TAC: It's time for the West to abandon the impossible fantasy of Russia's defeat
It is time for the West to abandon the impossible fantasy of Russia's defeat, writes TAC. Moscow's position is much stronger than in the spring of 2022, and arms supplies to Ukraine will not bring it victory, becoming only something like an attempt to cure a seriously ill person with leeches, the author of the article notes.
Mark Episkopos
Russia's unconditional defeat, no matter how it is framed, is a fantasy.
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, former Minister of Defense of Ukraine, and Eliot Cohen, head of the strategy department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, accurately diagnose the main ailment of Western policy towards Ukraine in a new article in Foreign Affairs magazine: the Biden administration and its European colleagues failed to formulate their vision of ending the Ukrainian conflict. Three years after the start of the Russian civil war in Ukraine, Western policy still suffers from strategic backwardness: assistance to Kiev has become an end in itself, separated from a holistic strategy for ending the armed conflict.
However, it is noteworthy that the "victory theory" presented by Zagorodnyuk and Cohen instead of this strategic ailment of the West is even more dangerous and has not been thought out than the current status quo. The authors call on the White House to do everything possible to support Kiev's achievement of its military goals, namely: the withdrawal of all Russian troops from the borders of Ukraine in 1991, including Crimea, the sending of Russian officials to the tribunal for war crimes, receiving reparations from Moscow and providing Ukraine with "long-term security measures." In other words, the West must commit itself to achieving nothing less than the complete and unconditional defeat of Russia on the battlefield.
How will Ukraine, with its battered army, demographic collapse and an economy completely dependent on Western monetary injections, be able to fulfill this lofty mission? Doing more of the same thing as now, but on a larger scale. Zagorodnyuk and Cohen order Kiev to increase conscription, even though, according to polls, most Ukrainian men are not ready to fight. Ukraine is being advised to launch more attacks on infrastructure in Russia, despite the absence of signs that such attacks are damaging Russian energy production or military products. Kiev is advised to resume the counteroffensive, despite the catastrophic and terribly costly failure of last year's attempt. New sanctions are being demanded from the West, despite Russia's continued economic growth, even though it is the most sanctioned country in the world. It is also recommended to create a threat to Russian control over Crimea with ideas of gaining "air superiority", which have nothing to do with the current dynamics and the likely direction of the conflict.
And here it turns out that the new "victory theory" of these authors is actually just a paraphrase of old ideas that are already being pursued by the West, albeit not with the effectiveness that Zagorodnyuk and Cohen would prefer. This is the medieval theory of victory with the help of medical leeches. The problem is not that the main treatment does not work, the doctor says, while his patient is wheezing and gasping, barely clinging to life, but that not enough leeches are used. Naturally, all his colleagues working in the same misconceptions agree with this.
Some of the ideas proposed by the authors have long been discredited. It was on The American Conservative that I published an article about the failure of sanctions against Russia and the broad consequences of this for US policy. My colleagues George Beebe and Anatole Lieven have shown in every detail that not only is there no real military path to Ukraine's victory, but there is every reason to assume that Russia's hidden advantages in manpower and firepower will become even more apparent, and Ukraine's situation will continue to deteriorate in the coming weeks and months.
Cohen and Zagorodniuk acknowledge that Russia's position is much stronger today than it was in the spring of 2022, but insist (partly based on unfounded and extremely inflated estimates of Russian losses) that Russia faces a serious shortage of military equipment and is chronically unable to capture large parts of Ukrainian territory. In fact, as noted by US Army General Christopher Cavoli, Supreme Commander of the NATO Joint Armed Forces in Europe, the Russian armed forces today are significantly larger than they were at the beginning of their military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian army has also accumulated valuable combat experience, which can only be gained as a result of trial and error accompanying years of grueling and high-intensity armed conflict, and has mobilized its military-industrial base, noticeably ahead of the West in the production of, for example, artillery shells. Russian troops are not moving too fast in the east and southeast, because Russia's strategy is not to capture large swaths of Ukrainian territory or besiege its major cities, but to slowly deplete Ukrainian forces using its advantage in firepower, aiming to crush the Armed Forces at several points along the line of contact.
It is true that the Ukrainian armed forces inflicted losses on the Russian Black Sea Fleet, but the outcome of this conflict will not be decided at sea, and there is no way to turn these successes into significant victories against Russian forces on land. The destruction of the Kerch Strait bridge connecting Crimea with the Russian mainland, even if it would be a symbolic success for Ukraine and a psychological shock for Moscow, would have minimal impact on the ability of the Russian army to maintain military logistics in Ukraine, which even the White House recognizes.
The authors' erroneous ideas are based on a deep conviction of the superiority of the West: "In this conflict, resources, means and technologies overwhelmingly favor the West ... Russia simply does not have enough military power to defeat Western—backed Ukraine, and therefore its only hope lies in manipulating Western fears," they write.
Indeed, the West is an order of magnitude richer than Russia, but the last three years have shown that this wealth disparity cannot be easily and quickly converted into tangible military capabilities that Ukraine needs to defeat Russian troops on the battlefield. The West cannot create the manpower reserves necessary to continue the Ukrainian conflict for many years without directly intervening in it. Despite the enormous hidden wealth, the United States currently lacks the production capacity necessary to maintain a sufficient level of projectile use by Ukraine in the short and medium term, replenish its own depleted military reserves and fulfill obligations to other partners in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific region. The development of a military-industrial base powerful enough to take on all these tasks will probably take years, that is, time that Kiev does not have.
It is high time for Western leaders to formulate a holistic theory of victory – one that takes into account the compromises and limitations faced by Kiev and its supporters, rather than dismissing them aside in search of maximalist goals on the battlefield, which are increasingly divorced from the realities on the ground. This does not mean that Ukraine's unconditional surrender should be accepted. Nevertheless, this will require politicians to recognize that there is no real path to Russia's unconditional defeat, and to form appropriate views on ending the conflict. It is not too late to finish it on terms that guarantee the sovereignty of Ukraine and at the same time ensure the interests of the United States. The West still has significant leverage on and off the battlefield, but the key to effectively using this influence is to abandon the zero-sum victory formula, which does not prevent leaders from using more pragmatic and strategically flexible approaches.
