Notes

When will the Russia-Ukraine war end? Experts offer their predictions
The United States should avoid prematurely pressuring Ukraine to compromise on terms and territories and refrain from unilateral actions that may mostly affect its European partners rather than the United States. The United States could, however, with its partners, create an international group of experts to examine peace options, which could become part of the grand strategy for ending the war. The good news is that Russia has not yet shown it can become a fully effective opponent. Wars of attrition are also so costly that they sometimes end with little strategic warning.

Some recent statements that exaggerate Ukraine’s military successes to the point of claiming that the current military aid process will allow Ukraine to defeat Russia are yet another case of when limited military victories are given far too much importance. They believed the wars that they had studied could shed light on the current conflict. Congress provided more than $100 billion in aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded last year, including $61.4 billion in military aid. And we have not yet reached a point where war aims have changed enough for a peace deal to be possible. This Swedish Air Force handout image from March 2, 2022, shows Russian fighter jets violating Swedish airspace east of the Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland.
But even if the offensive had made more progress it would have been a tall order to put the Russians sufficiently in a corner that their choice was only between battlefield humiliation and a negotiated withdrawal. We also need to keep in mind that there have been some successes, including pushing back the Black Sea Fleet through the effective use of naval drones. The bigger question was whether the crisis would destabilise the regime.

Regime Change in Russia?
Military moves would start to be judged by how they affected prospective talks. Even if there was a sudden interest in peace negotiations these could well be played for time and propaganda effect without much expectation that they would lead to an agreement. The election is so obviously rigged that it is hard for outsider observers to take it seriously as a landmark date. He would no doubt like some tangible victory before then – say the capture of all the Donbas that would allow him to argue that core objectives have been met. If there has not been any progress then at least he should take stock. The winter will be over and he can see what territory, if any, has been taken.


Furthermore the battles in the Donbas against the Russians, including for Bakhmut (which was eventually taken in June) had come at a high cost, with many experienced soldiers lost in the fight. The debates still rages about whether an earlier tactical withdrawal from Bakhmut would have made sense. One reason why the effects may be contained might be the speed with which the crisis came and went. This was at the dog end of the costly and unimpressive Russian offensives of the first part of the year.

It is not enough to have prevented a sudden Russian military victory in 2022, and no one can now predict how much military and civil aid Ukraine will need to keep fighting until there is some kind of end to the fighting, and then recover. In Iraq, the United States and its European and Arab partners decisively won the battle to liberate Kuwait in 1991 but did so without any clear plan for conflict termination or for creating a stable Iraq and lasting peace and ending the fighting. The United States invaded again in 2003 without any serious plan to deal with the fall of Saddam Hussein or provide effective governance and security in the aftermath of military success. Some two decades after the invasion in 2003, the United States is still trying to deal with a deeply divided and fragile Iraqi state some twenty years after what once was a massive military success. In Afghanistan, the United States lied to itself about both its levels of military and civil success, its ability to create Afghan forces that could truly stand on their own, and its civil failures in developing and unifying an Afghan state.

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The U.S. talk about integrated deterrence also remains an all too vacuous slogan. It does not show that such aid must be part of a continuing plan, call for public support of a coherent effort, or communication to Russia that it cannot outlast the aid effort if it keeps fighting. NATO’s real-world military image is scarcely all that different from that of Russia.


And, surprisingly, Russian and Ukrainian officials have met for talks on the border with Belarus. But, by agreeing to the talks, Putin seems to at least have accepted the possibility of a negotiated ceasefire. Ukraine will do all it can to keep pressure on the Russians there to make it untenable for the Russian navy in Sevastopol, the handful of air force bases there and their logistics base at Dzankoy.


“Essentially once the West made a decision that Ukraine is important … it had to support them to the end, and that means the Ukrainians are the ones who will decide when they’re going to stop,” he said. Still, Western arms — even though supplied in an incremental, cautious manner — in Ukraine have similarly been key to halting Russian advances. In theory, that gives the West influence over the direction of the war. The West could — as Ukraine has sought — supply even more sophisticated weapons, faster, in the hope of convincing Russia that it cannot win.


And Russia has a seemingly endless supply of young men whose lives it is willing to waste in this war. This would bear similarities to the situation after the initial Russian incursions into Ukraine in 2014 – but this time the west would be left facing an implacable, large hostile actor in Moscow. Ukraine, meanwhile, would need years of western support to ensure its eastern border remains stable. So a more likely end point here is not a negotiated peace, but rather a conflict that consolidates around lines of control. “You end up with something between a frozen conflict and an everlasting war, in which neither side has the energy or economy to win,” Nixey said.

The coming year will demonstrate whether Russia - and its suppliers in North Korea and Iran - or Ukraine - and its Western backers - are able and prepared to meet the voracious demands of industrial-age warfare. The lack of political noise in Moscow does not mean that there is no unease or dissent among the elite. The United States and its strategic partners clearly face major challenges in doing so. In his office, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council, told the BBC that "Prigozhin is not the most senior. They might become the new political elite". The Western countries have gone from training the Ukrainians on specific systems to training larger units on how to carry out coordinated attacks.
Rather than going to war, which is very costly, competing states prefer to settle these disagreements peacefully. Ideally, the two sides do this based upon their relative probabilities of winning a hypothetical war. If Moscow persisted in its war, the West may continue to arm Ukraine, enforce biting sanctions, and control some $300 billion in Russian financial assets.

Rushing in new weapons, equipment, and ammunition can accomplish a great deal, but the United States and European states need to take a much harder look at how to support and sustain Ukraine’s forces and civil population over time. Russia is throwing waves of recruits and mercenaries into close-quarters battles around towns like Bakhmut and Vuhledar. The outcome of the war in Ukraine will affect vital U.S. strategic interests for years to come.
“Futility” was my most used word in 2023 in connection with Russian policy. A Christmas Eve story in the New York Times claimed that Putin might be trying to find a way out. He was reported to have sent messages through “multiple channels” since September that he was prepared to do a deal, including freezing the fighting along the current front lines. There have been a number of proposals in circulation, from China’s last February and those later from the BRICS countries.


Some European states would carry out new military build-ups, and others would do more to ease tensions with Russia. Russia may have shown that its forces became hollow in many ways after the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Nevertheless, Western military critics of Russia’s performance in Ukraine need to start looking in the mirror.

Though recorded in 21st-century fashion through up-close-and-personal shots from mobile phone cameras and high-definition drone footage, the images being captured – of artillery duels and trench warfare – have a distinctly last-century feel to them. All one can say is that intense diplomatic activity can generate its own dynamic and could be a feature of 2024 largely absent from 2023. After a year in which both sides looked forward to military advances and were disappointed, this new year starts with expectations so low that the only way we can possibly be surprised is by developments that get us closer to a resolution. By the end of July there was no point in pretending that all was going well. One problem is it leads to playing down the benefits the US has always got in its conventional operations from superior firepower. As we learnt more it also became apparent that the demands of close coordination of complex operations in tough conditions were beyond fresh units that had not quite enough training.

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