By Noah Rothman
Thursday, March 02, 2023
Whoever planned the stagecraft for Joe Biden’s address in Warsaw, which followed the president’s visit to Kyiv on February 20, did his cause no favors.
Fresh off a logistically impressive and genuinely inspiring trip to Ukraine, Biden abandoned the sober demeanor he exhibited there and in Poland put on a show. Against the backdrop of the Royal Castle, illuminated by a laser light show accented with a fog machine, and as thousands in attendance cheered, Biden jaunted onto the stage to the sounds of “Freedom,” Norwegian DJ Kygo’s pop hit. There, he struck a note of triumphalism that neither he nor the West had yet earned.
The president ran through a litany of objectives that Vladimir Putin had tried and failed to achieve, and he took no small measure of credit for the Russian president’s misfortune. “President Putin is confronted with something today that he didn’t think was possible a year ago,” Biden declared. “The democracies of the world have grown stronger. Not weaker. But the autocrats in the world have gotten weaker, not stronger.” Biden added that the NATO alliance “will not waver” or “tire” in defending its cause, and Putin’s “craven lust for land and power will fail.”
Biden’s victory lap is premature. Maintaining the integrity of the Atlantic alliance and the resolve of its disparate polities to meet the Russian threat may be the foremost challenge of his administration. Moreover, the West’s resolve was and remains a by-product of Ukraine’s commitment to its own defense, not the other way around.
It’s easy to forget the degree to which Ukraine’s cause was written off as hopeless when Russia’s troops cascaded across its borders in the three-axis advance that began on February 24, 2022. As Radio Free Liberty’s Mike Eckel observed, “virtually no one expects Ukraine’s military to withstand a full Russian onslaught.” But it did. Ukrainian forces repelled an effort to seize Kyiv, crushing Russia’s western axis. Ukrainian defenders similarly delayed offensives along the southern axis, most notably in the strategic port city of Mariupol. Within two months of the invasion, according to U.S. estimates, roughly one-fifth of the forces Moscow had brought to bear in Ukraine were taken off the battlefield.
Just prior to the war’s outset, the Biden administration and its allies telegraphed their intention to provide some material support for Ukraine’s defense, but with the underlying assumption that the center of gravity in Eastern Europe would shift toward Moscow. New York Times reporter Helene Cooper revealed in January 2022 how resigned policy-makers in the administration were to Kyiv’s capitulation when she detailed their nascent plans to support an anti-Russian insurgency inside occupied Ukraine. But Ukrainians kept fighting and winning, and Western material contributions to Ukraine’s counteroffensives tended only to follow those victories.
On March 29, Moscow acknowledged the withdrawal of the forces it had committed to the siege of Kyiv. Shortly afterward, Washington consented to expand the scope of the weapons systems it was willing to share with Ukraine, including long-sought heavy artillery. By mid May, the Russian forces had retreated from positions around the eastern city of Kharkiv, breaking the siege and bombardment of this sprawling urban center. The White House followed by finally consenting to provide Ukraine with long-range artillery, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS). In early September, Russian troops abandoned the whole of Kharkiv Oblast. Before the end of that month, the Biden White House approved an additional $1.1 billion in Ukrainian security assistance — the largest single tranche up to that point. Russia pulled its troops back from Kherson, the first major city to fall to Russian invading forces, in November. Russian retrenchment helped Washington overcome its reluctance to provide Ukrainian forces with Patriot missile-defense systems and the training to use them. Over the winter, Ukrainian resistance to “spoiling attacks” by Russian forces across what had settled into largely static front lines shook loose Western commitments to provide Ukraine with tanks and half-track vehicles.
All throughout, the Biden administration negotiated against itself over the potential of these platforms to signal to Moscow the West’s escalating involvement in the conflict, only to summarily abandon its misgivings. Both before and during the war, the West invested more confidence in Russia’s capabilities than was deserved.
Russia’s long-delayed mobilization of up to 300,000 reservists in September didn’t change the dynamics on the battlefield; it just committed more poorly trained and equipped infantry units to the fight. Without the necessary air and armor support, they were promptly routed. That same month, Moscow illegally annexed four Ukrainian provinces it didn’t even fully occupy, but that move didn’t intimidate anyone into disengaging from Russia’s supposedly inviolable sovereign territory. Even now, Russian units at the vanguard of what analysts expect will be a broader offensive this spring are struggling to break Ukrainian lines.
After one mid-February “failed assault,” the British Ministry of Defense estimated that the Russians bequeathed Ukrainian forces at least 30 “mostly intact” armored vehicles. The U.S. estimates that about 200,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded since the start of the war. And the gutting of Moscow’s officer corps — the worst massacre of military leadership since the Second World War — compounds its battlefield losses. According to American estimates, Russia has already lost half its deployable tanks. It’s also running so low on serviceable ammunition that it has been forced to draw from 40-year-old stocks — and those are expected to be depleted before the end of this year.
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Ukraine’s record of success against the odds represents a spectacular return on Western investments. And yet, even as Ukrainian victories mount, the willingness to continue supporting Kyiv’s cause is on the wane.
In the U.S., an Associated Press survey found that fewer than half of Americans say they support arming Ukrainian defenders, down from 60 percent last May. Likewise, an Ipsos poll found that support for statements such as “We should not interfere” and “[My country] cannot afford to lend financial support to Ukraine” is on the rise in places such as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and the U.K.
Atrophying Western enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine is understandable, notwithstanding the exultant rhetoric of their self-congratulatory elected officials. Western objectives are ill-defined, and few are willing to commit themselves to Kyiv’s goal of Ukraine’s total liberation — including the territories occupied by Russian forces after 2014. Fewer still are eager to enunciate the foremost precondition for that sort of victory: Russia’s military defeat.
Insofar as it is possible, American Enterprise Institute scholar Hal Brands articulated the endgame in Ukraine as the Biden administration sees it. “Washington’s goal is a Ukraine that is militarily defensible, politically independent and economically viable,” he wrote. “This doesn’t necessarily include retaking difficult areas such as the eastern Donbas or Crimea.” Such an outcome would satisfy no party to this conflict.
Poll after poll of Ukrainians indicates there is a durable consensus against surrendering any territory in exchange for peace. Were Zelensky’s government to acquiesce to a peace plan that runs counter to that consensus, it would be unlikely to survive long. The Kremlin shows no indication that it is willing to take a face-saving off-ramp out of Ukraine even if one were to present itself. Still, in the absence of wholesale regime change in either nation, a negotiated settlement is the most likely resolution to the conflict. What that settlement would look like would depend on battlefield conditions, and those remain too fluid to be conducive to even a cease-fire negotiation, much less an armistice.
In the West, expressions of apprehension over the direction and duration of the conflict in Ukraine have a habit of lapsing into chauvinism. It’s not uncommon to hear armchair generals indulge the fantasy that NATO capitals can dictate terms to either Kyiv or Moscow. Western nations can define their levels of engagement in the conflict, but they cannot make the fighting stop.
Ukrainians won’t back down. For them, this is an existential conflict — a fight not just to protect their sovereignty but to avoid capture, rape, execution, obliteration in indiscriminate bombing and shelling, and the dismemberment of their families with their children shipped off to reeducation camps inside the Russian Federation. Operating perhaps under the assumption that sunk costs are not a fallacy at all, Moscow remains committed to achieving its objectives on the battlefield.
A proper appreciation for the limits of the West’s capabilities can, however, help its policy-makers define clearly and explicitly what their objectives are. Indeed, it is incumbent on policy-makers in responsive democracies to explicate a rationale for supporting Ukraine’s defense that is rooted in tangible national interests. In America’s case, the interests that are threatened by Putin’s war are many.
Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has pursued four grand-strategic objectives above all others: preventing major shooting wars between great powers, preserving the post–World War II geopolitical order, integrating nonaligned states into U.S.-backed institutions and open markets, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, both vertically (more bombs) and horizontally (more nuclear nations). Those broad objectives have defined the conduct of American foreign policy across the decades regardless of the partisan affiliation of the commander in chief. At least three of those four interests are imperiled by the conflict in Ukraine.
Viewing the West’s approach to supporting Ukrainian independence through the prism of U.S. interests could help Americans understand what they’re witnessing in Europe. The United States and its allies are eager to provide material support to the Ukrainian cause, but in a way that avoids confronting Moscow with the prospect of having no choice but to treat Western powers like cobelligerents. The U.S. and its allies stand athwart the efforts of revisionist powers such as Russia and China to reconstitute the spheres of influence that preclude economic integration and the free navigation of terrestrial and maritime trade routes. The U.S. and its allies are willing to support Ukraine’s recovery from the war, both to stabilize the nation (no one likes a failed state on their borders) and to facilitate its integration into Western markets and institutions.
Even critics of the West’s commitment to Ukraine’s defense recognize these national imperatives as imperatives. But time is running short to secure them. Not only is the West’s will to support this conflict indefinitely eroding, but the patience of Putin’s backers is also wearing thin.
Russia’s capacity to field a conventional army across its borders can degrade through attrition to the point that rational actors would cut their losses. The selective release of American intelligence indicating that China is “considering providing lethal support to Russia in its efforts in Ukraine,” according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, may be a sign that Putin’s backers in Beijing are losing faith in his cause. The People’s Republic of China is not in the business of being humiliated, and Moscow’s consent to tether itself to Xi Jinping’s purse strings may come with provisos that force the Kremlin to scale back its objectives. Given these inducements, the next several months will be critical in the effort to establish facts on the ground that will determine what a negotiated settlement to the conflict would look like.
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So, just how does the war end? With the caveat that unforeseeable events can intervene, and that the numerous variables at play preclude definitive predictions about the war’s trajectory, some scenarios are more likely than others.
For example, it’s probably safe to rule out the worst-case scenario. An outright Russian victory that results in the functional occupation of the whole of Ukraine, the annexation of its eastern and coastal oblasts into the Russian Federation, and the replacement of the Zelensky government with a pro-Russian puppet regime is now a remote prospect.
If we assume that Ukraine’s will to resist and the West’s material commitments to Kyiv’s defense persist, a maximally optimistic vision of the near term also cannot be ruled out. That vision involves the recapture of all Ukrainian territory, including the Donbas and the Crimean peninsula. But how? Through a combined arms assault that breaks through the line of contact in the Donbas, after which routed Russian forces would be compelled to retreat to more defensible positions in Ukraine’s south and across the Russian border. That would compel Russian forces to reinforce their southern and central groupings, leaving the territories they occupy along the coasts of the Black and Azov Seas vulnerable.
Recapturing these territories would be a slog, but that’s still more thinkable than the prospect of retaking Crimea. In the view of Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general — a view shared, as noted in Politico, by former Ukrainian defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk — liberating the peninsula would require “a large-scale air, sea and land operation to advance on several axes against key land objectives,” and a “hundred thousand or so Ukrainian troops” supported by “a land blockade and fire support base” to the north. No easy feat, to say the least, and an operation that would involve air and sea assets Ukraine cannot presently deploy. But putting real pressure on the peninsula could also put Crimean territory on the table as part of a negotiated cease-fire deal. Moreover, that deal could provide Russia with a face-saving way out of the conflict that preserves access to the Kerch Strait and perhaps even Sevastopol ports.
That outcome would preserve the “rules-based” international order. It would also provide Western governments with sufficient assurances that Russia cannot present a realistic threat to European security for years if not decades, facilitating the long-postponed pivot to the Pacific Rim. But such a victory would require the transfer of ordnance, weapons platforms, and air defense, as well as the maintenance of training and intelligence-sharing regimes in perpetuity. It might also necessitate security guarantees from the West. All this is to say that America would remain “a European power,” as Mikhail Gorbachev conceded in negotiations with George H. W. Bush off the coast of Malta in 1990.
There’s no doubt this would be a fragile peace — one that could be undone by any number of factors — but it is not outside the realm of possibility. A far less rosy scenario is, however, easier to envision.
As one U.S. defense official told the Washington Post in January, the West was rushing to provide Ukraine with fast-moving tanks, armored personnel carriers, and mobile artillery at that point only out of fear that “the World War I, trench-warfare dynamic going on” could stabilize into an impenetrable front line. In that event, the conflict would stall. The West would continue to lose its enthusiasm for the Ukrainian cause, perhaps presenting the Zelensky government with a fait accompli. Ukraine would be functionally bifurcated at that point, and with the imprimatur of its supposed supporters.
A destabilized, rump Ukrainian state on NATO’s frontier may be an acceptable proposition in Berlin, Paris, and Washington, but it won’t be acceptable to Poland, Slovakia, or the Baltic states. Those countries, which sit on or near Ukraine’s border, may feel compelled to secure their interests on their own, introducing infinitely more potential for an incident that could lead to a conflagration. A dynamic that fractures the NATO alliance would provide Russia with one of its primary geostrategic objectives on a silver platter. A partial Russian victory would also cement Moscow’s partnership with Beijing, paving the way for the introduction of offensive Chinese weapons in Europe. It would also terrify America’s partners in the Pacific, all of whom would have to either make peace with a rising China at the expense of their relations with the U.S. and its allies or steel themselves for an imminent conflict in their neighborhoods.
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Somewhere in between these two scenarios is a mixed verdict in which something like the post-2014 status quo re-emerges. An ambiguous outcome like that would likely reproduce the conditions that resulted in the farcical Minsk agreements, in which Russia was invited to play the role of neutral mediator in a conflict it had inaugurated. European monitors would be tasked with maintaining the peace — one they would in short order become invested in as Europe again becomes reliant on Russian energy imports. In sum, European capitals would once again cultivate an interest in appeasing Russia, playing along with its fictitious claims that the anti-Kyiv militias it funds and directs are entirely organic.
Such an unsatisfying outcome would freeze the conflict in Ukraine in place — at least for now. Much like similarly frozen conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdniestria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and elsewhere, the stalemated war in Ukraine could come to life again whenever it suited Moscow. Insurgencies — both pro- and anti-Russia — are certain to materialize. And all this would occur beneath the shadow of Russia’s nuclear umbrella, though the two-way street of nuclear deterrence has kept and will likely continue to keep everyone’s missiles safely interred in their silos.
Whatever the outcome of this war, there will be many months of fighting before an endgame becomes visible, much less viable. With both Ukraine’s and Russia’s backers growing impatient, the fighting is certain to intensify. But wars do end. The end comes when it is irrational to pursue through martial means objectives that can be more easily secured through a political process.
The Biden administration deserves credit for correctly identifying the permanent U.S. interests at stake in this war and seeking to secure them. But Americans’ patience is not limitless. The president cannot articulate what an endgame in Ukraine looks like yet — no one can. But he can and should identify what the U.S. would regard as a favorable outcome, and he must elaborate on how our strategy is designed to achieve that end. Instead, Biden is posing as the conquering hero, articulating only the moral urgency of the Ukrainian cause rather than the tangible national interests at stake, and insisting that U.S. support for the war is open-ended. That will not do for much longer.
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