Friday, March 29

What reflects Putin’s change in military strategy and what can stop him in Ukraine

In the last week there have been signs, stronger than ever, that Russia recognizes that it is not capable of achieving the goal of conquering Ukraine by military force. These signs linked to the peace talks in Ukraine, which would indicate that Russia is desisting from its attempt to surround kyiv, coincide with the previous declaration that its war objectives were limited to conquering the eastern part of the country. And even before that both Russia and Ukraine had declared that the peace negotiations were entering a phase of substantive discussions, as opposed to Russia limiting itself to presenting ultimatums.

Russia’s claim that it is winding down operations around kyiv and focusing its offensive in the east of the country is one of those occasions when a Russian Defense Ministry statement recognizably fits the truth. The “reality gap” is not in what Russia is doing, but in why it claims to be doing it. Russia has presented this withdrawal of its troops from the outskirts of kyiv as a kind of concession to “boost mutual confidence” in the peace talks. But it was already clear that their offense in that area had stalled, and in some cases was backing down, because of the Ukrainian resistance. The shift in plans to operations in the east and the rotation of battered Russian units from Ukraine’s northern flank are an acknowledgment by Moscow that—as many military analysts had predicted before the current conflict— does not have the strength to deploy it would take to conquer all of Ukraine along multiple axes of advance.

In fact, Russia is having to make do with what there is to maintain its current operations. The buildup of troops on the eve of the offensive against Ukraine saw units brought in from as far away as the Arctic and the Far East. Now that many of these units have been disrupted in the fighting in Ukraine, Russia is turning to every possible source of additional corps, including bringing in mercenaries and recruiting from Syria.

But while Ukraine’s success in fending off at least some of the Russian offensives may mean that the country as a whole is not in immediate danger of being invaded, the risk to the future of Ukrainian sovereignty remains. Russia has a long history of starting wars disastrously and then throwing enough soldiers and equipment into the conflict to crush its opponents through sheer accumulation. Russia can continue a war of attrition, regardless of the cost in casualties among poorly trained troops or the damage done to the Russian economy itself, for longer than Ukraine can maintain Western interest and support.

Pressure on Zelensky

And, meanwhile, Russia will continue to engineer humanitarian catastrophes in order to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into making concessions that will end the fighting. The capital itself will continue to be under threat. The suspension of attempts to advance and seize more territory around kyiv does not mean that Russia will stop launching long-range missile and artillery attacks on Ukrainian cities from areas it already controls.

That Russian pressure will be both direct, by offering Zelensky the disastrous choice of continuing the fighting at the cost of innocent lives or making concessions to end the suffering, and indirect, should Zelensky’s Western supporters change their advice—and their support – because they do not believe that Ukraine should put up any more resistance in the face of the humanitarian catastrophe.

Zelensky has already indicated that he would accept “neutral” status for Ukraine, thereby ending the fighting. But this in itself is fraught with danger. Zelensky knows as well as anyone that “neutral with security guarantees” was precisely Ukraine’s status a decade ago, and that it did nothing to prevent Russia from seizing Crimea and starting its war in eastern Ukraine. So, to make any sense, the very words would have to carry radically different international status and international support for Ukraine than in 2014. And there is always the danger that a temporary ceasefire — encouraged by a West reluctant to conflicts – can become a permanent division of the country, thus consolidating Russian territorial gains.

redefine victory

Optimism about the resistance to occupation by the Ukrainian population in the areas controlled by Russia, as well as in those that could still be conquered in the eastern offensive, hides a grim truth. The sad reality is that Moscow has a very high success rate in the crushing of resistance movements and insurgencies, largely thanks to the application of unlimited barbarism against the civilian population that supports them. So if Russia decides to occupy territory it already has under control, the only thing that could drive it out are new and much more substantial Ukrainian military offensives, which may not be within kyiv’s reach.

In the end, much depends on what Russia itself defines as “victory.” It has already reinvented its original war goals after failing to achieve them. The expectation that the Ukrainians were just frustrated Russians waiting to be freed from an imaginary neo-Nazi political elite that had seized power in kyiv was torpedoed by the first encounter with concrete reality on Ukrainian soil. Far from having the entire country in her hands, Russia must fight for every inch of Ukrainian territory.

So whatever victory Russia ultimately claims, it’s unlikely to be anything like what it thought it was going to do in the first place. But that matters little when she has established such control over public opinion in her country that much of her population thinks a defensive war is being waged. Indeed, a Russian declaration of success does not depend at all on the reality of the outcome of the war. The longer-term problem is that if Vladimir Putin comes out of this war convinced that Russia has scored more than a substantial defeat, there is nothing to deter him from continuing his plans for wars of conquest to reassert Moscow’s control. over the territories and peoples that he claims are independent by mistake.

Russia may need time to rebuild its military and reorient its economy under the new sanctions regime, but the only thing that will change Putin’s ambition is a clear and indisputable failure that cannot be explained away by trickery that redefines what Russia wanted with this war. Now, as at the beginning of the war, the West has a responsibility to help Ukraine bring about that failure.

Keir Giles works on the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, and is the author of Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West.

Translation of Julian Cnochaert.



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