Photo by Yehor Milohrodskyi on Unsplash

On Putin’s 8-year War in Ukraine

This is ~1500 words without the references or summary. If that’s too long for you, the key points are

1) Russia has been at war in Ukraine for 8 years already,

2) Putin drove the current escalation of that war, most likely to incorporate Ukraine into a 21st century Russian Empire,

3) the human costs will be horrific,

4) the economic costs will be borne by the whole world,

5) no one knows how it will end,

6) this matters to us in America because it is wrong and because it is a serious threat to our national interest, both by undermining the status quo world order and by increasing the likelihood of multiple new nuclear arms races.

First, context. The key event in recent Ukrainian history is the Maidan Revolution of 2013–14. This started with protests against the Russian-backed president at the time, escalated to significant violence in which over 100 protestors were killed, and culminated in the collapse of the pro-Russian regime and the election of a pro-European government.

In response to the sudden loss of a willing puppet regime in Ukraine, Putin annexed Crimea and tried to seize parts of eastern Ukraine near the cities of Donbas and Luhansk. Ukraine lost control of Crimea but has been able to hold a front against Russian troops and some local Russian-supported separatists in the east. That front was supposedly frozen with the “Minsk Agreements,” but those cease-fires have failed to end the conflict. Ukraine has been fighting this war for the past 8 years, with on-and-off support from allies in the West including the United States. This war has killed over 10,000 people already, and displaced roughly 2 million Ukrainians, either internally or abroad. This is the same war that saw a Russian surface-to-air missile unit shoot down a civilian airliner, flight MH17, in 2014.

Since last fall, the Russian military has engaged in a major force buildup on Ukraine’s borders, sparking the recent crisis between Russia and the West. Putin has dressed this up under the guise of Russian security concerns over NATO expansion. Ukraine is pursuing NATO membership and this is likely one factor in Putin’s calculus for invading further. But his actions of the past 8 years, and especially the past month, give the lie to any analysis that cites Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO either causing or justifying an expansion of Russia’s war.

Putin’s war speech today was plain. He does not see Ukraine as a sovereign nation, believes all former territories of the USSR are rightfully part of the Russian Empire, that the United States and EU are existential threats to Russia, and that aggressive action against Ukraine is entirely justified on these grounds. None of this is true. Russian aggression is a land grab, though to what extent remains to be seen. The hamfisted attempts at false flag operations (staged Russian activities meant to look like Ukrainian attacks on Russians) only highlight how desperate Putin is to manufacture a veneer of plausibility to peddle to his own populace and potential support abroad.

Russia has gone to war multiple times in recent years, including in Georgia in 2008 and in Syria in 2015. Those conflicts give us a sense of how the Russian military will likely operate in the coming weeks. They have overwhelming superiority in air and air-defense forces, meaning they will be able to bomb most Ukrainian targets at will. They have a history of bombing indiscriminately, even in densely populated urban centers. The Russian military is equipped with a large proportion of heavy artillery, which like their air forces do not exercise restraint to limit civilian deaths. Ukrainian cities caught in this conflict will be subjected to more concentrated firepower than any European city has seen since at least the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The casualties will be frightful, the tide of refugees enormous (Europe is not prepared for them). The suffering will be beyond measure.

One poignant story involves a Facebook group of Ukrainian moms discussing affixing stickers with their blood type to their school-bound children, so they can be transfused if wounded at school. This, in a country of over 40 million people (bigger than any US state, or about the size of Florida and New York combined).

Added to this is the likelihood of widespread assassination and detention of potential Ukrainian resistors. Russian military intelligence units operating in Ukraine have spent years compiling lists of Ukrainians likely to lead or participate in an anti-Russian insurgency. They can cross-reference those with data stolen from sources like Ukrainian car insurance companies to derive detailed targeting information on virtually every person on their list. The prospect of systematic mass murder following in the wake of unrestrained warfare is very real.

Time will tell how the West responds, though it seems sanctions of some form are almost certain. Even without sanctions, an expansion of the war will affect the global economy by restricting Ukrainian exports (chiefly food and iron). Sanctions on Russia may reach much further, including in particular energy, rare earth metals, and/or finance. The cost of goods in many markets will likely go up and market volatility will increase, against a backdrop of already painful inflation, choppy markets, and supply chain woes. There’s enough uncertainty already that these shocks may be enough to trigger a significant market correction and serious economic pain for many people worldwide.

The one immutable fact of war is that it is unpredictable, especially past the first few engagements in a new conflict. Though Russia has considerable superiority of arms relative to Ukraine, they will encounter stiff resistance. Putin may be able to annex most or all of Ukraine in a matter of weeks. He may be inviting another decade of intractable war. Russian casualties and economic hardship may prove too destabilizing for Putin to control, compelling him to abandon Ukraine or even toppling his government. Events may overcome everyone and spiral into a wider conflict (I think that is unlikely). All attempts to paint a picture of Ukraine past a few weeks are likely to age poorly. This is important because the costs are already very real, are about to go up enormously, and all for entirely uncertain gains. It is a mad gamble, with many lives in the balance, and no certainty for anyone.

You may wonder why we in America should care, given that Ukraine is halfway around the world and not a formal ally. The first and most obvious reason is humanitarian — Ukrainians interested in democratic self-government have a right to it, and a right not to be killed for it on an industrial scale. Some object that Ukrainian opposition includes far-right and neo-Nazi groups, which we ought not to support. Like the bluster about NATO expansion, this is true to a point. However, it is not the most pressing problem. We can help Ukraine deal with those groups when the existence of Ukraine at all is no longer threatened (though we should take care not to enable them to rule Ukraine instead of Putin).

The second is that Russian aggression poses a direct threat to US national interests, both general and specific. In the general sense, the United States benefits more from a world of US preeminence than a world dominated by Russia or China. For all America’s faults, this is true for most countries. No honest assessment can identify any other potential superpowers or a world without any superpowers within the coming decades. The current world order is thus the best of available options, however much America’s conduct could be improved. Permitting Russia to swallow Ukraine whole is to invite complete upheaval in the long term and in the short term something ranging from further diminishment of American international clout to rampant regional military adventurism.

More specifically, the US signed an agreement called the Budapest Memorandum which guarantees Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for their unilateral nuclear disarmament (other signatories were Russia, Ukraine, and the UK). Failing to support Ukraine now would signal to all other state actors that diplomatic agreements are meaningless compared to nuclear weapons in guaranteeing national independence. Hopes for denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula would vanish, plausibly replaced by South Korean, Taiwanese, and/or Japanese breakout efforts for the bomb. The race alone could trigger a regional war. So, too, in the Middle East, where Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia are already engaged in various levels of conflict and with some level of nuclear weapons programs in each country. Any one of these making a breakout for the bomb would prompt the other two to follow suit as quickly as possible, again with the race alone risking regional war. This ties to the general case made above, in that increased regional adventurism may encourage even more nuclear aspirants to acquire their own weapons.

What can we do? Sadly, not much. I won’t advocate for open war between the US and Russia. However, we can and should support continued Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression by all other means, and we should hold ourselves and our leaders accountable for that. The main things will be to continue to provide material assistance to Ukraine in its fight for independence; to persevere through economic hardship as needed to convince Putin to abandon his war; to contribute whatever we can to relief for Ukrainians internally and externally displaced by this war; and to expand our direct military assurance to NATO allies through forward-deployed units.

If you’re looking for better sources on all this, here are a few I recommend in no particular order. These and more inform the essay above.

• Rob Lee (on Twitter @RALee85) is the gold standard of open-source intel on Russia/Ukraine.
• Michael Kofman offers expert analysis of Russian military operations and strategy (widely published, sometimes on Twitter @KofmanMichael).
• Max Seddon is the Moscow Bureau Chief for Financial Times, if you don’t subscribe you can find snippets of his work also on Twitter (@maxseddon)
• Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul can be found on his blog https://michaelmcfaul.com/, Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/amb.mcfaul) and Twitter (@McFaul)
• Nolan Peterson is an American journalist and former Air Force Special Operations pilot who has written from Ukraine since 2014 and is there now (@nolanwpeterson on Twitter, writes for Coffee or Die Magazine).
• Dmitri Alperovitch is a Ukrainian, co-founder of CrowdStrike (yes that company from the Trump/Ukraine scandal), whose perspective is well outside the American national security “blob” is on Twitter @DAlperovitch.
• Jerry Hendrix (USN, Ret.) is a leading strategist, published in books and elsewhere, including National Review, on Twitter @JerryHendrixII (I’m lucky to have been a student of his)
• More on Russian kill lists here
• More on Putin’s strategy re: Ukraine, including more on RU military intelligence activities here
• Figures on Ukrainian economy here
• Casualty and refugee figures from the war in Donbas are from the UN, found here and here respectively

For Ukrainian voices on the ground, these are accounts I follow on Twitter:

• @ZelenskyyUa (President Zelenskyy)
• @IMatviyishyn
• @IAPonomarenko
• @lapatina
• I’m thin on this category out of an abundance of caution. They and others I follow share other local sources but I’m hesitant to follow many directly for fear of amplifying disinformation. If you have recommendations, please share them!