argumentative essay on russia and ukraine

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Huge EU flag being brought to Independence Square in Kiev. 27 November 2013. Kyiv, Ukraine Euromaidan protests. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov, Wikipedia Commons.

An Essay On The Russian Invasion Of Ukraine (Part I) – Analysis

By TransConflict

By Matthew Parish*

The first thing to say about this subject is that it is describing events that have not yet taken place (it is written in mid-January 2022) and its purpose is to explain why events will play out as they will. What is so remarkable about this subject is how predictable it is.

At the time of writing, Russia has amassed in the region of 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border and equivalent armour. The intention is therefore clearly for a ground war. Although Ukraine does possess an Air Force, it is mostly elderly and decrepit and poorly maintained. Ukraine will not dare use its Air Force to any significant degree in the forthcoming invasion, because if it does then it will be challenged and destroyed by the far superior Russian Air Force and in particular Russia’s extremely sophisticated surface-to-air-missile system the S-400. Hence Russia is preparing for a ground war. And she is going to win. Ukraine currently only has 60,000 deployed personnel across the entire country.

Why is Russia threatening to invade her neighbour, and what tangible benefits does she see from an invasion, with all the costs that entails? There are several reasons. The first has been the principal driver of Russian foreign policy since time immemorial: that invasions come from the west, and therefore one should maximise the size of one’s buffer zone. This explains why Russia has been insisting as precondition of a peaceful resolution to the impending conflict an undertaking from NATO not to seek Ukraine’s membership of the organisation and for all foreign troops currently situated in Ukraine, particularly its south, to leave. The second reason is that the Kyiv government has become increasingly hostile in its rhetoric and actions towards Moscow; and in this it has been supported by the United States. The view from Moscow is that the Biden administration is highly pro-Ukraine by reason of President Biden’s son’s political and commercial connections with Ukraine. In the eyes of Moscow, this will increase the number of foreign (specifically US) troops and armour in Ukraine. The United States is perceived as an enemy of Moscow at the current time, financing pro-democracy movements in Russia and amassing troops on the NATO borders of Belarus, Moscow’s ally. So the Russian opinion is that the United States has territorial ambitions to the detriment of Russia, in both Belarus and Ukraine. These ambitions must be hobbled.

How can the Russian military hobble the US military, which is so much larger? The answer is that the US military does not actually have much of a strategic interest in Ukraine; it’s not as though Russia was threatening to invade Mexico. Ukraine is a long way away, and it doesn’t create any commercial value. There is very little in the way of legitimate productive business in Ukraine, and it has always been so. Ukraine is a sink hole for foreign aid money. Because the country is close to an anarchy, power being divided up approximately territorially between a handful of oligarchs, the central government has scant funding (taxes are not collected or are diverted) save for that the international community may provide it with. It also has scant power. However one thing the central government in Kyiv can do is to make trade with Ukraine’s eastern nation Russia harder; and to make Russia’s trading with the west harder as goods for the most part need to go overland and Ukraine is in the way.

Then there is the issue of Ukraine’s gas debts to Russia. Russia traditionally sold gas to Ukraine at below-market prices. But as the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has proceeded with its anti-Russian rhetoric and policies, Russia has pulled the plug on the subsidies with the result that Ukraine now owes Russia colossal amounts of money being the difference between the subsidised price for gas used by Ukraine and the market price. Nobody wants to pay Ukraine’s debts to Russia on her behalf, and therefore the Russian mindset in substantial part is that if we are going to have to subsidise them because they will never pay us, then we had might as well incorporate them into our federation.

Then there is the matter of the two People’s Republics in Donbas, Donetsk and Luhansk respectively. These regions have their own quasi-autonomous government structures but in practice the writ of two of Ukraine’s oligarchs is what counts in these places. The People’s Republics are the source of steel manufacture, which Russia needs and which she is not getting in sufficient quantities by reason mostly of poor governance in the Donbas. So the Russian view is that to get what they need from the Donbas, they had might as well just run it themselves. Finally there is the issue of Igor Kolomoisky, one of those two oligarchs who also claims Dniepropetrovsk and the Dniepr region of eastern Ukraine for his own. Indeed he has his own private army, and at various times has owned or controlled Ukraine’s largest bank and Ukraine’s civil aviation fleet. Kolomoisky has been a notorious waverer over allegiance to Moscow over the years since Ukrainian independence in 1991, but at the last Presidential elections in Ukraine in 2019 he used his money and influence to instal as Ukraine’s new President a comedian (literally – he was the star of a TV show in which he was the fictional President, and then overnight he became the actual President). That comedian has not proven himself funny to Moscow, having made relentless visceral comments against Russia and pursuing anti-Russian policies. Behind him is Kolomoisky. So in the Russian perspective, Kolomoisky has to go.

Why is all this happening now? There are two principal reasons. The first is that oil prices are up (Brent crude is now USD83 a barrel), permitting Moscow to finance a war; the second is that the Trump administration, with whom Moscow had tolerable relations, has been replaced by the Biden administration, that is perceived as being hawks on Ukraine and supporting the comedian installed as President using Kolomoisky’s dirty money to the detriment of Moscow – and hence something must be done. Absent either of these two catalysts, war would be unlikely. Moscow is now seizing the opportunity while it can, knowing that the United States will not come to Ukraine’s defence. The United States is not going to put its troops in the way of the Red Army in the freezing month of February 2022.

The other thing one needs to understand in order to predict the outcome of the forthcoming Russian invasion of Ukraine is that Ukrainian patriotism is a flimsy construction that approximately follows the geography of the Ukrainian language. Ukrainian sounds like a dialect of Polish, albeit it written in the Cyrillic script. It is spoken as a first language predominantly by people west of the Dnieper River, that traverses Ukraine cutting it somewhat in two. Russian, by contrast, is the first language of people to the east of the Dnieper River and in the south of the country. In those parts of Ukraine, Russian (and Soviet) culture is more pronounced, as people watch Russian television, read Russian newspapers and surf Russian internet sites. In the west of the country, Ukrainian nationalism prevails more strongly, with Ukrainian-only television stations and media. This is a real difference. With the recent schism between Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches, and policies emphasising teaching in one language or the other to the exclusion of one of the two languages, Ukraine has been becoming ever more culturally divided. With the current nationalist government in power in Kyiv, with a relentless stream of anti-Russian rhetoric emerging from its President, this division is being concentrated.

Commentators have asserted that while Russia will be able easily to take Ukraine when she invades, she will nevertheless then be subject to a perpetual guerilla war as the nationalistic Ukrainians fight against their Russian invaders. The problem with this theory is that for the reasons of cultural division explained above, this will apply only to the territories to the west of the Dnieper, in which Ukrainian is the dominant language. The territories of south and east Ukraine (including the regions in which Mr Kolomoisky is so influential) are habituated to Russian culture and in many cases their mastery of the Ukrainian language is imperfect. Moreover those regions have suffered atrociously since Russian / Ukrainian tensions exploded into warfare in 2014. Kyiv does not trust the eastern and southern regions, deprives them of funds, and the towns and cities east of the Dnieper are impoverished in comparison with Kyiv and the west. A little Russian financial exuberance in the east and south of Ukraine may well be enough to reconcile the Russian-speaking Ukrainians to their fate as a part of the Russian Federation.

Ukraine’s long-ailing currency, the Gryvna, has brought nothing but inflation; the Russian-speaking Ukrainians might be pleased to get rid of it. The other burden they may anticipate ridding themselves of is Ukraine’s enormous international public debt, as western countries have loaned money in grossly unwise quantities to keep the government in Kyiv afloat. Most of that money has been stolen, and most of the stolen money went to the capital and to western Ukraine. The people of east and southern Ukraine have seen little in the way of benefit. Southern Ukraine must count as one of, if not the most, poor and benighted corners of Europe: travel there is difficult, there are little in the way of motorways, the cities feel hollowed out and there is no work. The youth of those regions may well be of the view that under Russian government, things simply can’t get worse.

For all these reasons, Russia is going to invade up to the River Dnieper and then she is going to stop. Thereby she will have cut Ukraine in two, making a decent buffer zone for herself from NATO expansionism; she will have secured Belarus’s southeastern border (Moscow palpably intends to absorb Belarus into Russia at some convenient moment); and her army will be on the outskirts of Kyiv. The Dnieper River cuts Kyiv in two, and if Russia were to go to the edge of the river then she would take Kyiv’s principal airport Boryspil while leaving much of the government, downtown and commercial districts to the rump Ukrainian state. Because eastern Ukraine is flat, this will be a tank invasion and then Russia will have sufficient deterrence to prevent NATO growing further because Kyiv will be in the sights of Russian tanks who can demolish the city if they see fit.

In the south of Ukraine, Russia will certainly push at least as far as Odessa, thereby controlling the entirety of the Black Sea and cutting Ukraine off from a major Black Sea port, also joining up the Crimean peninsula (annexed by Russia in 2014) with mainland Russia. Indeed so little extra effort is required that the Red Army will probably push through to Transdniestr, the breakaway Soviet-cultish part of eastern Moldova, where Russian troops have been located to keep the peace between the two parts of Moldova since the early 1990’s. What remains of Ukraine will be landlocked. Gas can be run through southern Ukraine without the need to supply any gas at subsidised prices to the rump Ukrainian state. The Ukrainian army will be decimated because it cannot fight tank battles against the Russian Federation. What is left of Ukraine will become even more dependent upon western largesse, whereas the West will have ever less incentive to maintain that largesse. Europe needs Russian gas, and Russia will have eliminated Ukraine as a stumbling block in the transit of Russian gas to Western Europe. Because Western Europe is so dependent upon Russian hydrocarbons, there is very little that can be done by way of sanctions: Western Europe cannot afford to impose them. To the extent that this is attempted, Russia can squeeze the rump Ukraine dry by applying her own sanctions against Kyiv and the western territories still nominally controlled from the capital. The net result is that the Russian bargaining position will be vastly strengthened. At that stage, Russia will pause and survey her work.

From a close reading of reports of recent geopolitical negotiations between Russia and the West over Ukraine, none of the foregoing events can realistically be prevented. The military outcome is impossible to prevent unless western countries place their own troops in uniform on the Russia-Ukrainian border: something of course they will not do. The West will then be forced to negotiate a humiliating breathing bubble for rump Ukraine, in which sanctions against Russia are foregone in favour of Russia maintaining civilian supplies to rump Ukraine. Kolomoisky will have been evicted from his Dniepropetrovsk duchy. The oligarchs will be evicted from Donbas, and Russia will get the steel industry back up and running in some sense. The war will be wildly popular with the Russian public, reinforcing support for the Russian President Vladimir Putin after some recent years in which his support had to an extent crumbled. The Russians will be the dominant force in the Black Sea. The regime in Transdniestr will be perpetuated. The Ukrainian nation state then risks dissolving into nearly nothing, as has happened on a number of prior occasions in her history.

This is the grim prophecy for events of the next month or two. Moscow will move quickly and hard, as it assesses that it has an increased comparative advantage while the weather remains cold. The whole thing may be over by April. The next article in this series will ask what foreign policy choices are available to the West in light of the scenarios this article has described; and how to decide which one to pursue. But before we turn to those questions, let us see whether this author is right about the course of February and March in eastern and southern Ukraine.

The politics of Russia and of Ukraine have been intimately intermingled ever since the formal divorce of the two countries from the Soviet Union in 1991. As with many collapses of larger states into smaller ones, the old political habits do not just disappear overnight and power relations between the two capitals remain. Russia’s principal problem with Ukraine is that Kyiv’s current political leadership is seeking to strike out in a direction independent from Moscow’s foreign policy, causing perceived damage to Russia’s national interest as Kyiv’s actions raise the possibility of NATO troops coming ever further towards Russia’s borders. Hence Russia is now moving her troops ever close towards NATO’s borders. The concept of Ukraine as a buffer state in which there is neutrality between the two sides is dissolving.

The principal reason for Russia’s imminent invasion of Ukraine is Moscow’s antipathy towards the strongly pro-western regime in Kyiv, led by President Volodimir Zelensky who is mere puppet of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Ukrainian oligarchs, Igor Kolomoisky. If one doubts this, recall that Mr Zelensky had no previous political career, no political party, no substantial funds of his own, and virtually the entirety of his political campaign to become Ukrainian President in 2019 was funded by Mr Kolomoisky. Zelensky won the election over the incumbent President, Petro Poroshenko, because votes were straightforwardly bought. Carousel voting in the amounts of 10 to 20 EUR per vote is common in Ukraine. (Carousel voting is a form of electoral corruption in which a voter is given a pre-marked ballot paper by an agent to place in the box and brings the blank ballot paper out of the polling station in his pocket, in exchange for his fee.)

With some 22 million people voting in that election, of which some 17 million voted for Zelensky, we might estimate the costs of buying that election at some EUR 250 million: an acceptable fee for Kolomoisky, whose precise wealth is not known but conservatively stands at some EUR 2 billion. The bank was used to paying dividends in the region of EUR 1.5 billion per year or more to its shareholder (Privatbank is the largest bank in Ukraine, some 50% of Ukrainians banking with it). It was nationalised on dubious legal pretexts (legal pretexts in Ukraine are always dubious; it must have the worst legal system in Europe bar none) in 2016 by the Poroshenko regime. The same happened to Ukrainian International Airlines, the flag carrier that was curiously owned by Igor Kolomoisky as well. which while never hugely profitable holds a valuable asset base of airport infrastructure and aircraft. Hence the expenditure of some EUR 250 million to remove the Petro Poroshenko regime from power and obtain de facto renewed control of his bank and his airline, Kolomoisky bought the election.

To understand how a renewed civil war emerged from disputes involving two commercial entities, we must go back at the very least to the Maidan Revolution of 2014. This western-backed and western-funded revolution against the Presidency of the Russia-leaning Viktor Yanukovich was surprising in its timing, taking place only a few months before he was due to stand for re-election. The Ukrainian political classes had come to understand the Presidency to represent a very delicate balance of power between those in Ukraine who look west and those who look west, with Presidents alternating between these two peoples in subsequent elections. In each case the President would be backed by one or more of the small class of Ukrainian oligarchs (there is only a handful) and the election results would proceed accordingly.

The Maidan Revolution upset that delicate status quo, and represented a real danger of a break-up of Ukraine. The political classes in Kyiv were wondering why there should be a revolution then, when a western-leading President would be installed only a year later in elections. However the western leaders had missed the point that Ukraine is not a democracy at all but rather an anarchy in which elections are purchased with money, and they feared that a pro-Russian President such as Yanukovich might stay in office in Kyiv indefinitely. Moreover Yanukovich, a rough and boorish man, made a lot of mistakes, aggravating both west-leaning Ukrainians and Moscow. So the west funded a revolution, and he went.

Moscow was not prepared to tolerate this slap in its face to Russia’s right to exercise political influence in Ukraine which had been shared between Moscow and the West for several years by then. Hence Moscow implemented a long-dormant plan to occupy Crimea and claim it as Russia’s; and Russia funded and provided logistical support to Ukrainian oligarch militias based in Donbas, thereby creating what we now called the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (two entities that might be reaching the end of their lives most shortly). As to the successor President to Yanukovich, a rough deal was hashed out whereby a wealthy Ukrainian businessman Petro Poroshenko (not in the circle of top oligarchs but nevertheless of some limited influence in Ukrainian business and political circles) would be elected as a compromise President. In practice Poroshenko would criticise Moscow before the West, in order to obtain aid and development funding and foreign policy concessions such as allowing Ukrainian passport holders to travel visa-free in the Schengen Zone. But at the same time he would hold regular (some said daily) talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to ensure that Ukrainian trade and foreign policy actions were private coordinated with Moscow. Hence peace of a sort was reached in Donbas, and the annexation of Crimea was completed.

Mr Kolomoisky was one of the oligarchs with influence in what is now the semi-autonomous regions of Donbas. He also controls the industrial city of Dniepropetrovsk and its surrounding oblasts (regional areas). Kolomoisky with Poroshenko’s dealings with the Kremlin, because his bank in particular flourished on the basis of its leaning westwards, being one of the most disciplined and well-run banks in Ukraine and opening financial markets between Ukraine and the West. Likewise, Ukrainian International Airlines had become a reasonably tolerable Western European carrier. Kolomoisky’s business interests had become co-aligned with those of Western Europe, particularly after the Donbas’s descent into chaos in 2014. Therefore the centrist President Poroshenko, who spoke in public as a western-leaning patriot but acted in private in coordination with the Kremlin, became unappealing to him. Kolomoisky found his influence diminished, as his own lines direct to the Kremlin had been foreclosed by Poroshenko. The nationalisation of the bank and the airline were blatant moves by Potroshenko to weaken Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky therefore started plotting to remove Poroshenko from office, as a result of which Poroshenko nationalised Privatbank and UIA in 2016, and placed Kolomoisky under criminal investigation. Kolomoisky had to flee to Israel, Ukraine issuing warrants against him that could have touched him elsewhere in Europe.

Nevertheless, even deprived of his bank and his airline, Kolomoisky maintained sufficient wealth to cast a long hand into Ukrainian politics from his place of temporary exile in Israel. He would not suffer being removed from Ukraine, and so, as the Ukrainian oligarch with perhaps the largest reserves of liquid funds, he decided to enter into the Ukrainian election to remove Poroshenko and replace him with a robustly pro-western figure. The way he did this was to fund a popular television show in which the main character acts as the President, in order to give facial recognition to Volodymir Zelensky; and then to buy him into office. He also paid for the campaign of an earlier disgraced western-leaving Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, to give the appearance of a genuine three-way competition. Poroshenko, not having access to anywhere near the funds in Kolomoisky’s war chest, did not stand a chance despite having served as a tolerably good President in times of extreme stress for the country. He had picked a cabinet mixing pro-western and pro-eastern names, and managed to keep them working approximately together insofar as that is possible in a country like Ukraine. But he had chosen a powerful enemy in Kolomoisky, who removed him.

Because Kolomoisky’s politics had tipped toward the European Union and the United States, once he was back in power via his proxy Zelensky he caused Zelensky and the Ukrainian central government as a whole to take a whole series of anti-Russian actions and to deliver bouts of anti-Russian bile across the western world. This made it virtually impossible for Russia to achieve its principal foreign policy goal, the lifting of western sanctions imposed after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, in exchange for which Moscow would gladly have cleared out the People’s Republics in Donbas and handed that territory ambiguously back to Ukraine. Hence from Moscow’s perspective, Kolomoisky had become a problem. He had bought an election – that is fine from Moscow’s perspective, it’s the sort of thing Russians are used to – but he had put in place a viscerally anti-Russian President who was inviting US clandestine troops into Ukrainian territory and sounding the need to increase the number of NATO troops on Ukraine’s western borders: something Moscow wishes to prevent at all costs. Kolomoisky had become an irritation to the Kremlin. And the one thing you don’t want to do when you were formerly close to and under the protective umbrella of the Kremlin, is to disappoint the Russian President with your disloyalty.

Hence the forthcoming war is about removing Igor Kolomoisky from his de facto position as President of Ukraine. Under Zelensky, former President Poroshenko had been the subject of “corruption investigations” and had fled the country. (The reader may be spotting a pattern about the fates of Ukrainian politicians who fall from grace.) However on 18 January 2022 Poroshenko flew back into Boryspil, Kyiv’s main airport, went straight to court, and was released on bail despite having fled the charges abroad over an extended period. Obviously the Judges understood the politics of this act very clearly. Poroshenko will be exonerated of his “corruption investigations” once Zelensky (and hence Kolomoisky) have been removed from office by actions of the Red Army. No doubt some “corruption investigations” will then be opened against Volodymir Zelensky, who at some point would do well to flee Ukraine in the time-honoured tradition of Ukrainian politics.

What happens next to Poroshenko remains something of an enigma. Presumably Moscow has promised him something to return to Kyiv amidst a frankly dangerous political dynamic. The Kremlin may have him in mind for a return to the Presidency; or if not, then another senior role in which he may continue to serve as a private liaison with Moscow. Poroshenko undertook the role of national healer once; the Kremlin may think he can do it again. Unlike Yanukovich, who Moscow was unimpressed with because his rhetoric was blatantly pro-Russian and Moscow saw no value in that (President Putin does not need his fur stroked; all such rhetoric could do was upset the West), Poroshenko knows what to say to western powers to serve as a useful mediator between the West and Moscow. Whether he will obtain the top job will depend upon whether the Kremlin wants him to have it and how much money they are prepared to throw at the problem (presumably a lot, given that they already have a standing army of some 100,000 troops and corresponding armour amassed on the Ukraine-Russia border).

Once a satisfactory candidate for President is installed in Kyiv, Moscow may well withdraw. It depends upon how much political resistance the west puts up to the installation of a candidate in the vein of Mr Poroshenko. Russia will assert that she has “stabilised” the political situation. The Ukrainian army will be “restructured” with Russian military “technical assistance”, to remove foreign influences and to step back from proximity to the Russian border. The People’s Republics will be abolished, either being handed back to Kyiv if Russia receives something in exchange for that; or being absorbed into the Russian Federation if not. And we will get back to something approximating to the political situation in 2014.

And what about Mr Kolomoisky. He is too senior, and too great a traitor, to be placed under “corruption investigations”. He might find himself having an unfortunately prepared meal at a very particular type of Russian restaurant. Or (which amounts to the same thing) he might be invited to commit suicide. The Russian President usually gives betrayers that option, on the basis that after their deaths their glorious deeds will be written up in the media and in the alternative who is to say which family members and friends will be hunted down by GRU (elite Russian military intelligence) units for assassination across the world. Mr Kolomoisky in particular needs to consider his next moves very carefully indeed, if he is not to suffer the fate of many an oligarch or unwise senior official who Mr Putin concluded to be a betrayer. The game plays out rather as though an episode in the history of the Roman Senate, the wealthiest oligarchs serving as conspiring Senators who the Emperor periodically catches and invites to poison themselves. The politics of Russia are a rough business, and those of Ukraine are, alas no better.

The West needs to understand this final point, if it is to get its Ukraine policy right. The Ukrainian state is an appalling impoverished shambles with the lowest GDP per capita in Europe, of GBP3,700. There is no central government of significant effect. The country is divided up between oligarch Dukes who compete for influence both East and West. Ukraine is a constant sponge for aid money from the west and hydrocarbon subsidies from the East. The country makes virtually nothing exportable in any quantities to speak of. She is important solely because she is a buffer state; and now she is getting buffeted around. In time the West will come to understand, and they will not impose substantial sanctions because significant sanctions would be self-defeating: Europe relies upon Russian gas that flows through Ukrainian pipes. A careful power-sharing arrangement is therefore necessary for Ukraine, and sophisticated diplomacy will be required to record the accord given the parties’ implacably hostile publicly stated ideological divisions. Let us hope that diplomacy succeeds sooner rather than later, to mitigate loss of life that is the inevitable corollary of war.

* Matthew Parish is the Managing Partner of The Paladins, www.the-paladins.com , a private firm of legal, security and intelligence consultants. He is the author of three books and over four hundred articles on international law, international relations and geopolitics. www.matthew-parish.com . Follow the author on Twitter @parish_matthew .

This article was originally published by The Paladins and is available by clicking here .

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Trans Conflict.

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argumentative essay on russia and ukraine

TransConflict

TransConflict was established in response to the challenges facing intra- and inter-ethnic relations in the Western Balkans. It is TransConflict’s assertion that the successful transformation of conflict requires a multi-dimensional approach that engages with and aims at transforming the very interests, relationships, discourses and structures that underpin and fuel outbreaks of low- and high-intensity violence.

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

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.

Newcastle University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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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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Putin is rewriting history to justify his threats to Ukraine

Putin pretends Russia and Ukraine are historically “one people.”

by Ellen Ioanes

Men hold flares in the national colors of Ukraine at a Unity Day event in Kyiv, Ukraine, on January 22, 2022.

As Russian troops mass on the Ukrainian border and worries of an invasion grow , Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to push a familiar Russian line about the conflict: that Ukraine belongs to Russia and that the two are “one people — a single whole.”

Specifically, much of Russia’s political positioning to launch an incursion into Ukrainian territory is based on Putin’s claim that Ukraine — like Russia, a former Soviet state — is an extension of Russia, the “little brother” that has been led astray by the West and must be reincorporated into the family. Thus, he sees Ukraine’s increasing westward turn as a provocation, by both Ukraine and NATO.

In reality, however, Ukraine has long been distinct from Russia, experts told Vox, and Putin’s current mythologizing of the Russia-Ukraine relationship fits a pattern of falsehoods designed to reconstitute imperial glory, and more importantly, to shield Putin from the threat of democracy in former Soviet republics — and possibly in Russia itself.

That fear informs the potential conflict brewing along the Ukrainian border, Maria Snegovaya , a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, told Vox via email.

“It looks like Putin is committed to preventing the deepening cooperation between Ukraine and the US/the West,” Snegovaya said, “which he views as Russia losing Ukraine.”

Snegovaya points to a 2021 essay by Putin, titled “ On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians ,” as an example of his thinking.

In the essay, Putin called the two nations “essentially the same historical and spiritual space,” tracing his notion of a shared history back more than a thousand years. That assertion, though, elides a long history of differences between the two countries, and even more significantly, flies in the face of current Ukrainian attitudes, which favor membership in both NATO and the EU , (though neither is likely in the near future).

As talks between the West and Russia are stumbling and military preparations and rhetoric are ratcheting up on the US side, Russia is continuing to spin a false story about cooperation between Ukraine and the West as grounds for a possible invasion, Ukrainian journalist Oleksiy Sorokin told Vox’s Jen Kirby last week.

“This whole notion, this discourse of basically Russia causing an escalation to keep Ukraine out of NATO, is wrong, because Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO in the near future,” Sorokin said. “So this is just like, in Ukraine, this is seen as one of the fake conditions that Russia is trying to bring to justify their aggression. But the real reason for Russian aggression is that Russia denies Ukrainian statehood.”

Putin is clinging to a revisionist history to assert his claim over Ukraine

Russia’s military buildup near Ukraine has increasingly alarmed the US and its NATO partners, for good reason; Ukraine is considered a US ally, and a Russian attempt to reabsorb it would position Russia directly on the border of the European Union, potentially opening the door for future conflict.

One justification Putin has offered for a potential invasion is that Ukraine is historically linked with Russia, and thus Ukraine’s increasing affinity with the US and NATO is provocative. While there’s some logic to the idea that NATO’s eastward expansion can be interpreted as a threat to Russian interests, as Vox’s Jonathan Guyer explained last week , the idea that Ukraine is historically united with Russia doesn’t hold up.

Nonetheless, the idea is deeply embedded in the conflict, Don Jensen, the director for Russia and Europe at the US Institute for Peace, told Vox. According to Jensen, “When Ukraine and Moscow fight about history, it’s about identity for both countries.”

Putin’s argument , as he lays it out in his 2021 essay, hinges on the idea that both nations descend from an early princedom called Kyivan Rus , which encompassed some of modern-day Ukraine and stretched north into the Baltic countries. But the historical ties between that entity and what was then Muscovy — part of modern-day Russia — aren’t particularly significant, and the idea that modern Russia evolved from Kyivan Rus doesn’t carry much weight, Jensen said.

“So when Putin claims that they are the inheritor of the great Slavic lands, consecrated by the Byzantine — now Russian — Orthodox Church, he’s really making a historical claim that’s not particularly true,” he told Vox. “It’s like Texas claiming direct descent from William the Conqueror.”

Ukraine, for its part, is distinct from Russia in many ways and has been influenced by a number of different cultures, including by Central European countries in the west, and present-day Greece and Turkey in the south. Over the centuries Ukraine was also conquered by a number of different groups, including the Mongols, Lithuanians, Poles, Austrians, and Swedes, as well as, eventually, the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great.

“And that’s where the confusion comes in,” Jensen said, “because on the one hand, there were constant intermarriages between Ukrainians and Russians. But Ukrainian language and culture is noticeably different, and it’s really hard for Russians to get this. As a matter of fact, it’s hard for certain people in certain DC think tanks to get that.”

Although Ukraine had been part of the Russian empire at various points in history, Soviet propaganda cemented the idea , at least in older generations of Ukrainians, that their country was intertwined with the Soviet Union, and indeed was “Little Russia,” as Volodymyr Kravchenko explains in Harvard’s journal of Ukrainian studies , though in reality Ukrainian nationalism existed in some form throughout the 20th century.

In the present day, Putin’s insistence that Russia and Ukraine are historically and “spiritually” the same country allows him to push another narrative — that Ukraine’s openness to joining NATO and increasing alliances with the US and European countries is both a betrayal and somehow disingenuous, a sinister plot to tear the two nations apart.

However, Soviet-era mythologizing — and Putin’s current amplification thereof — of Ukraine as a Russian appendage is powerful. “I don’t think people paid enough attention to all of these changes that were going on in the societies [of former Soviet republics],” Jensen told Vox. “A lot of international relations people in academics and government now are realists, they don’t look at societies very much ... they tend to look at just great-power competition. So you end up ignoring the changes inside a society. You also end up dealing with Russia and not dealing with Ukraine,” he said.

Ukraine has been gravitating toward the West for decades

While Ukraine’s westward path has not been a straight line since the dismantling of the Soviet Union, there are some key points in the past 30 years that show the extent to which Ukraine’s vision of itself as a nation is not as Russia’s annex: chiefly, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum , 2004’s Orange Revolution, and the Euromaidan in 2014.

The Budapest agreement saw Ukraine hand over its nuclear weapons to Russia for disposal in exchange for security assurances from the Kremlin, the US, and the UK. Under that agreement, the US assured Ukraine not only that it would respect the country’s borders and sovereignty, but also that it would respond should Russia not abide by the agreement.

Later, the Orange Revolution in 2004 — in which the Kremlin’s preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, lost a closely monitored election held after protests against Yanukovych’s attempt to steal the initial presidential election — marked a turning point in Ukrainian politics, away from Russia and toward democratic institutions. While Yanukovych did eventually come to power in 2010, Ukrainian society had made a decisive break with the past by that point, and pro-democracy reforms in response to the 2004 protests contributed to Yanukovych’s downfall in 2014 .

Then, the Euromaidan revolution, which began after Yanukovych backed out of a trade agreement with the EU in 2013, eventually forced Yanukovych to flee to Russia the following year. According to Peter Dickinson, writing for the Atlantic Council , both the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan “underlined Ukraine’s European choice and cemented the country’s rejection of a Russian reunion.”

After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 , in the intervening years, Putin’s aggression has “made Ukraine much more self-conscious; he’s pushed it to the West,” Jensen told Vox. “Even if he conquered the country, this would not stop.”

Although Ukraine’s post-Soviet democratic project has been flawed, recent events evince a desire among the Ukrainian people to continue building a stable, functional democracy that cooperates with the West — a desire that’s not just incompatible with Putin’s mythologizing of the ties between Russia and Ukraine, but potentially a threat to Putin’s own hold on power. A fully independent, democratic Ukraine could well signal to Russians that the Putin model isn’t their only option, and that popular uprisings can produce meaningful change.

“I think for [Putin] it’s quite important to prove that no, this democracy is not really genuine, that it’s the West that wants to impose it on the Ukrainians,” Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk told the New Yorker last week . “To admit that societies can do it themselves is to admit that change could be possible in Belarus, in Georgia, and in Russia as well.”

But while Ukraine has made a concerted effort — particularly since the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 — to engage with the US and Western institutions, it’s not clear that the West is reciprocating, Snegovaya told Vox.

“Major Western countries visibly lack unity on this issue,” she said. “Germany’s behavior is particularly unacceptable — it has been blocking Estonia’s weapons supplies to Ukraine .”

Last week, Germany refused to allow Estonia to sell German-made weapons to Ukraine under a so-called third-party agreement, frustrating NATO allies and German politicians alike. Germany has been loath to upset its relationship with Russia over the contentious Nord Stream 2 pipeline , making it more cautious than the US, for example, which is allowing Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to sell US-made weapons to Ukraine.

Going forward, Snegovaya told Vox, there’s little doubt that Putin will take advantage of the West’s uneven stance on Ukraine to paint a favorable narrative in Russia — similar to how he’s used a misleading narrative about the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine. “Instead of a message of strength, the alliance communicates a message of weakness,” Snegovaya said, “and Putin, as an experienced, opportunistic player, unquestionably sees that.”

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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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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Russia, One Year After the Invasion of Ukraine

Illustration of calendar with military footsteps stomping across it.

A year ago, in January, I went to Moscow to learn what I could about the coming war—chiefly, whether it would happen. I spoke with journalists and think tankers and people who seemed to know what the authorities were up to. I walked around Moscow and did some shopping. I stayed with my aunt near the botanical garden. Fresh white snow lay on the ground, and little kids walked with their moms to go sledding. Everyone was certain that there would be no war.

I had immigrated to the U.S. as a child, in the early eighties. Since the mid-nineties, I’d been coming back to Moscow about once a year. During that time, the city kept getting nicer, and the political situation kept getting worse. It was as if, in Russia, more prosperity meant less freedom. In the nineteen-nineties, Moscow was chaotic, crowded, dirty, and poor, but you could buy half a dozen newspapers on every corner that would denounce the war in Chechnya and call on Boris Yeltsin to resign. Nothing was holy, and everything was permitted. Twenty-five years later, Moscow was clean, tidy, and rich; you could get fresh pastries on every corner. You could also get prosecuted for something you said on Facebook. One of my friends had recently spent ten days in jail for protesting new construction in his neighborhood. He said that he met a lot of interesting people.

The material prosperity seemed to point away from war; the political repression, toward it. Outside of Moscow, things were less comfortable, and outside of Russia the Kremlin had in recent years become more aggressive. It had annexed Crimea , supported an insurgency in eastern Ukraine , propped up the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, interfered in the U.S. Presidential election. But internally the situation was stagnant: the same people in charge, the same rhetoric about the West, the same ideological mishmash of Soviet nostalgia , Russian Orthodoxy , and conspicuous consumption. In 2021, Vladimir Putin had changed the constitution so that he could stay in power, if he wanted, until 2036. The comparison people made most often was to the Brezhnev years—what Leonid Brezhnev himself had called the era of “developed socialism.” This was the era of developed Putinism. Most people did not expect any sudden moves.

My friends in Moscow were doing their best to wrap their minds around the contradictions. Alexander Baunov, a journalist and political analyst, was then at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank. We met in his cozy apartment, overlooking a typical Moscow courtyard—a small copse of trees and parked cars, all covered lovingly in a fresh layer of snow. Baunov thought that a war was possible. There was a growing sense among the Russian élite that the results of the Cold War needed to be revisited. The West continued to treat Russia as if it had lost—expanding NATO to its borders and dealing with Russia, in the context of things like E.U. expansion, as being no more important or powerful than the Baltic states or Ukraine—but it was the Soviet Union that had lost, not Russia. Putin, in particular, felt unfairly treated. “Gorbachev lost the Cold War,” Baunov said. “Maybe Yeltsin lost the Cold War. But not Putin. Putin has only ever won. He won in Chechnya, he won in Georgia, he won in Syria. So why does he continue to be treated like a loser?” Barack Obama referred to his country as a mere “regional power”; despite hosting a fabulous Olympics, Russia was sanctioned in 2014 for invading Ukraine, and sanctioned again, a few years later, for interfering in the U.S. Presidential elections. It was the sort of thing that the United States got away with all the time. But Russia got punished. It was insulting.

At the same time, Baunov thought that an actual war seemed unlikely. Ukraine was not only supposedly an organic part of Russia, it was also a key element of the Russian state’s mythology around the Second World War. The regime had invested so much energy into commemorating the victory over fascism; to turn around and then bomb Kyiv and Kharkiv, just as the fascists had once done, would stretch the borders of irony too far. And Putin, for all his bluster, was actually pretty cautious. He never started a fight he wasn’t sure he could win. Initiating a war with a NATO -backed Ukraine could be dangerous; it could lead to unpredictable consequences. It could lead to instability, and stability was the one thing that Putin had delivered to Russians over the past twenty years.

For liberals, it was increasingly a period of accommodation and consolidation. Another friend, whom I’ll call Kolya, had left his job writing life-style pieces for an independent Web site a few years earlier, as the Kremlin’s media policy grew increasingly meddlesome. Kolya accepted an offer to write pieces on social themes for a government outlet. This was far better, and clearer: he knew what topics to stay away from, and the pay was good.

I visited Kolya at his place near Patriarch’s Ponds. He had married into a family that had once been part of the Soviet nomenklatura, and he and his wife had inherited an apartment in a handsome nineteen-sixties Party building in the city center. From Kolya’s balcony you could see Brezhnev’s old apartment. You could tell it was Brezhnev’s because the windows were bigger than the surrounding ones. As for Kolya’s apartment, it was smaller than other apartments in his building. The reason was that the apartment next to his had once belonged to a Soviet war hero, and the war hero, of course, needed the building’s largest apartment, so his had been expanded, long ago, at the expense of Kolya’s. Still, it was a very nice apartment, with enormously high ceilings and lots of light.

Kolya was closely following the situation around Alexey Navalny , who had returned to Russia and been imprisoned a year before. Navalny was slowly being tortured to death in prison, and yet his team of investigators and activists continued to publish exposés of Russian officials’ corruption. There was still some real journalistic work being done in Russia, though a number of outlets, such as the news site Meduza, were primarily operating from abroad. Kolya said that he worried about outright censorship, but also about self-censorship. He told me about journalists who had left the field. One had gone to work in communications for a large bank. Another was now working on elections—“and not in a good way.” The noose was tightening, and yet no one thought there’d be a war.

What is one to make, in retrospect, of what happened to Russia between December, 1991, when its President, Boris Yeltsin, signed an agreement with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to disband the U.S.S.R., and February 24, 2022, when Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, ordered his troops, some of whom were stationed in Belarus, to invade Ukraine from the east, the south, and the north? There are many competing explanations. Some say that the economic and political reforms which were promised in the nineteen-nineties never actually happened; others that they happened too quickly. Some say that Russia was not prepared for democracy; others that the West was not prepared for a democratic Russia. Some say that it was all Putin’s fault, for destroying independent political life; others that it was Yeltsin’s, for failing to take advantage of Russia’s brief period of freedom; still others say that it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s, for so carelessly and naïvely destroying the U.S.S.R.

When Gorbachev began dismantling the empire, one of his most resonant phrases had been “We can’t go on living like this.” By “this” he meant poverty, and violence, and lies. Gorbachev also spoke of trying to build a “normal, modern country”—a country that did not invade its neighbors (as the U.S.S.R. had done to Afghanistan), or spend massive amounts of its budget on the military, but instead engaged in trade and tried to let people lead their lives. A few years later, Yeltsin used the same language of normality and meant, roughly, the same thing.

The question of whether Russia ever became a “normal” country has been hotly debated in political science. A famous 2004 article in Foreign Affairs , by the economist Andrei Shleifer and the political scientist Daniel Treisman, was called, simply, “A Normal Country.” Writing during an ebb in American interest in Russia, as Putin was consolidating his control of the country but before he started acting more aggressively toward his neighbors, Shleifer and Treisman argued that what looked like Russia’s poor performance as a democracy was just about average for a country with its level of income and development. For some time after 2004, there was reason to think that rising living standards, travel, and iPhones would do the work that lectures from Western politicians had failed to do—that modernity itself would make Russia a place where people went about their business and raised their families, and the government did not send them to die for no good reason on foreign soil.

That is not what happened. The oil and gas boom of the last two decades created for many Russians a level of prosperity that would have been unthinkable in Soviet times. Despite this, the violence and the lies persisted.

Alexander Baunov calls what happened in February of last year a putsch—the capture of the state by a clique bent on its own imperial projects and survival. “Just because the people carrying it out are the ones in power, does not make it less of a putsch,” Baunov told me recently. “There was no demand for this in Russian society.” Many Russians have, perhaps, accepted the war; they have sent their sons and husbands to die in it; but it was not anything that people were clamoring for. The capture of Crimea had been celebrated, but no one except the most marginal nationalists was calling for something similar to happen to Kherson or Zaporizhzhia, or even really the Donbas. As Volodymyr Zelensky said in his address to the Russian people on the eve of the war, Donetsk and Luhansk to most Russians were just words. Whereas for Ukrainians, he added, “this is our land. This is our history.” It was their home.

About half of the people I met with in Moscow last January are no longer there —one is in France, another in Latvia, my aunt is in Tel Aviv. My friend Kolya, whose apartment is across from Brezhnev’s, has remained in Moscow. He does not know English, he and his wife have a little kid and two elderly parents between them, and it’s just not clear what they would do abroad. Kolya says that, insofar as he’s able, he has stopped talking to people at work: “They are decent people on the whole but it’s not a situation anymore where it’s possible to talk in half-tones.” No one has asked him to write about or in support of the war, and his superiors have even said that if he gets mobilized they will try to get him out of it.

When we met last January, Alexander Baunov did not think that he would leave Russia, even if things got worse. “Social capital does not cross borders,” Baunov said. “And that’s the only capital we have.” But, just a few days after the war began, Baunov and his partner packed some bags and some books and flew to Dubai, then Belgrade, then Vienna, where Baunov had a fellowship. They have been flitting around the world, in a precarious visa situation, ever since. (A book that Baunov has been working on for several years, about twentieth-century dictatorships in Portugal, Spain, and Greece, came out last month; it is called “The End of the Regime.”)

I asked him why it was possible for him to live in Russia before the invasion, and why it was impossible to do so after it. He admitted that from afar it could look like a distinction without a difference. “If you’re in the Western information space and have been reading for twenty years about how Putin is a dictator, maybe it makes no sense,” Baunov said. “But from inside the difference was very clear.” Putin had been running a particular kind of dictatorship—a relatively restrained one. There were certain topics that you needed to stay away from and names you couldn’t mention, and, if you really threw down the gauntlet, the regime might well try to kill you. But for most people life was tolerable. You could color inside the lines, urge reforms and wiser governance, and hope for better days. After the invasion, that was no longer possible. The government passed laws threatening up to fifteen years’ imprisonment for speech that was deemed defamatory to the armed forces; the use of the word “war” instead of “special military operation” fell under this category. The remaining independent outlets—most notably the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta —were forced to suspend operations. That happened quickly, in the first weeks of the war, and since then the restrictions have only increased; Carnegie Moscow Center, which had been operating in Russia since 1994, was forced to close in April.

I asked Baunov how long he thought it would be before he returned to Russia. He said that he didn’t know, but it was possible that he would never return. There was no going back to February 23rd—not for him, not for Russia, and especially not for the Putin regime. “The country has undergone a moral catastrophe,” Baunov said. “Going back, in the future, would mean living with people who supported this catastrophe; who think they had taken part in a great project; who are proud of their participation in it.”

If once, in the Kremlin, there had been an ongoing argument between mildly pro-Western liberals and resolutely anti-Western conservatives, that argument is over. The liberals have lost. According to Baunov, there remains a small group of technocrats who would prefer something short of all-out war. “It’s not a party of peace, but you could call it the Party of peaceful life,” he said. “It’s people who want to ride in electric buses and dress well.” But it is on its heels. And though it was hard for Baunov to imagine Russia going back to the Soviet era, and even the Stalinist era, the country was already some way there. There was the search for internal enemies, the drawing up of lists, the public calls for ever harsher measures. On the day that we spoke, in late January, the news site Meduza was branded an “undesirable organization.” This meant that anyone publicly sharing their work could, in theory, be subject to criminal prosecution.

Baunov fears that there is room for things to get much worse. He recalled how, on January 22, 1905—Bloody Sunday—the tsar’s forces fired on peaceful demonstrators in St. Petersburg, precipitating a revolutionary crisis. “A few tens of people were shot and it was a major event,” he said. “A few years later, thousands of people were being shot and it wasn’t even notable.” The intervening years had seen Russia engaged in a major European war, and society’s tolerance for violence had drastically increased. “The room for experimentation on a population is almost limitless,” Baunov went on. “China went through the Cultural Revolution, and survived. Russia went through the Gulags and survived. Repressions decrease society’s willingness to resist.” That’s why governments use them.

For years after the Soviet collapse, it had seemed, to some, as if the Soviet era had been a bad dream, a deviation. Economists wrote studies tracing the likely development of the Russian economy after 1913 if war and revolution had not intervened. Part of the post-Soviet project, including Putin’s, was to restore some of the cultural ties that had been severed by the Soviets—to resurrect churches that the Bolsheviks had turned into bus stations, to repair old buildings that the Soviets had neglected, to give respect to various political figures from the past (Tsar Alexander III, for example).

But what if it was the post-Soviet period that was the exception? “It’s been a long time since the Kingdom of Novgorod,” in the words of the historian Stephen Kotkin . Before the Revolution, the Russian Empire, too, had been one of the most repressive regimes in Europe. Jews were kept in the Pale of Settlement. You needed the tsar’s permission to travel abroad. Much of the population, just a couple of generations away from serfdom, lived in abject poverty. The Soviets cancelled some of these laws, but added others. Aside from short bursts of freedom here and there, the story of Russia was the story of unceasing government destruction of people’s lives.

So which was the illusion: the peaceful Russia or the violent one, the Russia that trades and slowly prospers, or the one that brings only lies and threats and death?

Russia has given us Putin, but it has also given us all the people who stood up to Putin. The Party of peaceful life, as Baunov called it, was not winning, but at least, so far, it has not lost; all the time, people continue to get imprisoned for speaking out against the war. I was reminded of my friend Kolya—in the weeks after the war began, as Western sanctions were announced and prices began rising, he was one of the thousands of Russians who rushed out to make last-minute purchases. It was a way of taking some control of his destiny at a moment when things seemed dangerously out of control. As the Russian Army attempted and failed to take Kyiv , Kolya and his wife bought some chairs. ♦

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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.

When writing an essay on this topic, it is crucial to thoroughly research and gather information from reliable sources in order to present a well-informed and balanced perspective. The use of credible sources such as academic journals, news articles, and official reports is essential to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information presented in the essay.

Additionally, it is important to consider the historical, cultural, and geopolitical context of the war in order to provide a comprehensive analysis. This may involve examining the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the cultural and ethnic dynamics at play, and the broader geopolitical implications of the conflict.

Furthermore, it is essential to approach this topic with sensitivity and empathy, considering the human impact of the war on individuals and communities. This may involve incorporating personal testimonies, humanitarian reports, and accounts of human rights violations in order to provide a human-centric perspective on the conflict.

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
The impact of the conflict on the geopolitical landscape of Eastern Europe
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
The portrayal of the conflict in popular media and its influence on public perception
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.
Write a fictional account of a civilian's experience living in a war-torn region of Ukraine, exploring the psychological and emotional toll of the conflict.
Create a persuasive argument for or against international military intervention in the Russia and Ukraine War, considering the potential consequences and implications.
Imagine you are a diplomat tasked with negotiating a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Outline your strategy and approach, considering the competing interests and demands of both parties.
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 future of Russia and Ukraine

Ukraine and Russia flags on map displaying Europe.

Political scientist Kathryn Stoner is the Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford and an authority on Russian/Ukrainian politics.

She says views on the current war depend on which side someone is on: Many Russians and their leader Vladimir Putin say Ukrainians are Russians and have been since the 10th century. Ukrainians strongly disagree, likening the two nations to the U.S. and Great Britain. How the present conflict is resolved has important implications for other former Soviet states and the future of the European Union, as Stoner tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.

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Related : Kathryn Stoner , director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL)

[00:00:00] Kathryn Stoner: So it's Putin's generation that's made their peace with being cut from the West and they are not isolated from the rest of the world. But the younger generation isn't necessarily happy or contented with that. And so I think that's the hopeful thing.

[00:00:20] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything and I'm your host Russ Altman. If you're enjoying the show or if it's helped you in any way please consider rating and reviewing. We especially like fives, if we deserve them. Your input is extremely important for spreading the news and getting the algorithms to love us, as much as I know you do.

[00:00:39] Today, Kathryn Stoner from Stanford University will tell us what we need to understand about the history of Russia and the history of Ukraine in order to understand the terrible conflict that's ongoing now. It's the future of Russia.

[00:00:53] Before we get started, a quick reminder to rate and review The Future of Everything podcast on whatever app you're following it in.

[00:01:07] There's a terrible conflict happening between Russia and Ukraine, and it's created turmoil in that region and globally. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and there's been economic, political, and cultural implications of this conflict. Well, in order to understand this conflict, you need to understand the perspective of the Russians and Vladimir Putin on Ukraine. You have to understand the Ukrainian perspective on their own history. And you need to understand the role that these two countries play in the world and the impacts they have on places like the United States of America.

[00:01:41] Well, Kathryn Stoner is a senior fellow at the Spogli Freeman Institute for International Studies. And she's the director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She's an expert on Russia, and she's an expert on the Russian Ukrainian conflict. She'll help us understand the roots of this conflict. And in the end, give us some hope for how this may end well for everybody involved.

[00:02:09] Kathryn, thanks for being here. You're an expert in Russian affairs. How should we understand the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the context of Russian history and politics?

[00:02:19] Kathryn Stoner: That's a big opening question, Russ, but okay, um, uh, I'll take a hit at that. How you understand the history kind of depends on, uh, whose side you're on. So, um, on the one hand, if we look at, uh, Vladimir Putin's perspective, and he's now been president or prime minister of Russia. But anyway, in charge for the last twenty-four years and he's got another twelve to go, potentially. Ukraine, from his perspective, and he wrote this historical missive a few years ago, two or three years ago, basically explaining the unity of the Ukrainian and Russian people.

[00:02:58] And so he sees them as a single community that was originally united. He goes back all the way, um, to Kievan Rus' uh, and, um, and the tenth century and, um, the taking on of, uh, Russian Orthodox religion by Prince Vladimir. And he sees this as the founding, uh, of Russia. And Kievan Rus' obviously starts in Kiev. And so he then takes Russian history from there. So let's remember, he's not a professional historian.

[00:03:30] Russ Altman: Right, right.

[00:03:31] Kathryn Stoner: Um, but, um, he thinks he is, right?

[00:03:33] Russ Altman: And this is a convenient narrative for him, obviously.

[00:03:37] Kathryn Stoner: Absolutely. Absolutely. And he draws on history and, uh, um, and so, you know, Ukraine is kind of sacred Russian imperial territory. Now, from the Ukrainian perspective, they pick up the story, that any way you argue it, they say, look, we're an independent country. And you could almost think of it, um, like the United States and Great Britain, um, in some ways, right? Um, Putin says that, look, um, religiously, we're the same. It was a historical accident that we gave, uh, Ukraine away. That, you know, that was the fault of Vladimir Lenin and the communists.

[00:04:14] It's an artificial construct. Uh, the language is the same, blah, blah, blah. The Ukrainians say, look, this is a little bit like, you know, the United States and its revolution against, uh, the Empire. Either way you slice it, even if you go back to 989 as he does, um, and, uh, and Kievan Rus', it's Kievan Rus', right? So there was a Kiev before there was a, as a Russia.

[00:04:38] Um, but in 1991, December, Soviet Union breaks up and we have fifteen independent countries. And one of them is Ukraine and another one is Russia. And they are independent and different. Um, and I could keep going, but, uh Putin's predecessor as president of Russia, uh, Boris Yeltsin, um, signed a document acknowledging that, you know, they, this was an independent country and several other documents that, uh, later that in exchange for nuclear weapons, Russia would respect Ukrainian territory and Ukrainian borders. Um, and so those are pretty different perspectives, right? Ukraine, no matter how you slice it, we're our own place. And just because we speak a language that's similar, but not the same as Russian, doesn't mean we want to be governed by Russia again. And Putin and many people in Russia see it completely the opposite.

[00:05:38] Russ Altman: So given that they have this entrenched different, let's now take the United States perspective and there's a strategic aspect to this. And I know this is one of the things you study very closely. So putting that aside, and maybe we have opinions about that we being, you know, as if we're all a single voice. Maybe the United States has an opinion on that argument. But there's also strategic and lots of other implications of this conflict for the United States. So kind of the same question, how do we look at this? And to the extent that we are a we.

[00:06:07] Kathryn Stoner: Right. And there's how we did and how we do. Um, right. And so, well, so the U.S. signed an agreement with, uh, France and with Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan in 1994. The, um, Budapest memorandum, that, um, was, uh, all about basically moving, um, heritage nuclear, or legacy nuclear weapons from those four former republics. Uh, or three former republics of the Soviet Union into the fourth Russia, so that Russia would take over nuclear weapons.

[00:06:43] And so we were particularly concerned about that, uh, coming out of the Cold War at that time. And so that was an agreement we also signed. And we said in return for this, we will provide security for Ukraine. Now, we didn't say we guarantee, uh, NATO, that came later under George W. Bush at a NATO meeting in 2004.

[00:07:10] But, uh, we did, you know, I think a lot of people forget and Putin conveniently doesn't ever mention this, um, that his predecessor signed this agreement. So you, you know, our perspective is that Ukraine, just like the other fourteen former republics of the Soviet Union, are independent states, um, until their people decide otherwise.

[00:07:33] And there was a referendum in December of 1991, and it was resoundingly in favor of Ukraine becoming a, uh, an independent country. So our perspective is, um, there are rules in the international system governed by international law. And because, uh, there are not mechanisms like, you know, that are in terms of enforcing them, um, other than us all having a moral responsibility to do so or war, right?

[00:08:01] Um, and, um, so we not only feel we have this responsibility because we signed this security, um, guarantee. Um, but we also, or security assurance, I shouldn't say guarantee because it was kind of weak, to be honest. Um, we also view it as this is, uh, an aggressive war that was unprovoked on Ukraine. Um, Russia attacked a peaceful country and the reasons for that were, we think, uh, are because Mr. Putin saw, um, the possibility of Ukraine becoming a democracy and also joining the European Union. So not so much NATO, but the European Union and therefore pulling Ukraine away, um, from sort of Russian hegemony in that region.

[00:08:49] Russ Altman: So, and I believe you've written about and talked about how, is this a test case? Is this something that we should, we United States should be very careful about? Because as you've said now a couple of times, there's thirteen other, uh, former Soviet, uh, republics and they are at perhaps a similar risk. And how real is that risk? And how do you assess that? Because then we're starting, they're not, uh, those are people my age start thinking about similar arguments that were made about Southeast Asia in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. And we went, we know that that didn't go very well. So, and I don't want to bring that in kind of spuriously and I'm not a historian. But tell me about this domino effect, kind of the obvious, kind of maybe overly simplistic domino effect argument.

[00:09:34] Kathryn Stoner: Yeah. So, I mean, the, so the argument would be, and I think there are, um, some reasonable, uh, data points that would affirm this argument, would be that, uh, as you mentioned, so fifteen former republics that made up the Soviet Union.

[00:09:49] Russ Altman: Right.

[00:09:49] Kathryn Stoner: Russia and, and Ukraine are two, and then there are thirteen more. Um, the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, they have joined the European Union. They have also joined NATO. Russia has given up on them, basically, for the most part, right? Although, you know, they may interfere from time to time. And in one of my books, I talk about this a fair amount. Russia has a lot of different levers of control over all of these other fourteen republics including Ukraine. So the two I'd say that are, or three, that are most at risk. And one could argue if you're in Kazakhstan, four, um, are Georgia. Um, which is in the sort of South Caucasus region, above Armenia and Azerbaijan.

[00:10:31] Moldova, which is to the west of Ukraine. Also kind of a struggling quasi democracy, liberalizing and then Belarus. Now, Kazakhstan has a huge border, um, in Central Asia. Um, with Russia, it has a huge Russian population, but there's an important difference, I think, between Kazakhstan and let's say Ukraine or Georgia or Moldova, um, and that is that, um, it has an authoritarian government.

[00:10:58] Um, and it is a softer form of authoritarianism than Russia has become. But it is, uh, it is maybe more of a fellow traveler, its leadership, um, and governing system closer to Russia's and so therefore less of a threat. They also have China, um, sitting there as well. So different kind of dynamic then with the republics that are more to the west of Russia's borders.

[00:11:25] So the worry in Georgia, for example, this little weak country that very few of us probably think about, um, except here in Palo Alto, you know, that we have a Georgian restaurant.

[00:11:33] Russ Altman: Yes.

[00:11:34] Kathryn Stoner: Um, there's another one, another branch of that restaurant in Los Altos. Um, Georgia is a really fascinating country. I've been there a bunch of times. Um, and it had been, uh, democratizing, liberalizing, really gunning to join the EU and NATO. And now they've had a change of government, and that government just recently tried to, and actually succeeded in introducing a law, um, that was very similar to one of the first laws Putin introduced to crack down on civil society and NGOs.

[00:12:05] So, um, some of these places are valuable to Russia because there are pipelines that run through them. And so Georgia has, uh, has that pipeline issue. Um, but also, again, you know, this is an issue of falling out of Russia's orbit potentially and providing an example to Russians who may be not so happy with Mr. Putin, uh, of a different way of governing. And so that's also, we think, one of the biggest threats that, that he sees. If they had one of these color revolutions, as did Ukraine, that as the Georgians did. So this is a political risk.

[00:12:43] Russ Altman: Yeah. So you said that Georgia was kind of pretty gung ho about democracy and it seems like having democratic values is kind of a prerequisite for NATO and EU. But how, and I know you've written about this, this is one of your expertise areas. How democracy ready are these countries? And I say that very naively, not even knowing what that means. But, um, you know, I, we've all heard things about the nature of these democracies. They're nascent, democracy is hard.

[00:13:12] I think we're living that right now. So anybody who thought it was easy was wrong. Um, uh, and, um, and how should we think about those democratic movements under extreme pressure, uh, and with these neighbors, this big neighbor who has big time problems with democracy. Uh, but although I know you also study whatever the internal Russian interests and instincts for democracy are. So maybe a little primer on democracy in that part of the world.

[00:13:42] Kathryn Stoner: Sure. So, I mean, yes, you are right, Russ. Democracy is really hard, um, and it's problematic. And, um, but it's the, you know, uh, it's the worst of all systems except for all the alternatives.

[00:13:53] Russ Altman: Right.

[00:13:54] Kathryn Stoner: And so there are, is a generation that is over, over fifty basically in, um, that all of the former republics of the Soviet Union that lived under something even worse, which was communism.

[00:14:06] Um, and they lived under communism falling apart, which was also particularly difficult. And in different places, varying degrees of market reform, which was very painful, right? Because the Soviet system was, um, you know, if you'd like a small state, it's, it wouldn't have been the place for you because the state decided everything. And it's actually a really sort of fun to describe this to, um, Stanford undergraduates who have no idea who Gorbachev was. Or, you know, or Brezhnev or any of these, uh, sort of blast from the past names that you might remember. Um,

[00:14:41] Russ Altman: I have home videos of Gorbachev from his visit to Stanford, which I cherish. But that's a whole different thing.

[00:14:48] Kathryn Stoner: Yeah. Yeah. He just died a year before last. So, um, they have kind of a different perspective and a conflation even of democracy and market reform. And so if you ever want to descend in this podcast or another time into the sort of public opinion details and is there legitimate support for Putin within Russia, we can do that. But the short answer is, yeah, there is actually.

[00:15:11] So for many of these countries, the experience of democracy, or liberalization. Because none of them ever, except for the Baltics, really get to be consolidated democracies, including Russia. Although they do have some competitive elections in the 1990s, others just in Central Asia with the slight exception of Kyrgyzstan, there's just really no effort.

[00:15:32] But Ukraine is, and Georgia, were a little different, um, in terms of their experiences. And one of the big differences between them and Russia, or even, um, Belarus. But I would say Russian, uh, in particular, is that they have very active civil societies. So, um, you know, Russia, we do see people take to the streets and we have seen people take to the streets en masse. And we certainly saw that in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union was falling apart and we saw it in the nineties, we even saw it in 2020. Um, when, uh, and 2021 before the war when Alexei Navalny, for example, returned, um, and then even after the, uh, in initial invasion in 2022 in February, we saw some demonstrations.

[00:16:21] But that's the end in Russia. And that's largely because, um, Putin has just really cracked down his regime. But in Ukraine, we saw, as I mentioned, this color revolution. Um, and we also see one in Georgia in the early 2000s. And that is people taking to the streets over elections that they felt were corrupt. Um, and in fact were corrupt, and overturning the result and, um, sort of deepening their democracy. They have all had problems with corruption and basically stealing from the state and, um, uh, 'cause that's where a lot of the corruption comes from. Georgia for a while did well attacking petty corruption. Um, Ukraine has done well. Um, it, I think, gets a very bad reputation, um, for corruption. And certainly that was true before this Euromaidan, um, which was the sort of second Georgian, uh, pardon me, Ukrainian revolution in 2014. Um, and Putin responds to that by seizing Crimea and then starting a low boil war uh, in Eastern Ukraine.

[00:17:29] And, um, and so that's really, I think what has caused this, is that, this conflict, is that, as we said at the beginning, um, you know, there is a difference in historical opinion about, um, Ukraine and Russia. And there is, you know, I think a fundamental difference in, within Ukrainian society. Uh, of where, um, most Ukrainians would, like, uh, the future of Ukraine, and that is in Europe. And NATO. And Putin concerned that there is a demonstration effect in that.

[00:18:02] Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything with Russ Altman. More with Kathryn Stoner, next.

[00:18:17] Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman and I'm speaking with Kathryn Stoner from Stanford University.

[00:18:23] In the last segment, Kathryn gave us a great groundwork of the history of Russia. A little bit of the history of the Ukraine, how they think about their relationship with one another, and how this war serves the interests of Vladimir Putin and some Russians.

[00:18:39] In the next segment, she'll tell us why this war has not gone the way the Russians expected. Or really the way anybody expected with the possible exception of the Ukrainians. She'll also give us hope for how this might go in the end and why there are still reasons to think that there will be a better future for Russia.

[00:18:59] So Kathryn, in the last segment you gave us a really good set of background, the history, going even back to like 1000 AD. But now fast forwarding, this war has not gone the way I think anybody expected. Maybe the Ukrainians, but I think many here in America, certainly the Russians with their reputation for a huge, well-run army. This, we're now, you know, well past a year or two. What happened and how should we understand why this war has not been a big success for Russia?

[00:19:32] Kathryn Stoner: Yeah. So we're past two years, as you mentioned. Um, well, so basically we're at a stalemate. There are some incremental changes, um, along the, um, southeastern border, uh, you know, moving the line of conflict, um, even a little further west.

[00:19:51] Um, I think the big surprise here for Putin is, and, uh, certainly, you know, we can relate, um, when we think about our own experience with the Iraq war under the Bush administration. Um, is that, um, Ukrainians didn't want to be liberated, um, from, uh, what he tried to describe to them as, you know, an illegitimate regime. Um, they, um, they didn't want Russian tanks coming in. They didn't want to be part of Russia.

[00:20:22] And I, and so I think he had some bad intelligence. Um, that is the Russian military had bad intelligence. Putin himself had bad intelligence. Um, I think this is, uh, can be a problem with, uh, autocracies. Heck, I used the example of the, um, of the Iraq war because of course that was a problem in a democracy in that case as well. You might remember we were, uh, you know, assured that, uh, the Iraqis would be throwing rose petals, I think, at American tanks as they entered. And in fact, that was not the case as it turned out. And, um, Putin was evidently assured of the same thing. And in fact, Russ, they were so certain, um, the Russian military, that they were going to get this all over within a week that, um, dress uniforms were discovered in the tanks.

[00:21:08] Russ Altman: Wow.

[00:21:08] Kathryn Stoner: That were approaching Kiev, um, in preparation for, yeah, the parades and celebrations that were, um, supposed to ensue.

[00:21:18] Russ Altman: So that was a major, major failure of intelligence.

[00:21:23] Kathryn Stoner: Yes.

[00:21:23] Russ Altman: And so instead, of course, the Ukrainians mounted an incredibly spirited grassroots defense, I guess.

[00:21:31] Kathryn Stoner: Yeah. Yeah, even without having all of the weaponry that we've now given them and, um, our European partners have given them, um, they were able to do that. And so I think that brings us to the second reason it hasn't gone so well. Um, you'll remember in 2014, um, Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and still occupies that.

[00:21:53] Russ Altman: Yes.

[00:21:54] Kathryn Stoner: Um, well, they did that pretty easily, um, there was limited bloodshed. Um, but since then, um, the Ukrainian military retrained. Um, and so Russia saw some of that in, um, Donetsk and Luhansk, those eastern provinces of Ukraine where a low boil war continued between 2014 and the re invasion in 2022, and the Ukrainian military in those eight years was getting training from outside, more money was put into it, and they got better. Um, so I think that was the second major failure, um, in intelligence, um, with Putin, assuming that what they were going to face was what they faced in 2014. And it wasn't. It was a professionalized Ukrainian military.

[00:22:39] Russ Altman: The thing that shocks so many of us is that Putin has not been held to this by the, it doesn't appear that Russian public opinion has turned on him with the deaths of all of these Russian troops. My understanding is that during the Afghanistan, during the Russian Afghanistan kind of debacle, um, there was a ton of domestic unhappiness, uh, and that this contributed to lots of things. Um, what is going on and why aren't the Russians, um, furious about this? And why aren't they holding it against Putin?

[00:23:14] Kathryn Stoner: Well, so, some are furious, um, but not the majority. Um, but, uh, yeah, so just to give you some context, right? In terms of Afghanistan, we didn't exactly see people out in the streets protesting, right?

[00:23:27] Russ Altman: Right.

[00:23:28] Kathryn Stoner: Um, we just saw people kind tuning out. Um, of politics and not believing in the Soviet system. And frankly, they just couldn't afford to keep going in Afghanistan. Right? And so Gorbachev gets them out of that in 1989, after ten years there. What's happened here is in fact, even more men have died in this conflict in just over two years in Ukraine than in Afghanistan and all of the Soviet Union's post.

[00:23:57] Russ Altman: I did not know that.

[00:23:58] Kathryn Stoner: Yes, post Cold War, I mean, post war conflicts. So, all of them combined, already in Ukraine, more Russian troops have died. Um, I saw yesterday a statistic which I'm not, I will throw out but tell you that it's not completely confirmed that roughly two percent of Russian men aged twenty to fifty, um, have either been killed or severely wounded, uh, in Ukraine since the start of the war.

[00:24:27] Um, there is a study by Meduza, uh, and, uh, which is, um, this behind me is, uh, is from them, Meduza, which is, uh, um, an internet, um, newspaper. And media zone, uh, with the BBC that estimates, um, at least a hundred and twenty thousand dead, uh, Russians. Um, but it may be as high as a hundred and forty thousand, and somewhere around, that's dead. And three hundred and fifty thousand in total counting dead, and those so badly injured that they cannot go back to war. So this is huge, right?

[00:24:59] Russ Altman: This is really huge.

[00:25:00] Kathryn Stoner: So why aren't more people upset about this? Well, first of all, we think about two million have left the country, um, completely. Um, either because they had to, well, or they wanted to. Um, then, that's one. So some of the people you might see out on the streets are openly protesting may have, in fact, left.

[00:25:21] Second, since the beginning of the war, Russia's autocracy has gotten even harder. So if for us, you were on the Moscow Metro and you are just sitting there minding your own business, but happened to be wearing a yellow scarf. You, uh, would likely be reported by someone on that train, um, to the police. And that's a significant fine of, you know, five thousand rubles, which may be about half your monthly salary.

[00:25:46] Um, and, um, you know, depending on who you happen to encounter, it could also be jail time. So Russian jails is, uh, um, a friend of mine whose husband happens to still be in jail said, uh, to me in November, when I asked this exact question to her, um, it's the wife of, uh, of, uh, Kara-Murza, who's still in jail and ill, unfortunately. Um, she said, you know, Russian jails are really awful. Um, and that is a disincentive to protest. You don't know what's going to happen to you.

[00:26:17] Russ Altman: Right.

[00:26:17] Kathryn Stoner: Um, if you end up in jail there, because this is not a country that has rule of laws. We see with Evan Gershkovich, um, who's, uh, the Wall Street Journal reporter.

[00:26:26] Russ Altman: Yes.

[00:26:28] Kathryn Stoner: Being used as a political tool there. Um, so that's another thing. Um, and then even, you know, if you do things, um, like, um, for example, there's a case of a woman who, um, was putting messages on price tags, um, about how many people were dying in Ukraine, in, in, uh, Moscow. She's been, you know, arrested. Um, and, you know, she's gone to jail. Um, she had a kid, um, but you know, students will lose their places in universities. Um, you can lose your job. I mean, the knock on effects are long. And then ultimately, um, you can be sent to the front.

[00:27:06] Russ Altman: Right, which is the worst.

[00:27:08] Kathryn Stoner: Yeah, which is kind of an old Soviet era tactic, by the way, right, is what's your worst nightmare? It's worse than jail. You're gonna go fight for a regime you don't believe in and a war you don't believe in. So what is interesting though is, and it's very dangerous, obviously, to answer, you know, there's a lot of what we call preference falsification in surveys, right? So if someone comes to your door and says, and you're in, again, imaginary Russ in Moscow. Hey, um, I'm, you know, I'm a stranger. I'm either calling you or coming to your door and saying, do you support President Putin? Now in the current environment, knowing what I just told you about the scarf on the train,

[00:27:45] Russ Altman: That's an easy one. That's an easy one.

[00:27:47] Kathryn Stoner: What are you going to say Russ?

[00:27:49] Russ Altman: Yes, sir. Go, go Putin.

[00:27:52] Kathryn Stoner: Right. I sure do. Um, but so if you, but if you look at, um, asking that question less directly. Um, and so we have some things called list experiments where, you know, we have a list of names, um, of former Russian or Soviet leaders, um, without Putin, and then we add Putin to the list. You can see, you subtract one from the other and you can see that, okay, maybe it's not as much. Also, if you ask people about happiness, general happiness and their own well-being, it's much lower. Um, if you, um, ask them, and there's another organization called, um, Russian, uh, Field, um, has asked if you could go back in time and, uh, and not start this war, um, would you? And we're getting increasingly close to fifty percent saying they wouldn't have started it, um, to do it all again.

[00:28:46] Russ Altman: So let me, in the last minute, let me just ask, is there a source of hope for Russia, for Russians, and even for non-Russians like Ukrainians and Americans who are watching all this? Is there a reason to be optimistic?

[00:29:02] Kathryn Stoner: In the end, I think there is. I mean, until this war ends and all wars end in a negotiation, we're going to be stuck probably with Putin. Um, he can stay in office. Um, he just was re-elected

[00:29:14] Russ Altman: Yeah.

[00:29:14] Kathryn Stoner: Until 2030 this term and then constitutionally, he can say until 2036. He'll be in his eighties at that point. It's going to be problematic. However, autocracies tend to be a little fragile at the top. And you know, there, I think there's a limit to how much more time Russian business will go on this way. Right now, they're, they have short time horizons and opportunistically, they're making some money. But I think the real hope for Russia, and this comes through even in the dangerous question of, um, do you support the president? Do you support the war? Is really in people under thirty-five in Russia.

[00:29:50] And there we see the highest number of people, even in those circumstances, right? Of, of, uh, consequences being really grave, indicating that no, I don't. And these are people, after all, if you're born after 2000, you've never known another president other than Putin. And you, um, are the YouTube generation, you're the internet generation, Instagram. You know, they're about to cut off YouTube in Russia. They've cut off everything else. These are people who've studied abroad, um, and who want opportunities, right? And who were benefiting from Russia being integrated. So it's Putin's generation that's made their peace with being cut from the West and they are not isolated from the rest of the world, but the younger generation, isn't necessarily happy or contented with that. And so I think that's the hopeful thing. Um, and, uh, in the end, Russians are, are well educated people.

[00:30:38] Russ Altman: Yes. And you mentioned, I think you said, uh, two million people have left the country and do they want to go back?

[00:30:47] Kathryn Stoner: Some do, some don't. Um, you know, most people do. I'm, I should confess here, I was born in Canada, and I came to this country when I was twenty-two. And, you know, even as easy a transition as that is, my children are constantly making fun of my immigrant experience because it wasn't very hard, certainly compared to others. It's still, it's not your country for a while, right? And so when you throw on top of that, as we well know, you have to speak another language, or if your country is a pariah, as Russia is in much of the West, it's even harder, I think.

[00:31:18] So, you know, most people, I think if they could, would want to go back to their own country. And I think that's definitely true, uh, of a generation that's moved. It's also the smartest of Russians that have moved. And, you know, that is our gain. As we've seen from, uh, you know, people like Sergey Brin and others who've come and started wonderful companies here in the United States.

[00:31:40] Russ Altman: Thanks to Kathryn Stoner. That was the future of Russia.

[00:31:43] Thanks for tuning into this episode. With over 250 episodes in our archive. You have instant access to a huge array of discussions on the future of pretty much everything. If you're enjoying the show, a reminder to please consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues.

[00:32:00] Personal recommendations are the best way for us to grow the show. You can connect with me on X or Twitter @RBAltman, and you can connect with Stanford Engineering @StanfordENG.

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Ukraine invasion — explained

The roots of Russia's invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep. The current conflict is more than one country fighting to take over another; it is — in the words of one U.S. official — a shift in "the world order." Here are some helpful stories to make sense of it all.

How the Ukraine-Russia war is playing out differently on 3 separate fronts

A damaged statue of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin in a central square in Sudzha, in the Kursk region of western Russia, on Aug. 16. Ukrainian troops say they've taken control of Sudzha, one of more than 80 towns and villages they've captured since a cross-border invasion of Russia on Aug. 6. -/AP hide caption

KYIV, Ukraine — The front line in the Russia-Ukraine war stretches for more than 600 miles. Yet roughly speaking, it breaks down into three separate fronts — in Ukraine's north, east and south — which are all playing out differently.

The latest front is just across Ukraine's northern border, where Ukrainian troops carried out a surprise invasion into Russian territory on Aug. 6, and are solidifying their positions two weeks after that breakthrough.

In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces are making steady advances and are closing in on a town that's crucial for Ukraine's military supply lines.

And in the south, in the Black Sea, Ukraine has delivered an ongoing series of powerful blows to the Russian navy and carved out a channel that allows it to export its wheat and other agricultural products.

A Ukrainian military vehicle filled with captured Russian troops travels on the Ukrainian side of the border with Russia on Tuesday. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine has captured hundreds of Russian fighters since it launched its invasion into the Kursk region of western Russia on Aug. 6.

Ukrainian forces attack a second border region in western Russia

Here's a closer look at all three.

In the north, a "buffer zone"

Ukraine said over the weekend it knocked out two bridges that cross the Seym River in western Russia, rendering them useless.

This cuts off key transportation routes that Russia could have used to send reinforcements into the Kursk region, with the intent of driving out the Ukrainian forces that have been taking and holding ground for the past two weeks.

However, it also suggests Ukraine is adopting a defensive position and is not looking to advance deeper into Russia, at least in this area.

In video remarks Sunday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was trying to keep Russia away from the border region it has used to stage attacks against Ukraine.

"The creation of a buffer zone on the aggressor's territory is our operation in the Kursk region," Zelenskyy said.

In May, the Russians attempted to advance on the city Kharkiv, just 20 miles inside Ukraine. Ukraine halted the Russian ground offensive, though the city and surrounding areas still come under frequent Russian airstrikes with glide bombs that are difficult to defend against.

Viktoria Kitsenko poses for a portrait in front of Epicenter, the hardware superstore where she was working when it was hit with a Russian missile, killing 19 people in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on May 26.

Ukraine's Kharkiv has withstood Russia's relentless strikes. Locals fear what's next

After lightning advances in the first few days of its incursion, Ukraine's forces inside Russia have been making only limited gains in the past week. Ukraine is still providing limited details of the operation, but Zelenskyy, military analysts and a range of media reports indicate Ukrainian forces are solidifying their positions.

Ukraine's military says it has taken more than 80 villages and towns and now controls more than 400 square miles in the Kursk region. Those figures cannot be independently confirmed.

The Ukrainians have captured, at minimum, several hundred Russian troops. Ukraine's military allowed journalists to see more than 300 Russian prisoners of war who have been moved across the border and placed in a Ukrainian prison.

Meanwhile, Russia has not yet mounted a significant counterattack. Russian officials says additional troops are on the way, and Russian television has shown columns of troops and equipment heading to Kursk.

But so far, the fighting appears limited to mostly small-scale clashes. The Russians appear to be drawing their forces from other parts of Russia — and not from front-line troops already fighting inside Ukraine.

One of Ukraine's goals with the incursion into Russia is to draw Russian forces away from the front line in eastern Ukraine, but there's no evidence this has happened on any significant scale so far.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has not commented on the Ukrainian invasion for the past week, and made a visit Monday to Azerbaijan .

Smoke billows above a bridge on the Seym River in Russia's western region of Kursk. Ukraine's military released the footage on Sunday, saying this was the second bridge on the river it has destroyed in recent days. The bridge could have been a route for Russia to send in reinforcements to the area, where Ukrainian troops invaded Russia on Aug. 6. Ukrainian Armed Forces/via AP hide caption

In the east, Russian troops close in on a key town

Eastern Ukraine is still the main battlefront. The Russians claimed the capture of another small town Monday and are now less than 10 miles from the town of Pokrovsk.

Pokrovsk is a transportation hub that Ukraine uses to send troops and supplies to its front-line positions in the east. If the Russians take the town, Ukraine will have a tougher time supporting forces that are already outnumbered and outgunned.

For the past several days, Ukrainian officials have been urging civilians in Pokrovsk to evacuate to safer areas.

"With every passing day there is less and less time to collect personal belongings and leave for safer regions," local officials in Pokrovsk said in a recent statement.

Throughout the war, Ukraine has had a shortage of troops in the east. By sending thousands of its troops into Russia, Ukraine could be even more vulnerable in areas where it's struggling to stop Russian advances.

Weapons packages from the U.S. and European states are arriving, but not fast enough, according to Zelenskyy.

"We need to speed up the supply from our partners," Zelenskyy said in his Sunday night remarks. "There are no holidays in war. We need solutions, we need timely logistics of announced [weapons] packages. I am especially appealing now to the United States, Great Britain, and France."

In the Black Sea, Ukraine creates an export channel

One of Ukraine's biggest successes over the past year has been driving back the Russian navy in the Black Sea and establishing a shipping channel so it can again export grain and other agricultural products to world markets.

Russia dominated the Black Sea and blocked Ukrainian exports after its full-scale invasion in 2022. A subsequent deal that allowed limited Ukrainian exports fell apart last summer.

But Ukraine has found its own solution. Ukraine has fired missiles from land, hitting Russian ships that ventured too near the coast, and Ukraine also has developed its own sea drones to attack Russian vessels.

Retired U.S. Adm. James Foggo , who worked alongside the Ukrainian Navy in the Black Sea a decade ago, said the sea drones point to Ukraine's naval ingenuity.

"They're jet skis with explosives packed on them," said Foggo, who now heads the Center for Maritime Strategy in Arlington, Va. "They have some kind of remote control from some kind of command center. I don't know what kind of radio control they have on these things, but they're pretty darn good."

The Ukrainian missile and sea drone attacks have forced Russian ships to retreat from the western half of the Black Sea, opening the channel along the western coast for Ukrainian exports.

Ukraine announced last week that it's been one year since this option became available, and 2,300 cargo ships have used the route, an average of more than six a day. Ukraine also says it's approaching its prewar exports of wheat and other farm products at around 5 million tons a month.

Foggo called this a remarkable achievement.

"The Ukrainians, without a floating navy, have been able to destroy about one-third of the [Russian] Black Sea fleet," or about 25 ships and submarines. "That's absolutely amazing," he said.

Ukraine military
Russia-Ukraine
Russia-Ukraine war

Ukraine's Russia offensive is risky. To help, it wants less US caution on weapons

Ukraine’s daring ground offensive has taken the fight to Russia, but not nearly as much as its leaders would like

WASHINGTON -- Ukraine's daring ground offensive has taken the fight to Russia, but not nearly as much as its leaders would like because, they say, the United States won’t let them.

The U.S. restricts the use of long-range ballistic missiles it provides to Ukraine, which wants to aim them at military targets inside Russia. Ukraine's offensive, along with a barrage of drones and missiles that Moscow launched this week, has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to ease its cautious approach to the use of Western weapons in escalating Ukrainian attacks.

The Biden administration says its careful deliberations, including which advanced weapons it supplies to Ukraine and when, are necessary to avoid provoking retaliation from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some analysts agree Putin would take a Ukrainian strike by an American long-range ballistic missile as an attack by the U.S. itself.

But other American and European supporters of Ukraine say the White House should see that Putin's threats of attacking the West , including with nuclear weapons, are bluster. Their fear is the U.S. support that has allowed Ukraine to withstand Russia's 2022 invasion comes with delays and caveats that could ultimately contribute to its defeat.

"This war is going to end exactly how Western policymakers decide it will end,'' said Philip Breedlove, a retired U.S. general who led NATO in Europe from 2013 to 2016 and is among the retired U.S. military leaders and diplomats, Republican lawmakers, security analysts and others pushing for a loosening of restrictions on how Ukraine uses Western-provided weapons .

“If we keep doing what we're doing, Ukraine will eventually lose," Breedlove said. "Because right now ... we are purposely not giving Ukraine what they need to win.”

Lifting such restrictions “would strengthen Ukrainian self-defense, save lives and reduce destruction in Ukraine,” European Union foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell wrote Monday on the social platform X after Russia launched more than 200 missiles and drones at Ukraine. The next day, Russia launched 91 more.

The push and pull is playing out during Ukraine's surprise offensive into Russia's southern Kursk region, the first ground invasion of Russia since World War II.

Throughout the war , Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has balanced copious thanks for U.S. support with frustrated appeals for more arms and ammunition . Upping the pressure this month, he again said Ukraine must fight the war as it sees fit with all the weapons at its disposal and appealed for the U.S. to drop a ban on using American long-range ATACMS missiles to strike deeper into Russia.

“A sick old man from the Red Square, who constantly threatens everyone with the red button, will not dictate any of his red lines to us,” Zelenskyy said recently of Putin.

The Biden administration this year allowed Ukraine to fire shorter-range U.S.-provided munitions across the border in self-defense, but not ATACMS.

Ukraine's defense minister, Rustem Umerov, and presidential adviser Andriy Yermak were coming to Washington this week to discuss the specific long-range military targets that Ukraine would like to hit in Russia, according to a person familiar with the plans. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to share the officials’ plans.

Security analysts say Ukraine is using U.S.-provided HIMARS rocket systems in its offensive. Ukraine also announced it has used a U.S.-supplied glide bomb against Russian forces and deployed its own prototype of a long-range drone-missile hybrid.

Zelenskyy's military appeared to have launched the ground offensive on Aug. 6 without consulting American leaders.

As Ukraine has claimed hundreds of square miles (hundreds of square kilometers) of Russian territory, it has taken a message from another U.S. ally that receives military support, said Roman Kostenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and military commander.

“Israel once stated that it is quite respectful of the advice of its partners, but as an independent state, it makes decisions independently,” Kostenko told the Ukrainska Pravda news outlet. “I believe we can mirror this.”

The U.S. has deliberated at length before eventually approving a succession of advanced weapons that Ukraine has pleaded for: modern tanks, precision medium-range rocket systems, Patriot missile batteries , ATACMS for use inside occupied Ukrainian territory and F-16 aircraft .

The Biden administration condemned Russia's attacks this week on Ukrainian energy infrastructure and is helping bolster its ally's air defenses, but has not changed its policy on long-range weapons, national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters this week.

A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the government’s internal discussions, said the Biden administration believes there's no strategic advantage to ATACMS strikes within Russia .

There are too few ATACMS overall to allow Ukraine to hit a significant number of targets within Russia, the official said, adding that Ukraine is using the long-range missiles it has to challenge Russia's hold on the strategically important Crimean Peninsula.

Russia also has moved many of its aircraft away from what the Institute for the Study of War research group says are 16 Russian airbases within potential range of the ATACMS. That includes aircraft launching the hard-to-intercept glide bombs that Russia is using in Ukraine, the official said.

Many outside the administration disagree. More than 200 other Russian military targets are within ATACMS range in what appear to be carelessly guarded areas along 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) of border, said George Barros, a security analyst focusing on Ukraine and Russia for the Institute for the Study of War, which provides closely watched battlefield analysis of the conflict.

Those targets include large military bases, communications stations, logistics centers, repair facilities, fuel depots, ammunition warehouses and permanent headquarters, Barros said.

While tech-savvy Ukraine is pioneering aggressive new ways of using armed drones and electronic warfare against Russia, hardened targets like bases need the bigger punch that ATACMS can provide, Barros said.

A few selective strikes against some Russian targets would force Putin to shift manpower and resources to protect those targets, he said.

“That is the kind of strain that drastically reduces an attacker's ability to successfully logistically support their front-line forces,” Barros said.

Ukraine, fighting a far bigger military, needs the battlefield momentum that it hopes surprise offensives, demoralizing attacks within Russia and advanced weapons can provide. While it's pulled off a feat by deploying armed and uncrewed drone boats to bottle up Russia’s navy in the Black Sea , its biggest battlefield successes were in the first dramatic months of the war.

A 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive ended without major gains, and then U.S. political deadlock stalled military support for months and allowed Russian forces to gain territory.

In grim conversations this summer, Ukrainians and Americans spoke of the risk of a cease-fire on Russia's terms . Without leverage from battlefield successes, Ukraine could be forced to cede large amounts of Ukrainian territory and face another invasion later.

Billions of dollars' worth of U.S. military support is flowing again. Zelenskyy has expanded military conscription. And American military leaders are back to talking of what had been allies' vision for the next phase of the war, said Bill Taylor, a veteran former diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009.

That is, Ukraine spends the rest of the year rebuilding its ground forces and adding capacity to hit Russia hard enough that it seeks a cease-fire next year on terms Ukraine can accept, he said.

Long-range missile strikes on military targets anywhere inside Russia are part of that, Taylor said. “The Ukrainians should not have to give Russians a sanctuary."

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The Ukraine Crisis: What to Know About Why Russia Attacked

Here’s why Ukraine’s importance extends far beyond its borders.

By Patrick Kingsley

Follow live coverage on Russia ’s invasion of Ukraine .

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, just as diplomats at the United Nations Security Council were calling on him to refrain from war and hours after Ukraine’s president made an impassioned bid for peace, appealing to the Russian people to remember their ties to his country.

It is not just Ukraine’s 44 million people whose lives have been upended. In the coming days, many others far from the field of battle maybe find themselves buffeted by ripple effects. The fate of Ukraine has enormous implications for the rest of the continent, the health of the global economy and even America’s place in the world.

Moscow’s move against Ukraine, once a member of the Soviet Union, is sure to increase fears over the security of other former Soviet countries in Eastern Europe. It will heighten concerns about the strength of the post-1989 international order and America’s ability to influence it. It could also raise fuel prices across the world.

Here’s how Ukraine ended up at the center of a global crisis.

Why do Russia, the U.S. and Europe care so much about Ukraine?

Both Russia and the West see Ukraine as a potential buffer against each other.

Russia considers Ukraine within its natural sphere of influence. Most of it was for centuries part of the Russian Empire, many Ukrainians are native Russian speakers and the country was part of the Soviet Union until winning independence in 1991.

Russia was unnerved when an uprising in 2014 replaced Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president with an unequivocally Western-facing government.

Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Here’s where Ukraine has mounted multiple attacks this week in the apparent beginning of its long-planned counteroffensive.

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What's behind Russia's sluggish response to Ukrainian raid?

WASHINGTON — Russian forces have begun slowly responding to a week-long Ukrainian border raid that caught Moscow and even Kyiv's allies by surprise, according to three U.S. officials.

Ukrainian troops poured across the lightly defended border northeast of Kyiv last week, seizing villages and taking Russian troops prisoner. The Ukrainians, backed by more than $55 billion in Pentagon aid since Russia’s invasion in Feb. 2022, did not inform the White House or Pentagon in advance of their incursion, a U.S. official said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin as blamed Ukraine's allies for the embarrassing breach .

"It appears that the enemy, with the support from their Western backers, is executing their directives, and the West is using Ukrainians as proxies in this conflict," he said Monday at a national security meeting in Moscow.

"It seems the opponent is aiming to strengthen their negotiating position for the future," he added.

More: Russia opens new front in Ukraine war. Is Ukraine losing the war with Russia?

Caught off guard, Russia's initial response has been muted. Three U.S. officials, none of whom were authorized to speak publicly, described an under-prepared Russian military that may be constrained in its efforts to repel the Ukrainians by an over-reliance on artillery.

The Russian military lacks quick-reaction forces that can respond to an emergency, one of the officials noted, while the Pentagon trains and equips forces to respond quickly when needed. For example, the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division is capable of “forcible entry” missions anywhere in the world within 18 hours. Within four days, the division is prepared to deploy larger numbers of soldiers.

While Russian forces have pummeled the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine with millions of artillery shells in the more than than 900 days since Putin first invaded, Moscow has has been reluctant to use heavy artillery shelling to expel the Ukrainians from Kursk , two officials said.

Part of the reason may be a reluctance to attack its own towns, officials said. The Russian may also be running short on artillery ammunition, which they’ve fired constantly during intense fighting in eastern Ukraine.

More: One week in Kursk: Maps show Ukraine offensive as Russia builds trenches after attack

More recently, Russia has begun to move forces to confront the Ukrainian forces that now occupy as much as 1,000 square kilometers in Kursk, according to a second official. Among the reasons for the slow response is that Russian authorities don’t have a clear sense of what the Ukrainians are trying to do.

One possible motive for Ukraine’s attack is capturing Russian troops that Ukraine could use in a prisoner exchange, one official said. More than 3,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war have returned home in prisoner swaps, but it's unclear how many POWs each side is holding.

Stories from abroad, explained. Sign up for USA TODAY's Russia-Ukraine Crisis newsletter.

"Our advance in Kursk is going well today – we are reaching our strategic goal. The 'exchange fund' for our state has also been significantly replenished," Zelenskyy said Wednesday night.

Ukraine's Kursk gambit has raised morale in the country amid a dismal stalemate that's seen small but punishing Ukrainian losses in recent months.

More: Life on Ukraine’s front line: ‘Worse than hell’ as Russia advances

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, on Wednesday, according to a summary of their call.

“Minister Umerov provided an update on battlefield dynamics, as well as the impact of Russia's continued attacks in Ukraine,” Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement.

In Russia, solidarity and apathy as war with Ukraine escalates

Volunteers rally for people displaced by Ukraine’s incursion, but in Moscow, some brush off Kyiv’s drone assault.

Volunteers load a truck with humanitarian aid intended for residents of the Kursk region, which was affected by an incursion of Ukrainian troops in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict, in Moscow, Russia August 16, 2024. Signs on boxes and volunteers' T-shirts read: "Moscow helps". REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

On Wednesday, Russia’s air defence shot down 11 drones in and around Moscow in what was described as one of the “largest ever” such attacks by the city’s mayor, as Ukraine continues to strike within Russian territory proper.

Further south towards the Ukrainian border, Kyiv’s troops continue their advance through the Kursk region while rocket fire and artillery continue hitting the city of Belgorod , resulting in dozens of civilian casualties.

Keep reading

Kursk incursion lifts ukraine’s hopes but some expect ‘nightmare’ in donbas, putin inspects troops with kadyrov on first chechnya visit since 2011, ukraine targets moscow in ‘one of largest ever’ drone attacks, russia faces manpower woes after failing to stop ukraine’s kursk incursion.

The spillover of war in the border regions has struck a cord. State-back media channels have urged unity.

Some have even drawn parallels with the second world war when Kursk was a major battleground between Soviet and Nazi tanks.

“Kursk, all of Russia is with you,” read a banner lighting up the Rostov Arena stadium in Rostov-on-Don, earlier in August.

“Kursk, Krasnodar is with you,” read a message inscribed in burning candles on the main square of the eponymous city.

There have been many aid initiatives for conflict-racked regions and the thousands of Russians who have been displaced by the fighting.

Volunteers have been gathering aid for internal refugees in major cities such as Saint Petersburg. Donations are then driven by van to shelters and evacuation points in the Kursk region.

The shelling of Belgorod has not been forgotten, either.

“It’s impossible to break the people of Belgorod,” Margarita Lisnichaya, a political scientist, Belgorod native and member of the Digoria Expert Club think tank, told Al Jazeera.

“The townspeople stoically withstand the enemy’s blows and continue to stay in their homes. People know: they are at home and all of Russia supports them.”

Ukrainian drones have been striking Moscow throughout the conflict, even going so far as hitting the Kremlin itself last year, an act which officials described as a “terrorist attack”.

However, since then, the novelty has seemingly worn off and the drones, which rarely hurt Muscovites themselves, cause much less alarm.

All interviewees requested Al Jazeera withhold their last names.

“In my circle, they’ve barely said anything [about Wednesday’s incident],” said David, a Moscow resident in his late thirties who works in academia.

“From what I can see – only wry humour. They just sit in their offices, smirking to themselves: ‘Ah, it’s just another regular delivery’, ‘Nothing interesting has arrived for us yet’.”

“I don’t know, everyone was asleep when it happened,” added David’s friend Dima. “No one even reads the news about this any more.”

“The last time UAVs caught us by surprise was last year,” Dima said, referring to the drone attack on the Kremlin.

“Someone is probably nervous, as always,” said 40-year-old Luna, a milliner.

“In my circle, this was not discussed, especially since they didn’t even seem to have landed. Personally, I’m not nervous. It either hits us or it doesn’t, there’s no point in worrying. But I do live next to a hydroelectric power station, so perhaps there are reasons to worry.”

As part of Kyiv’s offensive and in an attempt to complicate Russia’s war effort, Ukrainian drones have repeatedly hit targets such as oil refineries and other infrastructure.

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