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Russia’s invasion managed to bring the entire nongeographic West into still firmer alignment.
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By Dr. Stephen Kotkin
John P. Birkelund ’52 Professor in History and International Affairs, Emeritus
Princeton University
An analyst who had been asked, in 1939, to assess the Soviet invasion of Finland in the Winter War, when shocking Soviet failures and stout Finnish successes were widely noted, might have looked quite the fool in 1940 when the Red Army smashed its way to victory with superior mass and firepower and Moscow imposed a draconian peace. Analyzing a war with the fighting underway requires utmost caution, not definitive statements. That applies no less to Russia’s criminal aggression against Ukraine, which—as 2024 began—was entering its third year at full scale and tenth since the seizure of Crimea in 2014. That said, we can take stock of what has transpired and place events within a broad context.
Let us begin with a marvel: four great victories in 2022. First, Ukraine successfully defended its sovereignty and independence, preventing Russian forces from seizing its capital or overturning its elected government. Second, the members of the Western alliance achieved a higher degree of unity and resolve, and a strong sense of renewed purpose, responding vigorously to Moscow’s aggression. Third, Russia’s vaunted, large, and modernized military, and especially its president, Vladimir Putin, were humiliated—not defeated strategically but exposed for searing incompetence, corruption, and rot. Fourth, the Chinese leadership discredited itself, particularly in the eyes of Europe but also East Asia, for its strong rhetorical and, soon enough, material support for Russia’s wanton violation of international law, effectively blowing up its own grand strategy of inserting a wedge between the European Union and the United States on China policy. These four victories—Ukrainian sovereignty, Western unity, Russian humiliation, and Chinese self-discrediting—were astonishing. I certainly did not foresee them in 2014, or in early 2022. We should not lose sight of this marvel.
Worth noting here as well is a strategic irony. From the vantage point of Washington, Ukraine’s valor and ingenuity, against Russia’s criminal assault and Beijing’s backing of it, managed to bring the entire nongeographic West—the community of states encompassing North America, Europe, and Asia’s first island chain, down to Australia—into still firmer alignment on the basis of their shared values and shared institutions. The much-hoped-for American pivot to Asia, to counter China more systematically, turned out to involve enhanced Transatlanticism.
Any strategist would want to consolidate these four great victories. That is, they would want to take them off the table and make sure they were not at risk of reversal.
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But the Ukrainians are the ones doing the fighting and the dying. These were fundamentally their victories, and they have a different view. Their view entails a just peace, which their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, defined as regaining all Ukrainian territory recognized under international law, extracting reparations for all the terrible destruction, and imposing war crimes tribunals on those responsible. One is hard-pressed to understand how such a peace would be feasible, short of marching on and conquering Moscow. At an emotional level, it is eminently understandable, given the accumulating documentation of Russian atrocities, from the deliberate killing of civilians to the annihilation and looting of Ukrainian cultural artifacts to wipe out evidence of the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation. Indeed, not only the individual acts but the entire war itself is an atrocity. A just but elusive peace has been allowed to eclipse an unsatisfying but attainable one, however. As a result, each of the four great victories of 2002 remains in play. One could even argue that they were placed at risk, effectively, for the aim of retaking the Sea of Azov littoral in 2023. In late 2022, Ukraine’s leadership could potentially have threatened a massive offensive to demand an unconditional armistice while building up but also husbanding materiel and fighters. But Ukrainian societal expectations, whatever Putin’s position, made such a farsighted strategy difficult.
Let us go deeper on this point, though. Economics wields very powerful tools, models with far-reaching explanatory power. There is a subtlety, however. The models depend on a qualifying phrase, “all other factors held constant.” With that, the models obtain their analytical force. In geopolitics, all other factors can never be held constant. Something was going to happen somewhere, sometime, to alter the context for Ukraine. It could have been in a place few people were watching closely or a place nearly everyone was watching, and yet still transpired in surprising ways. During the entire first two years of the expanded war against Ukraine, I found myself declaiming that something, somewhere, was going to happen, and I’ve found myself admitting, again and again, that I was wrong: nothing momentous happened to shift the context around Ukraine. Until the bolt from the blue on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters from Gaza rampaged into Israeli territory. The revival of war in the region changed, not completely but partially, the context for Ukraine, and not for the better as far as Kyiv is concerned. Going forward, more events around the world, not to mention in Washington and European capitals, could affect the calculation of the stakes and the commitments for, as well as the course of events in, Ukraine.
For some analysts, such an observation might reinforce calls for still greater, still faster delivery of material support for Ukraine right now. For others, though, it might underscore the urgency of taking the four great victories of 2022 off the table before they can be undone. Ukraine’s great victories, for itself and its partners, are perishable.
Every day the war continues is a bad day for Ukraine and, for the most part, a good one for Putin, which is why Ukraine needs an armistice. Putin and his forces are wrecking another country. He has his own country, and however rapaciously he covets Ukraine, ultimately he does not need it. Ukraine needs Ukraine. Even if Putin falls far short of his maximalist aims of installing a puppet regime in Kyiv, he wins a lesser but still major victory by denying a peaceful, prosperous Ukraine to Ukrainians. In other words, he wins even without winning.
All wars essentially begin as wars of maneuver. A belligerent attacks and, for a time, moves forward, taking territory, prisoners, and loot. Unless that aggressor attains a quick victory, the conflict devolves into a war of attrition. It can be a month. It can be three months, or six. At some point, absent a lighting victory, the parties find themselves in a war of attrition. Attempts to transform a war of attrition back into a war of maneuver—for example, with a miracle counteroffensive—historically have proven exceedingly difficult.1 And that’s even before we take into account the advent of near total drone-furnished battlefield transparency.
To be sure, there are cases when, following a relatively quick battlefield victory, the defeated party refuses to accept its fate and mounts an insurgency, which usually provokes a counterinsurgency. The Arabs and Palestinians have been defeated in the war against Israel, beginning in 1948 and numerous times thereafter. Their leadership refuses to accept defeat, however, and has mounted a multigenerational insurgency. Each time renewed conflict erupts at scale, one could argue, it worsens the Palestinian position, with the costs imposed largely on their civilian population. By the same token, Israel has won the war but failed to win the peace. Yet this insurgency-counterinsurgency pattern, prevalent in the past as well as today, does not apply to the case of Ukraine and Russia, so far.
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Wars of attrition are governed by just two variables, on each side: the capacity to fight and the will to fight. A country’s capacity to fight is not what it has on the battlefield at any given time. It is what that country’s population and draft board, as well as its defense-industrial complex and imports, can put onto the field to replace anyone and anything that gets annihilated. In other words, the capacity to fight is not the number of tanks or airplanes or drones a country has but the number of assembly lines and workers to produce them, or partners to sell them. It is not the number of soldiers on the front lines or even the number in reserve but the number available for call-ups, today and tomorrow. If the West supplies Ukraine with a tank, its life expectancy, even with luck, can be counted in weeks, perhaps days. Then it will need to go into the mechanical shops, if it can be salvaged, or harvested for spare parts.
On the Russian side, neither variable is sufficiently in play. Russia’s defense production capabilities on home soil are not being bombed or sabotaged at scale. On the contrary, not only do they continue to turn out war materiel but they are doing so in a greater quantity now than before the wider invasion of February 2022. Geography also contributes to Russian resilience. China, North Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and other countries that border Russia or that border countries that border Russia, whether out of self-interest, anti-Westernism, or both, have been serving as vigorous suppliers or transit points for Russia’s war effort. It’s impossible to blockade Eurasia.
To be sure, severe sanctions and export controls have been intended to exert pressure on Russia’s capacity to fight. Others in this volume address the effectiveness of these measures, the feasibility of enforcing them strictly in the real world, and their perverse and unintended consequences. Suffice it to say that besides Eurasian geography, relationships dating back to the Soviet era, the global demand for energy (particularly outside Europe), and the adaptability of Russian companies, among other factors, have significantly blunted the hoped-for impact of sanctions and export controls in the short and perhaps medium term.
Without direct bombing of Russia and a blockade across a major stretch of the earth, Ukraine can destroy vast quantities of Russian weaponry—which they have been doing—and still make little to no progress. Ukraine can kill or wound several hundred thousand soldiers fighting for Russia, which they have done, but if Russia can more or less replace them, one for one, which they have been doing, Ukraine can make little to no progress.
This leaves Russia’s will to fight. The government has been able to pay recruits from the provinces, who otherwise have few if any career prospects, some nine or even ten times the median monthly wage, a highly attractive proposition. If they happen to be killed, their families receive payouts exceeding lifetime earnings in most cases. The regime has been extra cautious not to entangle in the war too many middle- and upper-class families of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the war is not viewed as an economic opportunity and where political opposition could cascade. For some fighters, the Donbas and other locales resonate as historically Russian territories, in line with regime propaganda. (Several cities in southern and southeastern Ukraine date their founding to Catherine the Great, from Sevastopol to Dnipro and Kherson.) The regime also continues to draw from its prisons—murderers might not seem cut out to make good soldiers, unless the war is essentially murder. (In some instances, prisoners who have served their time at the front and earned pardons have gone back to Russia and committed more crimes, replenishing the prison population to draw upon.) True, the regime has bruited raising the eligibility age from 51 to 65, and to 70 for officers, which is above the male life expectancy, but for now Russian manpower needs appear to be sustainable.
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Russia’s will to fight is ultimately a question not solely of contract fighters and prisoners but of its leader, who shows few signs of feeling under pressure. On the contrary, Putin’s trademark cockiness has been on full view. (More on that to follow.)
On the Ukrainian side, by contrast, both variables are at play. Ukrainian capacity to fight is under massive pressure, in part because so much of it still comes from outside the country. Ukraine is likely to remain dependent for weapons and war materiel on Europe and the United States. These backers have been sending stocks without, for the most part, significantly increasing production lines. European stocks were already low and have come close to exhaustion, while any new production, at scale, of artillery munitions or other crucial elements of land-warfare fires has lagged, predictably. In a sign of the stock depletion trend, the United States borrowed munitions from South Korea, which constitutionally was not allowed to send them directly to a war zone. Washington was also compelled to supply Ukraine with American cluster munitions, which European countries have outlawed and which initially even the Americans had hesitated to contemplate.
War can be unpredictable, and individual battles can be highly contingent, but longer-term considerations structure outcomes more. No one could be surprised at the severe erosion of Ukraine’s capacity to fight—it has been foreseeable since the end of 2022, if not longer. Simply put, Ukraine and its partners have not been able to replace what they have been expending and what the Russians have been destroying. Sure, some analysts have faulted the Europeans and Americans for failing to ramp up defense production lines to support Ukraine all this time while exhausting stocks. But the reasons that prevented timely investments in production of new munitions are the same ones that caused the situation whereby such belated increases became necessary. A lot of things that should happen do not happen.
Ukrainians’ will to fight has remained strong despite the duration and intensity of the suffering on home soil (the war has barely touched Russia’s territory). How long that endures remains to be seen. Unlike Russia, Ukraine is an open society and partially democratic system that cannot send its people into a meat grinder with little or no regard for casualty numbers. Moreover, Ukraine’s will to fight lies not merely in its government and people but in its partners, in the United States and Europe, principally, and in East Asia and Australia. At the beginning of the war, I devised a simple equation to understand its trajectory.
Ukrainian valor/ingenuity + Russian atrocities = Western unity and resolve.
There was never a reason to doubt the persistence of Russian atrocities. And for a long time, Ukrainian valor and ingenuity held. But Ukraine’s self-inflicted debacle at Bakhmut, a strategically meaningless city its civilian leadership opted to defend—for political and information-war reasons—unsuccessfully and at an exorbitantly high cost, began to chip away at that vital part of the equation. In some ways, the 2023 spring-summer-fall counteroffensive was meant to restore this variable to peak strength. But beyond the blatant fact that Ukraine (no more than Russia) could not execute a combined arms operation at scale, attempting to do so achieved more than Russia could have on the battlefield at the time: it struck a deep blow to Ukraine’s fighting image and thereby softened Western unity and resolve.
A smaller country—a democracy, however flawed, whose casualties reverberate publicly—found itself in a ghastly attritional war against a far larger country—a dictatorship that does not value life or permit free public debate about it. What is more, the smaller country has been fighting for territory against one with immense strategic depth. If Ukraine’s counteroffensive Hail Mary had been wildly successful in recapturing the territory it sought, it would have converted the current 600-mile-wide front into a 1200-mile one, for unless Russia’s capacity to fight suddenly vanished and/or its will to fight was demolished, Putin’s forces could continue to lob missiles and, at some point, come back in force. Putin does not require a pause to rebuild his war capacity: he has been doing so while fighting.
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The key to any war is to win the peace. A country can win the war and lose the peace. The United States did just that in Afghanistan. Arguably, it also did that in Iraq, although differences of opinion persist over the outcome and it might be too early to assay a definitive judgment. Be that as it may, the principle holds: a battlefield victory can be squandered, as history has shown time and again. Paradoxically, a country can lose a war and win the peace. Arguably the United States did just that in Vietnam, for, notwithstanding the atrocities America committed there, Vietnam became a highly pro-American country over time.
So, Ukraine needs a plan not solely to win the war but to win the peace. Banal as this point is, one is hard-pressed to encounter it in most public discussions about supporting Ukraine. Let us venture a vision of winning the peace for Ukraine.
First, a caveat. I sit in an office at Stanford University, literally in a tower (not ivory but concrete: the Hoover Tower), on an idyllic academic campus in Silicon Valley, far away from the meat grinder front lines. I’m not under bombardment. I have not lost family members in this war. And yet, for me, the war does carry a certain intimacy. Just about every day, for the past two years, and for some years before that, I’ve been using primary source documents to write about war in these very territories—Kharkiv, the Donbas, Dnipro, Crimea, Odesa. That war took place some eight decades ago. It is a central focus of the final installment in my trilogy, Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower, 1941–1990s. By the way, Joseph Stalin presided over victory in that war but, in the fullness of time, he lost the peace. Russian troops, in the 1990s, completed a retreat from positions in Central and Eastern Europe—which were attained by the Red Army at incalculable cost—along the very same roads used by Napoleon, only in the opposite direction.
The sine qua non of Ukraine winning the peace is an armistice and an end to the fighting as soon as possible, an obtainable security guarantee, and European Union accession. In other words, a Ukraine, safe and secure, which has joined the West. This after all was the reason why so many Ukrainians risked life and limb to oppose domestic tyrants twice, in 2004 and 2013–2014, before standing up to an invasion by a foreign tyrant. Russia cannot be picked up with a forklift and moved away from Ukraine. Under its current and future governments, Russia needs to be deterred from repeating its aggression or, better still, incentivized not to.
What might constitute a security guarantee remains uncertain—but it cannot be fantasy: it must be obtainable. It should also be rooted in a treaty ratified by the legislatures and therefore the publics of the countries willing to provide it, not something delivered by a leader or group of leaders who are destined to change. It will not flow from sympathetic politicians or pundits who insist that it must happen and will happen because it is the right thing to do. So, it would take very considerable work to achieve. Ditto for EU accession. The EU redistributes considerable sums of money, from richer member countries to poorer ones, and every single recipient EU member, under current rules, would lose EU funds and become a donor state were Ukraine to be admitted. So, some very heavy lifting lies ahead. In Poland, one of Ukraine’s most steadfast supporters, societal opposition to Ukrainian grain imports gives a taste of what might be to come. Ukraine, without a fundamental transformation of its current political culture, could outdo Poland or Hungary and Slovakia—other troubled democracies—inside the EU. Still, these challenges, which would follow from an armistice, are better than the unending grinding down from major fighting.
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This is a war for Ukraine’s sovereignty and its future. Consider the demographic devastation. Ukraine’s population peaked in 1991–1993 at more than 50 million. Today, no more than 31 million people, and perhaps as few as 28 million, live in areas controlled by the Ukrainian government (almost 6 million live under occupation).2 Ukraine’s fertility rate was already the lowest in Europe before February 2022 (the country was counting 39 births for every 100 deaths). On top of catastrophic battlefield losses, Ukraine has seen the mass dispatch of women and children abroad as well as illegal male flight. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 8 million Ukrainians sought refuge abroad in the early days of the war. Significant numbers did return, but nearly 4 million Ukrainians registered as residents in the European Union, including around 1 million each in Germany and Poland; another 1 million made it to Canada and the United States. The vast majority is gainfully employed, in economies with hunger for labor. Nearly 3 million Ukrainians, the largest single contingent, fled or were taken to Russia, according to UNHCR (how many have stayed inside Russia or moved on remains uncertain). Disabled Ukrainians now number more than 3 million. The war’s mental health effects remain to be assessed.
True, by Eastern European standards, Ukraine retains a relatively large population, but not in vital younger age groups. More than half of Ukrainians aged 10 and under are in school abroad, studying in a foreign language, and for most this is their third year of such schooling—what will push them back into a broken country, if the war ends? As the war grinds on, how many more years of going to school in German, Polish, Czech, and other languages, will be necessary for assimilation? And large numbers of newborn Ukrainian children are not on the way: the country has a tiny generation of 20-year-olds because of very low 1990s birthrates during a collapse-induced economic depression, and even now, after massive casualties, Ukraine has at least double the men in their 40s as in their 20s. Why has the Zelensky government refrained from drafting 20-year-olds during the war’s first two years? Not because it wants to lose the war, but because it wants to safeguard the country’s precarious future.
Continuing the current strategy of indefinite attritional war against the odds, with so much already won and so much new damage daily, seems inexpedient, even if Western support at sufficient scale were to continue without interruption. What appears to be on offer from Putin, if he is taken at face value, is a “negotiation” that begins with Ukrainian recognition of Russian annexations as well as permanent infringement on Ukrainian sovereignty in its freedom to choose international alignments. Putin exhibits a “fixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices,” wrote William J. Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and former ambassador to Moscow, in Foreign Affairs in early 2024.3 Ukraine needs an enduring armistice that abjures recognition of Russian annexations or compromises on its sovereign right to join international bodies such as the EU or NATO. History is long and circumstances can suddenly, unexpectedly, and radically change to afford resolutions to long-standing issues left unresolved, such as evicting occupiers. There is no imperative to trade land for peace. But given Putin’s position, how would Ukraine possibly obtain a durable armistice on favorable terms?
No country is going to inflict a clean, comprehensive, once-and-for-all defeat on one of the world’s two great nuclear powers. Nor is an abrupt—and enduring—transition to a Russia governed by the rule of law with scrupulous respect for its neighbors’ sovereignty on the horizon. Imposing enforceable concessions on Russia from a position of battlefield strength did not work in 2023, and Ukraine appears to lack the wherewithal to try again in 2024 (and possibly beyond). Holding on and waiting for a long-anticipated Russian collapse—whether among troops on the battlefield or on the home front—might not serve to secure from foreign partners the support necessary to carry out even a minimal plan of holding on and building up. True, Ukraine has made notable progress in its domestic manufacture of weapons, especially drones, and its new strategy of necessity—sabotage and striking behind Russian lines as well as on the sea—has raised hopes. So far, it falls some distance from shifting Russia’s momentum.
It is long past time to open a more decisive political front.
Authoritarian regimes are both all-powerful and brittle at the same time. They fail at pretty much everything at some point. But they can survive as long as they excel at one thing: suppressing political alternatives. If a regime is highly effective at suppression, it can exhibit serial incompetence, even lose wars, and persist in power. Such a regime can lose more than one war. (Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević didn’t get kicked out until he lost multiple wars.) So, policy should entail cultivating, encouraging, and promoting political alternatives by overt and covert means. That is how one gets an authoritarian regime’s attention. That is how one puts significant pressure on their will to fight. That is how one potentially obtains a more favorable armistice.
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To be sure, one can understand the strong desire to avoid a NATO versus Russia war. There is no appetite for such a direct conflict among the governments or publics in Europe or in the United States. Depending on how it came about, it might enhance Western unity and resolve; more likely, it would fracture and undermine cohesion and commitment. What is more, such a direct conflict carries actual existential risks. Anyone can intuit what the US war plan is for major power conflict: Russia attacks, and if they’re winning, we nuke them, then they nuke us. Or Russia attacks, and if we’re winning, they nuke us, then we nuke them. There are important details, scenarios, and permutations, but boiled down, the war plan is sobering in its underlying simplicity. It is not a plan citizens want their leaders to be arguing back and forth about for real. No one in a position of authority should want to have such discussions in the Situation Room.
Nuclear blackmail is frustrating, and some analysts assert that the threat has been exaggerated, that Putin has been bluffing, that Ukraine’s partners have hamstrung themselves. Perhaps. But when an adversary possesses such capabilities, no matter how suicidal or irrational one might think using them would be, their use cannot be ruled out. Whatever probability one might want to assign to nuclear risk in a war between nuclear powers, it is not zero. Even the dual-key system, whereby a president’s orders to launch must be matched by similar orders of the defense minister, bears minimal reassurance. Ask yourself why, despite the abject failures of Russia’s initial war plan and execution, and much else since, Sergei Shoigu still occupies the position of Russia’s defense minister. One reason is that his blatant impotence signifies Russia might effectively be a single-key launch system.
Despite these considerations, the US administration and the Europeans have chosen to incur the risk of Russian escalation and a direct military confrontation with Russia by supporting Ukraine on the field of battle. That has been done, gradually, as the United States, Europeans, and other partners have supplied larger and larger quantities of heavier and heavier weapons with greater and greater reach in the teeth of Russia’s threats to respond.
Incurring escalation risks on the battlefield, where Russia is stronger, has been accompanied by a refusal to incur escalation risks in the political arena. Russia’s political system is potentially vulnerable, and yet discussions of regime change, let alone bold measures to that effect, have been ruled out as excessively escalatory. All the while, public criticisms of Western policy by backers of Ukraine have mostly chastised hesitancy in supplying weapons systems. Let us note that Ukraine did not come close to running out of Western-provided heavy weapons before calling off the 2023 counteroffensive, so purported issues with their supply did not determine the disappointing outcome. Russia’s robust antiaircraft capabilities, moreover, continue to render questionable the pundit-anticipated impact of F-16s (independent of what quantity of supply would be realistic). No doubt some capabilities could have been furnished earlier and in greater quantity. But it is remarkable that critics have by and large not taken up the glaring hesitancy to pressure Putin’s regime politically.
Western partners are escalating on the battlefield; they should escalate in the political space. Both the American CIA director and the director of British intelligence (MI6) have publicly boasted about their successes in recruiting Russian defectors, while providing mechanisms for more to do so, including on Telegram. This trolling has drawn infuriated responses from Russian security officials behind the scenes, an encouraging sign. But should that, or could that, effort be taken several steps further? Russian officials and propagandists already obsessively accuse the United States and NATO of fomenting regime change in Moscow—why not commit the offense for which one has already been charged and convicted?
Consider the possibility of constituting some form of a Russian government in exile or a committee of concerned patriots, located in and perhaps rotating through European capitals. I do not mean inviting the pro-Western democratic opposition—which has many courageous activists, but which is also highly fractious and, with exceptions, ineffective in rallying support inside the country—to form a government abroad. Arguably, if they were capable of doing this, they would have done so. (We’ll have to see what they do next.) Instead, I mean Russian military and security officials, men in uniform, their medals prominently displayed on their chests: defectors from Putin who are unapologetic Russian nationalists, authoritarian, anti-Western, and evincing little or no affection for Ukraine, but who have concluded, correctly, that the war is badly damaging Russia.4
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Putin will choose his personal regime over the war every time. How do we know? Look at what happened to General Sergei Surovikin. He remains alive and could be recalled should the war front appreciably deteriorate. But Putin sacked him even though he was by far Russia’s best-performing battlefield commander in Ukraine, responsible for the well-executed retreat and tightening lines at Kherson, when Russia got out all its troops and heavy weapons, and for Russia’s stunningly successful, well-built defenses in Ukraine’s southern regions. But he was viewed as disloyal because of vague associations with the June 2023 mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the death squads known by the unfortunately romanticizing name Wagner Group.
Prigozhin staged an unwitting referendum on the regime. Once he launched his forces on Moscow, major military brass and security officials, propagandists, elected and appointed officials, almost the entire establishment, mostly kept mum—they did not publicly and vociferously defend Putin and his regime. This exposed the regime’s hollowness despite its repressive strength and macroeconomic expertise. At the same time, no commanding officers publicly joined Prigozhin’s mutiny, which is perhaps why he called it off. All coups fail, until they succeed; and that happens only when some people take the leap, prompting others to join, in a bandwagon effect, and breaking through the severe collective action challenge. For anyone incurring that extreme personal risk, there was nothing on offer economically from Europe, no proposal for a dialogue about Russia’s place in the international order, nothing concrete to salvage the country’s future. Note that American intelligence officials publicly hinted they knew beforehand that Prigozhin planned to seize Russia’s southern military headquarters in Rostov, where the war in Ukraine is being overseen, but then stated, in medias res, that the episode was an internal Russian affair and the United States would not become involved.
Putin sacrificed Prigozhin for his disloyalty—having him assassinated, with implausible deniability, once the mutiny had been thoroughly contained—even though his fighters have been indispensable to the war effort in Ukraine, as well as to maintaining Russia’s valued positions across much of Central Africa. Again, Putin chose his regime over the war. Ukraine and its supporters need to put this variable in play.
To be sure, Putin’s war has consolidated groups with vested interests in its continuation. They continue to expand their power bases and enrich themselves, while others fall out of windows. But even some of the regime beneficiaries know that Putin is ruining their beloved Russia—hemorrhaging invaluable human capital, failing to ensure even minimal inward technology transfer, isolating the country from traditional partners in Europe, failing to invest in anything but killing machines, mortgaging the future. Prigozhin said two things during the mutiny: (1) if Russia was going to wage war, it should do so with far greater competence; and (2) the war was launched for invalid, corrupt reasons and was a terrible idea. Analysts have focused almost exclusively on the former rather than the latter. They have wrongly asserted that he was a supporter of the war; he was a proponent of his own fame and fortune and of a different, better war, which, he knew, Putin’s Russia was unable to fight. He was power-hungry and a war skeptic.
Since Prigozhin’s demise, the physicist and former parliamentarian Boris Nadezhdin publicly called Russia’s attack on Ukraine a “fatal mistake,” and he drew tens of thousands of people, in highly visible public queues, to sign petitions to qualify him to run against Putin in the March 2024 presidential elections. Predictably, the apparatus abruptly disqualified him after he submitted sufficient names. “Dictatorships don’t last forever,” Nadezhdin declared, giving voice to millions: “And neither do dictators.” Eager to use a liberal candidate to portray liberals’ supposed impotence, while legitimating the election with ostensible choice, the regime had staged a second unwitting referendum on itself. Any perceived alternative to Putin breaks the regime’s information monopoly and reveals its vulnerabilities. Perhaps that explains the suspicious death, at age 47, of Russia’s most successful opposition politician, the anticorruption crusader and liberal nationalist Alexei Navalny, who even in an Arctic prison retained enormous influence via social media channels in the run-up to the presidential election.
Navalny’s bravery, inventiveness, and moral clarity will define this epoch of Russian history, as much and perhaps more than the role Putin assigns to his own misrule. With his bungled invasion of Ukraine, Putin wrecked his own mystique, losing forever his reputation as a supposed master strategist. He retains control over formidable levers of power, with severe repression and pressures for conformity, but Navalny, to a much lesser extent Nadezhdin, and Prigozhin with his march irrevocably demonstrated in different ways the live possibility of an alternative.
Top-level defectors should not call for Russia’s defeat—the vast majority of Russians do not want to see their country defeated—but an end to the fighting. They would not have to praise or make concessions to the West beyond agreeing to an armistice without annexations or sovereign infringement on Ukraine, for Russia’s sake. Men in uniform, the ones who are willing to defect, or have already defected but stayed in place, would appeal to their counterparts still in Russia who are fed up with the depth of the Putin regime’s self-harm to Russian interests, a kind of Prigozhin episode redux. But this time, they would be greeted with policy levers to help arrest Russia’s downward spiral. That would enhance their appeal to the mass of patriotic, nationalist Russians who could be drawn to an alternative to the current personal regime or at least the current course of the regime.
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Uniformed defectors need to be given a platform and protection abroad, help to make speech after speech overflowing with insider information about how the war is damaging Russia, and assistance with communications technology to diffuse those messages throughout Russia’s public sphere without consequences for those receiving them. This approach would need to be accompanied by a promised package of sanctions relief and investment for Russia in the event of a lasting armistice without conditions. Many European business and government leaders would be relieved to be able to resume partnerships with a Russian government that ends the aggression against Ukraine to rescue Russia. Such a turn of events could possibly dampen the appeal of far-right pro-Russian movements in Europe as well.
Let me be clear: the Western policy goal in support of Ukraine does not need regime change to succeed. It needs to raise the credible threat of regime change, to put pressure on the regime, to expand the public perception and concrete manifestations of political alternatives, to build on what Prigozhin demonstrated, Navalny achieved, and Nadezhdin reconfirmed. To enable Ukraine to obtain an armistice on favorable terms, Putin needs to feel that his regime is at serious risk.
Such a proposal will be treated skeptically, and that is understandable. It suffers from uncertain prospects for success. But what is the better plan? To continue with the existing strategy—which lacks a clear articulation of an attainable victory, let alone for winning the peace—and, as a result, see a softening of the political will to continue backing Ukraine? No supporting country is going to supply Ukraine with the five hundred thousand men and women aged 18–29 it needs, and Ukraine’s own ability to do so is circumscribed, physically and politically, in these slaughterhouse conditions. No supporting coalition of countries is able to produce munitions or antiaircraft missiles or other direly needed supplies in the short or perhaps even medium term in sufficient quantities to outgun Russia. And even if, by a miracle, supplies do increase to required levels, a prolonged war of attrition remains a staggering prospect. No miracle weapon system, even in quantity, holds the power to turn the tide decisively. Not even the US superpower calling upon its many alliances can blockade Eurasia.
Applying political pressure systematically, and institutionally, does not preclude continuing to support Ukraine on the battlefield as well, obviously. This is not a substitute set of measures but additions to the tool kit, a ratcheting up of the acknowledged pursuit of defections. As long as Ukrainians are willing to defend their sovereignty, Western countries should live up to their promises to continue vital support—but to be sustainable, all efforts must be undergirded by a strategy that is easily communicated and possible to achieve in order to maintain political backing in democratic polities.5 That goal, to reiterate, should be an armistice without annexations or sovereignty infringement. For those who argue that any agreement signed by Putin is not worth the paper on which it is printed, that might well be true, but not if he signs it in Beijing, or at least with Xi Jinping at the ceremony.
For the American public, Russia’s war against Ukraine needs to be placed in global context. The current US-led international order for decades has had three areas of territorial vulnerability: Crimea/Ukraine, Israel, and the South China Sea / Taiwan. (South Korea is protected by a US defense treaty and nuclear umbrella and so are Poland and the Baltic states.) These areas are directly related to the three illiberal Eurasian land empires that view themselves as ancient civilizations predating the US-led liberal order by a millennium or more, and are unwilling to submit to that order as currently configured: Russia, Iran, China. Two of the three vulnerable areas are experiencing renewed conflict at scale, and each runs the risk of still wider war. Conflict in the third, so far at a lower level, could escalate to a world war between the United States and China, which could also have implications for Ukraine as well as Russian assertiveness in other places not protected by an American-led defense treaty and nuclear umbrella. In some ways, everything in the world, no matter how tragic from a humanitarian perspective, no matter how important from a strategic perspective, falls short of the question of managing risks with China. Avoiding either a global war or capitulation in East Asia must be the top US strategic priority.
In this light, too, an indefinite attritional war in Ukraine appears to defy strategic logic no less than capitulation there. True, some analysts argue that credibility is indivisible, so a US failure in Ukraine would reverberate globally, emboldening adversaries. But this latest version of a domino theory does not stand up to the historical record, certainly with regard to the aftermath of Vietnam. The regime in Beijing has zero doubt that the United States will join a war over Taiwan and demonstrates that conviction by assiduously preparing accordingly. US commitment to Ukraine is about that country, not about US credibility. The United States has no treaty obligations vis-à-vis Ukraine.
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US support for Ukraine has been impressive. The approach—a version of lend-lease for Ukraine twinned with sanctions against Russia—fits a familiar pattern. The United States is an expeditionary force, with a military that is phenomenal on the water and even better under the water, in the air, and in space. Land is a different matter. When the United States has had to face a large-scale land war in modern times, it has rented a land army. In the Second World War, America effectively rented the Red Army to defeat the Wehrmacht on land. D-Day was an expeditionary action, followed by a comparatively limited land war, not all of which went swimmingly. In East Asia, the United States effectively rented the Chinese land army, and the Japanese had their teeth broken in China. After a US campaign on the sea and much island hopping, an invasion of Japan’s home islands was obviated by the dropping of two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet land army’s bludgeoning of Japanese land forces in Manchuria and on the Korean Peninsula. Subsequent US fighting in Korea and Vietnam, land wars, did not go all that well, with high casualties by American standards. The Gulf War was fought in expeditionary style, using shock-and-awe tactics. Afghanistan, too, resembled an expeditionary war before devolving, like Iraq, into a counterinsurgency.
To be sure, the US Army is a highly competent, dedicated service, with formidable capabilities, but casualties in land warfare exceed those of expeditionary or maritime warfare by many orders of magnitude—a difficult proposition for a democracy, not to mention a military that prioritizes force protection. The US land army is now at its smallest since 1940. Today the United States is, consciously or not, renting the Ukrainian land army to degrade Russia’s land army to sizable effect. (The same posture could be said to apply to the position of Germany or even Poland and Finland, which, unlike Germany, have real armies.) This looks like American strategic DNA. But instructing Ukraine to suffer land-war-scale casualties against Russia, a land power par excellence with a regime that does not value human life, never struck me as a persuasive strategy in this war. Consider, finally, that although the East Asian theater is more water than land, land warfare there cannot be ruled out. And yet, there is no obvious option, as it were, to rent. (We could add that the United States has lost its shipbuilding capacity.) Whatever the outcome of Ukraine’s noble fight, the lesson for America is already sobering.
Needless to add, any “strategy” worthy of the name entails matching means to ends. The United States does not seem clear about what it wants to achieve, let alone how. That analyst of the Winter War in 1939, by the way, was Adolf Hitler’s general staff. They miscalculated.
Stephen Kotkin is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of a trilogy on Joseph Stalin and global history.
Endnotes
- This was laid out in typically brutalist style in John J. Mearsheimer, “Bound to Lose: Ukraine’s 2023 Counteroffensive,” John’s Substack (blog), September 2, 2023, https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/bound-to-lose.
- Ella Libanova, “Ukraine’s Demography in the Second Year of the Full-Fledged War,” Focus Ukraine (blog), Wilson Center Kennan Institute, June 27, 2023, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ukraines-demography-second-year-full-fledged-war. ; Jadwiga Rogoza, “Ukraine in the Face of a Demographic Catastrophe,” Center for Eastern Studies, July 11, 2023, https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2023-07-11/ukraine-face-a-demographic-catastrophe. ; Olena Harmash, “Ukrainian Refugees: How Will the Economy Recover with a Diminished Population?,” Reuters, July 7, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/however-war-ends-ukraines-diminished-population-will-hit-economy-years-2023-07-07/.
- William J. Burns, “Spycraft and Statecraft,” Foreign Affairs, January 30, 2024.
- Such views are well articulated by a Federal Security Service general. Mariia Litvinova, “ ‘Putin Has Done More Damage to the Country than Any Other Sovereign Has Done in Its Entire History.’ Retired FSB General Yevgeny Savostyanov on the Confrontation with the West and the Future of Russia” [“ ‘Putin nanec strane takov vred, kotoroyi ne nanosil ni odin gosudar’ za vsiu ee istoriiu”: general FSB v otstavke Evgenii Savostianov o protivosostoianii s Zapadom i budushchem Rossii”], Republic, February 11, 2024, https://republic.ru/posts/111434.
- Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “Wars and Elections: How European Leaders Can Maintain Public Support for Ukraine,” European Council on Foreign Relations, February 21, 2024, https://ecfr.eu/publication/wars-and-elections-how-european-leaders-can-maintain-public-support-for-ukraine/.
Chapter 1: Ukraine, Russia, China, and the World, by Stephen Kotkin, from War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, edited by Hal Brands (Johns Hopkins University Press, 04.02.2024), published by Project Muse, Johns Hopkins University, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International license.