The Russo-Ukrainian War and the End of Illusions

More than 30 months into the war, the Russian armed forces continue to slowly progress in Donbas and now seem poised to eventually take the city of Pokrovsk, a major logistical hub in Donetsk whose capture by Russia would be a significant blow to Ukraine. This comes after the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive, which as I argued one year and a half ago was never particularly likely to be successful, failed last year. At this point, I don’t think many people really believe that Ukraine can win the war in any meaningful sense, yet few people seem willing to draw conclusions from that fact. In particular, people seem unwilling to accept the fact that, in order to stop the war, Ukraine will have to make concessions. What those concessions will be exactly is hard to tell, but that Ukraine will have to make some can’t seriously be doubted and, even if you think that only Ukraine’s interests matter, the conversation should be about what is the optimal strategy to end the war given that each feasible strategy will require concessions. I will go back to that question at the end of this essay, but that’s not the main topic I want to discuss. Instead I want to talk about what the fact that Russia is probably going to win the war means for the West and Western foreign policy.¹ But first I need to explain in more detail why I think that Ukraine will not be able to defeat Russia and end the war on its terms.

Ukraine will have to make territorial and political concessions

The challenge for people who disagree with my view that Russia is probably going to win the war is to present a plausible “theory of victory” for Ukraine and I don’t think they can. There just doesn’t seem to be any scenario in which Russia agrees to withdraw from Ukraine, even to the pre-2022 borders, without Ukraine making territorial or political concessions and probably both. In particular, although some people are floating the idea that Ukraine could exchange the territory in captured in Kursk for Ukrainian territory currently held by Russia, this doesn’t seem even remotely plausible to me. Ukraine probably hoped that, by launching that incursion, it would force Russia to stop its offensive in Donetsk and shift resources to Kursk, but the Russians didn’t take the bait and have apparently been able to contain the Ukrainian incursion without having to withdraw a large number of troops from Donetsk. Despite what many commentators were initially saying, I don’t see any sign that Putin responded to that incursion by panicking or that he is terribly embarrassed by it, quite the contrary.

So the main result is that Ukraine’s already insufficient resources — everybody seemed to agree before it launched the Kursk incursion that it was outgunned and outnumbered in Donetsk — will be spread thinner and that it will be even more at a disadvantage where it matters the most, namely in the Donbas. Indeed, if the front starts collapsing in Donetsk due to insufficient resources, Ukraine will eventually have to shift resources from Kursk to plug the holes over there, at which point it will be easier for Russia to recover the territory it lost in Kursk and Ukraine won’t have anything to exchange. This incursion in Kursk may actually make it politically easier for Putin to allocate more resources to the war because now he can say that Russia proper is at risk and, as we shall see, the fact that he faces severe political constraints to mobilize both men and resources to fight the war is Ukraine’s best chance to achieve a relatively favorable outcome. But even if Russia can’t push the Ukrainian armed forces across the border in Kursk through force, I don’t think it really matters, because overall the war is not going Ukraine’s way and this means that Moscow will be able to obtain Ukraine’s withdrawal from Kursk as part of a deal eventually.

Indeed, a basic fact that should play a central role in any analysis of the war, but is often ignored, is that Ukraine pays a greater cost for the continuation of the war than Russia. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Russia won’t call it quits, since Ukraine’s ability and willingness to suffer the cost of continuing the war may be greater than Russia’s. For instance, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong also paid a greater cost than the Americans during the Vietnam War, but it was still the US that ended up giving up because at the end of the day the communists just cared more and therefore were prepared to take a lot more pain than the Americans. Another example that may seem more relevant is the Soviet-Afghan War. I suspect that, to the extent their optimism is something more than pure wishful thinking, most people who still believe in a Ukrainian victory have this kind of examples in mind, but I think this kind of comparison is very misleading.

First, Ukraine is not a predominantly rural country with a fast-growing population, it’s a middle-income, industrial country with a population that is predominantly urban and highly-educated with a TFR barely above 1. Not only does this mean that Vietnamese or Afghans were more used to hardship and had a greater tolerance for pain than Ukrainians today, but it also means that Vietnam or Afghanistan could afford to pay a much greater price than Ukraine without compromising their future. Indeed, when you have a TFR above 5, you can afford to lose people in a way you can’t when you have a TFR barely above 1. Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal recently explained, the reason why Ukrainian officials have been reluctant to mobilize people between 18 and 25 so far is that men in that cohort haven’t had children yet. The Russo-Ukrainian War is not as deadly as the Vietnam War or the Soviet-Afghan War for Ukrainians, but Ukrainian women and children can move to the EU relatively easily and millions of them have already done so, where many if not most will likely stay even after the war because they enjoy a much higher standard of living in the EU and they will have spent several years over there by then. While Ukrainian men are currently prevented from leaving the country, many of them will probably join their family in the EU after the war. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s fertility has totally collapsed since the beginning of the war, with the already low number of births divided by more than 2. It’s already unlikely that Ukraine will ever recover demographically from the war and this will only get worse as it continues.

Ukraine is also a democracy, even if a very imperfect one, where people have more ways to affect policy than in a communist dictatorship or a traditional society like Vietnam and Afghanistan. To be sure, even in a mature democracy, policy in general and foreign policy in particular is largely insulated from the popular will and is predominantly the result of debates and bargaining among elites. But the main mechanism for that insulation is the fact that regular people don’t follow policy debates and often are not even aware of them, so in a way there is no such thing as a “popular will” on most issues that policy-makers debate because most people don’t really understand or care about them, which is obviously not true of strategy during a war (because the population is directly affected by the way in often dramatic ways), even if propaganda and the rally-around-the-flag effect help keeping the population aligned with the government to some extent. This makes it harder, other things being equal, to continue fighting a war that results in untold amounts of suffering, especially when things don’t show any improvement on the front or indeed keep getting worse.

For reasons I will explain later, I don’t think the West is going to stop providing economic and military assistance to Ukraine and therefore I don’t think that’s how the war is going to end, I think it will end because eventually Ukrainians will grow tired of seeing their sons, husbands and brothers come back home in coffins or crippled, while they have to freeze during winter because of blackouts (Ukraine has lost 2/3 of its electricity production capacity since the beginning of the war), constantly worry about missile strikes and more generally are unable to have a normal life, without any sign that all those sacrifices are achieving anything on the battlefield. Ukrainians seem increasingly open to the idea of a negotiated peace, even if that requires making territorial concessions to Russia. According to the main Ukrainian polling institute, while only 10% of Ukrainians were open to giving up territory in return for peace at the beginning of the war, almost a third of them are today and remarkably this result is more or less the same across regions. One can always question the particular phrasing of the question, but the trend is clear and revealed preferences during the debate about the mobilization law last winter paint a similar picture.

Once a critical mass of people in favor of making concessions to end the war is reached, some people in the Ukrainian elite will try to take advantage of that shift by advocating for such concessions openly, at which point the pressure for the government to signal to Russia that it’s prepared to make concessions it had up until now ruled out will grow. Other people will no doubt resist that, which Russia may facilitate depending on how it responds to that debate in Ukraine (more on Russia’s attitude toward a negotiated settlement later), but unless Ukraine turns into a dictatorship or there is some kind of coup (which I guess can’t be entirely ruled out but would only delay the inevitable because even a dictatorship can’t ignore public opinion), this pressure will eventually become impossible to resist.² This is all the more true that, as more Ukrainians and especially members of the Ukrainian elite start openly advocating for political and territorial concessions to end the war, the US and its allies will also feel more comfortable pushing the Ukrainian government to make such concessions. Right now, the leverage they have in theory is limited in practice because it’s politically delicate to pressure Ukraine into making concessions, but that problem will be greatly alleviated once Ukrainians themselves start advocating for that. This shift in Ukrainian public opinion may even trigger a preference cascade eventually, but it may not and could also remain gradual.

Again, if you think that what I’m predicting here is not going to happen, you have to say what exactly is going to stop the trend we’re seeing in that direction and I don’t think you can. As far as I can tell, people have made two kinds of arguments to that effect, neither of which I find even remotely convincing. The first consists in arguing that, if only the West were not so hesitant to provide Ukraine with such and such alleged wunderwaffen or to lift restrictions on their use, it could defeat Russia or inflict on it such a high cost that it would agree to negotiate on Ukrainian terms. Thus, for a long time, people were placing their hopes in F-16s. It was never explained how, given their cost and the time it takes to train pilots to use them, Ukraine was going to have a fleet of F-16s and other Western fighters sufficient to fundamentally alter the balance of power in the air and obviously that’s not going to happen. Now people are clamoring for the US to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s ability to carry out strikes deep inside Russia. Although US officials still resist that move, I suspect they will eventually relent, but as Stephen Biddle recently argued it won’t tip the balance of the war. The idea that, as one Bloomberg columnist recently put it, lifting those restrictions on the use of Western missiles would allow Zelensky to “bomb Putin to the negotiation table” is preposterous. Moreover, as I will explain later, while it’s true that NATO governments have frequently dragged their feet and procrastinated in providing assistance to Ukraine, there are structural reasons for that which are unlikely to change.

Another kind of argument people make to argue that, although right now it looks as though the war is not going Ukraine’s way, it can still turn things around is predicated on the prediction that Russia will collapse or will no longer be able to sustain the war effort and will be force to negotiate on Ukrainian terms. Russia also has a manpower issue, but it’s so far been able to limit the political impact of the war because, except briefly during the “partial mobilization” in the fall of 2022, soldiers have mostly been drawn from the lower-class through financial inducement and their families have little political influence. This is very different from the Soviet-Afghan War, during which although the children of the elites were largely exempted from the draft, even students at some of the best universities were eventually conscripted and sent to Afghanistan. As I will argue later, this strategy to generate manpower will become less viable as the war continues, but it’s very dubious that it will put the Russian government under the kind of political strain that mobilization creates in Ukraine anytime soon.

In general, only a tiny share of the Russian population is directly affected by the war other than soldiers and their families (such as people in Kursk who have lost their homes or people in Belgorod who are regularly shelled), whereas most of Ukraine’s population is. The vast majority of the Russian population actually benefits from the war, because military spending has boosted incomes. While in the long run this, along with sanctions, will harm Russia’s economy by creating various distortions and crowding out civilian investment, Moscow can probably keep this going for several years. Putin’s regime has fostered widespread apathy in the Russian population, which in broad outlines is ideologically aligned with Putin’s justification of the war and benefits from it at least in the short run, so I don’t think a popular revolution is a very likely possibility in the foreseeable future. This leaves the possibility of a challenge from above, but despite Prigozhin’s rebellion last summer, Putin’s hold on power seems firm. I guess this impression could be misleading, it’s difficult to know what is going on behind the scenes, but it seems irrational to bet the house on some kind of coup and besides it’s not clear that whoever would replace Putin would be more likely to end the war on Ukraine’s terms.

Indeed, while Americans never cared much about Vietnam, just as the Soviets didn’t really care about Afghanistan, the Russians actually care about Ukraine, because Putin’s views about the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians are widespread in Russia, where the independence of Ukraine was never fully accepted. There are millions of ethnic Russians in the territories that Russia occupies in Ukraine, whose families have been there for decades or even centuries, which even putting everything else aside makes the comparison with the Vietnam War or the Soviet-Afghan War inept. In fact, Russia has already paid a far greater cost to fight the war against Ukraine than the Soviet Union did during the Soviet-Afghan War, which compared to the Russo-Ukrainian War was a rather small affair from the point of view of Moscow’s commitment. The Russians are no more immune to the sunk cost fallacy than we are and that alone means that it would probably take a very long time before they agreed to just give up and withdraw unconditionally from Ukraine. I think the Ukrainians, for whom the war is far more costly, will call it quits before that happens and agree to make political and territorial concessions to end the war.

In fact, after months of insisting that Ukraine would not make any such concessions, Zelensky has already started to move in that direction. In a recent interview with Le Monde, he effectively abandoned his demand that Russia withdraws from every inch of Ukrainian territory before talks can even begin, explaining that Russian officials should attend the peace conference planned this fall. Even more significantly, while repeating that Ukraine can’t give up territory in exchange for peace and saying that it would be unconstitutional, he nevertheless suggested that it might happen “if the Ukrainian people want it”. This shows that even Ukrainian officials understand that it won’t be possible for them to end the war on Ukraine’s terms. Previously, Zelensky had insisted as part of his “peace plan” that Russia “shall immediately, completely, and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders and cease the hostilities”. This document also made clear that the borders in question were “as of the declaration of independence of Ukraine in 1991, which includes all parts of the territory of Ukraine temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation with no exceptions”, a clear reference to Crimea.

Needless to say, there never was any chance that Russia would agree to that or be forced to do it and it’s doubtful that even Zelensky ever thought it would happen, yet he still insisted that Russia’s withdrawal from every inch of Ukrainian territory was a precondition for talks and no Western official contradicted him. One reason was probably that, by making a show of intransigence, Ukrainian officials were trying to raise the expectations of Russian officials about what it would cost them to achieve their current goals, in the hope that it would lead them to revise them downward. But another reason is presumably that Zelensky feared that, if he said openly that Ukraine would have to make concessions to Russia in order to end the war, he would find himself vulnerable to attacks by other Ukrainian politicians who would depict that as defeatism. A similar reason explains why NATO officials pretended to go along with Zelensky’s “peace plan”, despite knowing it was completely disconnected from reality, because had they said so publicly it would have inevitably led to heavy criticism both from politicians and the media in the West. As Ukrainians grow more weary of the war, this calculus is changing, because increasingly the risk will be that other Ukrainian politicians will try to outflank him from the other side by criticizing him for his intransigence.

Presumably the same thing will happen in the West, where as more Ukrainians publicly advocate for concessions to end the war, it will become politically easier for officials to defend that solution and even pressure Ukraine to adopt it. In fact, I expect that Ukrainian officials will eventually welcome such public pressure, because it will allow them to deflect the blame on the West for concessions they know to be inevitable. They will argue that, although Ukraine is willing to continue to fight, it can’t do so without the support of the West. Since it’s wavering, the argument will go, prudence dictates that Ukrainians make concessions to Russia even if they don’t want to. But while this shift has already begun, I think it will be very slow, both in Ukraine and in the West. I don’t expect Western military and economic assistance to Ukraine to stop anytime soon. As I have argued before, now that we have committed to Ukraine’s defense in such a strong way, it will be very difficult to backtrack as people will insist that it would damage our credibility and, while I think that argument is bad, it’s nevertheless very effective. I said above that the Russians were not immune to the sunk cost fallacy, but neither are we. In general, once a policy has been adopted, it tends to have a lot of inertia because of the way in which large bureaucracies work. This fact that decisions on Ukraine are to a large extent coordinated in NATO makes that inertia even stronger, because it means that any government that considers withholding support from Ukraine will immediately come under pressure from its allies not to, which makes preserving the status quo the path of least resistance and further insulate policy toward Ukraine from internal pressure.

Indeed, I still think it will take years before the war ends, because the shift in Ukrainian public opinion has been relatively slow so far and, unless the Ukrainian armed forces start collapsing, there is every reason to think it will remain slow. Of course, many people do think a collapse of the Ukrainian armed forces is probable, but while it can’t be entirely ruled out I don’t think it’s very likely. As I argued above, the war is much less disruptive for Russia than for Ukraine and it has more resources, both in manpower and equipment, but it’s easy to exaggerate that advantage and I think a lot of people do. Russia is burning equipment at a very high rate and the stockpiles it inherited from the Soviet period aren’t infinite. Right now, most of the equipment it’s producing is actually refurbished materiel from those stockpiles, so as time goes by it should become harder to replace losses. I think people sometimes make too much of that argument and talk as if Russia would soon be unable to continue the war because of that, which I don’t think is going to happen, but the basic point is still correct. Similarly, while in theory Russia has a lot more military-age men it can mobilize than Ukraine, in practice this advantage is not as meaningful as it seems because, for reasons that will be discussed later, it’s also harder politically and economically for the Russian government to mobilize them.

In fact, the inability of both Russian and Ukraine to mobilize, train and equip a sufficient number of men to exploit tactical successes and turn them into strategic victories has arguably been the central fact of the war. I think it’s plausible that Russia will eventually capture the whole of Donbas and even more territory elsewhere, but unless it radically changes tack, starts allocating far more resources to the war and forcibly mobilizing a much larger number of men (which it seems unwilling or unable to do), I don’t think a scenario in which it eventually takes the entire left bank of the Dniepr and goes back more or less to the borders it had before the partition of Poland is likely. I’m no military expert, so I’m relying on pretty simplistic heuristics to think about what could happen and I could easily be wrong, but when I see how many casualties Russia has to suffer to capture relatively small towns my conclusion is that in order for such a scenario to materialize the resources advantage of Russia would have to be far greater and I don’t think it’s likely that it will make such a commitment.

Of course, I understand that, for various reasons (once certain strategic and well-defended positions have been captured it will become easier to take more territory, attrition can reduce the effectiveness of the Ukrainian armed forces, etc.), the amount of losses that have been necessary to achieve results in the past is a very imperfect predictor what it would take to capture more territory in the future, but I still think it’s a decent heuristic as a rough first approximation and in this case the delta between how much force Russia can plausibly generate and the amount it would have to generate for that scenario to materialize is large enough that I feel safe concluding it’s unlikely to happen. It would be a different story if I thought that NATO might eventually stop providing military and economic assistance to Ukraine, but as I already noted, I think it’s very unlikely to happen. Even if Trump wins in November, which certainly seems plausible at the moment, I think the national security establishment will eventually be able to ensure that assistance continues for reasons that have to do with how foreign policy is made in the US and others that are more specific to Trump’s personal deficiencies and lack of attention to policy issues.

As I have argued last year, I think that since the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, we’ve basically entered a phase of the war similar to what happened after the end of 1950 in the Korean War. The war is going to continue for years and Russia will continue to make gains, but I expect them to be relatively limited in the grand scheme of things and eventually both sides will grow tired and freeze the conflict. I doubt there will be a peace treaty, although if things get bad enough for Ukraine it may have to agree to one, but in one way or another it will make territorial and political concessions and Russia will agree to a long-term ceasefire. Once again, it’s a fool’s errand to try to predict what will happen in a war and therefore it wouldn’t be surprising if even that admittedly vague prediction turned out to be false, but we have to make predictions to think about policy and I think something like that is the most likely outcome. If I’m right and that’s more or less how the war ends, what does that mean for Western policy toward Russia and Ukraine so far? That’s what I want to turn to next.

The failure of Western policy toward Russia and Ukraine

I think that, if my prediction about how the war is going to end turns out to be correct, the most immediate lesson for Western foreign policy will be that, as dysfunctional as Putin’s regime might be, it was still unrealistic to think that we could defeat Russia in a proxy war in Ukraine. A ubiquitous argument among anti-Russia hawks is that, since NATO members collectively have a GDP twenty times larger than Russia, Russia doesn’t stand a chance against Ukraine if the West is prepared to commit itself to the defense of Ukraine. The problem with that argument is that, even putting aside the fact that for various reasons GDP is a very imperfect measure of military potential, having more resources at one’s disposal doesn’t matter unless one is willing to actually commit them and, despite their over-the-top rhetoric about how the fate of democracy everywhere is at stake, Western countries evidently have a very limited willingness to commit resources to Ukraine’s defense. Of course, they have provided a very large amount of military and economic assistance to Ukraine, but as hawks regularly complain it’s still not enough and they have also been procrastinating and dragging their feet the entire time. Moreover, that’s just talking about material assistance to Ukraine, but as we have seen the main problem Ukraine faces is arguably the lack of manpower and, with a few exceptions, even hawks don’t advocate that NATO send troops to fight Russia in Ukraine.

The conclusion I draw from that unwillingness on the part of the West to make a strong enough commitment to defeat Russia in Ukraine is that we should have anticipated that we’d be powerless to prevent Russia from defeating Ukraine in case of a full-scale war between them and done more to prevent such a war in the first place. When you put it like that, this conclusion seems uncontroversial enough, but what I mean in particular is that we should have openly rejected NATO’s idiotic and hypocritical “open door” policy and more generally made clear to both Russia and Ukraine that we had no intention of ever bringing Ukraine into Western political and security structures. While this argument is now very unpopular, it was once the dominant view among Russia watchers, not just among self-styled realists. For instance, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, who co-wrote a biography of Putin and can’t be suspected of sympathy for him, argued in 2015 that Washington shouldn’t send weapons to Ukraine because since Russia enjoyed “escalation dominance” in Ukraine, meaning that “whatever move we make, [Putin] can match it and go further” it would only increase the probability of a war that we’d be powerless to prevent Ukraine from losing.³ Of course, hawks deny that Russia enjoyed escalation dominance over NATO in Ukraine, but as I’ve argued above that’s because they don’t understand that what matters for escalation dominance is not just theoretical capabilities but also the willingness to commit them.

I’m not going to argue here against the claim that Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO or Western policy in general, because although I find that view absurd — even if I obviously don’t think Western policy was the only factor — I plan to discuss it at length elsewhere. But it should be noted that, even if one concedes that Western policy did play a role in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, it doesn’t follow that the best way to prevent it was to follow the realist advice and stay away from Ukraine. Indeed, anti-Russia hawks could, and many of them do, argue that if the West had signaled a stronger commitment to help Ukraine in case of invasion at the time and done more to help Kiev prepare for it, then Putin would not have invaded it because he would have concluded that it didn’t pass a cost-benefit test. They may even be right about that, but the problem with that argument is that, had the US tried to do that, it would have faced a credibility problem and that probably wouldn’t have worked. As I have argued, the reason why, despite being much weaker than NATO, Russia has escalation dominance in Ukraine is that NATO members are not willing to commit a large share of the resources theoretically available to them to defend Ukraine.

If that is so, it has little to do with the fact that people like me write arguments in favor of restraint, because in truth such arguments have very little impact on policy relative to other factors. The main reason why the West is not willing to make a stronger commitment to Ukraine’s defense is that, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric that has become popular since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine’s independence is not a core interest of the West. This point was made cogently by Obama in the long interview he did with Jeffrey Goldberg in 2016:

Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.

“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he said.

I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

“It’s realistic,” he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.”

I think we’re going to learn that Obama was right or rather that’s what people should, but probably won’t unfortunately, conclude from the way in which the war is probably going to end.

Ukraine’s economy is very small and, as a result, trade with it doesn’t matter to Western countries. This also means that, unlike China or Russia for European countries, there are few groups in the West that have an economic stake in Ukraine’s independence and will lobby government officials to provide more economic and military assistance.⁴ Once again, I don’t think the West is going to stop supporting Ukraine anytime soon, but I also think that it will continue to do so in a half-hearted way and to drag its feet to provide more assistance. Hawks are right when they say that, for instance, the West could do more to help Ukraine by implementing harsher sanctions against Russia. For instance, we could in theory do more to prevent Russia from selling oil and gas on the international market, but this would increase the price of energy and harm us a lot. We could also do more to prevent the circumvention of export control on dual-use Western components to Russia, but this would impose a cost on Western companies to track their supply chains and would force us to sanction more non-Western companies in emerging markets, which in turn would create political tensions with those countries and harm Western companies. There are limits to how far Western officials are prepared to go in that direction. This is not because they’re evil or particularly short-sighted, that’s just how politics works and it’s foolish to expect that Western politicians can divert a lot of resources to help Ukraine defeat Russia if they don’t have the support of many powerful groups pushing for a stronger commitment to Ukraine’s defense.

Similarly, while public opinion in the West has become very hostile to Russia and is largely sympathetic to Ukraine, the truth is that at the end of the day most people don’t really care about Ukraine. A lot of very bad things also happen in the rest of the world, which the West could also prevent in theory (in many cases it would actually be much easier than helping Ukraine defeat Russia), but people mostly don’t care about them either. A terrible civil war has been raging in Sudan since last year, Azerbaijan carried out ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and now threatens to attack Armenia, Israel is turning Gaza into a pile of ruble and allowing settlers to run amok terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank, various conflicts that have resulted in the death of a very large number of people have been raging in some parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo for more than 20 years, etc. and people in the West mostly don’t care, despite the fact that in some cases Western governments are more or less directly assisting people committing war crimes in those conflicts. Again, that’s not because they’re evil or stupid, it’s just normal for people not to care very much about what happens in foreign countries. They have a normal job to do and the rest of the time they want to be with their family or just enjoy their life without thinking about what’s happening on the other side of the world if that’s not directly and meaningfully impacting them. You can argue that people should care more, but they don’t, so it makes no difference to my point even if you’re right.

Of course, if the rhetoric to the effect that what is at stake in Ukraine is the fate of democracy everywhere or that unless Ukraine defeats Russia it will attack NATO’s eastern flank next were true, it would be a different story. The Cold War was very expensive, but the US and its allies still fought it and allocated huge amounts of resources to do so because they really believed that the Soviet Union might invade Western Europe. It’s true that, based on what we have learned since the collapse of the Soviet Union with the partial declassification of Soviet archives and testimonies by former Soviet officials, that Western fears of a Soviet invasion were exaggerated, but Western officials really believed that was a serious possibility all the same. It’s quite clear that, despite their rhetoric, Western officials are not overly concerned about the possibility that Russia might attack NATO’s eastern flank in Poland or the Baltics and, as I have argued previously, they have every reason not to be.⁵ It’s striking that, in the debate about Russia and Ukraine, the prevailing discourse manages to both underestimate and overestimate Russia. They overestimate it by talking as if Russian leaders could be so disconnected from reality as to not realize that Russia would have no chance in a war against NATO and underestimate it by assuming that because NATO is so much more powerful than Russia it can win a proxy war in Ukraine against it.

The lack of a powerful constituency with a stake in the preservation of Ukraine’s independence is not something Western political leaders can easily change and it should rather be seen as a constraint they have to take into account. That’s related to what Obama was talking about when, in the context of the debate about the dispute between Ukraine and Russia, he said that it was important to be clear about what your core interests are and what they aren’t. Not that a policy goal is a core interest of a country if and only if there are enough groups in that country willing to back it, that’s neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, but there is still a correlation.⁶ Even if he sometimes failed to follow his own advice, making the distinction Obama was talking about is the first step toward appreciating the limits of your power, because you can’t realistically implement a policy that is very costly unless you know that enough people will be prepared to back it. In turn, the failure to correctly ascertain the limits of your power is a cardinal sin in foreign policy and, as during the Syrian Civil War, often results in disaster. Unfortunately, I think it will also result in disaster here and everyone, but the Ukrainians most of all, will pay the price for that failure. There is nothing moral about pursuing a policy that exceeds your real capabilities, even if your goal is to correct a real injustice, as in this case.

To be fair, a similar argument can probably be made against the realist position. One could argue that, although few groups in the West have a stake in Ukraine’s independence, as I’ve noted above the same thing is true about Russia in the US, which is by far the most powerful and influential country in the Western alliance. But, so the argument goes, only the existence of enough groups in the US with a stake in the preservation of good relations with Russia could have prevented idealist thinking, which has always been very powerful in the American foreign policy establishment, from making it politically feasible to consistently hold the realist line on Ukraine. I’ve actually made that argument before and think it’s pretty convincing:

Obama had clear realist leanings and tried to be conciliatory toward Russia in order not to fuel the security dilemma, but in this political environment he could only achieve a policy that was ambiguous and, to quote the French historian Jacques Bainville, “too harsh in its mild features and too mild in its harsh aspects”. Given that a realist policy wasn’t really politically feasible, it might have been preferable to be more aggressive against Russia, because it might have deterred it from invading Ukraine. The same can arguably be said about Germany’s stance toward Russia. Since the invasion, it has become largely uncontroversial that it was completely wrong, but as I plan to argue in details soon, I actually think the war could have been avoided if the West had been united behind that policy. The problem is that Germany was never able to convince its partners to come onboard and, as a result, the kind of conciliatory policy it pursued toward Russia was arguably worse than if it had joined the bandwagon and been more aggressive.

Indeed, there is clearly something tragic in the Greek sense about the Russo-Ukrainian War, because while it was possible for everyone to see what course of action were most likely to prevent it, even if many people refused to see it, political constraints that nobody could do anything about inevitably pushed us toward what was arguably the policy that maximized the probability that it would happen.

The price for Ukraine is pretty obvious and I will return to that question at the end of this essay, but the West is also going to pay a price, though unless things really spiral out of control it should be relatively modest. In a way that’s part of the problem, because the West in general and the US in particular is just too powerful for its own good, hence it’s largely insulated from the damage its own foreign policy mistakes wreak. I have already discussed at length the costs of providing military assistance to Ukraine elsewhere, so I don’t want to repeat myself here, but it suffices to say that even if we manage to avoid a catastrophic escalation that would bring NATO into the war (a scenario that seems very unlikely but can’t be totally ruled out), this policy would have large direct and indirect costs for the West not only in purely economic terms but also in terms of military preparedness and foreign policy. This would be true even if Ukraine defeated Russia, but since it probably won’t, it’s going to be even worse. The purely economic cost is sustainable because Western countries are very rich, which is also one of the reasons I don’t think Western support to Ukraine is going to end anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be small and it won’t. If we include both direct and indirect costs, and if I’m right that the war is going to last several more years, then it will probably run into trillions of dollars by the time it’s over.

Perhaps the most common argument in favor of the view that it’s in the West’s interest to provide military assistance to Ukraine is that it will make Europe safer by degrading Russia’s military capabilities at a low cost for NATO. But General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s commander-in-chief in Europe, recently told Congress that the opposite was going to happen:

In sum, Russia is on track to command the largest military on the continent and a defense industrial complex capable of generating substantial amounts of ammunition and materiel in support of large scale combat operations. Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia will be larger, more lethal, and angrier with the West than when it invaded.

In other words, not only is Western military assistance to Ukraine fail to achieve its objective, but as I previously warned it might, it will probably bring about the very kind of situation it was supposed to prevent. It’s true that, because it’s going to be forced to fight a long war of attrition, Russia is going to burn through most of its Soviet-era stockpiles of equipment, but what good will that do us? The vast majority of that equipment was in no condition to be used without significant and costly refurbishment that Russia showed absolutely no inclination to perform until it had to, it would probably have become totally unsalvageable or useless within a few decades and it’s not as if Russia was going to use it against NATO if we hadn’t supported Ukraine anyway. Indeed, even if Russia had somehow been crazy enough to attack a NATO member next, it’s very unlikely that it would have turned into a war of attrition in which Russia has to dig into its stockpiles because the fear of a nuclear escalation would almost certainly have ended the fighting long before that. What matters for Europe’s security is not how much equipment Russia has in stockpiles, it’s the capabilities it can actually mobilize on a relatively short notice, which is very different.

I think Cavoli likely exaggerates the threat that Russia will pose after the war is over, which is not surprising because it’s in the Pentagon’s interest to inflate threats in order to secure a larger budget, but there is little doubt that, if you take into account both capabilities and intentions, Russia will pose a greater threat to Europe after the war than before and more importantly for the debate about Western policy toward Ukraine it will pose a greater threat than it would have if the West had not forced Russia to fight a prolonged war of attrition by providing military assistance to Ukraine. Had this not happened, Ukraine would have run out of ammunition sometime in 2022 and the conventional phase of the war, if not the war itself, would have ended a few months after the beginning of the invasion. I’m sure people will argue that, had this happened, people would have launched a massive program of military spending to reconstitute its forces anyway, but there is no evidence whatsoever for that view and plenty of evidence that it wouldn’t have. Indeed, not only did Putin fail to mobilize despite the failure of Russia’s initial assault in 2022 until the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv in the fall, but even after that counteroffensive Russia still planned to wind defense spending down after 2023, presumably because it was overoptimistic about the prospects of ending the war quickly.

In response to the greater threat posed by Russia, European countries will increase their defense spending because even though a Russian attack on NATO is very unlikely people will be scared of it and governments have to prepare even for unlikely possibilities (though military budgets won’t increase as much as people are predicting because European officials don’t really believe their apocalyptic rhetoric about the consequences a Ukrainian defeat would have and most European governments are going to face severe budget deficits in the coming years as a result of expenditures they made to deal with the pandemic and the energy crisis), so the main result of the war, from a strategic point of view, is going to be a new equilibrium in which both Russia and the West spend more on defense (which in turn means that over the next few decades trillions of dollars will be diverted from more productive uses to finance military spending), without a fundamental alteration of the balance of power in Europe. While it’s going to be a tragedy for Ukraine, this won’t be the end of the world for the rest of Europe and most of the people who at the moment are claiming that unless Russia is defeated in Ukraine all hell is going to break lose will have forgotten about it only a few month after it’s over if not before, but it will still be very costly and it’s only because the West is so rich and powerful that we likely won’t feel the pain very much.

Moreover, the West’s policy of providing military assistance to Ukraine and letting Kiev define its war goals instead of using the leverage it has to prevent the Ukrainians from pursuing unrealistic objectives won’t just be costly because it will have large economic costs, it will also be costly in terms of military preparedness and our ability to achieve other foreign policy goals. The point about military preparedness is that, to some extent, the military assistance that the US and its allies reduce their ability to respond militarily to crises that might erupt in other parts of the world. People dismiss that fact because they argue that Western nations could theoretically solve that problem by investing more in their military preparedness, but that’s largely irrelevant because they won’t or at least not enough to eliminate the problem, due to political and organizational constraints that simply can’t be wished out of existence. For instance, France could in theory make investments to massively increase the production of SCALP missiles and replenish its stockpiles more quickly while increasing deliveries to Ukraine, but in practice it won’t because this would cost several billions of euros and it’s struggling with a large budget deficit that is going to take precedence over that. If there were enough powerful groups with a stake in Ukraine’s independence, then it might have been a different story because they would fight to make Ukraine a priority during the political fights over the budget, but as I already noted above that’s not the case. Most Western countries, including the US, are in a similar situation.

Western support to Ukraine, by prolonging the war and destroying the West’s relationship with Russia, will also reduce our ability to achieve other foreign policy goals because Russia is going to make that harder. Indeed, while Russia is a relatively weak country and not a serious competitor for the US or even a major threat to Europe, it still has considerable spoiling power. Again, I have already discussed this point in detail before and I’m not going to repeat myself, but it’s striking how people constantly inflate the threat posed by Russia yet keep ignoring that fact. For instance, Russia has a lot of very sophisticated weapon systems and since the end of the Cold War the US has tried hard to make sure they wouldn’t be transferred to Western adversaries, because it understood that if that happened it would reduce the West’s military advantage over the countries that benefited from such transfers, raise the cost of using military force against them and therefore reduce the credibility of the threat to do so. In the past, Russia has often avoided transferring its most sophisticated military technology to Western adversaries in part to preserve good relations with the West, but now that motive is gone.

The fact that, largely thanks to Western support for Ukraine, Russia’s invasion has turned into a long war of attrition has already forced Moscow to develop much closer ties with China, Iran and North Korea. In exchange for assistance during the war, such as Iranian drones, Chinese dual-use components and North Korean artillery shells, it has already been reported that Russia has agreed to transfers of technology and this could get a lot worse by the time it’s over. People dismiss Russia’s military technology because the Russian armed forces have failed to defeat Ukraine quickly, but that probably had little to do with the performance of Russian weapon systems and, if tomorrow Iran is able to acquire dozens of S-400 systems and they shoot down Israeli planes or if Russia transfers P-800 Oniks missiles to the Houthis and they start using them against the US Navy in the Red Sea, the people who are making fun of Russian military technology at the moment will not be laughing anymore.⁷ There is a reason why Israel, which regularly conducts air strikes against Iranian and Iran-affiliated targets in Syria (where Russia has air defense systems), has been very careful not to anger Russia by siding with Ukraine. Russia may lag behind the US and the most advanced Western nations, but having inherited a massive military-industrial complex and decades of investment in sophisticated weapon systems, it still has a significant edge in military technology over most of the world. In many areas, this includes China, which is otherwise far more powerful than Russia.

What should Ukraine do and why it probably won’t do it

As I just explained, the cost of NATO’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine will be large for the West (though not so large that we’ll learn any lesson from it), but one could argue that it will at least make Ukraine better off. That’s hardly obvious though and, depending on how exactly the war ends, the opposite may be true. It’s not impossible that, had the West made it clear to Ukraine that it would not provide military assistance during the first weeks of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine would have agreed to a deal with Russia that, while harsh and unfair, would nevertheless have been preferable to what it will have to accept eventually and would have avoided the massive human and economic cost of continuing the war for several years. Of course, hawks strenuously deny that and claim there is no way that is true, but that’s little more than a flat assertion and based on the available evidence about the negotiations that took place at the time this possibility can hardly be ruled out. For instance, Russia’s territorial demands were less extensive at the time since it was only asking that Ukraine recognizes the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk in their administrative boundaries, whereas it has since claim not only Donetsk and Luhansk for itself but also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Hawks assert that it was merely a ruse and that Russia would eventually have annexed that and more if Ukraine had accepted Moscow’s conditions at the time, but they have no idea and don’t really provide any evidence in support of that claim, beyond saying that since Russia invaded Ukraine before there is no reason to think it won’t do it again. In fact, there are plenty of reasons to think it wouldn’t have done it again, starting with the fact that invading Ukraine had proved much harder and more costly than they had anticipated. It’s hardly obvious that, having obtained both territorial and political concessions from Ukraine (which probably fell short of Putin’s original goals but could still be presented as a clear victory), Russia wouldn’t have left it there. Of course, it may also have not, but that’s irrelevant unless you think that by continuing the war Ukraine will eventually achieve a better outcome and frankly it seems very dubious at this point. It’s also not clear that, even if the West had made it clear to Ukraine that it would have to fend for itself against Russia, it wouldn’t still have rejected Moscow’s conditions at the time and ended up having to accept something even worse than what it will get.

Ultimately, we’ll never know for sure, because for that we’d have to be able to observe the counterfactual in which the West refused to help Ukraine and by definition that’s impossible. It also doesn’t matter very much, not only because that boat has already sailed, but also because it’s dubious that the US and its allies would ever have left Ukraine to fend for itself, even if we agree for the sake of the argument that it would have been preferable. Indeed, while the evidence suggests that initially the West didn’t plan to make a commitment to Ukraine’s defense (if only because they thought it would be defeated relatively quickly), once the Ukrainian armed forces had repulsed Russia’s initial assault it was always going to be very difficult for Western officials to resist the calls to provide military assistance. Just as it was very difficult for Western officials not to promise Ukraine that it would eventually be welcome into Western political and security structures, even if that made a Russian invasion more likely, because the ideological makeup of the foreign policy establishment in Washington and other Western capitals made it hard for government officials to avoid making that kind of promise, it was always going to be very difficult to let Ukraine lose for lack of ammunition once it managed to defeat Russia’s initial assault. Once again, while government officials have some room for choice it would be wrong to pretend their actions were always predetermined, we must also keep in mind that in many cases they face incentives that push them to make suboptimal decisions.

This leaves the question of what, now that Russia has invaded Ukraine and that Western governments have committed to provide military assistance to Kiev, Ukraine and the West should do. I think the right way to think about the question of what is the best time for Ukraine to open negotiations to end the war is to frame it as a sort of optimization problem. Ukraine’s goal should be to end the war at the lowest possible cost to itself. We can distinguish between two kinds of cost that Ukraine faces as it seeks to achieve that goal. First, there are the costs of continuing the war, such as casualties and the destruction of property. I’m not just talking about the immediate costs but also about their long term consequences. For instance, when infrastructure is destroyed, not only does it have immediate consequences on the economy and people’s well-being but it will also affect them in the future. Another kind of cost are the concessions that Ukraine would have to make to convince Russia to end the war. Again, this should be construed not just as the immediate cost of the concessions in question, but should include the cost they will have in the long run. For instance, if Ukraine needs to give up territory to end the war, the cost should include the impact this will have on future economic growth and the increased vulnerability to another Russian attack in the future it may entail. The relationship between those two kinds of cost is complex and not easy to figure out, but that’s what one has to do in order to solve the above-mentioned optimization problem.

For instance, insofar as what concessions that Russia will demand to end the war depends in part on what the Russian leadership believes about how costly it will be for Russia to convince Ukraine to make those concessions, and in turn that depends in part on their beliefs about Ukraine’s willingness to endure further hardship to avoid compromising, it’s plausible that other things being equal Ukraine can induce Russia to reduce the concessions it demands by waiting longer before opening peace talks because doing so will increase Russia’s estimate of Ukraine’s determination. Moreover, the longer the war lasts and the higher the cost already incurred by Russia will be, which other things being equal also makes it more likely to reduce its demands.⁸ This tends to create an inverse relationship between the first kind of cost and the second kind of cost, because the longer Ukraine waits to sue for peace and the more it will suffer due to the continuation of the war, but that’s only true other things being equal and other things probably aren’t equal. Indeed, Putin’s belief about how costly it would be for Russia to force Ukraine to make the concessions he wants to extract from it doesn’t just depend on his belief about Kiev’s determination to keep fighting, but also on his belief about each side’s military prospects if the war continues. In particular, if Ukraine’s military situation continues to deteriorate as the war goes on, it will reduce Putin’s estimate of how costly it would be to achieve his current goals other things being equal, which could in theory more than compensate the opposite effect that Ukraine’s continued refusal to negotiate will have on his belief about Kiev’s determination not to compromise.

For the reasons I have already discussed, I think that’s exactly what is going to happen. I doubt that, by continuing the war, Ukraine is doing much to raise Putin’s estimate of how costly it will be to achieve his goals, because at the moment Ukraine’s military situation keeps getting worse, polls show a trend in favor of making concessions to end the war in Ukrainian public opinion and, as I have argued above, there is no reason to think any of that is going to change as the war goes on. So it seems to me that, in the long run, there is actually a positive correlation between the costs that Ukraine will incur by continuing the war and the costs it will have to pay in the form of concessions to end it. The only glimmer of hope for Ukraine, putting aside the possibility of a coup in Russia or something like that (which seems very unlikely and is certainly not the kind of possibility anyone should bet the future of their country on), is that Putin is clearly reluctant to increase Russia’s commitment to the war and in particular to carry out another round of mobilization. Except in the fall of 2022, when he was forced to mobilize to deal with the emergency, Putin has so far been able to avoid it by enticing people to voluntarily sign up to fight in Ukraine with financially attractive contracts. This has allowed Russia to recruit enough men while sparing the more affluent and educated part of the population, which has kept the political cost of fighting the war to a minimum. However, there are limits to how much that strategy can accomplish, which Russia may be close to reaching. Indeed, Putin recently doubled the bonus that people who volunteer to fight in Ukraine receive upon signing a contract, which suggests that Russia is finding it more difficult to reach its recruitment targets in that way.

Putin may soon reach a point where, if he wants to preserve Russia’s ability to launch offensives and maintain the pressure on Ukraine, he will have to escalate Russia’s commitment to the war, which will require him to take steps he’d rather avoid for political and economic reasons. Indeed, not only would another round of mobilization be unpopular, but it would also worsen inflationary pressure. Russia’s economy is already overheating and has very little slack, so another round of mobilization would increase inflation by reducing the labor supply, not only because the men sent to fight in Ukraine would no longer be available to work in Russia but also because another mobilization would no doubt induce many people to leave the country. So I think Putin will eventually have to decide whether he wants to increase Russia’s commitment to the war, which he clearly doesn’t want to do, but I think he probably will if, when that time comes, Ukraine is not prepared to make enough concessions. This war has become deeply personal to him and he surely know that how it ends will largely define his legacy, so I don’t think it’s very likely that he won’t escalate if he thinks that it’s the only way he can secure the kind of terms that he could present as a victory. If the Ukrainians miss that window because they are not prepared to make enough concessions, he will likely escalate Russia’s commitment, the sunk cost fallacy will kick in and the window will close, so Ukraine will probably end up paying a higher price for similar or even worse terms in the end.

It’s hard to know exactly what concessions Ukraine would have to make to satisfy Putin, that’s something that would only emerge in the course of negotiations, but I think that, at the minimum, Kiev will not only have to agree that Russia keep at least de facto control over the Ukrainian territory it has conquered but also formally renounce NATO membership. Hawks will say that, should Ukraine agree to such terms, it would effectively mean that it’s no longer fully sovereign but only has a diminished form of sovereignty. They are right, but unfortunately I think that, even if Ukraine doesn’t make those concessions when the window of opportunity I described above is still open, it will still have to agree to that eventually and possibly much worse. The only difference is that more people will die, Ukraine’s infrastructure will be more thoroughly destroyed and more Ukrainians will leave the country or stay abroad. Once again, if people don’t think Ukraine should agree to such a deal, they need to present a realistic plan that would allow it to avoid making that kind of concessions eventually, but I don’t think they can. Every plan that people have put forward requires the West to massively increase military assistance to Ukraine. Now, it’s possible that if Western military assistance increased massively and Kiev did another round of mobilization, Ukraine could inflict enough damage on the Russian armed forces to convince Putin to revise his goals and agree to more limited terms. But it’s not going to happen because, as I explained above, there just aren’t enough people with a stake in Ukraine’s independence in the West for economic and military assistance to increase dramatically.

Again, most Western countries currently face large public deficits and in the next few years there will be major political battles about what expenditures to cut in order to reduce them, so Ukraine should consider itself lucky if Western economic and military assistance doesn’t go down. If that is so, it’s not because people like me write papers in which they argue that it’s not in the West’s interest to continue the current policy toward Ukraine, it’s because due to the lack of groups that have a stake in Ukraine’s independence in the West nobody will go to bat for Ukraine in the upcoming budgetary debates. For instance, if the French government tries to cut pensions or reduce wage subsidies to balance the budget, plenty of organized groups are going to fight to prevent that and the French government will have strong incentives to listen to them, but there won’t be anyone to argue that we should increase economic and military assistance to Ukraine because voters don’t care and there are no economic interests in France with a stake in Ukraine’s independence. As I explained above, I still expect Western countries to keep supporting Ukraine due to inertia and pressure from allies, but it’s not realistic to expect that it will increase significantly in this context. Moreover, the problem with that plan isn’t limited to the lack of stakeholders in Ukraine’s independence in the West, there is also Ukraine’s own reluctance to take the steps it presupposes to take into account.

Indeed, while it’s true that the West has been procrastinating a lot on military assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has also been procrastinating with mobilization and that reluctance to mobilize is only going to get worse. It’s clear that Ukraine needs more manpower at the moment, so for increased Western assistance to help, Ukraine would also need to do another round of mobilization. Ukraine’s ability to properly train new recruits is very limited, but if we assume that Western assistance will increase massively, we can assume that in particular NATO will massively scale up the training of Ukrainian conscripts. The problem is that, even if that were realistic (as I have just argued it’s not because the West isn’t going to dramatically increase military assistance to Ukraine), Ukrainians would still have to agree to further expand mobilization and it’s hardly obvious that it would happen. The last time Ukraine had to expand mobilization, it led to a protracted debate and it took months for the relevant legislation to be voted, which only happened after it was significantly watered down. The opposition is still asking that a demobilization framework be put in place to allow the people who have been fighting since the beginning of the war to go back home. If Ukraine wants to increase the available manpower, it will have to mobilize men under 25, which will make the proposal even more controversial and will almost certainly result in compromises that reduce the scope of mobilization. Political constraints are real and can’t be wished out of existence, not even in Ukraine, but that’s precisely what the people who argue that we should aim for a decisive Ukrainian victory do.

Another objection to the idea that Ukraine should make concessions to end the war before Putin ups the ante is that, if Ukraine agrees to a ceasefire now without NATO membership, it will just pave the way for another Russian invasion later that will allow Putin to finish the job. To be sure, nobody can say for sure that it’s not what would happen, but that argument is only convincing if the people who make it have a realistic alternative to propose and again they simply don’t. Besides, while hawks talk as if it were certain that Russia would attack Ukraine again if there were a ceasefire soon, that’s obviously not the case. The war has demonstrated to Putin that subjugating Ukraine would be extremely costly and, if he can secure terms that would amount to a clear victory, it’s hardly obvious that he would not be satisfied with that. Moreover, even if we assume for the sake of the argument that it’s certain that Russia would attack Ukraine again, it doesn’t follow that Ukraine should agree to a ceasefire unless it can also be shown that Russia and not Ukraine would benefit more from a pause in the fighting, which is hardly obvious given that again Ukraine is losing at the moment. Hawks never even bother to make that argument because ultimately their opposition to a ceasefire is based, not on rational considerations, but on the judgment that Russia has no right to demand territorial or political concessions from Ukraine. Well, it does not, but Ukraine will still have to make them in the end. As the French screenwriter Michel Audiard said, when 130 kilograms men say something, 60 kilograms men listen. He could have added that this has nothing to do with the rights of 130 kilograms men.

In a recent article, which acknowledges that the war is going badly for Ukraine, The Economist argues that NATO should invite Ukraine to join. I think following that advice would basically guarantee that Russia would reject negotiations and continue the war until Kiev is willing to accept even harsher terms. Indeed, the Russians know that NATO will never bring Ukraine into the Alliance as long as the war is ongoing (because NATO members don’t want to join the war against Russia), so if they believe that Ukraine would join NATO as soon as the war is over they would have a strong incentive to keep the war going. As I keep pointing out, the claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “nothing to do” with NATO is preposterous, but unfortunately it has become a dogma in the West. In order to defend it, people even misrepresent what Putin says or omit contextual information to make it sound as if he used to be okay with NATO expansion, but that doesn’t make this dogma any less absurd. No matter how much people insist on ignoring the evidence that the Russians genuinely care about preventing Ukraine from ever joining NATO, that is still a fact and we only ignore that fact at our own peril. What makes this worse is that, based on the West’s behavior since 2022 and even before that, it’s pretty clear that Western officials have no intention of following through on their promise to bring Ukraine into NATO and only repeat it for reasons that have to do with intra-alliance politics.

In my view, instead of pursuing NATO membership (which Russia will never allow and that the West doesn’t really intend to grant anyway), Ukraine should focus on secure the right to eventually join the EU, which I think Russia might be prepared to accept if Kiev commits to opting out of the Common Security and Defence Policy. It should also resist arms limitations that would prevent it from creating a credible deterrent to another Russian aggression. Some arms limitations, such as restrictions on long-range missiles, are probably okay since Ukraine has shown that it could make aggression very costly to Russia even without such weapons, but any cap on the number of tanks, artillery systems, etc. should be high enough to make another invasion by Russia very costly. Of course, NATO would be better for Ukraine, but again I don’t think the Russians will never agree to that and Ukraine has no realistic prospect of forcing them to change their mind. Frankly, I don’t know if the Russians would even agree to that, but the probability of a deal is certainly higher if Ukraine doesn’t insist on NATO membership, which is a highly sensitive issue in Russia. Not only has the prospect that Ukraine might join NATO been making everyone in the Russian foreign policy establishment foaming at the mouth for decades, but Putin has explicitly and repeatedly said that preventing that was one of his main war goals (indeed that’s one of the few things he’s been clear about when it comes to his war goals), so abandoning that demand would involve a major loss of face and that’s not very likely given that Russia is winning. Since the West will never agree to openly close the door on Ukrainian membership to NATO, since the so-called “open door” policy has become a dogma so deeply entrenched in the Western foreign policy establishment that no politician is going to explicitly reject it (even though most of them know it’s idiotic), it will have to be Ukraine that gives up that goal.

Yet another objection is that Putin is not interested in negotiations anyway. This may be true, but nobody really knows and once again the certainty that people who assert that is unwarranted. Indeed, since the beginning of the war, there has been plenty of evidence that Russia was interested in negotiations. For instance, according to the New York Times, after the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv had put Russia on the defensive in the fall of 2022, US intelligence services intercepted Russian communications suggesting that Russia was thinking about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In response, Biden sent William Burns, the director of the CIA and a former US ambassador in Moscow, to meet Sergei Naryshkin, his Russian counterpart, in Ankara to warn against that. Burns apparently told the New York Times that, when Naryshkin arrived, he was so convinced that he’d come to negotiate a deal to end the war that it took some time for Burns to disabuse him of that notion and be able to talk about the risk of a nuclear escalation.⁹ More recently, Reuters published a piece, based on interviews with several Russian sources, according to which Putin didn’t want to carry out another round of mobilization and was prepared to accept a ceasefire that would freeze the conflict on the current frontlines. Of course, even if Putin was once willing to negotiate, he may have since changed his mind. The evidence I mentioned pre-dates the Kursk incursion and, according to a report by independent Russian journalists, Putin is no longer interested in peace talks. But ultimately nobody knows and there is still plenty of evidence that Russia would be prepared to negotiate a ceasefire. The people who assert that Putin is not interested in negotiations either totally ignore that kind of evidence or at best dismiss it summarily on the ground that it’s just Russian disinformation meant to undermine the West’s resolve in supporting Ukraine. They know that, presumably, thanks to their ability to read Putin’s mind.

A related point opponents of negotiations make, in response to people who claim that continuing the war is pointless because it’s very costly yet doesn’t result in dramatic changes on the ground, is that even if the frontlines don’t change much it doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to keep fighting because the very fact of imposing pain on the other side is what makes negotiations possible because only when one or both sides have suffered enough pain will they be prepared to make the concessions necessary to end the war. As long as negotiations have not happened, they seem to imply, it means that neither side has suffered enough for negotiations to be useful. Now, they are right that it’s fallacious to claim that the imposition of pain doesn’t affect the politics of peace, but it’s just as fallacious to claim that politicians have no discretion in when to start negotiations and that it's just something that will happen automatically after enough pain has been imposed and not before. Concretely, peace happens after people start talking and agree to make concessions, which is a choice they have to make. Obviously, they face constraints in making that choice, but it's still not a purely mechanical process that is totally outside of their control. Nor is it something that, in principle, the West couldn’t influence by using the leverage it has over Ukraine and making it clear to Russia that it’s prepared to use carrots and not just sticks in return for better terms for Ukraine. Western officials are unwilling to use that leverage, however, because the cost of not doing so will primarily be borne by Ukraine while the cost of doing so would be borne by them personally, as they would be sure to be criticized heavily in the media for betraying Ukraine, even if that would ultimately in Ukraine’s interest and might actually be welcomes by people in Ukraine who understand that but need cover to plead more openly for a deal.

Unfortunately, as I keep saying, political constraints can’t be ignored and those which prevent both people in Ukraine and people in the West from openly advocating for making concessions to Russia are no different. Thus, even if Ukraine really has a window of opportunity to make a deal with Russia before Putin decides to escalate Russia’s commitment to the war that, while bad and unjust, would still not be as bad and unjust as the deal Ukraine would have to accept later if it doesn’t seize that window of opportunity and Putin ups the ante, I expect that it’s exactly what is going to happen. While Ukrainian public opinion has moved toward greater acceptance of compromise since the beginning of the war, it still seems to be far from where it would have to be in order for a deal with Russia to be possible, even if my relatively optimistic assumptions about what kind of deal Putin would be prepared to offer are true. This is particularly true among Ukrainian military, journalistic and political elites, who are more nationalist than average and have more influence on policy. It’s quite likely that, because it’s blinded by ideology, a nationalist minority will prevent Kiev from making concessions before the window of opportunity I have been talking about closes and that as a result Ukraine will eventually have to agree to far worse terms than it could have obtained. In the worst case scenario, if Putin overcomes his reluctance to carry out another round of mobilization or somehow manages to keep the pressure on Ukraine at the same level without doing that and the war continues for long enough, attrition could reach such a point that Ukrainian soldiers will just start ignoring orders and the front will collapse, at which point even Ukrainian statehood might be at risk. I have no idea how likely such a scenario is, but I think it’s more likely than a scenario in which Putin just gives up or is overthrown by some kind of coup.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have explained how I think the rest of the Russo-Ukrainian War is going to unfold and, based on what I think is the most likely outcome, to draw lessons about not only what Ukraine and the West should have done in the past but also what they should do in the future. Obviously, trying to predict what is going to happen in a war is a fool’s errand and it’s quite possible that my predictions will turn out to be wrong, but if we are to think about policy then we have no choice but to engage in that exercise and try to make at least vague predictions. I have argued that Ukraine didn’t have a realistic path to victory, that it should therefore try to make a deal, however costly and unfair it would be, while Putin is still hesitating to up the ante, because failing to do so before he does would be even costlier. However, I have also concluded that unfortunately Ukraine was unlikely to do so, because political constraints would make that very difficult. Indeed, a recurrent theme in this essay is that political constraints matter a great deal and often result in outcomes that are suboptimal in the long run, because they tend to create a misalignment between the incentives of decision-makers in the short run and what’s in the interest of their country in the long run. A key lesson of that discussion is that, as Obama said in 2015, statesmen should pay attention not so much to their theoretical capabilities but to their real capabilities given the political constraints they face and only make commitments they are truly prepared to honor. Unfortunately, I don’t think that Western officials have heeded that lesson in dealing with Russia and Ukraine since the end of the Cold War, a mistake for which the price has already been high and will be much higher by the time the war is over.

1. To be clear, in saying that Russia is going to win the war, I don’t mean that it will have made it better off, nor do I believe that to be true. I just mean that, although Russia probably won’t get everything it wants, it will not be making any concession relative to the status quo ante, whereas Ukraine will.

2. We could also imagine a coup in response to the government’s refusal to entertain the kind of concessions that would end the war. In general, we should keep in mind that social and political conditions can change quickly and unpredictably in time of war, so trying to predict the precise sequence of events that will end the war is a fool’s errand.

3. It’s worth noting that Obama listened to them and always refused to send weapons to Ukraine. It was Trump, who supposedly was a creature of the Kremlin, who reversed that policy in 2017 by approving the sale of Javelin missiles to Ukraine.

4. As people like Angela Stent have noted, the fact that, at critical junctures during the post-Cold War era, the US has often not privileged the preservation of good relations with Russia when making foreign policy decisions, despite the fact that under Clinton/Yeltsin and Bush/Putin their leaders had a very good personal relationship, also has a lot to do with the fact that, because the bilateral economic relationship is negligible, there were few groups in the US with a stake in the relationship with Russia. This contrasts with the situation in Europe, where trade with Russia was very important. The main group in the US that has been arguing for prioritizing the relationship with Russia during that period, for reasons I will briefly mention shortly, is Pentagon officials. Judging from press reports, that is still true, as Pentagon officials seem to have played a significant role in limiting military assistance to Ukraine.

5. It’s obviously different for Poland and the Baltics, which I think is partly based on irrational factors, but also has a rational basis. Indeed, while it’s very unlikely that Russia would risk getting into a war with NATO by attacking them, NATO will not always be there and they have to think about the long term. Now, in the long run, the existence of of a politically independent Ukraine as a buffer state and potential ally in case of a conflict with Russia will be very important to them. But at the end of the day their weight in the Western alliance is relatively limited.

6. Scholars in international relations theory disagree about how to define national interests or about whether it’s even a meaningful notion, but I don’t want to get into that debate because it’s a topic for another post and the claim I’m making here is probably true on any theory, except for the view that it’s not a well-defined notion or that it’s not relevant to understand international relations.

7. One of the reasons why, as I noted above, the Pentagon seems to be the main group resisting increasing Washington’s commitment to Ukraine’s defense in the US national security establishment is presumably that, unlike the morons dismissing Putin’s “red lines” out of hand, military officials understand that sort of things.

8. In principle, only the expected cost of prolonging the war should matter (because the cost already incurred can’t be recovered even if Russia revises downward its demands to end the war), but in practice Putin and the rest of the Russian leadership are no more immune to the sunk cost fallacy than anyone else. Thus, even if we’re trying to model what Ukraine should rationally do, we should take into account the fact that Russia will not act in a fully rational way.

9. In a public conversation with Richard Moore, his British counterpart, Burns recently alluded to US fears that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine in the fall of 2022, in connection to the debate about whether or not Putin’s “red lines” should be taken seriously.