On Thursday, after weeks of negotiation, the EU approved a 50 billion euro funding package for Ukraine, giving the country a much needed economic boost, while the U.S. bill remains held up in Congress.
On a recent episode of Carnegie Connects, host Aaron David Miller discussed the status of Russia’s war against Ukraine with Carnegie senior fellows Dara Massicot and Eric Ciaramella. This Q&A was adapted from their conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aaron David Miller: How would you describe this conflict? Give us some perspective on the battlefield dynamic at the moment.
Dara Massicot: I don’t have a bumper-sticker word yet for this. “Stalemate” would imply that neither side has a really good option moving forward, and that’s not true. This is still very much hotly contested along most parts of the front. Both sides are encountering the same type of problems when they try to move forward offensively. Both sides are also operating pretty efficiently on defense, too.
Aaron David Miller: Can you describe this as a grinding war of attrition, or is that too simple?
Dara Massicot: You can. The dynamic that we see right now is not a stable one, and over time, if we don’t change this dynamic, it’s going to get worse for Ukraine. Russia is able to stabilize its front lines with manpower, but this isn’t easy. It’s straining the volunteer system to its limits. It’s facing labor shortages in critical industries across the country that aren’t directly affiliated with the defense industry, and even a little bit there too.
So it is attrition. Russia is willing to absorb a lot of casualties that, frankly, Ukraine cannot afford to, but its power remains pretty disordered. If you look at all the advantages that it does have—whether it’s artillery rate of fire, glide bombs, missiles—it’s still not able to translate that into meaningful forward progress, which it would very much like to do.
Eric Ciaramella: If we think of it in traditional chess terms, “stalemate” implies that there’s no move that any side can make to change the picture on the board. And what’s actually happening here is a race to rearm. In this case, what we’re talking about is a Russian military reconstitution that’s underway. The question is: can Ukraine rely on the collective economic weight of its Western backers, which far dwarfs the economic potential of Russia? By the end of this year, things could be in a very different position based on the decisions that the West and the Russian and Ukrainian leadership make now.
Aaron David Miller: Almost two years into this war, what have the Russians and Ukrainians learned in terms of their capacities to adjust to make their military campaigns more effective?
Dara Massicot: My impression has been that often the Ukrainians are the first ones to try something innovative and adaptive. And the Russians often look at that and think, “That’s a really good idea.” Then they have the advantage of scaling it up at home and then putting it back into the battlefield. We’re seeing that now with drones and loitering munitions. We’re seeing the same dynamic in terms of inserting infantry really quickly using an armored vehicle and then pulling back because they can’t actually bring large armor to the front. Those were techniques that were first initiated by the Ukrainians, and now the Russians are able to do it. They’ve been innovating and adapting.
That process has really accelerated since they mobilized last September. A lot of the innovations that I see right now are with Shahed drones and how Russia’s using them. They’re trying to adapt their missile strikes to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses and destroy them so that it opens the skies up.
The cycle of learning and adaptation is getting shorter and shorter. But I think the West has not fully activated a lot of its potential in technology and innovation and human capital, because it hasn’t made the same types of mobilization choices or activated the same types of legislation that would really crank this into overdrive in the way that the Russians have.
Aaron David Miller: What is driving the will to fund on the part of the Europeans?
Eric Ciaramella: There is a broad sense of urgency that Russia can’t be allowed to prevail in Ukraine because it would have devastating effects on the whole European security order. Even though Ukraine is not in NATO or the European Union now, European nations recognize that Ukraine’s future security and prosperity and independence are now closely intertwined with their fates as well. It’s not necessarily an existential risk as it is for Ukraine, but it’s pretty close to that. So for the Europeans, you’re seeing a much more serious discussion about how to lock this policy in on a more predictable and sustainable footing.
Aaron David Miller: What is [Russian President] Vladimir Putin thinking now?
Eric Ciaramella: I would say he feels the wind in his sails. He feels like the war is finally breaking in his favor. The fundamentals are good from his viewpoint. The Russian economy has proved remarkably resilient to Western sanctions. The Russian defense industrial base is ramping up after the [Yevgeny] Prigozhin mutiny last summer. There’s no real threat to his power on the horizon, neither from within the regime nor from society. There’s a farce of a Russian presidential election that’s going to happen in March, and he’s pretty much coasting to another six-year term in office.
And Western politics is intervening, and the narrative has completely shifted. We’re talking about fatigue and how long the West can sustain this. Most importantly, the counteroffensive last year was a really major effort by the Ukrainians and a surge by Western partners of equipment and training, but the Russians were able to defend against it. So Putin probably feels pretty confident that he has the means to slowly grind down the Ukrainians and to bank on politics in the West—and in Washington, especially—intervening to give him a decisive advantage by the end of the year.
Dara Massicot: I don’t know Putin’s mind, but I think that balancing the domestic stability picture absorbs a large percentage of his bandwidth. And this war can’t go on forever with the types of casualties that they’re taking today. In an effort to encircle the ruins of one Ukrainian village, they’ve shed anywhere from 10,000 to upward of 20,000 casualties over the last couple months. I think he feels confident that the West will buckle.
I can see this kind of overconfidence coming into their tone and their language and how they’re thinking about this. And they’re basing that on very mathematical calculations about war. They’re looking at artillery and missile production. They’re looking at what’s happening in Washington and concluding that this is going in the right way for them and quickly. Domestically, Russia has issues, and I think they’re trying to paper over those and manage them in the short term. I don’t think that they can keep this intensity up forever from a domestic stability perspective. Their defense industry may be operating at a more efficient level, but this is having a cost too.
Aaron David Miller: At an absolute minimum between now and November, what does the United States need to do in order to buck up Ukraine and get Putin to reassess, to some degree, his overconfidence?
Eric Ciaramella: I think there’s a clear blueprint for how to do this. First, Congress needs to pass the emergency funding. The Ukrainians have already started rationing ammunition since the fall.
The second, and I believe even more critical, component is that we need to start constructing a much broader policy framework in which we—the United States, European allies, and our allies in the Asia-Pacific—provide Ukraine a long-term security arrangement that can bridge the period of time from now until they formally enter Western institutions, whether it’s the EU or NATO.
What does that look like? There was this really significant document that was signed last July on the margins of the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, that was a joint declaration of enduring support for Ukraine. It was signed by the leaders of the G7 nations and the European Union. Twenty-four additional nations have signed on, and basically they all pledged to negotiate separately and together under this multilateral framework for a set of specific, bilateral, long-term security commitments. The goal is to provide a more predictable and sustainable funding model so that Ukrainian military planners can understand what’s in the pipeline for them, building toward a force that’s capable of defending the country and deterring against future Russian attacks. I personally wish that this conversation had moved a little bit faster since the Vilnius summit, but it got held up by U.S. politics and by a focus on the crisis management measures associated with the counteroffensive and all of that.
But we’re starting to see the fruits of that initial document bear out. The UK prime minister was recently in Ukraine, met with President [Volodymyr] Zelensky, and signed a ten-year security cooperation agreement. That’s just one of these branches in this broader tree. My hope is that the United States can do a similar thing and get a very strong U.S. commitment, but the big part is going to be getting Congress involved, because I think it’s not credible from the U.S. side if we don’t have substantial interbranch cooperation.
Dara Massicot: I’m a little more short-term and trying to see how we can get Ukraine through this year on the battlefield. Right now, they know they need to dig in, they need to go on the defensive, and they need support with that. The goal is to be able to defend their borders with Belarus and Russia and make it so complicated that Russia does not continuously try to attack them and move forward like they’re doing right now.
Russian forces still perform pretty poorly when they’re on the offensive. The Ukrainians are defending fairly well in areas where they’re dug in. The Russians are losing multiple battalions against very few comparatively on the Ukrainian side. The Ukrainians also need more air defenses and more air defense interceptors if they’re going to defend their cities as best as they can.
I also think that it’s time to reconsider if there are any policy limitations about longer-range strikes on military targets inside Russia proper. To leave that as a sanctuary continues to signal that Ukraine will be a missile sponge indefinitely. I think that there’s some dynamics that probably need to change, and this is all in service of Ukrainian forces regenerating their combat power so that they are in a position in 2025 to be able to more effectively contest Russian positions. This is all doable. There are options, but it does need funding, and it needs funding immediately.
Aaron David Miller: Are you persuaded that the risk aversion that the [Biden] administration demonstrated—which I would’ve argued was quite rational, given the numbers of unknowns and uncertainties in the first year of the war—has dissipated to the extent that the administration will be willing to countenance these?
Dara Massicot: Yeah, I don’t know exactly where they’re at right now. This is not something to take lightly, and it should be evaluated not in ignorance and not in fear, either.
I think about the behaviors that Russia has exhibited against the Ukrainians. If they’re firing missiles that they’ve sourced from North Korea 500 kilometers into Ukraine, why is Ukraine not permitted to do the same? Russia has vulnerabilities in its force structure. They can produce hundreds of missiles a month. They cannot produce hundreds of missile launchers a month or hundreds of aircraft a month.
Aaron David Miller: Do you see any prospect for any sort of negotiation that would be of value and effective for Ukraine in the coming year?
Eric Ciaramella: I think the issue here is a definitional one. Sure, Putin is willing to negotiate, but what he defines as a negotiation is very different than what we have in mind, which is a give and take and a search for win-win solutions and compromises that acknowledge at least the interests of the other party.
What Putin is looking for is to dictate the terms of Ukrainian surrender. He calls it a negotiation because he wants it to be at a table with the flags and produce a document and all of that, but fundamentally, he’s not willing to move off his positions that he wants control over Ukraine. So I don’t think we’re going to get the kind of grand war-ending negotiation that some have been hypothesizing about in the media. Is it possible to imagine tactical negotiations on specific issues? We haven’t really talked about the Black Sea much, but there’s been a lot of dynamism there, despite the kind of static situation on the front lines.
Aaron David Miller: Any serious negotiation that would create any sense of expectation about a “sustainable” end state would depend on change in the battlefield dynamic. Presumably that is to say, Ukraine making significant gains might compel and/or force Putin to consider or even engage in a negotiation. Is that a fair logic chain?
Dara Massicot: It is. Ukraine’s position at a negotiating table will be made much stronger with the understanding that it is backed with American and European support in a significant and long-standing way. Without that, I don’t know what kind of negotiating position the Ukrainians would be in. It would be a terrible one.
It’s possible that Russia is sending private signals that are somehow very different from the public signals that it’s putting out, which don’t seem very negotiation-minded. It seems more like dictating of terms.
I would say, though, if there are private conversations going on, our support to Ukraine should be about giving Ukraine agency, and that’s communicating to their leadership that we support them no matter what. And no matter which twists and turns this takes or what road they want to take, whether that’s a ceasefire or continuing to fight, they’re in the driver’s seat, with us supporting, and they should be told that.
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