The President’s biggest mistake Wladimir Putin until here Ukraine should give the West the impression that the Russia could lose the war. The first attack on Kiev stumbled and failed. The Russian colossus didn’t look nearly as impressive as it first appeared. The war suddenly looked like a showdown between a disillusioned crowd of incompetent Russians and overly energetic and experienced Ukrainian patriots.
Such expectations, of course, aroused Ukrainian war aims. The president Volodmir Zelenskyy was once from the camp for a peace deal in Ukraine. “Security and neutrality guarantees, nonnuclear status of our state. We are ready to negotiate,” he said a month after the conflict began. Now Zelensky is demanding a complete victory: the retaking of every inch of Russianheld territory, including the Crimea. Polls show that Ukrainians will not settle for less. While the fighting takes place in Donetsk It is luhanskUkrainian leaders and some of their Western supporters are already dreaming of Nurembergstyle trials for Putin and his leaders in Moscow.
The problem is that Ukraine has only one sure way to achieve this feat in the short term: NATO’s direct involvement in the war. Just full desert storm style deployment of NATO and US troops and weapons US could win a broad Ukrainian victory in the near future. (Not to mention that such a deployment would most likely increase the chances of one of the war’s bleakest prospects: the more Russia loses, the more likely it is to resort to nuclear weapons.)
A Leopard 2 tank is operated by a Ukrainian soldier February 13 during a demonstration at the military base in Swietoszow, Poland. Photo: Maciek Nabrdalik/The New York Times
In the absence of NATO involvement, the Ukrainian army is able to hold its line and retake territory as it has already done Kharkiv It is Khersonbut complete victory is almost impossible. If Russia in Bakhmut hardly advances a few hundred meters a day, at an average cost of 50 to 70 men, since the Ukrainians are so well entrenched, the Ukrainians would be able to advance better than the Russians, who are equally well entrenched throughout the region between Russia and the east bank of the Dnieper Delta, including the Coast of the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov and the isthmus leading to the Crimea? What was a meat grinder in one direction becomes a meat grinder in the other direction.
Furthermore, Russia has almost entirely transformed its state into a war economy, while the US has yet to meet the manufacturing needs to supply its foreign partners. The war has already taken 13 years of manufacturing Stinger surfacetoair missiles and five years of Javelin missiles, and the US has shipped $19 billion worth of weapons Taiwan late. Western media reports have focused on Russian men evading military orders, but the Kremlin still has plenty of soldiers to fall back on, even after mobilizing 300,000 men in September.
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The debate about sending heavy military equipment to Ukraine, which has particularly occupied the German press, is irrelevant in this sense. It is not clear when all NATOpromised Leopard 1 and 2 and M1 Abrams tanks will be operational. Ukraine has requested between 300 and 500 tanks, and NATO has only pledged about 200.
It makes sense that Zelenskyy would put so much diplomacy into these arms shipments: he needs to get the message across to the Kremlin that Ukraine is ready for a long and bitter conflict. But in terms of combatready equipment over the next six months, very little of what has been promised will materialize. If Zelenskyy wants to complete his WinstonChurchill selfimage sooner rather than later, he will want to hasten the day when he can toast NATO that is, the US entry into the conflict.
The problem for Kiev is that, barring public assurances, Washington has no interest in entering the war directly. General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has already expressed the view that shortterm total victory for both Russia and Ukraine is impossible. The president Joe Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, insisted on preventing the US from intervening in the conflict. The American public also shows no appetite for direct involvement. The US might even have an interest in keeping the war going as long as it reduces Russia’s ability to operate in other parts of the world, increases the value of US energy exports, and as a convenient dress rehearsal for Allied unity and coordination serves The economic war against Beijing.
Less noticed is that the Kremlin’s war aims may inevitably have been scaled back. Seemingly resigned to its inability to bring about regime change in Kiev and conquer a larger part of Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin now seems mainly focused on maintaining its positions in Luhansk and Donetsk in order to secure land access to Crimea. These are areas that Ukraine would struggle to reintegrate even under the best of circumstances.
From today’s perspective, Ukraine’s economic future looks viable even without the territories currently occupied by Russia. Ukraine has not become a landlocked country, Kyiv still controls seven of the eight oblasts with the highest GDP per capita. Ukraine would risk jeopardizing their position in a counteroffensive. Paradoxically, continuing the war also serves Russian interests: it gives Moscow more chances to attack Ukraine until it becomes a buffer state, making it even less attractive as a candidate for NATO and European Union membership.
Historian Stephen Kotkin recently argued that Ukrainians would be better off defining their victory as membership of the European Union rather than full reconquest of Ukrainian territory. What’s more, apart from countries that remained neutral during the Cold War, every historic case of EU accession was preceded by NATO accession, which since the 1990s has acted as Europe’s risk assessment agency, making sure countries are safe for investment are . This has not gone unnoticed by Ukrainians: polls (most of which have excluded Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014) show that interest in the country’s NATO membership appears to have skyrocketed since the conflict began.
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Ultimately, only Washington has the power to decide how much of Ukraine it wants to bring under its umbrella. Genuine official reluctance to accept Ukraine into NATO has rarely been clearer, and public support for Kiev has never been so artful. Meanwhile, European leaders may soon find themselves in the unwelcome position of convincing Ukrainians that access to the common market and a European stimulus package are reasonable exchanges for “complete victory”. / TRANSLATION BY GUILHERME RUSSO
*Thomas Meaney is a research associate at the Max Planck Society in Göttingen, Germany. He writes on American foreign policy and international relations for the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and elsewhere.