week, month, year, decade - as long as this goes on and as long as we are lucky enough to dodge the ultimate disaster.