Message from the Director

Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine is now well into its second year, and the tide is turning inexorably in favor of Ukraine. The initial invasion in February 2022, which aimed to capture Kyiv and the eastern half of the country, ground to a halt and was repulsed on several fronts. Russia never achieved control of the air. Russian forces were driven back from Kyiv in the spring, and a second assault focused on the Donbas region in the east made slow progress. A Ukrainian counteroffensive expelled the Russian army from the northeastern Kharkiv region and the southern city of Kherson in the late summer and early fall. Putin drafted an additional 300,000 soldiers in the fall to rebuild his army and announced a third offensive, which failed to make any substantial gains over the winter. As this goes to press, Ukraine is beginning another long-awaited offensive, and judging by the facts that the Russians are carrying out evacuations behind their lines and that Ukrainian refugees are returning to homes near the front lines, local expectations have shifted in favor of Ukraine. Ukraine’s globally connected society is opposing Russia’s corrupt, bureaucratic state, and the society appears to be winning.

As the conflict drags on, the Ukrainian forces become steadily stronger, more experienced, and better equipped, while the Russian forces have become weaker, more demoralized, and more disorganized. Aid from the United States and its NATO allies has played a key role in building up the Ukrainian military. US aid so far amounts to $46.6 billion, which is an effort comparable only to Lend-Lease during the Second World War, when US aid meant the difference between victory and defeat for the Soviet Union and Britain. The key US equipment at the beginning of the war consisted of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles, and communications gear. As Ukraine moved onto the offensive, modern artillery and HIMARS multiple rocket launchers played a key role, along with sophisticated drones that supplemented the modified civilian drones created by ingenious Ukrainian defenders. Patriot missiles arrived to strengthen Ukraine’s air defenses as Russia launched waves of assaults on Ukrainian civilian targets with long-range missiles. German Leopard 2 tanks and American Bradley armored vehicles are expected to play a key role in Ukraine’s offensive this summer.

At each stage of the conflict, the Biden administration has been left to struggle with an existential question: how much can the West intervene in the conflict before Putin resorts to nuclear war? Putin is an insecure autocrat. Losing the war may cost him his job, and losing control of Russian politics may cost him his life, so he may be willing to take extraordinary risks. His strategy has been one of extended deterrence: threatening to escalate by using nuclear weapons if the West crosses some undefined line. Biden announced at the Hiroshima G7 meeting in May that the United States will allow its allies to provide F-16 fighter planes to Ukraine, which is a qualitative escalation in NATO’s intervention. This decision effectively puts a time limit on Putin’s war, because if Ukraine receives a squadron of F-16s it will enjoy unchallenged control of the air. The history of modern warfare shows that air power is absolutely decisive in conventional combat. US officials estimate that retraining experienced pilots to operate F-16s will take four to six months, and US allies including Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and Poland have volunteered to donate jets. The Biden administration has apparently concluded that Putin’s threats are not credible, although it remains to be seen how he will respond when US allies provide advanced fighter jets to Ukraine.

The war has backfired in terms of Russia’s avowed war aims, which were to prevent Ukraine from drawing closer to the West and to stop the expansion of NATO. Instead, Putin has succeeded in unifying the fractious Ukrainian public in opposition to himself and reenergizing and strengthening NATO, which now officially acknowledges that Russia is its primary security threat. Finland and Sweden gave up their neutral stances. Both countries signed NATO accession protocols in July 2022; Finland acceded to NATO officially in April 2023, and Sweden is waiting for ratification by the last NATO member, Turkey. Before Putin started the war, Ukraine seemed unlikely ever to be admitted as a member of NATO because it appeared to represent a strategic liability rather than an asset and it was crippled by territorial disputes with Russia. Its prospects of joining the EU appeared no better, because it had a troubled history of episodes of authoritarianism and incompetent economic policies. Now Ukraine has advanced to EU candidacy, and it seems probable that Ukraine will join NATO as part of the war settlement. The conflict has drawn Russia and China closer, but instead of finding the balanced partnership that he had sought, Putin has found himself economically dependent on China and a supplicant for support that China is reluctant to provide.

Opposition to the war is growing in Russia. 15,000 people were arrested for protesting the outbreak of the war, but the scale of the repression deterred further mass protests. Enduring images include the grandmother scolding Russian soldiers and the young woman arrested near a Moscow metro station for holding two Harry Potter books, one yellow and one blue. When the authorities announced a “partial mobilization” last fall, hundreds of thousands of draft-age Russian men fled the country. After the borders were closed, a mother rescued her son from a military base by taking a taxi to a hole in the fence. A major shot himself in the leg to try to avoid going to the front, and when he was called up a second time, he crossed the border into Kazakhstan disguised as a drunken mushroom gatherer. He was apprehended by the Kazakh border patrol and is now in prison in Russia. Most spectacularly, in a country that loves to make jokes at the expense of the Chukchi minority, a Chukchi and a Russian got in a fishing boat and sailed to America. They made it to an American island in the Bering Strait, and now they are living in Arizona. Disinformation and repression work for a while, but millions of Russians already know that what Putin is doing in Ukraine—the bombardment of civilians, the war crimes in occupied territory—violates their religious convictions and their basic sense of decency, and that understanding is spreading.

Putin’s last hope of salvaging victory of a sort from the disaster he has created for himself is that the West will somehow crumble, cut off its aid, and leave Ukraine to its own devices. Russian elites thought that the United States would be polarized, distracted by its internal struggles and uninterested in the fate of Ukraine, and that Europe would be too divided to act. So far, all indications are to the contrary. President Biden sent the strongest possible signal of his intentions when he surprised the world by appearing in Kyiv in person. Since then, NATO has delivered some 200 tanks to Ukraine and has promised to deliver over three hundred. This should have resolved Putin’s residual uncertainty about NATO’s intentions. In fact, the effect of the war has been to reenergize NATO and revitalize transatlantic ties generally. Elections are drawing near in November in Poland, but both the government and the opposition are committed to the Ukrainian cause. It is looking like the opposition to the governing Law and Justice (PiS) government may win, which would put an end to Poland’s dispute over rule of law with the European Union.

Perhaps the final thread of hope to which Putin can cling is that Donald Trump, who is leading the field for the Republican presidential nomination, might be elected in 2024. Trump has refused to commit to providing aid to Ukraine or to say which side should prevail. Russia has added the names of prominent targets of Trump’s ire to its sanctions list: Letitia James, Attorney General of New York; Brad Raffensberger, Secretary of State of Georgia (who certified the Georgia US presidential election results in 2020); and even Lt. Michael Byrd, a US Capitol Police officer. The Trump factor may explain Putin’s often-expressed optimism that time is on Russia’s side in the war. The F-16 announcement may finally shatter that conviction, since the delivery of F-16s would create a deadline for ending the war that precedes the US election in November 2024.

Putin’s war against Ukraine has been a horrible chapter in Russia’s abusive relationship with its most important neighbor, which it has wanted to claim as its own for as long as it can remember. It has shaken the foundations of Putin’s power in Russia, it has unleashed global consequences, including raising the prices of grain and energy and driving millions into food insecurity in Africa, and it continues to pose an existential threat of escalation. Meanwhile, the war has dragged on because the expectations of the two sides have to converge before negotiations can be productive. The best hope of ending the war quickly is to resolve the biggest outstanding source of uncertainty, which is about the intentions of the West.

Randall W. Stone is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies.