The Crimea annexation: "Putin fears the existence of a strong and prosperous nationalism-minded Ukraine, but removing a bunch of pro-Russian people from the Ukrainian electorate made that more likely ...."
Indeed. Some analysts believe that Khrushchev moved Crimea from Russia to Ukraine to weaken Ukraine by making it more Russian.
> For a compromise to work, Russia has to want to compromise. And continuing to support Ukrainian success on the battlefield is the best way to make that happen.
How's that working out? Because the result of Ukraine taking back territory in Kharkiv Oblast was that Putin mobilized 300,000 men and formally annexed 4 Ukrainian Oblasts. And the result of the Kerch Strait Bridge bombing was that Putin put the general responsible for Russia's Syria operations in charge of the war in Ukraine, escalated strikes on civilian infrastructure, and is now looking to buy more missiles and drones from Iran.
By giving weapons to Ukraine while refusing to articulate a clear end goal and not objecting to Zelensky repeatedly stating almost certainly unattainable maximalist goals such as retaking Crimea, the US government has effectively given a blank check to Ukrainian hardliners. And the result, so far, has been empowering Russian hardliners. What is that thing that they say about the definition of insanity, again?
I debate with myself whether Europe is actually free-riding.
Historically-speaking, Russia’s military is the classic Western military: a thin cadre of officers and unempowered NCOs with a large equipment inventory to fit out conscripts when they’re called up.
The US military is just very different since Vietnam. Our units are constantly at full strength and trained. Equipment is forward deployed and constantly in use. The amount of training soldiers receive is extremely high. Historically, this sort of military investment is very rare even though it’s always how the absurdly dominant military powers operated.
So is Europe free-riding or is it just doing what countries have always done with their military?
A big question in the cold war was: are US citizens willing to risk nuclear destruction in order to protect western Europe from the Soviets? It seems the US was able to convince that former empire that yes, they were willing to do so - largely due to the NATO structure. The NATO system has continued long past the demise of the Soviets, but the underlying promise remained essentially intact, and was even expanded.
But I think that also during the post-Soviet period, despite the expansion of Nato, the willingness of US citizens to take personal risks to protect Europe has diminished significantly. This is largely because Europe is clearly wealthy enough to protect itself, if it wants to.
It seems obvious to me, and apparently to many in Europe based on their reactions, that Putin would not stop with Ukraine. So why should the US aid Ukraine? What exactly are we saying? I hope its not along the lines of "we're back! We're here to save Europe from the Russians, and we will fight to the death!" My interpretation is it is more like, "let's buy some time while Europe prepares, with an eye toward diminishing US involvement, to confront an aggressive Russia." (yes, I simplify by referring to "Europe.").
Given this, I think that even if you support our help for Ukraine (as I do) you have to take Putin's nuclear threats seriously. Not to the US or Nato, but to Ukraine. And I'm not sure there is any effective response to it. US citizens are not willing to die to save Ukraine,. (It is dubious enough that most of them would do so for a Nato country). So direct military action against Russia seems off the table.
Will Ukraine be terrorized into submission as a result? Maybe. Will they continue fighting heroically? Maybe. But the big question is, can Europe get prepared to defend itself without relying on US civilians being in the line of fire?
Suppose US policy A implies a 2% chance of global nuclear catastrophe and a 3% chance of catastrophe (nuclear or otherwise) for Ukraine, while US policy B implies a 1% chance of global nuclear catastrophe but a 10% chance of catastrophe for Ukraine.
Plausibly the US would prefer B to A, while Ukraine would prefer A to B.
Obviously I made those numbers up, but the basic point -- that Ukraine is going to be willing to tolerate higher levels of global risk than the US to deter Russia from destroying Ukraine -- is surely right. Isn't this an important sense in which US and Ukrainian interests are not aligned?
The situation in Donbas was also starting to look unsustainable due to Western arming of Ukraine. In particular, the big Russian troop buildup in Fall 2021 started after Ukraine used Turkish Bayraktar drones against the Donbas militia, only one year after those exact same drones had devastated a post-Soviet Army that, liked the Donbas militias, lacked the latest anti-drone countermeasrues in Nagorno-Karabach. https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-using-turkish-drones-donbass-conflict-self-defence-zelenskiy-says-2021-10-29/
Since the cover story was that the Donbas rebels had gotten all of their weapons from the Ukrainian military, Russia couldn't give them the latest anti-drone countermeasures without breaking plausible deniability, meaning that the Donbas rebels wouldn't be able to hold out much longer unless the rules of the game were changed. It really isn't hard to figure out.
"The United States is using up a lot of military equipment in the war, but it’s being used for the purpose of destroying Russian military equipment. Since we were already fully committed to an anti-Russian military alliance, this is actually a really good deal for us. Basically, NATO equipment + Ukrainian lives are being traded for Russian equipment + Russian lives, which leaves NATO coming out ahead."
What's the evidence that Russia posed a threat to US interests before? Because if they didn't, then we're wrecking Europe's economy and running down US and NATO military stockpiles for a pointless war that it still isn't entirely clear won't end up with Russia having more territory than they had on February 23 when the dust settles.
"And when Volodymyr Zelenskyy was first elected in 2019, he ran and won as a dovish alternative to the incumbent regime."
Yes, and when Zelensky actually tried to implement the Minsk Accords after he was elected, the far-right militias in the Donbas refused to follow his orders to stand down and threatened to lynch him. Zelensky manged to negotiate a ceasefire despite this in 2020, but then in 2021 he took a much sharper anti-Russian turn: talking about retaking Crimea, banning pro-Russian media, and, like I said above, using TB2 drones in the Donbas. The new BIden administration openly approved all of this. The actual invasion was preceded by a massive increase in shelling along the Donbas line of contact.
"For all the talk of Ukraine and NATO, it’s worth recalling that not only did the war directly lead to Sweden and Finland applying the join the alliance, but their accession proved to be a bit of a nothingburger."
Putin didn't actually take back that offer until September 30 when he formally announced the annexation of the 4 regions in Ukraine. The offer was on the table for more than 6 months.
Meanwhile, Biden still has yet to articulate any coherent goal for what is now undeniably a US military operation, while in the last few months Zelensky has been calling for almost certainly unattainable goals such as retaking Crimea by force that even Matt expresses serious reservations about in this very article. Is it too much to ask that our government articulate just what they are trying to accomplish here?
On March 29, as part of the Istanbul negotiations, the Ukrainian government made public a proposal that amounted to: Ukraine would declare neutrality and agree to not build nuclear weapons or host foreign troops in return for Article V-esque security guarantees from a number of countries. These security guarantees would not include Crimea and would also not include parts of the Donbas, with the exact boundaries to be determined in later negotiations, effectively ceding those territories. The issue of Crimea would be kicked down the road for 15 years. https://faridaily.substack.com/p/ukraines-10-point-plan
Russian government officials were asked about this proposal at the time, and their only recorded public objection was to the part about Crimea: "Peskov bristled at the mention of the Crimean proposal, saying it was part of Russia and that only Russia could decide the peninsula's fate." https://www.rferl.org/a/kremlin-donwplays-ukraine-peace-talks/31777798.html
I think this is strong evidence that when Russian spokesmen said "neutrality" on March 7, they likely would have been fine with an interpretation of "neutrality" that meant: Ukraine can't officially join military alliances and no nuclear weapons, NATO bases, or NATO missiles on Ukrainian territory. I note that marked NATO trainers had been deployed to Ukrainian territory from 2015-early 2022, and Putin had referred to the training missions in speeches as "de facto NATO bases."
Russian officials also did not publicly object to this part of the proposal: "For their part, these guarantors confirm their intention to promote Ukraine’s membership in the European Union."
There is no way that Russia is going to invade Ukraine. That was my personal assessment based on about fifty years of readings on military science and an up to date knowledge of Russian military strength. And that assessment assumed the limited number of combined arms formations Russia had at its disposal were well trained, supplied, had adequate logistics and were in any way competent to undertake the task. In fact I was wrong. They were stupid enough to try and as a bonus proved they weren't competent to do that.
I suppose my main beef with this piece is the nonsense about NATO allies not spending enough on their military. Clearly, given Russian capabilities, they were spending more than they needed to spend. Nowhere in any NATO agreement on funding was stipulated that NATO members needed to have ready stockpiles of arms or munitions for donation to non-NATO members. No one anticipated this situation, And it doesn't have anything to do with what is going on in Ukraine.
The weird thing to me is the people who claim the war *won't* end with some sort of negotiated settlement. Like even in Ukraine succeeds in taking back the Donbass and Crimea (seems unlikely IMO), you still have all sorts of problems that would needs some sort of settlement, from what to do about the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who are now in Russia to things like border crossings or what to do with war criminals (real or imagined) or what to do with Crimean ethnic Russias who don't want to go back to being Ukrainians.
So while I agree with Matt that Putin is the main road block to any sort of deal here I think the "Ukraine wins Russia loses, that's how it ends!" people on Twitter are really out to lunch on how this war, or wars in general, tend to actually end.
Yes, I remain incredulous about the "unconditional Ukrainian victory" position that a lot of people have -- there's no way that can be achieved absent large scale internal political changes in Russia and Ukraine, NATO, etc. have no power to accomplish that. Even if Ukraine physically drives Russian troops not just back to the start line of the invasion, but to the 1991 borders, that wouldn't end the war unless Russia was amenable to it since Russia would otherwise still retain the ability to make air, drone, missile, and artillery strikes into Ukraine and foment unrest amongst the now-internalized ethnic Russian population. (This last issue is really the ultimate sticking point -- there is no possibility of a permanent peace between Ukraine and Russia at any plausible set of borders absent large scale population transfers one way or another.)
You do know that Russia is already carrying out large scale population transfers, right? Large numbers of people fled the Donbas when Russia started military operations there in 2014 and the population has continued to decline over time. There's been mass kidnappings of Ukrainians, particularly children to Russia since the new phase of the war began. It's not clear whether people have a choice on whether to "evacuate" Kherson. This is over and above the mass shelling and destruction of Ukranian towns and cities by the Russian military and the death squads that follow in their wake.
Yes, I'm aware of that, although part of those activities (e.g., the Kherson evacuation and child abductions) wouldn't help accomplish what I'm talking about and likely would make things worse by simply commingling the populations further.
I don't understand this point. If Russia removes the local population to Russia by force and the quisling/recent Russian settlers flee to Russia from occupied Ukraine, there is much less of an ethnic Russian population in Ukraine. Ukraine obviously would like its citizens back, but Russia is the one forcing large-scale population transfers here and making Ukraine more Ukranian in culture and language.
Yup, totally aware of all of this. My big point if you can't just wish away issues like how, as far as I can tell, most people who live Crimea don't want to go back to being part of Ukraine. Zelensky's policy could be "I don't care, we will force you to be part of us, or you can flee" but a brief reading of the [squints at notes] last 120 years of European history shows this often doesn't end well.
Yup, likewise how do you start the reconstruction of Ukraine if the war is still going on? Likewise with Crimea there are things other than population transfers/ethnic cleansing you could do, say make Crimea a demilitarized free state largely in control of its own internal affairs in some sort of federal union with Ukraine or something like that. But of course that would require a diplomatic deal. These are real problems you can't just wish away.
There is a thread running through these debates of: "if Putin is able to keep territory then the invasion will have been a success for Russia and nuclear blackmail proven effective". I disagree with this premise, and I think it clouds thinking on this issue.
1. If Russia magically got to keep all currently "annexed" territory tomorrow (which they can't they need to bleed more first under any optimistic for Russia scenario), the invasion would still have been an enormously costly mistake. Their military has been extremely depleted (and humiliated) and will be difficult to rebuild given export controls and economic weakness and loss of morale and officers. Lots of Russians have died.
2. Inheriting these territories likely to be a net drain on resources for the foreseeable future. They are probably buying long term guerilla and terroristic resistance and a costly occupation. Their economy will basically never recover from sanctions to an ex-ante position (and fossil fuel profits are a melting icecube anyway). Their elites will not be welcome on the world stage.
It has been a huge, colossal, enormous, irreversible disaster ALREADY.
3. Russia is, clearly, still significantly restrained by NATO nuclear and conventional deterrent (just as NATO has been by theirs). This is nothing new. Russia not willing to nuke Kyiv or even employ tactical nukes so far on their end, despite getting their asses kicked by NATO armed troops. NATO, in turn, is calibrating its aid to defensive weapons (no long range cruise missiles) and not providing direct military support like a no fly zone.
4. Adding this together and the lesson is not "take Estonia if you want! Easy money!" it's "you'll end up with a conventional war boondoggle you might even lose, gain nothing, and lose much. The much stronger and more advanced than you NATO will arm partisans to kill a bunch of your guys, and you might get couped as a consequence as your economy continues to collapse and you become super isolated."
I agree that Putin is not anywhere close to putting a deal on the table Ukraine will accept, and that's the issue of overriding importance. But there are a broad range of "bad for Ukraine" deals that would satisfy NATO interests given the costs already imposed. That is, in fact, strategic misalignment.
"They are probably buying long term guerilla and terroristic resistance and a costly occupation."
This part doesn't seem to have panned out. Nearly 8 months of occupation of large parts of Ukraine and Russia was able to outright annex the most historically "pro-Western" city in Eastern Ukraine (Kherson) with relatively little resistance. There have been *some* behind-the-lines attacks, but count them up and they don't even reach the level of early 90s Northern Ireland (as of September 8 the count was 20 Russia-appointed officials killed *and injured*). In addition, according to the Washington Post anonymous Ukrainian government sources have strongly implied that at least some of these attacks were carried out by Ukrainian special forces, not local partisans. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/08/ukraine-assassinations-occupied-territory-russia/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
This is why I don't like how Matt Y keeps waving around his "invading Ukraine is a bad idea" article from early February. He was right that invading Ukraine was a bad idea for Russia, but he reached that conclusion for the wrong reasons. Matt predicted that Russia would easily win the conventional war, but that Ukrainians everywhere would fight a fierce insurgency Both of these predictions turned out to be false.
Insurgencies take a while to get going. It’s likely people are holding off and waiting for the Ukrainian army to come to them. After all, the Ukrainian army is winning, and it seems to have zero problems with pushback once it reaches an area. If I was Russia, I’d be worried about insurgencies in Dagestan, Buryatia, and all the other places they are press-ganging non-ethnic Russians from to die in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian army started to take back significant territory in September. Russia captured most of the territories back in February, and started their de facto annexation process in April. Should have been plenty of time.
The Battle of Kyiv was won in a month and Russian forces driven completely out of Kyiv and Zhytomyr oblasts by April 4. That sounds like significant territory to me. Russian strategic objectives of capturing Kiev were over and done with by then. There has been ongoing partisan warfare, even though the Russian occupiers torture and kill civilians at scale.
I think it's worth noting that in a way we're not really fighting a war against Russia at all - the war is against its governing regime. Obviously the regime represents Russia and controls Russia and Russia is bound by the regime's decisions, but what I'm getting at is there's a real principal-agent problem here. Even if Russia had *won* this war, it wouldn't actually have served the "national interest of Russia" and certainly not of the Russian people. The whole thing was done to serve the interests of the regime alone.
What this means for us now is that just because the war has already inflicted huge harm on "Russia" does not necessarily mean that, if a settlement is negotiated now, it would serve as an effective future deterrent for Russia's principals. I don't think it would.
I was using it as an example of maximal "nuclear bullying leads to Russia conquering the west because it shows USA actually backs down over nuclear blackmail which opens up great Russian opportunities for expansion" rhetoric but feel free to insert your non-NATO eastern European country of choice if you think that fits the argument better.
I think we are agreeing that Russia's has shot itself in the foot (head?) here and is not getting a real W no matter what happens to Ukraine, let alone retaining the capacity and interest in picking more conventional fights.
It's completely justified to anyone who has even a one-paragraph understanding of how the Security Council works, but how remarkable it is that this article makes not one single mention of the UN.
At the end of the day Russia broke the cardinal rules of the game established in 1945. Namely that war must not be “diplomacy by other means”, and that you cannot simply initiate an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country to better your situation.
Any outcome other than “Russia must fail and be seen to fail” in this war would be catastrophic, as it will show that this behavior is legitimate. More wars in Europe will be sure to follow, as will the invasion of Taiwan. The odds of nuclear conflict will *increase* exponentially.
We don’t need a Versailles-level punitive-humiliating agreement for Russia , but we do need one that shows clealry and *beyond question* that the war wasn’t worth it, and not just from the humanistic perspective that “alll wars are bad” but from a nationalist perspective too, i.e. Russia must lose all it took since 2014. The principle of sovereignty must be reaffirmed on the ground. I repeat and stress that the interest of Justice and security for all (preventing nuclear war) are aligned here. To appease putin out of fear of nuclear war would just make that outcome more likely.
While this expresses the present correctly, the history is flawed.
"You can also have conflicts in the form of free-riding. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, America’s European allies objectively needed help defending themselves against the Soviet Union. Thus the logic of NATO. Today, though, Europe clearly has the financial resources to defend itself which would let the United States focus on helping Asian allies who actually don’t have the scale to stand alone against China."
The reason for low European spending in 1949 was only partly their inability to afford more. It was also because of a perception that European powers could not be trusted with large military budgets - and had caused all the devastation two world wars by that very spending. The USA, whose large isolationist political faction meant that it could be trusted not to start aggressive wars with that large military, was therefore deputed to run the defence of Europe against the USSR.
The most obvious case here is West Germany in 1949, when the sense was that a large Bundeswehr would be too similar to a restoration of the Wehrmacht of the Nazi era and of the Kaisers and therefore restricting their military and supplying the defence of Germany through the large US deployment and the smaller UK, Belgian and Dutch deployments, but Italy was also seen as similarly problematic, and lots of countries hadn't gotten over the threat that a powerful France would represent if all of its adversaries were rendered incapable of defending themselves. The idea of de Gaulle going on a conquest spree like a third Napoleon might seem laughable now, but it did not seem so in the 1940s.
The modern political situation - and, indeed, the entire post-Cold War era - is completely changed, but there are plenty of Europeans who still prefer the idea of American soldiers protecting them to soldiers of their own nation whom they do not trust.
I don’t take the realists to worry that a stubborn Ukraine is the impediment to negotiations but rather that the US is driving the bus here and the US’s clear goal is to degrade Russia and possibly get rid of Putin. The next step in the logic is that Russia knows this and for that reason the conflict has become much kore a US/Russia conflict than Afghanistan in the 80s ever was. That makes it more difficult for Russia to save face and we are in an escalating cycle that is difficult for both sides to escape (the US can’t back down in the face of nuclear threats, true, but that is a problem too). The idea is that the US should try to find ways to signal it wants a negotiated solution but it seems not to be doing that. Not imposing a no-fly zone was good but we need more restraint like that and more signals that there is some exit ramp.
Hear, hear.
The Crimea annexation: "Putin fears the existence of a strong and prosperous nationalism-minded Ukraine, but removing a bunch of pro-Russian people from the Ukrainian electorate made that more likely ...."
Indeed. Some analysts believe that Khrushchev moved Crimea from Russia to Ukraine to weaken Ukraine by making it more Russian.
"But then they published this reminder"
Was "this reminder" meant to be a hyperlink to the relevant ISW article?
Oh and:
> For a compromise to work, Russia has to want to compromise. And continuing to support Ukrainian success on the battlefield is the best way to make that happen.
How's that working out? Because the result of Ukraine taking back territory in Kharkiv Oblast was that Putin mobilized 300,000 men and formally annexed 4 Ukrainian Oblasts. And the result of the Kerch Strait Bridge bombing was that Putin put the general responsible for Russia's Syria operations in charge of the war in Ukraine, escalated strikes on civilian infrastructure, and is now looking to buy more missiles and drones from Iran.
By giving weapons to Ukraine while refusing to articulate a clear end goal and not objecting to Zelensky repeatedly stating almost certainly unattainable maximalist goals such as retaking Crimea, the US government has effectively given a blank check to Ukrainian hardliners. And the result, so far, has been empowering Russian hardliners. What is that thing that they say about the definition of insanity, again?
I debate with myself whether Europe is actually free-riding.
Historically-speaking, Russia’s military is the classic Western military: a thin cadre of officers and unempowered NCOs with a large equipment inventory to fit out conscripts when they’re called up.
The US military is just very different since Vietnam. Our units are constantly at full strength and trained. Equipment is forward deployed and constantly in use. The amount of training soldiers receive is extremely high. Historically, this sort of military investment is very rare even though it’s always how the absurdly dominant military powers operated.
So is Europe free-riding or is it just doing what countries have always done with their military?
A big question in the cold war was: are US citizens willing to risk nuclear destruction in order to protect western Europe from the Soviets? It seems the US was able to convince that former empire that yes, they were willing to do so - largely due to the NATO structure. The NATO system has continued long past the demise of the Soviets, but the underlying promise remained essentially intact, and was even expanded.
But I think that also during the post-Soviet period, despite the expansion of Nato, the willingness of US citizens to take personal risks to protect Europe has diminished significantly. This is largely because Europe is clearly wealthy enough to protect itself, if it wants to.
It seems obvious to me, and apparently to many in Europe based on their reactions, that Putin would not stop with Ukraine. So why should the US aid Ukraine? What exactly are we saying? I hope its not along the lines of "we're back! We're here to save Europe from the Russians, and we will fight to the death!" My interpretation is it is more like, "let's buy some time while Europe prepares, with an eye toward diminishing US involvement, to confront an aggressive Russia." (yes, I simplify by referring to "Europe.").
Given this, I think that even if you support our help for Ukraine (as I do) you have to take Putin's nuclear threats seriously. Not to the US or Nato, but to Ukraine. And I'm not sure there is any effective response to it. US citizens are not willing to die to save Ukraine,. (It is dubious enough that most of them would do so for a Nato country). So direct military action against Russia seems off the table.
Will Ukraine be terrorized into submission as a result? Maybe. Will they continue fighting heroically? Maybe. But the big question is, can Europe get prepared to defend itself without relying on US civilians being in the line of fire?
Suppose US policy A implies a 2% chance of global nuclear catastrophe and a 3% chance of catastrophe (nuclear or otherwise) for Ukraine, while US policy B implies a 1% chance of global nuclear catastrophe but a 10% chance of catastrophe for Ukraine.
Plausibly the US would prefer B to A, while Ukraine would prefer A to B.
Obviously I made those numbers up, but the basic point -- that Ukraine is going to be willing to tolerate higher levels of global risk than the US to deter Russia from destroying Ukraine -- is surely right. Isn't this an important sense in which US and Ukrainian interests are not aligned?
"Russia had Crimea. They had a “frozen conflict” going on in Donbas that was keeping Ukraine out of NATO."
Crimea had a worsening water crisis due to Kyiv damming up the North Crimean Canal, which had provided 85% of Crimea's fresh water. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-19/russia-vs-ukraine-crimea-s-water-crisis-is-an-impossible-problem-for-putin
The situation in Donbas was also starting to look unsustainable due to Western arming of Ukraine. In particular, the big Russian troop buildup in Fall 2021 started after Ukraine used Turkish Bayraktar drones against the Donbas militia, only one year after those exact same drones had devastated a post-Soviet Army that, liked the Donbas militias, lacked the latest anti-drone countermeasrues in Nagorno-Karabach. https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-using-turkish-drones-donbass-conflict-self-defence-zelenskiy-says-2021-10-29/
Since the cover story was that the Donbas rebels had gotten all of their weapons from the Ukrainian military, Russia couldn't give them the latest anti-drone countermeasures without breaking plausible deniability, meaning that the Donbas rebels wouldn't be able to hold out much longer unless the rules of the game were changed. It really isn't hard to figure out.
"The United States is using up a lot of military equipment in the war, but it’s being used for the purpose of destroying Russian military equipment. Since we were already fully committed to an anti-Russian military alliance, this is actually a really good deal for us. Basically, NATO equipment + Ukrainian lives are being traded for Russian equipment + Russian lives, which leaves NATO coming out ahead."
What's the evidence that Russia posed a threat to US interests before? Because if they didn't, then we're wrecking Europe's economy and running down US and NATO military stockpiles for a pointless war that it still isn't entirely clear won't end up with Russia having more territory than they had on February 23 when the dust settles.
"And when Volodymyr Zelenskyy was first elected in 2019, he ran and won as a dovish alternative to the incumbent regime."
Yes, and when Zelensky actually tried to implement the Minsk Accords after he was elected, the far-right militias in the Donbas refused to follow his orders to stand down and threatened to lynch him. Zelensky manged to negotiate a ceasefire despite this in 2020, but then in 2021 he took a much sharper anti-Russian turn: talking about retaking Crimea, banning pro-Russian media, and, like I said above, using TB2 drones in the Donbas. The new BIden administration openly approved all of this. The actual invasion was preceded by a massive increase in shelling along the Donbas line of contact.
"For all the talk of Ukraine and NATO, it’s worth recalling that not only did the war directly lead to Sweden and Finland applying the join the alliance, but their accession proved to be a bit of a nothingburger."
It turned out to be a nothingburger because they said that they had no plans to host NATO bases or missiles, and Finland and Sweden have had effective Article V protection since 2014 anyway. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/27/finland-sweden-strengthen-ties-nato
----
This whole article completely ignores that back on March 7, Russian government spokesmen publicly stated that they would make peace in exchange for neutrality, Crimea, and Donbas. https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-says-russian-military-action-will-stop-moment-if-ukraine-meets-2022-03-07/ And that negotiations proceeded along those lines for just over a month until Boris Johnson paid a visit on April 9 and encouraged Kyiv to break off negotiations, as reported in Ukrainian news media. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/05/5/7344206/
Putin didn't actually take back that offer until September 30 when he formally announced the annexation of the 4 regions in Ukraine. The offer was on the table for more than 6 months.
Meanwhile, Biden still has yet to articulate any coherent goal for what is now undeniably a US military operation, while in the last few months Zelensky has been calling for almost certainly unattainable goals such as retaking Crimea by force that even Matt expresses serious reservations about in this very article. Is it too much to ask that our government articulate just what they are trying to accomplish here?
Another thing on the negotiations:
On March 29, as part of the Istanbul negotiations, the Ukrainian government made public a proposal that amounted to: Ukraine would declare neutrality and agree to not build nuclear weapons or host foreign troops in return for Article V-esque security guarantees from a number of countries. These security guarantees would not include Crimea and would also not include parts of the Donbas, with the exact boundaries to be determined in later negotiations, effectively ceding those territories. The issue of Crimea would be kicked down the road for 15 years. https://faridaily.substack.com/p/ukraines-10-point-plan
Russian government officials were asked about this proposal at the time, and their only recorded public objection was to the part about Crimea: "Peskov bristled at the mention of the Crimean proposal, saying it was part of Russia and that only Russia could decide the peninsula's fate." https://www.rferl.org/a/kremlin-donwplays-ukraine-peace-talks/31777798.html
I think this is strong evidence that when Russian spokesmen said "neutrality" on March 7, they likely would have been fine with an interpretation of "neutrality" that meant: Ukraine can't officially join military alliances and no nuclear weapons, NATO bases, or NATO missiles on Ukrainian territory. I note that marked NATO trainers had been deployed to Ukrainian territory from 2015-early 2022, and Putin had referred to the training missions in speeches as "de facto NATO bases."
Russian officials also did not publicly object to this part of the proposal: "For their part, these guarantors confirm their intention to promote Ukraine’s membership in the European Union."
There is no way that Russia is going to invade Ukraine. That was my personal assessment based on about fifty years of readings on military science and an up to date knowledge of Russian military strength. And that assessment assumed the limited number of combined arms formations Russia had at its disposal were well trained, supplied, had adequate logistics and were in any way competent to undertake the task. In fact I was wrong. They were stupid enough to try and as a bonus proved they weren't competent to do that.
I suppose my main beef with this piece is the nonsense about NATO allies not spending enough on their military. Clearly, given Russian capabilities, they were spending more than they needed to spend. Nowhere in any NATO agreement on funding was stipulated that NATO members needed to have ready stockpiles of arms or munitions for donation to non-NATO members. No one anticipated this situation, And it doesn't have anything to do with what is going on in Ukraine.
The weird thing to me is the people who claim the war *won't* end with some sort of negotiated settlement. Like even in Ukraine succeeds in taking back the Donbass and Crimea (seems unlikely IMO), you still have all sorts of problems that would needs some sort of settlement, from what to do about the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who are now in Russia to things like border crossings or what to do with war criminals (real or imagined) or what to do with Crimean ethnic Russias who don't want to go back to being Ukrainians.
So while I agree with Matt that Putin is the main road block to any sort of deal here I think the "Ukraine wins Russia loses, that's how it ends!" people on Twitter are really out to lunch on how this war, or wars in general, tend to actually end.
Yes, I remain incredulous about the "unconditional Ukrainian victory" position that a lot of people have -- there's no way that can be achieved absent large scale internal political changes in Russia and Ukraine, NATO, etc. have no power to accomplish that. Even if Ukraine physically drives Russian troops not just back to the start line of the invasion, but to the 1991 borders, that wouldn't end the war unless Russia was amenable to it since Russia would otherwise still retain the ability to make air, drone, missile, and artillery strikes into Ukraine and foment unrest amongst the now-internalized ethnic Russian population. (This last issue is really the ultimate sticking point -- there is no possibility of a permanent peace between Ukraine and Russia at any plausible set of borders absent large scale population transfers one way or another.)
You do know that Russia is already carrying out large scale population transfers, right? Large numbers of people fled the Donbas when Russia started military operations there in 2014 and the population has continued to decline over time. There's been mass kidnappings of Ukrainians, particularly children to Russia since the new phase of the war began. It's not clear whether people have a choice on whether to "evacuate" Kherson. This is over and above the mass shelling and destruction of Ukranian towns and cities by the Russian military and the death squads that follow in their wake.
Yes, I'm aware of that, although part of those activities (e.g., the Kherson evacuation and child abductions) wouldn't help accomplish what I'm talking about and likely would make things worse by simply commingling the populations further.
I don't understand this point. If Russia removes the local population to Russia by force and the quisling/recent Russian settlers flee to Russia from occupied Ukraine, there is much less of an ethnic Russian population in Ukraine. Ukraine obviously would like its citizens back, but Russia is the one forcing large-scale population transfers here and making Ukraine more Ukranian in culture and language.
Yup, totally aware of all of this. My big point if you can't just wish away issues like how, as far as I can tell, most people who live Crimea don't want to go back to being part of Ukraine. Zelensky's policy could be "I don't care, we will force you to be part of us, or you can flee" but a brief reading of the [squints at notes] last 120 years of European history shows this often doesn't end well.
Yup, likewise how do you start the reconstruction of Ukraine if the war is still going on? Likewise with Crimea there are things other than population transfers/ethnic cleansing you could do, say make Crimea a demilitarized free state largely in control of its own internal affairs in some sort of federal union with Ukraine or something like that. But of course that would require a diplomatic deal. These are real problems you can't just wish away.
There is a thread running through these debates of: "if Putin is able to keep territory then the invasion will have been a success for Russia and nuclear blackmail proven effective". I disagree with this premise, and I think it clouds thinking on this issue.
1. If Russia magically got to keep all currently "annexed" territory tomorrow (which they can't they need to bleed more first under any optimistic for Russia scenario), the invasion would still have been an enormously costly mistake. Their military has been extremely depleted (and humiliated) and will be difficult to rebuild given export controls and economic weakness and loss of morale and officers. Lots of Russians have died.
2. Inheriting these territories likely to be a net drain on resources for the foreseeable future. They are probably buying long term guerilla and terroristic resistance and a costly occupation. Their economy will basically never recover from sanctions to an ex-ante position (and fossil fuel profits are a melting icecube anyway). Their elites will not be welcome on the world stage.
It has been a huge, colossal, enormous, irreversible disaster ALREADY.
3. Russia is, clearly, still significantly restrained by NATO nuclear and conventional deterrent (just as NATO has been by theirs). This is nothing new. Russia not willing to nuke Kyiv or even employ tactical nukes so far on their end, despite getting their asses kicked by NATO armed troops. NATO, in turn, is calibrating its aid to defensive weapons (no long range cruise missiles) and not providing direct military support like a no fly zone.
4. Adding this together and the lesson is not "take Estonia if you want! Easy money!" it's "you'll end up with a conventional war boondoggle you might even lose, gain nothing, and lose much. The much stronger and more advanced than you NATO will arm partisans to kill a bunch of your guys, and you might get couped as a consequence as your economy continues to collapse and you become super isolated."
I agree that Putin is not anywhere close to putting a deal on the table Ukraine will accept, and that's the issue of overriding importance. But there are a broad range of "bad for Ukraine" deals that would satisfy NATO interests given the costs already imposed. That is, in fact, strategic misalignment.
"They are probably buying long term guerilla and terroristic resistance and a costly occupation."
This part doesn't seem to have panned out. Nearly 8 months of occupation of large parts of Ukraine and Russia was able to outright annex the most historically "pro-Western" city in Eastern Ukraine (Kherson) with relatively little resistance. There have been *some* behind-the-lines attacks, but count them up and they don't even reach the level of early 90s Northern Ireland (as of September 8 the count was 20 Russia-appointed officials killed *and injured*). In addition, according to the Washington Post anonymous Ukrainian government sources have strongly implied that at least some of these attacks were carried out by Ukrainian special forces, not local partisans. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/08/ukraine-assassinations-occupied-territory-russia/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
So I think we can assume that everything in blue on the 2010 Ukrainian Presidential election map could potentially be up for grabs depending on how the conventional war plays out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Ukrainian_presidential_election#/media/File:%D0%94%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D1%82%D1%83%D1%80_2010_%D0%BF%D0%BE_%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%85-en.png
This is why I don't like how Matt Y keeps waving around his "invading Ukraine is a bad idea" article from early February. He was right that invading Ukraine was a bad idea for Russia, but he reached that conclusion for the wrong reasons. Matt predicted that Russia would easily win the conventional war, but that Ukrainians everywhere would fight a fierce insurgency Both of these predictions turned out to be false.
(I meant most historically "pro-Western" city in *Southeastern* Ukraine.)
Insurgencies take a while to get going. It’s likely people are holding off and waiting for the Ukrainian army to come to them. After all, the Ukrainian army is winning, and it seems to have zero problems with pushback once it reaches an area. If I was Russia, I’d be worried about insurgencies in Dagestan, Buryatia, and all the other places they are press-ganging non-ethnic Russians from to die in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian army started to take back significant territory in September. Russia captured most of the territories back in February, and started their de facto annexation process in April. Should have been plenty of time.
The Battle of Kyiv was won in a month and Russian forces driven completely out of Kyiv and Zhytomyr oblasts by April 4. That sounds like significant territory to me. Russian strategic objectives of capturing Kiev were over and done with by then. There has been ongoing partisan warfare, even though the Russian occupiers torture and kill civilians at scale.
> The Battle of Kyiv was won in a month and Russian forces driven completely out of Kyiv and Zhytomyr oblasts by April 4.
In large part due to large scale partisan/guerrilla warfare in the North of the country, which started on Day 1.
Then after April 4 we had 5 months of near-stalemate outside of Donbas.
> There has been ongoing partisan warfare
I went over this in my original comment. The numbers simply simply aren't that high:
> There have been *some* behind-the-lines attacks, but count them up and they don't even reach the level of early 90s Northern Ireland (as of September 8 the count was 20 Russia-appointed officials killed *and injured*). In addition, according to the Washington Post anonymous Ukrainian government sources have strongly implied that at least some of these attacks were carried out by Ukrainian special forces, not local partisans. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/08/ukraine-assassinations-occupied-territory-russia/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
I think it's worth noting that in a way we're not really fighting a war against Russia at all - the war is against its governing regime. Obviously the regime represents Russia and controls Russia and Russia is bound by the regime's decisions, but what I'm getting at is there's a real principal-agent problem here. Even if Russia had *won* this war, it wouldn't actually have served the "national interest of Russia" and certainly not of the Russian people. The whole thing was done to serve the interests of the regime alone.
What this means for us now is that just because the war has already inflicted huge harm on "Russia" does not necessarily mean that, if a settlement is negotiated now, it would serve as an effective future deterrent for Russia's principals. I don't think it would.
But even the regime's interests have been harmed a great deal.
I was using it as an example of maximal "nuclear bullying leads to Russia conquering the west because it shows USA actually backs down over nuclear blackmail which opens up great Russian opportunities for expansion" rhetoric but feel free to insert your non-NATO eastern European country of choice if you think that fits the argument better.
I think we are agreeing that Russia's has shot itself in the foot (head?) here and is not getting a real W no matter what happens to Ukraine, let alone retaining the capacity and interest in picking more conventional fights.
Replies bare systematically getting more likes than original comments. That is unprecedented and suggests there are no concensus answers.
It's completely justified to anyone who has even a one-paragraph understanding of how the Security Council works, but how remarkable it is that this article makes not one single mention of the UN.
At the end of the day Russia broke the cardinal rules of the game established in 1945. Namely that war must not be “diplomacy by other means”, and that you cannot simply initiate an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country to better your situation.
Any outcome other than “Russia must fail and be seen to fail” in this war would be catastrophic, as it will show that this behavior is legitimate. More wars in Europe will be sure to follow, as will the invasion of Taiwan. The odds of nuclear conflict will *increase* exponentially.
We don’t need a Versailles-level punitive-humiliating agreement for Russia , but we do need one that shows clealry and *beyond question* that the war wasn’t worth it, and not just from the humanistic perspective that “alll wars are bad” but from a nationalist perspective too, i.e. Russia must lose all it took since 2014. The principle of sovereignty must be reaffirmed on the ground. I repeat and stress that the interest of Justice and security for all (preventing nuclear war) are aligned here. To appease putin out of fear of nuclear war would just make that outcome more likely.
While this expresses the present correctly, the history is flawed.
"You can also have conflicts in the form of free-riding. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, America’s European allies objectively needed help defending themselves against the Soviet Union. Thus the logic of NATO. Today, though, Europe clearly has the financial resources to defend itself which would let the United States focus on helping Asian allies who actually don’t have the scale to stand alone against China."
The reason for low European spending in 1949 was only partly their inability to afford more. It was also because of a perception that European powers could not be trusted with large military budgets - and had caused all the devastation two world wars by that very spending. The USA, whose large isolationist political faction meant that it could be trusted not to start aggressive wars with that large military, was therefore deputed to run the defence of Europe against the USSR.
The most obvious case here is West Germany in 1949, when the sense was that a large Bundeswehr would be too similar to a restoration of the Wehrmacht of the Nazi era and of the Kaisers and therefore restricting their military and supplying the defence of Germany through the large US deployment and the smaller UK, Belgian and Dutch deployments, but Italy was also seen as similarly problematic, and lots of countries hadn't gotten over the threat that a powerful France would represent if all of its adversaries were rendered incapable of defending themselves. The idea of de Gaulle going on a conquest spree like a third Napoleon might seem laughable now, but it did not seem so in the 1940s.
The modern political situation - and, indeed, the entire post-Cold War era - is completely changed, but there are plenty of Europeans who still prefer the idea of American soldiers protecting them to soldiers of their own nation whom they do not trust.
As someone (Churchill?) said, the purpose of NATO was to keep America in, the Soviet Union out, and Germany down.
I don’t take the realists to worry that a stubborn Ukraine is the impediment to negotiations but rather that the US is driving the bus here and the US’s clear goal is to degrade Russia and possibly get rid of Putin. The next step in the logic is that Russia knows this and for that reason the conflict has become much kore a US/Russia conflict than Afghanistan in the 80s ever was. That makes it more difficult for Russia to save face and we are in an escalating cycle that is difficult for both sides to escape (the US can’t back down in the face of nuclear threats, true, but that is a problem too). The idea is that the US should try to find ways to signal it wants a negotiated solution but it seems not to be doing that. Not imposing a no-fly zone was good but we need more restraint like that and more signals that there is some exit ramp.