One Year On

At 1945 Andrew A. Michta seizes the opportunity of the first anniversary of Russia’ attack on Ukraine to emphasize the possibility of a Ukrainian victory in the war and the destruction of Russia itself:

If we support Ukraine with main battle tanks, long-range fires, and modern fighter aircraft, the Ukrainian military will be in a position to defeat the Russian army. In the wake of such a defeat the Russian Federation – what Lev Dobriansky described as a modern-day “prison of nations” – will likely implode.

It is high time we grasp that the disintegration of the Russian Federation – while admittedly fraught with risk – may in fact happen, for until and unless the Russians figure out how to become a “normal state,” Europe and the world will know no peace.

The war in Ukraine, which in hindsight will likely be seen as Putin’s ultimate folly, is not only a test of Western resolve and a promise of a better world for Ukraine, Belarus and Eastern Europe writ large.

Assuming Russia is unequivocally defeated in Ukraine, it may also offer Russians a chance at a brighter future.

Graham Allison, writing at Foreign Policy, offers a less rosy analysis of the prognosis:

Yet even as Putin’s war has undermined Russia on the geopolitical stage, we should not overlook the fact that Russia has succeeded in severely weakening Ukraine on the ground.

This week, the Belfer Russia-Ukraine War Task Force, which I lead, is releasing a Report Card summarizing where things stand on the battlefield at the end of the first year of Russia’s war. As the Report Card documents, when we measure key indicators including territorial gains and losses, deaths of combatants and civilians, destruction of infrastructure, and economic impact, the brute facts are hard to ignore.

At the battlefield level, if one can remember only three numbers, they are: one-fifth, one-third, and 40 percent.

Since invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Russian troops have seized an additional 11 percent of Ukraine’s territory. When combined with land seized from Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, that means Russia now controls almost one-fifth of the country. The Ukrainian economy has been crushed, its GDP declining by more than one-third. Ukraine is now dependent on the United States and Western Europe not only for weekly deliveries of weapons and ammunition but also for monthly subsidies to pay its soldiers, officials, and pensioners. Forty percent of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed or occupied.

Read the whole thing. Here is the summary:

If year two of the war were a carbon copy of the first, Russia would control almost one-third of Ukraine next February.

while at Responsible Statecraft Justin Logan is critical of our own strategic choices:

Beyond choosing out of area, the alliance also went out of its mind, expanding like wildfire across the former Warsaw Pact. Expansion was a rare twofer for U.S. statecraft in Europe: taking on small, geographically vulnerable states made the alliance both weaker (diluting its military power by admitting countries that demanded more security than they supplied) and more provocative to Russia by bringing U.S. military power ever closer to the Russian border.

With the NATO front line moving further and further east during a period of Russian decline, the largest and most important member-states felt extremely secure, cutting their defense spending to the bone. The major industrial powers of Europe relied on the American pacifier, happily spending their own resources on infrastructure, a generous social safety system, and a variety of other domestic priorities.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, it looked for a moment as though Europe may have been shaken from its slumber. French President Emmanuel Macron’s proclamation that Europe needed to “wake up” and “be able to decide and increasingly take responsibility for more of our neighborhood security policy” suddenly looked prescient. Even the free-rider par excellence, Germany, declared the invasion had produced a Zeitenwende, or change of an era in European security. As part of this new era, Germany would dedicate €100 billion to defense over the subsequent four years, bringing its defense spending to 2 percent of GDP.

It was fun while it lasted.

The Biden administration’s reaction to the invasion effectively smothered a more robust European response. When it came into office, Biden immediately reversed Donald Trump’s effort to withdraw 12,000 U.S. servicemembers from Germany. Its “global posture review” assessed the U.S. presence around the world and concluded that it was pretty close to ideal.

After the Russian invasion, Biden sent an additional 20,000 U.S. troops to Europe to reassure the Europeans. It was exactly the opposite of what he should have done. The return of major war to Europe was a thunderbolt that provided the perfect opportunity to hand off European security to the Europeans. Biden squandered it.

Since then, the “New Era” in Germany has been revealed as little more than an accounting gimmick. Under the Zeitenwende plan, by 2026 Germany will be spending less on defense than it did in 2022. Meanwhile in the first year of war, the United States contributed more than $110 billion to Ukraine — by far the most of any state or institution.

However, that’s completely consistent with something I’ve pointed out as the objective held by some here in the United States for the U. S. not merely to be the preeminent military power but to be the only military power.

A key point that should not be ignored is that there are three broad outcomes:

1. Ukraine prevails on the battlefield, driving Russia completely out of the territory that Ukraine held in 2014.
2. Russia prevails on the battlefield, either incorporating the entirety of Ukraine into Greater Russia or neutralizing Ukraine
3. Some negotiated settlement with neither party fully achieving its goals

There is no realistic prospect for the first outcome, at least not without involving NATO directly. Russia will not surrender Crimea. It’s hard to imagine the second outcome transpiring, either.

That leaves the third which begins to appear more like the conclusion such as it was of the Korean War than the conclusions of either World War I or World War II.