argumentative essay about russia and ukraine

The return of the enemy: Putin’s war on Ukraine and a cognitive blockage in Western security policy

Subscribe to the center on the united states and europe update, constanze stelzenmüller constanze stelzenmüller director - center on the united states and europe , senior fellow - foreign policy , center on the united states and europe , fritz stern chair on germany and trans-atlantic relations.

August 2023

39 min read

This is a translated, expanded, and updated version of an essay that appeared in the German magazine Kursbuch in June 2023. This piece is part of a series of policy analyses entitled “ The Talbott Papers on Implications of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine ,” named in honor of American statesman and former Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott. Brookings is grateful to Trustee Phil Knight for his generous support of the Brookings Foreign Policy program.

Eighteen months after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of his country’s sovereign neighbor on February 24, 2022, the question of how this war ends appears as open as ever. Ukraine has put up a heroic resistance to the invaders. The West, under U.S. leadership, and with huge financial and material outlays on both sides of the Atlantic, has helped. Kyiv’s counteroffensive is producing modest successes. But it is equally clear that it is taking a terrible toll — on Ukraine’s armed forces, on its citizens, and on its supporters worldwide. Russia, too, is taking heavy losses, has failed to reach key goals, and is arguably running out of options; the brief mutiny of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has revealed startling vulnerabilities in the top echelons of the Kremlin, including of Putin himself. 1 Still, Moscow continues its barbaric, indiscriminate attacks against Ukraine’s troops, its people, its cultural heritage sites, and the infrastructure of its economy.

Is it time — as critics continue to argue — to seek a compromise solution instead of further arms deliveries in order to prevent further bloodshed or a disintegration of the Western coalition? 2 Might it even be imperative for Ukraine to renounce regaining its entire territory in order to avoid defeat, the expansion of the war to neighboring states, a nuclear escalation by the Kremlin, or starvation in the world’s poorest countries? Certainly, Vladimir Putin appears to be calculating that time is on his side. “Far from seeking an off-ramp,” Alexander Gabuev writes, “Vladimir Putin is preparing for an even bigger war.” 3

Such a compromise peace would demand a near-superhuman degree of pragmatism and self-denial from the Ukrainians, who are victims of a war of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and who live under almost continuous Russian bombardment. The critics’ fears are nonetheless worthy of careful consideration because they are realistic. They are heightened by the visible fact of Western governments struggling with numerous other disruptive challenges, as well as the prospect of a string of elections in key states, from Poland in October 2023 to the United States in November 2024; all of which appear to be empowering the extreme right, or at least driving up the price of voter consent. Notably, opposition against U.S. support for Ukraine is rising in the ranks of Republican presidential candidates and among their voters as the election campaign takes off. 4 Responsible policymakers must acknowledge these constraints and weigh the costs and risks of all options.

Putin’s Russia: Take it literally and seriously

And yet the calls for negotiation elide a central question: What if Putin’s system and the Russian president himself are unwilling — even unable — to reach such a compromise? The distinguished German historian of Eastern Europe Karl Schlögel has described Putinism succinctly: “a violence-based order following on the demise of a continental empire and a system of state socialism” rooted in a “Soviet-Stalinist DNA … It includes the targeted killing of political opponents, commonplace violence in prisons and camps, impunity for crimes, arbitrariness, conspiracy myths, the notion of ‘enemies of the people.’” 5

In his now notorious historical essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” from the summer of 2021, Putin flatly — and not for the first time — denied Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent country; it was, he wrote, a component (together with Belarus) of a “single large nation, a triune nation.” 6 The Kremlin has repeatedly made it clear that only Ukraine’s complete surrender, including the relinquishment of its sovereignty, is acceptable as the basis for a peace agreement.

This maximalist intransigence is by no means limited to Ukraine. On December 17, 2021, the Kremlin sent two similar “draft treaties” to the White House and to NATO headquarters in Brussels which articulated the Kremlin’s goals for Europe with remarkable clarity. 7 The demands in the proposals — which were immediately dismissed by their recipients — included not just a veto on Ukrainian membership in the alliance but a revision of the Euro-Atlantic security acquis of the post-Cold War period on enlargement, basing, deployments, exercises, and cooperation with partners. They would have severely limited U.S. freedom of movement in Europe (with no concomitant limitations on Russia), reversed 25 years of Central and Eastern European integration into NATO and the European Union, ended the right of non-members to choose their own alliances, and re-established a Russian sphere of influence on the continent. 8 The coup de grâce was the final stipulation (Art. 7) of the draft U.S.-Russia treaty, that all nuclear weapons should be returned to their national territories: it would have meant the end of the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe and thus quite possibly of the alliance itself.

As my Brookings colleagues Fiona Hill and Angela Stent have warned: “This war is about more than Ukraine. … Ukrainians and their supporters understand that in the event of a Russian victory, Putin’s expansionism would not end at the Ukrainian border. The Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and many other states that were once part of the Russian empire would be at risk of attack or overthrow from within.” 9

Konrad Schuller, the Eastern Europe correspondent of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, adds that the proponents of negotiations misjudge the categorical nature of this hostility: “In the case of total enmity, compromise never serves anything but a tactical pause.” This approach, he writes, has “deep roots in the Soviet Union,” and has been demonstrated time and again by Putin, as in the systematic violation of the Minsk agreements from the outset. 10

It appears Putin must be taken — like Donald Trump — literally and seriously .

It appears Putin must be taken — like Donald Trump — literally and seriously . That, in turn, requires confronting something else: the return of the category of the enemy to security policy.

1989: The end of enmity

The key theorist of this concept in the 20th century was Carl Schmitt, a fierce critic of liberal modernity, parliamentary democracy, and political pluralism; also an ardent antisemite. Despite his refusal to distance himself from his role as “crown jurist of the Third Reich,” his thought has unleashed what Jan-Werner Müller described as a “great and lasting intellectual fallout” for debates about political geostrategy to this day — not only in the West, but also in Russia and China. 11 For Schmitt, the concept of the enemy is the essence of the political: “The political enemy is … the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.” 12 Enmity is not meant here in a metaphorical sense: “The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.” 13 Schmitt distinguishes here between “real” and “absolute” enemies: the former are capable of a territorial reconciliation of interests; the latter are incapable of this because of the ideological nature of their antagonism. 14

During the Cold War, much of the world was divided into camps of friend and foe, some of which were separated by genuine fortified borders such as the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. The West’s adversary was the Soviet Union, a rival superpower with a totalitarian ideology and a “settled and implacable hostility,” together with the Warsaw Pact. 15 In the words of John Lewis Gaddis, Western leaders envisaged a postwar European security order “that assumed the possibility of compatible interests, even among incompatible systems” — whereas Josef Stalin’s goal was “the eventual Soviet domination of Europe,” and it “assumed no such thing.” 16 The states of the West, on the other hand, as former French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian noted in 2016, no longer defined their national identity after 1945 in opposition to a “demonized Other.” 17

It seemed that the phenomenon of the enemy in international relations had ended up on the garbage heap of history.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States was left as the only superpower, with no rival far and wide. Its hegemonic status was also reflected in political theory: the so-called theory of convergence, according to which the rest of the world would gradually align itself with the Western model of free-market democracy. (Ironically, the notion of convergence originated in a famous essay by the Russian physicist and human rights defender Andrei Sakharov, whose 1968 essay “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” posited that the political systems of the West and the Soviet bloc would converge as their relations thawed. 18 ) Thomas Wright has pointed out that “the notion of convergence pervaded the three post-Cold War U.S. administrations. It was an explicit goal of their strategy and defined the parameters of it.” 19

The convergence thesis found its classic expression in a 1990 address to Congress by then-President George H.W. Bush:

“Out of these troubled times … a new world order … can emerge: a new era — freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.” 20

History, as we know, has taken a somewhat different course since then. Nonetheless, there was remarkable progress in the decade that followed, which initially seemed to confirm the hope for convergence. The bipolar order of the Cold War reconstituted itself as an “aspiring global commonwealth that enlarged NATO and transformed the United Nations, the [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the EU.” 21 Not only that, the democratic transformation of almost the entire Warsaw Pact found imitators around the world; civil society movements overthrew authoritarian regimes in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It seemed that the phenomenon of the enemy in international relations had ended up on the garbage heap of history.

The key proponents of this thesis were the liberal political theorists. Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History” — arguably the most influential articulation of the theory of liberal entropy — postulated outright that the category of the enemy state, or more precisely, the enemy state with an anti-Western ideology, was doomed to become an anachronism. “The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology of world historical significance … And the death of this ideology means … the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.” Fukuyama hastened to add that terrorism and wars of national liberation would continue, but “large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.” 22

As late as 2011, the most persistent proponent of the liberal convergence thesis, G. John Ikenberry, inveighed against the “panicked narrative” of the rise of illiberal, authoritarian powers: “China and other emerging great powers do not want to contest the basic rules and principles of the liberal international order; they wish to gain more authority and leadership within it. Indeed, today’s power transition represents not the defeat of the liberal order but its ultimate ascendance.” 23

The country that most enthusiastically embraced the narrative of the end of history, the victory of the West through diplomacy and democratic transformation, and the irresistible global spread of a rules-based world order, was reunified Germany. In 2019, the diplomat Thomas Bagger, then head of the planning staff at the German Foreign Office, described Berlin’s interpretation of the Zeitenwende of 1989 with gentle but unmistakable irony:

“Toward the end of a century marked by having been on the wrong side of history twice, Germany finally found itself on the right side. What had looked impossible, even unthinkable, for decades suddenly seemed to be not just real, but indeed inevitable. The rapid transformation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe into parliamentary democracies and market economies was taken as empirical proof of Fukuyama’s bold headline. … Best of all, while Germany would still have to transform its new regions in the East, the former GDR, the country in a broader sense had already arrived at its historical destination: it was a stable parliamentary democracy, with its own well-tested and respected social market economy. While many other countries around the globe would have to transform, Germany could remain as is, waiting for the others to gradually adhere to its model. It was just a matter of time.” 24

Thirty years after reunification, the Germans’ remarkably complacent interpretation of the events of 1989 would become a stubborn cognitive blockage against perceiving and adapting to another, much darker period of climate change in international relations and the global security order.

In the United States, however, the representatives of the realist school of international relations viewed this liberal narrative of a linear arc of history with the same skepticism they harbored for international institutions, international law, and the notion of a liberal world order in general. Realist theorists such as Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt argued that competition was the main driver of the international system. But because realists consider interests to be far more important than ideologies, they are also disinclined to consider a rival state or even an adversary an “enemy” in the Schmittian sense. The competitor’s interests are simply different; this also makes it easier to negotiate with them, to come to a compromise, or even to accept their demand for a sphere of influence. 25 This rather relaxed — and quite condescending — view of the phenomenon of interstate competition was doubtless rooted in the fact that until recently the United States had no plausible peer rival. China’s rise has noticeably changed the realists’ tone.

A third school — the constructivists — took exception to the realists’ refusal to acknowledge identity and ideas as key factors in the behavior of states. And it was the constructivist Alexander Wendt who, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, addressed the problem of the enemy head-on. He distinguished between Hobbesian, Lockean, and Kantian orders — based respectively on enmity, rivalry, and friendship. 26 Explicitly citing Schmitt, Wendt defined the difference between enemy and rival: “An enemy does not recognize the right of the Self to exist as a free subject at all … A rival, in contrast, is thought to recognize the Self’s right to life and liberty.” He adds: “Violence between enemies has no internal limits. … Violence between rivals, in contrast, is self-limiting, constrained by recognition of each other’s right to exist.” 27 Wendt cites post-Cold War conflicts occurring between “Palestinian and Israeli fundamentalists” and in Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda as examples of hostility. All of these examples, however, are of internal or highly localized conflicts.

At the end of the first Bush presidency (1989-93) and then under his successor Bill Clinton (1993-2001), the United Nations sent peacekeepers to Cambodia and Rwanda, and NATO intervened in the Balkans with combat troops for the first time since its founding. Justifications for sending troops included the need to prevent regional destabilization, to end a humanitarian disaster, or the violation of basic principles of international law such as the prohibition of genocide. Leading Western states had patronage relationships with some of the conflict actors (France-Rwanda; France/U.K.-Serbia; Germany-Croatia), but they never went so far as to consider their clients’ enemies as their own. Meanwhile, relations among the great powers were for the most part stable and constructive. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and U.S. President Clinton clashed over NATO’s air war against Serbia. Otherwise, however, they largely cooperated with each other; Clinton paved the way for China to join the World Trade Organization.

2001: Terrorists, the West’s new enemy

It was the rise of radical Islamist terrorism, al-Qaida’s attacks on America on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent “Global War on Terror” with which the category of the enemy as the enemy of the West returned to trans-Atlantic strategic discourse. The neoconservative strategists of President George W. Bush (2001-2009) were convinced that the terrorists and their state sponsors had to be utterly defeated; they put this conviction into practice by driving the Taliban out of Afghanistan and invading Iraq. Their highly controversial formulas, such as the “axis of evil” or “Islamofascism,” were reminiscent of the “absolute enemy” in Schmitt’s “Theory of the Partisan . ” 28 What distinguished the neoconservatives from the Schmittians, however, was the fact that they were moral universalists and, in the majority, convinced advocates of a democratic transformation of the Middle East. On this issue, they were in broad agreement with the liberal internationalists.

The Islamist enemy, it was hoped, would also be transformed by the pull of freedom and democracy. As my colleague Robert Kagan wrote in 2008: “The best [option] may be to hasten the process of modernization in the Islamic world. More modernization, more globalization, faster.” 29 The great powers of Russia and China would — or so it was assumed — share the task of combating terrorism with the West. For the rest, the great powers would — as the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy put it — “compete in peace.” 30 In 2005, Bush’s Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said that once China became a “responsible stakeholder” in the U.S.-led world order, all differences could be settled in light of shared interests. 31

A decade later, Le Drian identified the Islamic State group (IS) as France’s “current enemy.” 32 But he simultaneously introduced a distinction that was as precise as it was careful: for France, he explained, IS was an ennemi conjoncturel , an enemy whose status was contingent, depending on the current threat it posed. France, on the other hand, is an ennemi structurel for IS, based on an “apocalyptic, totalitarian, and eliminatory vision of this combat … Our deeds are of little importance from this point of view. We are targeted above all for what we are, and for what we represent.” 33 We will have to come back to this distinction.

2008-present: The pulverization of peaceful convergence

The presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2016) was the last in the post-Cold War era to spell out its national security strategy within the paradigm of peaceful convergence. Obama, however, viewed the interventionism of his predecessors with skepticism. He understood that competition was rising globally, but he was determined not to let that fact define his administration. 34

When Obama took office in 2009, Dmitry Medvedev was his counterpart in the Kremlin. But the power center was Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who had served once before as prime minister (1999-2000) and as president (2000-2008). Putin had triggered a sharp revisionist turn in Russian foreign policy in 1999 with the bloody Chechen war. In February 2007, he challenged the West in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. 35 In August 2008, the Kremlin provoked Georgia into a week-long shooting war as punishment for its aspirations to become a NATO member. Obama nevertheless offered Russia a “reset”; it produced the New START Treaty on strategic arms reduction and greater Russian cooperation on Afghanistan and Iran.

In 2012, Putin again assumed the Russian presidency. Yet even as Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and sent proxy troops into eastern Ukraine, Obama — supported by German Chancellor Angela Merkel — resisted pressure from Congress and his own administration to send lethal weapons to Kyiv. When Putin intervened in Syria in 2015 in favor of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad (triggering Germany’s refugee crisis), the United States also remained reluctant to intervene. Obama believed that the Europeans should take more responsibility for their own security; for him, the most important American security interests lay elsewhere, in Asia.

But China had also become much more power-conscious, both in its own neighborhood and in international institutions. The Obama administration initially took a wait-and-see approach; then it tried to change course with the “pivot to Asia” — with limited success. Derek Chollet, who had served as a senior Pentagon official in the administration, described U.S.-China relations as “increasingly cooperative on select issues, [but] rooted in competition and distrust.” 36 Few people, however, would have been less inclined to view a challenging great power like Russia or a rising rival like China as an enemy than the cerebral Obama; indeed, he notoriously dismissed Russia as a “regional power.”

Donald Trump’s term in office did not end the era of friendly convergence — that had already been ‘pulverized’ by the global financial crisis, the failure of the Arab Spring, Russia and China’s increasing challenge to the Western-led liberal world order, and the global rise of populism.

Donald Trump’s term in office (2017-2021) did not end the era of friendly convergence — that had already been “pulverized” by the global financial crisis, the failure of the Arab Spring, Russia and China’s increasing challenge to the Western-led liberal world order, and the global rise of populism. 37 But it became the scene of a bizarre power struggle in U.S. security policy between Republican traditionalists and the president. The former sought to articulate a new paradigm of global great power competition with the 2017 National Security Strategy. The document referred to Russia and China as “revisionist powers”; however, it simultaneously emphasized the importance of democracy, values, and allies. 38 This restrained intonation of systemic rivalry enjoyed bipartisan consensus. It found an increasing echo in Europe as well — such as in the European Union’s 2019 China Strategy, with its description of the emerging great power as a “partner, competitor, and strategic rival.” 39

The commander-in-chief’s political instincts, as it happened, were diametrically opposed to those of his advisers. The president had nothing but contempt for institutions, rules, allies, and especially NATO and the EU; he admired authoritarian leaders like Putin all the more submissively. In all this, Trump was (and is) neither a strategist nor an ideologue, but a transactional “America First” nationalist in a zero-sum world — a theory of American power that an anonymous senior official described as a “no friends, no enemies” policy. 40 Trump’s attacks on the rules-based world order were ultimately unsuccessful, as were his attempts to prevent his successor from winning the election. Nor did he manage to stop the U.S. government from providing Ukraine with lethal assistance, increasing sanctions on Russia, and strengthening the American military presence in Europe. 41

The lasting damage done by Trump’s tenure, however, was and is the normalization of ethno-nationalism, open contempt for democracy, and violence in the U.S. conservative camp. The enemy of the right-wing of the GOP (as is the case with other radical populists) is none other than liberal modernity itself. The Economist reported from a meeting of the hard-right Conservative Political Action Conference: “the movement’s goal is the utter destruction of the enemy.” 42

Joe Biden assumed the presidency of a politically and socially deeply divided country in January 2021, in the midst of a historic pandemic that by today’s count has claimed the lives of nearly seven million people worldwide and has shed an unsparing light on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the international order and Western democracies. 43 An administration strategy paper from March of that year described Russia as a disruptor (“determined to enhance its global influence and play a disruptive role on the world stage”) and China as a potential peer opponent (“the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system”). 44

2022: The return of the great power enemy

Only eleven months later, Putin invaded Ukraine; shortly before, Moscow and Beijing had sworn a “friendship” with “no limits.” 45 In October 2022, the administration’s National Security Strategy stated succinctly: “The world is now at an inflection point. This decade will be decisive, in setting the terms of our competition with the [People’s Republic of China], managing the acute threat posed by Russia, and in our efforts to deal with shared challenges, particularly climate change, pandemics, and economic turbulence.” 46 But in the summer of 2023, fears of a U.S.-China war continue to haunt Western capitals; Russia shows no signs that it might be willing to relent.

The free democracies must now understand that they are dealing with a phenomenon they had believed to be historically obsolete: state rivals who see them as ideological enemies. Specifically, “absolute” enemies as defined by Schmitt, or ennemis structurels, as Le Drian put it. Or — to use a more old-fashioned term — mortal enemies. Whether the leadership in Beijing perceives the nations of the West in this sense can be left open here — but in the case of Putin and his regime, the case is clear. Putin’s frequent characterization of the Kyiv leadership as “Nazis,” the tirades with which Putin rails against a “corrupt” Ukraine and a “decadent” West and threatens to “cleanse” “filth and traitors” in his own population, the threats of nuclear Armageddon — these linguistic tropes are familiar from the history of 20th-century genocides. 47

Conceivably, in the case of Putin himself, there is a personal psychopathology at play. Equally possibly, it is — as Fiona Hill argues — simply a cynical terror strategy designed to paralyze the resistance of Ukraine and the West. 48 Perhaps Putin is convinced that he can win this way; perhaps he feels compelled to articulate his invasion as a life-or-death struggle because his power and his life depend on not losing? In any case, the facts are that this unhinged language is amplified daily in the most garish colors by members of the Kremlin leadership as well as Russia’s state-controlled media, that it is taken at face value by much of the Russian population, and that it is implemented in brutal and sadistic ways by Putin’s armed forces. In this respect, Putin’s publicly staged hostility has long since developed a political life of its own. “If anything,” writes Tatiana Stanovaya in a compelling analysis of the hardening mood of Russia’s next-generation security elites, “the country is becoming more committed to the fight … No one is seriously considering or discussing a diplomatic end to the war: a notion that looks to many high-profile Russians like a personal threat, given all the war crimes that their country has committed and the responsibility that the entire elite now bears for the carnage in Ukraine.” 49

Help Ukraine win, strengthen Europe’s defenses, and avoid the mirroring trap

So how should the West grapple with this dilemma? Peace for Ukraine must at some point involve negotiations with Russia. But given the Kremlin’s implacable attitude, the burden of proof for the credibility of its negotiating offers would be extremely high. An armistice based on a freezing of the status quo in the form of continued Russian occupation of Crimea and the Donbas would reward Putin’s aggression and merely pause hostilities. The fact that the aggressor’s identity and the extent of his war crimes are beyond legal doubt will weigh heavily on any negotiations; an end to the fighting without some form of accountability, atonement, and reparations is hard to imagine. Diplomacy, in other words, would have to be very largely on Kyiv’s terms. That does not necessarily presuppose a Russian military defeat or a Ukrainian military victory. Conceivably, Russia could be forced to conclude that the price of pursuing Ukraine’s subjugation is unsustainably high by, for example, losing the support of a key non-Western power like China, or if the so-called Global South turned away from it. But as long as neither of those scenarios is within reach, helping Ukraine means helping it win on the battlefield. 50

Given the risk that an end to the war becomes an interregnum between wars, only the strongest guarantees can satisfy Ukraine’s security interests, and indeed those of the Western alliance.

Would that lead Russia to stop seeing it, and the West, as enemies? Certainly, Germany only embarked on the road to atonement after utter defeat, capitulation, and occupation — a scenario that seems unimaginable for Russia in this conflict. Given the risk that an end to the war becomes an interregnum between wars, only the strongest guarantees — a clear, constructive, and hopefully short path to NATO and EU membership — can satisfy Ukraine’s security interests, and indeed those of the Western alliance. The EU has accelerated membership talks, and the European Council is expected to kick off accession negotiations with Ukraine in December, a process that my Brookings colleague Carlo Bastasin notes comes with “huge political, financial, and institutional implications.” 51 Managing it carefully is all the more crucial because NATO member states were unable to agree on accelerating Kyiv’s NATO accession at the Vilnius summit in July; the question will unquestionably return with full force at the alliance’s 75th-anniversary summit in Washington, DC in July 2024.

Meanwhile, NATO, as well as the European Union, will have to continue to radically rethink their security provisions and address their huge deficits in deterrence and defense. Given the evolving U.S. presidential election campaign, Europeans especially will have to do more (much more) to defend themselves. As long as Russia is internally totalitarian and externally neo-imperial, Europe’s security can only be defined against Moscow.

Finally, as Le Drian put it succinctly in his 2016 essay: we must not fall into the intellectual trap of mirroring. This risk is not trivial, as was demonstrated by the attempts of Justice Department officials under the Bush administration after the September 11 attacks to justify “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding by invoking a quasi-unlimited executive prerogative. 52 The current debate on how to deal with China’s increasingly assertive global stance also has hysterical overtones, even if the concern itself is justified. And, yes, there is a very real danger of subjecting those who leave authoritarian regimes to blanket suspicion, racism, and dehumanization.

The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long into the abyss for a long time, the abyss also gazes into you.” 53 In an age of what a recent U.K. strategy paper calls accelerated, constant, and dynamic systemic competition and faced with authoritarian great powers who think of us as the absolute enemy, that warning is especially pertinent. 54

Russia’s reasons for invading Ukraine – however debatable – shouldn’t be ignored in a peace deal

argumentative essay about russia and ukraine

Professor of Political Geography, Newcastle University

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Nick Megoran does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Recent developments in the US presidential campaign have pushed the question of how to resolve the war in Ukraine war up the agenda. With a Republican presidential victory looking increasingly likely, reports suggest Donald Trump would quickly demand that Ukraine enter peace talks should he win November’s election.

His choice of running-mate – the outspoken opponent of US military assistance to Ukraine, JD Vance – has further increased the likelihood of this.

A recent poll in Ukraine showed 44% of Ukrainians want formal peace talks with Russia to begin, up from 23% in May 2023. But what would a just and stable long-term peace look like? Ukraine has set out its demands , including full withdrawal of Russian troops and the creation of a tribunal to prosecute Russian war criminals.

These are eminently reasonable. But it is also important to understand Russian grievances. This is not to excuse aggression – but Russia started the war, so understanding its reasoning is important to grasp why it occurred and how eventually to end it.

The Kremlin set out its complaints in a 2021 essay purportedly written by Vladimir Putin: On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians . If we cut through its dubious historical claims , the remaining grievances are largely traditional geopolitical issues about disputed territory, borders and minorities . These local, regional and national-scale issues are routinely encountered after the break-up of multi-ethnic empires such as the Soviet Union.

Putin’s essay refers to “Ukrainian neo-Nazis,” and he has repeatedly said that the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine is a goal of the invasion. The suggestion that Ukraine is overrun by fascists is nonsense. But government-mandated celebrations of Ukrainian nationalist Third Reich collaborators such as Stepan Bandera have caused outrage in Russia and beyond .

A statue of a man, a woman and two children commemorating Ukraine's 1930s famine.

The toppling of Russian statues and their replacement with memorials to Ukrainian ultra-nationalists has also proved deeply contentious. This question of how the Communist period is remembered in public space is one that many east European states have faced and found ways to address . A future peace deal could defuse these tensions by allowing individual communities, at the local scale, to decide how they wish to remember the past and mark public space.

Language barriers

At the regional scale, a recurring complaint in Putin’s essay is that Russian-speaking minorities (especially in Ukraine’s eastern regions) have suffered discrimination under Kyiv’s laws on language and education. Promoting Ukrainian at the expense of minority languages, Putin argues, is problematic in a country “that is very complex in terms of its territorial, national and linguistic composition”.

Putin greatly exaggerates the threat to ethno-linguistic minorities. But non-partisan international bodies such as the United Nations , the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe OSCE and the European Centre for Minority Issues have also raised concerns about discrimination against minorities in Ukraine.

This challenge of how to promote the language and culture of a majority ethnic group while respecting ethnic diversity following independence is a recurring one. There are numerous creative ways to resolve it.

For example, in the 19th century, the Danish-German conflict over Schleswig-Holstein was seen as the classic unsolvable ethno-territorial dispute. The division of Schleswig between Germany and Denmark in a 1920 referendum left vulnerable and dissatisfied linguistic minorities on both sides of the new border. It was eventually solved by a model of non-territorial autonomy .

This meant that the two states agreed to respect the international boundary, but minorities were given the right to use their own languages for education, worship and cultural life. It’s a model that might usefully be reworked in Ukraine.

Question of boundaries

Finally, at the national scale, Russia has disputed Ukraine’s boundaries and has illegally annexed territories. Putin’s essay argues that these boundaries had been artificially manipulated by the Bolsheviks and were “never seen as state borders”.

A man smoking a cigarette walks past an artwork depicting a Russian soldier with a large z in the background.

Historical scholarship would agree that the Soviet Union’s boundaries – like virtually any modern state boundary – were to an extent artificial. But that’s no excuse to contest them today. Russia has repeatedly recognised Ukraine’s boundaries, most clearly in a 2003 treaty . There have been fewer than a dozen successful examples of boundary changes by force since 1945 and the UN can’t allow this precedent.

But there are many ways in which the either/or logic of state sovereignty – in other words, “this land is either mine or yours” – can be adapted to help overcome these issues. One is the creation of sovereign regions, such as Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea. Historically Swedish, they ended up Finnish after the first world war.

Now a demilitarised, self-governing territory, they fall under Finnish authority but govern their own internal affairs. Such a solution could be adapted for eastern areas of Ukraine that Russia has illegally annexed.

Another sticking point is likely to be Crimea , which has historically been closely identified with Russia. This could be resolved through “territorial leasing”, where one state leases land to another. For example, Russia currently leases its Baikonur space centre from Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan exercises sovereignty over the city, but it is subject to Russian jurisdiction and the head of the city’s administration is appointed by the presidents of the two countries. Ukraine could lease Crimea to Russia, with both states involved in its joint administration.

The Russia-Ukraine war can’t be reduced to any single factor such as geography. A peace deal will need to address issues including war crimes, reparations and the return of abductees. It will also require new geopolitical arrangements guaranteeing the security of both Russia and Ukraine. Given previous broken Russian promises to Ukraine, and the bitter legacy of its naked aggression, a just and lasting peace like this will be hard to achieve.

But geographical issues will need tackling as stepping stones towards a settlement. The good news is that there are plenty of successful examples from around the world showing how this can be done.

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Explained: Vladimir Putin’s key justifications for Ukraine invasion

Russian president’s denial of neighbouring nation’s statehood laid ‘groundwork for war’

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Vladimir Putin addresses nation following talks with Azerbaijan&#039;s President Ilham Aliyev

1. Ukraine ‘is Russia’

2. russian ‘genocide’, 3. nato expansion.

Vladimir Putin has been roundly condemned for attacking the notion of Ukrainian statehood in an “angry” and “dismissive” speech that put a new spin on the history of Russia’s relations with its eastern European neighbour.

How Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could play out How Russian media is reporting the Ukraine invasion Why Vladimir Putin is so hung up about Nato

In the Russian president’s “version of Ukraine’s history”, the territory now controlled by Kyiv “was always part of Russia”, said Associated Press (AP) editor-at-large John Daniszewski. But “while that serves his purpose, it is also a fiction” that denies Ukraine’s “own 1,000-year history”.

World leaders have dismissed Putin’s claims in his address to the nation on Monday, when he signed a decree recognising the independence of the separatist Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, collectively known as Donbas. But those claims nonetheless lay the “groundwork for war” , wrote Daniszewski.

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During his televised address, Putin “buoyed his case for codifying the cleavage of two rebel territories from Ukraine by arguing that the very idea of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction”, The New York Times (NYT) reported.

“With a conviction of an authoritarian unburdened by historical nuance”, the paper continued, the Russian leader “declared Ukraine an invention of the Bolshevik revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin”. According to Putin, Lenin “endowed Ukraine with a sense of statehood by allowing it autonomy within the newly created Soviet state”.

Experts do not dispute that the Bolsheviks recognised Ukraine as a separate socialist republic in 1917, following the foundation of the Soviet Union. But Ukraine can trace its history back to Kievan Rus’, a loose federation dating from the Middle Ages that is widely accepted to form the basis of the country’s national identity.

All the same, Putin’s contrary claim that “there had never been a historical Ukraine until Soviet times” is being used to justify a potential invasion of Ukraine , said AP’s Daniszewski.

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And “as with all historical narratives”, he continued, “there were elements of truth in what Putin was saying”, in that “Ukrainians and Russians are related eastern Slavic peoples whose destinies have been both intertwined and separated throughout history”.

But in justifying a potential Russian occupation, Putin chose to “focus on the time of Russia’s maximum dominance over Ukraine”, overlooking “that it has been a separate state recognised by international treaties and explicitly by Russia over the last 30 years”.

Another key element of the Kremlin’s grounds for a conflict with Ukraine is allegations from Moscow that the government in Kyiv is committing “genocide” against ethnic Russians in the two separatist-controlled regions.

The claim has been dismissed as “absurd” by the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank, but Putin justified the deployment this week of troops to Luhansk and Donetsk by arguing that they were “peacekeepers” .

His government has repeatedly claimed that the Ukrainian military has targeted civilians with historic links to Russia during the shadow war that has been taking place in the Donbas region since 2014.

But “there have been no serious efforts to support this explosive claim”, the Atlantic Council said. Instead, the allegations “represent a grotesque distortion of reality” that seeks to “blame the victims for a war of aggression orchestrated by Moscow that has killed thousands of Ukrainians and forced millions to flee their homes”.

The Kremlin has aggressively pushed back against Western leaders who have rubbished the genocide claims. The Foreign Ministry said that such a dismissal by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz following talks with Putin last week was “unacceptable”.

But while Moscow is yet to produce evidence of a “genocide” against ethnic Russians in the Donbas, “detailed accounts of Kremlin atrocities in eastern Ukraine” do exist, the Atlantic Council reported. “They make for grim reading”, highlighting ”war crimes that have taken place amid the lawlessness of Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine ”.

Putin has long maintained that Nato has overstretched its mandate by expanding eastwards and admitting members that border Russia .

The Kremlin wants “an end to Nato expansion, a rollback of previous expansion, a removal of American nuclear weapons from Europe and a Russian sphere of influence”, wrote Seth G. Jones, director of international security at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies .

Putin has demanded that Nato publicly renounce a pledge that Ukraine will one day be allowed to join the alliance, arguing that “the best solution to the Ukraine crisis would be for Kyiv to independently disavow its ambitions to join Nato”, The Times said.

Despite Nato reportedly having no immediate plans to admit the eastern European country to the military alliance, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has maintained that it is a “matter of relations between Ukraine and the alliance”.

“It certainly should not be the choice of any state in any part of the world,” he said in mid-December, following talks with Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Aggression from Moscow “has pushed Ukraine into Nato”, Zelenskyy warned.

Ex-Labour minister George Robertson, who led Nato between 1999 and 2003, has said Putin wanted to join the alliance early in his rule. Robertson told The Guardian that the Russian leader “wanted to be part of that secure, stable prosperous West that Russia was out of at the time”.

That may explain why Putin’s latest attack on Ukrainian statehood “sounded like a fever dream”, wrote BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams. “Why, he asked, did Nato make an enemy of Russia”, underlining “that the Kremlin remains deeply resentful of the way history panned out”.

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The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War

When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.

Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency a decade ago. In 2012, he described Russia as a “state-civilization,” which by its nature absorbed smaller cultures such as Ukraine’s. The next year, he claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were joined in “spiritual unity.” In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, he argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.

As the objects of this rhetoric, and of the war of destruction that it sanctions, Ukrainians grasp all of this. Ukraine does have a history, of course, and Ukrainians do constitute a nation. But empire enforces objectification on the periphery and amnesia at the center. Thus modern Russian imperialism includes memory laws that forbid serious discussion of the Soviet past. It is illegal for Russians to apply the word “war” to the invasion of Ukraine. It is also illegal to say that Stalin began the Second World War as Hitler’s ally, and used much the same justification to attack Poland as Putin is using to attack Ukraine. When the invasion began, in February, Russian publishers were ordered to purge mentions of Ukraine from textbooks.

Faced with the Kremlin’s official mixture of fantasy and taboo, the temptation is to prove the opposite: that it is Ukraine rather than Russia that is eternal, that it is Ukrainians, not Russians, who are always right, and so on. Yet Ukrainian history gives us something more interesting than a mere counter-narrative to empire. We can find Ukrainian national feeling at a very early date. In contemporary Ukraine, though, the nation is not so much anti-colonial, a rejection of a particular imperial power, as post-colonial, the creation of something new.

Southern Ukraine, where Russian troops are now besieging cities and bombing hospitals , was well known to the ancients. In the founding myth of Athens, the goddess Athena gives the city the gift of the olive tree. In fact, the city could grow olives only because it imported grain from ports on the Black Sea coast. The Greeks knew the coast, but not the hinterland, where they imagined mythical creatures guarding fields of gold and ambrosia. Here already was a colonial view of Ukraine: a land of fantasy, where those who take have the right to dream.

The city of Kyiv did not exist in ancient times, but it is very old—about half a millennium older than Moscow. It was probably founded in the sixth or seventh century, north of any territory seen by Greeks or controlled by Romans. Islam was advancing, and Christianity was becoming European. The Western Roman Empire had fallen, leaving a form of Christianity subordinate to a pope. The Eastern (Byzantine) Empire remained, directing what we now call the Orthodox Church. As Rome and Constantinople competed for converts, peoples east of Kyiv converted to Islam. Kyivans spoke a Slavic language that had no writing system, and practiced a paganism without idols or temples.

Putin’s vision of “unity” relates to a baptism that took place in this setting. In the ninth century, a group of Vikings known as the Rus arrived in Kyiv. Seeking a southbound route for their slave trade, they found the Dnipro River, which runs through the city. Their chieftains then fought over a patchwork of territories in what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and the northeast of Russia—with Kyiv always as the prize. In the late tenth century, a Viking named Valdemar took the city, with the help of a Scandinavian army. He initially governed as a pagan. But, around 987, when the Byzantines faced an internal revolt, he sensed an opportunity. He came to the emperor’s aid, and received his sister’s hand in marriage. In the process, Valdemar converted to Christianity.

Putin claims that this messy sequence of events reveals the will of God to bind Russia and Ukraine forever. The will of God is easy to misunderstand; in any case, modern nations did not exist at the time, and the words “Russia” and “Ukraine” had no meaning. Valdemar was typical of the pagan Eastern European rulers of his day, considering multiple monotheistic options before choosing the one that made the most strategic sense. The word “Rus” no longer meant Viking slavers but a Christian polity. Its ruling family now intermarried with others, and the local people were treated as subjects to be taxed rather than as bodies to be sold.

Yet no rule defined who would take power after a Kyivan ruler’s death. Valdemar took a Byzantine princess as his wife, but he had a half a dozen others, not to mention a harem of hundreds of women. When he died in 1015, he had imprisoned one of his sons, Sviatopolk, and was making war upon another, Yaroslav. Sviatopolk was freed after his father’s death, and killed three of his brothers, but he was defeated on the battlefield by Yaroslav. Other sons entered the fray, and Yaroslav didn’t rule alone until 1036. The succession had taken twenty-one years. At least ten other sons of Valdemar had died in the meantime.

These events do not reveal a timeless empire, as Putin claims. But they do suggest the importance of a succession principle, a theme very important in Ukrainian-Russian relations today. The Ukrainian transliteration of “Valdemar” is “Volodymyr,” the name of Ukraine’s President. In Ukraine, power is transferred through democratic elections: when Volodymyr Zelensky won the 2019 Presidential election , the sitting President accepted defeat. The Russian transliteration of the same name is “Vladimir.” Russia is brittle: it has no succession principle , and it’s unclear what will happen when Vladimir Putin dies or is forced from power. The pressure of mortality confirms the imperial thinking. An aging tyrant, obsessed by his legacy, seizes upon a lofty illusion that seems to confer immortality: the “unity” of Russia and Ukraine.

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In the Icelandic sagas, Yaroslav is remembered as the Lame; in Eastern Europe, he is the Wise, the giver of laws. Yet he did not solve the problem of succession. Following his reign, the lands around Kyiv fragmented again and again. In 1240, the city fell to the Mongols; later, most of old Rus was claimed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then the largest state in Europe. Lithuania borrowed from Kyiv a grammar of politics, as well as a good deal of law. For a couple of centuries, its grand dukes also ruled Poland. But, in 1569, after the Lithuanian dynasty died out, a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was formalized, and the territories of Ukraine were placed under Polish jurisdiction.

This was a crucial change. After 1569, Kyiv was no longer a source of law but an object of it—the archetypal colonial situation. It was colonization that set off Ukraine from the former territories of Rus, and its manner generated qualities still visible today: suspicion of the central state, organization in crisis, and the notion of freedom as self-expression, despite a powerful neighbor.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all the forces of Europe’s globalization seemed to bear down on Ukraine. Polish colonization resembled and in some measure enabled the European colonization of the wider world. Polish nobles introduced land-management practices—along with land managers, most of whom were Jewish—that allowed the establishment of profitable plantations. Local Ukrainian warlords rushed to imitate the system, and adopted elements of Polish culture, including Western Christianity and the Polish language. In an age of discovery, enserfed peasants labored for a world market.

Ukraine’s colonization coincided with the Renaissance, and with a spectacular flowering of Polish culture. Like other Renaissance thinkers, Polish scholars in Ukraine resuscitated ancient knowledge, and sometimes overturned it. It was a Pole, Copernicus, who undid the legacy of Ptolemy’s “ Almagest ” and confirmed that the Earth orbits the sun. It was another Pole, Maciej of Miechów, who corrected Ptolemy’s “ Geography ,” clearing Ukrainian maps of gold and ambrosia. As in ancient times, however, the tilling of the black earth enabled tremendous wealth, raising the question of why those who labored and those who profited experienced such different fates.

The Renaissance considered questions of identity through language. Across Europe, there was a debate as to whether Latin, now revived, was sufficient for the culture, or whether vernacular spoken languages should be elevated for the task. In the early fourteenth century, Dante answered this question in favor of Italian; English, French, Spanish, and Polish writers created other literary languages by codifying local vernaculars. In Ukraine, literary Polish emerged victorious over the Ukrainian vernacular, becoming the language of the commercial and intellectual élite. In a way, this was typical: Polish was a modern language, like English or Italian. But it was not the local language in Ukraine. Ukraine’s answer to the language question was deeply colonial, whereas in the rest of Europe it could be seen as broadly democratic.

The Reformation brought a similar result: local élites converted to Protestantism and then to Roman Catholicism, alienating them further from an Orthodox population. The convergence of colonization, the Renaissance, and the Reformation was specific to Ukraine. By the sixteen-forties, the few large landholders generally spoke Polish and were Catholic, and those who worked for them spoke Ukrainian and were Orthodox. Globalization had generated differences and inequalities that pushed the people to rebellion.

Ukrainians on the battlefield today rely on no fantasy of the past to counter Putin’s. If there is a precursor that matters to them, it is the Cossacks, a group of free people who lived on the far reaches of the Ukrainian steppe, making their fortress on an island in the middle of the Dnipro. Having escaped the Polish system of landowners and peasants, they could choose to be “registered Cossacks,” paid for their service in the Polish Army. Still, they were not citizens, and more of them wished to be registered than the Polish-Lithuanian parliament would allow.

The rebellion began in 1648, when an influential Cossack, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, saw his lands seized and his son attacked by a Polish noble. Finding himself beyond the protection of the law, Khmelnytsky turned his fellow-Cossacks toward revolt against the Polish-speaking, Roman Catholic magnates who dominated Ukraine. The accumulated cultural, religious, and economic grievances of the people quickly transformed the revolt into something very much like an anti-colonial uprising, with violence directed not only against the private armies of the magnates but against Poles and Jews generally. The magnates carried out reprisals against peasants and Cossacks, impaling them on stakes. The Polish-Lithuanian cavalry fought what had been their own Cossack infantry. Each side knew the other very well.

In 1651, the Cossacks, realizing that they needed help, turned to an Eastern power, Muscovy, about which they knew little. When Kyivan Rus had collapsed, most of its lands had been absorbed by Lithuania, but some of its northeastern territories remained under the dominion of a Mongol successor state. There, in a new city called Moscow, leaders known as tsars had begun an extraordinary period of territorial expansion, extending their realm into northern Asia. In 1648, the year that the Cossack uprising began, a Muscovite explorer reached the Pacific Ocean.

The war in Ukraine allowed Muscovy to turn its attention to Europe. In 1654, the Cossacks signed an agreement with representatives of the tsar. The Muscovite armies invaded Poland-Lithuania from the east; soon after, Sweden invaded from the north, setting off the crisis that Polish history remembers as “the Deluge.” Peace was eventually made between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy, in 1667, and Ukraine was divided more or less down the middle, along the Dnipro. After a thousand years of existence, Kyiv was politically connected to Moscow for the first time.

The Cossacks were something like an early national movement. The problem was that their struggle against one colonial power enabled another. In 1721, Muscovy was renamed the Russian Empire, in reference to old Rus. Poland-Lithuania never really recovered from the Deluge, and was partitioned out of existence between 1772 and 1795. Russia thereby claimed the rest of Ukraine—everything but a western district known as Galicia, which went to the Habsburgs. Around the same time, in 1775, the Cossacks lost their status. They did not gain the political rights they had wanted, nor did the peasants who supported them gain control of the black earth. Polish landowners remained in Ukraine, even as state power became Russian.

Whereas Putin’s story of Ukraine is about destiny, the Ukrainian recollection of the Cossacks is about unfulfilled aspirations. The country’s national anthem, written in 1862, speaks of a young people upon whom fate has yet to smile, but who will one day prove worthy of the “Cossack nation.”

The nineteenth century was the age of national revivals. When the Ukrainian movement began in imperial Russian Kharkov—today Kharkiv , and largely in ruins—the focus was on the Cossack legacy. The next move was to locate history in the people, as an account of continuous culture. At first, such efforts did not seem threatening to imperial rule. But, after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War, in 1856, and the insult of the Polish uprising of 1863 and 1864, Ukrainian culture was declared not to exist. It was often deemed an invention of Polish élites—an idea that Putin endorsed in his essay on “historical unity.” Leading Ukrainian thinkers emigrated to Galicia, where they could speak freely.

The First World War brought the principle of self-determination, which promised a release from imperial rule. In practice, it was often used to rescue old empires, or to build new ones. A Ukrainian National Republic was established in 1917, as the Russian Empire collapsed into revolution. In 1918, in return for a promise of foodstuffs, the country was recognized by Austria and Germany . Woodrow Wilson championed self-determination, but his victorious entente ignored Ukraine, recognizing Polish claims instead. Vladimir Lenin invoked the principle as well, though he meant only that the exploitation of national questions could advance class revolution. Ukraine soon found itself at the center of the Russian civil war, in which the Red Army, led by the Bolsheviks, and the White Army, fighting for the defunct empire, both denied Ukraine’s right to sovereignty. In this dreadful conflict, which followed four years of war, millions of people died, among them tens of thousands of Jews.

Though the Red Army ultimately prevailed, Bolshevik leaders knew that the Ukrainian question had to be addressed. Putin claims that the Bolsheviks created Ukraine, but the truth is close to the opposite. The Bolsheviks destroyed the Ukrainian National Republic. Aware that Ukrainian identity was real and widespread, they designed their new state to account for it. It was largely thanks to Ukraine that the Soviet Union took the form it did, as a federation of units with national names.

The failure of self-determination in Ukraine was hardly unique. Almost all of the new states created after the First World War were destroyed, within about two decades, by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or both. In the political imaginations of both regimes, Ukraine was the territory whose possession would allow them to break the postwar order, and to transform the world in their own image. As in the sixteenth century, it was as if all the forces of world history were concentrated on a single country.

Stalin spoke of an internal colonization, in which peasants would be exploited so that the Soviet economy could imitate—and then overtake—capitalism. His policy of collective agriculture, in which land was seized from farmers, was particularly unwelcome in Ukraine, where the revolution had finally got rid of the (still largely Polish) landholders. Yet the black earth of Ukraine was central to Stalin’s plans, and he moved to subdue it. In 1932 and 1933, he enforced a series of policies that led to around four million people dying of hunger or related disease. Soviet propaganda blamed the Ukrainians, claiming that they were killing themselves to discredit Soviet rule—a tactic echoed, today, by Putin. Europeans who tried to organize famine relief were dismissed as Nazis.

The actual Nazis saw Stalin’s famine as a sign that Ukrainian agriculture could be exploited for another imperial project: their own. Hitler wanted Soviet power overthrown, Soviet cities depopulated, and the whole western part of the country colonized. His vision of Ukrainians was intensely colonial : he imagined that he could deport and starve them by the millions, and exploit the labor of whoever remained. It was Hitler’s desire for Ukrainian land that brought millions of Jews under German control. In this sense, colonial logic about Ukraine was a necessary condition for the Holocaust .

Between 1933 and 1945, Soviet and Nazi colonialism made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world . More civilians were killed in Ukraine, in acts of atrocity, than anywhere else. That reckoning doesn’t even include soldiers: more Ukrainians died fighting the Germans, in the Second World War, than French, American, and British troops combined.

The major conflict of the war in Europe was the German-Soviet struggle for Ukraine, which took place between 1941 and 1945. But, when the war began, in 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany were de-facto allies, and jointly invaded Poland. At the time, what is now western Ukraine was southeastern Poland. A small group of Ukrainian nationalists there joined the Germans, understanding that they would seek to destroy the U.S.S.R. When it became clear that the Germans would fail, the nationalists left their service, ethnically cleansed Poles in 1943 and 1944, and then resisted the Soviets. In Putin’s texts, they figure as timeless villains, responsible for Ukrainian difference generally. The irony, of course, is that they emerged thanks to Stalin’s much grander collaboration with Hitler. They were crushed by Soviet power, in a brutal counter-insurgency, and today Ukraine’s far right polls at one to two per cent. Meanwhile, the Poles, whose ancestors were the chief victims of Ukrainian nationalism, have admitted nearly three million Ukrainian refugees , reminding us that there are other ways to handle history than stories of eternal victimhood.

After the war, western Ukraine was added to Soviet Ukraine, and the republic was placed under suspicion precisely because it had been under German occupation. New restrictions on Ukrainian culture were justified by a manufactured allocation of guilt. This circular logic—we punish you, therefore you must be guilty—informs Kremlin propaganda today. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has argued that Russia had to invade Ukraine because Ukraine might have started a war. Putin, who has said the same, is clearly drawing on Stalin’s rhetoric. We are to understand that the Soviet victory in the Second World War left Russians forever pure and Ukrainians eternally guilty. At the funerals of Russian soldiers, grieving parents are told that their sons were fighting Nazis.

The history of the colonization of Ukraine, like the history of troubling and divisive subjects in general, can help us get free of myths. The past delivers to Putin several strands of colonial rhetoric, which he has combined and intensified. It also leaves us vulnerable to a language of exploitation: whenever we speak of “the Ukraine” instead of “Ukraine,” or pronounce the capital city in the Russian style , or act as if Americans can tell Ukrainians when and how to make peace, we are continuing imperial rhetoric by partaking in it.

Ukrainian national rhetoric is less coherent than Putin’s imperialism, and, therefore, more credible, and more human. Independence arrived in 1991, when the U.S.S.R was dissolved. Since then, the country’s politics have been marked by corruption and inequality, but also by a democratic spirit that has grown in tandem with national self-awareness. In 2004, an attempt to rig an election was defeated by a mass movement. In 2014, millions of Ukrainians protested a President who retreated from the E.U. The protesters were massacred, the President fled, and Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time. Again and again, Ukrainians have elected Presidents who seek reconciliation with Russia; again and again, this has failed. Zelensky is an extreme case: he ran on a platform of peace, only to be greeted with an invasion.

Ukraine is a post-colonial country, one that does not define itself against exploitation so much as accept, and sometimes even celebrate, the complications of emerging from it. Its people are bilingual, and its soldiers speak the language of the invader as well as their own. The war is fought in a decentralized way , dependent on the solidarity of local communities. These communities are diverse, but together they defend the notion of Ukraine as a political nation. There is something heartening in this. The model of the nation as a mini-empire, replicating inequalities on a smaller scale, and aiming for a homogeneity that is confused with identity, has worn itself out. If we are going to have democratic states in the twenty-first century, they will have to accept some of the complexity that is taken for granted in Ukraine.

The contrast between an aging empire and a new kind of nation is captured by Zelensky, whose simple presence makes Kremlin ideology seem senseless. Born in 1978, he is a child of the U.S.S.R., and speaks Russian with his family. A Jew, he reminds us that democracy can be multicultural. He does not so much answer Russian imperialism as exist alongside it, as though hailing from some wiser dimension. He does not need to mirror Putin; he just needs to show up. Every day, he affirms his nation by what he says and what he does.

Ukrainians assert their nation’s existence through simple acts of solidarity. They are not resisting Russia because of some absence or some difference, because they are not Russians or opposed to Russians. What is to be resisted is elemental: the threat of national extinction represented by Russian colonialism, a war of destruction expressly designed to resolve “the Ukrainian question.” Ukrainians know that there is not a question to be answered, only a life to be lived and, if need be, to be risked. They resist because they know who they are. In one of his very first videos after the invasion, when Russian propaganda claimed that he had fled Kyiv, Zelensky pointed the camera at himself and said, “The President is here.” That is it. Ukraine is here.

What can Ukraine teach us about the future of war?

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Russia and Ukraine Explained and Analyzed

Smoke enveloped a Ukrainian air base in Mariupol after a Russian strike Thursday, part of Vladimir Putin’ invasion of his neighbor. Photo by AP/Evgeniy Maloletka

Pardee’s Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević assess the unfolding crisis: “This is not about Ukraine alone. This is about the future of democracies everywhere”

Rich barlow.

With troops on the ground and rockets from the air, Russia attacked Ukraine Thursday as Vladimir Putin made good on months of threats against a neighboring country that he claims, falsely, wasn’t a country at all until communist Russia created it. The invasion, the largest attack by one European nation on another since World War II, has had widespread global impact, causing stock markets to plummet, oil prices to soar, and NATO countries, including the United States, to threaten aggressive consequences for Russia.

Among the sanctions against Russia from President Biden that are already in place, or expected soon, are restricting Russia’s access to large financial institutions, cutting it off from advanced technology that could hinder its communications, and sanctioning members of Putin’s closest inner circle. Biden has sent troops to fortify NATO allies, but vows they won’t engage in the Russia-Ukraine war.

For perspective on the stunning developments, BU Today asked two Pardee School of Global Studies professors, Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević, to assess the crisis. Lukes , a professor of history and of international relations, specializes in Central European history and contemporary Russia (he watched the 1968 Russian invasion of Prague as a teenager). Garčević is a professor of the practice of international relations, specializing in diplomacy, security, and conflict, and in Europe. He has served as Montenegro’s ambassador to several nations and international organizations, including NATO.

With Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević

Bu today: how dangerous is the european situation, and why should americans care about it.

Igor Lukes: The situation is dangerous. Russia has committed a massive force to seize a peaceful sovereign country that never presented any threat. This will trigger limited countermeasures by NATO. Diplomats and politicians of all nationalities—including Russia’s last plausible partner, China—had warned Putin not to use force. He dismissed their concerns. Launching this attack on Ukraine, he has irreparably damaged the post–Cold War order. Should Americans care? Yes, they should. This is not about Ukraine alone. This is about the future of democracies everywhere. But even the most fervent supporters of Ukraine must bear in mind John Quincy Adams’ view that America, although a champion of universal freedom, “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Ukrainians are on their own as they face Putin’s armed force.

Vesko Garčević: Vesko Garčević: The world should care about it, because it puts the European security architecture in question. And not just the European architecture; it’s international norms, like respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty of other countries. [If] the big ones can take small countries as booties in world affairs… I come from a small country, therefore I understand it very well. On top of it, Russia has more nuclear warheads than three NATO states—the United States, the UK, and France— put together . It has the third largest conventional army in the world. And it has a veto in the UN Security Council, which prevents the council from taking any measures in this case. Russia knows its power very well. It’s exercising its power right now in front of our eyes, and I would say that very much matters to somebody who lives in the United States as much as somebody who lives in Europe.

BU Today: Russia is not the military threat that it once was, correct?

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: I would disagree with that. We can speak about other problems that Russia is facing, like economic crisis and the political system, but whether it is on the same level as the USSR or lagging behind, it is still powerful enough to match the power of other big powers. It has a security culture of an empire that implies they can use power in the way they are using it right now. I would just refer to the open letter signed by 73 European security experts a couple of weeks ago in which they highlighted the military might of Russia.

Igor Lukes: Lukes: The threat has changed. Nobody expects the Russian troops to come pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany on their way to the English Channel to install the flag of communism along the way. Putin’s objective is to degrade and destabilize the West to camouflage his failure to improve Russia. Looking at the collapsing global markets today, he is rubbing his hands.

BU Today: Some observers say that Putin’s end game is to revive the Soviet empire, while others suggest he has real security concerns, whether unfounded or not. Which is your view?

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: It has something to do with both of those. I would say Russia sees itself more as tsarist Russia than the USSR. They think in terms of spheres of influence, and they need to have buffer zones around them because—I’m speaking of their official narratives—of a need of enlargement; they would like to get security guarantees. It’s not the first time that Russia brought up this issue. In the ’90s, they believed that they would be able to create, along with Americans and others, some type of umbrella security organization in Europe. It’s about the influence of Russia in regions they consider historically, intimately, inherently part of their sphere of influence. An essay by Putin last year referred to Ukraine as a nation that doesn’t exist as such; the same narrative, according to media reports, Putin used in meetings with other world leaders. I can disagree, but I can recognize the idea of a sphere of influence of Russia.

Igor Lukes: Lukes: In 2005, Putin said that the “collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century.” However, I reject the chimera of Putin’s alleged “security concerns.” Note that Russia, after months of deceptive signals—maskirovka—has attacked its neighbor. The much weaker Ukrainian troops were deployed in a defensive pattern because they had no plan to attack Russia. Under such circumstances, who should feel insecure? Stalin, generations of Soviet arms control negotiators, and now Putin have all sought to gain unilateral advantage by claiming that Russia’s historical experience with foreign invasions justified their disproportionate demands. It is easy to refute the myth of Russia’s vulnerability and victimhood, provided one has patience with a bit of history. The British noted in 1836 that since Peter the Great (1672-1725), the boundaries of Russia had extended 700 miles toward Berlin, 500 miles toward Constantinople, 630 miles toward Stockholm, and 1,000 miles toward Teheran. In 1848, a clear-sighted Central European historian warned the Frankfurt Assembly: “You are aware of the power possessed by Russia; you know that this power, already grown to colossal size, increases in strength and pushes outward from the center from one decade to the next. Every further step that it may be able to take…threatens the speed and creation and imposition of a new universal monarchy, an unimaginable and unmentionable evil, a calamity without limit or end.” This trend was only accelerated by Joseph Stalin, who extended his dominion from Berlin to Vladivostok. The Russian state began emerging in the 15th century and grew into the biggest country on this planet. This could hardly have happened as a result of foreign invasions.

BU Today: We’ve long been told Putin is a master chess player in international affairs. But some say he’s miscalculated and bitten off too much with Ukraine. Which is it?

Igor Lukes: Lukes: Putin is an improviser. He started in 2000 by promising to focus on Russia’s unprecedented population decline, public health, environment, and education. He dropped all of those needed reforms because they took too long and were not properly spectacular. Instead, he focused on military reform, weapons development, killing his critics at home and abroad. Nobody should mistake this mediocre KGB lieutenant colonel for a strategist. With his war on peaceful Ukraine, he has unified NATO, his neighbors, including Finland and Sweden, and the European Union. His troops may swiftly overwhelm the regular Ukrainian forces. But they will merge with the civilians, and later, at a time of their choosing, come out at night; it will hurt.

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: Even great chess players make mistakes. I would not say this action has not been carefully planned. A year ago, there were Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, staging something similar, but this was put on hold. Russia didn’t decide to invade Ukraine on a whim—Putin simply woke up one morning and [said], let’s go and invade Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean that this is not a miscalculation. I think for the long run, Russia, and particularly Russian citizens, will pay a steep price. Even if they have immediate gains—one may be to install a puppet government in Ukraine—for the long run, this may not be a right calculation. Because Russia should cooperate with the world and not live as a pariah in world affairs.

BU Today: Several analysts, and history, suggest sanctions won’t be effective. Are there any that the West has imposed, or might impose, that could make Putin negotiate a settlement?

Igor Lukes: Lukes: I agree that sanctions won’t change anything, but they won’t be pleasant. I hope that they will be tailored to hit the Kremlin clique rather than the innocent Russian people. I’d like to see the oligarchs and Putin’s family expelled from the palaces in the West, deported to Russia, their accounts frozen. The banks that finance Russian intelligence services need to be cut off. Putin has turned himself into an international pariah, below the level of Kim Jong Un. Treat him accordingly.

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: I come from a country, [the former] Yugoslavia, that was under sanctions [during the Bosnian and Kosovo wars of the 1990s]. I experienced myself what it means. General economic sanctions don’t work. They affect ordinary people. I just discussed with my students: imagine you live in an authoritarian regime which controls the economy. Once space shrinks, who benefits are those who are connected to the regime. There are not many options on the table, and I think Putin knows that, because Ukraine is not a NATO member. You cannot invoke Article 5 [obligating NATO to defend members under attack]. But you cannot also sit still, looking at what’s going on in front of all eyes. Well-crafted sanctions that target people that are behind [the regime], freezing their assets—or what the UK just did, kicked out [Russian billionaire Roman] Abramovich from the UK—those types of sanctions, but trying to avoid that ordinary people suffer, this is the only way to go. For the long run, I think this [invasion] tells us that Russia feels cornered. Not many countries will side with Russia. But in the short run, militarily, Russia outmatches Ukraine. They may reach Kiev or destabilize Ukraine to bring to power somebody who is similar to [pro-Russia] Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia. They will eliminate any potential threat that Ukraine may turn to the West. If Ukraine becomes a prosperous, democratic country, that’s a message for Russians, too.

BU Today: Are fears that Putin will threaten other nations if he succeeds in Ukraine warranted? Is this the start of a new and unstable Cold War?

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: When it comes to Russia’s intentions, I’m not sure that they’re going to go further. There is NATO, and the situation is different in the Baltic states. I tweeted that if Ukraine teaches us something, it teaches that for the Baltic states, the best decision they made was to join NATO. [Otherwise], they would have been targeted potentially by Russia on the same pretext—they have a Russian national minority that may call the mother state to intervene to protect their rights. But Russia may play in another part of Europe, like the Balkans, where I come from. The Balkans are not fully integrated into the European Union or NATO. It can be seen as an easy target, low-hanging fruit. It is what many people are concerned about, including me. There are also people [there] very supportive of Russia.

Igor Lukes: Lukes: Excepting the crises in Berlin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Able Archer in 1983 [when a NATO military exercise panicked Russia into readying nuclear forces], the Cold War was a stable and predictable affair. The Kremlin leaders, including Stalin and Brezhnev, were rational actors. Putin is not. Therefore, he is a threat to the world order, and he is probably proud of it.

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Rich Barlow is a senior writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a small-town newspaper reporter, and is a former Boston Globe religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile

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There are 12 comments on Russia and Ukraine Explained and Analyzed

This is a great read, Rich. Thanks to all for the insight.

I have to confess to not sleeping well over this the past few nights. Let’s keep the folks of Ukraine in our thoughts.

Thank you for a great article. I tend to agree with most of what the two professors say, but would like to put Professor Lukes’ statements about Russian expansion since the 15th century in context.

Many years ago, at the time of the Cold War, I also read the figures about Russia having expanded xxx miles towards the West … xxx miles towards the South … xxx miles towards the East … In fact, an analyst calculated the number of square miles per year!!! If I am not mistaken, the piece was triggered by British concerns that the Russians were advancing in Central Asia and approaching India … hence the Anglo-Afghan Wars

There is no doubt that Russia expanded … but this was very much part of the massive European expansion of the 18th and 19th century. It was no different from the United States expansion towards the Pacific , or the mighty overseas empires of Portugal, Spain, Britain and France.

The Russians were “somewhat lucky” because Siberia was virtually empty, but they fought nasty wars in the Caucasus and elsewhere … they even partitioned Poland with the Prussians and the Austrians … and they fought endless wars with the Ottoman Turks for control of today’s Ukraine and the Balkans.

It cannot be denied that Russia was an expanding empire but she was far from unique.

However, the invasions they suffered are not a myth, and Hitler was only the last.

They had Napoleon also coming from the West … and before that Swedes and Poles … and from the East they had Tatars and Mongols who destroyed their state several times.

The Russians are afraid of the outside world and it is actually a wonder that they have not invaded more! They genuinely fear the West and cannot think of NATO as purely defensive. They have a siege mentality.

I read somewhere that during the 1980s the CIA went to Ronald Reagan and convinced him that the Russians were truly scared … so Reagan moderated his “Evil Empire” statements.

It is true that we cannot trust Putin. But because of their history, I find it difficult to believe that the Russians will ever trust the West.

Since the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union or Russian army attacked or intervened militarily in Finland (1940), Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania (1940), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1980), Georgia (2008), and now Ukraine. The Russian argument of being surrounded by enemies does not stand ground in confrontation with their aggressive history of expansionism and brutal russification and/or Sovietization of territories they tried to subjugate.

“Igor Lukes: The situation is dangerous. Russia has committed a massive force to seize a peaceful sovereign country that never presented any threat.”

Ukraine has been wanting to join NATO. That presents a threat to Russia. It appears that this is the root cause due to which Putin decided to invade.

Ukraine may have tried to gain membership to NATO, but it was not granted nor is there any indication that it’s status would change. This is demonstrated by the Western governments not commuting troops directly to the conflict

And once Russia takes over Ukraine they will look around and see there are now many more NATO countries next to them. Then what will they do to alleviate that ‘threat’?

Only those who have lived through the horrors of total war will understand what is going on. Academic deliberation is pointless at this time.

Ukrainians have the right to join any organization they want as they are an independent country. Putin’s feelings are of no relevance here. The military aggression, killing, and subjugating countries and their populations to the will of the strongman can’t be tolerated. The peers of BU students in Ukraine are dying to defend their abandoned and imperfect country, while some BU academics are falsely portraying the USA as the ultimate evil and source of all wrongs. Ask the Ukrainians who they look to most for help! The test of this American generation is coming whether we like it or not.

BU Students and staff should organize a peaceful march on Comm Ave or Marsh Plaza to show support for Ukraine . This is the least we can do .

This is not a crisis, this is war. Please show some integrity with your headlines for once.

Please inform people about the real story behind Luganks and Donetsk. How Ukrainian air force bombed the middle of the city right near the kindergarten and a children’s playground in an attempt to kill the leaders of Lugansk, how there was a massive internal war in Donetsk. How LNR and DNR formed. All of that is vital information.

Also, how about you guys look into other wars going on right now? Saudi bombing Yemen, Israel bombing Syria, USA bombing Somali, Turkey bombing Rojava. Please talk about the fact that since 1945 81% of all wars were started by USA.

I am not saying either side is right or wrong. All I am stating is facts and I am trying to bring them to light. I want people to make decisions for themselves and be able to think and not just consume the information they are told to believe.

As a Ukrainian, it is very painful to hear some of the comments about Ukrainian “crisis”. It has always been about Russian Aggression. Ukrainian nation is the stronger in spirit, patriotic, talented, courageous, and now desperately in need for help! Not debating who is right or wrong, but the world unity and support to the nation that is so brave and standing alone! in front of the 3rd largest army in the world. We are defending not only our land, but the whole concept of democracy and other countries that are lucky enough not to be neighbors with the country aggressor.

“Igor Lukes: The situation is dangerous. Russia has committed a massive force to seize a peaceful sovereign country that never presented any threat.”

Exactly! However, what is missing here is to mention 2008 Georgia. This was the first time Russia openly invaded independent sovereign nation. And what did Obama and Angela Merkel do? Symbolic sanctions and staying quite. This is exactly what motivated Putin to become an international bully and go after Crimea and Eastern Ukraine at first and then attack the rest of the country.

The US, EU & NATO made huge mistakes in dealing with Russia and treating Putin as a rational decision-maker.

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Home — Essay Samples — War — Russia and Ukraine War

Essays on Russia and Ukraine War

Writing an essay on the war between Russia and Ukraine is of utmost importance in order to bring awareness to this ongoing conflict and its impact on the global community. This topic is particularly significant as it not only sheds light on the political and military aspects of the war, but also highlights the humanitarian crisis and human rights violations that have arisen as a result.

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Overall, writing an essay on the war between Russia and Ukraine is an opportunity to raise awareness and facilitate a deeper understanding of this complex and multifaceted issue. By approaching this topic with diligence, empathy, and a commitment to accuracy, writers can contribute to a more informed and nuanced discourse on this critical global issue.

What Makes a Good Russia and Ukraine War Essay Topics

When it comes to choosing a compelling topic for an essay on the Russia and Ukraine War, it's important to consider a few key factors. First and foremost, the topic should be relevant and timely, addressing current events and ongoing conflicts. Additionally, it's crucial to choose a topic that is both interesting and thought-provoking, allowing for in-depth analysis and critical thinking. To brainstorm and choose the best essay topic, consider the various aspects of the conflict, such as political, social, and economic implications. It's also important to think about the audience and their level of familiarity with the topic, as well as the potential for original research and unique insights. Ultimately, a good essay topic on the Russia and Ukraine War will be one that is impactful, relevant, and intellectually stimulating.

Best Russia and Ukraine War essay topics

The role of propaganda in shaping public opinion during the Russia and Ukraine War
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The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and its implications for international intervention
The use of hybrid warfare and unconventional tactics in the Russia and Ukraine War
The role of energy politics in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine
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The implications of the Russia and Ukraine War on global security and stability
The historical and cultural roots of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine
The role of international organizations in mediating the Russia and Ukraine War
The impact of the conflict on the economy and infrastructure of Ukraine

Russia and Ukraine War essay topics Prompts

Imagine you are a journalist embedded in a war zone. Describe the challenges and ethical considerations you would face in reporting on the Russia and Ukraine War.
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Write a comparative analysis of the Russia and Ukraine War and another historical conflict, exploring the similarities and differences in terms of tactics, motivations, and outcomes.

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The Realist Case for Ukraine

Jeffrey Mankoff
January 25, 2023

Editor’s Note: The Russian invasion of Ukraine was the most significant geopolitical event of 2022. Beginning with Dov Zakheim’s comments in the Spring 2022 issue, Orbis authors have discussed the ramifications of the invasion. As we approach the one-year anniversary, Revisiting Orbis will be offering updated commentary from its contributors. Joining Frank Hoffman’s essay is this contribution from Jeffrey Mankoff.

The scope of the Biden administration’s response to the invasion of Ukraine has already exceeded what many observers—not to mention Russia’s leadership—expected. From intelligence sharing with Kyiv ahead of the invasion to the imposition of unprecedented sanctions on the Russian economy to the provision of increasingly capable weaponry to Ukraine’s armed forces, the United States has been critical to the failure of Russia’s “special military operation” to achieve its objectives. Despite US support and Ukrainian valor, the war is now approaching a second year, and several observers in the United States and in Europe have become increasingly alarmed at the consequence of a longer war.

Amid these concerns, some of the most trenchant criticisms of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy have come from self-described realists. The realist paradigm , widely taught in international relations courses, describes the international system as anarchic, with states ruthlessly pursuing their own interests. It is critical of states and leaders who allow wooly ideological commitments to get in the way of this pursuit of realpolitik . Realism and realists are by nature cautious, wary of grand crusades and cognizant of the fact that problems in international relations are rarely “solved,” but must be managed over time. While these considerations have led many realists to call for greater restraint in aiding Ukraine, a strong realist claim can be made that the United States should continue its forthright support of Ukraine’s effort to drive the Russian occupiers out of its territory.

While Europe has a long tradition of realpolitik , in the United States, realism has always had a stronger presence in the academy than in government. It has enjoyed something of a revival in recent years as a response to the ideological overstretch of the war on terror. Today, self-identified realists—both scholars like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer , and practitioners, notably Henry Kissinger—have warned of the potential risks posed by the administration’s sustained support for Kyiv. Realists have provided an important check on the riskier ideas emanating from supporters of more robust intervention, such as the idea of imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the early stages of the war. Their critique centers on concern over some combination of the potential for US support to escalate the conflict into a direct clash between Moscow and NATO, divert resources from the higher priority “pacing challenge” of China, or spark a wider Russian collapse that makes integrating a defeated Russia into a new European security architecture impossible.

None of these concerns should be dismissed out of hand. Each, however, rests on problematic assumptions. The realist case for aiding Ukraine accepts Mearsheimer’s insight about the tragic structural nature of international politics, particularly the danger of a sustained period of great-power competition with both Russia and China—as well as the continued threat that Vladimir Putin’s Russia poses to peace and stability in Europe. It acknowledges that Ukraine’s resilience and ingenuity provide an opportunity to, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin put it “weaken Russia” and reshape the global balance of power in favor of the United States and its allies.

Fears of Escalation

The most serious realist objection to continuing US support for Ukraine centers on the prospect that the conflict will escalate—either vertically (i.e., involving the use of more powerful weapons, including weapons of mass destruction) or horizontally (i.e., beyond Ukraine and into NATO member territory). Moscow has deliberately cultivated these fears: at the start of the invasion, Putin warned that countries attempting to interfere with the invasion of Ukraine would face “consequences … such as you have never seen in your entire history,” and in September Putin noted that the United States had created a precedent for nuclear use with its bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hinting that Russia would be justified in resorting to nuclear use if it failed to achieve its objectives through conventional means. Threats of horizontal escalation have meanwhile been directed at Russian neighbors such as Moldova and Kazakhstan that have had the temerity to criticize the invasion of Ukraine or suggest they might seek to deepen alignment with the West in response. Many respected Western observers, including former White House staffer Fiona Hill , Harvard professor Graham Allison , and CIA director William Burns have warned that Putin’s nuclear threats should be taken seriously.

Taking them seriously does not, however, require discarding the core realist insight that states and leaders are motivated by self-interest—above all, an interest in survival. Russian nuclear doctrine is clear on the circumstances under which Moscow would use nuclear weapons: after an attack on Russia using weapons of mass destruction, or in response to a conventional attack when “the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.” Two caveats apply, however. First, doctrinal statements may not be dispositive, especially in a personalistic regime during periods of high stress, and second, Russia’s claimed annexation of Crimea and four oblasts of eastern Ukraine creates ambiguity around the question of where Moscow would draw the line regarding the “existence of the state.”

Russian behavior nevertheless remains consistent with the realist belief that states act in accordance with their self-interest and are subject to rational cost-benefit calculations. After Russian commentators floated the possibility of tactical nuclear use against Ukrainian forces last fall, strong, credible warnings from the United States (communicated among others by Burns and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan )—along with messages from key Russian partners China and India —prompted Putin to publicly denounce an intention to use nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Ukrainian strikes against Crimea and the four oblasts Russia claims have continued. And despite some observers’ worries about Putin’s mental state, Russian nuclear signaling has remained consistent, with the logic described by Olga Oliker in 2016 as “less a lowering of the threshold than a reminder that escalation is possible and that Russia must therefore be taken seriously” despite its myriad failings.

As Nigel Gould-Davies wisely notes, “escalation is a choice, not a tripwire—one an adversary can deter by credibly conveying the costs this would incur.” The lesson realists should take from these developments is not that escalation is impossible, but that the old logic of deterrence, which allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to navigate the Cold War without resorting to nuclear conflict, still applies.

A realist strategy on the West’s part would assume that Putin remains a rational actor (within the bounds of his own ideology) and seek to shape Russia’s decision-making calculus—much as it did by aiding the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1980s. That means embracing the logic of containment (a realist strategy par excellence ) to deter expansion of the conflict to Moldova or Kazakhstan, while continuing to strengthen the Ukrainian military—ideally, to the extent that Putin or a successor is forced to withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine’s entire territory—but certainly such that Kyiv is able to negotiate a favorable peace from a position of strength.

At the same time, the Biden administration’s caution in avoiding calls for regime change in Moscow or efforts to expand the war to Russian territory are wise. The goal should be to convince the Russian leadership (whether Putin or a successor) that success in Ukraine is impossible—not to provoke a “ color revolution ” in Moscow or Russia’s “ de-colonization .” As during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the United States should be prepared for negotiations , even as it seeks Russia’s defeat inside Ukraine proper.

After the War: European Security and the ‘Russian Question’

A second realist concern centers on the construction of a new security architecture for Europe and Eurasia at the end of the war. Some realist thinkers point to concern that a defeated Russia will reject any attempt to build a postwar order, much as Germany’s enduring opposition to the Versailles Treaty paved the way for the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of World War II.

According to Michael O’Hanlon and Melanie W. Sisson , “no one is in a mood now to be kind to Russia, but an overly harsh peace deal that leaves Russia ruined would not serve our own long-term interests.” Or, as Kissinger writes :

“The preferred outcome for some is a Russia rendered impotent by the war. I disagree. For all its propensity to violence, Russia has made decisive contributions to the global equilibrium and to the balance of power for over half a millennium. Its historical role should not be degraded.”

Such warnings are a useful check on the overheated ambitions of those calling for regime change or “de-colonization”—both objectives likely well beyond the ability of American power to bring about, irrespective of their desirability. At the same time, they ignore one of the most important insights from Kissinger’s earlier work, one that many academic realists are loathe to accept, namely that individual leaders and regime types matters.

In A World Restored his first (and, arguably, best) book, Kissinger contrasted the integration of post-Napoleonic France into the Concert of Europe with the exclusion of Weimar Germany from the European security architecture developed after World War I. According to Kissinger, it was Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich’s insistence that France under the restored Bourbon dynasty have a stake in post-1815 Europe that ensured a century of relative peace among the European Great Powers. Echoing the claim famously made by John Maynard Keynes , Kissinger suggested that the “victor’s peace” imposed on Germany after the November 1918 Armistice all but guaranteed that interwar Germany would be a revanchist power.

Many realists have compared the post-Cold War settlement that Russia now seeks to overturn with the one the Allies crafted in Paris in 1919, and now fear that a defeated Russia would prove similarly truculent and aggressive, rendering a stable postwar order impossible. Yet building any kind of stable order with a Russia that is still ruled by Putin or another figure motivated by grievance against the West and regarding Ukrainian identity and independence as ephemeral is likely impossible.

For all of Metternich’s skill as a practitioner of realpolitik , his “system,” as Kissinger recognized, rested on a shared ideological commitment—to combatting the virus of revolution—and only worked after the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, which shared the worldview of Metternich and his conservative allies. Similarly, a new European architecture that includes Russia can only work if Russia itself sheds it imperial and autocratic impulses and comes to share the worldview and values of its European neighbors. If transforming Russia is not in the power of the Western allies, therefore, they should settle instead for a more modest ambition—ensuring the failure of Russia’s war in Ukraine, followed by something akin to the containment strategy devised by George Kennan for prosecuting the Cold War. If and when Russia’s inherent contradictions force a reckoning with the legacy of its imperial war, the United States and its allies need to be more creative and forward-leaning than they were in 1990–91 in anchoring Russia to the institutions and norms of the democratic West, but that challenge lies well in the future.

Russia, Ukraine, and the ‘Pacing Challenge’ of China

Beyond concern about Russian revanchism looms the problem of China, which many realists regard as the only serious threat to US interests. If the United States is serious about checking Chinese expansion in Asia, warns the realist scholar-practitioner Elbridge Colby , it “should laser-focus its military on Asia, reducing its level of forces and expenditures in Europe.” This thinking builds on the Biden administration’s characterization of China as the “pacing challenge” facing the United States, compared to the “immediate and persistent” threat posed by Russia. It rests on the assumption that the United States can afford to dramatically scale back its commitments to Ukraine, while making some heroic—and unrealistic—assumptions about the ability of European governments to step up and preserve order in their region on their own. It likewise assumes that what happens in Ukraine and in Europe more broadly has minimal implications for the geopolitical competition in Asia.

In practice though, not only does a favorable outcome to the conflict in Ukraine depend on the United States’ continued investment in the conflict, but the outcome of the war between Russia and Ukraine will have enormous impact on the competition between the United States and China. Notwithstanding the rhetoric around Germany’s Zeitenwende and the shift in public opinion prompted by Russia’s invasion, the reality is that the United States has consistently been out in front of its European allies when it comes to financial assistance and weapons deliveries to Ukraine, as well as sanctions on Russia. A Europe left to its own devices would be less inclined to step into the breach than to seek its own modus vivendi with Moscow—something Russian (and Soviet) leaders have long understood. Both German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron have emphasized the importance of dialogue with Moscow. Scholz’s reluctance to approve the transfer of German-made tanks to Ukraine without cover from Washington reflects how far Europe’s leading powers remain from being able to take responsibility for security in their neighborhood.

Notwithstanding the war in Ukraine, Chinese rhetoric and provocations toward Taiwan are accelerating, and deterring a Chinese invasion is increasingly urgent for the United States. Helping Ukraine win will also have a significant impact on Chinese actions. Focusing on Russia’s defeat would be in keeping with a well-worn realist principle described by the arch realist Carl von Clausewitz : allies care about their own interests above all else, such that “if [a conflict involving an alliance] is not successful, then the ally … tries to get out of it on the cheapest terms possible.” Already, Russia’s military difficulties have raised “ questions and concerns ” in Beijing; a further diminished Russia would be of even less value as a Chinese partner and complicate efforts at sustaining a coordinated a Sino-Russian challenge.

As even Russian observers acknowledge , the war in Ukraine is providing a strong fillip for Western unity. That unity, which includes support from US allies in Asia , is among the principal advantages the United States would have in a conflict over Taiwan. And given the consolidation of a Sino-Russian revisionist axis, encapsulated in the signing of a partnership with “no limits ” three weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, defeating Russia in Ukraine would undermine Chinese capabilities as well. It could also influence Chinese thinking about the likelihood that an invasion of Taiwan would succeed.

A related realist concern centers on the consequences of a Russian defeat for the strategic competition with China. Kissinger warns that a weakened, chaotic Russia could become a “ contested vacuum ,” and an arena for geopolitical competition between the remaining great powers, another potential arena for Sino-American confrontation. The consequences of a full-scale Russian collapse would be profound , but the prospect of that kind of collapse remains low, even if Russia is comprehensively defeated in Ukraine. While Putin’s regime may not survive defeat, Russia as a state and a geopolitical actor almost certainly will —though it could be significantly weakened in the process.

A weaker, more chaotic Russia would pose problems for many of its neighbors—not least China. Beijing’s “ neighborhood diplomacy ” is focused on building economic linkages while preventing the spread of instability across Chinese borders. Investment through the Belt and Road Initiative as well the growing security cooperation with the states of Central Asia are all testament to Beijing’s emphasis on containing threats outside its territory. In an ironic way, greater instability on China’s Eurasian frontier would vindicate the ideas of early advocates for China’s “Eurasian pivot,” who hoped that, by shifting its strategic focus away from maritime East Asia, Beijing could ameliorate tensions with the West. Today, with Sino-American tensions rapidly mounting, the need for Beijing to devote more attention and resources to its border with Russia could at least prolong the timeline for a challenge to the status quo over Taiwan.

Let’s Get Real(ist)

From a realist perspective, ensuring Russia’s defeat in Ukraine would significantly benefit the United States. Not only would it enhance the security of American allies in Europe (as well as Russia’s vulnerable neighbors), but it would also create a more favorable balance of power as the United States pursues its ongoing strategic competition with China. Should the failure of Russia’s war of aggression spark significant change within Russia, the United States and its allies will have an opportunity to correct some of the mistakes that realists identified in the construction of Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture, which many realists (and Russian scholars) cite as a key factor in the conflict over Ukraine. Even if Russia remains belligerent and aggressive, its failure in Ukraine will leave it weaker, poorer, and more isolated.

In giving aid and succor to Ukraine, the United States should take on board realists’ warnings about the danger of doing too much or taking unnecessary risks. As the founder of academic realism Hans Morgenthau suggested, prudence is the primary realist virtue. The Biden administration’s insistence that US-provided arms not be used for attacks on Russian soil, like its refusal to deploy American troops to Ukraine or enforce a no-fly zone that would require engaging Russian targets, are prudent. Refusing Kyiv’s requests for heavy armor and longer-range artillery that could allow it to mount more effective offensive operations is not. Nor should the United States be coy about seeking Russia’s defeat and the withdrawal of all Russian forces from Ukraine as a war aim.

Kissinger’s career in government notwithstanding, realism has struggled to gain a foothold in American foreign policy because of its sometimes antiseptic, amoral nature. Realists’ belief in the enduring nature of international competition can blind them to the turning points in history, when previously unthinkable possibilities become manifest, just as their calls for dispassionate analysis can obscure the importance of human factors like emotion and ideology. Much of the realist commentary on the war in Ukraine has fallen into this trap. Adherents of the realist tradition should recognize how the war in Ukraine represents an inflection point for Europe and for the global balance of power.

The eleven months since Putin’s ill-considered invasion have brought enormous suffering but have also launched a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape international order. That resulting order could be a world “ safe for autocracy ”—or one that rests on a new consensus about the value of liberal democracy, with a more secure Europe and a United States more advantageously positioned for long-term competition with of China. For realists concerned about managing competition over the longer term, the opportunity to build a more stable, balanced order and compete more effectively with Beijing is one that should be embraced. The first step to that end is ensuring the failure of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not an official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Defense Department, or the United States government.

Image: President of Ukraine

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Voice for the army - support for the soldier, the russo-ukrainian war: a strategic assessment two years into the conflict.

painted model soldiers standing on a map of eastern Europe

by LTC Amos C. Fox, USA Land Warfare Paper 158, February 2024

In Brief Examining the strategic balance in the Russo-Ukrainian War leads to the conclusion that Russia has the upper hand. In 2024, Ukraine has limited prospects for overturning Russian territorial annexations and troop reinforcements of stolen territory. Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russian offensive action decreases as U.S. financial and materiel support decreases. Ukraine needs a significant increase in land forces to evict the occupying Russian land forces.

Introduction

The Russo-Ukrainian War is passing into its third year. In the period leading up to this point in the conflict, the defense and security studies community has been awash with arguments stating that the war is a stalemate. Perhaps the most compelling argument comes from General Valery Zaluzhny, former commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, who stated as much in an interview with the Economist in November 2023. 1 Meanwhile, there are others, including noted analyst Jack Watling, who emphatically state the opposite. 2

Nonetheless, two years in, it is useful to objectively examine the conflict’s strategic balance. Some basic questions guide the examination, such as: is Ukraine winning, or is Russia winning? What does Ukraine need to defeat Russia, and conversely, what does Russia need to win in Ukraine? Moreover, aside from identifying who is winning or losing the conflict, it is important to identify salient trends that are germane not just within the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War, but that are applicable throughout the defense and security studies communities.

This article addresses these questions through the use of the ends-ways-means-risk heuristic. In doing so, it examines Russia and Ukraine’s current strategic dispositions, and not what they were in February 2022, nor what we might want them to be. Viewing the conflict through the lens of preference and aspiration causes any analyst to misread the strategic situation. The goal of this article, however, is to take a sobering look at the realities of the conflict, offer an assessment of the situation, and posit where the conflict is likely to go in 2024.

The overall conclusion is that Russia is winning the conflict. Russia is winning because it possesses its minimally acceptable outcome: the possession of the Donbas, of the land bridge to Crimea, and of Crimea itself. This victory condition, however, is dependent upon Ukraine’s inability to generate a force sufficient to a) defeat Russia’s forces in each of those discrete pieces of territory; b) retake control of that territory; and c) hold that territory against subsequent Russian counterattacks. No amount of precision strike, long-range fires or drone attacks can compensate for the lack of land forces Ukraine needs to defeat Russia’s army and then take and hold all that terrain. Thus, without an influx of resources for the Ukrainian armed forces—to include a significant increase in land forces—Russia will likely prevail in the conflict. If U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen, as it is at the time of this writing, then Russian victory in 2024 is a real possibility.

Laying the Groundwork: Situational Implications

Moreover, several other important implications emerge for the defense and security studies community. First, land wars fought for control of territory possess inherently different military end states than irregular wars, counterinsurgencies and civil wars. Therefore, militaries must have the right army for the conflict in which they are engaged. A counterinsurgency army or constabulary force, for instance, will not win a war for territory against an industrialized army built to fight and win wars of attrition. This is something policymakers, senior military leaders and force designers must appreciate and carefully consider as they look to build the armies of the future.

Second, land wars fought for control of territory require military strategies properly aligned to those ends. Therefore, militaries must have the right strategy for the conflict, or phase of the conflict, in which they are engaged. A strategy built on the centrality of precision strike but lacking sufficient land forces to exploit the success of precision strike, for instance, will not win a war for territory—especially against an industrialized army built to fight and win wars of attrition. Policymakers and senior military leaders must periodically refresh and reframe their political ends and military strategies according to their means; otherwise, they risk a wasteful strategy that fritters away limited resources in the pursuit of unrealistic goals.

Third, despite statements to the contrary, physical mass—in this case, more manpower—is more important than precision strike and long-range fires where the physical possession of territory is a critical component of political and military victory for both states. Physical mass allows an army to hold and defend territory. The more physical mass an army possesses, the more resilient it is to attacks of any type and the more difficult and costly it is to defeat—whether that be in munitions expended, number of attacks conducted or lives lost.

Fourth, a prepared, layered and protected defense, like that of Russia’s along the contact line with Ukraine’s armed forces, is challenging to overcome. This challenge grows exponentially if the attacker lacks sufficiently resilient and resourced land forces that are capable of a three-fold mission: (1) defeating the occupying army; (2) moving into the liberated territory; and (3) controlling that land. Armies that are designed to deliver a punch but lack the depth of force structure to continue advancing into vacated or liberated territory after a successful attack, and subsequently are unable to stave off counterattacks, are of little use beyond defensive duty. This finding is at odds with conventional wisdom regarding future force structure that posits that future forces should be small and light and should fight dispersed.

Fifth, Carl von Clausewitz warns that, “So long as I have not overthrown my opponent, I am bound to fear he may overthrow me. Thus, I am not in control: he dictates to me as much as I dictate to him.” 3 The Russo-Ukrainian War has reiterated Clausewitz’s caution: as neither army is able to outright defeat the other, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a long war of attrition, which is fueling the stalemate to which Zaluzhny refers and Watling rejects. The writing between the lines thus suggests that, when confronted with war, a state must unleash a military force that is capable of both defeating its adversary’s army and simultaneously accomplishing its supplemental conditions of end state, to include taking and holding large swaths of physical terrain. Without defeating an adversary’s army—regardless of its composition—one must then always contend with the possibility that tactical military gains are fleeting. Moreover, by first defeating an adversary’s army, one might turn what would otherwise be a long war of attrition into a short war of attrition.

Russian Strategic Assessment

Russia’s strategic ends can be summarized as:

fracture the Ukrainian state—politically, territorially and culturally;
maintain sufficient territorial acquisitions to support a range of acceptable political-military outcomes;
maintain strategic materiel overmatch;
exhaust Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting—both materially and as regards Ukrainian support from the international community;
normalize the conflict’s abnormalities; and
undercut and erode Ukraine’s ability to conduct offensive operations to reclaim annexed territory.

When viewing all of these ends collectively, it is clear that denationalization of the Ukrainian state is Russia’s strategic end in this conflict. Raphael Lemkin defines denationalization as a state’s deliberate and systematic process of eroding or destroying another state’s national character and national patterns (i.e., culture, self-identity, language, customs, etc.). 4 Russia’s policy and military objectives have evolved ever so slightly since February 2022, but Ukraine’s denationalization remains at the heart of the Kremlin’s strategic ends. The Kremlin’s objectives in 2022 included unseating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, ending Ukrainian self-rule and replacing it with a Russian partisan political leadership, and annexing a significant portion of Ukraine’s territory. To that end, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the time of “denazifying” and “demilitarizing” Ukraine, while also forcing Kyiv to remain politically and militarily neutral within the international community’s network of political and military alliances. 5 Putin reaffirmed these policy aims during a December 2023 press conference in Moscow. 6 Nonetheless, Russia’s military activities—which have not made advances toward Kyiv since Moscow’s initial assault on the capital failed in April 2022—do not indicate any renewed effort to remove Zelenskyy or Ukraine’s government from power. There is, though, a real possibility of this occurring in 2024, especially if U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen for the foreseeable future.

It does appear, however, that the Kremlin is attempting to elongate the conflict in time and cost such that Moscow outlasts both Kyiv’s financial and military support from the international community and Ukraine’s material means to continue attempting offensive military activities to reclaim its territory. In doing so, the Kremlin likely intends to accelerate Ukraine to strategic exhaustion and subsequently force Kyiv to broker a peace deal.

As noted recently, Russia’s territorial ambitions of Ukraine likely operate along a spectrum of acceptable outcomes. 7 Presumably, as noted above, Russia’s minimally acceptable outcome—or the minimal territorial holdings that the Kremlin is satisfied to end the war possessing—include retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea (see Figure 1). For clarity’s sake, the land bridge to Crimea includes the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts—the two oblasts that provide a unified ground link between the Donbas and Crimea. The land bridge is important because it provides Russia a ground-based connection from Russian territory between the occupied Donbas and occupied Crimea, thus simplifying the governance, defense and retention of Crimea.

2024 will be a pivotal year for Ukraine. If the United States elects a Ukraine-friendly president, then Kyiv can likely expect continued financial and military support from the United States in 2025. On the other hand, if it does not elect a Ukraine-friendly president, then Kyiv can anticipate a range of decreasing financial and military support in the defense of their state against Russian denationalization efforts.

At the same time, the appearance of Chinese, North Korean and Iranian weapons and munitions on the Ukrainian battlefield indicate that Russia is facing its own challenges keeping up with the conflict’s attritional character. 8 Though the degree to which external support is helping keep its war-machine going in Ukraine is challenging to discern through open-source information, we do know that external support allows the Russian military to overcome some of its defense industry’s production and distribution shortfalls. In turn, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support allows the Kremlin to continue elongating the conflict in time, space and resources with the goal of exhausting Ukraine’s military and Kyiv’s capacity to sustain its resistance to Russia.

Russia has already weathered much of the risk associated with invading Ukraine. Economic sanctions hit hard early on, but Russian industry and its economy have absorbed those early hardships and found ways to offset many of those challenges—including through Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support. 9 Further, the West’s gradual escalation of weapon support to Ukraine allowed Russia to develop an equally gradual learning curve to those weapons, and, in most cases, nullify any “game-changing” effects that they might have generated if introduced early in the conflict and with sufficient density to create front-wide effects. 10 Instead, the slow drip of Western support allowed Russian forces to observe, learn and adapt to those weapon systems and develop effective ways to counter Western technology and firepower. 11 The Russian military’s learning process has allowed it to recover from its embarrassing performance early in the conflict and draw into question the U.S. and other Western states’ strategy of third-party support to Ukraine. 12

The primary risks that the Russo-Ukrainian War poses to Russia today are: (1) The United States and/or NATO might intervene with their land forces on behalf of Ukraine; and (2) political upheaval might occur as a result of domestic unrest. The risk of U.S. and NATO intervention with land forces is low, and will likely remain that way, because of the fear of Russian escalation with tactical or strategic nuclear weapons. 13 Although the likelihood of Russian nuclear strikes in Ukraine is also low, Russian political leaders regularly unsheathe nuclear threats to oppose and deter unwanted activities. 14 Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, recently threated Ukraine with a nuclear response if Ukraine attacked Russian missile launch sites within Russia with Western-supplied, long-range missiles. 15 This follows Russia’s repositioning of some of its nuclear arsenal to Belarus in the summer of 2023. 16 Nonetheless, short of the commitment of U.S. or NATO land forces, or the potential loss of the Crimean peninsula, Russia’s likelihood to actually use nuclear weapons remains low.

To the second risk—that of domestic unrest creating political instability—Putin and his coterie of supporters continue to use old Russian methods to offset this problem. Arrests, assassinations, disappearances and suppression are the primary methods employed against this challenge and to deter domestic opposition to his policies vis-à-vis Ukraine. 17 The assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, in August 2023, is perhaps the most high-profile example of this technique. 18 Further, the periodic disappearances and imprisonments of Alexei Navalny is another example of the Putin regime attempting to keep political opposition quiet. 19 Longtime Kremlin henchman, Igor Girkin, who was extremely critical of Putin and of the Kremlin’s handling of the war in Ukraine during 2023, was sentenced to four years in prison in January 2024. 20 Moreover, the suppression of journalists within Russia is spiking as Putin seeks to silence opposition and punish dissent in the wake of the strong economic and domestic upheavals caused by his war. 21

In addition, former U.S. Army Europe commander, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, USA, Ret., states that Russia mobilizes citizens from its peripheral and more rural areas for its war in Ukraine. 22 Many of these individuals are ethnic minorities and therefore of lesser importance in Putin’s (and many Russians’) social hierarchy. 23 According to Hodges, by pulling heavily from the areas outside of Russia’s major population centers, to include Moscow and St. Petersburg, Putin is able to offset a significant potential domestic unrest by thrusting the weight of combat losses into the state’s far-flung reaches, to be borne by those with less social status. 24 Doing so buys Putin more time to continue the conflict and attempt to bankrupt both Ukrainian and Western resolve.

Means are the military equipment and other materiel that a military force requires to create feasible ways. Moreover, means operate as the strategic glue that binds a military force’s ends with their ways. As mentioned in the Ends section, Russian industry appears to be challenged by the Russian armed forces’ demand for military equipment and armaments. The Russian armed forces’ ways—or approach to operating on the battlefield against Ukraine—is resource-intensive. Early Russian combat losses—the result of stalwart Ukrainian fighting coupled with inept Russian tactics—generated massive logistics challenges for Russia. Further, Russia has continued to fight according to long-standing Russian military practice: lead with fires, and move forward incrementally as the fires allow. The incremental advances, however, have also come at extreme costs in men and materiel. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, for instance, refer to Russian fighting at the battles of Mariupol and Bakhmut as relying on “meatgrinder tactics” in which human-wave attacks are used to advance Russian military interests. 25 As of 20 February 2024, Russia has lost 404,950 troops, 6,503 tanks, 338 aircraft and 25 ships, among many other combat losses; the losses that they have afflicted on Ukrainian forces remains largely unknown. 26

As noted by Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s chief intelligence officer, Russia’s use of proxy forces is the primary way in which they have sought to offset land force requirements and to relieve some of the stress on their own army. 27 The contractual proxy, the Wagner Group, and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Armies (DPA and LPA, respectively)—both cultural proxies—were the primary proxies used between the renewed hostilities of February 2022 through the summer of 2023. The Wagner Group’s attempted coup in June 2023 naturally cooled the Kremlin’s reliance on it. At the same time, Russia’s military operations have become less offensive and more defensive, seeking to retain land already annexed, as opposed to confiscating more Ukrainian territory. Consequently, Moscow’s demand for more land forces and disposable infantry has somewhat diminished.

Nonetheless, fighting a defensive war along the contact line across the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea has increased Russia’s need for drones and strike capability. As noted previously, Russia has maintained good diplomatic relationships with China, North Korea and Iran; this has allowed the Russian armed forces access to important weaponry from those states for use on the battlefield in Ukraine. Thus, despite the potential for economic sanctions to cripple Russia’s ability to wage war, the Kremlin has diversified its bases of economic and military power to ensure that it has the means it requires to continue the conflict with Ukraine. Moreover, this has allowed Russia to overcome many of the advantages that Ukraine obtained through the introduction of U.S. and other Western-supplied military aide and so to return theater-level stasis to the battlefield. Put another way, Russia’s ability to diversify its means has allowed it to generate a stalemate—which works in Moscow’s favor—and to keep the conflict going, with the goal of outlasting the international community’s military support and exhausting Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting.

Considering Russia’s diverse bases of power, it is likely that battlefield stasis—or stalemate—will continue through 2024. In fact, this is probably Russia’s preferred course of action. It is likely that Russia is seeking to elongate the conflict through the upcoming U.S. presidential election, in hopes that the United States will elect a president who is not as friendly toward Kyiv and the Ukrainian fight for sovereignty—namely, one that will eliminate U.S. support to Ukraine’s war effort altogether.

Ways are the specific methods an actor seeks to obtain their ends, with deference to their means. Ways consist of many supporting lines of operation or lines of effort. Moreover, many complimentary campaigns and operations can exist simultaneously within a strategy’s ways. Further, from a taxonomical position, the dominant approach or line of operation (or effort) within a strategy’s ways often becomes shorthand for a combatant’s general strategy. To that end, Russia’s strategy can be considered a strategy of exhaustion.

Russia’s strategy of exhaustion can be broken into five lines of effort:

incrementally increase territorial gains to support negotiations later down the line;
fortify territorial gains to prevent Ukrainian efforts to retake that land;
destroy Ukraine’s offensive capability to prevent future attempts to retake annexed territory;
temporally elongate the conflict to outlast U.S. and Western military support; and
temporally and spatially elongate the conflict to exceed Ukraine’s manpower reserves.

Early in the conflict, Russia’s strategy focused on the conquest of Ukrainian territory. The scale is up for debate, but Russian military operations indicated that they intended to take Kyiv, the oblasts that paralleled both sides of the Dnieper River, and all the oblasts east of the Dnieper to the Ukraine-Russia international boundary. This operation floundered, but Russia was able to extend their holdings in the Donbas, retain Crimea and obtain the land bridge to Crimea—which had been a goal of their 2014–2015 campaign, one that they came up short on at that time. 28

As noted in the Means section above, Russia attempted limited territorial gains through 2023. 29 The attainment of any further Ukrainian territory is likely only for negotiation purposes. With that, if and when Russia and Ukraine reach the point in which they must negotiate an end to the conflict, Russia can offer to “give back” some of Ukraine’s territory as a bargaining chip so that it can hold onto what it truly desires: retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. This is a trend that will likely continue through 2024; we can expect to see Russia attempting to extend their territorial holdings along the contact line, arguably for the purpose of improving their bargaining position if and when negotiations between the two states come to fruition.

Further, Russia seeks to cause Ukraine’s war effort to culminate by depleting Ukrainian materiel and manpower—both on hand and reserves. Putin states that Russia currently has 617,000 soldiers participating in the conflict. The number of combat forces within Ukraine is unknown. 30 Nonetheless, significant battles, such as Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and others, while tough on Russia, are of serious concern for Ukraine. Russia’s population advantage in relation to Ukraine means, quite simply, that the Kremlin has a much deeper well from which to generate an army than does Kyiv. Therefore, Russia continues to leverage its population advantages over Ukraine in bloody battles of attrition to exhaust Ukraine’s ability to field forces. The Kremlin’s attempt to cause the Ukrainian armed forces to culminate shows signs of success. In December 2023, for instance, Zelenskyy stated that his military commanders were asking for an additional 500,000 troops. 31 Zelenskyy called this number “very serious” because of the impact it would have on Ukrainian civil society. 32 Budanov more recently echoed Zelenskyy, stating that Ukraine’s position was precarious without further mobilizations of manpower. 33

Russia’s strategy of exhaustion, therefore, appears to be working. Russian mass has generally frozen the conflict along the lines of Russia’s minimally acceptable outcome noted previously, i.e., the retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. This reality flies in the face of General Chris Cavoli, commander of U.S. Army European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who emphatically stated: “Precision can beat Mass. The Ukrainians have showed that this past autumn. But it takes time for it to work, and that time is usually bought with space. And so, to use this method, we need space to trade for time. Not all of us have that. We have to compensate for this in our thinking [and] our planning.” 34

While U.S. and Western-provided precision strike might have helped Ukraine in some early instances within the conflict, Russian mass, coupled with Russian’s intention on retaining territory, is disproving Cavoli’s hypothesis. Further, the sacrifice of territory for time that Cavoli refers to actually plays to the favor of Russian rather than Ukrainian political-military objectives. The land that Ukrainian forces have involuntarily ceded to Russian land forces is not likely to be retaken by precision strike. Ukraine will require a significant amount of land forces, supported by joint fires and precision strike, to dislodge Russian land forces, to control the retaken territory, and to hold it against subsequent Russian counterattacks.

Russian Strategic Assessment: Summary

If winning in war is defined by one state’s attainment of their political-military objectives at the cost of their adversary’s political-military objectives, then Russia appears to possess the upper-hand through two years of conflict (see Table 1). Russia’s strategy of exhaustion and territorial annexation appears to be working, albeit at high costs to the Russian economy and the Russian people. Russia has had to diversify its bases of power to maintain the war stocks required to execute its strategy of exhaustion, and it has had to exact a heavy toll on the Russian people to conduct the bite-and-hold tactics needed to make its territorial gains. Considering that Russia is largely on the defensive now, holding its position along the time of contact, the toll on the Russian people will likely decrease in the coming year. Moreover, considering its heavily fortified defensive position, it will likely maintain the upper hand on the battlefield through 2024.

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment

Ukraine’s focus remains to liberate its territory from Russian occupation and restore its 1991 borders with Russia, which includes restoring its sovereignty over the Donbas and Crimea. 35 Beyond that, Ukraine continues to work to strengthen its bonds with the West. From security assistance partnerships to working on joining the European Union (EU), Zelenskyy and his government continue to press the diplomatic channels to maintain and gain political, military and economic support from the international community. 36

Kyiv’s efforts to join the EU and continue to maintain support from the international community are arguably much more realistic than its objective to remove Russian military forces—to include Russian proxies—from Ukraine’s territory. The classic board game Risk provides an excellent analogy for what Ukraine must do. In Risk, to claim or reclaim a piece of territory on the map, a player must attack and defeat the army occupying a territory. If (and when) the attacker defeats the defender, the attacker must then do two things—not just one. The attacker must not only move armies into the conquered territory, but he must also leave at least one army in the territory from which he initiated his attack. In effect, any successful attack diffuses combat power, and this is on top of any losses suffered during the attack. And yet, the attacker must identify the appropriate balance of armies between the newly acquired territory and the territory from which he attacked. An imbalance in either territory creates an enticing target for counterattack by the vanquished occupier.

Ukraine finds itself in just such a position; however, instead of just attacking to retake one small portion of its territory, Ukraine must work to reclaim nearly 20 percent of its territory. 37 Compounding this problem is the size of Russia’s occupation force. As noted previously, Putin indicated that Russia has 670,000 soldiers committed to the conflict—this is more than a 200 percent increase from Moscow’s initial 190,000-strong invasion force. 38 It is challenging to verify Putin’s numbers, or to identify how those numbers are split between combat and support troops, and troops operating in Ukraine vice support troops committed to the conflict but operating in Russia. Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, let’s assume all 670,000 Russian troops are in Ukraine. Using the traditional attacker-to-defender heuristic, which states that a successful attack requires three units of measure to every one defensive unit of measure (3:1), and using individual troops as the unit of measure, we find that a successful Ukrainian attack would require more than two million troops to execute the sequence outlined above.

Are two million troops really what’s required to evict Russian land forces from Ukraine and hold it against a likely counterattack? Some analysts—both old and current—suggest that the 3:1 ratio is flawed, not relevant, or both. 39 Or does modern technology obviate the need for some of those land forces, as Cavoli suggested?

The fact of the matter remains: Long-range precision strike, drones of all types and excellent targeting information have done what complimentary arms and intelligence have always done—they have supported the advance or defensive posture of competing land forces, but they have not supplanted it. Moreover, technology must be viewed in the context of both the operations that it is supporting, but also the adversarial operations that it seeks to overcome. If it is correct that Russian strategy is primarily concerned with retaining its territorial acquisitions at this point, and thus Russian military forces are focused on conducting defensive operations, and that Ukrainian land forces do not have the numbers to conduct the attack-defeat-occupy-defend sequence in conjunction with those other components of combined arms operations, then the precision strike, drones and targeting information might be the window dressing for a futile strategic position. Seen in this light, Kyiv’s strategy is out of balance; that is, Kyiv’s ends exceed the limits of its means. The effect of this situation has contributed to the conflict being characterized as a war of attrition.

The greatest risk to Ukraine’s strategy for winning the war against Russia is the loss of U.S. political, financial and military support. The loss of support from other European partners closely follows in order of importance. A great deal has been written about this in other publications, and as a result, this section will examine other strategic risks.

One of Kyiv’s biggest strategic risks is exhausting or diffusing its military force so much so that Russian land forces might attack and confiscate additional Ukrainian land through increasingly vulnerable positions. For instance, Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 could have very well created so-called soft spots in Ukraine’s lines through which a localized counterattack might create an operational breakthrough. That did not happen, but this situation is something that strategic military planners must consider if Zelenskyy and his government truly intend to liberate all of Ukraine’s territory from Russia.

In addition, the reclamation of Crimea is something that is potentially a game-changing situation. Putin has stated the Crimea is Russia’s red line, indicating that a nuclear retort could likely coincide with any legitimate Ukrainian attempt to retake the peninsula. 40 Therefore, Putin’s red line is something policymakers and strategists in Kyiv would have to consider before enacting any attempt to seize and hold Crimea. Might Putin’s red line be a bluff? Perhaps. But the threat of nuclear strike, coupled with Putin’s move of nuclear weapons into Belarus and his repositioning of nuclear strike weapons close to Ukraine earlier in the conflict, demonstrate some credibility to the threat.

As noted extensively in the section on Ukraine’s strategic ends, manpower is the biggest resource inhibiting Ukraine from attaining its political-military objectives. 41 As Zaluzhnyi notes in a recent essay, Ukraine’s recruiting and retention problems, coupled with a fixed population, no coalition to share the manpower load and two years of killed in action and other casualties, have put Ukraine in this position. 42 It is not a position that they are likely to overcome, even if Kyiv initiates a conscription system. Considering the 3:1 math outlined above, Kyiv theoretically needs to generate a trained army of more than two million troops if it hopes to remove Russian land forces from Ukraine. Moreover, if technology enthusiasts are correct and precision strike weapons, drones and advanced intelligence could shift the 3:1 ratio to perhaps 2:1 or even 1.5:1 in open combat, that advantage would shift back toward the defenders in urban areas. This is because of considerations of International Humanitarian Law and the challenges of targeting in more respective operating environments—a useful segue to discuss combat in urban areas.

The math gets even more challenging when this context is applied. Trevor Dupuy writes that, “The 3:1 force ratio requirement for the attacker cannot be of useful value without some knowledge of the behavioral and other combat variable factors involved.” 43 As such, factors such as the operating environment, the type of opponent and the method in which they have historically fought must also be applied to the situation. Theory and military doctrine both suggest that the ratio for attacker to defender in urban operating environments increases from 3:1 to 6:1. 44

Considering the large number of cities in Ukraine’s occupied areas, as well as their breadth and the depth of the front that Kyiv’s forces would have to work through, this poses a significant challenge. Hypothetically, Russian forces might strong-point places like Donetsk City, Mariupol, Melitopol, Simferopol and Sevastopol, creating a network of interlocked spikes in required strength—from 3:1 to 6:1—and thus increasing the overall combat power required by Ukraine to remove Russian military forces from the country.

Moreover, if Ukraine is able to remove Russian land forces from Ukraine, the question of insurgency must also come into the equation. Retaking physical territory is one thing; securing the loyalty of the people in that territory is quite another. Vast portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as well as the entirety of Crimea, have been occupied by Russia for a decade. The political loyalties, cultural affiliation and domestic politics of the population in those areas are far from certain at this point. Thus, the chance for an insurgency in the Donbas and Crimea must also be considered when calculating the means—in this case, human capital—required to conduct operations to reclaim and hold lost territory.

Already running short of needed ammunition, to include artillery, missiles and air defense missiles, Ukraine’s ammunition crunch is likely to accelerate through 2024. This is yet another concern raised by Zaluzhnyi in his recent essay on what Ukraine needs to survive and win against Russia. 45 At the time of this writing, Congress has failed to approve the Department of Defense’s latest funding requests for Ukraine. Whether they move forward on that remains to be seen. Nonetheless, for the purpose of continuing the discussion, let’s assume that Congress approves the funding in March 2024. But by that time, that lapse in funding will have created a lapse in support to Ukraine, exacerbating an already tenuous ammunition situation and potentially creating something far more critical. As it currently stands, Ukrainian units are approaching the point at which they are able to do little more than defend their positions and maintain the front lines. 46 Moving forward in time, Ukrainian units will not be able to conduct robust offensive operations—which would require methodically penetrating Russian defensive belts and destroying Russian land forces in stride—because they will not have enough ammunition.

A lag will also develop between the time in which Congress authorizes funds for Ukraine, the time that the military can deliver the equipment associated with those funds to Ukraine’s armed forces and the time that the Ukrainian armed forces can put that equipment to use on the battlefield. In the interim period between Congressional approval and the Ukrainian forces putting the equipment to use in the field, the risk of Russian tactical and operational military offensive operations increases, while Ukraine’s risk of successful defensive operations decreases. Therefore, one might expect to see Russian land forces attempting to penetrate Ukrainian lines in the coming months in an effort to exploit Ukraine’s ammunition crisis and, as noted earlier, to take additional territory to strengthen its bargaining position later down the road.

Having examined Ukraine’s strategic ends and the challenges presented to those ends by both Ukraine’s risks and means, the ways is a fairly simple discussion. Ukraine’s limited manpower and ammunition base already limits what Ukraine can do offensively. If Russian forces in Ukraine do actually approach 670,000, and the 3:1 ratio (or 6:1 ratio) are accurate planning considerations, Kyiv would have to generate, at a minimum, the men, materiel and ammunition for a two million-soldier army to retake the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. Moreover, this does not account for any counterattacks that might follow Ukrainian success or for potential insurgencies in any of those newly liberated areas.

In recent conversations on the subject, Michael Kofman and Franz-Stefan Gady made mention of this and suggested that, for the foreseeable future, Ukrainian forces are limited to defensive operations along the contact line and to small, limited objective offensives with operations rarely exceeding platoon size. 47 Hardly a way to win a war. Although Gady’s assessment of Ukraine’s position was more optimistic than Kofman’s, both analysts suggest a very challenging 2024 for Kyiv’s armed forces. Considering the strategic balance, Gady and Kofman are correct—Ukraine will be quite challenged in 2024 to do much more than defend the contact line with sufficient force to prevent Russian breakthroughs. Avdiivka is a case in point.

Avdiivka—located along the contact line in Donetsk oblast—is the conflict’s current hot spot. Russian land forces continue to use “meat assaults” to attrite Ukrainian men, materiel and equipment in the city in hopes of extending their territorial annexation and exhausting Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting. 48 After months of fighting, Russia appears to be on the cusp of claiming the city. 49 Accurate casualty numbers are challenging to identify at this point, but reports indicate that thousands of troops on both sides have died as the struggle for the city churns through men and resources. Holding the line against robust Russian attacks, like that at Avdiivka, is likely to be the maximum extent of Ukrainian operations through 2024.

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment: Summary

The most basic finding is that Ukraine has culminated and is not capable of offensive operations at the scale and duration required to retake the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea or Crimea. What’s more, the Ukrainian armed forces will require a significant augmentation of land power to remove Russia from Ukraine’s territory. Precision strikes and air power will help in this endeavor, but Ukrainian infantry and armored forces must still move into the terrain, clear the terrain of Russian land forces, hold the terrain and then prevail against any Russian counterattacks. Therefore, onlookers should not expect any grand Ukrainian offensive through 2024. Ukraine might attempt one or two smaller scale offensives to nibble away Russian held territory, but anything larger exceeds Ukraine’s means.

If U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen for an extended period of time, Ukraine’s ability to just hold the contact line with Russia will deteriorate further. U.S. weapons, ammunition and military equipment are vital to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Each day without that support adds more fragility to Ukraine’s supply network, its artillery forces and its land forces. It means increasing weaknesses proliferating through the Ukrainian armed forces and Kyiv’s inability to develop useful military strategy. In short, 2024 looks bleak for Ukraine and for its ability to meet its political-military objectives.

If, however, U.S. support to Ukraine is unlocked relatively soon, Ukraine’s ability to defend itself will still see a slight dip in capability, but it will likely rebound quickly. Nonetheless, Ukraine’s manpower challenges will still prevent it from any large-scale offensives during 2024. The influx of long-range precision strikes, air power and intelligence from the United States—and other Western nations—will help mitigate some of the personnel challenges, but certainly not completely obviate that concern. Therefore, the attritional grind of forces aligned on opposing trench networks is likely to characterize the conflict throughout 2024.

The Russo-Ukrainian War is currently in stasis. This stalemate is the result of competing strategies, one of which is focused on the retention of annexed territory—and the other on the vanquishment of a hostile force from its territory without the means to accomplish that objective. Considering the balance in relation to each state’s ends, Russia is currently winning the war (see Table 3). Russia controls significant portions of Ukrainian territory, and they are not likely to be evicted from that territory by any other means than brutal land warfare, which Ukraine cannot currently afford. What’s more, it is debatable if Ukraine will be able to generate the forces needed to liberate and hold the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. It would likely take an international coalition to generate the number of troops, combat forces and strike capabilities needed to accomplish the liberation of Ukraine’s occupied territory. This international coalition materializing is extremely unlikely to happen.

As stated in the Introduction, land wars fought for territory possess different military end goals than irregular wars, counterinsurgencies and civil wars. Moreover, a strategy’s ends must be supported first by its means, and secondarily, by resource-bound ways to accomplish those ends. Thus, precision strike strategies and light-footprint approaches do not provide sufficient forces to defeat industrialized armies built to fight wars based on the physical destruction of opposing armies and occupying their territory. Robust land forces, capable of delivering overwhelming firepower and flooding into territory held by an aggressor army, are the future of war, not relics of 20th century armed conflict. This is not a feature of conflict specific to Europe, but, as John McManus notes, something that has also been proven in east Asia during U.S. operations in the Pacific theater during World War II. For instance, McManus notes that the U.S. Army employed more divisions during the invasion of The Philippines than it did during the invasion of Normandy. 50 Given the considerations that policymakers face regarding a China-Taiwan conflict scenario, it is useful to take into account McManus’ findings, as well as the realities of war laid bare in Ukraine. If China were to invade Taiwan, with the intention of annexation, then similar factors to that of the Russo-Ukrainian War are worth weighing. Large, robust land forces would be required to enter, clear and hold Taiwan.

Moreover, Russia’s operations in Ukraine illustrate that mass beats precision, and not the other way around. Precision might provide a tactical victory at a single point on the battlefield, but those victories of a finite point are not likely to deliver strategic victory. Further, denigrating Russia’s mass strategy as “stupid” misses the point. If Russia delivers strategic victory, it cannot be that illogical, regardless of how dubious the methods. Ultimately, Russia’s operations in Ukraine show that mass, especially in wars of territorial annexation, are how a state truly consolidates its gains and hedges those military victories against counterattacks.

Finally, the Russo-Ukrainian War illustrates how important it is to eliminate an enemy army to insulate one’s state from see-saw transitions between tactical victories. Clausewitz asserts that an undestroyed army always presents the possibility of returning to the battlefield and undercutting its adversary’s aims. Ukraine’s inability to eliminate Russia’s army and remove it from the battlefield in Ukraine means that Kyiv will have to continually wrestle with the Kremlin aggressively pursuing its aims in Ukraine. Ukraine’s inability to generate the size of force, coupled with the destructive warfighting capabilities needed to destroy Russia’s army in Ukraine and to occupy and hold the liberated territory, means that this war of attrition will likely grind on until either Ukraine can generate the force needed to evict Putin’s army from Ukraine, Ukraine becomes strategically exhausted and has to quit the conflict, or both parties decide to end the conflict. Regardless of the outcome, 2024 will likely continue to see Russia attempting to strategically exhaust Ukraine; meanwhile, Kyiv will do its best to maintain its position along the contact line as it tries to recruit and train the army needed to destroy Russia’s army and to liberate its territory.

Amos Fox is a PhD candidate at the University of Reading and a freelance writer and conflict scholar writing for the Association of the United States Army. His research and writing focus on the theory of war and warfare, proxy war, future armed conflict, urban warfare, armored warfare and the Russo-Ukrainian War. Amos has published in RUSI Journal and Small Wars and Insurgencies among many other publications, and he has been a guest on numerous podcasts, including RUSI’s Western Way of War , This Means War , the Dead Prussian Podcast and the Voices of War .

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Jack Watling, “The War in Ukraine is Not a Stalemate,” Foreign Affairs , 3 January 2023.
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Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin, “Putin Vows to Fight on In Ukraine Until Russia Achieves its Goals,” Reuters , 14 December 2023.
Harriet Morris, “An Emboldened, Confident Putin Says There Will Be No Peace in Ukraine Until Russia’s Goals are Met,” Associated Press , 14 December 2023.
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Tong-Hyung, “North Korea Stresses Alignment with Russia”; “China’s Position on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine”; Darlene Superville, “The White House is Concerned Iran May Provide Ballistic Missiles to Russia for Use Against Ukraine,” Associated Press , 21 November 2023.
Matthew Luxmoore and Michael Gordon, “Russia’s Army Learns from Its Mistakes in Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal , 24 September 2023.
Margarita Konaev and Owen Daniels, “The Russians Are Getting Better,” Foreign Affairs , 6 September 2023.
Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Stormbreak: Fighting Through Russian Defences in Ukraine’s 2023 Offensive (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2023), 15–19.
Bryan Frederick et. al., Escalation in the War in Ukraine: Lessons Learned and Risks for the Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023), 77.
“Bluffing or Not, Putin’s Declared Deployment of Nuclear Weapons to Belarus Raises Tensions,” Associated Press , 27 July 2023.
“Russia’s Medvedev Warns of Nuclear Response if Ukraine Hits Missile Launch Sites,” Reuters , 11 January 2024.
“Ukraine War: Putin Confirms First Nuclear Weapons Moved to Belarus,” BBC News , 17 June 2023.
Steve Gutterman, “The Week in Russia: Carnage and Clampdown,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , 19 January 2024.
Samantha de Bendern et al., “Prigozhin May Be Dead, but Putin’s Position Remains Uncertain,” Chatham House , 24 August 2024.
Gutterman, “The Week in Russia: Carnage and Clampdown.”
Robert Picheta et al., “Pro-War Putin Critic Igor Girkin Sentenced to Four Years in Prison on Extremist Charges,” CNN , 25 January 2024.
Robert Coalson, “How the Russian State Ramped Up the Suppression of Dissent in 2023: ‘It Worked in the Soviet Union, and It Works Now,’” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , 31 December 2023.
Ben Hodges, “Ukraine Update with Lieutenant General (Retired) Ben Hodges,” Revolution in Military Affairs [podcast], 1 January 2024.
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Hodges, “The Ukraine Update.”
Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in the Second Year of Its Invasion of Ukraine (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2023), 3–8.
The Kyiv Post keeps a running tally of these figures and other Russian losses in a ticker across the top of their homepage: https://www.kyivpost.com .
Christopher Miller, “Kyrylo Budanov: The Ukrainian Military Spy Chief Who ‘Likes the Darkness,’” Financial Times , 20 January 2024.
“Ukraine in Maps: Tracking the War with Russia,” BBC News , 20 December 2023.
Constant Meheut, “Russia Makes Small Battlefield Gains, Increasing Pressure on Ukraine,” New York Times , 22 December 2023.
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Olivia Olander, “Ukraine Intends to Push Russia Entirely Out, Zelenskyy Says as Counteroffensive Continues,” Politico , 11 September 2022; Guy Davies, “Zelenskyy to ABC: How Russia-Ukraine War Could End, Thoughts on US Politics and Putin’s Weakness,” ABC News , 9 July 2023.
Angela Charlton, “Ukraine’s a Step Closer to Joining the EU. Here’s What It Means, and Why It Matters,” Associated Press , 14 December 2023.
Visual Journalism Team, “Ukraine in Maps: Tracking the War with Russia,” BBC News , 20 December 2023.
“Russia-Ukraine Tensions: Putin Orders Troops to Separatist Regions and Recognizes Their Independence,” New York Times , 21 February 2022.
John Mearsheimer, “Assessing the Conventional Balance: The 3:1 Rule and Its Critics,” International Security 13, no. 4 (1989): 65–70; Michael Kofman, “Firepower Truly Matters with Michael Kofman,” Revolution in Military Affairs [podcast], 3 December 2023.
Vladimir Isachenkov, “Putin Warns West: Moscow Has ‘Red Line’ About Ukraine, NATO,” Associated Press , 30 November 2021.
Maria Kostenko et al., “As the War Grinds On, Ukraine Needs More Troops. Not Everyone Is Ready to Enlist,” CNN , 19 November 2023.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi, “Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win It,” Economist , accessed 24 January 2024.
Trevor Dupuy, Numbers, Predictions, and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1979), 12.
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Olena Harmash and Tom Balmforth, “Ukrainian Troops Face Artillery Shortages, Scale Back Some Operations – Commander,” Reuters , 18 December 2023.
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Joseph Ataman, Frederick Pleitgen and Dara Tarasova-Markina, “Russia’s Relentless ‘Meat Assaults’ Are Wearing Down Outmanned and Outgunned Ukrainian Forces,” CNN , 23 January 2024.
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The views and opinions of our authors do not necessarily reflect those of the Association of the United States Army. An article selected for publication represents research by the author(s) which, in the opinion of the Association, will contribute to the discussion of a particular defense or national security issue. These articles should not be taken to represent the views of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, the United States government, the Association of the United States Army or its members.

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Philosophy and Current Affairs: The Russia-Ukraine War

According to one founding myth, philosophy begins in ancient Greece with Socrates abstracting from concrete examples of just activity in order to determine the timeless and eternal essence of justice. To this day, few philosophy journals are dedicated to the analysis of historically contingent current affairs, let alone a specific event of historical significance, like Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. So, to explain why I edited a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica on the protracted conflict between Russia and Ukraine, I will briefly: detail my involvement in the current Russia-Ukraine war; describe the connection between my philosophical commitments and my recent activity in Kyiv; and elucidate the dialectical relation between academic and public philosophy, generally. Finally, I will offer a short summary of each essay in this special issue of SPE on the Russia-Ukraine war.

1. Current Affairs: Reporting on the Russia-Ukraine War

Ukrainians have been fighting Russian or Russian-backed troops since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. However, the backstory for this special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica begins with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. I was in Toronto at the time, and I was horrified by Russia’s attack on Kyiv. Yet there was something else nagging at me: very few people in my proximity seemed to grasp the significance of a nuclear power invading a neighboring country with over 100,000 troops. So, a few months later when a colleague in the Canadian press explained that they would have gaps in their Ukraine coverage over the summer and thus could use a freelance journalist on the ground, I figured this was an opportunity to put my public philosophy skills to good use, by providing Canadian readers with reports on daily life in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major cities.

After publishing a few articles for The Toronto Star and doing some background research for the CBC, The Wall Street Journal commissioned me to write a piece on the state of higher education in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, Ukrainian colleges and universities were in disarray. At the time, some seven thousand scholars had fled Ukraine and thousands more had been displaced within the country. Two years later, over 170 Ukrainian institutions of higher education have been damaged and more than twenty have been completely destroyed . And the academics who stayed in Ukraine continue conduct their research, teaching, and public service in very challenging circumstances .

That said, two things really stood out to me when doing my initial research on higher education in Ukraine. First, nearly every Rector and senior administrator noted that Western universities were providing plenty of support for Ukrainian students and scholars who had fled the country, but that there was little or no help for Ukrainian academics working in Ukraine. Second, Ukrainian academics were doing amazing work inside and outside the classroom to keep their local communities running and to raise funds for the Ukrainian war effort. And ultimately, these two facts got me thinking: “I could write a story about the state of higher education in Ukraine, or maybe I could do something to help my fellow academics in Kyiv.”

As it turns out, I never wrote that Wall Street Journal story. Instead, I followed the example of public outreach set by Ukrainian students and scholars by returning to Toronto and organizing a benefit conference to assist academic and civic institutions in Ukraine. Specifically, the benefit conference was designed to support the work students and scholars at Kyiv Mohyla Academy were doing to counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had on higher education and civilian life in Kyiv. The conference was entitled “What Good Is Philosophy? – The Role of the Academy in a Time of Crisis,” and it took place from March 17 to 19, 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in the University of Toronto.

Keynotes at this benefit event were delivered by world-renowned author, Margaret Atwood, one of the most celebrated scholars of Ukrainian history, Timothy Snyder, and two of Ukraine’s preeminent public intellectuals, Mychailo Wynnyckyj and Volodymyr Yermolenko. Lectures were also given by some of the most influential philosophers writing today, including Peter Adamson, Elizabeth Anderson, Seyla Benhabib, Agnes Callard, Quassim Cassam, Tim Crane, Simon Critchley, David Enoch, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Sally Haslanger, Angie Hobbs, Barry Lam, Melissa Lane, Dominic Lopes, Kate Manne, Jeff McMahan, Jennifer Nagel, Philip Pettit, Kieran Setiya, Jason Stanley, Timothy Williamson , and Jonathan Wolff. The closing remarks were delivered by Ukraine’s Ambassador to Canada, Yulia Kovaliv.

The benefit conference raised $50,000 CAD for Kyiv Mohyla Academy. And shortly after the event, the editor-in-chief of Studia Philosophica Estonica , Toomas Lot, asked if I would be interested in editing a special issue of their journal on the Russia-Ukraine war. In fact, Toomas asked me to build on the work I did for the benefit conference by transcribing the keynotes and commissioning an original set of accessible essays on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with the aim of sharing philosophical analyses of the war with academics and the general public, alike. And since my civic engagement in Ukraine was inspired by my study of philosophy, and given that I believe philosophy can be effectively used to elucidate current events, I gladly accepted Toomas’s invitation to edit a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica on the Russia-Ukraine war.

2. Philosophy: Authenticity, Responsibility, and The Russia-Ukraine War

Just as editing a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica on the Russia–Ukraine war deviates from standard academic practice, I appreciate that reporting from a war-torn country and supporting civic institutions in a foreign state are hardly typical activities for a professor of philosophy. That said, much of my work in and for Ukraine has been informed by my reading of two key figures in the history of philosophy: Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. Specifically, Heidegger’s analysis of human existence and authenticity combined with Levinas’s work on responsibility, vulnerability, and proximity influenced my decision to cover Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and then organize a benefit conference for Kyiv Mohyla Academy. And I hope briefly reflecting on the connection between my philosophical commitments and my recent activities in Kyiv will help us see the dialectal relation between academic and public philosophy as well as the value of public outreach.

In Being and Time , Heidegger offers a detailed analysis of Dasein . Dasein is an ordinary German word that means ‘existence.’ Yet in Being and Time , Heidegger uses Dasein as a technical term for ‘human being’ to push back against notions of a fixed human nature and show that our essence lies in our existence. This means that who and what we are is a function of the historical contingency, manifold abilities, and future indeterminacy that characterize a human life, generally. The education we receive, the careers we pursue, or the relationships we cultivate depend upon the time, place, and circumstances of our birth. These historical realities undoubtedly shape who we are, but they are contingent insofar as we are born with the capacity to study a host of subjects, pursue a variety of careers, or cultivate all kinds of relationships. The contingency of our upbringing combined with our ability to lead alternate lives allows us to question the identity we inherit, and this questioning puts us in a position to choose who and what we will be going forward. The fact that we can make this choice indicates the uncertainty of our future and presupposes that a portion of our life still lies ahead of us. Taken together, the contingency of our past, the multiple abilities we possess, and the indeterminacy of our future enable us to define our own identity through the choices we make over time. And as Heidegger sees it, when we take responsibility for our existence by making life-defining choices, we lead an authentic human life.

Taking responsibility for who and what we are through life-defining choices raises questions about the basis upon which we make such decisions, and this brings us to the work of Heidegger’s student and critic: Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas largely accepts Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein , but he worries that the historical contingency and future indeterminacy that characterize human life implies that we are absolutely free to make any life-defining decision we please—i.e., we are equally free to choose to be Mother Theresa or a Nazi—and therefore our existential choices are ethically arbitrary. To address this concern, Levinas offers a detailed analysis of what Heidegger calls the ‘existential situation’ in which we make life-defining decisions, and Levinas argues that taking responsibility for who and what we are is based on our ability to respond to the wants and needs of others. Briefly, the idea is that I am free to teach Heidegger and Levinas if there are students who want to study philosophy, and I am equally free to be an orthopedic surgeon if there are patients who need their knees repaired. That said, Levinas is famous for stating in Totality and Infinity that ethics is infinitely demanding and that human agency (our ability to make choices and act upon them) is based on the vulnerability of others. To see what these claims mean just think of the civil war currently being fought in Sudan, the suppression of women in Afghanistan, the homeless crisis in North American cities, and all the other strife and suffering that offers us endless opportunities to act ethically by supporting others in need. At the same time, Levinas realizes that human finitude imposes a limit on the amount we can do to mitigate the misfortune of others. For that reason, he develops an account of ethical activity in which we use our skills and abilities to facilitate the flourishing of others within our proximity. So, taking responsibility for who and what we are by making life-defining decisions is ultimately based on our ability to respond to the wants and needs of others in our specific existential situation.

As strange as it may sound, Heidegger’s arcane work on historical contingency, manifold abilities, and future indeterminacy, as well as Levinas’s esoteric writing on responsibility, vulnerability, and proximity, influenced my decisions to report on the Russia–Ukraine war and run a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was scheduled to spend that summer editing The Cambridge Critical Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time , as well as teaching a seminar on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception at Massey College in the University of Toronto. This work would have been in keeping with my education and career path to date, but I had also spent a significant amount of time since completing my Ph.D. writing, editing, and producing public philosophy for The New Statesman and CBC. So, when a colleague in the Canadian press asked if I would be interested in traveling to Ukraine to spend several months covering the ongoing conflict, I was put in a position to question my current commitments and choose between continuing with my academic duties or working as a war correspondent. And since Canadians clearly needed to enhance their understanding of the Russia—Ukraine war, I decided that reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the best use of my ability to write for a general audience at this pivotal moment in history. Similarly, when I started doing research for a story about the state of higher education in Ukraine, I realized that I might be able to use my connections at various western universities to generate support for students and scholars in Kyiv, but then I had to choose between completing my story on higher education or figuring out a way to assist the Ukrainian academy. And since the needs of students and scholars in Kyiv were obviously greater than the needs of the Canadian reader, I decided to return to Toronto to organize a benefit conference for Kyiv Mohyla Academy. Of course, nearly every aspect of Ukrainian society needed support following Russia’s invasion, and arguably the Ukrainian military was the most vulnerable and thus the most in need of assistance. Yet my background and abilities meant that there were limits on the type of work I could choose to do in and for Ukraine. And in the end, I thought fundraising for students and scholars in Kyiv was the best way for me to simultaneously live up to my philosophical commitments and employ my distinctive skill set in this specific situation.

3. Philosophy and Current Affairs: A Virtuous Circle

Drawing on Heidegger and Levinas to inform my decision-making and inspire my civic engagement in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has helped me appreciate the connection between my academic training and my public outreach. It has also helped me perceive the nature and value of public philosophy, generally. Specifically, public philosophy runs along a spectrum from the popularization of academic ideas, through the application of those ideas to current affairs, to an active participation in social and political movements. This suggests that public philosophy presupposes the esoteric work done by professional philosophers in universities. But philosophical engagement with current events often raises new questions that require further academic research. So, to illustrate the essence and importance of public philosophy, I will tease out the dialectical relationship between our scholarly and civic activities and then conclude with a few words about the public philosophy in this special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica on the Russia—Ukraine war.

While the essence of philosophy is contested within the academy, the practice of academic philosophy involves asking a series of questions of a metaphysical, ethical, or aesthetic nature, and then answering them in creative ways to enhance our understanding. This attempt to expand our knowledge starts with a deep appreciation for the history of philosophy and may require subtle distinctions, detailed argumentation, and a new vocabulary. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics , and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory are all excellent examples of academic philosophy. And although these books were written in different eras, they have at least one common feature: each demands a certain level of academic expertise before their key ideas shine through.

Since we need to know something about the work of Kant, Sidgwick, and Adorno before we can share their ideas with the wider world, academic expertise is the basis of public philosophy. But it is just the beginning. The process of popularization requires translating an idea from the vocabulary needed to test it in the academy to a language the lay person understands. Transcendental deductions, synthetic a priori judgments, and the unity of apperception are more or less intelligible phenomena to Kant scholars. But these technical terms mean very little to the uninitiated. So, some form of translation is necessary to turn the idioms of the academy into publicly accessible philosophy.

Translating technical terms into ordinary language calls for real literary skill. It may also involve placing an academic idea in its historical context or explaining it through a set of examples. Yet after an arcane idea is translated into accessible prose, it can be used to introduce students to philosophy and educate the public, generally. Nigel Warburton offers a clear distillation of perennial philosophical issues in Philosophy: The Basics , and his book is often used to teach new undergraduates. Similarly, Angie Hobbs does a fine job placing the writing of influential philosophers in context, and her contributions to In Our Time on BBC Radio have given Plato, Aristotle, and many others a broad audience. Collectively, Nigel and Angie have produced a lot of user-friendly philosophy, and the translation work of popularizers like them has paved the way for applied public philosophy.

Once an arcane academic idea has been made generally intelligible, it can be applied in everyday life. In fact, applied public philosophy is meant to help us make sense of current events and provide us with the insight we need to make difficult decisions. As editor of The New Statesman’s Agora series , most of the articles I published were designed to clarify current affairs or contribute to controversial debates. Eric Schliesser and Eric Winsberg’s piece , “Climate and Coronavirus: The Science is Not the Same,” was an attempt to clarify current events, whereas Judith Butler’s column , “The Backlash Against ‘Gender Ideology’ Must Stop,” was a contribution to a contentious debate. But Carrie Jenkin’s article , “Love Isn’t About Happiness: It’s About Understanding and Inspiration” signifies that applied public philosophy is equally concerned with human flourishing. And as a public service, the application of academic ideas to daily life requires a willingness to look beyond the confines of the university, while also providing an opportunity to follow through on one’s philosophical commitments via civic engagement.

Using suitably clarified academic ideas to analyze contemporary social and political issues presupposes a robust understanding of the actors and institutions in a specific social movement as well as a feel for what is at stake in a given political debate. Acquiring this insight often involves a mix of independent research and regular contact with civic associations. This interaction may enable a philosophical assessment of current events, but it can equally encourage philosophically inspired participation in various social and political struggles of the day. As noted above, my civic engagement in Ukraine has been motivated by my study of Heidegger and Levinas, and I see my work in Kyiv as one small way to contribute to a larger fight for liberal democracy. At the same time, my public work in Ukraine has prompted me to rethink Heidegger’s and Levinas’s notions of freedom and responsibility in the context of mass mobilization, and I can envision a research project on the ethics of conscription where I analyze the extent to which the vulnerability of others within our proximity can impose strict limits on our ability to make life-defining decisions. In short, my philosophically inspired social and political engagement in Ukraine has forced me to question my conception of agency and thus prompted me to further my academic work.

With that said, we’ve come full circle : public philosophy presupposes and contributes to philosophy as it is practiced in the academy. Specifically, public philosophers translate arcane academic ideas into popular prose for the purpose of general education. Once academic ideas are suitably clarified, public philosophers can use them to elucidate current affairs and motivate participation in social and political movements. This philosophical engagement with contemporary events often raises new questions that inspire fresh academic research. And academic and public philosophy prove their worth through the collective contribution they make to advancing human understanding, educating citizens, and inspiring social and political progress.

4. Philosophy and Current Affairs: Reflections on The Russia-Ukraine War

The dialectical relation between academic and public philosophy suggests that the Socratic distinction between examples of just activity and the essence of justice is not as clear as contemporary philosophy journals imply, and each publicly accessible article in my special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica on the Russia-Ukraine war combines academic insight with an analysis of current affairs to enhance our understanding of the most significant geopolitical event of the twenty-first century.

In “Grappling with Evil Amidst Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” Mychailo Wynnyckyj details his experience of Russia’s attack on Kyiv in the spring of 2022 and then he argues that the notion of individual rights that lies at the foundation of western legal and political institutions is incapable of dealing with the collective evil exhibited by the Russian army during their invasion of Ukraine.

Timothy Snyder’s essay, “Thinking About Freedom in Wartime Ukraine,” recounts his meeting with President Zelensky shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and it explores the philosophical implications of Zelensky’s decision to stay in Kyiv as Russian troops marched on the Ukrainian capital. Specifically, Snyder explains what Zelensky’s bravery during the first few days of the full-scale invasion shows us about the relations between freedom and speech, freedom and risk, freedom and obligation, and freedom and security.

In “The Sword is Mightier Than the Pen,” Aaron James Wendland asks world-renowned author, Margaret Atwood, about the power of poetry and literature; the relationship between fiction and political commentary; the social and political impact of her dystopian and anti-authoritarian work; modern utopias and the role of hope in utopian writing; her undergraduate studies in logic and the history of philosophy; and the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy.

Volodymyr Yermolenko examines the power of ideas to shape social and political events in his article, “Thinking in Dark Times.” He is particularly interested in the way misguided or false ideas about Russian and Ukrainian history and politics have contributed to the current Russia–Ukraine war. He also reflects on the way this war has transformed his understanding of some key philosophical concepts, including life, death, and social solidarity.

In “Just War Theory and The Russia-Ukraine War,” Jeff McMahan draws on revisionist just war theory to analyze the morality of action by both sides in the current conflict. He argues that virtually all uses of force by the Russian military in Ukraine are impermissible; that Ukrainian forces are bound by moral constraints, such as the requirement of proportionality, which requires the most careful attention to risks of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons; and that some Russian civilians are liable to some harms.

Gerald Lang’s article, “Against the Odds: Defending Defensive Wars,” looks at the ‘reasonable prospect of success’ condition in just war theory and the ‘problem of bloodless invasion’ to see whether they present the Ukrainian resistance with justificatory headaches. Lang concludes that there is no principled barrier to Ukraine’s resistance, but that civilian and combatant casualties must be taken into consideration by the Ukrainian government when prosecuting their just war.

In “What Is This Thing Called Peace?”, Fabio Lampert scrutinizes discourse surrounding the Russia-Ukraine war in Western nations, where, despite widespread support for Ukraine, a contingent advocates for peace by rejecting military aid. As Lampert sees it, this “pacifist” stance gains traction through public demonstrations in European countries and political endorsement. Yet by opposing military aid while advocating peace, Lampert argues these “pacifist” messages distort genuine efforts for establishing peace in Ukraine.

Jonathan Wolff provides a framework for analyzing and assessing the value of nationalism in his essay, “Nationalisms: Purification, Privilege, Pride, and Protection.” According to Wolff, there are different types of nationalism, used in different circumstances, and for different purposes, and he attempts to distinguish acceptable and unacceptable forms of nationalism by distinguishing four functions of nationalism: purification, privilege, pride, and protection. These functions can be mixed together in different ways, and Wolff claims that purification and privilege are both highly problematic, while pride, and especially protection, are far more defensible.

In “The Antinomies of the Russia-Ukraine War and Its Challenges to Feminist Theory,” Irina Zherebkina looks at the difficulties a large-scale war in Europe presents for a number of feminist, pacifist, and leftist certainties. Zherebkina considers the view that Ukraine should stop resisting aggression in the face of the threat of a world nuclear war or if the conflict turns into a war of extermination, but then she argues that a true Ukrainian victory over an authoritarian aggressor would amount to preserving and empowering democracy in Ukraine, and she claims that this is possible only on the basis of building broad transnational anti-Putin alliances, including alliances with all the forces opposing Putin in Russia and Belarus.

Siobhan Kattago’s article, “The Russia-Ukraine War and The Sediments of Time,” frames western responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine within what Reinhart Koselleck calls ‘the sediments of time,’ or Zeitschichten that contain different temporalities, speeds, and directions. Specifically, Kattago looks at Western reactions to the Russia-Ukraine war through distinct temporal lenses, including Zeitenwende , déjà vu , interregnum , and Never Again, and then she examines what these temporalities mean for the post-war international legal and political order.

In “Putin’s Use and Abuse of History as a Political Weapon,” Cynthia Nielsen discusses Putin’s account of history in the context of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Nielsen focuses on Putin’s Imperialist History of Russia, his “Great Patriotic War” narrative, and his NATO ressentiment , and then she explains how these accounts of history help us see that a central factor driving this war is Russia’s inability to see it itself as anything other than an empire.

George Pattison considers calls to ban Russian literature in his essay, “To Cancel or Not to Cancel? – Questioning the Russian Idea.” Taking his cue from Putin’s use of Dostoevsky to support his critical view of western culture, Pattison challenges the view that Dostoevsky can be straightforwardly corralled into the Russian president’s nationalistic and imperialistic agenda. Instead, Pattison follows the approach taken by George Lukacs in response to National Socialism’s self-presentation as the authentic inheritor of the German cultural tradition, namely, to show that any great cultural work is going to be resistant to the kind of one-dimensional interpretations typical of authoritarian regimes.

In “Academic Dialogue Against the Background of War,” Nataliia Vaikina examines pleas to boycott the Russian academy after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Against the view that such a boycott would prevent western academics from working with their Russian colleagues to counter Kremlin propaganda and to co-produced Western-Russian research that may benefit everyone, Vaikina argues that the Russian censorship and policing of the academy combined with Russian ideology means that there are currently no conversation partners for Western academics within the Russian academy.

Orysya Bila and Josh Duclos explore the instrumental and intrinsic values associated with teaching philosophy in their article, “Utopia, Dystopia, and Democracy: Teaching Philosophy in Wartime Ukraine.” Duclos argues that teaching philosophy in Ukraine can cultivate habits of thought and action that promote democratic citizenship while opposing authoritarian dogmatism. Conscious of Ukraine’s Soviet past, Bila cautions against using philosophers and philosophy departments as an ideological arm of any political party, and then she argues that philosophy has value as a distinct form of thinking with the power to provide consolation and promote change.

Finally, in “Ukrainian Civil Society: Past Lessons and Future Possibilities,” Nataliia Volovchuk looks at the evolution of Ukrainian civil society and considers what that evolution means for Ukraine going forward. Specifically, Volovchuk examines the interaction between Ukrainian civil society and the state and then she explains how Ukrainian civil society has struggled with different utopian ideas over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Volovchuk concludes her essay with an analysis of some utopian obstacles for Ukrainian civil society that may come with European integration.

As the editor of a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica on the Russia–Ukraine war, I appreciate the commitment of my contributors and I believe curating this collection of essays is an extension of my previous efforts to assist Ukraine in its time of need. As we have seen, philosophy is not confined to the academy. It can be used to elucidate current affairs and simultaneously serve as the basis of social and political progress. And so, I sincerely hope that the articles in my special issue not only enhance our understanding of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but equally inspire us to marshal all the support Ukraine requires in its fight for freedom and democracy.

Citation for Republication: This essay was originally published as part of a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica entitled, “Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War”. A copy of the original article can be found here .

Aaron Wendland

Aaron James Wendland is Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College London. He co-edited two books for Routledge, Heidegger on Technology and Wittgenstein and Heidegger , and he is currently editing Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Critical Guide for Cambridge University Press. He has also published numerous pieces of public philosophy in The New York Times , The New Statesman , The Toronto Star , The Moscow Times , The Kyiv Independent , Canadian Broadcasting Corporation , Australian Broadcasting Corporation , and Ukraine World . From 2018-2022, he edited a popular philosophy column, Agora , in The New Statesman , and he is an Associate Producer at Ideas on CBC Radio .

Aaron James Wendland
Authenticity
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen
Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War
responsibility
Richard B. Gibson
Studia Philosophica Estonica

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> Ukraine and Russia
> Conclusion: Ukraine, Russia, and the West ‒ from Cold War to Cold War

Book contents

Ukraine and Russia
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Additional material
1 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine
2 New World Order? 1989‒1993
3 Hope and Hardship, 1994‒1999
4 Autocracy and Revolution, 1999‒2004
5 Reform and Reversal, 2004‒2010
6 Viktor Yanukovych and the Path to Confrontation, 2010‒2013
7 From Revolution to War, 2013‒2015
8 Conclusion: Ukraine, Russia, and the West ‒ from Cold War to Cold War

8 - Conclusion: Ukraine, Russia, and the West ‒ from Cold War to Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 November 2019

Russia’s incursions into Ukraine shattered any remaining illusions about order in post-Cold War Europe, leaving Ukraine and the West struggling to respond while Russia reveled in its fait accompli and started to come to grips with its isolation. What caused the conflict? The summary stresses that multiple factors interacted. From the outset, the actors’ goals were incompatible, even if that was obscured by the euphoria that accompanied the fall of communism. Viewing the situation as one of conflicting goals in a classic security dilemma not only revises our understanding of what happened, but changes our thinking on what the future might look like. While many choices could have been made differently, the grounds for conflict were deeply rooted, and the actors were much more constrained, both internationally and domestically, than the literature focused on blame would have us believe. The implication is that neither schemes to make Ukraine a neutral country nor waiting for Vladimir Putin to pass from the scene is likely to resolve the conflict.

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Conclusion: Ukraine, Russia, and the West ‒ from Cold War to Cold War
Paul D'Anieri , University of California, Riverside
Book: Ukraine and Russia
Online publication: 01 November 2019
Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108657044.009

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Why is Putin attacking Ukraine? He told us.

In a recent speech, the Russian president laid out the nationalist ideas that animate him — and helped cause the Ukraine crisis.

by Zack Beauchamp

People from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the territory controlled by pro-Russia separatist governments in eastern Ukraine, watch Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address at their temporary home in the Rostov-on-Don region of Russia on Monday, February 21.

Editor’s note, February 23, 11:50 pm: In a Wednesday night speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a “special military operation” would begin in Ukraine. Multiple news organizations reported explosions in multiple cities and evidence of large-scale military operations happening across Ukraine. Find the latest here .

Perhaps the biggest question behind the current crisis in Ukraine is this: What is Vladimir Putin thinking?

The Russian president’s decision to deploy large numbers of troops to eastern Ukraine has already triggered new Western sanctions on Russia . A full invasion could lead to land warfare on a scale Europe hasn’t seen since World War II, a bloody and devastating conflict for Russians and Ukrainians alike. What could justify even threatening that?

Putin’s clearest answer yet came in a speech delivered on Monday. He believes that Ukraine is an illegitimate country that exists on land that’s historically and rightfully Russian: “Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood,” as he puts it.

The overtures to the West from the current government of Ukraine are an attempt to stand up to this false regime, as is its antagonistic stance toward Moscow. This combination — an anti-Russian regime in what Putin views as rightfully Russian territory populated by rightfully Russian people — is unacceptable to him.

“Ukraine might have remained a sovereign state so long as it had a pro-Putin government,” says Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who studies Russia. “Reuniting the lands formally would probably not have been at the forefront of the agenda if Putin felt he had enough political support from the Ukrainian regime.”

Putin’s basic claim — that there is no historical Ukrainian nation worthy of present-day sovereignty — is demonstrably false . However, this does not mean Putin is lying: In fact, Russia experts generally saw his speech as an expression of his real beliefs.

The speech is consistent with a body of statements from the Russian president going back years, ranging from a 5,000-word essay on Ukrainian history published last year to a 2005 speech declaring that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster [in which] tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.”

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, explained

That Putin truly believes in aggressive Russian nationalism does not make a larger invasion inevitable. Depending on how you interpret the finer points of his views, it is possible to imagine off-ramps or Western concessions that could avert the worst possible outcomes.

But it does mean that simply reducing Russia’s motivation to one clear grievance — fear that Ukraine may join NATO or a simple aggressive desire to seize Ukrainian land — is a mistake. In Putin’s mind, these factors are inseparable in a complex historical and ideological narrative.

Understanding the current crisis, and perhaps even resolving it, depends on taking these nationalist ideas seriously.

History, according to Putin

The central contention of Putin’s speech on Monday is that Ukraine and Russia are, in historical terms, essentially inseparable.

“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said, per the Kremlin’s official translation . “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”

What we now call Ukraine, he says, “was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik Communist Russia.” In this questionable narrative, a trio of early Soviet leaders — Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev — carved land away from Russia and several nearby nations to create a distinct and ahistorical republic called Ukraine. The creation of Ukraine and the other Soviet republics was an attempt to win the support of “the most zealous nationalists” across the Soviet Union — at the expense of the historical idea of Russia.

Putin’s “Nazi” rhetoric reveals his terrifying war aims in Ukraine

This illustrates what Putin means by “the virus of nationalism.” Ukrainian nationalism, in his view, is an infection introduced to the Russian host by the Bolsheviks; when the Soviet Union collapsed, and republics from Ukraine to Estonia to Georgia declared independence, the virus killed its host.

People hold signs and chant slogans during a protest outside the Russian Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 22.

In reality, these countries have longstanding ethnonational identities distinct from Russia. But Putin does not accept this, treating the former Soviet republics — and, above all, Ukraine — as parts of Russia stolen from the motherland as a result of communist machinations.

“Radicals and nationalists, including and primarily those in Ukraine, are taking credit for having gained independence. As we can see, this is absolutely wrong,” he says. “The disintegration of our united country was brought about by the historic, strategic mistakes on the part of Bolshevik and Soviet leaders ... the collapse of the historical Russia known as the USSR is on their conscience.”

Putin is rewriting history to justify his threats to Ukraine

As a result, Putin cannot see post-Soviet Ukraine as a real country; in his view, it has no real history nor national tradition to unite it. Instead, he sees it as a playground for oligarchs who deploy anti-Russian demagoguery as a smokescreen for their corruption. “The Ukrainian authorities — I would like to emphasize this — began by building their statehood on the negation of everything that united us,” he says.

Russian control over Ukraine, he argues, has been replaced by a different kind of foreign rule: that of the West. After the 2013 Euromaidan protests, which toppled pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych, “Ukraine itself was placed under external control ... a colony with a puppet regime.”

The ominous implication of this historical narrative is that the Ukrainian government, in its current form, is both illegitimate and intolerable.

It is illegitimate because Putin views Ukraine as a rightful part of Russia separated purely by an accident of history. It is intolerable because Ukraine’s government seeks to legitimate itself by courting conflict with Russia, both oppressing its native Russian speakers and menacing Russia’s borders.

A Western-backed government like this, Putin warns, threatens the very survival of the Russian state. In the speech’s most paranoid passages, he warns of Ukraine acquiring nuclear weapons with Western assistance, joining NATO, and ultimately serving as a launching pad for an American assault on Russia.

“This is not about our political regime or anything like that. They just do not need a big and independent country like Russia around,” he says. “This is the source of America’s traditional policy towards Russia.”

A military assault is not Putin’s only fear. He calls the Ukraine Maidan movement a “coup d’état” undertaken “with direct assistance from foreign states”; there is no doubt he fears a similar movement against his own government. Bringing Ukraine to heel — demonstrating that a pro-Western protest movement in Russia’s historical heartland cannot succeed — is vital to protecting his own government.

“I think the bigger threat for him is a regime threat, not an actual military invasion,” Gunitsky explains. “He thinks the West wants to subvert his regime the way they did in Ukraine. That’s why NATO is only a part of threat.”

In the Russian president’s mind, there is a seamless connection between Russian nationalism and Russian security interests. Putin believes that the current Ukrainian government threatens Russia for reasons bound up in their imperial past; restoring Russian control over territories that he believes it rightfully owns would be one way of ending the threat.

This thinking is most clearly on display in the most ominous line in Putin’s speech: one that can, in context, can plausibly be read as a threat to bring Ukraine back under Moscow’s direct rule.

“You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunization would mean for Ukraine.”

Residents collect water from a well in the town of Schastia, near the eastern Ukraine city of Lugansk, on February 23, after the town’s pump stations were knocked out of power by shelling.

What Putin’s worldview means for Ukraine

Putin’s narrative is twisted history.

For one thing, it is simply incorrect to say that Ukraine has no independent national identity separate from Russia. Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, was built centuries before Moscow. At the end of World War I, Ukraine declared independence from Russia ; it was put back under Soviet rule by force.

“Putin is no historian,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian of Eastern Europe, writes in the Financial Times . “Ukraine has its own distinct and fascinating history and Ukrainians have as much a right to a future as anyone else.”

It is not merely manipulation by elites that led people in former Soviet republics, from Estonia to Ukraine to Georgia, to attempt to exit Moscow’s orbit in the 1990s — it was real anger with Soviet repression and colonialism. And it’s Putin’s behavior, not some kind of elite Ukrainian manipulation, that has driven up support among Ukrainians for a tighter link with the West.

Yet Putin’s belief in the notion of Russian victimhood depicted in the speech appears to be sincere, consistent with his long public record.

“I am convinced that Putin was ‘speaking from the heart,’” says Alina Polyakova, the president of the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank. “Most of this was in his essay on Ukraine from last year.”

In that essay , Putin argued that “the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.” In his 2014 speech announcing the annexation of Crimea, a Ukrainian territory that remains under Russian occupation, he argued that “it was [historically] impossible to imagine that Ukraine and Russia may split up and become two separate states.”

In a 2007 speech in Munich , Putin warned that the American-led global order was one in which “no one felt safe.” Russia and the world, he said, had reached “a decisive moment” for moving away from it. And, of course, there was the 2005 speech lamenting the end of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical disaster” because (among other reasons) it led to ethnic Russians living in independent states outside Russian borders — like, for example, Ukraine.

But the fact that Putin has long harbored nationalist grievances does not clarify how far he is willing to go in pursuit of these ends.

A panel of leading Russia experts convened by Columbia University on Tuesday afternoon all agreed that Putin’s speech struck a belligerent nationalist tone and that it represented his sincere thinking on the topic. But they disagreed on the implications: most notably, whether Putin could be placated with Western concession and whether he is truly serious about using an invasion to rectify what he sees as historical crimes against Russia.

Fyodor Lukyanov, a leading Moscow-based foreign policy analyst, argued that Putin really wants the West to listen to his concerns about Ukraine and come to the negotiating table. “From the beginning,” he argued, the buildup on Ukrainian borders “was not a preparation for war.” Rather, it was a reaction to the fact that “all attempts by Russia in previous years to offer a more or less normal discussion about security arrangements were simply ignored.”

Stephen Sestanovich, a former US diplomat who worked on Russia issues, argued that the speech proved the opposite: that “Putin’s focus is less the European security order and more a kind of obsession with Ukraine as an illegitimate state that makes it almost impossible to imagine serious negotiations.” He agreed that Putin may not escalate much further in Ukraine, but that’s because the West had called his bluff by refusing to grant any major security concessions.

By contrast, the RAND Corporation’s Samuel Charap argued that an invasion was all but inevitable: Putin’s aggressive speech, together with his forward military deployments , signaled a clear intent to mount an all-out assault. And Kadri Liik, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, claimed that Putin’s revanchist nationalism was at odds with the Russian public.

“A real large-scale war for Ukraine would be hugely unpopular,” she said. It “would be the beginning of the end of Putin’s rule, and I think he might know that.”

There is no straight line from Putin’s speech to any one course of action. The basic difficulty in analyzing the risk of an all-out invasion of Ukraine — that a Russian bluff and Russian preparation for an invasion look extremely similar — remains in place even after the Russian deployment to eastern Ukraine.

Yet the speech helps shed light on a critical aspect of the crisis: why Putin is doing this. Fail to understand the sense of historical grievance, and the way that it shapes his view of the “threat” from Ukraine, and you fail to understand why he’s willing to play such a high-stakes game today.

Any solution to the crisis needs to take his worldview seriously — and figure out what, exactly, can be done to address it.

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United States Institute of Peace

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The United States Speaks Clearly on Russia’s Ukraine War

Seeking peace for Ukraine and a more stable world means sustaining that message globally.

By: Ambassador William B. Taylor

Publication Type: Analysis

President Biden’s essay on the Ukraine war in Tuesday’s New York Times has vitally clarified America’s interests and goals following weeks of public debate weighted with uncertainty and concern over U.S. intentions and methods in that conflict. It offers a straightforward, positive approach—one that the world’s democracies should sustain—for confronting Russia’s assault against not only Ukraine, but global peace, stability and the rule of law.

President Joe Biden speaks at the White House in May. His May 31 op-ed essay in the New York Times summarized U.S. goals and methods for ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

A Clear, Positive Goal

“America’s goal is straightforward,” Biden wrote in the essay . “We want to see a democratic, independent, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression.”

That succinct, positive formulation of the U.S. objective contrasts with negative goals focused on Russia, such as weakening its geostrategic position or power. It forms a clear message, pro-Ukraine and pro-freedom rather than anti-Russia, that is vital to strengthen the necessary alliances against the Kremlin’s brutal aggression. It helps strengthen the U.S. partnership with Europe. Also, as USIP experts have noted, it’s an essential first step to building more support among nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America that have hesitated to fully oppose Russia’s effort to turn back the 75-year struggle to build an international rules-based order.

It seems no accident that Biden’s essay appeared in the Times , for it responds directly to the newspaper’s May 19 editorial seeking greater clarity on U.S. policy. That editorial was part of a broader questioning in May, among many commentators and scholars , about whether the battlefield surprises of the war’s first three months were leading to what the Times editorial called “U.S. aims and strategy in this war [that] have become harder to discern.”

“I want to be clear about the aims of the United States,” Biden wrote on Tuesday, and he was. It is the positive goals he emphasized—a restoration of Ukraine’s independence and ability to define its future, that will advance the vital U.S. and allied interests in the protection of democracy, sovereignty and rule of law .

Biden’s word choices, describing the “democratic, independent, sovereign and prosperous” Ukraine that America supports, carry real meaning. A democratic Ukraine is one that will continue its tradition, in 30 years of independence, of freely elected governments. It will continue to respond to Ukrainians’ persistent demands, in the face of Russian resistance and corruption, for more transparent governance. An independent and sovereign Ukraine is one that preserves its right to choose its future course, including potential membership in the European Union or NATO. A prosperous Ukraine is one that is free of Russian strangleholds on its economy, which the Kremlin is trying to achieve by seizing Ukraine’s remaining coastline, notably the port of Odesa.

The Path to a Negotiated Peace

Biden emphasized that he “will not pressure Ukraine—in private or in public—to make any territorial concessions” as part of any eventual peace process with Russia. Rather, he said, U.S. military aid is meant to help Ukrainians defend themselves well enough to “be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

This approach is in contrast to suggestions, including by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger last week , that Ukraine cede to Russia the Crimean Peninsula and portions of Donbas that Russia seized in 2014. Zelenskyy sharply rejected the notion as redolent of the 1938 Munich Agreement in which European governments forced Czechoslovakia to cede its Sudetenland region to Nazi Germany.

U.S. as well as international policymakers should note the consistent evidence that Zelenskyy’s determination to sustain Ukraine’s fight accurately reflects Ukrainians’ attitudes. In stark contrast to Putin’s demonstrated personal isolation (illustrated graphically by his meetings with rare formal visitors across an absurdly long table), Zelenskyy seeks out steady contact with Ukraine’s citizenry. Ukraine’s independent polling organization, the Rating group , is sustaining wartime monitoring of public opinion and found this month that 94 percent of Ukrainians approve of Zelenskyy’s performance since the war began.

As Biden expressed the U.S. goal of a “Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression,” he also signaled a method for achieving it: supplying Ukraine with highly capable defensive weapons. His article announced that the United States will send Ukraine advanced, long-range rocket systems that have recently become more vital as the war has shifted to the wide, open steppe of southeastern Ukraine. The United States and its allies already have delivered 108 howitzers with a potential range up to 25 miles, and Ukraine so far has deployed 85 of them to front lines, a U.S. defense official said last week . The rocket system that Biden mentioned in his article will carry ammunition capable of a 50-mile range.

Those U.S. measures are reinforced by the European Union’s decision Tuesday to ban 90 percent of Russian oil exports to Europe by the end of the year—and by Germany’s announcement that it will send advanced, longer-range anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine.

The first step to any eventual peace process that can protect the basic rights of nations to freedom and democracy is a global rejection of Russia’s unprovoked assault and support for its victims’ self-defense. As President Biden wrote Tuesday, the savagery and criminality of Russia’s attack makes American and international support for Ukraine “a profound moral issue,” not only “the right thing to do” but also “in our vital national interests.” Sustaining that clear message for Americans, Ukrainians, other allies—and indeed, for Russians—is a step not only toward restoring a just peace in brutalized Ukraine, but in preserving hope for an end to such wars worldwide.

Related Publications

Why Is the U.S. Deploying Long-Range Missiles in Germany?

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

By: Yashar Parsie

On the sidelines of last month’s NATO summit, the United States and Germany announced that Washington will begin episodic deployments of long-range conventional capabilities to Germany. In 1987, the United States and Soviet Union agreed to eliminate these systems under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, but Russia’s violations led the United States to withdraw from the treaty in 2019. Three years later, Russia invaded Ukraine and has engaged in nuclear saber-rattling since then. Washington plans to deploy these systems to strengthen deterrence, but Moscow has criticized them.

Type: Question and Answer

Global Policy

Russia’s War and China’s Rise Set a New Path for South Korea-NATO Relations

Tuesday, August 20, 2024

By: Geunwook Lee; Kwang-Jin Kim

July 2024 marked the third time South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol joined a NATO summit along with the leaders of the alliance’s other Indo-Pacific partner countries (Australia, Japan and New Zealand), informally known as the IP4. This represents a new phase in South Korea’s relations with the Atlantic alliance, but building a lasting friendship will take time and requires navigating a series of challenges. Amid an emerging global division of democratic and authoritarian camps and the challenges posed by China and Russia for both the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic regions, it is incumbent on both Brussels and Seoul to build a more cooperative relationship. That journey, however, has just begun.

Type: Analysis

Ukraine’s Pivot Changes the Narrative in Russia’s war; Outcome Remains Unclear

Thursday, August 15, 2024

By: Mary Glantz, Ph.D.

Almost 30 months into Vladimir Putin’s brutalization of Ukraine with a full-scale invasion that has pulverized vast swaths of its farmlands, towns and cities, Ukrainians have surprised Putin and the world by driving the war back into Russia — a move that, if nothing else, has altered the current narrative around this conflict. Ukraine has again brandished its determination, initiative and innovation, effectively resetting assumptions in its defense against its much larger attacker. The possible outcomes of Ukraine’s strike remain varied and unpredictable — and its eventual implications will rest on the evolutions of several questions, both military and political.

Donald Jensen on Ukraine’s Surprise Incursion into Russia

Monday, August 12, 2024

By: Donald N. Jensen, Ph.D.

The Ukrainian military seized a chunk of territory in the Kursk region of Russia as part of a surprise incursion that has left the Russian military in “a panic,” says USIP’s Donald Jensen, adding that Putin’s strategy until now did not “take into account that Ukraine could strike back, and they certainly have.”

Type: Podcast

The Point Conversations and insights about the moment.

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Jesse Wegman

Editorial Board Member

One of Trump’s Insidious Lies on Abortion Is Grounded in an Old Truth

As the debate over the Debate rages a day later, it’s tempting to try to catalog all of the lies Donald Trump told to an audience of tens of millions of Americans. But more interesting than the fact of his lies is how he lies.

Take a look at the former president’s rambling answer on abortion and reproductive rights. Linsey Davis of ABC News corrected Trump when he claimed, falsely, that Democratic-led states allow “execution after birth.” But he followed that one up with another lie, more insidious and, in its way, more Trumpian.

“Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote,” he said.

Let’s stop right there. The first part — “every legal scholar,” whether liberal or conservative — is not only untrue but obviously so. Just look at the briefs filed at the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade. You will find an overwhelming number of liberal scholars weighing in on the side of preserving the constitutional right to an abortion.

But as with so many of Trump’s lies, it is wrapped around a grain of truth. In this case, the grain is that some high-profile liberals once criticized Roe v. Wade. Famously, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did so before she became a Supreme Court justice, arguing that Roe was decided too quickly and too broadly.

Of course, anyone who listened to her reasoning would learn that she did not want Roe overturned. Rather she wanted it to be grounded more explicitly in the Constitution , on equal protection grounds, rather than on the right to privacy. In the 1970s, the liberal law professor John Hart Ely strongly denounced Roe , but by 2022, when Justice Samuel Alito quoted Ely in his decision overturning Roe, attitudes like that were near impossible to find on the left.

This was all part of the political and legal evolution of the debate over abortion rights, but Trump doesn’t do nuance. So he ignored the inconvenient parts of the story and never explained the nature of the objections to Roe. And he changed “some” scholars to “all,” as though through sheer maximalism — the biggest building, the smartest guy, the perfect phone call — he could lull voters into his simplistic, zero-sum view of the world.

It’s also worth noting that, contrary to Trump’s claim, I have yet to meet anyone who actually wants abortion to be decided on a state-by-state basis. Why would they? No matter where you stand on the issue, it involves profound matters of life and death, bodily autonomy and human equality. What abortion opponent is fine with a rule that lets unborn babies be killed in California but not in Kentucky? What abortion rights supporter is content with protecting women from forced birth in New York but not in Texas?

This is why we have a federal Constitution that is supreme over the states — it’s how we protect and defend the fundamental rights of all Americans, regardless of where they happen to live. One of those rights — which Americans continue to support by at least a 2-to-1 majority , even after Roe was struck down — is a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.

Opinion Writer

If Football Were Treated Like Inflation

Imagine you’re listening to a football game on the radio and the play-by-play guy says: “Patrick Mahomes takes the snap, throws … and that’s 71 yards gained over the last 12 plays!”

Ridiculous, right? But that’s exactly what journalists and economists do every month when the inflation numbers come out. Instead of saying what happened in the latest month — the latest “play” — we usually focus on what happened to prices over the past 12 months.

Can’t blame the government for this. The headline on the news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that came out on Wednesday was this: “ C.P.I. for All Items Rises 0.2% in August; Shelter Up .” That’s the one-month change in the Consumer Price Index. It’s the equivalent of telling people what happened on the latest play from the line of scrimmage.

But reports about that announcement said things like this: “Inflation fell in August to 2.5 percent, down from 2.9 percent in July.” Summing up the price change over the past 12 months through August is the equivalent of summing up the total yardage over the past 12 plays.

The justification for focusing on the price change over the past year is that the monthly numbers are volatile. Looking over an entire year smooths out those ups and downs.

The problem is that the fresh news gets swamped by stuff that happened in the past. If the Kansas City Chiefs happened to gain 98 yards on a kickoff runback a few plays ago, that will “inflate” the total yardage gained over the past 12 plays. Economists call that a base effect. As time goes on, the 98-yard gain will fall out of the 12-play total and suddenly yardage gained — like measured inflation — will abruptly fall.

I’m not against measuring the year-over-year change in prices, but I’d like to see more attention on the latest monthly change, which is really the only new thing. What did happen on that Mahomes pass play?

Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

Actually, Europe Is Doing a Lot for Ukraine

It wasn’t the biggest whopper of the night, but during the debate, Donald Trump — who refused to say that Ukraine should win its war — said some false things about the role our allies are playing. Again, let me give you the full statement, with no sanewashing :

“I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly — people being killed by the millions. It’s the millions. It’s so much worse than the numbers that you’re getting, which are fake numbers. Look, we’re in for $250 billion or more because they don’t ask Europe, which is a much bigger beneficiary to getting this thing done than we are. They’re in for $150 billion less because Biden and you don’t have the courage to ask Europe like I did with NATO. They paid billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars when I said either you pay up or we’re not going to protect you anymore. So that may be one of the reasons they don’t like me as much as they like weak people. But you take a look at what’s happening. We’re in for $250 to $275 billion. They’re into $100 to $150. They should be forced to equalize.”

I’m not sure why he thinks it necessary to claim that the casualty numbers are fake. But I do know that he loves to claim that our allies aren’t paying their share. Except that’s completely wrong. I wrote about this a few months ago : Europe is spending considerably more on Ukraine than we are:

It’s true that America, with its much bigger defense industry, is supplying most of the weapons. But we are not bearing most of the monetary burden.

For Trump, of course, the claim that Europe isn’t helping serves the purpose of portraying the Biden-Harris administration as weak. But it just isn’t true.

Kathleen Kingsbury

Opinion Editor

The Question Kamala Harris Couldn’t Answer

Even before Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris, it was clearly the vice president’s night. In more than 90 minutes of contentious debate, Harris continued to prosecute the case against a second Donald Trump presidency more effectively than perhaps any of his other rivals has since 2015. But was it enough to satisfy those voters who say they still need to know more about her in order to cast a ballot in her favor this November?

Over the weekend, a survey by The New York Times and Siena College found that 60 percent of likely voters said they believed America was headed in the wrong direction, and many reported that they didn’t know enough about where Harris stands on several key issues. Any poll is just a snapshot in time, and it is admittedly hard to interpret exactly what those respondents are looking for from her. Do they want a better understanding of how she plans to govern from the Oval Office in terms of policy? Or are they more interested in her character and what type of leader she would be?

For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed. According to the Times tracker, the vice president spent nearly half of her speaking time attacking Trump. She rightfully called out his lies and his dangerous embrace of dictators. She was also strong in defending reproductive rights, as well as President Biden’s record on foreign and domestic policy. And she mentioned a handful of plans she’d pursue if she won the White House.

Yet we learned very few new details about those plans. On the economy, which voters often rank as the issue of most importance to them, she only scratched the surface in discussing how she’d enact tax cuts, build more affordable housing and help parents of young children. On foreign policy, she committed herself to a two-state solution in the Middle East and to supporting Ukraine in victory over Russia, but she didn’t expand on how she’d seek to achieve either goal. She pledged not to ban fracking but said little on how she would plan to invest in climate solutions. She also continued to dodge questions about why she recently distanced herself from positions that she took in her quest to be the Democratic nominee in 2020.

Most important, she did very little to distinguish her plans from Biden’s in an election in which the electorate seems hungry for change.

To be clear, Trump utterly failed to present or defend his policy goals. In many ways, the former president confirmed what has been obvious for years: His main aim, should he win another term, would be to do whatever is best for Donald Trump. He is not fit to serve .

But on a night when Harris set traps every which way for Trump (and he took the bait essentially every time), the one moment those tables were turned was when the former president asked her what she would do differently from the past three and a half years. Some voters may still be left looking for that answer.

Jessica Bennett

Contributing Opinion Editor

How to Diminish a Former President

She didn’t shout. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t complain about having less time to speak .

But “she” — she being Kamala Harris, to use Donald Trump’s preferred name for her — managed to undermine him, provoking him into shouting, finger-pointing and sputtering, ranting about eating dogs and nuclear weapons with sweat on his upper lip. She remained calm and collected, emasculating him one subtle jab at a time.

I came into the debate prepared to watch for the subtleties of Trump’s sexism . He wouldn’t look at her. He refused to speak her name. He kept referring to “her boss”(President Biden), diminishing her power. But by the end of the debate, I was tallying the ways that Harris had done the reverse: picking at his brittle ego, cracking the fragile facade of his blustering machismo.

She dismissed the size of his rallies. She mocked his “love letters to Kim Jong-un.” She called him “weak,” referred to him as “this fella” and said Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch.” She talked about his multiple bankruptcies (code for him failing as a man and a provider) and noted that he had been “fired by 81 million people” and was clearly “having a hard time processing that,” like a gentle mother, patting her tantruming child on the head.

And she managed to do it without being shrill or angry or coming off as petty. Worst of all, she laughed at him. It wasn’t a forced or controlled or premeditated laugh. It was a real laugh. A big laugh. The sort of laugh she couldn’t hold in and made those of us watching laugh along with her.

“Talk about extreme,” she said, as he stared dead-eyed into the distance. She immediately hammered home all of the former generals and advisers who had declared him unfit for office. He could only fidget uncomfortably in response.

Eight years ago, the same man, perhaps less sleepy but no less angry, hulked over Hillary Clinton as she tried to ignore him and keep speaking. Now the woman running for this country’s highest office was no longer turning the other cheek. Instead, she laid bare the smallness of Trump’s manhood and asserted her own power, competence and confidence in the face of it. In the end, only a woman could do that for us.

David Firestone

Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board

Over 90 Minutes, Trump Descended to His True Self

For the first 10 minutes or so of Tuesday night’s debate, it looked as though the restrained version of Donald Trump might have shown up in Philadelphia, the one who learned his lesson from his failure to curb his impulses in the 2020 debates with Joe Biden. He stayed silent while Kamala Harris ripped up his economic plan, which she correctly noted was based on a tax cut for the wealthy and a sales tax on all imported goods. When it was his turn to respond, he accurately pointed out that the Biden administration had made no attempt to end the tariffs he imposed on China.

But it didn’t last, and no one who has watched Trump over the past decade thought it could. Within minutes, he descended from a discussion of tariffs into a description of immigrants — one he returned to over and over again during the evening — that could only be described as a form of nativist hysteria.

“They are taking over the towns,” he said. “They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country. They are dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.”

This was the level of delusion that Harris and her campaign had clearly hoped Trump would demonstrate to voters, and it just got worse from there. “They’re eating the dogs,” he said, referring to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — a particularly heinous calumny that began on social media and was spread by his running mate, JD Vance. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” When the moderator David Muir pointed out that local officials had seen nothing of the kind, Trump said he heard about it on television.

Throughout the evening, in moments just like that, Harris was able to do something that Biden had failed to do when he was campaigning for re-election: push Trump in ways that exposed his spattering of lies and wild fantasies.

This was even true about the frightening attempt on Trump’s life. There has been no evidence that it was politically motivated, but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming it was. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said, referring to his false claim that the indictments against him were evidence of “weaponizing” the justice system.

And asked about his role in undermining the democratic process, he said it was actually Harris who had done so, by usurping Biden’s role atop the ticket. “You talk about a threat to democracy — he got 14 million votes, and they threw him out of office. And you know what? I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her. But he got 14 million votes. They threw him out. She got zero votes.”

The debate was an unqualified success for Harris not just because she was able to define herself and her plans but also because she was able to push a few buttons and let Trump show off his truest self.

On Abortion, Trump Floundered in Fantasy Land

When running for office after taking away the reproductive freedoms of roughly half the American public, the best thing to do may simply be to lie about what you have done.

That was the political calculus made by Donald Trump during Tuesday night’s debate. His bald and outrageous lies about abortion and his role in overturning Roe v. Wade were fantastical, even for him. There’s lying, and then there’s the world of fairy tales, and he chose the latter.

Trump said Roe v. Wade had “torn our country apart” and that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative” wanted the issue to be sent back to the states.

This is a lie. A majority of Americans supported the protections for abortion under Roe and still do.

He accused Democrats of supporting killing babies. “In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” he said. This is another lie, and one of the ABC News moderators, Linsey Davis, called him on it. He accused Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, of saying “execution after birth” is “absolutely fine.” This, too, is a lie.

Trump misled those who were watching the debate, saying he believes in “exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.” Yet it is thanks to Trump that states have been able to enact abortion bans that include no such exceptions.

Vice President Kamala Harris, rightly, pointed out that a majority of Americans believe in a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body and pointed out the pain that has been caused so many women in Republican-led states since the Supreme Court’s decision.

Abortion bans are a losing issue for Republicans, and Trump did nothing to change that.

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

I’m Hearing Huge Relief From Democrats Over Harris’s Debate Performance

Within the first half-hour of the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I heard from four veteran Democratic presidential campaign officials, and all of them had the same reaction to Harris: a strong and confident performance that often put Trump on the defensive, with the potential to win the face-off as he sputtered over abortion rights and students loans.

Harris went on offense from the start, as she strode across the stage to Trump’s podium and reached out, shook his hand and introduced herself. Her performance was — in pretty much every way — a total contrast to President Biden’s in the June debate, and if Trump had a playbook to win the debate, it wasn’t clear as he scrambled to fight back against her attacks over the economy, tariffs, in vitro fertilization and China.

Trump’s go-to line — “another lie” — probably pleased many in his MAGA base, but I’m skeptical it was persuasive for many undecided and swing voters. That’s because a lot of those voters have told The Times that they are tired of Trump’s complaining when they want to hear specifics about what he would do in office.

Time and again, Harris laid the bait, and Trump took it. “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Harris said at one point. When the ABC moderators tried to ask Trump about immigration, he said, “First let me respond to the rallies.” But Harris also found ways to send Trump off on tangents, like when he pushed the lie that migrants in Ohio are killing pets for food. The moderators fact-checked him, but he wouldn’t let it go. And then Harris lowered the boom.

“Talk about extreme,” she said, laughing.

The Democratic strategists were struck by how much Harris owned Trump, who raised his voice more and more as the debate unfolded. They saw her as strong but likable and substantive on the issues. As for Republicans, one Trump ally argued that the former president spoke with confidence and strength and that many voters would still be unforgiving of Harris over the Biden-era economy.

The first 20 to 25 minutes of a debate are often the most important part: America is a country with a short attention span where first impressions count, where politicians try to set the tone and tempo of a debate from the start, and you can often tell quickly if someone will have an off night. Trump is often at his most disciplined (relatively speaking) at the start of a debate; as time goes on, he tends to meander in his answers and get snappish.

In this case, though, whatever discipline Trump had fell away pretty quickly in the face of a Harris onslaught. If she came under pressure, it was from the ABC moderators who pressed her on her changes in policy positions like on fracking. But I’m skeptical that the pressure from a moderator’s question will break through to voters like the pressure that Harris subjected Trump to on abortion and his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy.

Michelle Cottle

Trump Is Provoking a Congressional Fight He Can’t Win

Donald Trump took time out from his pre-debate “ policy time ” on Tuesday to stick his out-of-joint nose into Congress’s fight over funding the government:

“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET,” he raved on Truth Social . “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN — CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”

Such feistiness! Love to see it. Especially since the former president must know, or at least suspect, that he is spitting into the wind — shrieking at his minions to go hard on a poison-pill measure that has less chance of becoming law this season than JD Vance has of winding up the new V.P. of the Cat Fanciers’ Association . (The poison pill is a measure to require proof of citizenship to vote, even though the law already forbids noncitizens from voting, and Republicans have never shown any evidence that this is a problem.)

Then again, it’s not totally unreasonable for Trump to expect Republican lawmakers to blindly do his bidding. I mean, earlier this year, they tanked a serious bipartisan bill on what is ostensibly one of the party’s top priorities — border security — because Trump told them that doing so was in his electoral interests. Why not then force a government shutdown in pursuit of a measure that would cast further doubt on the integrity of our election system?

I’ll tell you why not. Because a government shutdown in the final stretch of a tick-tight, high-stakes election cycle would be political madness — especially if it looked as though the shutdown occurred not because of substantive disagreements over spending but because Trump was bullying his congressional team into indulging his delusions about election fraud. Again.

MAGA die-hards might be jazzed. The rest of the electorate, not so much.

Republican lawmakers may be loath to upset their nominee, but they value nothing above their own political fortunes. Most of them aren’t stupid enough to sign up for this kind of self-immolation.

Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer and Rachel Louise Snyder

3 Questions: When Women Kill Their Abusers

Alicia Wittmeyer, Opinion Special Projects Editor: You’ve written about domestic violence for years. For your latest essay , how did you end up focusing on the legal consequences for women who kill their abusers?

Rachel Louise Snyder, Contributing Opinion Writer: When I was writing my book “ No Visible Bruises ” I heard over and over how we didn’t know the number of women who were in prison for killing someone who was abusing them. I found this startling; this seemed like such a basic statistic. After I spoke about this at Stanford Law School in 2020, the executive directors of the Criminal Justice Center — Debbie Mukamal and David Sklansky — pushed for a large-scale survey of women in prison for homicide, which became the basis for the piece.

Wittmeyer: What was it like being in a prison as a proctor instead of a journalist?

Snyder: It was so humbling. Debbie made me go through training about not harming people while you’re talking with them and, honestly, I think it’s forever changed the way I interact with people. For example, when I do these incredibly intense interviews now, I never get off the phone with someone without asking what their plan is to take care of themselves. Will they call a friend? Go to church?

Doing this in person mattered. Formerly incarcerated women who were our consultants said that inmates get surveyed ad nauseam, especially through the mail: all these faceless, nameless people asking for the worst moment of their lives. Stanford ensured that clergy and/or a social worker was available on survey days so that the women would have some emotional support.

Wittmeyer: I know the researchers hope to eventually expand their survey to every state in the country. Ambitious, important — daunting! Any sense of the states that might be next on their list?

Snyder: To some extent, it depends on where we get permission — getting permission to do in-person research is a whole complicated process that, in our case, took nearly two years (in part, because of Covid).

California, Florida and Texas contain a huge percentage of the women who are incarcerated for homicide nationwide. But Texas is complicated because its facilities are smaller, and a survey would require visiting more of them, so just logistically it’s difficult. There are states with certain laws that make them potentially interesting to us, like Oklahoma and Illinois, for example. But it costs money to do this kind of research, and no one wants to fund it, honestly.

As a society, we don’t like messy victims. The anti-domestic violence advocacy world prioritized resources for victims who don’t get convicted of committing crimes. Incarcerated women simply don’t have a ton of people on the outside really advocating for them among potential donors. So, in part, the next state will depend on who is willing to fund this research.

IMAGES

Understanding Putin’s Russia and the Struggle over Ukraine
Essay on Imperialism
Amazon.com: On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians: Essay
Putin’s essay on Russia and Ukraine about far larger issues than that
Spell out the consequences for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Russia invades Ukraine by Robert Hird

COMMENTS

War Between Ukraine and Russia Would Be a Tragedy
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This does not sit well with the strategic-actor assumption that undergirds many realist-inspired explanations of Russia's war in Ukraine. In sum, there is much to recommend to the balancing argument. Clearly, Russia seems to have been concerned about the growing level of political-military cooperation between Ukraine and the West.
Russia's War Against Ukraine: Context, Causes, and Consequences
Intermediate Causes: Kyiv's Westward Drift and Russia's Dwindling Influence Inside Ukraine. The intermediate causes of Russia's 2022 attack are Kyiv's increasingly pro-Western stance and the loss of Russian influ-ence to shape Ukrainian politics, and thus its foreign-policy orientation, from within.
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On the face of it, the fighting in Ukraine suggests that we have learnt little in the past 100 years. As in Flanders from 1914 to 1918, this is a war now largely fought in trenches and dictated by ...
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Since the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union or Russian army attacked or intervened militarily in Finland (1940), Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania (1940), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1980), Georgia (2008), and now Ukraine. The Russian argument of being surrounded by enemies does not stand ...
Essays on Russia and Ukraine War
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been ongoing for several years, resulting in military interventions, territorial annexations, and economic and political instability. This essay aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the causes, progression, and impact of the Russian War in Ukraine, as well... Russia and Ukraine War.
The Realist Case for Ukraine
The Realist Case for Ukraine. Editor's Note: The Russian invasion of Ukraine was the most significant geopolitical event of 2022. Beginning with Dov Zakheim's comments in the Spring 2022 issue, Orbis authors have discussed the ramifications of the invasion. As we approach the one-year anniversary, Revisiting Orbis will be offering updated ...
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President Biden's essay on the Ukraine war in Tuesday's New York Times has vitally clarified America's interests and goals following weeks of public debate weighted with uncertainty and concern over U.S. intentions and methods in that conflict. It offers a straightforward, positive approach—one that the world's democracies should sustain—for confronting Russia's assault against ...
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Imagine you're listening to a football game on the radio and the play-by-play guy says: "Patrick Mahomes takes the snap, throws … and that's 71 yards gained over the last 12 plays!"