A Chechen woman passes by a tank of Russian federal troops on the main street of Gehy-Chu village, south from Grozny, Chechnya, on Feb. 16, 2000. STR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

All wars have a different stamp when it comes to atrocities.
The crimes of the 1970-1975 Cambodian war were different from the concentration camps in northwest Bosnia in 1992. The crimes of the 1983-2009 Sri Lankan Civil War were different from those in Sierra Leone in 1999. There, random civilians were chosen and amputated at the wrist or the elbow: the intent to leave their victims as human monuments of terror.

But although the origins of the wars are different, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reckless, indiscriminate bombing—a standard part of his playbook—in Ukraine has startling parallels to other Putin wars I have witnessed in my time as a reporter.

When I go through my old reporting notebooks from past conflicts, I find the same war crimes documented there that we’re now seeing in Ukraine. Most notably in Grozny, Chechnya, from 1999-2000, during the brutal Second Chechen War when Putin was cutting his teeth on power; and with the destruction of Aleppo in Syria.

Many of the casualties in Ukraine are caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems and airstrikes. Chechnya had a similar fate with artillery, helicopter gunships, and airstrikes; Aleppo was destroyed by Putin’s screeching war planes.

In all cases, Putin and his generals (he has just tasked the “Butcher of Syria,” Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov, to be his ground commander in Ukraine) employed indiscriminate use of air power, leading to civilian casualties. Both times, they targeted heavily residential civilian areas with hospitals and schools, forcing civilians to flee from danger. He has created columns of refugees and destroyed the fabric of society.

The people I have seen killed or injured in Putin’s wars weren’t on the battlefield. The ones I remember the clearest were children with missing limbs or shrapnel embedded in their brains, women carrying toddlers, confused older adults, and people with disabilities—people who did not deserve to be targeted and were supposed to be protected under international human rights law.

Putin has aided the most ruthless of dictators, such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who waged a war against his own people and punished them for seeking freedom. Assad chemically gassed his citizens, imprisoned children, tortured thousands of people, starved entire cities by imposing sieges, and sent millions of refugees outside of their country. And he did it all with Putin’s—and the Russian military’s—support.

Putin helped by sending Russian warplanes to systematically target hospitals and first responders known as the White Helmets. During the siege of Aleppo in 2016, more than 440 civilians died, including 90 children. The attacks killed newborn babies, doctors, and students.

These were clear-cut war crimes. According to Human Rights Watch, Russian and Syrian “airstrikes often appeared to be recklessly indiscriminate, deliberately targeted at least one medical facility, and included the use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions and incendiary weapons.” The Russian bombers then moved to Idlib, Syria, where they targeted more civilian facilities, including maternity hospitals.

For me, Syria was a time when I recorded some of the most gruesome atrocities of my long career. Hospital bombings were perhaps the most disturbing—I remember one angry Syrian doctor in tears of rage about how the world could sit by so silently. I remember days spent with the most courageous health care workers who were scrambling to save lives in a triage hospital with scant supplies. I remember the anguished messages from a friend and doctor in Idlib, whom I’ll refer to as Dr. Omar for his safety, who operated on children for years in a basement with a flashlight. I remember taking testimonies from victims of torture where the methods were so barbaric, I had to check with doctors to make sure the victims could live through such abuse. Syria was a painful war.

Seeing what’s happening in Ukraine also takes me back to another dangerous and cruel war. In January 2000, I was in Chechnya when Grozny, its capital, fell to Russian forces, some of them blissed out on vodka and the sedative Dimedrol. I will never forget the wasted landscape, of coming across a house for the blind, where 30 residents sat stunned in the rubble of what had once been their home. It was freezing cold and their roof was blasted away.

“What are you waiting for?” I asked them, as they sat with their white canes.

“For somebody to come save us,” one answered.

Ironically, many of them were ethnic Russians, including one who told me: “I’ve been waiting my whole life for good things to happen.” He explained he was sightless from a car crash when he was 28. “I guess now they won’t.”

A week or so later, I saw Putin’s screeching missiles strike a small village where I was sheltering with some old women in a potato cellar. I saw the backpacks of school children covered in blood in the snow.

In Grozny, that forgotten city Putin smashed like a toy, I wrote that even the doctors “scream and scream” on street corners. I remember after one brutal aerial bombardment, one woman who “came out of the cellar 10 days ago. … She is covered with dirt and grime, her face hidden behind weeks of unwashed soot. … ‘I’m an educated person, I hate going around like this, but I have descended into the condition of a monkey.’”

Now, Putin has shifted to Ukraine and is using the very same playbook I personally saw him use to catastrophic effect in Syria and Chechnya. (The Kremlin, meanwhile, denies war crimes and says Russian military forces are not targeting civilians.)

I watch Ukraine knowing full well what Putin is doing. His campaign of terror is meant to wear down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s resolve to resist. It is meant to dehumanize. Putin believes he can break Ukraine’s spirit even as he breaks its citizens’ bones.

It is also emptying the country. War dismantles countries by forcing the inhabitants to flee. This is called ethnic cleansing. Putin has forced more than 12 million Ukrainians from their homes, according to the United Nations. Over 5 million people have fled to neighboring countries, and an estimated 7.1 million people are displaced within Ukraine. Millions of refugees similarly fled Syria to neighboring countries. During the first year of the Second Chechen War alone, more than half a million people were displaced.

It is hard to comprehend the level of human insecurity until you stand in the middle of a corridor of desperate people fleeing with the only things they could grab: passports, children, a suitcase full of clothes. I learned long ago that no one ever wants to leave their home, so they usually wait until the last possible moment. By then it’s too late to do much more than run.

In the winter of 2013-2014, I worked with refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq for the UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency. The thousands of people I met were desperate with grief and the knowledge that they would probably never see the land of their birth again—nor would their children. The sense of displacement and alienation—not to mention the lack of dignity and the trauma—was unfathomable.

Putin’s killing machine will continue. Much of it won’t be known for months, perhaps years, to come. There will be more mass graves, more bombings. He will continue to violate humanitarian law with impunity.

“Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it,” philosopher George Santayana once wrote. But in the case of Putin, the playbook of horror will continue until he is finally stopped.

Source: Foreign Policy

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a news conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 2023. CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

Congress has finally approved around $61 billion in new aid to Ukraine, and something strange has happened: Talk of Ukrainian victory has returned to Washington. It’s a jarring turnabout. For the last few months, the White House and others issued dire warnings that if left unaided, Ukrainian lines might collapse and Russian troops might again roll on Kyiv. But with the worst averted, sights are setting higher. The Biden administration is now working to build up the Ukrainian Armed Forces over a 10-year period, at a likely cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan suggested that Ukraine would mount another counteroffensive in 2025.

This optimism is misplaced. The new bill may well represent the last big package that the United States will send to Ukraine. As the geopolitical analyst Ian Bremmer noted, “America continuing to send Ukraine [$]60 billion in support year after year [is] unrealistic no matter who wins the presidency.” Current aid will mostly help to put Ukraine in a better position for future negotiations. It will ameliorate shortfalls in ammunition and weaponry, making it less likely that Ukrainian forces will lose more ground in coming months. Yet Ukraine still faces other challenges: insufficient fortifications, a yawning manpower shortage, and a surprisingly resilient Russian army. On the whole, Ukraine remains the weaker party; Western assistance has not altered that reality.

The White House presented the supplemental as an all-or-nothing choice: Approve billions in funding or watch Ukraine go under. Such rhetoric contains eerie echoes of wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan, where the United States kept pouring resources into lost causes at least in part because no U.S. leader wanted to be held responsible at the final moment of failure. Throughout the Ukraine aid debate, key questions were left entirely unanswered: What is the United States trying to achieve in Ukraine given that total victory is not feasible? What is it willing to risk and spend to get there? The supplemental punts these uncomfortable questions down the road. But if Washington doesn’t confront them, it may end up back in the same position next year—or worse.

THE MATTER OF an endgame in Ukraine has always been fraught. Political scientists have frequently noted that any end to this war will include diplomatic negotiation. Some draw the conclusion that if negotiation is inevitable, talks should begin sooner rather than later. Others argue that Ukraine must improve its battlefield position before negotiating. The government in Kyiv maintains that Russia must be driven completely out of Ukraine, including Crimea, before talks can begin. Some even argue that regime change in Moscow is a precondition for peace.

The squishy middle of the Washington debate, which seems to include senior members of the Biden administration, falls somewhere between these extremes: hoping for major Ukrainian advances, while avoiding escalation and acknowledging privately or anonymously that the math is not in Kyiv’s favor. The White House is correct that aid should be designed to put the Ukrainians in a strong negotiating position. But this raises further questions: How should one determine when the moment for negotiations has arrived? If Ukraine keeps fighting without talking, will its bargaining power improve or diminish?

The calculation is also complicated by confusion about what the United States is trying to achieve in Ukraine. Some emphasize broad, universal principles such as defending democracy or protecting the international order. These are laudable goals, but they could plausibly produce opposite conclusions: either that universal principles have already been adequately defended—the steep price Russia has paid could dissuade future aggressors—or alternately that Ukraine must score a definitive victory.

More hard-nosed analysts instead argue that America’s primary goal in arming Ukraine is to bleed Russia. Keeping up the flow of Western weapons, they argue, allows the West to diminish Russia’s military capabilities at a reasonable cost. As an objective, however, weakening Russia offers no endgame, and implies a long-term, semipermanent commitment to war. Given Russia’s ability to reconstitute its forces, it is not even clear the West is succeeding on this front.

A final group offers more concrete goals: enabling Ukraine to retake specific chunks of territory so as to protect its economic viability as a sovereign state, or to prevent Russia from seizing Odesa and other valuable places. But although these are more specific objectives, there is no consensus on them in Western capitals and little willingness to push for peace negotiations once they are achieved.

This is perhaps why White House officials return so often to the formulation that Western aid is simply intended to put Ukraine in the best possible position at the bargaining table. Saying this requires no difficult decisions about the territory Ukraine needs to retake and no consideration of how long Western aid should continue. It also evades the question of Ukraine’s future orientation—will it join the EU or NATO?—which may need to be resolved in order to end the war.

In short, the current approach is a strategic cop-out. Its primary benefit is to paper over differences among Ukraine’s supporters. The risk is that the war will join the ranks of forever wars and end in one of three ways: in defeat, on worse terms than could have been obtained earlier, or on the same terms at a higher human and financial toll.

“Forever war” became a slogan over the past decade-plus, used by activists to describe the seemingly endless American deployments overseas in complex wars from Afghanistan to Syria and Niger. Like all slogans, the term was imprecise, but it crisply conveyed the problem of waging open-ended conflicts aimed at absolute, unachievable victory.

The conflict in Ukraine should not be directly compared to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: No U.S. troops are engaged in combat, and the government of Ukraine is fighting an illegal invasion. Still, there are parallels. Once the Afghanistan surge failed, the debate pitted those who argued that the conflict could not be won against those who argued that it could be sustained at a low enough cost indefinitely. Today’s Ukraine debates have begun to trend in that direction. Sen. Mitch McConnell, among others, has argued that aiding Ukraine is a bargain in defense terms and pumps money back into the U.S. economy.

The common link between Ukraine and past forever wars is thus the way genuine strategic debate gets evaded or stigmatized. Lawmakers and policymakers find it easier to sustain the war effort by presenting a succession of all-or-nothing choices than to look ahead and weigh realistic alternatives.

Proponents of either disengagement or escalation fill the vacuum left by ill-defined or unattainable goals. The former proved surprisingly successful in holding up U.S. assistance for six-plus months. The latter camp, meanwhile, is ascending. After all, if the present trajectory is unfavorable and adopting more limited aims is ruled out, policymakers will seek the other logical solution: that of expanding involvement in the conflict.

The West has gradually escalated over the past two years, as has Russia. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine and its Western supporters have pushed for ever more advanced weapons. From support vehicles to tanks, tube artillery to ATACMS, the cycle was consistent: As soon as the White House approved one system, pressure would mount to supply the next. A similar trend played out in Europe. Yet with the third year of the conflict underway, technological exhaustion is imposing an upper limit on this trend. In many areas, there is now no “next system” to send.

This dynamic helps explain the recent discussion of more intensive forms of involvement. Just last week, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron told reporters that Ukraine could use British-provided weapons to strike targets inside Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron renewed his recent suggestion that he might send troops to Ukraine to serve in behind-the-lines roles. Each of these was a distinctly escalatory proposal that even six months ago would not have happened. On Monday, citing the British and French statements, Russia announced it would hold drills to practice the battlefield use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Another proposal, which the Department of Defense is reportedly considering in some form, is to send greater numbers of U.S. military advisors to Ukraine to provide maintenance support, training, and tactical advice. This is likewise portrayed as a middle step between the status quo and entering the conflict directly. But it’s also dangerous, creating the potential for direct conflict with Russian forces should advisors be killed or wounded. Russia, for its part, may view the measure as a precursor to greater Western involvement and escalate in turn. The experience of the Vietnam war—where advisors proved to be steppingstones to full combat—ought to serve as a warning.

Of course, the intent of recent calls for intensified Western involvement is to improve the balance of power between Ukraine and Russia. But if a vast infusion of Western technology over the last two years has not resolved Ukraine’s weakness vis-à-vis Russia, then neither advisors nor behind-the-lines support would likely change this dynamic.

FOR ALL THE effort the Biden administration has put into delivering aid to Ukraine, it has also set U.S. strategy on autopilot. There appears to be no plan other than to try to keep the money flowing—the new aid could last as little as six months or as long as 18 months—which will work until it doesn’t.

Instead, the administration should publicly acknowledge that Ukrainian and American interests are not identical and that Kyiv’s stated aim of liberating every inch of Ukrainian territory is not realistically achievable. America’s most important interests are to safeguard Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign state and to avoid direct conflict with Russia. Each of these should take priority over the further liberation of territory.

Accordingly, U.S. leaders should encourage and incentivize Ukraine to prioritize defense over offense, a process that is already beginning. The last two years have demonstrated the ability of defenders to hold off motivated and more numerous attackers; both sides have experienced slow advances and limited gains when facing dug-in opponents. Washington should channel its assistance into ensuring Ukraine can protect itself, which means more basics like ammunition and fortifications and fewer high-tech offensive systems like ATACMS. It should also help Ukraine to rebuild its military-industrial base.

No less important, the time has come to encourage negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. If Ukrainian forces, buoyed by new aid deliveries, can stabilize the front line, then the summer of 2024 may prove to be a favorable negotiating window. Up to this point, the Biden administration has been wary of pushing Ukraine to negotiate for fear of appearing to signal a lack of U.S. commitment. In addition, negotiations can be slow, and Russia may not yet be willing to participate in earnest. But the proposition has not been tested, and it is worth trying, particularly because punting the decision to Kyiv, while supplying it with arms, has the perverse effect of discouraging Ukraine from talking. Neither side can truly gauge what it could obtain until it starts talking to the other, and recent revelations about prior negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow suggest that a settlement is not impossible.

Finally, Washington should lean on its European allies to spend the money and place the orders to equip Ukraine. America’s commitments may falter, whether because of popular dissatisfaction, a new president, or crises elsewhere in the world. Moscow, too, may eschew talks, reasoning that Ukraine’s position is only getting weaker. To mitigate these possibilities, Washington should shift more of the burden to European countries whose proximity to Russia give them a strong interest in Ukraine’s success. These states have already begun to step up; the Czech Republic, for example, has spearheaded an innovative ammunition initiative. But Europe can do much more: increase national funding for ammunition and rocket production, authorize emergency funds and improve cross-continent defense procurement through the European Union, and take over the organizational burden of coordinating aid.

This time, Congress eventually delivered. Next time, it might not. On both sides of the Atlantic, governments should prepare for U.S. aid to dry up and work to place Ukraine on a more strategic and durable footing. After all, current levels of support have not sufficed to put the worst outcomes—whether a Russian breakthrough, a destructive forever conflict, or an expanded war—out of view. Averting those outcomes requires opening the space to weigh difficult trade-offs now. You can take only so many all-or-nothing gambles until you end up with nothing.

Source: Foreign Policy

ber of a Ukrainian special police unit falls after firing a D-30 howitzer toward Russian positions near Kreminna.
A member of a Ukrainian special police unit falls after firing a D-30 howitzer toward Russian positions near Kreminna, Ukraine, on July 7, 2023. LIBKOS/AP

As Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its third year, the apparent impasse on the battlefield masks decisive shifts. The war’s main front is now political, with Russian President Vladimir Putin betting that divisions and hesitations in the West will hand him the victory he has failed to achieve on the ground.

Worried about the consequences for their continent’s security if Washington disengages and Ukraine falls, European governments have increased aid in recent months. Collectively, they have now supplied or pledged more weapons to Kyiv than Washington—and more than double the assistance if economic aid is included. That marks a significant change from the war’s early days, but it hasn’t been enough to turn the tide for Ukraine.

When and how will this war end? The Kremlin has made it abundantly clear that the only negotiated end it will accept is Ukraine’s surrender, while the Ukrainians have made it equally plain that they will continue to resist being subsumed into Moscow’s empire. Two years on, peace in Europe is nowhere in sight.

To shed light on these and other shifts in the war, Foreign Policy asked eight prominent thinkers what comes next.—Stefan Theil, deputy editor

Ukrainian service members perform a medical evacuation during a military exercise in the Donetsk region on Feb. 3. GENYA SAVILOV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Bracing for a Long War

By Angela Stent, author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest

As Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its third year, the current dynamic stalemate looks set to continue. Neither side is winning or losing. The Russians are making incremental territorial gains at the cost of enormous casualties and lost equipment. The Ukrainians, having failed to achieve the objectives of their 2023 counteroffensive, are on the defensive and also experiencing significant casualties. This war of attrition is taking its toll on Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelensky recently parted ways with his top military commander, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, after fissures between the two became public. Both countries need to mobilize more troops, but there will be no Russian mobilization before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s sham reelection next month. For Ukraine, whose population is less than a third the size of Russia’s, it will be more difficult for to mobilize the forces it needs.

The war is not only about troops but also about the continued supply of weapons. Russia is purchasing drones from Iran and increasing amounts of artillery ammunition and some missiles from North Korea. Ukraine is dependent on weapons supplies and financial support from Europe and the United States. The European Union’s recent approval of $54 billion in financial assistance will enable the Ukrainian state to continue functioning, and European NATO members will supply some additional weapons. But the United States remains key: It is the most important supplier of advanced weaponry, and its dysfunctional domestic politics may jeopardize Ukraine’s ability to continue to fight Russia. If Congress does not approve the requested $60 billion in assistance to Ukraine and if the U.S. government does not speed up the supply of advanced weapons, then the outlook for Ukraine’s ability to push back against Russia in 2024 is much bleaker.

There is little prospect of negotiations to end the war in 2024, nor can either side achieve a decisive victory. The Kremlin has made clear that it has no interest in negotiations that do not lead to Ukraine’s surrender, including the permanent loss of the four territories illegally annexed by Russia in 2022. The stated Russian goal remains the so-called “de-Nazification”—Russian lingo for regime change—and demilitarization of Ukraine. No Ukrainian leader would ever agree to such terms. Putin is awaiting the result of this year’s U.S. election and hoping that the next U.S. president will eschew support for Ukraine and return to business as usual with Russia. In that case, Ukraine’s ability to survive as an independent, sovereign state would be in question, with all the knock-on effects on the security of Europe and beyond.

Proposals for how the war might end—including the Korean model, which would involve an armistice, no peace treaty, and Western security guarantees for Ukraine—presuppose that Russia would ever accept an independent Ukraine. As long as Putin or a successor who shares his worldview is in power, that is unlikely to happen.

A destroyed bridge, clogged with ice and snow, is seen from above in the village of Bohorodychne, Ukraine, on Jan. 27. ROMAN PILIPEY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Like It or Not, We Are Now in Cold War II

By Jo Inge Bekkevold, senior China fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies

When Russian troops crossed into Ukraine in February 2022, it was immediately clear that the invasion would accelerate the geopolitical divide between the United States and its allies on one side and the emerging Sino-Russian axis on the other. In 2024, we are now significantly closer to a bipolar global divide reminiscent of the Cold War than only two years ago.

For one, the war has fostered the Sino-Russian embrace by increasing Beijing’s sway over Moscow. Largely isolated from the West as a result of the war, Moscow now increasingly depends on China as a market for its oil and gas exports, as a provider of a wide range of consumer goods, and as a partner for developing new technologies. Beijing’s support of Russia’s war effort has also widened divisions between China and Europe. This is evident in Europe’s rejection of China’s so-called peace plan for Ukraine, Beijing’s remarkable loss of influence in Central and Eastern Europe (with the high-profile 16+1 dialogue largely dead and buried), and the inclusion of China in NATO’s latest Strategic Concept.

Europe’s prewar dependence on Russian energy was the kind of vulnerability that the West now wants to avoid vis-à-vis China. Washington and Brussels are taking steps to de-risk their close economic ties with China; Beijing, for its part, is increasing its own self-sufficiency. Finally, Russia’s aggression has enhanced trans-Atlantic unity, prompted European NATO members to increase their defense budgets, pushed Finland and Sweden into NATO’s arms, and forced the United States to boost its military presence in Europe again.

Nonetheless, the current situation is different from the original Cold War. Today, the Sino-Russian partnership rests on a stronger geopolitical foundation than the Sino-Soviet one. At the same time, the trans-Atlantic unity created by Russia’s attack on Ukraine is fragile. Some European states are dragging their feet on defense spending, prolonging Sweden’s accession to NATO, advocating autonomy from the United States, or disagreeing with efforts to de-risk from China. Each case on its own may not be a threat to Western unity, but seen together, they matter. The most visible and important sign of Western fractures, though, is former U.S. President Donald Trump questioning the role of NATO and the U.S. security guarantee to its alliance partners during his presidential campaign.

Russia’s war has thus exposed the increased frailty of the Western bloc. Europe still suffers from its post-Cold War dreams and delusions. Accustomed to three decades of peace and globalization, many European politicians seem to be reluctant to face up to the realities of war, whether it comes in the form of an ongoing Russian invasion or it takes shape as a new cold war. Russian aggression also casts another spotlight on the rise of nationalism, populism, and polarization in the United States and a number of European countries. During the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, Washington was able to exploit the differences between Beijing and Moscow, whereas today, Beijing and Moscow are in a stronger position to exploit the differences within the Western bloc.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shakes hands with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during a news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Feb. 8, 2023. SARA MEYSSONNIER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Can Europe Go It Alone?

By Kristi Raik, deputy director of the Estonia-based International Centre for Defence and Security

If Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014 were wake-up calls reminding the West about Russia’s aggressive great-power ambitions, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was an electric shock for Europe’s continuously decaying defense. If that wasn’t enough, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has now openly invited Russia to attack European NATO members.

Now that Ukraine is entering the third year of a massive land, sea, air, and information war, there is a real threat that Russia will gain the upper hand on the battlefield. Already, U.S. military aid to Ukraine has dwindled to a trickle, and the prospect of Trump’s election victory in November means that European leaders face the gravest strategic challenge to their continent in generations. If Europe fails this test, Moscow would be emboldened to go further in restoring its sphere of influence and undermining its main enemy, which it has clearly said is NATO.

European leaders openly acknowledge the need to prepare for Europe being abandoned by the United States, but big words by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have yet to be matched with deeds. The actual steps Europe has taken to increase defense spending, boost arms production, and help Ukraine win the war are falling short. Western debates on Russia keep signaling a lack of strategic clarity and resolve. A Russian defeat is feared so much that many in the West would rather have it both ways: Russia shouldn’t win and neither should Ukraine. For Russia, such wavering is an invitation to continue fighting until victory. As we’ve heard many times, Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that time is on his side.

Both the United States and Europe have much at stake. Ukraine’s defeat would likely do more damage to Washington’s credibility around the world than the U.S. departure from Afghanistan. It would mean losing a conflict that was eminently winnable—but that Washington did not choose or dare to win.

2024 is a critical year for proving Putin wrong and paving the way for Ukraine’s victory. According to calculations by the Estonian Defense Ministry, Western countries would need to invest just 0.25 percent of their GDP in military assistance to Ukraine in order to enable the country to continue defending itself in 2024 and prepare for a new counteroffensive in 2025. This investment would be crucial for changing Russia’s calculus regarding not just Ukraine but European security architecture at large. A long-term Western commitment would force the Kremlin to draw the conclusion that it cannot achieve its goals in Ukraine by waging war. It would also send the message that Europe is committed to its defense—and that Russia has no chance of gaining anything by attacking its neighbors.

Looking beyond 2024, Ukraine can win the war if the West steps up support and makes the cost of war unbearable for Russia. Moscow can win if the West fails to mobilize the necessary resources and, more importantly, will.

Should Russia win in Ukraine, there is a chance that this would finally be the effective shock to compel Europe and the United States to get serious about stopping Russian expansion. I’d rather avoid that test.

A Norwegian Home Guard instructor jumps above a Ukrainian soldier during a training exercise in Trondheim, Norway, on Aug. 25, 2023. JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Time to Call Putin’s Bluff

By Anders Fogh Rasmussen, founder of the Alliance of Democracies and former secretary-general of NATO

After two years of war, a dangerous narrative has emerged in Western debates: The conflict is at a stalemate, and Ukraine is close to the limits of what it can achieve on the battlefield. This assessment is wrong—the means to deliver a Ukrainian victory remains firmly in the West’s hands. But leaders in Europe and the United States must show the political courage to make it happen.

A Ukrainian victory relies on two principles: first, ensuring that Ukraine has all it needs to defeat Russia on the battlefield; and second, a viable plan for a secure and prosperous Ukraine to emerge after the war.

Western leaders have been far too hesitant to supply Ukrainian forces with what they need to win. The long delay in providing tanks and armored vehicles allowed Russia to dig in and fortify its defenses, which made it far more difficult for Ukraine to recapture its territory. Similarly, the failure to prepare Western defense industries for a long war means that Russia—aided by impoverished North Korea and heavily sanctioned Iran—is now outproducing the combined might of the democratic world. This is unconscionable. The West must put its industries on a war footing to make clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin that his strategy of outlasting the West will fail.

2024 must also be the year when Ukraine’s supporters set out a clear plan for the country’s future. This should be built on three pillars: long-term security guarantees, accession to the European Union, and NATO membership. On this, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked me last month to co-chair a new working group to develop proposals on Ukraine’s security and Euro-Atlantic integration.

On security guarantees, there has already been significant progress. Last summer in Vilnius, Lithuania, the G-7 agreed to work on a series of bilateral security arrangements with Ukraine. Today, more than 30 countries are in negotiations with the Ukrainian government; Britain finalized the first security agreement in January, followed by Germany and France last week.

The prospect of EU membership provides a framework for Ukraine to rebuild after the war and can provide additional security guarantees through the bloc’s mutual defense pact. But ultimately, NATO membership remains the only surefire way to guarantee Ukraine’s long-term security. On this, there is still too much hesitancy in Western capitals.

NATO leaders need to realize that if Ukraine is again left in the waiting room, it will only encourage further conflict and instability. As Sweden and Finland have recognized—and as Russia’s invasions of Ukraine since 2014 have made abundantly clear—gray zones are danger zones when it comes to Russia. At this year’s NATO summit in Washington, leaders should call Putin’s bluff and issue an invitation for Ukraine to join the alliance. Membership would not happen overnight, but it would send an unequivocal message to Putin that he cannot stop the process and that his war is futile. In that way, a membership invitation for Ukraine can help pave the path to peace.

A destroyed Russian tank sits in a snow-covered wheat field in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region on Feb. 22, 2023. ANATOLII STEPANOVAFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Sanctions Need Time to Work

By Agathe Demarais, columnist at Foreign Policy and senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations

What have we learned from two years of Western financial and economic sanctions on Russia? Three themes will define the path forward. First, Moscow is winning the information war on sanctions, as the prevailing narrative is that these measures are ineffective. Arguing otherwise is difficult: The Kremlin and its backers do a great job at intimidating anyone who dares to highlight sanctions successes. (A genuine question: If sanctions really are useless, why is the Kremlin so busy trying to discredit them?) That the Western public debate appears skewed toward sanctions failures does not help, either. Newspaper headlines typically focus on circumvention schemes that support Russia’s efforts to get hold of semiconductors. Smuggling certainly exists, but the reality is more nuanced than splashy headlines suggest. The big picture is that Russian imports of top-notch technology have sunk by around 40 percent compared with prewar levels—at a time when Russia’s high-tech needs have probably never been higher. This is not enough to stop Moscow’s war machine, and more needs to be done to beef up export controls. Yet a 40 percent drop remains a significant, albeit untold, sanctions success.

Second, the impact of sanctions on Russian businesses is becoming increasingly visible, especially in sectors that have been deprived of Western equipment and know-how, such as aerospace and energy. Faced with gradual wear and tear while lacking access to U.S. and European technology, Russian firms face growing maintenance headaches. S7, a Siberian airline, had to ground its Airbus jets and reduce head count in January for lack of access to engine parts. In the same month, Lukoil, a major Russian oil refiner, had to shut down a cracking unit after a Western-made compressor broke down. More such stories are likely to emerge in 2024, illustrating the important fact that sanctions are a marathon, not a sprint. Their cumulative impact will be high and highlight the fact that, grand claims of unlimited Sino-Russian friendship notwithstanding, Chinese gear cannot fully meet Russia’s high-tech needs. At least not at this stage.

Third, the Western debate on the future of Russia’s central bank reserves will remain heated, dominating discussions among like-minded allies. On the one hand, the United States and Britain are pushing for Western countries to seize Russia’s foreign exchange assets and transfer them to Ukraine. Their argument is a moral one: The aggressor must pay. On the other hand, several European Union countries—including Belgium, France, and Germany—oppose this plan, arguing that it would undermine trust in Western financial infrastructure and currencies. The European Central Bank (and, more intriguingly, the International Monetary Fund) has joined this cautious camp. With most of Russia’s immobilized assets held in Belgium, nothing can happen without getting EU states on board. Yet Brussels, Paris, and Berlin will likely not budge, especially as trans-Atlantic relations enter a wait-and-see mode ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. As a result, a seizure of Russian reserves looks unlikely in 2024. Given the potential unintended consequences of such a move, this may not be bad news.

A Ukrainian service member carries a Leleka reconnaissance drone after it landed in the Donetsk region on June 27, 2023. GENYA SAVILOV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

How Ukraine Can Help Itself

By Franz-Stefan Gady, consulting senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies

To reduce its reliance on Western weapons deliveries, Ukraine is increasingly focusing on producing more of its own. The results have been evident, for example, in the Black Sea—where sea drones developed and produced in Ukraine have decimated the Russian fleet—and deep inside Russia itself, where there has been a sharp rise in reported explosions at defense-related facilities and infrastructure, such as refineries and fuel depots. While Kyiv rarely comments on these attacks, they are widely believed to come from Ukrainian-made drones.

These Ukrainian successes are important, but turning the tide in the war will require a decisive advantage in firepower on the battlefield, principally artillery munition and strike drones. That, in turn, will require a significant increase in military production not just in Europe and the United States but also in Ukraine itself. The challenge for Kyiv is substantial: Prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion, Ukrainian defense companies specialized in making Soviet-era equipment and struggled to meet the Ukrainian military’s demands for advanced weaponry. That’s why Ukraine’s 2024 defense budget still allocates the majority of procurement funds—about $6.8 billion—to purchases of foreign equipment.

As Ukraine scrambles to retool and expand its arms industry under wartime conditions, it’s getting help from Western governments, defense companies, and private initiatives. Germany’s Rheinmetall, for example, aims to begin producing armored vehicles in Ukraine this year. Kyiv’s Alliance of Defense Industries has recruited more than 60 companies, including dozens of foreign firms, to facilitate investment in the Ukrainian defense sector and localize production. Baykar, the Turkish manufacturer of the Bayraktar drone, announced this month that it had started construction of a drone factory in Ukraine.

There is substantial Western interest in Ukraine’s defense sector—in particular, homegrown drone technology. But Russian attacks still deter many U.S. and European defense contractors from investing in the country, since one Russian missile or drone could wipe out a multimillion-dollar investment. The Ukrainians have been trying to get around this risk by spreading production to smaller, dispersed facilities that are harder for Russian intelligence to detect and collectively wipe out.

Ukraine is also turning into a laboratory for new ways to develop and manufacture weapons. Without much government direction, private sector and citizen-run initiatives have created a decentralized innovation ecosystem for collaboration on electronic warfare systems, cybersecurity, strike drones, naval drones, loitering munitions, battle management technology, and more. Kyiv has set up coordination platforms that have generated hundreds of project applications from these initiatives, in turn producing dozens of defense contracts. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has also reformed and expedited its certification process, with new weapons directly tested on the battlefield. The challenge is not how to innovate but how to scale up production, given skilled labor shortages, supply chain bottlenecks, corruption, and Russian attacks.

One possible way forward is to expand Ukraine’s military industrial base on NATO territory using joint ventures with Western companies underwritten by a dedicated investment fund. That would not only give Ukraine a steady supply of NATO-standard weapons immune to political whims in the West but also send a strong signal to Moscow that it may not have time—and Western fickleness—on its side after all.

Ukrainian soldiers look up at a starry sky during night training in the Donetsk region on Aug. 17, 2023.LIBKOS/AP

Where Will the War Go From Here? It Depends.

By David Petraeus, chairman of the KKR Global Institute, former director of the CIA, and retired U.S. Army general

Any answer to a question about the future of Russia’s war in Ukraine has to begin with: It depends. Because the course of the war will, indeed, depend on a number of critical developments.

Foremost will be the level of assistance on which the U.S. Congress finally agrees. This is hugely significant, as Washington has supplied nearly as much military aid as all of Europe put together. What’s more, U.S. decisions on delivering certain types of weapons, such as Western tanks and aircraft, have often led the way for other countries.

Of equal importance—given that Europe has provided twice as much assistance to Ukraine as the United States when nonmilitary aid is included—will be the level of support from the European Union and its members, as well as other Western countries.

Also critical will be the U.S.-led effort to tighten sanctions and export controls on Russia—and cut off schemes to evade them. Despite considerable success so far, evasion schemes continue to evolve, and continued focus will be needed.

Within security assistance, several items will be particularly important. In the near term, these include systems that enable Ukraine to identify, track, and destroy incoming drones, rockets, missiles, and aircraft. Ukraine’s critical needs also include longer-range precision missiles, Western aircraft, artillery ammunition, and additional cluster munitions, which have proved particularly important in fending off Russian attacks.

Needless to say, the course of the war will also depend heavily on Ukrainian and Russian resolve—and their respective ability to recruit, train, equip, and employ additional forces and capabilities. As much as Russian President Vladimir Putin appears in control, one should not assume that the Russian people will continue to go along with his war as enormous casualties mount and quality of life erodes.

Much depends, as well, on each side’s ability to refine new unmanned capabilities, such as the impressive sea drones deployed by Ukraine to force Russia to withdraw most of the surviving Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol, Crimea, where it was based for more than two centuries. In fact, Ukraine’s campaign in the western Black Sea—using sea drones and missiles—has largely pushed Russian warships out and enabled Ukraine to restart large-scale grain exports that are critically important to Egypt and other countries.

Of enormous impact, as well, would be providing Ukraine with the nearly $300 billion in Russian reserves currently frozen in Western countries. This long-overdue initiative would also send a very important message to the Kremlin about Ukraine’s ability to repair the damage Russia has done and to build out its own military-industrial complex.

Finally, the course of the war will depend on each side’s ability to learn and adapt as the battlefield evolves; to develop, produce, and employ new weapons systems and other technologies; and to improve the capabilities of leaders, staffs, individual soldiers, and units.

This year promises to be another very difficult one for both countries’ military forces on the ground as well as their homefronts. Two years on, there does not appear to be a conceivable end to the war in sight.

Ukrainian soldiers ride an armored vehicle at the front line near Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Aug. 13, 2023. LIBKOS/AP

Western Divides Will Decide What’s Next

By C. Raja Mohan, columnist at Foreign Policy and visiting professor at the National University of Singapore

The lack of decisive military gains for Ukraine in 2023 has produced deep divisions within the West. These divisions might be unexpected, but they are not surprising. All major wars have a powerful effect on the domestic politics of the countries involved; military setbacks can often sharpen internal political crises. The unity in Europe and the West triggered by Russia’s invasion in February 2022 has now yielded to serious differences on the major issues relating to the pursuit of war and the terms of peace. These divisions are acute within the U.S. political class, between the United States and its European allies, between Western and Eastern Europe, and within Central Europe. Ukraine, which has paid an enormous price in defending itself against the Russian invasion, has also not been immune to differences on the conduct of war. All these open divisions stand in contrast to the apparent unity in Russia, which has seen President Vladimir Putin consolidate his position after the Wagner mercenary army’s astonishing mutiny and march on Moscow last June.

2024 will test the capacity of all sides to preserve internal coherence amid the war’s rapidly rising costs. While its authoritarian system might help Russia suppress its own domestic divisions, it is hard to believe that the massive economic and human costs of Putin’s war of choice will have no political impact. For now, though, the question is whether the West can prevent the multiple fault lines in Ukraine policy from becoming a split. On the face of it, the West’s massive economic superiority over Russia should readily allow Ukraine to prevail in a prolonged war with Moscow. The West has been slow in responding to this imperative, and 2024 can tell us if the West can devise a strategy for assisting and supplying Kyiv to hold the current line of contact with Russian forces in the short term and prevail over Putin in a war that will likely last longer than many expected when it began.

For Europe, the war in Ukraine offers two different paths. One is the continent’s rapid strategic diminution in relation to the United States and Asia as a result of Europe’s continuing reluctance to defend itself. The other is a path of geopolitical rejuvenation by strengthening its defense capabilities, developing a more strategic view of its role in the world, and thereby retaining a say in how the long-term balance of power in Eurasia is shaped. If Europe is ready to seriously address the security front, it will be easier to keep the Americans in and persuade a future Russian regime to discard its territorial expansionism in favor of security guarantees and a regional order in which Moscow can play a legitimate role. Alternatively, the Europeans should expect a future U.S. president to define the prospects for their continent in a direct negotiation with Moscow—and, for that matter, Beijing.

Source: Foreign Policy

Ukrainian soldiers drive a tank close to the front near Bakhmut in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, on Dec. 13, 2023. ANATOLI STEPANOV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Ukraine’s daring attack on a major Russian warship in occupied Crimea in the small hours of Dec. 26 was one more episode in Kyiv’s strategy to deny Russia control over the Black Sea. With most of its ships driven out of its home port in Sevastopol, the Russian Black Sea Fleet can no longer find safe haven anywhere along the Crimean Peninsula. All ports there are now vulnerable to attack.

The Institute for the Study of War tells the story with data, showing that Sevastopol saw a steady decline in the number of Russian naval vessels in port between June and December 2023; by contrast, Novorossiysk on the Russian mainland farther east showed a steady gain. While Russia has been going all-out to attack Ukraine’s infrastructure, its risky move to deploy ships and submarines armed with Kalibr missiles in the Black Sea is exposing them to potential Ukrainian attack. It is a tacit acknowledgment that Russia can no longer depend on Crimean ports and launch sites.

Ukraine’s success has been due to domestically produced missiles and drones, sometimes launched using Zodiac boats or jet skis. But its most potent attacks have come from the air, where Ukraine has used its Soviet-era fighter aircraft to launch both domestically produced and NATO-supplied missiles. These attacks have taken place with the protection of Ukraine’s advanced air defenses—including newly supplied foreign ones—which are regularly shooting down the majority of Russian missiles and drones destined for Ukrainian targets.

Ukraine thus has made significant strides denying Russia control of both the sea and airspace over and around its territory, thereby preventing the Russian Navy and Air Force from operating with impunity. But is that enough for Kyiv to win? To many Western observers, victory doesn’t seem possible in the face of wave after wave of Russian troops grinding down Ukrainian defenders. Ukraine’s strategy to deny Russia free use of its sea and airspace may be working, but as things stand, it cannot defeat the Russian army on the ground, nor can it defend against every missile striking civilian targets.

Indeed, the current conventional wisdom in large parts of the West is that Ukraine is losing the ground war, leaving no pathway to victory for the country as Russia pounds Ukrainian civilians into submission. Kyiv might as well call for a cease-fire and sue for peace.

The trouble with this scenario is that it spells defeat not only for Ukraine, but also for the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. It would embolden both Russia and China to pursue their political, economic, and security objectives undeterred—including the seizure of new territory in Eastern Europe and Taiwan.

But is the conventional wisdom right—or does Ukraine’s clever success at sea and in the air suggest that a different outcome is possible? Perhaps the Russian army can be defeated by making use of Ukraine’s willingness to fight in new ways. If you asked a U.S. military professional, the key to dislodging the Russians is to subject them to relentless and accurate air attacks that are well synchronized with the maneuver of combined arms forces on the ground. While the Ukrainians are admirably using the weapons at hand to strike Russian forces both strategically, as in Crimea, and operationally, as in hitting command and logistics targets, success at the tactical level has remained elusive. To achieve a tactical breakthrough on the ground front that leads to operational and strategic success, they will need to be more effective from the air.

For power from the air to be decisive in 2024, the Ukrainian Armed Forces must create temporary windows of localized air superiority in which to mass firepower and maneuver forces. Given the Ukrainians’ success in denying their airspace to Russia at points of their choosing, such windows are possible using the assets they already have at hand. More and better weapons tailored to this scenario would make them more successful across the entire front with Russia.

Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, acknowledges that to break out of the current positional stalemate—which favors Russia—and return to maneuver warfare, where Ukraine has an advantage, Ukrainian forces need air superiority, the ability to breach mine obstacles, better counter-battery capability, and more assets for electronic warfare. Specifically, he argues for three key components. First, armed UAVs that use real-time reconnaissance to coordinate attacks with artillery (which could include properly armed Turkish-built TB2s, MQ-1C Gray Eagles, MQ-9 Reapers, or bespoke cheap and light UAVs capable of employing the necessary weapons). Second, armed UAVs to suppress enemy air defenses, as well as medium-range surface-to-air missile simulators to deter Russian pilots. And third, unmanned vehicles to breach and clear mines.

Although the technologies are new, this combination of capabilities recalls the method U.S. and allied NATO forces practiced during the Cold War in West Germany to confront numerically superior Warsaw Pact ground forces protected by layered air defenses. The Joint Air Attack Team (JAAT) was developed to synchronize attack helicopters, artillery, and close air support by fighter planes to ensure a constant barrage of the enemy in case of a ground force attack. Pooling NATO assets in this way was designed to give the alliance’s forces the mass, maneuverability, and flexibility needed to overcome superior numbers, avoid a war of attrition, and escape the type of bloody slugfest that characterizes the current stalemate in Ukraine.

In Ukraine’s case, a modernized JAAT would encompass, among many things, armed UAVs carrying Maverick and Hellfire missiles, loitering munitions, precision-guided artillery shells, and extended-range standoff missiles fired by aircraft. These systems would be coordinated in an electromagnetic environment shaped by Ukrainian operators to dominate the local airspace, saturate the battlefield with munitions, and clear mines to open the way for a ground assault. This updated JAAT—let’s call it electronic, or eJAAT—would create a bubble of localized air superiority that would advance as the combined arms force advances under the bubble’s protection.

Given Russia’s willingness to endure significant casualty rates, the eJAAT could be even more effective on defense: Massing firepower against advancing troops through an eJAAT might result in a stunning rout of the attackers, opening opportunities for Ukraine to strategically exploit the sudden change of fortunes.

Zaluzhny has made it publicly clear that “the decisive factor will be not a single new invention, but will come from combining all the technical solutions that already exist.” Like all good commanders, Zaluzhny is painfully aware that the 2023 campaign didn’t work as well as he had intended. Even so, and to their advantage, the Ukrainians have clearly demonstrated their innovative talents, willingness to exploit Western methods, and total commitment to victory. U.S. and European assistance to work with them on how to better manage operational complexity and combine technology, information, and tactics in more dynamic ways, coupled with security assistance tailored to the eJAAT approach, would return movement to the now-static battlefield and give Ukraine a fighting chance.

If Ukraine can achieve the momentum in the ground war that evaded it during its failed summer offensive, Kyiv will have a real pathway to victory. That pathway will run through Ukraine’s demonstrated prowess at sea and in the air, joined to an embrace of a sophisticated combination of techniques on the ground. It will be a pathway to victory not only for Ukraine, but also for the United States and its allies.

Source: Foreign Policy

The USS Nimitz and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force and South Korean Navy warships sail in formation during a joint naval exercise off the South Korean coast on April 4. SOUTH KOREAN DEFENSE MINISTRY VIA GETTY IMAGES

The United States is a heartbeat away from a world war that it could lose. There are serious conflicts requiring U.S. attention in two of the world’s three most strategically important regions. Should China decide to launch an attack on Taiwan, the situation could quickly escalate into a global war on three fronts, directly or indirectly involving the United States. The hour is late, and while there are options for improving the U.S. position, they all require serious effort and inevitable trade-offs. It’s time to move with real urgency to mobilize the United States, its defenses, and its allies for what could become the world crisis of our time.

The United States is a heartbeat away from a world war that it could lose. There are serious conflicts requiring U.S. attention in two of the world’s three most strategically important regions. Should China decide to launch an attack on Taiwan, the situation could quickly escalate into a global war on three fronts, directly or indirectly involving the United States. The hour is late, and while there are options for improving the U.S. position, they all require serious effort and inevitable trade-offs. It’s time to move with real urgency to mobilize the United States, its defenses, and its allies for what could become the world crisis of our time.

Describing the United States’ predicament in such stark terms may strike many readers as alarmist. The United States has long been the most powerful nation on earth. It won two world wars, defeated the Soviet Union, and still possesses the world’s top military. For the past year and a half, the United States has been imposing gigantic costs on Russia by supporting Ukraine—so much so that it seemed conceivable to this author that the United States might be able to sequence its contests by inflicting a decisive defeat-by-proxy on Russia before turning its primary attention to strengthening the U.S. military posture in the Indo-Pacific.

But that strategy is becoming less viable by the day. As Russia mobilizes for a long war in Ukraine and a new front opens in the Levant, the temptation will grow for a rapidly arming China to make a move on Taiwan. Already, Beijing is testing Washington in East Asia, knowing full well that the United States would struggle to deal with a third geopolitical crisis. If war does come, the United States would find some very important factors suddenly working against it.

One of those factors is geography. As the last two U.S. National Defense Strategies made clear and the latest congressional strategic posture commission confirmed, today’s U.S. military is not designed to fight wars against two major rivals simultaneously. In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the United States would be hard-pressed to rebuff the attack while keeping up the flow of support to Ukraine and Israel.

This isn’t because the United States is in decline. It’s because unlike the United States, which needs to be strong in all three of these places, each of its adversaries—China, Russia, and Iran—only has to be strong in its own home region to achieve its objectives.

The worst-case scenario is an escalating war in at least three far-flung theaters, fought by a thinly stretched U.S. military alongside ill-equipped allies that are mostly unable to defend themselves against large industrial powers with the resolve, resources, and ruthlessness to sustain a long conflict. Waging this fight would require a scale of national unity, resource mobilization, and willingness to sacrifice that Americans and their allies have not seen in generations.

The United States has fought multifront wars before. But in past conflicts, it was always able to outproduce its opponents. That’s no longer the case: China’s navy is already bigger than the United States’ in terms of sheer number of ships, and it’s growing by the equivalent of the entire French Navy (about 130 vessels, according to the French naval chief of staff) every four years. By comparison, the U.S. Navy plans an expansion by 75 ships over the next decade.

A related disadvantage is money. In past conflicts, Washington could easily outspend adversaries. During World War II, the U.S. national debt-to-GDP ratio almost doubled, from 61 percent of GDP to 113 percent. By contrast, the United States would enter a conflict today with debt already in excess of 100 percent of GDP.

Assuming a rate of expansion similar to that of World War II, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the debt could swell to 200 percent of GDP or higher. As the Congressional Budget Office and other sources have noted, debt loads on that scale would risk catastrophic consequences for the U.S. economy and financial system.

A global conflict would bring on other perils. Two U.S. rivals—Russia and Iran—are major oil producers. One recent report found that a prolonged closure of the Hormuz Strait amid a broader Middle Eastern conflict could push oil prices beyond $100 per barrel, substantially increasing inflationary pressures. China is a major holder of U.S. debt, and a sustained sell-off by Beijing could drive up yields in U.S. bonds and place further strains on the economy. It’s reasonable to assume that Americans would face shortages in everything from electronics to home-building materials.

All of that pales alongside the human costs that the United States could suffer in a global conflict. Large numbers of U.S. service members would likely die. Some of the United States’ adversaries have conventional and nuclear capabilities that can reach the U.S. homeland; others have the ability to inspire or direct Hamas-style terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, which may be easier to carry out given the porous state of the U.S. southern border.

Source: Foreign Policy

French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Élysée Palace in Paris ahead of negotiations about Ukraine, on Dec. 9, 2019. CHESNOT/GETTY IMAGES

As Russia’s war against Ukraine approaches its third winter, there is still no end in sight. The drip feed of Western military aid is enough for Ukraine to keep fighting but insufficient to liberate all its territory. At the same time, despite continued popular support for Kyiv’s cause in Western countries, there is plenty of talk about Western war fatigue, with increasing behind-the-scenes debate about a possible compromise to end or freeze the war.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine approaches its third winter, there is still no end in sight. The drip feed of Western military aid is enough for Ukraine to keep fighting but insufficient to liberate all its territory. At the same time, despite continued popular support for Kyiv’s cause in Western countries, there is plenty of talk about Western war fatigue, with increasing behind-the-scenes debate about a possible compromise to end or freeze the war.

A compromise would be premature for a number of familiar reasons. First, neither side is ready for serious negotiations. Regaining control over Ukraine may not be existential for Russia’s survival, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed, but it could very well become a matter of life and death for Putin himself. For Ukraine, the fight is existential, and Western leaders have said again and again that it is for Ukraine to decide when to negotiate and on what conditions. That mantra is flawed, however, since we already know that Ukraine wants to keep fighting. By holding back on crucial weapons deliveries, Western countries are partly responsible for Ukraine not advancing as fast as it and its supporters would wish.

Second, violence in Russian-occupied territories will not stop as long as these territories remain under Moscow’s control. Freezing the conflict is therefore a non-starter for the Ukrainians who have seen the horrors perpetrated by Russians in Bucha, Irpin, and countless other towns and villages. This is well understood by Ukraine’s neighbors, which have their own experience of Russian and Soviet occupation. It means living under fear, unfreedom, and the constant threat of violence.

These arguments against seeking a settlement any time soon will be familiar to readers following the war. Less discussed—but much more fundamental for all of Europe—is what a settlement would mean for the future European security order. If the war were frozen, not only would Russia be rewarded for its attack. It would also hold on to its goal of fundamentally revising the European security order and reestablishing its sphere of influence.

It should be very clear that Moscow’s understanding of the principles and norms of European security is incompatible with Western views. As we can see in Ukraine, the Kremlin equates security with control, which has deep roots in Russian history and foreign policy. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

The tradition of Russia as a land-hungry empire goes back in a straight line to medieval Muscovy, which transformed into an expansionist state under the rule of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century. Ivan, also known for his cruelty in torturing and massacring his own people, has been rehabilitated and celebrated under Putin’s rule, while Putin himself has adopted another torture-loving Russian empire builder, Peter the Great, as his role model.

Another key Russian foreign-policy tradition is the idea that the European security order should be based on agreements among the major powers over the heads of smaller ones. Since 2014, the Kremlin has repeatedly made references to the Congress of Vienna, which redrew the map of Europe in the early 1800s, and the Yalta Conference, the British-Soviet-U.S. meeting in February 1945 that divided Europe into two spheres of influence. From the Russian perspective, both agreements laid the foundation for decades-long stability. The price of that stability, however, is painfully known to the countries affected by Russian domination. The Vienna agreement wiped Poland off the map as a sovereign state for a century, and Yalta doomed half of Europe to more than 40 years of Soviet occupation and totalitarian rule.

Europe’s post-Cold War order has brought unprecedented levels of freedom, sovereignty, and prosperity to Russia’s western neighbors. Most of the former Eastern Bloc countries used their sovereignty to make a decisive turn to the West. Among the former Soviet republics, the Baltic states’ Western turn was fast and determined; Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova tried to follow later and are still struggling for the right to choose their future place in Europe, including membership in the European Union. The EU’s decision-making structures underpin a fundamentally different order compared with being part of a Russian-controlled zone: The bloc gives substantial power to smaller states, even as members delegate some aspects of sovereignty to supranational institutions. Staying in the gray zone between Russia and the EU, as Ukraine has done, proved to be the least stable option.

Russia never felt comfortable with post-Cold War developments in European security. It frequently complained about not being treated as an equal by the West—yet Russia’s and Europe’s definitions of equality are very different. For Russia, it means being on par with other great powers, notably the United States, and not with its sovereign neighbors, whose agency it has consistently denied. Because it does not see them as equals, Moscow also has little interest in what Berlin or Paris has to say, let alone Brussels. That clouds every aspect of how Russia views its neighbors. When hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets during the 2004 Orange Revolution to protest against their corrupt and dishonest government—and again during the Maidan Revolution in late 2013 and early 2014—all Moscow could see was a supposed U.S. plot to weaken Russia.

In 2009, then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed a new European security treaty in an attempt to defend what Russia considered its legitimate security interests, now allegedly being trod on by the West. Using code language such as “indivisibility of security,” what Moscow really seemed to seek was to confine NATO to the Cold War-era West and gain veto right over the alliance’s decisions if Russia considered them contrary to its very different definition of security.

In December 2021, as Russian forces were massing to invade Ukraine, the Kremlin made a renewed attempt to promote its vision of a European security order in two documents addressed to NATO and the United States. This time the ambiguity was gone and the revisionist aims clear: a full restoration of Moscow’s Cold War-era sphere of influence and the pushback of NATO’s presence in Europe to the line before its eastward expansion in the 1990s. These aims remain unchanged and reflect Russia’s long-term strategic thinking. Western efforts since the Cold War to build a common European order with Russia have clearly failed.

If Russia achieves its strategic goal of reestablishing control over Ukraine, even in part, it will ratify Russia’s efforts to impose its vision of order on its European neighbors. But even if Russia is defeated and has to leave all occupied territories in Ukraine, it will not easily give up its centuries-old understanding of itself as an empire and major power entitled to privileged rights in its sphere of influence. Unlike some empires that were wound down in the past—such as Nazi Germany and imperial Japan—Russia will not be totally defeated. It will not be occupied by foreign powers or be forced to go through a profound system change. Russia’s imminent transformation to a status quo power that accepts its post-Cold War place in Europe, let alone further enlargement of the EU and NATO, is therefore unlikely.

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously argued in the 1990s that Russia cannot be an empire without Ukraine. Russian propagandists claim that Russia can only exist as an empire or not exist at all. Rejecting this claim will be an essential precondition for a post-imperial Russia to emerge.

Another precondition will be for Russia to acknowledge its neighbors as sovereign states and not mere puppets doing Washington’s bidding. Where the Kremlin—echoed by so-called realists in the West—is profoundly wrong with regard to its Ukraine war is the idea that world history is written by the major powers. If that were true, the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and Ukraine would have no reason to exist today as sovereign states. One of the big unintended consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that it has demonstrated and strengthened the agency of Russia’s neighbors. A new power bloc in NATO now stretches from Scandinavia to the Black Sea. Poland and Ukraine are becoming leading military powers in Europe. Their contribution to European defense will be much needed in coming years and decades.

We should not expect a common understanding between the West and Russia on European security to emerge anytime soon—and certainly not as part of a negotiated agreement that would at least partially reward Russia for its dismemberment of Ukraine. It is therefore necessary to envisage a future European security order not with Russia but against it, aimed at deterring further Russian threats and defending European democracies against the Kremlin’s authoritarian, revisionist, and imperialist ambitions.

This would be a dual order similar in some ways to the Cold War era. Then, Western democracies created their own liberal rules-based structures, notably NATO and the EU, while pursuing a containment policy against the Soviet Union and engaging in ideological, economic, military, and technological competition with the Eastern Bloc. Such a new European order would, however, be inherently unstable, not least because the global context has profoundly changed since the Cold War. The United States’ commitment to European security is undermined by both domestic political turbulence and a geostrategic environment where the main U.S. competitor is now China, not Russia. At the same time, the world is no longer bipolar but has multiple competing and interconnected centers of power.

In spite of these changes, the future European order will most likely be characterized by a long-term Russian threat and an antagonistic relationship with Moscow, much as during the Cold War. Russia will continue to reject a new balance of power that shrinks its former Soviet and tsarist sphere of influence, while the West will continue to reject the very principle of spheres of influence. Russia would seek to revise the balance of power as soon as it rebuilds its military capability. In order to make the new order in Europe more sustainable, the West will need to pursue a proactive containment policy, including credible deterrence and defense, full integration of Ukraine and other countries in NATO and the EU, and restrictions on Russia’s ability to restore its military strength.

No matter where one stands on negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, the fundamental question of Europe’s future security order cannot be ignored.

Source: Foreign Policy

U.S. President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev shake hands after holding a press conference in Moscow on July 31, 1991. REUTERS/RICK WILKING

In August 1991, then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush was in Kyiv to counsel Ukrainians against statehood. Only weeks before Ukraine declared independence and only months before the Soviet Union was dissolved, Bush worried about the collapse of Soviet authority. These worries were echoed at the time by other Western leaders, including German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Without Moscow’s continued control over its empire, they feared, the country’s future would be marked by nationalism, ethnic conflicts, and nuclear weapons getting into irresponsible hands. These leaders, for all their achievements managing the end of the Cold War, were on the wrong side of history on this fundamental question of self-determination for Moscow’s captive peoples. Luckily, Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics that are now independent did not listen.

Today, we are witnessing similar fears in Western capitals. With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime in a downward spiral due to the Kremlin’s disastrous war against Ukraine, the Russian regime’s collapse and even Russia’s possible disintegration have become a major cause of concern. Support for the war among Russian citizens has decreased, domestic criticism has grown despite harsh repression, and hundreds of thousands of men have fled the country since Putin announced a partial mobilization in late September.

Once again, the West is hesitant about the right way to manage these tensions and could be making the same mistake as in 1991. Several Western leaders have been showing fear of a Ukrainian victory in the ongoing war against Russia—a prospect that many have found hard to get across their lips. The result is a series of equivocating statements that tiptoe around the issue of the endgame of the war. Instead of finding clear words about a Ukrainian victory, leaders are focusing on denying Putin the success he seeks. The furthest German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will go is to declare that Putin “cannot win.” French President Emmanuel Macron, who has missed no opportunity to announce his desire to negotiate with Putin, has even suggested that any end to the Kremlin’s genocidal war must not humiliate the Russian leader.

Beneath the surface of remarkable trans-Atlantic unity opposing Russia’s war against Ukraine, therefore, there is still a yawning gap between the concerns of Russia’s immediate neighbors and those of countries farther west. Washington, Berlin, and Paris are preoccupied with their fears of escalation and the potential of a cornered Putin using nuclear weapons, and they have denied Ukraine the offensive weapons it needs to win the war. For instance, the United States only decided to provide Ukraine with advanced High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems starting in June—but secretly installed features that would prevent their use with longer-range rockets and thereby deny the Ukrainians the ability to attack military bases on Russian territory, as was widely reported this week. Germany, despite pressure from Ukraine and some NATO allies, has consistently refused to supply Leopard battle tanks (or even allow other countries to supply them) that would be hugely helpful for Ukraine to liberate occupied territories.

Any look at the history of empires shows that only a clear defeat can force a change in Russian thinking.

The Baltic states and Poland do not fear any real or imagined escalation as much as a Russian victory. They have therefore provided Kyiv with as much military aid as they can, outpacing many other countries when measured relative to the size of their economies. And they have made their frustration with Western handwringing clear. From the viewpoint of these countries, the West’s inconsistent and constantly shifting limits on the kinds of weapons it will deliver unnecessarily prolong the war, increase Ukraine’s death toll and civilian suffering, and raise the chance that Putin may yet turn the war’s tide. He has not moved away from his declared goal of destroying Ukrainian statehood and can only be pushed back by force—the sooner, the better, NATO members closer to Russia argue.

It is ironic that Western Europeans are more afraid of escalation than countries closer to Russia, even though the latter would be directly affected by any escalation of the war. Beyond the flow of refugees, the war has, in fact, already reached their soil. When, during one of Russia’s many attacks on civilian infrastructure, a Ukrainian air defense missile landed on Polish territory and killed two people on Nov. 15, Poles saw the incident as proof that Ukraine needs more Western military aid, not less. If Russia were to use nuclear weapons or, more likely, attack a Ukrainian nuclear power plant, nuclear fallout would reach neighboring countries first. They would also face the biggest burden of any new waves of Ukrainian refugees—but are willing and prepared to receive them.

Being the object of Russia’s imperial policies from the 1700s to the present day has taught the Baltic countries and Poland to fear Russian strength more than weakness—and to fear Russia’s potential victory in Ukraine much more than its defeat. The 20th century alone saw three major upheavals in Europe, each of them with existential consequences for the three Baltic states and Poland. These countries gained their independence as a result of World War I, were twice occupied by the Soviet Union during and after World War II, and only reestablished their independence from Moscow with the end of the Cold War. Feb. 24, the start of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine since 2014, was another such fateful moment. In some Western capitals, the initial instinct was to accept what they saw as Ukraine’s unavoidable defeat and not prolong the conflict by sending arms. The immediate instinct of the Baltic states and Poland, on the other hand, was to do everything possible to assist Ukraine and prevent a Russian victory.

Unlike Western governments, the Baltic states and Poland have been paying close attention to what Putin and the Russian elites actually say, including their clearly stated intent of reestablishing Moscow’s imperial sphere of control. The invasion opens up two perspectives: Either Russia violently reimposes its influence over its neighbors, starting with Ukraine and continuing with other states it formerly controlled, or Ukraine reaffirms its freedom and eventually joins the Euro-Atlantic community as a full-fledged member, like the Baltics and former members of the Soviet bloc have done. Anything in between—a cease-fire that freezes the conflict, for instance—will allow Putin or his successor to rearm, resupply, and give it another go. For Ukraine to secure its freedom, Russia must suffer a clear defeat in Ukraine.

That’s not to say that concerns related to Russia’s nuclear weapons shouldn’t be taken seriously. Managing the threat requires a mix of prudence and firmness from the West. Because of an overabundance of prudence, however, Russia has managed to smartly manipulate fears of a nuclear Armageddon to maintain the West’s self-imposed constraints on sending heavier and longer-range weapons to Ukraine. Thankfully, the West is now relearning deterrence—including clear messaging to Russia about the devastating consequences it would suffer if it were to follow through on its nuclear threats. It is in the interest of global stability that the Kremlin does not succeed in using nuclear blackmail to eke out a victory in Ukraine. What’s more, Russia resorting to nuclear weapons carries great risk for Putin and is therefore highly unlikely. Russia using conventional force to occupy territories in neighboring countries, unfortunately, is a devastating reality.

Moscow is unlikely to give up its imperialist designs on neighboring countries anytime soon, and any look at the history of empires shows that only a clear defeat can force a change in thinking. The idea that Russia is only secure if it dominates its smaller neighbors and controls a sphere of influence is deeply rooted in centuries of Russian thought. No smaller neighbor of Russia has yet managed to achieve truly friendly relations: Even Finland, which tried just about everything short of letting itself be occupied, has given up and is on the way to joining NATO. In all likelihood, the next Russian leader will emerge from within the current system dominated by the security forces—and represent the same values and worldview now on display in Ukraine. Russia’s disintegration seems much less likely than the continuation of centralized, autocratic, and oppressive rule.

In spite of the realities staring them in the face, some Western leaders still hold on to hopes of returning to a version of the old status quo with Russia. Scholz, as he hems and haws on military assistance to Ukraine, hopes that “we can come back to a peace order that worked and make it safe again.” Russia’s neighbors are left to wonder what “order that worked” Scholz might mean. During the Cold War, large parts of Central and Eastern Europe were occupied. In the 1990s, Russia instigated wars and frozen conflicts in post-Soviet states in order to keep them under its control. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and has been fighting and occupying Ukraine since 2014. Western governments issued a few diplomatic statements and minor sanctions but endorsed Russia’s sphere of influence by blocking Ukraine’s and Georgia’s aspirations to join the European Union and NATO. This caution was motivated by the wish to reduce tensions and ensure stability but ultimately encouraged Russia to impose its “order that worked” by force.

Today, the most stable part of Russia’s immediate neighborhood are those countries that have joined NATO and the EU following their own choice and efforts to break free from Moscow’s domination. Ukraine has embarked on the same path, supported by more than 80 percent of its citizens. In the 1990s, the Baltic states had to overcome strong suspicions in Western capitals about the wisdom of extending the EU and NATO to any former Soviet republics. Some Western observers continue to echo the Kremlin’s claims that NATO enlargement is to blame for Russia’s growing aggressiveness. Yet Russia’s neighbors know all too well that NATO did not cause Russia’s aggressive imperialism, which existed for centuries before the alliance was even born. On the contrary, NATO enlargement has turned out to be the most successful means of containing it. When deterred by a superior force, Russia backs down.

The Ukrainians’ courage and determination to defend their independence is a historic chance for the United States and Europe to deliver a decisive blow to Russian imperialism and toxic nationalism. But so far, the major Western powers hesitate to throw their weight behind this outcome. Ukraine, strongly supported by the Baltic countries and Poland, insists that Russia must be fought, isolated, and sanctioned until it completely withdraws from Ukraine, pays reparations for war damage, and delivers Russians accused of war crimes to face trial. This will be a long process requiring a change in Western thinking, but it is unavoidable if past mistakes of handling Russian aggression are to be corrected. Eventually, a free and democratic Ukraine, secure in its borders and fully integrated into the trans-Atlantic community, will be the best possible chance for a deep transformation within Russia. It is that outcome—about which the West should be clear—that could one day open up a truly peaceful, post-imperial era in Russia’s relations with its neighbors.

Source: Foreign Policy