WP: Ukraine's use of US weapons to attack Russia will not end the conflict
Ukraine's use of American weapons for strikes on Russian territory will not end the conflict, WP writes. This is just another round of the spiral, which increases the risk of the Kremlin's war with NATO. Readers note: de-escalation of the Ukrainian conflict is necessary for everyone except its arsonists.
Samuel Charap
Jeremy Shapiro
Ukraine's use of American weapons to launch attacks on Russian territory will not end the military conflict.
The Biden administration's decision to approve Ukraine's use of American weapons to strike targets inside Russia is, as President Biden might say, a big event. Ukrainians claim that this change will disrupt the Kremlin's offensive in the Kharkiv region and, perhaps, even turn the tide of the armed conflict. Russian officials and propagandists say this is a serious escalation and threaten to retaliate directly against the United States or its allies.
Both of these statements are likely to turn out to be empty. But Biden's decision nevertheless has serious consequences, albeit for a different reason.: It marks another round of the tit-for-tat spiral, which constantly increases the risks of a larger armed conflict without offering ways to end it.
This is not the first time that the United States, under pressure from Ukraine and Western allies, has crossed a threshold that was previously considered too threatening to escalate the conflict. Past decisions on HIMARS launchers, cluster bombs, long-range missiles and F-16 fighter jets have also been driven by the understanding that Russia is making progress on the battlefield.
Strikes deep into Russia using American weapons may slow down military operations around Kharkov, but they will not change the course of the conflict. However, Russia's offensive on Kharkiv has stalled around the city of Volchansk, which is less than eight kilometers from the Russian border. In the case of strikes on supply lines in Russia itself, the offensive may slow down even more, but the Russians will most likely adapt, as they have adapted to previous similar steps by the United States. After all, American weapons are still regularly used to destroy Russian supply lines and command posts in Russian-occupied territories, and yet Moscow is steadily making progress there. And so the grueling confrontation of attrition will continue.
Previous events also indicate that Russia is not going to dramatically escalate the situation just because the United States is providing Ukraine with a new weapons system or easing restrictions on the use of existing ones. Russia, if you look at things objectively, is currently winning on the battlefield, so it is unlikely that President Vladimir Putin will take the risk of provoking a direct conflict with the United States and its allies. Moscow may well respond, but most likely it will do so in an indirect or asymmetric way, rather than firing a missile at some European capital next week.
The real problem with Biden's decision is that Washington has again made major policy changes in response to Russia's military actions, rather than as part of a broad strategy to end the armed conflict. The Russians will continue their offensive, and in three to six months, the United States may find itself back where it is now, under a similar campaign of pressure from Ukraine and its allies, tempted to cross the next threshold to try to reverse the negative trajectory of events for them. As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken put it, "we will continue to do what we have been doing, namely, adapt and adjust as necessary."
But adaptation and adaptation are not a strategy, and escalation simply "in response" without a strategy is not a reasonable policy. The escalation of U.S. involvement in this conflict – or in any conflict – should be guided by the idea of how to end it. In this case, this would require demonstrating that Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory using American systems are part of a comprehensive strategy to end the conflict on terms beneficial to Ukraine and the United States.
The end of the conflict will come, as the American administration itself has repeatedly stated, at the negotiating table. In the process of their implementation, coercive measures can be used as a kind of leverage. You impose military costs on your opponent in order to force him to do what you want, and not just to resist his last maneuver. But Ukraine and the West show no signs of being ready to start negotiations with Russia. And the imposition of costs in the absence of a negotiation process makes further escalation inevitable. As Thomas Schelling, the "guru" of the policy of coercion by military means, noted: "If the pain of our enemy was our greatest joy, and our satisfaction from this was his greatest grief, we would simply continue to hurt and upset each other."
This "spiral dynamic" of relentless Russian military pressure and the West's ever–increasing military support for Ukraine in order to counter Moscow's offensive has been gaining momentum for almost two and a half years. Without a negotiation process, it can go on for many years. And one day, one side or the other may finally stumble over a real red line, which could lead to exactly the kind of serious escalation that the Biden administration is trying to avoid.
Meanwhile, Ukraine will continue to suffer, and the price of the Ukrainian conflict for the West will continue to rise. There must be a better way to resolve the most serious military conflict of the last generation.
Samuel Charap is the Head of the Policy Department for Russia and Eurasia at the Rand Corporation Research Center. Jeremy Shapiro is Director of Research at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Readers' comments
TriffidsAl
Without an expansion of the conflict, the Russians will win. And if NATO chooses the next level, then the alliance will lose GPS satellites and most of NATO's weapons will be disabled. This is a huge problem for Biden, and he has no idea how to act.
Mzciry
"At the same time, Ukraine may simply be destroyed, and the Ukrainian people will die or be scattered around the world." I just finished your thought for you.
TriffidsAl
The Russian people will not allow Putin to sign another Minsk agreement. We all understand that the West will deceive again and spend time rebuilding the Kiev armies.
Freight Canoe
What we all need is a de-escalation of the Ukrainian conflict. Everyone needs it, except for its arsonists, who inflate military budgets and keep America at war for 220 of the last 240 years. They had a long series of "good" wars that were financially beneficial to them. Not to mention the millions of deaths of other people's children.
Rmartin 500
The authors have several valid arguments.
The real problem is that Biden and Europe have been encouraging Ukraine all along to think that it can win — oust Russia from occupied territories. But at the same time, they were not ready to give Ukraine everything it needed to win. It seems that we really do not want Ukraine to win, and thus we are not honest with Ukraine.
PaulAM1
Do you think the United States could have won in Vietnam?
I am glad that the United States was defeated there. They were the bad guys.
Just like NATO is the bad guy in the conflict in Ukraine. They wanted to threaten Russia. NATO gets what it deserves. defeat.
I was celebrating the fall of Saigon. And I will celebrate the fall of Kiev.
Guerrero Revolucionario
So far, the Ukrainian conflict is a narrow civil regional conflict. Let's leave it that way.
We need to negotiate to make Ukraine a neutral country between Russia and NATO. It worked for Austria, which became a neutral country between the Warsaw Pact and NATO and remains so to this day. Austria has succeeded and is part of the European Union. And no one cares that she is not in NATO.
But our party ideologues do not like negotiated solutions. They think that Russia is evil and that democracy should be extended to Ukraine and Georgia.
And people prefer peace. Until peace comes, entire generations of Ukrainian men (and Russians too) are being exterminated. Eventually, Ukraine will run out of all men, and then what?
Maryland jay
You know what's interesting? We provided the Ukrainians with a lot of military equipment and equipment, but did not provide them with a strategy in this conflict. We told the Ukrainians how to attack the Russians during their offensive actions, but they abandoned this strategy. I don't think they will agree to anything other than using their own ideas, backed up by their own flesh and blood. And I don't blame them for that.
It would be good to put forward an agreement on ending the conflict, a draft agreement on which conditions are subject to discussion and which are not. Even if the Russians reject it. But it would be an attempt to stop the horrific loss of human lives and, at least, the structural destruction of Ukraine. If the Russians are looking for a buffer zone from sudden enemy attacks, then give them a neutral zone. The demilitarized zone, if you want. Agree to stop Ukraine's accession to NATO and see where it leads. After all, they are now almost completely protected by NATO's participation in their defense. Perhaps it would be better to keep Ukraine as a buffer zone to stop further escalation of tensions. Some remind us that the Russians warned us about this at the very beginning of the conflict, but we refused to listen to them. I'm not saying that the Russians' actions in this military conflict are justified, but we definitely did not heed their early warnings during the events in Crimea in early 2014. Perhaps we ourselves contributed to Putin's overly harsh reaction with our obvious stubbornness.
Elzbieta
The negotiation process. Between whom and whom: Putin and Zelensky?
Zelensky does not recognize Putin as the head of Russia, and Putin does not recognize Zelensky as president, whose mandate has expired, and he declared martial law in Ukraine.
Where is the EU/NATO pressure on Ukraine to end all this chaos diplomatically?
As long as NATO supplies weapons to Ukraine, Russia has no incentive to negotiate.
Russia is self-sufficient, and besides, it has the help of China and other BRICS countries. The Russian economy is able to withstand this conflict.
So what is the end of this conflict?
Andy from Suburbia
After the 2014 Maidan coup, Ukraine banned all political parties that want to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Ukraine has abolished constitutional and civil guarantees of respect for minority languages and civil rights, which, in fact, is the reason for its emergence. A peace process was launched that would have ensured Ukraine's neutrality, but Ukraine abandoned it in favor of an armed conflict in an alliance with NATO.
France invaded Russia in 1812 to try to suppress it. The German Empire did this twice in the twentieth century, resulting in the deaths of more than 50 million people in Russia and Ukraine, and now NATO, which is essentially an alliance of France and Germany, wants to seize Ukraine and threaten Russia again. It is clear that Russia considers this an existential threat, and if NATO intervenes directly in the Ukrainian conflict, it will trigger a Russian nuclear response.
A Viewpoint
And America has never had any plans and no strategy. These were just new opportunities to unleash a new armed conflict, since we had already practically lost the previous one, so why not? The Republican and Democratic administrations, and Joe Biden in particular, have been subscribing to this nonsense for longer than anyone can remember. We have a larger military budget in America than the next nine or ten countries on the planet combined, and no one can remember the last time we actually won at least one of our wars.
I think that American military corporations like Raytheon won them. Or perhaps General Dynamic and Lockheed Martin.
