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America shouldn’t insist on a strategic defeat of Russia
BY MICHAEL O’HANLON & CAITLIN TALMADGE, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS
The Hill, 12/13/23
The Biden administration has done a generally solid job on Ukraine policy — first warning the world about Russia’s intentions, then helping Ukraine survive the invasion, and subsequently marshalling unprecedented NATO assistance. Along the way, America has avoided provoking Russia escalating to attacks on NATO territory or nuclear weapons use. Today, Ukraine controls more than 80 percent of its pre-2014 territory and is holding its own against Russia in the south and east.
But the war is far from over. Russia aspires to expand its territorial holdings and wants to keep Ukraine permanently destabilized, unable to integrate with the West. Ukraine wants to win back all of its territory, including Crimea, and to pursue its own future economic and security relationships outside Russia’s strategic orbit.
The two sides are so far apart in their goals that negotiations currently seem pointless and, for President Zelensky, politically impossible. Meanwhile, Putin likely believes he can simply wait out Western support and throw more bodies at the front until he exhausts an abandoned Ukraine.
In this context, what should America’s war aims be? President Biden says the United States will help Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” Some Republicans want to cut off all U.S. funding, but most Democrats as well as Republicans seem to have a more practical question: what battlefield goals are truly within reach, and what strategic outcome would be adequate to protect American interests?
Most Americans believe Ukraine has the moral high ground — but that is different from believing Ukraine will get everything it wants at the end of this fight.
We would counsel the Biden administration to rethink two aspects of its approach, even as it remains rightly and resolutely committed to Ukraine’s survival and ultimate reconstruction as a nation.
First, the slogan “as long as it takes” doesn’t work. The war has effectively been stalemated for all of 2023. Reinforcing failure to the tune of more than $50 billion a year in taxpayer money will, at some point, no longer make sense. The Biden administration should argue that Ukraine now deserves a serious chance to try again to win back territory over the 2024-2025 time frame — because the operations Ukraine is attempting are incredibly challenging, because building modern militaries takes time, because it would be awful to see Putin achieve his territorial goals, and because millions of Ukrainians still live under brutal Russian rule.
But once we have a newly elected president — Biden or Trump or someone else — that leader should undertake a strategic review of the Ukraine war over the course of 2025. Should the war still be stalemated then, it would make sense for the U.S. to rethink its maximalist approach to helping Ukraine — and there is no reason not to say so now. This would not embolden Putin, who already assumes as much. Nor would it imply that we might abandon Ukraine in 2025. It would mean only that we might have to scale back our goals for what can be achieved on the battlefield — and to scale back our support for Ukraine at that point accordingly.
Second, the U.S. should avoid setting its sights on the vague goal of a “strategic defeat” for Russia. We do not say this out of any sympathy for Vladimir Putin. And, to be sure, at one level Russia has already suffered a strategic defeat. Putin’s invasion has led to a larger and stronger NATO, severe economic punishment, the exodus of more than a million Russian citizens, at least 300,000 casualties and no obvious path out of what is becoming a forever war.
But Putin will likely remain committed to this war now that he is in it. He has a high tolerance for other people’s pain, which he surely sees as an acceptable price for reclaiming choice land that used to be part of Russia’s empire. And with Russia’s larger population, he may be able to continue paying that price indefinitely. Furthermore, whether or not Russia gains more territory, Putin is achieving his goal of destabilizing and impoverishing Ukraine simply by keeping the war at a stalemate and preventing deeper integration with the West.
As such, the goal should not be “strategic defeat.” The goals, rather, should be stability in Europe and the sustainability of a strong Ukraine, both of which are best served by ending the war sooner rather than later. Achieving these goals will require lots of help for Ukraine even if, ultimately, we must encourage Kyiv to give up on reclaiming all its land. This will also require strong Ukrainian economic and security linkages to the West.
With this kind of more realistic talk about how the United States views the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration may improve its chances of convincing a wary Congress to provide another big assistance package for Kyiv. Now is the moment to help Ukraine prepare the proper offensive that it has not yet had the time, resources or strategic dexterity to prosecute. But that window will not, and should not, last forever — and defeating Putin comprehensively at all costs should not be our central goal.
In fact, the Russian president supposedly breathed his last on Thursday, Oct. 26. The Putin we see now is thus actually his double, who, Solovey claims, has been filling in for the sickly real Putin for several months.
Few Russian or Western analysts believe General SVR and Solovey (who some say are one and the same person). After all, they have no concrete evidence supporting their sensational claims. They do provide remarkably detailed accounts of Putin’s supposed death that enhance their verisimilitude, but imaginative crackpots and secret police provocateurs would be expected to do the same.
The problem is that Solovey strikes one as anything but a crackpot or a dupe of the Federal Security Service. He has a biting sense of humor, speaks well, argues logically and generally comes across as the kind of professor every student would want. Other than his claims regarding Putin’s death and the supposed exile of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the deceased head of the mercenary Wagner Group, to an island off the coast of Venezuela, his analyses of Russia’s internal politics are invariably smart and incisive.
So, if Solovey isn’t a madman or a puppet, he must be one of two remaining possibilities.
As a would-be opposition leader who may or may not really believe that Putin is dead, Solovey may be determined to sow confusion in the ranks of Russian elites and among ordinary Russians, leading them to wonder whether the great leader is still alive and to question whether the man claiming to be Putin really is Putin — thereby undermining his legitimacy.
With Russia’s presidential elections scheduled for March 2024, popular doubt about Putin’s health and existence can only complicate the Kremlin’s plans regarding just who should run and what margin of victory should there be. Unsurprisingly, Putin’s spokesman, the ever-mendacious Dmitry Peskov, felt compelled to deny rumors of Putin’s death and the existence of Putin doubles as fake news. But, since Peskov is always assumed never to tell the truth, was the denial a confirmation, or was it really a denial?
The other possibility is that Solovey and General SVR are not bona fide independent democratic oppositionists, as they claim to be. They may in fact be agents of the security services or spokesmen for powerful elites able to provide Solovey — who lives in Moscow and, despite his savage criticism of Putin, has managed to avoid arrest — with protection. The intended effect of the death claim would be the same — doubt, confusion and delegitimation — but the fact that the instigators could be establishment elites has more worrisome implications for Putin and the political system.
Two democrats in cahoots with a handful of others in Russia can effectively spread rumors, but cannot upend the existing system. In contrast, elite efforts to delegitimize the current regime bespeak a significant crack within what appears to outside observers as a monolithic regime.
And that, in turn, means that the post-Putin power struggle has already broken out, even if the real Putin is still alive. It’s broken out because the elites, both those supporting Putin and those opposing him, believe that Putin is too enervated, too weak or too politically moribund to make a difference.
Would the elites providing cover to Solovey be democratically inclined or, at least, opposed to retaining the existing Putinite system? Given Russia’s political culture, given that its population has been taught to despise liberalism and democracy for over two decades, and given the high likelihood that establishment elites may be out to merely reform the system and not replace it, chances are that Solovey’s possible protectors are conservative reformers who would want to dismantle the worst aspects of Putinism and try to end the war against Ukraine before the number of Russian dead exceeds 300,000. Solovey himself describes his politics as liberal conservative, which may also be the appropriate modifiers to describe his protectors.
Regardless of whether Putin is physically dead or alive, the brouhaha over his rumored death clearly shows that he’s in serious trouble. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have read General SVR’s and Solovey’s claims. Many more are discussing them. Seeds of doubt about the “grandpa in the bunker,” as Putin’s critics call him, have been planted.
And just as the general and Solovey have no proof of Putin’s death, their critics have no proof of his life, as one can always claim that the man claiming to be the real Putin is really a doppelganger.
Russian politics is becoming even more bizarre than usual. Strap on your seatbelts: The next few weeks and months are likely to be even more full of surprises.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
by Debra Cagan, John Herbst and Alexander Vershbow, opinion contributors
The Hill,
Nearly 20 of our fellow experts and national security professionals — whose digital signatures appear at the end of this op-ed — agree: The war in Ukraine has reached a decisive moment and that vital U.S. interests are at stake.
Long before the Kremlin first invaded Ukraine in 2014, we have — from senior positions in the U.S. government and military — followed Moscow’s foreign policy and the grave dangers it presents to the United States and our allies. We have carefully watched Moscow’s major offensive since February and the response of the Biden administration and its allies and partners. We have maintained close touch with Ukrainian, U.S. and European officials. Two of us just returned from meetings with Ukraine’s defense and military leaders.
Although the Biden administration has successfully rallied U.S. allies and provided substantial military assistance, including this month, to Ukraine’s valiant armed forces, it has failed to produce a satisfactory strategic narrative which enables governments to maintain public support for the NATO engagement over the long term.
By providing aid sufficient to produce a stalemate, but not enough to roll back Russian territorial gains, the Biden administration may be unintentionally seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. Out of an over-abundance of caution about provoking Russian escalation (conventional as well as nuclear), we are in effect ceding the initiative to Russian President Vladimir Putin and reducing the pressure on Moscow to halt its aggression and get serious about negotiations.
Moscow’s imperialist war against the people of Ukraine is not just a moral outrage — a campaign of genocide aimed at erasing the Ukrainian nation from the map — but a clear danger to U.S. security and prosperity.
American principles and interests demand the strongest possible response, one sufficient to force the Russians as much as possible back to pre-February lines and to impose costs heavy enough to deter Russia from invading a third time. With Russian forces struggling to regroup in the east and stave off Ukrainian efforts to retake Kherson in the south, now is the time for Ukraine’s allies to pull out all the stops by providing Ukraine the means it needs to prevail. Dragging out the conflict through so-called strategic pauses will do nothing but allow Putin to regroup, recover and inflict more damage in Ukraine and beyond.
But so far, neither the administration nor European allies have succeeded in making clear why this is important to the United States and the West. It is important because Putin is pursuing a revisionist foreign policy designed to upend the rules-based security system that has ensured American and global stability and enabled prosperity since the end of World War II. Putin’s aggressive designs do not end in Ukraine. As Russian officials have repeatedly made clear, if Russia wins in Ukraine, our Baltic NATO allies are at risk, as are other allies residing in the neighborhood.
Prudent policy today identifies tomorrow’s risk and seeks the right place and time to deal with that risk. For the U.S. and NATO, that time is now — and the place is Ukraine, a large country whose population understands that its choice is either defeating Putin or losing their independence and even their existence as a distinct, Western-oriented nation.
With the necessary weapons and economic aid, Ukraine can defeat Russia.
If it succeeds, our soldiers are less likely to have to risk their lives protecting U.S. treaty allies whom Russia also threatens.
What does defeat for Putin look like? The survival of Ukraine as a secure, independent, and economically viable country. That means a Ukraine with defensible borders that include Odesa and a substantial portion of the Black Sea coast, as well as a strong, well-armed military and a real end to hostilities. That should ideally include the return to Ukrainian control of all territories seized since Feb. 24 and, ultimately, the lands stolen in 2014, including Crimea. Such a peace is only possible when Putin realizes he is soundly defeated and can no longer achieve his objectives of dominating Ukraine or any other nation by force.
Moscow’s plan now is to make as many gains on the battlefield as possible; to conduct sham referendums in the newly occupied Ukrainian territory as a prelude to their annexation; to undermine unity in the West’s support for Ukraine by cutting off gas supplies going into the winter; and to blockade Ukrainian ports to produce destabilizing food shortages in the Global South designed to blow back on the West. For all of these purposes, Moscow needs time. Which means the United States and its allies must keep the pressure on Moscow.
The Biden administration should move more quickly and strategically, in meeting Ukrainian requests for weapons systems. And when it decides to send more advanced weapons, like HIMARS artillery, it should send them in larger quantities that maximize their impact on the battlefield.
Ukraine needs long-range fires to disrupt the Russian offensive, including Russian resupply, fuel, and ammunition stocks. That means the U.S. should send ATACMS munitions, fired by HIMARS with the 300km range necessary to strike Russian military targets anywhere in Ukraine, including occupied Crimea. And Ukraine needs constant resupply of ammunition and spare parts for artillery platforms supplied from various countries, some of which are not interchangeable. These systems are constantly in use, which makes maintenance and spare parts resupply critical. How and where these tasks are accomplished and the logistics infrastructure to quickly get the equipment back where it can be of greatest use can also make a huge difference.
Beyond this, Ukraine needs more short- and medium-range air defense to counter Russian air and missile attacks. An increasing problem is the need to deploy adequate countermeasures to hamper the growing prevalence of Russian-produced drones and new ones it is trying to procure from Iran.
It is to Putin’s advantage to threaten nuclear war, but not to initiate it. And we have seen the Kremlin make nuclear threats that proved hollow — for instance in connection with Finland and Sweden joining NATO. If we allow Putin to intimidate us from providing the weapons Ukraine needs to stop Russian revisionism, what happens when he waves his nuclear wand over the Baltic states? And why would the administration assume that Putin would not dare do that with Estonia or Poland if the tactic worked for him in Ukraine?
The stakes are clear for us, our allies, and Ukraine. We should not fool ourselves. We may think that each day we delay providing Ukraine the weapons it needs to win, we are avoiding a confrontation with the Kremlin. To the contrary, we are merely increasing the probability that we will face that danger on less favorable grounds. The smart and prudent move is to stop Putin’s aggressive designs in Ukraine, and to do so now, when it will make a difference.
General Philip Breedlove, USAF (ret.); 17th Supreme Allied Commander Europe and distinguished professor, Sam Nunn School, Georgia Institute of Technology
Debra Cagan, former State and Defense Department official;distinguished energy fellow, Transatlantic Leadership Network
Ambassador Paula J. Dobriansky, former under secretary of state for global affairs
Ambassador Eric Edelman, former ambassador to Finland and Turkey;former under secretary of defense for policy
Ambassador Daniel Fried, former assistant secretary of state for Europe;Weiser Family distinguished fellow, Atlantic Council
Ambassador John Herbst, former Ambassador to Ukraine and Uzbekistan; senior director, Eurasia Center, Atlantic Council
Ambassador John Kornblum, former ambassador to Germany
David Kramer, former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor
Robert McConnell, former assistant attorney general; co-founder, US-Ukraine Foundation
Ambassador Stephen Sestanovich, former ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union; senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations;professor, Columbia University
Ambassador William Taylor, former ambassador to Ukraine
Ambassador Alexander Vershbow, former NATO deputy secretary general; former assistant secretary of defense; former ambassador to Russia and NATO
Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, former ambassador to Ukraine
Institutional affiliations are for purposes of identification only.
