GUEST COLUMN | BOB PEARSON
Vladimir Putin has a problem. His first Ukraine objective failed; he didn’t take Kyiv or topple Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s leader. Putin has failed to completely occupy Ukraine’s eastern provinces and make them part of Russia. Now he’s switched to a third strategy — to give Europe a Russian winter and break the will of the West to stand with Ukraine.
Putin is raising the stakes with each gamble. While he is adding troops, he cannot order a national draft because that would be another admission of his inability to enforce his will on Ukraine. He has not gone to mass mobilization and he has not gone to mass repression; both decisions not to act are signs of his constraints. By calling the invasion a limited military operation, he has signaled that it has limits and he is confident of victory.
Both these premises are now in doubt. He hopes, with gas supply shutdowns, to inflict such economic pain on Europe that the Europeans will insist on a settlement. Over time the sanctions on Russia will get worse. One of the clearest signs is the growing effectiveness of the sanctions on high technology parts and chips the Russian economy needs. Even Russian military equipment, especially missiles, now uses older technology designed for other purposes. Ukraine has succeeded in carrying the war to Crimea, shocking the Russians who thought they would never be a part of the war. Ukraine now has launched an offensive to liberate Kherson, the largest city the Russians hold.
If Russia is not winning, neither is Ukraine visibly losing. President Zelenskyy has stopped mentioning his willingness to negotiate and is talking of recovering all the territory of Ukraine, including that taken by Russia in 2014. The change in circumstances now makes it very difficult for Putin to carry out any plan to hold a popular plebiscite to annex the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. His army still has not pushed Ukrainian forces out those areas. Some Ukrainian resistance in Russian controlled areas now is also evident.
On balance, at this point, Putin has the more difficult side of the conflict. He knows that if Russia is losing over time, the risk of elite opposition in military and industrial circles will grow. He propagandizes the massive support he claims from the Russian people. If that wavers, then so does his position of power. NATO is stronger; national defense budgets are higher, more NATO forces have moved into Eastern Europe, aid for the Ukrainian forces grows, and Finland and Sweden are de facto NATO members. Both sides are managing the nuclear issue. The U.S. has restrained from supplying weapons that reach into Russia, and Russia has not attacked NATO supply lines in any major way.
War, as I feel I must always say, is often an unpredictable enterprise. To paraphrase Churchill, I am not predicting that this is the beginning of the end, and not even predicting that this is the end of the beginning. But it is not at all what Mr. Putin envisaged when he invaded Ukraine on February 24. The Europeans have a hard winter ahead. If they can manage their way through it, and the U.S. can continue to provide effective leadership, the world may be headed for a brighter, safer future.
W. Robert Pearson was an innovative diplomat, leader and crisis manager at the top levels of the U.S. government. He was U.S. ambassador to Turkey and completed a 30-year career in 2006 with the Department of State as director general of the Foreign Service. He lives in Fearrington Village with his wife, Maggie, who also worked as a diplomat and served as a senior foreign service public diplomacy officer from 2000 to 2006 period.