Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine – as distinct from his campaign of aggression against it - began a year ago. It’s widely understood both that the war has not gone at all as he expected and that he is nevertheless determined to try to tough it out. The geopolitical stakes are very high. This war must be won. But it’s important to define very clearly what we mean by ‘winning’ in such a context.
Ukraine has done better than expected. Veteran Russia-watcher Paul Dibb declared, on the eve of the invasion, that Ukraine’s army would be quite unable to withstand a Russian military plainly perceived as formidable. It didn’t turn out that way. This was, in the first instance, because the egregious corruption of the Russian regime has undermined every supposed strength of its armed forces.
But it is also because Putin, in his arrogance and obsessiveness, gravely underestimated both the will of Ukrainians to fight and the ability of Washington and Brussels to coordinate a NATO response that was coherent, punishing and effective. The imposition of biting sanctions, the coordinated diplomatic condemnation by the Western powers and at least some of their allies, the supplying of arms and aid to Ukraine and, symbolically, the call by the great Scandinavian neutrals, Sweden and Finland, for admission to NATO were immensely reassuring.
However, the war is now delicately poised. What happens next will do much to shape how the war ends, for better or worse. The population of Russia, at 146 million, is more than three times that of Ukraine (43 million). It is having serious trouble mobilizing soldiers for its shambolic land forces, but it has a far greater manpower pool on which to draw than does Ukraine. In a long slog, given already high rates of attrition, this will weigh heavily in the scales of the war.
Ukraine shows no sign of buckling and Putin has done everything he could possibly have done to inflame and entrench Ukrainian nationalism. But he has inflicted enormous damage on Ukrainian infrastructure and great losses on its economy. His forces, plainly given orders from him directly, have disregarded all the laws of war. He also keeps threatening to escalate or widen the war, in an effort to divide the coalition backing Ukraine and deter it from supplying Kyiv with the heavy weapons and financial wherewithal to defeat him.
Here, then is the most immediate danger: that the West, led by the American public, will tire of the war sooner than Putin, if he can drag it out. It might then abandon the heroic President Zelensky and his compatriots, in the manner that the Biden administration abandoned Afghanistan, pell-mell, after all the hard work had been done in enabling the Kabul regime to withstand the terrorism of the Taliban. The Kremlin will have observed both that and Washington’s withdrawal from the Middle East and will be planning its strategy with these things in mind.
Among the scenarios in which American withdrawal could occur we must count the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025. And even if that does not occur, the Republican Party has, within its bosom, a growing number of isolationists and America Firsters. They may well push for a scaling back of aid to Ukraine, or even a direct negotiation with Moscow. It was Richard Nixon’s direct negotiations with Hanoi, through Henry Kissinger, between 1969 and 1973, that demoralized Saigon and facilitated the Communist victory in Vietnam in 1975.
A second danger, which requires the most vigilant attention from Western strategists, is that the war will widen in any one of three ways. The first would be Putin escalating it, perhaps by fomenting trouble in the Baltic states, or using a tactical nuclear weapon. The second would be some form of coordination with Tehran and Beijing to create either the reality or the imminent threat of a second front. All such a second front need do is distract Washington and suck weapons and funds out of its support for Ukraine in order for it to be a telling strategic move.
The third way is one which Putin has long been practising, but which he might choose to enlarge: a combination of cyber war and political subversion within the Western democracies aimed at fomenting confusion, division and disorder. An observation which bears heavily on this aspect of the situation is that those who work for Putin are the remnants of the old KGB, now rebadged as the FSB and SVR, as well as the GRU (military intelligence). They are now embedded within a neo-fascist instead of a communist state, marred by deep kleptocracy.
There is no greater urgency, in terms of deep background awareness, for those who would participate in the Western debate over the Ukraine War, than to acquaint themselves in depth with the ideological and organizational roots of the Putin regime and the history of its subordination of the oligarchs, in an alliance of corrupt kleptocrats, in the 2000s.
A central impediment to even top-level US comprehension of Putin’s Russia, for years, was that the CIA’s Russia division was eviscerated after the Cold War, having already been fatally undermined by the deep betrayal of its assets inside Russia by Moscow’s moles inside the Agency: Aldrich Ames and another, still unidentified Russian mole, as Robert Baer points out in The Fourth Man: The Hunt for the KGB’s CIA Mole and Why the US Overlooked Putin (2022).
But what all policy makers or analysts need has been available, for some years, in first rate studies by Steven Lee Myers The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2015), Masha Gessen The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017) or Heidi Blake From Russia With Blood: Putin’s Ruthless Killing Campaign and Secret War on the West (2019). These are all open source and thus free of the insidious bureaucratic and political agendas or cognitive failures that plague intelligence agencies and the staffs of prime or foreign ministers.
Our own Robert Horvath, a path-breaking scholar on Putin’s Russia and one of 121 foreign individuals black-listed by Moscow for their work, has pinned down the roots of the nastiest and most feral aspects of the Putin regime and how it operates, in Putin’s Fascists (2021). For anyone presuming to advise on strategic policy in the current context, this is required reading. Its deep analysis must override the superficial assumptions of ‘realist’ international relations theory or dubious notions about Russia’s war being the fault of NATO expansion after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Moreover, only such works of cutting edge independent research can inform scenario planning about possible outcomes of this war. For while protracted war or widened war are possible from this point, there are other possibilities and these demand the most exacting thought. The first is a possible palace coup in Moscow, followed by a power struggle within Russia and all that could flow from this. The second is the decisive defeat of Russia within twelve months and an opening for a second crack at the peaceful integration of Russia into the European community of states.
There is a historic precedent for the first of these scenarios. In the 16th century, before the rise of the Romanovs, the war by Ivan the Terrible, aimed at conquering Ukraine and Lithuania, ended in a debacle for Muscovy and what is known as the Time of Troubles (1598-1613), an era of lawlessness and anarchy. Given the serious institutional problems created in Russia by the Putin era and the interests of various powerful oligarchs and security chiefs, the costs of this war could conceivably precipitate a reprise of this piece of Russian history.
Conversely, a decisive Ukrainian victory on the field of battle followed by an opening to Russia’s less noxious elites might make possible a future beyond trauma and stand-off. A future in which that NATO and the European Union could attempt to remedy the serious errors of judgement and oversight which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the backing of a hopeful Washington for the inept and alcoholic Boris Yeltsin. What is needed is a deal that could win the hearts and minds of Russia’s best and most statesmanlike figures, based on the vision of a much better future for Russia and for Russo-Ukrainian relations.
Of these four scenarios: protracted war followed by shabby Western withdrawal; widened war followed by uncertainty, danger and ambivalence; internal regime change in Russia followed by anarchy; and Ukrainian victory, followed by a ‘Marshall Plan’ for Russia (and Ukraine), there will be a temptation to intuitively pick the apparently most plausible, then act as if it is inevitable. The requirement right now, however, is to assess which of these futures the opponents of Putin ought be committed to avoiding and which they should put their weight behind, to bring it into being.
In making such assessments, it is vital to bear in mind that what is in play right now is full spectrum warfare, of which the kinetic (guns, rockets, tanks and planes) is only one and only the most instrumental. The economic, diplomatic, cyber and information fronts are every bit as important. Decisive victory on those fronts would lead to the kinetic arms of Russia’s policy being brought to a standstill. The United States, after all, was not defeated in kinetic terms in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. It simply grew tired of the costs of seeking to prevail and it lost the information wars.
The Kremlin, as it has done since Lenin seized power in late 1917, places great importance on information warfare. It needs to be decisively defeated on that front. To this end, information warfare on an open-source basis is called for. Putin has clearly lost a great deal of prestige and credibility over the past twelve months. Now he needs to be buried beyond any hope of recovery. His regime needs to be openly and in detail exposed for what it is and a program for a better Russian future openly developed and advocated.
Former American ambassador to Putin’s Russia, Michael McFaul, in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, laid out an aggressive and lucid program for economic warfare against Russia, including the confiscation of its $300 billion in foreign exchange reserves and their use to fund and rebuild Ukraine. There’s a lot to be said for such strong action at the present juncture. However, if the mass of Russians is to be won over to a vision for a post-Putin transformation, there will need, also, to be contingency planning for a viable ‘Marshall Plan’ for Russia, which is to say a rebuild analogous to that provided for Germany and other parts of Western Europe after 1945.
That will take careful thought and will likely run into objections from Ukrainians, currently incensed by Russia’s immensely destructive war against their country. But unless one seeks no more than an armistice with a truculent and aggrieved Russia, some such vision is going to be vital. And it must be founded on the open statement that Russia is not only a great power, if much less of one than the Soviet Union was, but more importantly a great Indo-European culture. It is the homeland of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Pasternak and Sakharov. That Russia should be embraced by Europe. Its spiritual leader, Alexei Navalny, is currently being slowly murdered in Putin’s prisons.
Here, then, is the choice before the West in the coming twelve months: hesitate and leave the strategic initiative to Putin (and his allies in Tehran and Beijing), or take the fight up to him full-spectrum, with an integrated strategic vision which aims to defeat his invasion of Ukraine. Back Kyiv to the hilt and overturn Putin’s neo-fascist regime by making it impossible for that regime to breathe or prosper. But hold out the vision to Russia of a better future after the Great Kleptocrat is dead and buried. That’s the path of resolution and purpose.
Paul Monk is a Fellow of the Institute for Law and Strategy (London and New York), a former senior intelligence analyst and the author of Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018). His classic text Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China will appear in a second edition this coming winter.