Category Archives: Russia

The Ukraine War is a Stalemate. What if Putin Escalates to Try to Win?

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Russia Su-34Russia is not going to win unless it escalates. So what do we do if it uses a really horrific weapon?

This is a re-post of a column I wrote recently for 1945.com. When I wrote it, it still looked like Russia would win by sheer weight. As we come up on April, a Russian victory is increasingly unlikely. The Russian military, as structured, is too heavy, too poorly supplied, too corrupt, and too reliant of sheer firepower to win.

By winning, I mean something like Russia’s original war aims – replacing the Ukrainian leadership, annihilating its military, or taking territory (Donbas, the Black Sea coast). If you define down ‘winning’ to mean just blowing the place to hell, I guess Russia is ‘winning.’

But Putin has tied his legacy to this war; he’s macho, self-possessed, and desperate for Russia to be ranked as a great, consequential power in world politics. He is likely to escalate to try to win rather than withdraw, even as this war reduces Russia’s claim to great power status even more.

So what do we do if Russia uses a chemical or even tactical nuclear weapon to break the battlefield stalemate? The pressure from the Western public to do something in response would be overwhelming. At minimum, I think much of the objection to a no-fly zone would dissipate. That, in turn, would become a low-intensity NATO-Russian shooting war with the ever-present possibility of it spiraling out of control.

We need to start thinking, now, what we would do if Russia uses non-conventional weapons in a desperate bid to win. Naturally, all our options are bad. Here’s that 1945 essay:

The war in Ukraine is devolving into a grind of limited, costly Russian advances and ferocious Ukrainian counterattacks. It still looks as if Russia will win – if only because it will relentlessly pound Ukrainian cities with artillery – but there is now a reasonable chance Ukraine will fight Russia to a stalemate.

It is now painfully clear that Russia expected a blitzkrieg victory, a quick, in-and-out invasion similar to its ten-day war in Georgia in 2008. A modernized, high-tech Russian military was to roll over a poorly-armed and -trained Ukrainian army fighting for a weak state with low public legitimacy. The plan was, apparently, to impose a Russian stooge in the place of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and then go home before the West could organize a response.

Read the rest here.

Mearsheimer, NATO Expansion, and the Ukraine War – M Predicts Russia’s Desire to Dominate Ukraine, but also NATO Expanding to Fill a Vacuum

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UkraineEveryone seems to have a take on Mearsheimer and Ukraine, so here’s mine: Mearsheimer’s offensive realism predicts Russian’s desire to dominate its borderlands, but ALSO a NATO effort thwart that via expansion. So its awkward that he blames NATO, because playing international politics toughly is what his offensive realist theory would predict NATO to do.

This is a re-post of an article I wrote a few days ago at 1945.com. I should say to start that I find damning Mearsheimer as some kind of Russian operative or stooge is wrong. He’s been predicting this for years, and he’s an academic with a reputation for integrity. He’s a far cry from embarrassing, pro-Putin hacks like Tulsi Gabbard or Glenn Greenwald.

Still, I think Mearsheimer gets Ukraine wrong, because he only looks at it from Russia’s perspective. His theoretical priors – offensive realism – do predict that Russia will try to control its borderlands. But offensive realism ALSO predicts that

1. those borderlands will try to escape Russian domination (which Ukraine is doing now and Eastern Europe did by joining NATO)

2. Russian competitors will try to help those borderlands escape (which NATO did by accepting Eastern European states)

3. Germany/EU/NATO, for which Eastern Europe is also a borderland, will also try to dominate it (which has indeed been the case historically – Germany and Russia have contested to dominate EE)

4. states with a window of opportunity for gain against an opponent (Russia’s post-Cold War weakness) will take it (which NATO and Eastern Europe did by consolidating expansion when Russian was weak)

In other words, Mearsheimer’s own theory does not predict Russian domination of Eastern Europe as a stable equilibrium but instead predicts a dynamic contest between Russia, the states it seeks to dominate (Ukraine included), and Germany/EU/NATO for whom Eastern Europe is also a borderland.

Here’s that essay on 1945.com:

The debate over the causes of the Ukraine War is intense. In the West, there has been much contention over whether the expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union provoked the invasion. The most famous proponent of that claim has been John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago professor of international relations. Mearsheimer’s core argument is made here and here, and he has recently re-stated it here and here. Others have made this argument as well (here, here, here). The Russian government has even deployed Mearsheimer’s talks to defend its war.

Please read the rest here.

Should We Support a Ukrainian Insurgency if Russia Wins the War?

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UkraineThis is a re-post of a column I wrote a few days ago for 1945.com. I think almost everybody’s working assumption is that, yes, we should support an insurgency – assuming the Ukrainians lose the battlefield conflict which still seems likely

The reasons seem pretty obvious: Russia is clearly the aggressor. The Ukrainians are putting up a tough fight. It’s hard not to sympathize with their plight and want to help them as much as possible. A non-fly zone would be super risky, so support for their war effort, including after a battlefield defeat is a good choice.

All that is persuasive to me too, but I would add a few points:

1. The Ukrainians need to make the choice to launch an insurgency themselves. It will be brutal and likely long. We should not egg them on. They need to decide on their own.

2. The Ukrainians can’t use across-the-border safe-havens in NATO territory. A common tactic in insurgencies is to slip into a neighboring country to re-group and avoid the counter-insurgent. The VC/NVA did this in Vietnam, as did the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. But in Ukraine, we can’t have Russian forces chasing Ukrainian rebels on NATO territory. The escalation threat is too great.

3. What if the Russian COIN is extremely vicious and the Ukrainians can’t win? There is a humanitarian argument for surrender if a) you can’t win, and b) the other side is massacring your people in response. I don’t know just how harsh the Russians will be as counter-insurgents, but their tactics in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Syria, and now in Ukraine suggest a future COIN in Ukraine would be harsh.

Here’s that 1945 essay:

Ukrainian resistance is inspiring. Almost overnight, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has become a global celebrity. Stories of Ukrainian grandmothers standing up to the Russians are all over social media (however exaggerated). Ukraine’s chances of winning the war – or more accurately, fighting the Russians to a standstill – are improving with every day it is not defeated. Time is on Ukraine’s side, particularly given Russia’s growing logistical problems.

Can Ukraine Hang On Another Month?

If Ukraine can hang on for another month, Russia is in serious trouble. By then, the NATO operation to send weapons, ammunition, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine will be running at full speed. Also at that point, the sanctions on Russia will be sinking deep into the crevices of its economy. Most industries and firms will have spare parts and reserves for a few weeks. So for the rest of March, Russians might still be able to have their foreign car repaired, or find a replacement battery for their foreign cell phone. By April that will be unlikely, and small failures throughout Russia’s economy will be cascading into a major crisis.

Read the rest here.

China’s Support for Putin in Ukraine, and Resistance to Sanctions, is Not Just about Taiwan

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ChinaThis is a local re-post of a column I wrote recently for 1945.com. If you want to see just how absurd Chinese support for Putin is becoming, here is China’s own version of QAnon.

My basic argument is that Beijing is supporting Russia for reasons beyond just the precedent for its own move on Taiwan someday and desire for Russian support for that. That’s part of it obviously. But I think there at least three deeper reasons, which I initially suggested here on Twitter:

First, ideological. China is an autocracy. It wants other autocracies to survive in order to mask or normalize its own autocracy. It does not want to stand alone, as a authoritarian outlier in a world of democracies with a global norm of democracy. So it will not enforce sanctions on N Korea, nor on Russia. It won’t help its own ideological self-isolation.

Second, strategic. China has an obvious interest in Russia and North Korea playing spoiler to the world’s democracies. If the democracies are busy with North Korean shenanigans and Putin’s risk-taking, they’re not focusing on the East and South China Seas. So why not keep these countries afloat for the distraction value?

Third, economic. Sanctions-running is lucrative. It’s a nice way to get ultra-cheap contracts for NK fishing rights or Russian natural resource exports.

Also, Putin getting himself bloodied against the West is also no bad thing for China, given long standing Chinese-Russian tensions in Asia.

Here’s that 1945 essay:

Ukrainian resistance in the war against Russia has surprised everyone. There is now a growing chance Ukraine may stalemate the Russian army. And even should Ukraine be defeated – which is still likely given the sheer amount of force Russian President Vladimir Putin can bring to bear if he chooses – a Ukrainian insurgency seems increasingly likely. Western support of that insurgency also seems increasingly likely.

In short, Putin will not win the quick war he appears to have expected. Russia will be badly isolated and increasingly dependent on China as an escape hatch from the pressure of sanctions.

Read the rest here.

More on Sanctions against Russia: Yes, Sanctions are Blunt and Limited, but Our Options are Limited; a No-Fly Zone would be very Risky

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SanctionsThis is a re-post of something I wrote recently at 1945.com on sanctioning Russia. It pulls from Twitter debates on Russian sanctions I’ve gotten tangled up in (here, here, here).

So everybody agrees that sanctions are a blunt tool. And everybody also agrees that sanctions don’t ‘work’ if you insist that they should achieve some enormous goal like pushing Russia out of Ukraine or denuclearizing North Korea. And it’s probably true that the US particularly overuses sanctions. And finally, it’s common to blame sanctions for humanitarian impacts (although I’d argue that’s more because of internal allocative decisions in the target states, but that’s a debate for another time).

So everybody agrees they kinda suck. So why do we do them? Because they are often a middle option between dovish diplomacy and the hawkish use of force:

Diplomacy is ideal, and in some cases like the Iran deal, it appears to have worked. Trump dumping that deal for sanctions was a mistake. But in tough cases like NK WMD or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, diplomacy seems like too weak a response. NK has a long history of gaming talks to buy time to build its WMD, and it’s pretty clear in Ukraine that Russia is seeking a battlefield solution. So yes, let’s keep talking, but tougher cases probably require a bit of steel in the glove.

The use of force is too much steel in the glove though in most cases. An no-fly zone over Ukraine is a step toward NATO-Russian war, as just about everyone now grasps. Denuclearizing NK by force would likely start another war.

So yeah, sanctions are unsatisfying, but we wind up there, because other options are often worse. Here is that 1945 essay:

The Limits on Sanctions against Russia – The Russian invasion of Ukraine is bogging down. Russia’s poor tactical performance and severe logistical snarls have surprised much of the world, including Putin himself apparently. The Ukrainians are fighting better and harder than expected. Ukraine’s civilian population is rising up. We have all seen videos of regular Ukrainians yelling at Russian soldiers or making Molotov cocktails.

This war is not the blitzkrieg Putin hoped for. Ukraine will not consensually join a Russian sphere of influence. Resistance is widespread, and Russia will need to leave an occupation army for some time if it hopes to solidify its gains. Hence, even if the Ukrainian military is defeated on the battlefield – which is still probable –a Ukrainian insurgency seems likely.

Please read the rest here.

Ukraine: We Won’t Put Up a No-Fly Zone, but We do have Other Options: Sanctions, Weapons/Ammo Assistance, Humanitarian Aid, even Foreign Volunteers

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Russia T-80 TanksSorry for not posting for awhile. I have commented heavily on the war on Twitter. Please follow me there. I have also been writing a lot of columns on the war for 1945.com this week. Go here.

This post is a re-up of something I wrote for 1945 this week. Basically I argue that we should stop focusing on whether or not to establish a non-fly zone (NFZ). We are not going to do that. It is way to dangerous. I know the Ukrainians want an NFZ, and we want to help them, but risks of spiraling, kinetic exchanges between NATO and Russia are just too great.

Enforcing an NFZ would require NATO to shoot down Russian planes and helicopters, or at minimum target air defense on the ground. Russian operators would die. NATO pilots would too as the Russians shot back. Pressure would rise on both sides to respond elsewhere and with greater force. That escalation risk is scary. Both are nuclear-armed with large militaries. That constrains us.

Perhaps if the behavior of Russian forces in Ukraine really becomes terrible and extreme, we will reconsider. But that strikes me as a unlikely at the moment. Putin is a gangster, but he’s not Hitler. He also has a strategic interest in not levelling Ukraine and igniting an insurgency in response to occupier brutality.

I would also point out that NATO publics do not want to risk a war with Russia even if you do.

But we can, and are, sending lots of weapons, ammunition, and humanitarian aid, effectively funding and equipping the Ukrainian war effort as the Ukrainians themselves fight it. Sanctions will push up the price of the war for Russia. Even foreign volunteers are now going there.

Here’s that 1945 essay:

Ukraine’s resistance to Russia is genuinely heroic. People around the world have been moved by the inspiring imagery on social media. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has become a global celebrity overnight. In this passionate moment, there have been widespread calls for the West to do more.

This is tempting of course. The NATO alliance sits right across the border. Ukraine borders three NATO members. That enormous convoy of Russian armored vehicles north of Kyiv is an attractive target, and Ukraine does not appear to have enough assets to strike it. Zelensky has asked for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Strategically, this makes sense for the Ukrainians. Russian airpower substantially outguns the Ukrainian side. The incompetence displayed on the Russian side this week will likely slowly give way. The sheer weight of Russian power will likely be brought to bear in the coming month. Ukraine will still probably lose the conflict – even if the likelihood of that is lower than we thought last week.

Read the rest here.

Why Hasn’t the ‘Imminent’ Russian Invasion of Ukraine Happened? Likely bc Putin – and the Russian Military especially – Fear a Quagmire, Worsened by Decades of Putin’s Own Misrule

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UkraineThis is a re-post of an essay I recently wrote for 1945.com. Putin still hasn’t pulled the trigger on a Ukraine invasion, almost two months into this ‘imminent’ crisis. That increasingly prompts the question, why? What’s the delay?

The answer, I bet, is that Russia just can’t afford a quagmire war like it (barely) could in the 1980s in Afghanistan, in great part because of how badly Putin himself has misgoverned the country. To stay in power, he has run down Russian power, turning the country into a hugely corrupt, stagnant petro-dictatorship.

A country like that just can’t handle the stresses or costs of a ‘forever war.’ Stupid, unwinnable wars are expensive and generate lots of domestic stress. The US struggled to contain the dislocations generated by the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars. The USSR’s disastrous counter-insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s helped brought the country down. Putin – with far less national power at his disposal, ironically because of his own catastrophic misrule of Russia – now faces a war which could shake his regime at home if it turns into a quagmire.

To be sure, it still seems like Putin will invade. If I had to guess, he will. Staging all those force in the cold is costing him a fortune. If he backs down know, he’ll think he looks like a wimp. And Putin loves macho posturing, so he’ll probably just invade to prove what a tough guy he is after getting trolled so much by the Biden administration.

But since he is still shilly-shallying, I’d say he is starting to realize that an invasion would a huge disaster for Russia. It does have the size and weight anymore for even a limited operation like this. That’s Gangster Putin’s own fault and a delicious irony we should all enjoy.

Here’s that 1945.com essay:

A Russian invasion of Ukraine has appeared imminent for almost two months now. Yet it has not happened, and the window for it is closing. When the spring rains hit in the next month or so, maneuver warfare on the Eurasian plain will be substantially harder. Armored and tracked vehicles will struggle in the mud. Also, maintaining a large force in staging locations at high readiness is expensive, especially in the cold. Russian troops must be fed and housed in the field in temporary facilities at cost. In short, if Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to invade Ukraine, it must be soon. And yet he has not.

Read the rest here.

If the EU Steps Up (which it won’t), then Ukraine Need Not Undermine the US Pivot to Asia

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ChinaThis is a re-post of an essay I wrote for 1945.com a few days ago. My argument is an expansion of what I complained about a few days ago: Europe, not the US, should be leading on Ukraine.

Yes, the US can do it, but that Europe can’t take care of security issues of medium-range right on its own doorstep is just embarrassing. It raises the obvious opportunity cost that deeper US involvement in Europe undercuts the pivot.

I am little skeptical of this overrating this fear, as I say in the essay, because the US spends so much on national security – the Defense Department budget, plus all the other defense spending we don’t run through DoD in order to make its budget look smaller than it actually is. That aggregate number is around 1 trillion USD, which should be enough to confront both Russia and China (especially given Russian weakness), except for open war with both simultaneously.

So we shouldn’t get carried away that Ukraine will stop the American re-balance against China. Biden is pretty clearly avoiding a major commitment to Ukraine to prevent this outcome.

But still, it is long overdue for the Europeans to get organized on common defense, especially when they complain about the US ignoring their opinions on issues like Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s what happens when you don’t spend on defense and implicitly expect the Americans to do the heavy lifting.

In fact, the an ideal world would be an integrated European Union defense identity which acted as a second liberal superpower, confronting Russia and Islamic radicalism in its region, while the US confronted China. What a huge advancement of liberal and democratic values that would be! But that’s decades away if ever…

Anyway, here is that 1945 essay:

As the Ukraine crisis heats up, its impact on the US effort to re-balance to Asia, specifically against China, has arisen. The consensus is that, for the most part, a renewed US focus on European security will pull US resources and policy-maker attention away from Asia and back toward Europe. In a similar manner, the US has hitherto struggled to focus on East Asia, as China took off in the last two decades, because of the war on terror. Yet China is of far greater import to the US in the coming decades than either Eastern Europe or the greater Middle East. On that, there is near consensus in the foreign policy community now.

The rest is available here.

Yes, Ukraine is a Crisis, but Mostly Limited to Eastern Europe and EU Ineffectiveness; Don’t Read it onto East Asia

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UkraineThis is a re-up of a column I wrote for 1945.com recently. I find the hyperbole in Western media on Ukraine exhausting. As with the Afghanistan withdrawal commentary last August, the usual suspects of blob neocons and hyperventilating journalists are going bananas that nothing less than world order is on the line in Ukraine! Did you know we even have to fight a war with Russia? Did you know that war has been ‘imminent’ for, um, the last six weeks? *sigh*

All this is wrong, just like it was wrong last summer when the ‘it’s always the 1930s!’ crowd engaged in the same histrionics over Biden’s Afghan withdrawal. Here are two Twitter threads by me – on Ukraine and Afghanistan – about the neocon-blob-industrial complex’ impulse to read every challenge to the US everywhere in the most apocalyptic terms possible.

So yes, Ukraine is a crisis, but a limited one. It’s not going to bring down NATO or the EU or democracy and so on. And no, it’s not going to encourage China to attack Taiwan. Deterrence doesn’t work that way. It’s far more nuanced and local than whether or not a US president is seen as ‘strong’ or ‘weak,’ which is such a flexible, subjective criterion anyway, that it is analytically pretty useless. Not everything is about the US president’s reputation for toughness, and that US analysts so often come back to this point just shows you their parochialism: they don’t know much about the rest of the world so they read everything through the US politics lens they know. Bleh.

The real geopolitical take-away from the Ukraine mess is – besides the obvious looming  catastrophe for Ukraine and, somewhat also, for Russia – is the pathetic impotence of the Europeans on their own security even on their doorstep. Good grief. Anytime the Europeans want to step up and take responsibility for their own affairs would be great. Paul Poast and I have a piece coming in Foreign Affairs about US allies’ free-riding, and Ukraine is illustrating our argument every day.

Anyway, here is that 1945 essay:

Ukraine is a serious, but limited, crisis. For the Ukrainians living near Russia’s potential invasion points, the possibility of serious violence looms. And for Ukraine’s fledgling, unsteady democracy, such an invasion would be a disaster. Even Russia grey zone warfare – a mixed attempt at subversion and bullying without opening invading the country – would be terrible. It would set Ukrainian democracy back a decade or more, corrupt the government, and likely split the country. Russia clearly has the ability to enforce its will on Ukraine in the short-term, and there is little the West can do about it barring the risk of major escalation.

Read the rest here.

The Ukraine Mess is about Putin’s Post-Imperial Hangover, Not NATO Expansion, ‘Weak’ Biden, etc…

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RussiaThis is a re-up of an essay I wrote recently for 1945.com about Ukraine. I say badly what Cheryl Rofer and Francis Fukuyama say much better than me, namely that:

Russia would probably not have respected Eastern European sovereignty had NATO not expanded, so it is a red herring to blame NATO expansion for Putin’s current bullying of Ukraine. Realists and restrainers have been arguing this for a while, including Stephen Walt who summarizes it all nicely here:

Had the United States and its European allies not succumbed to hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal idealism and relied instead on realism’s core insights, the present crisis would not have occurred. Indeed, Russia would probably never have seized Crimea, and Ukraine would be safer today. The world is paying a high price for relying on a flawed theory of world politics.

The idea that Russia wouldn’t be bullying Ukraine without NATO expansion turns on two highly contestable ‘realist’ assumptions, it seems to me:

1. It somehow was a ‘liberal illusion’ (Walt) to pull Eastern Europe into NATO when we had the chance.

Wait, isn’t it also realist to grab a power advantage when one has the chance? Why is it liberal fluffery to bring a huge swathe of sympathetic states into the Western community, improving Western power, when given the chance? Realists say the West took advantage of Russian weakness to expand NATO, as if realist paradigmatic priors of perilous, self-help anarchy suggest we should have left Eastern Europe unaligned. But that’s wrong; realism says the opposite: we should have – and did – screw the Russians when we had the chance, because, hey, anarchy is a tough, dog-eat-dog world and grabbing a big advantage at low cost (Russia was weak and the threat of conflict was low) is exactly what egoistic states do. (I dislike this argument myself. I supported expansion for more liberal reasons, because the Eastern European states so obviously wanted to join. My point rather, is it’s hardly ‘realist’ to pass over a huge, possibly one-time, opportunity to improve Western power.)

2. Russian behavior toward Eastern Europe would be more restrained, more liberal, and less neo-imperial had NATO not expanded.

Does anyone really believe this? Consider Russia’s long history of dominating and bullying its ‘near-abroad’ neighbors. Consider Putin’s obviously revanchist temperament and huge, chip-on-his-shoulder imperial hangover. He clearly misses the Soviet Union and its influence in the world and insatiably craves the perception of parity with the US. I suppose it’s possible Putin would have behaved better, but I’d say the counterfactual that he’d be bullying non-aligned Poland or the Baltics right now – with Ukraine already subverted and controlled – is just as credible if not more.

Anyway, here’s that 1945 essay:

A Russian invasion of Ukraine would be a disaster for Russia. It would obviously also be a disaster for the Ukrainian population, but geopolitically it is hard to see how Russian President Vladimir Putin would escape either the international isolation which would ensue, or win the war itself with manageable costs.

Read the rest here.