Ukraine's defeat will be America's defeat

 Robert Kagan in the Atlantic:

"Trump Is Facing a Catastrophic Defeat in Ukraine

Vice-president Elect J. D. Vance once said that he doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine. We will soon find out whether the American people share his indifference, because if there is not soon a large new infusion of aid from the United States, Ukraine will likely lose the war within the next 12 to 18 months. Ukraine will not lose in a nice, negotiated way, with vital territories sacrificed but an independent Ukraine kept alive, sovereign, and protected by Western security guarantees. It faces instead a complete defeat, a loss of sovereignty, and full Russian control.

This poses an immediate problem for Donald Trump. He promised to settle the war quickly upon taking office, but now faces the hard reality that Vladimir Putin has no interest in a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukraine intact as a sovereign nation. Putin also sees an opportunity to strike a damaging blow at American global power. Trump must now choose between accepting a humiliating strategic defeat on the global stage and immediately redoubling American support for Ukraine while there’s still time...

The end of an independent Ukraine is and always has been Putin’s goal. While foreign-policy commentators spin theories about what kind of deal Putin might accept, how much territory he might demand, and what kind of security guarantees, demilitarized zones, and foreign assistance he might permit, Putin himself has never shown interest in anything short of Ukraine’s complete capitulation. Before Russia’s invasion, many people couldn’t believe that Putin really wanted all of Ukraine. His original aim was to decapitate the government in Kyiv, replace it with a government subservient to Moscow, and through that government control the entire country... Today, after almost three years of fighting, Putin’s goals have not changed: He wants it all.

Putin’s stated terms for a settlement have been consistent throughout the war: a change of government in Kyiv in favor of a pro-Russian regime; “de-Nazification,” his favored euphemism for extinguishing Ukrainian nationalism; demilitarization, or leaving Ukraine without combat power sufficient to defend against another Russian attack; and “neutrality,” meaning no ties with Western organizations such as NATO or the EU, and no Western aid programs aimed at shoring up Ukrainian independence. Western experts filling the op-ed pages and journals with ideas for securing a post-settlement Ukraine have been negotiating with themselves...

Some hopeful souls argue that Putin will be more flexible once talks begin. But this is based on the mistaken assumption that Putin believes he needs a respite from the fighting. He doesn’t. Yes, the Russian economy is suffering. Yes, Russian losses at the front remain staggeringly high. Yes, Putin lacks the manpower both to fight and to produce vital weaponry and is reluctant to risk political upheaval by instituting a full-scale draft. If the war were going to drag on for another two years or more, these problems might eventually force Putin to seek some kind of truce, perhaps even the kind of agreement Americans muse about. But Putin thinks he’s going to win sooner than that, and he believes that Russians can sustain their present hardships long enough to achieve victory.

Are we so sure he’s wrong? Have American predictions about Russia’s inability to withstand “crippling” sanctions proved correct so far? Western sanctions have forced Russians to adapt and adjust, to find work-arounds on trade, oil, and financing, but although those adjustments have been painful, they have been largely successful... Today, Russia looks outwardly like the Russia of the Great Patriotic War, with exuberant nationalism stimulated and the smallest dissent brutally repressed... The Russian people have historically shown remarkable capacity for sacrifice under the twin stimuli of patriotism and terror. To assume that Russia can’t sustain this war economy long enough to outlast the Ukrainians would be foolish. One more year may be all it takes. Russia faces problems, even serious problems, but Putin believes that without substantial new aid Ukraine’s problems are going to bring it down sooner than Russia.

That is the key point: Putin sees the timelines working in his favor. Russian forces may begin to run low on military equipment in the fall of 2025, but by that time Ukraine may already be close to collapse. Ukraine can’t sustain the war another year without a new aid package from the United States. Ukrainian forces are already suffering from shortages of soldiers, national exhaustion, and collapsing morale. Russia’s casualty rate is higher than Ukraine’s, but there are more Russians than Ukrainians, and Putin has found a way to keep filling the ranks, including with foreign fighters. As one of Ukraine’s top generals recently observed, “the number of Russian troops is constantly increasing.” This year, he estimates, has brought 100,000 additional Russian troops to Ukrainian soil. Meanwhile, lack of equipment prevents Ukraine from outfitting reserve units.

Ukrainian morale is already sagging under Russian missile and drone attacks and the prolonged uncertainty about whether the United States’ vital and irreplaceable support will continue. What happens if that uncertainty becomes certainty, if the next couple of months make clear that the United States is not going to provide a new aid package? That alone could be enough to cause a complete collapse of Ukrainian morale on the military and the home front. But Ukraine has another problem, too. Its defensive lines are now so shallow that if Russian troops break through, they may be able to race west toward Kyiv.

Putin believes he is winning. “The situation is changing dramatically,” he observed in a recent press conference. “We’re moving along the entire front line every day.” His foreign-intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, recently declared, “We are close to achieving our goals, while the armed forces of Ukraine are on the verge of collapse.”... Putin today sees victory within his grasp, more than at any other time since the invasion began...

If Trump cuts off or reduces aid to Ukraine, as he has recently suggested he would, then not only will Ukraine collapse but the divisions between the U.S. and its allies, and among the Europeans themselves, will deepen and multiply. Putin is closer to his aim of splintering the West than at any other time in the quarter century since he took power.

Is this a moment at which to expect Putin to negotiate a peace deal? A truce would give Ukrainians time to breathe and restore their damaged infrastructure as well as their damaged psyches. It would allow them to re-arm without expending the weapons they already have. It would reduce the divisions between the Trump administration and its European allies. It would spare Trump the need to decide whether to seek an aid package for Ukraine and allow him to focus on parts of the world where Russia is more vulnerable, such as the post-Assad Middle East.  Today Putin has momentum on his side in what he regards, correctly, as the decisive main theater. If he wins in Ukraine, his loss in Syria will look trivial by comparison. If he hasn’t blinked after almost three years of misery, hardship, and near defeat, why would he blink now when he believes, with reason, that he is on the precipice of such a massive victory?

A Russian victory means the end of Ukraine. Putin’s aim is not an independent albeit smaller Ukraine, a neutral Ukraine, or even an autonomous Ukraine within a Russian sphere of influence. His goal is no Ukraine. “Modern Ukraine,” he has said, “is entirely the product of the Soviet era.” Putin does not just want to sever Ukraine’s relationships with the West. He aims to stamp out the very idea of Ukraine, to erase it as a political and cultural entity... Putin’s call for “de-Nazification” is not just about removing the Zelensky government, but an effort to stamp out all traces of an independent Ukrainian political and cultural identity.

The vigorous Russification that Putin’s forces have been imposing in Crimea and the Donbas and other conquered Ukrainian territories is evidence of the deadly seriousness of his intent. International human-rights organizations and journalists, writing in The New York Times, have documented the creation in occupied Ukraine of “a highly institutionalized, bureaucratic and frequently brutal system of repression run by Moscow” comprising “a gulag of more than 100 prisons, detention facilities, informal camps and basements” across an area roughly the size of Ohio. According to a June 2023 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, nearly all Ukrainians released from this gulag reported being subjected to systematic torture and abuse by Russian authorities... Hundreds of summary executions have been documented, and more are likely—many of the civilians detained by Russia have yet to be seen again. Escapees from Russian-occupied Ukraine speak of a “prison society” in which anyone with pro-Ukrainian views risks being sent “to the basement,” where torture and possible death await...

Putin has decreed that all people in the occupied territories must renounce their Ukrainian citizenship and become Russian citizens or face deportation. Russian citizenship is required to send children to school, to register a vehicle, to get medical treatment, and to receive pensions. People without Russian passports cannot own farmland, vote, run for office, or register a religious congregation. In schools throughout the Russian-occupied territories, students learn a Russian curriculum and complete a Russian “patriotic education program” and early military training, all taught by teachers sent from the Russian Federation. Parents who object to this Russification risk having their children taken away and sent to boarding schools in Russia or occupied Crimea, where, Putin has decreed, they can be adopted by Russian citizens. By the end of 2023, Ukrainian officials had verified the names of 19,000 children relocated to schools and camps in Russia or to Russian-occupied territory. As former British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly put it in 2023, “Russia’s forcible deportation of innocent Ukrainian children is a systematic attempt to erase Ukraine’s future.”... 

These horrors await the rest of Ukraine if Putin wins... Russian-occupation authorities will seek to stamp out this resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism across the whole country. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will flee, putting enormous strain on Ukraine’s neighbors to the west. But thousands more will wind up in prison, facing torture or murder. Some commentators argue that it would be better to let Ukraine lose quickly because that, at least, would end the suffering. Yet for many millions of Ukrainians, defeat would be just the beginning of their suffering.

This is where Ukraine is headed unless something changes, and soon. Putin at this moment has no incentive to make any deal that leaves even part of Ukraine intact and independent. Only the prospect of a dramatic, near-term change in his military fortunes could force Putin to take a more accommodating course...

Which brings us to President-Elect Donald Trump, who now finds himself in a trap only partly of his own devising... Trump himself seemed to think that his election alone would be enough to convince Putin that it was time to cut a deal... Trump’s first moves following November 5 exuded confidence that Putin would accommodate the new sheriff in town. Two days after the election, in a phone call with Putin that Trump’s staff leaked to the press, Trump reportedly “advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine”... Days after the phone call in which Trump “advised” him not to escalate, Putin fired a hypersonic, nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine, and he’s been escalating ever since. He also had his spokesmen deny that any phone call had taken place. Even today, Putin insists that he and Trump have not spoken since the election... In a message clearly aimed at Trump’s pretensions of power, Putin suggested that the West make a “rational assessment of events and its own capabilities.”...

Trump has since backed off. When asked about the phone call, Trump these days won’t confirm that it ever happened—“I don’t want to say anything about that, because I don’t want to do anything that could impede the negotiation.” More significantly, he has begun making preemptive concessions in the hope of getting Putin to begin talks. He has declared that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO. He has suggested that Ukraine will receive less aid than it has been getting from the United States. And he has criticized Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use American-made ATACMS to strike Russian territory. Putin has simply pocketed all these concessions and offered nothing in return except a willingness to talk “without preconditions.” Now begin the negotiations about beginning the negotiations, while the clock ticks on Kyiv’s ability to endure...

What can Trump do now? Quite a bit, actually... The thing that Putin has most feared, and has bent over backwards to avoid provoking, is the United States and NATO’s direct involvement in the conflict. He must have been in a panic when his troops were bogged down and losing in Ukraine, vulnerable to NATO air and missile strikes. But the Biden administration refused to even threaten direct involvement, both when it knew Putin’s war plans months in advance, and after the initial invasion, when Putin’s troops were vulnerable. Trump’s supporters like to boast that one of his strengths in dealing with adversaries is his dangerous unpredictability. Hinting at U.S. forces becoming directly involved, as Trump reportedly did in his call with Putin, would certainly have confirmed that reputation. But Putin, one suspects, is not inclined to take such threats seriously without seeing real action to back them. After all, he knows all about bluffs—he paralyzed the Biden administration with them for the better part of three years.

Trump has a credibility problem... Putin knows what we all know: that Trump wants out of Ukraine. He does not want to own the war, does not want to spend his first months in a confrontation with Russia, does not want the close cooperation with NATO and other allies that continuing support for Ukraine will require, and, above all, does not want to spend the first months of his new term pushing a Ukraine aid package through Congress after running against that aid. Putin also knows that even if Trump eventually changes his mind, perhaps out of frustration with Putin’s stalling, it will be too late. Months would pass before an aid bill made it through both houses and weaponry began arriving on the battlefield. Putin watched that process grind on last year, and he used the time well. He can afford to wait. After all, if eight months from now Putin feels the tide about to turn against him in the war, he can make the same deal then that Trump would like him to make now. In the meantime, he can continue pummeling the demoralized Ukrainians, taking down what remains of their energy grid, and shrinking the territory under Kyiv’s control.

No, in order to change Putin’s calculations, Trump would have to do exactly what he has not wanted to do so far: He would have to renew aid to the Ukrainians immediately, and in sufficient quantity and quality to change the trajectory on the battlefield. He would also have to indicate convincingly that he was prepared to continue providing aid until Putin either acquiesced to a reasonable deal or faced the collapse of his army. Such actions by Trump would change the timelines sufficiently to give Putin cause for concern. Short of that, the Russian president has no reason to talk about peace terms. He need only wait for Ukraine’s collapse.

Putin doesn’t care who the president of the United States is. His goal for more than two decades has been to weaken the U.S. and break its global hegemony and its leadership of the “liberal world order” so that Russia may resume what he sees as its rightful place as a European great power and an empire with global influence. Putin has many immediate reasons to want to subjugate Ukraine, but he also believes that victory will begin the unraveling of eight decades of American global primacy and the oppressive, American-led liberal world order. Think of what he can accomplish by proving through the conquest of Ukraine that even America’s No. 1 tough guy... is helpless to stop him and to prevent a significant blow to American power and influence. In other words, think of what it will mean for Donald Trump’s America to lose...

Unfortunately for Trump, Ukraine is where this titanic struggle is being waged. Today, not only Putin but Xi, Kim, Khamenei, and others whom the American people generally regard as adversaries believe that a Russian victory in Ukraine will do grave damage to American strength everywhere. That is why they are pouring money, weaponry, and, in the case of North Korea, even their own soldiers into the battle. Whatever short-term benefits they may be deriving from assisting Russia, the big payoff they seek is a deadly blow to the American power and influence that has constrained them for decades... When the fall of Ukraine comes, it will be hard to spin as anything but a defeat for the United States, and for its president.

This was not what Trump had in mind when he said he could get a peace deal in Ukraine. He no doubt envisioned being lauded as the statesman who persuaded Putin to make a deal, saving the world from the horrors of another endless war. His power and prestige would be enhanced. He would be a winner. His plans do not include being rebuffed, rolled over, and by most of the world’s judgment, defeated.

Whether Trump can figure out where the path he is presently following will lead him is a test of his instincts. He is not on the path to glory. And unless he switches quickly, his choice will determine much more than the future of Ukraine."