According to Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the strategy of sitting back and waiting for the Russian war machine to stall due to sanctions could be “terribly wrong.”
“This is a very risky strategy,” he said.
Ukrainian resistance cannot hold out for long, and Western sanctions won’t stop Russia in time, he told CNBC’s Squawk Box Asia on Friday.
He said the US is relying heavily on sanctions and “very belated arms deliveries” to Ukraine, but he is concerned that those fighting for Ukraine will not be able to defend the country for long.
Even though the Russians have taken more casualties than expected, he says, they are still “relentlessly moving forward.”
“The assumption that this will drag on, that the United States can sit back and watch economic sanctions do their thing, could be seriously misguided,” Ferguson said.
There is no guarantee that Ukraine will hold out, and what I fear is the steadily worsening news from Ukraine and the destruction of Ukrainian defenses.
Niall Ferguson
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Anna Ohanian of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) echoed this sentiment.
“While the sanctions will take effect — perhaps they could change Putin’s behavior in the future — they cannot be relied on as a tool to stop the violence at the moment,” said Ohanyan, CEIP Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia. program.
“It won’t work fast enough to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine, and I think that’s a critical issue,” Ferguson said.
“Nightmare Scenario”
The US and its allies have imposed wide-ranging sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. But there seems to be a race between Russia’s military achievements and sanctions hurting Moscow.
“There are no guarantees that Ukraine will hold out, and what I fear is the ever-worsening news from Ukraine and the destruction of Ukrainian defenses,” Ferguson said.
“We will sit and say that the sanctions really hurt Russia, but for Putin it will not matter, because he will be able to claim victory. This is a nightmare scenario for me,” he added.
Ferguson said the US should help support Ukraine’s defenses without turning it into a full-scale war between NATO and Russia.
Arms deliveries to Ukraine have slowed in the past, he said, but now there are “crazy efforts” to help Ukraine keep fighting.
However, this could set the stage for a proxy war, CEIP’s Ohanian said.
“Unfortunately, it seems [at] At the moment, sanctions and military assistance are working against each other,” she said.
Deal Opportunity
Ferguson also said the US was “missing the opportunity” by relying on sanctions.
He said he believes a deal could be struck between Russia and Ukraine if Kyiv is willing to accept neutrality and renounce NATO membership.
He pointed to a 2014 proposal published by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that proposed making Ukraine a neutral country rather than trying to join NATO.
“It is clear that President Zelensky is open to this idea, which is a major change in the position of Ukraine in order to try to save his country from further destruction,” he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told ABC News this week that he has “cooled off” on the issue of joining NATO.
According to him, Ukraine understands that NATO does not want to accept it into the alliance, and the country will not ask to be allowed into NATO.
Peace is “urgently needed” to avoid further bloodshed and destruction of Ukraine, which Ferguson says appears to be Russia’s plan for now.
“The goal was to prevent Ukraine from becoming a successful Western-oriented democracy, whether in NATO or the EU,” he said. “This can be achieved simply by destroying the Ukrainian infrastructure and turning it into a smoking pile of rubble, and, unfortunately, every day allows President Putin to do more and more,” he said.
Ohanian agreed that a diplomatic push was needed to de-escalate, ceasefire and negotiate “more important issues”.