By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Why Russia's 2022 Ukrainian War

While the war’s outcome hangs in the balance, the United States and Western allies recently decided to deliver longer-range artillery and rocket launchers in limited quantities, with ranges of no more than 80 kilometers, to help Ukraine close the gap in long-range strike capabilities. Despite these new deliveries, Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to bank on the assumption that Ukraine’s friends don’t have the stamina to maintain pressure on Russia and support the Ukrainian people.

Throughout the past few months, Vladimir Putin has offered up all manner of outlandish excuses for his invasion of Ukraine. At various times, he blamed the war on everything from NATO expansion to imaginary Nazis while also making unsubstantiated claims about Western plots to invade Russia and Ukrainian schemes to acquire nuclear weapons.

The reality, it now transpires, is considerably less elaborate and infinitely more chilling. Putin has launched the most significant European conflict since WWII because he wants to conquer Ukraine. Inspired by old czars, Putin aims to crush his neighbor and incorporate it into a new Russian Empire.

Putin elaborated on his imperial vision during a June 9 event in Moscow to mark the 350th birthday of Russian Czar Peter the Great. He spoke admiringly of Czar Peter’s achievements during the Great Northern War and drew direct parallels to his current expansionist policies. Putin stated that the lands taken from Sweden during the Great Northern War were historically Russian, and Peter was merely returning them to their rightful owners. “It is now also our responsibility to return (Russian) land,” he said in an apparent reference to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s latest comments underline his imperial objectives in Ukraine and expand on years of similar statements lamenting the fall of the Russian Empire. For more than a decade, he has questioned the historical legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood and publicly insisted that Ukrainians are Russians (“one people”). Putin has repeatedly accused Ukraine of occupying ancestral Russian lands and blamed the early Bolsheviks for bungling the border between the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet republics.

His unapologetically imperialistic attitude toward Russian-Ukrainian relations was laid bare in July 2021 in the form of a 7,000-word essay authored by Putin, which set out to explain the alleged “historical unity” binding the two nations together. “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia. For we are one people,” Putin, the amateur historian, concluded. This bizarre treatise was widely interpreted as a declaration of war against the entire notion of an independent Ukraine and has since been made required reading for all Russian military personnel.

The Russian dictator’s obsession with Ukraine reflects his burning resentment over the collapse of the USSR and his lingering bitterness at post-Soviet Russia’s dramatic loss of international status.

This nostalgia is not rooted in a fondness for the ideology of Marxist-Leninism. Instead, Putin regards the disintegration of the Soviet Empire as the demise of “historical Russia” and has spoken of how the 1991 break-up left “tens of millions of our compatriots” living beyond the borders of the Russian Federation. As the former Soviet republic with the most profound ties to Russia and the largest ethnic Russian population, independent Ukraine has come to embody this sense of historical injustice.

 

The road to war

Putin’s efforts to “return” Ukrainian land to Russia did not begin with the invasion on February 24. The current campaign of imperial conquest started eight years earlier with the Russian takeover of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, which Putin seized in a lightning military operation that took advantage of political paralysis in Kyiv in the aftermath of the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution.

Following his success in Crimea, Putin attempted to partition mainland Ukraine by instigating pro-Kremlin uprisings throughout the south and east of the country. This initiative fell flat after Kremlin agents ran into stronger than expected local opposition from Russian-speaking Ukrainian patriots, leaving Putin’s proxies in possession of a relatively small foothold in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Control over Crimea and the Donbas allowed Putin to keep Ukraine destabilized, but his true objective has always been the reestablishment of complete Russian control over the whole country. After eight years of geopolitical pressure and hybrid warfare failed to achieve the desired outcome, and sensing that Ukraine was now in danger of moving irreparably out of the Russian orbit, Putin made the fateful decision in early 2022 to launch a full-scale invasion.

 

Mounting Pressure

In the aftermath of Euromaidan, Russia launched a campaign of hybrid warfare against Ukraine. First and foremost, this included the use of force ‒ as shown in the outright annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and overt support for pro-Russian separatist militias in the Donbas ‒ to compromise Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sow a degree of chaos so that Ukraine could not be absorbed by Western structures shortly, as well as to remind Kyiv that Russian interests could not be overlooked. Furthermore, it also featured unconventional methods like economic pressure, displays of military muscle-flexing, religious influence, the dissemination of propaganda, the mobilization of Russia’s political tentacles in Ukraine, and ‘active measures’ such as agitation and clandestine attempts to instigate a coup. This is also the geopolitical background in which the development of infrastructure projects to supply Russian natural gas to European nations via pipelines that bypass Ukraine must be understood. Although this course of action managed to complicate Ukraine’s accession to NATO, it did not diminish Kyiv’s willingness to join the Atlantic alliance. Ultimately, said strategy failed to achieve favorable regime change.

                                                                                         

Ultimatum

In 2021, a massive concentration of Russian troops, military platforms, and weapons close to the Ukrainian border occurred. The Russians did not even bother to conceal this move, which was interpreted by many as a sign of an imminent attack. However, such conspicuousness did not make much sense if what was initially intended as a large-scale attack because such a move sacrifices the element of surprise. On the other hand, however, it is entirely logical if the point of said preparations was to issue a credible threat or ultimatum. After all, as noted by Hans Morgenthau, diplomatic requests unbacked by force are not even credible. Moscow formulated a set of demands, including the guarantee that no more states from the post-Soviet space ever join NATO or host military activities undertaken by the transatlantic alliance, the withdrawal of offensive weapons from neighboring European countries, the removal of NATO military infrastructure placed in Eastern Europe since 1997, and a series of restrictions related to both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

Considering the maximalist character of those demands, they could not have been realistically granted by the US and NATO. Still, the Kremlin’s manifested interest in holding bilateral talks with the United States in Geneva indicated that a negotiated settlement that considered Moscow’s concerns might have been acceptable. Yet, what the Russians were asking for was nothing less than revising the post-Cold War global order to carry out a structural redesign of the European security architecture, something that would require a great power concert similar to the Congress of Vienna. Moscow badly wanted to be treated as a great power that deserved to be recognized as such by Washington and Brussels and also as a regional hegemon whose sphere of influence ‒ especially in Ukraine ‒ had to be respected in a multipolar world. Nonetheless, Moscow lacked the strength or critical mass needed to twist Washington’s arm or convince NATO to voluntarily relinquish many of the positions it had gained in recent decades, at least not without a fight. The Russians not only lacked the upper hand, but they were also in no position to impose anything. Thus, in the West, this was seen as an act of blackmail meant to justify an invasion that would happen anyway.

Nevertheless, this ultimatum was likely the last card that the Russians could play with, and, once its ineffectiveness was demonstrated, they had run out of options and were running out of time. The only possibility for the Kremlin to get what it wanted in Ukraine was a sheer force. Even if the Russians likely never discarded the idea of launching an invasion, it must have been a difficult decision. Then again, the teachings of seminal authors like Sun Tzu and Machiavelli emphasize that to get important things done, one must be willing to walk a dangerous path that can lead to worldly glory or utter ruin. Indeed, statecraft can often be a deadly business.

                                                                                                 

Invasion

On February 24, 2022, Russia initiated a “special military operation,” a euphemism conceived to sugar-coat the overt invasion of Ukraine. The kinetic force would now be used as an instrument serving Moscow’s agenda, a game-changing decision of unprecedented proportions in recent decades of European history. At first, it looked like the goal of the Russian military intervention was to overthrow the Ukrainian government to replace it with a pro-Russian regime and return Kyiv to Moscow’s strategic orbit as a satellite, liquidate the Ukrainian Armed Forces and staunchly nationalist militant groups like the Azov Regiment, and trigger a diplomatic crisis that would unravel the internal cohesiveness of NATO. However, there is a more precise perspective now. The Russian endgame goes well beyond regime change through ‘shock and awe,’ a Blitzkrieg offensive, or surgical strikes. The facts on the ground strongly suggest that Moscow seeks to accomplish through hard power the outright dismantling of Ukraine as a functional national state, even if the whole endeavor takes months or even years. Such strategic pursuit is reflected in the obliteration of infrastructure, the elimination of industry, attacks that have targeted cultural sites, the intentional massive exodus of Ukrainians, and the demoralization of the remaining Ukrainian population. These actions have also aligned with the systematic rhetorical denial of legitimate Ukrainian statehood.

Furthermore, Russia’s heavy-handed use of military power projection ‒ mainly airstrikes, artillery, and infantry in the envelopment and siege of key positions ‒ is a feature, not a bug. In contrast, nuclear saber-rattling and firing hypersonic missiles to destroy buildings spectacularly are measures designed to remind the West that a direct military intervention on behalf of Ukraine would provoke Armageddon. Still, they are not aimed at Ukraine per se.

For many contemporary observers, this might sound difficult to grasp or perhaps even baffling. However, the historical record offers enlightening precedents that can better understand the Kremlin’s rationale in the Ukraine War. For instance, after several dramatic clashes, the fatal outcome of the Punic Wars was the obliteration of Carthage by Roman forces. After a bloody siege in which Carthage itself was leveled, and many of its inhabitants were killed, the survivors were sold into slavery, and Rome annexed the territory previously held by the Carthaginians in the Maghreb. This victory fueled the undisputed rise of Rome as the most significant power in the Mediterranean world, a position it held for centuries. Furthermore, the ancient Central Asian kingdom of Khwarezm was reduced to rubble by Genghis Khan in a disproportionate retaliation for executing Mongolian diplomatic envoys. The annihilation of Khwarezm was so comprehensive and the amount of bloodshed so staggering that, aside from professional historians, few are even aware that it ever existed.

Yet, there are also more recent examples that point in a similar direction. American analyst David Goldman has observed that Vladimir Putin’s course of action in Ukraine mirrors the approach followed by Cardinal Richelieu toward Pomerania. In the context of the Thirty Years War, the ruthless devastation and carnage unleashed there by the crafty French statesman ‒ a legendary figure still remembered as a leading practitioner of raison d’état ‒ responded to an interest in undermining the Austro-Spanish Habsburg Empire (which until then was a superior foe) so that France could emerge as a leading European power under a new correlation of forces. On the other hand, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the so-called “Morgenthau Plan” ‒ formulated by Henry Morgenthau Jr., US Secretary of the Treasury ‒ contemplated the deliberate demilitarization of Germany, its territorial dismemberment, the dispersion of the local population, and the removal of German industrial capabilities, so that country’s economy adopted a low-key agrarian profile instead. Although it gained some traction initially, it was not implemented because Washington realized that a prosperous, industrialized, and strong West Germany would be far more helpful as a bulwark ‒ and maybe even potential spearhead ‒ against the bloc headed by the Soviet Union.

Said episodes show that Russia’s path in Ukraine is hardly innovative. Russian strategic thinking embraces the classical Machiavellian principle that it is better to be feared than loved. Hence, the Kremlin’s strategy is undeniably merciless and risky. It serves multiple purposes:

So far, it is unknown how far the Russians are prepared to go, especially considering the availability of resources, internal political dynamics, tactical setbacks, and the apparent logistical underperformance of Russian troops. At first, it looked like they wanted to take Kyiv and maybe even attempt to create a direct corridor to reach Moldova. Still, the redirection of their efforts to the east and the southern coastline likely indicates that those areas are being targeted because they are strategically significant, mainly if the partition or even an outright annexation is considered convenient for Russian national interests. Moreover, both possibilities could conceivably co-exist. It is too soon to tell, but an option worth considering is the incorporation of the Donbas into the Russian Federation proper and the parallel establishment of a ‘Novorossiya’ as a new state similar to Kosovo Abkhazia or South Ossetia.

Without those territories, what is left of Ukraine would be little more than an indefensible and economically diminished statelet with no viable future. Furthermore, the Russians would not even need to conquer it all. After all, the costs of trying to take and occupy Western Ukraine ‒ an area whose population has long harbored Russophobe attitudes for generations ‒ would be superior to the benefits since it would probably lead to a protracted military quagmire and a nasty bloodbath. If the Russians bisect Ukraine, due to their historical background and socio-cultural profile and as a result of the ensuing chaos, Galicia would likely be swallowed by Poland, whereas Hungary would hypothetically annex Transcarpathia. As long as Russia manages to establish its suzerainty over the area East of the Dnieper River, the Kremlin would not mind those developments because, although beneficial for the individual national interests of Warsaw and Budapest, said territorial reconfiguration would sow discord within both the EU and NATO. Indeed, poisoned apples can be helpful in the practice of statecraft. Besides, the materialization of this scenario would provide a valuable opportunity to reformulate European security architecture, a process in which Russia needs to make its voice heard in one way or another.

Based on the counterintuitive concept of ‘constructive destruction,’ Russia could then remake the portions of Ukraine under its control by its military, geopolitical, strategic, economic, and demographic interests. Perhaps what Moscow has in mind is a polity that resembles Belarus, i.e., a heavily Russified state closely aligned with the Kremlin in all significant respects. Likewise, it could be transformed into a defensive buffer and a forward position to keep Western forces at bay. This creation could be integrated into regional institutional frameworks controlled by Moscow, such as the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Moreover, the Russians could harness Beijing’s interest in key transnational corridors that enhance geoeconomic interconnectedness with Europe as essential components of the Belt and Road Initiative to rebuild Ukraine ‒ or what is left of it, anyway ‒ in a manner that is beneficial for the Eurasian axis of continental powers. Considering its industrial and agricultural comparative advantages, abundant natural resources, and privileged logistics and trade position, Ukraine would certainly be a tempting prize for China. As a remarkable precedent, it must be borne in mind that the Great Stone industrial park, located in Belarus and developed thanks to Chinese capital and the active involvement of heavyweight Chinese firms, is one of the most important hi-tech investment projects in Europe.

 

Adjusted in a versatile and flexible way

Russia’s strategy towards Ukraine has been adjusted in a versatile and flexible way to address changing circumstances during the last couple of decades. The incremental nature of Moscow’s approach, from relatively subtle measures to the overt use of military strength, is a sign of despair. Still, it also illustrates that the Kremlin believes the associated risks and costs are worth taking because what is at stake is vital for Russian grand strategy and national security. However, implementing a strategy does not guarantee that the intended outcomes will be successfully reached. After all, war is a dangerous gamble; once the first shots are fired, there is no way to tell how things will play out. No plan remains unchanged after the proverbial die has been cast. The available means might not suffice to pursue the intended outcomes, and the expected goals might not be realistically achievable in the timeframe initially contemplated. The resulting fallout can also be a lot messier than expected. Moreover, the Ukraine War is an exceedingly complex conflict fought on many overlapping battlefields. Finally, dozens of things could go wrong, and the prospect of miscalculations, escalations, and accidents increases both uncertainty and the dangerousness of the war.

Furthermore, even if the Russians manage to prevail, that does not mean the conflict will subside. Their triumph would encourage them to challenge the status quo in other contentious flashpoints such as the Baltics, Moldova, or Poland, to galvanize their revisionist agenda by forcibly attempting to overturn the unfavorable balance of power that emerged from the post-Cold War era. In other words, tensions would not diminish. The Atlanticist maritime powers ‒ mainly the US and the UK ‒ are aware of this, which is why they are investing a lot of resources to make sure that Russia bleeds dry in Ukraine until it implodes or, at the very least, make sure that a pyrrhic victory comes with prohibitive costs, even if that means that Ukraine is demolished in the process. For Washington and London, it is imperative to undermine Russia’s geopolitical projection before developing some partnerships with Germany. Using Ukraine as cannon fodder against Russia is a practical way to make it happen without engaging the Russians in a confrontation. All they need to do is support Kyiv with generous supplies of intelligence, weaponry, diplomatic backing, and cash.

Nevertheless, if the Russians experience a full-spectrum strategic defeat and Ukraine indeed becomes the graveyard of their renewed imperial ambitions, this would provoke an internal power struggle in Moscow and set in motion a chain reaction that could lead to the removal of Vladimir Putin but, contrary to what Western liberals desire, both Russian history and Realpolitik indicate that he would likely be replaced by an even more hawkish leader (and there is no shortage of hardliners in Moscow), not to mention that revanchist sentiment amongst ordinary Russians would rise to sky-high proportions. Even worse, the Balkanization of Russia ‒ a country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal ‒ would open Pandora’s box by bringing a toxic amount of uncertainty. Hence, this scenario is also problematic.

Mutual hostility will not subside because there are conflicting geopolitical interests, and both sides are raising the stakes. By the worldview of the Realist intellectual tradition, the only way to prevent the conflict from spiraling out of control before it is too late would be to reach a negotiated settlement. Such an alternative would not lead to everlasting peace. Still, in an imperfect world, it could provide a functional framework to manage rivalries so that there can be a reasonable degree of stability, a solution that continental European heavyweights like France and Germany could favor. Russia would have to curtail the aggressiveness of its strategy and moderate its ambitions in exchange for reliable guarantees. In turn, the West would have to make concessions and accept Russia as a force to be reckoned with based on a sober and dispassionate understanding of geopolitical realities. Nonetheless, a solution inspired by cool-headedness seems elusive, at least for the time being. Until attitudes change, the strong will do what they can, and the weak will suffer what they must, as Thucydides wrote many centuries ago on the harsh nature of war.

 

 

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