Rogue Assets Isn’t a Ukraine Problem

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 25, 2023

 

This post is in response to Do You Feel In Charge?

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

 

It is worth noting that this phenomenon — deniable assets acting under orders from Kyiv, or genuinely rogue agents — isn’t exclusive to Ukraine.

 

Via the New York Times this week:

 

Fighting raged for a second day on Tuesday in the Belgorod region of southern Russia as a Ukrainian-aligned paramilitary group claimed to seize villages and rebuff counterattacks, in the most dramatic instance to date of bringing the war into Russian territory.

 

The Free Russia Legion, a group of Russian volunteers who have taken up arms to fight for Ukraine, claimed responsibility for the incursion, while Kyiv publicly denied direct involvement, turning the tables on a Russian strategy that preceded the invasion last year of sending unacknowledged weaponry and soldiers into Ukraine.

 

Ethnic Russians fighting with Ukrainian support on Russian soil against the Russian Federation is precisely the sort of thing that critics of Western support for Kyiv have warned has the potential to touch off an uncontrollable conflagration. It is all risky, to be sure. But it highlights what skeptics of those warnings have been saying for months: There are few ways that Russia can escalate the already brutal war it has started while ensuring that the benefits for the Kremlin are not outweighed by the risks and second-order consequences.

 

Legitimate concerns that a conflict’s participants do not fit neatly into sterile Western boxes plague every war. We heard much the same thing of the conflict in Syria, which, by the time Western nations began contemplating intervening in, had raged for years and blurred the distinctions between immaculate Western liberal proxies and bloodstained, theocratic mercenaries. That’s the nature of war.

 

The objective, therefore, should be to prevent such conflicts — most efficiently, through the forward positioning of a prohibitive deterrent force coupled with credible threats to would-be aggressors. All the alternatives to preventing a war before it starts are unsavory. But letting conflicts in which Western interests are materially threatened metastasize has a long track record of convincing Western officials that intervention is the only viable option.