America Explained is a newsletter about American politics, foreign policy, and history - and the way they all tie together. In the last week I’ve bought you posts about the Trump indictment, about the Supreme Court’s new gerrymandering ruling, and now this one about the war in Ukraine. To support (and access) it all, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber in order to support my work. It’s just $5 a month for you, but a big deal for me.
For months, the war in Ukraine has seemed locked in a stalemate. After the large gains that Kiev made its Kharkiv offensive in fall 2022, Russia managed to stabilize its lines with a massive influx of conscripts. Moscow then made limited gains, with a great deal of fighting taking place in and around the city of Bakhmut, but otherwise there has been little movement over the winter. Russia’s offensive momentum has seemed to be spent, and Ukraine has been working on building up its military with Western training and weaponry in preparation for a new offensive.
Now, that offensive appears to have begun, and the stakes are high - not just for Ukraine, but also for the United States, the Biden administration, and Europe.
Goals unknown, sort of
Ukraine has mostly kept quiet recently about what exactly the goals of its counteroffensive are, and even whether it is happening. U.S. officials also claim not to know the details, although they have also given fairly detailed information - which they present as guesses - off the record. The consensus seems to be that Ukraine is aiming to thrust southwards along multiple lines with the overall goal of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea. What comes next is a bit hazy, but at least some Ukrainians close to the government have claimed that this will be a precursor to an attack on Crimea itself:
Oleksiy Arestovych, who served as Ukrainian presidential adviser until he resigned earlier this year, said one of the goals of Ukraine's counteroffensive may be an operation in the south of the country which will seek to cut Russians off from the land corridor to Crimea, paving the way for Ukraine to recapture the Black Sea peninsula that was illegally annexed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014.
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"Crimea cannot be held without a land corridor," Arestovych told YouTube channel Feygin Live, hosted by lawyer and former Russian opposition politician Mark Feygin. He was weighing in on a possible attempt by Ukraine to recapture the peninsula as part of its counteroffensive.
Arestovych also claims that as part of the offensive, Ukraine will aim to destroy the Kerch bridge - which was damaged in a truck bombing last year - thus isolating Crimea from the Russian mainland entirely, and leaving the troops there open to attack. The bridge could be targeted with the new Storm Shadow missiles that Kiev has acquired from the West in recent months.
Of course, none of this might be true, or Kiev might change its goals in response to an evolving situation. It might choose to focus the main thrust of its attack elsewhere, such as around Kherson or the Donbas. It might also fall well short of its goals, particularly if they extend as far as retaking Crimea, a territory for which Russia will fight bitterly.
The exact extent of Ukraine’s goals matters, though, because it determines the impact that the war has on the wider world. Officials in many Western countries fear a runaway Ukrainian victory with a similar degree of intensity to which they fear a runaway Russian victory. If Ukraine really does manage to invade Crimea, there is a widespread belief that Russia may consider the use of nuclear weapons or another form of major escalation, tipping the war into a dangerous new phase.
As I’ve argued before, the Ukraine war has put the West in a position of remarkable passivity. Officials in Europe and the United States won’t come out and say they don’t want Ukraine to take Crimea because it would strain relations with Kiev and reduce whatever leverage Ukraine has in negotiations with Moscow, but many of them are thinking it. Instead, they are left hoping that they’ll get Goldilocks’ War, a conflict which goes just right and prevents them from having to make very hard choices about exactly how much risk they are willing to run to support Ukraine.
So what is the U.S. goal?
This problem of passivity shows up even in very informed discussions of what exactly America’s goal is or should be in the current Ukrainian counteroffensive. Should America really be hoping for a runaway Ukrainian victory? Should it want simply a long war of attrition which grinds Russia down? Or is the goal an early negotiated settlement? Nobody can really say what the Biden administration’s goal actually is, much less what it should be.
One answer to this question is to basically say that the U.S. benefits from the damage the war is doing to Russia, and long may it continue. Former Trump administration official A. Wess Mitchell has argued that the war is allowing the U.S. to degrade the Russian military on the cheap, by providing weapons and training only and allowing someone else to do the fighting. The damage done to Russia means that the U.S. will be able to pivot its attention to China, which in the long run poses a much greater threat:
Underlying all of this is the need to use the current window wisely: to prepare for and thereby hopefully avoid a catastrophic war with China. That Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine much sooner than Chinese President Xi Jinping was ready to move against Taiwan represents the greatest strategic opportunity for the West in decades. Just imagine if the two despots’ timetables had been aligned. The United States should exploit the opportunity it has been presented by Putin’s barbaric folly to the fullest, for as long as it goes on. That was a sound strategy at the start of the war, and it remains a sound strategy today.
According to this view, the fact that the Biden administration has been slow to provide Ukraine with some advanced military capabilities or to openly support its maximalist goals - like retaking Crimea - is not so important as the fact that the war is proving incredibly long and bloody for the Russian military. Pushing Russia too far might mean something really bad happens, whereas a grinding war of attrition just bleeds Russia out and discourages it from military adventurism elsewhere. It’s Goldilocks’ War - just right.
Other voices are arguing for Washington to make a much greater effort to give Ukraine the tools it needs to achieve victory. In this view, the Biden administration needs to stop prevaricating and be clear who it wants to win. Raphael S. Cohen and Gian Gentile, both highly respected military strategists, argue:
Stepping back, then, the United States’ strategy in the war in Ukraine so far is a case in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Viewed individually, most decisions the United States has made in the war make sense. It is logical for the Biden administration to be opaque about its goals in the conflict and hesitant about providing high-end weaponry to a country engaged in an indirect conflict with a nuclear-armed major power. Similarly, it is understandable for Congress to want accountability for how Americans’ taxes are being spent.
Judged collectively, however, these decisions add up to a suboptimal, messy U.S. strategy for supporting a war. The vagueness of the ends, the indecisiveness of the ways, and the uncertainty in the means have produced a U.S. effort that is not as robust, quick, or forward-looking as it could or should be. This lack of strategic optimization has delayed needed support to Ukraine, and it may have even prolonged the conflict.
The challenge was foreseeable a year or more ago: Ukraine will survive as an independent state, continue to face a long-term threat from Russia, and run out of Soviet-era equipment—be it air defenses, tanks, or planes. Had the West acted more decisively and strategically, Ukraine would not only be in a better shape to undertake the counteroffensive it recently launched in southern and eastern Ukraine, but also be better-positioned for a more durable postwar settlement.
Thankfully, Ukrainian bravery and Russian missteps mean that the war remains winnable for Kyiv. The United States just needs the will and strategy to embrace that victory.
The problem with this take is that it doesn’t really define what “winning” looks like, or how all the problems that might pop up on the road to winning - like a nuclear war over Crimea - are to be avoided. Implicit in takes like this is the idea that Russia is bluffing when it threatens escalation, and that even if Vladimir Putin’s regime is threatened then he still won’t use extreme measures to save himself.
The issue of nuclear weapons hangs over this whole debate. On the one hand, if Washington tries to hold Kiev back from retaking Crimea because of the risk of a nuclear war, that sends the message that possession of nuclear weapons can immunize states against facing the consequences of aggression. On the other hand, a campaign to retake Crimea really might start nuclear war, ending the “nuclear taboo” which has existed since 1945 and opening a Pandora’s box of consequences for the world. Even if the chances of that happening are only 10%, many would argue that that’s unacceptably high.
The undoing of Goldilocks’ War
Absent some very dramatic breakthrough on the battlefield, this tension won’t be explicitly solved. Everyone - in America, in Europe, in Russia, in Kiev - is waiting to see what the results of the current counteroffensive are before trying to give shape to the next political and diplomatic phase of the struggle. If Ukrainian forces break through, things will move quickly. More likely, they’ll make some gains but the overall situation will be ambiguous and somewhat stalemated. U.S. goals will remain diffuse and unclear.
But then things get tricky. Diffuse and unclear aims are not good for maintaining public or political support. The politics of aid to Ukraine is already shifting, with far-right and progressive members of Congress increasingly questioning how much more money Washington can send. If Ukraine doesn’t show big gains in the current offensive, critics will question the worth of sending even more aid. If it does show big gains, they’ll argue that the time has come to rein Kiev in and minimize the risk of nuclear war.
Diminishing public and political support may end up being the undoing of Goldilocks’ War, particularly if the conflict drags on - as many analysts think it will - for this year and the next. Russia has every incentive to keep in the fight until the 2024 election, hoping that Trump will be elected and that he’ll then force Ukraine into making concessions, as he has signalled he will. And a longer war makes it harder to keep the public and politicians onside.
The Biden administration should respond to this flagging public support by raising the rhetorical and practical states - laying out what U.S. goals are, how it aims to achieve them, and the exact risks it is willing to bear to get there. A clearer strategy would give a more effective counterargument to critics of aid to Ukraine by making it clear exactly what is at stake in the fight. It would also place the onus on the MAGA movement to explain why, contrary to the administration, it thinks a Russian victory would be good for American security.
Or the administration might just keep trying to muddle through, letting public support drain further, and leaving the path clear for Trump to poke holes in the idea of Goldilocks’ War.
The former would probably be better than the latter.