War termination prospects in the Russia-Ukraine War

A good thing about the media habit of highlighting round-year anniversaries is that it does provide a chance for thoughtful analyses to get more of an audience than they usually do.

Yes, thinking about “war termination” is important

In the case of the Russia-Ukraine War, Fred Kaplan¹ gives some thought to war termination, a topic that hasn’t received enough public debate and, in the US, certainly not enough attention from Congress. And he opens with a caution about assuming how much of a Zeitenwende (turning point) the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year may turn out to be: “It is an open question where the war is going, but we can draw certain lessons from the fight so far—some suggesting the contours of a new geopolitical world, others revealing that the world hasn’t changed as much as we have thought.”

That reminds me of a laconic Arlo Guthrie line: “Some things don’t change, you know. Some things do.” But while Everything Changed In The Blink Of An Eye makes a catchy headline, it’s particularly important when it comes to war and preventing war to pay close attention to what really is novel and where the continuities are.

I don’t think Kaplan is trying to be Hegelian here. But he does note as many other have that the current war has highlighted the dependence of Europe on the United States for its defense - particularly against Russia - “the war has built no case for unbridled American power. To the contrary, it has also underscored the necessity of allies.“ In the current case, “The allied [NATO] support for Ukraine has been as effective, legitimate, and popular as it is, precisely because it is an allied effort—not, as Putin has tried to portray it, a campaign for American supremacy.”

The bad news - at least for most participants and victims - “despite the morale-building talk of an inevitable Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat, both sides are stuck in a stalemate, and the war is likely to persist for a long time.“ He offers a plausible outline of what an eventual peace deal might look like. But he notes, as others have, that both sides have to get to the point where they see negotiations as a desirable alternative to continuing the war. While that sounds like a mundane point, how nations and governments act during wars is not determined by spreadsheet calculations but also very heavily by passion and anthropologica habits of long standing. And he speculates about how a Ukrainian defeat could affect the cohesion of the NATO alliance and nuclear proliferation.

He also has some useful reflections on China’s interests and strategic calculations in the war, including the potential advantages and disadvantages of the war continuing longer.

Russia expert Fiona Hill in this recent interview² stresses the need for public diplomatic initiatives to push for negotiations to end the war:

RAND Corporation report on how to shorten the war

No one familiar with the RAND Corporation’s history would confuse it with a pacifist organization. But this report on “Avoiding a Long War”³ is anything but a polemic about what a great chance this is for the West to stick it to the Bad Russians.

It has a helpful analysis of the advantages and disadvantages for the United States of a longer vs. a shorter war. The RAND report argues: "Our analysis suggests that duration is the most important of the remaining dimensions for the United States. The negative consequences of a long war would be severe." (bold in original)

The Biden Administration has publicly stated two goals for its backing Ukraine in the war, in the words of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin⁴ in April 2022: “We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.”

The former goal could be best served by a shorter rather than a longer war, in order to minimize that damage to Ukraine, assuming that the peace settlement was solid enough not to encourage a new war and, presumably, to offer a reasonable chance for Ukraine to eventually regain control of all the territories Russia has taken since 2014. While Ukraine is presently very understandably going to be unwilling to entertain the notion publicly, there are significant examples of countries divided for decades without giving up the goal of eventual unification: China and Taiwan, North and South Korea, Cyrus, East and West Germany.

The second goal stated by Austin, though, is better served by a longer war that drains Russian resources and destroys lots of Russian equipment. Here is where the risks of relying on historical analogies comes to the fore. It’s widely assumed and often mentioned in public commentary that the Soviet war in Afghanistan of 1979-1989 was a major factor, even the primary factor, in the fall and disintegration of the Soviet Union. That is far from an obvious factor. For instance, a Radio Free Europe report on the 10-year anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal stated simply, “The Afghan campaign [war] weakened [the patriotic] mystique [of the Soviet Red Army] and with it the appeal of the Communist regime overall.“⁵

While “mystique” matters in the subjective side of war and politics, as an explanation of something as monumental as the end of the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Soviet regime is, well, very subjective.

On the other hand, Joy Neumeyer⁶ wrote in the generally hawkishly-anti-Russia Atlantic more recently:

Mikhail Gorbachev came into office in 1985 determined to end the war, calling it a “bleeding wound” the following year. Although previous rulers had sought to present the invasion as a noble humanitarian mission, Gorbachev’s relaxation of censorship allowed the press to reveal the conflict’s sordid sides, and freed a variety of people to voice long-suppressed anger over its consequences. Popular ambivalence turned to revulsion as the public learned about war crimes, drug abuse, and neglect of returning veterans. In the embittered anthem “Soldiers Aren’t Born,” the punk-rock band Civil Defense mourned ordinary people’s sacrifices for hollow ideals (“The coffin was wrapped in a red rag, the heroic march drowned out by angry grief”). Veterans, meanwhile, were outraged by criticism that they saw as unjust denigration of their service. [my emphasis]

So, Gorbachev ended a war that had become unpopular. And that led to the fall not only of his government but of the entire country of the Soviet Union?

She points to other factors, as well:

Pacifist sentiments competed for attention with other problems, including the nuclear fallout from Chernobyl, food shortages, and interethnic violence in the republics. Elite regiments that had served in Afghanistan were dispatched to put down pro-independence demonstrations in Baku, Tbilisi, Riga, and Vilnius, killing hundreds of protesters. Amid the chaos of the late ’80s, efforts to reinvent the Soviet Union failed, and the country imploded.

She didn’t include the critical factor that Russia and become a petrostate and thereby made itself subject to big impacts from swings in world oil and gas prices.

My point here is not to dwell on that experience. But rather to caution against facile assumptions that the long war in Afghanistan fatally undermined the whole regime. Especially if the argument leads policymakers to prolong the current war in Ukraine based on that dubious assumption.

Disadvantages to the US from a long war

As Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe write in the RAND report, the US could also reap important benefits from a shorter war. “A negotiated settlement might open the door to a broader negotiation of rules of the road for regional stability that could mitigate the prospects of conflict breaking out elsewhere along Russia's periphery.”

The longer the war goes on, the longer there is a chance for it to escalate into direct war between NATO and Russia. And for Russia to use a nuclear weapon, however indignantly some of the more high-adrenaline New Cold Warriors try to shut down ever the briefest discussion of that risk. They also note that any economic benefit to Ukraine that might come from recovering areas already held by Russia before the start of the current war “is unlikely to be essential to Ukraine's viability.”

And end their Conclusion, they put it this way:

Territorial control, although immensely important to Ukraine, is not the most important dimension of the war's future for the United States. We conclude that, in addition to averting possible escalation to a Russia-NATO war or Russian nuclear use, avoiding a long war is also a higher priority for the United States than facilitating significantly more Ukrainian territorial control. Furthermore, the U.S. ability to micromanage where the line is ultimately drawn is highly constrained since the U.S. military is not directly involved in the fighting. [my emphasis]

There is also a web of implications for the relations between the four power blocs of the US, China, Russia, and the EU. The longer the war goes on, the more dependent Russia is likely to become on China. With China now ranked as the official top national security challenge for the US, that reduces the prospect of the US and/or Europe being able to use Russia as a balance against China. And as long the war continues, the attention of US military and diplomatic personnel will be more heavily focused on Russia and the ongoing war than would be the case if a decent peace settlement were concluded.

The EU and the EU also have to consider the postwar condition of Ukraine. As it is, a huge amount of Ukraine’s economic infrastructure has been destroyed and over a third of its population has been displaced, millions of them outside the country. The worse the destruction, the longer it will take to rebuild. To the extent that the US and Europe find it desirable to have Ukraine as some kind of effective ally against new Russian aggression, the easier it will be to get to that new postwar arrangement, the less destruction there is during the war itself.

To add to the enormous reconstruction costs, which are likely to fall mainly on the EU, is the fact that much of the financial “aid” that Ukraine has received from the West is in the form of loans. And adding Ukraine to the EU and to NATO are not simple or quick operations. It will take years, probably decades, for Ukraine to qualify for membership in either. Additionally, the EU under its current approach would require Ukraine to pursue stringent austerity policies, which the enormous amount of debit its friends have loaded on to the country will make even more devastating in terms of economic development and public infrastructure.

Added to all this, the official purpose of the economic sanctions against Russia is to get them to pull back from the war in Ukraine. But the longer the war goes on, the more elaborate adjustments Russia will have to make, including greater reliance on China. And that means that whatever coercive value sanctions may have will diminish over time. Promising to end sanctions is only effective as a bargaining tool to the degree that Russia would reap benefits from the sanctions ending.

On the other hand, Janis Kluge⁷ makes the argument in a brief piece that in general, the Western sanctions are likely to have a stronger effect over time.

While it may be inevitable that general slogans like “less aid to Ukraine” vs. “more aid to Ukraine” will loom large in Western political debates over the war, Charap and Priebe make clear that provision of aid and security guarantees involve some complex and elaborate sending of signals to both allies and foes.

Early in the war, Kyiv proposed that the United States and other countries provide Ukraine a commitment even more ironclad than those undertaken by Washington toward treaty allies: an explicit vow to use military force if Ukraine were attacked again. (Contrary to popular belief, not even Article 5 of the Washington Treaty commits NATO allies to use force if another is attacked. Each ally promises to take "such action as it deems necessary" in the event of an attack on another.) The reaction in Western capitals to the proposed commitment was lukewarm at best.

I’ll also note here that the mutual-defense clause in the European Union treaty is on its face more robust than the wording in Article 5 of the NATO treaty.

Finally, Anatol Lieven⁸ reminds us that diplomatic signaling is not only complex but fluid:

In 2014, it appears to have been Chancellor Angela Merkel’s warnings of “massive damage” to Russia and German-Russian relations that persuaded Putin to call a halt to the advance of the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. In return, Germany refused to arm Ukraine, and with France, brokered the Minsk 2 agreement, whereby the Donbas would return to Ukraine as an autonomous territory.

In 2016, Russian hopes of a split between western Europe and the United States were revived by the election of Donald Trump – not because of any specific policy, rather because of the strong hostility that he provoked in Europe. But Biden’s election brought the US administration and west European establishments back together again. These years also saw Ukraine refuse to guarantee autonomy for the Donbas, and western failure to put any pressure on Kyiv to do so.

1. Kaplan, Fred (2023): How the Ukraine War Is Likely to End. Slate 02/24/2022. <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/02/how-the-ukraine-war-is-likely-to-end.html> (Accessed: 2023-24-02).

2. Fiona Hill: Absolute victory over Russia is not possible. UnHerd You Tube channel 02/22/2023. (Accessed: 2023-26-02).

3. Charap, Samuel & Priebe, Miranda (2023): Avoiding a Long War: U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict. RAND Corporation, Jan 2023 <https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html> (Accessed: 2023-24-02).

4. Ronald Popeski, Ronald & Kelly, Lidia (2022): Russia's Lavrov: Either Ukraine fulfils Moscow's proposals or our army will decide. Reuters 12/27/2022. <https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-lavrov-either-ukraine-fulfils-moscows-proposals-or-our-army-will-decide-2022-12-26/> (Accessed 2022-31-12).

5. Recknagel, Charles (1999): Afghanistan: Soviet Withdrawal Hastened Collapse Of Communism. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 02/09/1999. <Recknagel, Charles (1999): Afghanistan: Soviet Withdrawal Hastened Collapse Of Communism. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 02/09/1999. <https://www.rferl.org/a/1090558.html> (Accessed: 2023-26-02).> (Accessed: 2023-26-02).

6. Neumeyer, Joy (2021): How Afghanistan Changed a Superpower. The Atlantic 08/28/2021. <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/afghanistan-soviet-union-superpower/619897/> (Accessed: 2023-26-02.

7. Janis Kluge, The Longer the War Lasts, the Heavier the Sanctions Weigh. In: Margarete Klein (Coord.), What the Prospect of a Prolonged War Means for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, Berlin: German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), 20.02.2023 (360 Degrees). <https://www.swp-berlin.org/publikation/what-the-prospect-of-a-prolonged-war-means-for-russia-ukraine-and-belarus#publication-article-79> (Accessed: 2023-26-02).

8. Lieven, Anatol (2023): For years, Putin didn’t invade Ukraine. What made him finally snap in 2022? Guardian 02/24/2023 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/24/vladimir-putin-invade-ukraine-2022-russia> (Accessed: 2023-24-02).