James Sherr
Honorary Fellow
International Centre for Defence & Security
Tallinn, Estonia
The unity and confidence that characterised the West’s initial response to Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukraine in early 2022 is rapidly disappearing. As pessimism grows, so does the influence of misconceptions and poor analysis. Memory of protracted, high-intensity war at industrial scales has all but vanished in most of the West, and that is also true of its surprises, its hardships and its reverses. The paradox is that Ukraine, the country bearing the rigours of this war, is resigned to them, whereas the United States, which devotes less than 4 percent of its defence budget to the war and has yet to suffer a single fatality, increasingly doubts its necessity and is losing faith in its outcome. What fallacies, false expectations and falsehoods lie behind this response?
1: Ukraine’s position is doomed to deteriorate
For now, broadly speaking, the war is in a state of deadlock. But that is not the same as stalemate. A deadlock can be overcome; a stalemate cannot. Today, it is evident that the differential in respect to several key capabilities lies in Russia’s favour, and this discrepancy is likely to worsen this year if US and EU funds are not unblocked. But Russia has lost half the territory it occupied after February 2022, and it has recovered very little of it. It lacks the force levels required to accomplish most of its operational objectives, let alone succeed strategically. In the Black Sea, on the other hand, Ukraine has partially turned the tables and might do so completely given adequate provision of long-range strike systems. Today, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is damaged; tomorrow it can be crippled. As maritime cooperation increases between Bulgaria, Romania and Türkiye, Ukrainian grain exports, now resumed, should steadily increase.
Not least important, Ukrainians accept the necessity of a long war. They never expected a fairy tale and are not crushed by the absence of one. The dominant sentiment is: ‘things are bad but far from hopeless’; the mood of decision-makers, military commanders and state experts is sober but very far from defeatist. The priority for 2024 must be transition to the strategic defensive and, on the part of Ukraine’s partners, adequate provision for that strategy.
The beginning of wisdom is to recognise that static analysis cannot provide a basis for long-term prognoses. Were it otherwise, the 1942 Dieppe raid would have demonstrated the impossibility of an allied invasion of Europe, Operation Barbarossa would have persuaded the UK and USA that the USSR would collapse in a matter of weeks, and Britain’s financial and military dependence on the US would have shown that it was a ‘basket case’.
2: Russia cannot be defeated
This is a doctrine, not a truth. The incessant urgency of Russian military operations, the reinforcement of failed attacks with fresh ones, the proclamation and revision of unrealistic deadlines, the discrepancy between plans and results point to less confidence in the Kremlin than appearances suggest. Russia has formidable strengths and, against the expectations of many, has amended and adapted in response to failure. Yet it also has endemic vulnerabilities that will prove increasingly telling if the West is willing to play the long game.
First, there are the fraying elements of the Kremlin’s contract with the core Russian population, which is deeply attached to its peacetime way of life. Hence, Putin has deferred any second mobilisation since the levy of 300,000 in September 2022. Numbers have been increased by doubling conscription terms, conscripting ‘expendables’ and by other ‘creative means’. There is little reason to suppose that the mandated force level of 1.32 mn will be met.
Second, the defence sector suffers from constraints and ills endemic to the current administrative model. According to the law adopted in November 2023, spending on national defence, security, intelligence and law enforcement, will increase to 38.7 percent of the 2024-6 budget. In practice, much of this increase is evaporating under the impact of inflation and accounting tricks. Russia’s vaunted advantage in artillery is insufficient to maintain the current level of operations, which continue to draw down on pre-2022 stocks. If the West meets its own planned expansion of artillery production, a number of Russia’s advantages will contract and possibly disappear in 2025.
Third, the decline of the energy sector is not being reversed. Russia’s efforts to compensate for the loss of European markets may have defied Western expectations, but they fall well below Russia’s needs. Its western Siberian fields are exhausted, China refuses to finance Russia’s Power of Siberia-2 pipeline (which it needs far less than Russia); it pays half the former European price for imports from Power of Siberia-1 and is pressing for further price cuts. Even at current prices, Russia’s revenues from the latter are below the costs of extraction and transport. The increasingly onerous tax burden on the energy sector and the transfer of critically important revenue to the defence-industrial complex are sharpening tradeoffs. The tighter the squeeze on energy, the harsher these tradeoffs become.
These are secular, i.e. systemic, ills and trends. The picture of limitless Russian resources, widely internalised in the West, is built on embroidered truths and artful lies.
3: There is no alternative to negotiation
This is an adage at odds with experience and evidence. Russia’s ‘minimal’ terms, mooted in informal channels, are not only unacceptable, but derisive. They not only include recognition of annexed territory, but territory yet to be annexed; they call for compensation for bombardment of Russian territories, a ‘statute of neutrality’ (hence an absence of guarantees for Ukraine’s security), the effective reduction of Ukraine’s armed forces to constabulary levels and full ‘de-Nazification’. There is no reason to suppose that such concessions as might be extracted from Russia will be observed any more than they were after the Minsk accords.
Instead of pipedreams masked by denial, it would behove the West and profit its interests to assist Ukraine in developing a strategy for a long war and providing the resources required to wage it. Time will only favour Russia if we allow it to. If we decide to abandon the struggle, we should do so honestly and take full credit for the consequences.