Almost a week since Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked Russian invasion against Ukraine, it’s increasingly clear that things are not going well.
Expected quick Russian advances against the outnumbered Ukrainian military have yet to materialize. Russian forces have failed to capture a single major Ukrainian city, the skies over Ukraine are still contested, and there is growing evidence that the invasion force is bogged down and running short on fuel, food, and morale.
Off the battlefield, Russia’s economic and political isolation is worsening practically by the hour. Western governments are demonstrating a united front in imposing severe economic sanctions on Moscow. Even famously neutral Switzerland has joined its European neighbors along with Russia’s former allies in Eastern Europe. International corporations are running to the exits; sports organizations are falling over themselves to kick Russian athletes to the curb; and inside Russia, opposition to the war is growing.
Putin is losing in Ukraine and, paradoxically, that might be even more frightening than him winning.
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A lightning-fast Russian victory would have created a fait accompli in Ukraine, proved the country’s military mettle, humiliated Kyiv, and paradoxically made it easier for Moscow to impose a victor’s peace and go home. Russia’s point would have been made. But the slow advance of Russian forces, combined with the increasingly harsh Western response and the outpouring of Ukrainian nationalism and popular resistance may convince Russia that it now needs to take an iron first to its Western neighbor.
The worse things get for Russia—and the more Putin is pushed into a corner—the more likely he is to lash out in aggressive and unpredictable ways.
For reasons that are not immediately clear, Russian forces initially appeared to hold back, seemingly unwilling to impose a significant price not just on Ukrainian civilians, but also its soldiers. Perhaps Moscow felt that a lighter touch might make it easier to pacify the country after a Russian victory. Or Putin underestimated the tenacity of Ukraine’s military.
Whatever the reason, Moscow is now changing course and adopting far more aggressive tactics. Russian forces have ramped up missile and artillery attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, and in the capitol of Kyiv.
In its most recent conflicts, Russian forces used scorched tactics that turned the Chechen capital of Grozny, as well as Syrian cities, into burned-out ghost towns. There are legitimate reasons to fear that Russian forces will utilize similar tactics in Ukraine. Indeed, the price of Ukrainian resistance in the first days of the conflict could mean far greater bloodletting than if Russia had been able to quickly achieve its war aims.
For all the courage of Ukrainian forces to date, they are facing off against one of the largest militaries in the world and one that, historically, has shown little fealty to the laws of armed combat (or the lives of its own soldiers). More likely than not, from a military perspective, things are going to end badly for Ukraine.
There are other fears as well. Putin’s announcement this weekend that he is placing the country’s nuclear forces on heightened alert has raised concerns of a potentially catastrophic escalation. Those fears are likely overstated. Putin’s declaration amounts to a ham-handed effort to use the specter of nuclear conflict to intimidate Western governments into ending their military support for Ukraine. The fact that the US hasn’t put its nuclear forces on higher alert should tell you all you need to know about the success of that gambit.
But the fact that such escalation cannot be fully discounted is emblematic of how concerning this crisis has—and still could—become. With Putin increasingly isolated and acting in a manner that is defined more by strategic irrationality than strategic genius, the West needs to think hard about how far it is willing to push the Russian leader into a corner.
As difficult as it may seem, all sides in the conflict need to provide the Russian leader with potential off-ramps to further escalation. Preliminary negotiations in Belarus, between Russia and Ukraine, appeared to go nowhere. But the door to diplomacy needs to be left ajar. The West will continue to squeeze Russia with economic sanctions, but at the same time Western leaders must make clear that if Russia withdraws its forces from Ukraine, those sanctions could potentially be lifted.
Sanctions are a tool of coercion, not punishment. They are enacted in order to push countries to adopt different policies and end behavior that is threatening or destructive. In short, sanctions are not meant to be permanent.
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Whether we like it or not, the West will likely be forced to deal with Vladimir Putin for the foreseeable future (those calling for regime change in Moscow are, as the kids might say, getting high on their own supply).
Punishing him may feel satisfying but it won’t end the war and it is the Russian people—not Putin himself—who will pay the most acute price. Anti-Kremlin rhetoric is understandable, even laudable considering the indefensible nature of Russia’s actions. In fact, it’s deeply satisfying to see so many people around the globe respond with revulsion and horror to what is unfolding in Ukraine. But there are dangers in turning Russia into an unredeemable pariah state. As unpalatable as it might seem, the only way out of this conflict is a solution that allows Putin to declare victory—be it a pledge of Ukrainian neutrality and/or a indefinite pause in seeking NATO membership in return for the departure of all Russian troops from Ukrainian soil.
To be sure, there is no guarantee that Putin embraces de-escalation. In the run-up to war he drove by every off-ramp with the enthusiasm of a 16 year-old driver, days past getting his license. Putin’s foray into Ukraine appeared to reflect his belief that he needed to teach Kyiv a lesson. Deterrence didn’t stop Putin from going to war and coercion may not work either. But the West’s focus needs to be ending a war that has the potential to get horribly out of hand.
There will be plenty of time for punishment and recriminations later. Saving Ukraine must be the first priority.
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