The past week has brought some clarity to the fog of the Ukrainian War: the momentous date of May 9, the commemoration of the Soviet Union’s victory over Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has come and gone with no change in Russian strategy.
When Vladimir Putin came out to inspect the military parades and intercontinental ballistic missiles, there was neither a declaration of pseudo-victory nor an announcement of escalation that would put all of Russia on a war footing and start mass recruitment to the front.
So the Russian plan appears to remain the same – to pursue the crushing war in southern and eastern Ukraine, essentially abandoning the goal of regime change in favor of holding territory that could eventually be integrated into the Russian Federation.
From a US perspective, this seems like a strategic justification. Despite some reckless bluster about the US role in taking down Russian targets, we have steadily increased support for Ukraine — including a $40 billion package that is likely to pass the Senate next week — without provoking a dangerous escalation by Russia in response.
The risk that a proxy war will encourage Moscow to move towards a larger conflict has manifested itself in the constant military threats on Russian state TV, but not, so far, in the actual choices of the Kremlin. Putin obviously doesn’t like to see American armaments flowing into Ukraine, but he seems willing to fight the war on those terms rather than betting on more existential goals.
American success, however, raises new dilemmas. Two scenarios emerge for the next six months of war. In the first, Russia and Ukraine exchange territory in small increments, and the war gradually cools down into a “frozen conflict,” a style familiar from other wars in Russia’s vicinity.
Under these circumstances, any lasting peace agreement would likely require the granting of Russian control over some conquered territory, in the Crimea and the Donbass, if not the land bridge between them, now held mainly by Russian forces. That would give Moscow a clear reward for its aggression, despite all it lost in the course of the invasion. And depending on how much territory was ceded, it would leave Ukraine crippled and weakened, despite its military success.
So such a deal might seem unacceptable in Kiev, Washington, or both. But then the alternative — a permanent stalemate always poised for a return to low-intensity warfare — would also leave Ukraine crippled and weakened, dependent on flows of money and Western military equipment and less able to rebuild itself with confidence.
And the pro-Ukraine united front in the United States is already fragmenting a bit because of the scale of what we’re sending. So it’s unclear whether the Biden administration or the Zelensky administration would be wise to invest in a long-term strategy for a frozen conflict that requires constant bipartisan support — and perhaps soon support from a Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis administration.
There is another scenario, however, in which this dilemma diminishes, because the impasse breaks in Ukraine’s favor. This is the future that the Ukrainian military says is within its grasp — in which, with sufficient military aid and equipment, it can step up its modest counter-offensives and push the Russians back not just to pre-war lines, but potentially beyond. of Ukrainian territory.
This is the future the US should want — except for the extremely important detail that it is also the future in which Russian nuclear escalation suddenly becomes much more likely than it is today.
We know that Russian military doctrine envisions the defensive use of tactical nuclear weapons to turn the tide in a losing war. We must assume that Putin and his circle consider the total defeat in Ukraine to be a threat to the regime. Combine these realities with a world where the Russians are suddenly being beaten, watching their territorial gains evaporate, and you have the most nuclear-shadowed military situation since the naval blockade of Cuba in 1962.
I’ve been turning over these dilemmas since I recently moderated a panel at the Catholic University of America with three center-right foreign policy thinkers: Elbridge Colby, Rebeccah Heinrichs, and Jakub Grygiel. On the wisdom of our support for Ukraine so far, the panel was basically cohesive.
On the issue of the end of the war and the nuclear danger, however, we could see our challenges distilled – with Grygiel emphasizing the importance of regaining territory in the east and along the Black Sea coast for Ukraine to be plausibly self-sufficient in the future, while Heinrich, more aggressive, and Colby, more cautious, discussed what our position should be in the event that rapid Ukrainian advances are met with a Russian tactical nuclear strike. This question is not immediately before us; this will only become a problem if Ukraine starts to make substantial gains.
But as we are arming the Ukrainians on a scale that seems designed to enable a counteroffensive, I sincerely hope that a version of the Colby and Heinrichs back-and-forth is happening at the highest levels of our government — before an issue that matters in academic debates today becomes the most important issue in the world.
