The West must keep augmenting Ukraine's strength until Russia loses

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is in my opinion the most serious conflict in the world since WWII.

It is an all-out invasion by one of the world’s pre-eminent military powers against a vast country with 45 million inhabitants. To illustrate how unprecedent this war is, consider the fact that before the war, Ukraine’s border with Russia was almost 2 000 kilometers long and that today’s line of contact between the opposing sides is almost certainly even longer, because of Russian advances out of Belarus and Crimea. We haven’t seen anything like that since Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, when the front extended 3 000 kilometers, from the Baltic sea to the Black sea.¹

What is also new is the threat of open war between great powers armed with nuclear weapons. In my opinion, the threat of war between NATO and Russia has never been higher that now. In past crises, such as the Cuban missile crisis, there was never a hot war going on, playing on everyone’s nerves and clouding the judgement of leaders emotions. Also, during the original Cold War, there was a rough military parity between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, which added some stability.

Today, with the Russian army bogged down in mud around Kyiv, the conventional superiority of the West over Russia, especially in the air, is obvious to everyone. This disparity in convention force only makes the situation more unstable, and leaves the nuclear button as the only major card that Putin’s Russia still has up its sleeves in the case of Western attack.

In the light of all of this, it is understandable that many in the West are looking for a diplomatic way out, and we hear calls of mutual de-escalation and a negotiated settlement to the war. However, I am afraid that unless Ukraine agrees to capitulate, which it seems extremely unwilling to do, there can be no such a negotiated settlement. This war, in my opinion, is bound to go down to the wire.

In this text, I will explain why I think that Russia and Ukraine will not sign a peace treaty anytime soon, and what I think the West should do to increase Ukraine’s chances to successfully defend itself, without at the same triggering a nuclear war.

All or nothing

When you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die. There are no middle grounds.

- Cersei Lannister to Eddard Stark

Contrary to what Russian propaganda wants its people to believe, this is not an existential crisis for Russia. But it absolutely is an existential crisis for Vladimir Putin and the inner circle of people bound to him. If they lose the war, they stand to lose everything - their power, their wealth and prestige, and even their freedom and lives.

There is simply no way in which the regime can politically survive a defeat in Ukraine. There is nothing worse for the legitimacy of a government than to lose a war against a supposedly inferior enemy. And Russian nationalists see Ukraine as a very inferior foe, one whose destruction should be hardly a nuisance for the invincible Russian army. They have always looked down on the Ukraine with condescension and arrogance - for them, it is a lost province inhabited by their younger cousins, who need to be spanked a little to remember who they really are and where they belong in the world. Old Tsarist terminology, now sometimes revived by the Kremlin’s propaganda, literally called Ukrainians “Little Russians”.

How can you lose to these people and still see yourself as a great power? What will you think about a leader who led your nation to such a humiliation and ignominy? Even if there is no moral shame over the invasion and over Russian war crimes among the Russian public, if Russia loses, they are bound to be livid that it was carried out in such an incompetent way.

Needless to say, this would be a massive problem for any government. But it is even worse for Putin, whose entire political career is based on the idea that he is a tough guy, a strongman who is making Russia powerful and fearsome again. And if you cause trouble, he’s gonna kill you. Well, he is not going to look very tough anymore if he can’t beat Russia’s little cousins, is he?

And a fall from grace in Russia could be vicious. There is an obvious downside to surrounding your self by former KGB officers and people from the St. Petersburg mafia. And Putin himself established a precedent of killing high-level political enemies. If he loses power and manages to survive the coup, he will never sleep easily in Russia.

Will he be able to go to exile? Perhaps, depending on how much gold he can take with him on the plane. But it seems that there is going to be a tremendous pressure to extradite him to be punished. The US president and the US Senate already proclaimed Putin to be a war criminal, and more countries are joining in this condemnation every day. It will be difficult for Putin and the people around him to find a save haven anywhere on Earth if they decide to flee.

If Putin and his close comrades want to safe themselves, they have to find a way how to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, or at least credibly claim that they have done so.

Blood and the spoils of war

Normally, we think of war as attaining political gains at the price of losses. “Is it worth it?”, a hypothetical stateman might ask, thinking about how many lives of his soldiers and what costs in money his country is willing to pay to achieve its goal.

However, Vladimir Putin’s government is now facing a weirdly reversed version of this dilemma: What gains would be sufficient to justify Russian losses to the public? How much new territory and/or concessions does Russia have to win to be able to proclaim victory?”

The most worrying trend for them is, of course, that the losses are mounting fast. According to relatively conservative US estimates, Russia has so far lost more than 7000 soldiers killed and many more wounded. Losses of equipment are increasing in a similar fashion:

The most problematic is not even the absolute amount of losses, but the fact that they keep climbing up in such a steady, unrelenting way. It does not matter whether the Russian are advancing or bogged down. Every day, hundreds more die, a dozen per hour and one per every five minutes on average, if the US figure of 7000 is to be believed. The goddess of war never sleeps and is always hungry.

What kind of a peace treaty would be enough of a win to justify so many lives lost? Probably one that Ukrainians are not willing to sign, at least at this moment.

Moscow can of course try to wait for a more opportune moment, when Ukraine will be weaker and willing to sign a more unequal treaty. But before the moment arrives, there will be more funerals and more angry mothers, thus the victory will need to be even more impressive, and the Ukrainians even more unlikely to accept it, and so on.

Holding out stubbornly

The Ukrainian government is in my opinion as unlikely to agree to a ceasefire any time soon as Russia is. Its people are more angry than we can possibly imagine and more united against the common enemy than ever before. And while their military has certainly incurred heavy losses, they still control the vast majority of their country and have successfully dramatically slowed down or outright stopped Russian advances during the past two weeks or so, and even managed to reverse them in a few places.

Gradually, Russia appears to turn away from a blitzkrieg conquest to a grim strategy of destruction. Heavy artillery is being brought near Ukrainian cities and its considerable firepower being unleashed against civilian inhabited areas. I do not believe for a second that the bombings of the maternity hospital or the bomb shelter were accidents - the point is to terrify and to break the will to resist.

But this can just as easily backfire by making the Ukrainians even more angry and in fact strengthening their resolve. The willingness of people to suffer in defense of their homeland is never to be underestimated. In WWII, the USSR, of which Ukraine was a part of, and in fact one especially exposed to the fighting, lost about 20 million people, or 10 % of the population, and yet it never came close to surrendering.

When reading about the Ukrainian war, I am often reminded of the quote by Ho Chi Minh about US vs. Vietnamese casualties: “You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.” And Ukraine is certainly not losing ten men for every killed Russian.

But the level of casualties and destruction will, just as in Russia, shape Ukrainian demands for a post-war settlement, meaning they will be ambitious and impossible for Putin to accept. I think that Zelensky’s government will demand, at absolute minimum, that the status quo before Russia invaded in February is restored. In all likelihood, they will also want the Donbas back, if not Crimea.

They signaled their willing to forego NATO membership, but that is a far smaller concession than it might seem. NATO never really wanted them to accede anyway, especially not after the start of the Donbas war in 2014, and the Ukrainians have made it clear that they will want some legally binding treaty guarantees of their security. Which is not that different from them being in NATO, really. It would still prevent Russian encroachment in the future, which is what Russia is worried about.

All in all, I think Zelensky cannot assent to any peace treaty that would give Putin enough concessions for him to claim victory. If Zelensky did so, his people would not only see that as a betrayal, but it might also destroy their willingness to resist in the future²: “We sacrificed so much just for THIS?! We could have surrendered right away and spare the trouble!”

And so Kyiv will not accept anything remotely sufficient for Moscow, and the war will drag on for many more months³.

Can the West de-escalate the situation?

Short answer: no.

The West is not directly involved in the war, and so a significant part of its political elites and intellectuals continue believe that it is still possible to step back from the brink - to push through a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia and to then improve relations with Russia.

The first part is probably feasible, if the West would be willing to refuse to continue helping Ukraine and press its leadership into a de facto capitulation.

However, doing that would not be only an unforgivable betrayal of Ukraine, but also a colossal mistake from the point of view of the West’s own self-interest. Putin is not going to forget nor forgive that almost every single Western nations supplied weapons to his Ukrainian enemies and he will attempt to take revenge at the nearest opportunity.

Even in the context of economic sanctions, Moscow made all kinds of bellicose noises about this being an economic warfare and a part of a long-term Western plan to destroy Russia. They will want to get even, and nothing the West is going to do now is going to change that desire.

Even if we would totally abandon the Ukrainians and do everything to allay Moscow’s fears, Putin will still see us as enemies - which he after all always did, even long before the West started to help Ukraine. Attempts at reconciliation and a return to normalcy will only confirm the Kremlin’s assessment that the West is weak and decadent and can be easily taken advantage of.

And remember, from Putin’s stated point of view, which might very well be sincere, the West gave weapons to neo-Nazis hellbent on committing genocide against Russians. And so he will want to retaliate by doing something analogical. Perhaps he will order cyberattacks against hospitals, or assassinations of anti-Russian politicians, or maybe the arming of terrorist groups. One way or the other, it is not going to be pretty.

I am quite hopeful that the West has finally learned its lesson about Putin’s Russia. Many Western governments have in fact committed themselves to helping Ukraine to such a degree that they cannot easily reverse that stance, and therefore I think the West will not go down that road. But it cannot be ruled out entirely. A concern remains that certain countries (= mainly Germany, France and Italy) will persuade themselves by wishful thinking themselves that they are nothing more than third party bystanders in the Ukrainian war and can thus return to good relations with Putin once the war in Ukraine is over.

Nothing could be more foolish - the West’s relations with Putin’s Russia are now well past the point of no return and we can only go forward.

What should the West do then?

As I wrote above, my prediction is that Russia and Ukraine will not come to settlement anytime soon. However, the rate of casualties and equipment losses is too high for either side to sustain and both armies must be getting exhausted by now. I therefore expect the war to turn into a slow war of attrition, with both armies fortifying their positions and shelling the enemy, and with major advances and breakthroughs becoming more and more rare. This is in fact already happening on most fronts.

Every large-scale modern war has been to a large extent a war of attrition, with the side with the higher GDP usually slowly grinding the opposition down by sending more tanks, planes and artillery shells. This is especially visible in WWI, which had little in the way of advances on the Western front, and the results came down to who could replace the losses and keep their army standing longer. But something similar was at play during WWII as well, in which the Allies had a massive industrial advantage over the Axis powers and overwhelmed them with their war production.

An aspect of WWII that is seldom remembered is the importance of US wartime aid to other Allied nations, especially of the Lend and Lease program, within which the US supplied absolutely massive amounts of equipment and weapons to Britain and even more importantly, to the USSR. The extent of American aid to the USSR was later overshadowed by Cold War-era hostility, but we should remember that it was a quintessential source of Allied victory.

We correctly remember the bravery of the Soviet soldiers and populations, but we mostly forgotten that the Soviet military was subsidized by American supplies of everything from tanks and trucks to canned meat. As Kamil Galeev writes, this allowed to USSR to put its economy “on life support” even as a large part of its territory was occupied by Germany, and to carry on the struggle.

I think that in the present moment, we find ourselves in an equivalent situation - Ukraine is in a war of attrition with Russia, it has a chunk of its territory occupied by the enemy, and its industrial base, especially the armaments industry, is being destroyed by Russian missive and air attacks. Russia clearly aims to diminish Ukraine long-term war making capacity and then to finish it off - a typical strategy in modern attrition warfare.

Here, Western help can (again!) be absolutely crucial. The United States and Europe still posses enormous industrial capacity which positively dwarves that of Russia. If we can put our economies to work at Ukraine’s behalf, to put its economy on life support while its own production capability is being destroyed and its people fleeing abroad, we can immensely boost its chances of winning.

Ukraine will need all kinds of military stuff - anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, anti-missile systems, artillery shells, artillery itself, tanks, armored cars, armed drones, you name it. Perhaps less obviously, it will also need “non-lethal” aid - jeeps and trucks, for example, are key for logistics. Night vision goggles and encoded communication gear are also reportedly proving extremely valuable. And so on. I cannot judge what equipment presents the worst bottleneck for the Ukrainians at the present moment, but I know we should listen to them give it to them.

This will inevitably cost a lot of money. But defeating the menace of renewed Russian imperialism is well worth it. Also, there are several benefits of such a program - it can help to boost employment and help us recover from the Covid crisis, to increase production capacities which might come in handy in case of a future conflict, and perhaps even create fitting jobs for the millions of Ukrainian refugees arriving into Europe.

In WWI and WWII, a large share of the factory work was done by women while men fought at the front, I am sure that Ukrainian refugees, who are mostly women, would gladly do the same for their country and their husbands and sons.

On the other side of the equation of attritional warfare, the West can do and already has done a lot to disrupt Russia’s wartime production by refusing to supply key components and equipment, on whose import from the West Russia is heavily dependent, and which it cannot easily replace by relying on China.

If we continue to effectively deprive Russia of these key inputs, we will not only decrease its overall economic strength and punish it, as is the generally stated goal of the sanctions, but also reduce its ability to produce all the important military stuff and thus limit its capacity to continue waging war against Ukraine. (And perhaps against us in the future!)

Taken together, we are observing a fight between two combatants who are unable to strike a killing blow, and so are trying to bleed each other out by many small cuts. Our task if to keep giving Ukraine enough blood transfusion and at the same time rubbing salt into Russia’s wounds long enough and hard enough that Ukraine will be able outlast Russia and win the war.

I fully believe this is an achievable goal. The Russian economy is weak and even it’s military has proven surprisingly inept at logistics, even in the early days of the war. And, luckily, China has so far refused to provide Russia with any meaningful material assistance.

Ideally, in the end, the Russian military will lose its ability to supply its forward units and the invasion force will implode. Even if that does not happen, our help will still enable the Ukrainians to hold their ground and bargain with Putin from a position of relative strength.

The main problem might be how to deliver all the stuff to Ukraine without it, or even the roads and railway lines, being destroyed by Russia. Fortunately, the border between the EU/NATO and Ukraine is long and so there are many possible routes. So far, most of the supplies are being sent through Poland and a smaller part through Slovakia, so perhaps a large share should be transported via Romania, or even Moldova⁴? Infuriatingly, Hungary has so far refused to allow weapons to be transported through its territory, and so EU governments should put them under all pressure necessary to revise that decision.

Another important step will be to secure the supply routes from Russian air or missile attacks. Fortunately, the Russian air force has so far underperformed and failed to achieve clear superiority in the air, while their stockpiles of modern long-range missiles might be running low. But it will still be important to protect the supplies by anti-air defenses, so that the goods can flow uninterrupted.

If this can be done in the coming months in sufficient quantity, I am confident that Russia will be unable to achieve outright victory and even quite optimistic that Russia will outright lose and that Putin and his pals will then get what they deserve.

If that comes to pass, it will have tremendous positive global repercussions, which is what I am going to write about in my next post.

1. Of course the number of soldiers is far, far lower than in WWII, so the fighting is less intense. In some sense it is not a true front because the line of contact is not unbroken and there is room for maneuver on both sides.

2. Just think about how the Munich Agreement destroyed Czechoslovakia’s ethos overnight. Any willingness to resist the Nazis evaporated overnight, and barely six months later the Wehrmacht marched to Prague without firing a shot.

3. I can be wrong here about reading the public mood in Ukraine. Perhaps we are only seeing a ton of propaganda and most of the people in Ukraine are just wishing for peace, no matter what. But I am still inclined to believe that spirits remain high and that they are not going to seriously sue for peace anytime soon.

4. Moldova is not in the EU or NATO, but has a lot to fear from Russia and has become increasingly pro-Western during the war.