Make Ukraine Costly for Putin — Not America

By Philip Klein

Friday, February 25, 2022

 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a vigorous debate about the proper role for the United States. If we set aside those who are parroting Vladimir Putin’s position or those waxing on about American obligations to Ukraine, most of the real debate concerns what the U.S. should be doing within a range of certain parameters.

 

On one end, there are noninterventionists who argue that it is not in the U.S. national interest to get in the middle of a conflict between Russia and Ukraine and that, therefore, we should do little or nothing in response to Putin’s invasion. On the other end, there are those who argue that we should do everything we can to help Ukraine short of putting U.S. boots on the ground. It’s in between those two points where much of the debate is really playing out.

 

An honest discussion would acknowledge that fair points have been made on both sides of this debate. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans learned hard lessons about the dangers of tying national-security strategy to ideological goals such as democracy promotion, as well as the difficulty of the U.S. extricating itself from conflicts once engaged. Additionally, it’s fair to point out that Ukraine is far from a model liberal democracy and that it has been rife with corruption.

 

That having been said, we should not be sanguine about the dangers — both direct and indirect — of Putin effectively controlling Ukraine. Ukraine has 44 million people, is rich in natural resources, and occupies a strategically important position between Russia and Eastern Europe. Gaining Ukraine would make Russia a more powerful foe.

 

Furthermore, were Russia to take over Ukraine without major consequences, it would encourage further belligerent behavior by Putin and other U.S. adversaries, and would be especially worrisome given China’s designs on Taiwan.

 

As my anti-interventionist colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty has pointed out, the U.S. cannot ultimately win a pure escalation game with Putin. Given Putin’s long-standing lament that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a tragedy and his belief that Ukraine is part of Russia, Putin has significantly more interest in the country that borders his own than the U.S. does. He has shown himself to be undeterred by sanctions and condemnations by the international community, and willing to commit hundreds of thousands of troops to advance his goals. Given the lack of appetite within the U.S. and Europe for a ground war with Russia over Ukraine, the cold hard reality is that there is no way to stop Putin if he is determined to pummel Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be a cakewalk to Kyiv.

 

Ever since World War II, Americans have had many reminders of the limits of military intervention, even against smaller and dramatically overpowered rivals. In these cases, the U.S. cause was undermined by outside actors, who made the interventions markedly more costly without putting their own military in harm’s way. Such was the case with Soviet assistance to our enemies in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Iran meddling in the Iraq War.

 

So as we debate a framework for how to respond to the invasion, the U.S. should be thinking of how we can make the Ukraine invasion as much of a disaster as possible for Putin, so that he is eventually forced to withdraw, after incurring a tremendous cost. And we should be balancing this interest against the cost of any action to the U.S.

 

The responses may involve a combination of diplomatic isolation and increasingly devastating economic sanctions as well as military aid or more covert intelligence assistance to Ukraine. The precise details of various actions could be debated. But the general calculus from an American perspective should be that we should take actions that will impose a greater cost on Putin than they would on us, and we should avoid actions that would prove more costly to the U.S. relative to the benefit.

 

Ultimately, what happens will depend on how hard the Ukrainian people are willing to fight and how long Putin can maintain support at home for the invasion. While Russia has a more powerful military, Ukraine has a large population, a challenging climate, and imposing urban areas. The logistics of sustaining an invasion across such a large territory will be enormous. If Ukrainians are willing to absorb casualties and keep an insurgency going, the invasion could become tremendously costly for Russia. While reports from the battlefield should always be viewed with caution, early signs point to Ukrainians putting up a fight. Ukraine has also announced the distribution of 10,000 rifles to civilians to defend Kyiv.

 

While, as an autocrat, Putin is not restrained by public will, he is also not impervious to the effects of waning public support or low morale. Even in a country that is known to stifle dissent, hundreds of demonstrators came out in St. Petersburg on Thursday, at great personal risk, to protest Putin’s invasion. In a meeting with Putin that was televised, Aleksandr Shokhin, a top Russian industrial lobbyist, pleaded, “Everything should be done to demonstrate as much as possible that Russia remains part of the global economy and will not provoke, including through some kind of response measures, global negative phenomena on world markets.” Should the war drag on, lack of support could severely undermine Putin back at home and hurt morale on the battlefield.

 

The bottom line is that having failed to prevent the invasion, the U.S. should now focus on making the action costly for Putin without its becoming so costly for America.