The west must face reality in Ukraine
Nina L Khrushcheva 9th January 2024
Whereas the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is willing to
throw everything at this war, Ukraine’s backers are losing their
resolve.
![Ukraine,Russia,Putin,west]()
Life goes on: Red Square in Moscow at the end of the year (Oliveshadow/
shutterstock.com)
Harvard’s Graham Allison recently commented
that, while China ‘is and will be the fiercest rival a ruling power has
ever faced’, the current ‘demonization’ of the country ‘confuses more
than it clarifies’. To ‘create and sustain a strategy for meeting the
China challenge’, Allison insists, the United States ‘must understand
China for what it is’—neither ‘ten feet tall’ nor ‘on the brink of
collapse’. Post-Soviet Russia has never received such consideration.
On the contrary, the US has spent decades caricaturing Russia as both a quintessential villain and a fragile has-been. After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the then president, Barack Obama, dismissed it as a ‘regional power’ displaying its own weakness. And following the full-scale invasion
of Ukraine in 2022, the apparent assumption was that Russia—and
Vladimir Putin’s regime—would quickly crumble under the weight of
western sanctions.
A long war
Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was fuelled by delusion.
But that does not mean that the west’s assessment of the situation was
sensible. On the contrary, most western observers seemed to be able to
imagine just two scenarios: either Putin takes Kyiv in a matter of days,
turning Ukraine into a Kremlin puppet, or Russia is quickly defeated,
forcing Putin to withdraw his troops and recognise Ukraine’s territorial
integrity.
This helps to explain why, when Russia’s initial offensive stalled,
the then British prime minister, Boris Johnson, visiting Kyiv,
reportedly recommended
that Ukraine should ‘just fight’, rather than negotiating a peace deal.
Better to let Russia lose—weakening the country’s economy, depleting
its military and damaging Putin’s position, possibly beyond repair—than
to reward it for its invasion.
And Russia would lose, the narrative went. Whereas Ukraine had the west’s full-throated support—with weapon and aid flows to match—Russia did not have enough equipment and what it did have was as outdated as its tactics. Beyond the battlefield, unprecedented
western sanctions were destined to trigger a harsh backlash against
Putin; Russians might even storm the Kremlin to regain access to
European handbags and American fast food. No one seemed to imagine that
the demonisation and dismissal of most things Russian could galvanise Russians against the west or that Russia would be able to sustain a long war.
Dangerous narrative
Yet this is precisely what has happened. Russia continued to leverage
its numerical advantage, while updating its battlefield strategy and boosting production of military hardware. At home, it minimised the costs of the sanctions, not only by circumventing them but also by making sure
that local actors—including the Russian state—gained ownership of
departing western firms’ Russian operations at rock-bottom prices.
Meanwhile, it built up its war economy.
For ordinary Russians, things are not bad at all. Store shelves are
well-stocked and restaurants are bustling. Pensions and salaries have increased—not by as much as inflation,
but enough to support the Kremlin-backed narrative that Russia is
standing strong, despite the west’s best efforts to destroy it. Far from
recognising how dangerous this narrative is, western leaders continue
to reinforce it, with the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, for example, saying last June, at the start of Ukraine’s failed counter-offensive, that ‘Russians need to feel the bitter taste of defeat’.
The war is still not popular in Russia: 56 per cent of the Russians surveyed in October by the Levada Centre expressed support
for a transition to peace talks. At the same time, just 34 per cent of
respondents reported that they would support withdrawing Russian troops
from Ukraine and returning Russian-controlled Ukrainian territory.
Meanwhile, Putin’s approval rating remains above 80 per cent. Call it the Stalingrad effect.
Weakening position
While Russians rally around Putin, Ukraine’s western backers seem to be losing their resolve. Last month, European Union leaders failed to push through a €50 billion financial-aid package for Ukraine, though they did agree to start EU accession talks. This failure came as the US Congress gave up on passing a new military-aid package for Ukraine last year.
Now the president, Joe Biden, is promising the US will stand with Ukraine, not for ‘as long as it takes’, as he used to claim, but for ‘as long as we can’. He still argues that Russia lacks the ‘resources and capacity’ to sustain a long war in Ukraine and it is true that sanctions will ultimately take a toll
on Russia’s economy. But Putin will throw everything he has at this
war—and will likely maintain considerable popular support along the way.
The decline in foreign aid is already weakening Ukraine’s position on the battlefield, after a year of few tangible gains by Ukrainian forces. Meanwhile, a rift seems to be growing between the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Ukrainian military’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny.
Plausible scenarios
There are three plausible scenarios. First, the west recommits to
supporting Ukraine. But the political hurdles—Republican opposition in
the US and a Hungarian (and now Slovak) veto in the EU—are high. Even if
they are cleared, Ukraine will struggle to recruit enough new soldiers.
In the second scenario, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization puts boots on the ground in Ukraine. Though Putin has never had any intention
of invading a NATO member country, the narrative that a Russian victory
in Ukraine would lead to more Russian invasions could be used to
justify committing western troops. The risk is that the Stalingrad
effect would be turbocharged, Russians would rise up to defend the
Motherland and instability would engulf Europe.
In the third scenario, the west finds ways to communicate with the
Kremlin. Russia is far from invulnerable, but it is not on the brink of
collapse and Putin probably has several years ahead of him as president.
Even if he were removed from power, Russians’ deep mistrust of the west
would persist. Given this—and the harsh reality that Ukraine is
unlikely to reclaim all of its territory—the west should focus on bolstering Ukraine’s defences, while preparing to seize any opportunity to engage in realistic talks with the Kremlin.
Nina L Khrushcheva is professor of international affairs at the New School in New York and co-author of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St Martin's Press).