In Search of a Ukraine Strategy

Biden makes the case for staying an increasingly shaky course

One of the nice things about public speaking - or the worst part, depending on your disposition - is that sometimes the questions force you to decide your own position on difficult issues, rather than simply prevaricate.

This approach works too.

That happened to me at a panel yesterday on Ukraine. The panel was based on a new RAND report that looks at what we have learned about escalation over the course of the last eighteen months in Ukraine, what factors might contribute to future escalation, and whether the findings can be applied in other contexts. The long-form version of the report is a good read for anyone interested in some of the big picture lessons of the war for US policy.

But of course, the Q&A for the panelists focused as much on the future course of the war than on the report itself.¹ The question was simple: “What should the Biden administration do now on Ukraine?”

There’s no simple answer, though. It’s increasingly clear that things cannot simply continue the way they have been, and the scope of choices for US leaders has shrunk.

Indeed, some of things that were always known - even if they weren’t talked about in public – have become clearer, requiring us to answer a much longer set of challenging questions: How much territory can Ukraine realistically recover through military means? How long will Western public opinion continue to support funding the war? When do the tradeoffs and failure to invest in our defense industrial base mean that our stockpiles are insufficient to resource Ukraine?

The last eighteen months has been a veritable orgy of triumphalist rhetoric, with Western policymakers grandstanding about Ukrainian victory and inevitable NATO membership. How can U.S. policymakers respond now that reality is beginning to set in?

The Limits of Existing Strategy

Let’s start by oversimplifying the situation in Ukraine: since the spring, Ukraine’s forces have largely spent their existing offensive capabilities while making limited gains; they are poorly positioned for defense; they face a potential shortfall in Western support; and the winter is likely to be rough, with another Russian infrastructure bombing campaign.

Some of this is the result of Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive. Military analysts have already done some excellent early analysis of this conflict, and the Washington Post – just this week – published a lengthy two-part expose on the course of the counteroffensive.

I recommend you read them yourself, but the bottom line seems fairly clear at this point: a combination of factors helped to undermine the counteroffensive, including a mismatch between US and Ukrainian views of strategy,  and some of the tactical decisions taken by Ukrainian leadership (i.e., the decision to use less experienced troops in a leading role, or the decision to defend Bakhmut at significant cost in men and materiel). Russian fortifications, which proved far more solid and effective in repelling Ukrainian advances than might have been expected, were significant. 

Some of these factors couldn’t have been predicted up front, but Western popular perceptions always wildly overestimated the potential gains that Ukraine could make in this counteroffensive; even a fairly successful campaign would probably have looked lackluster compared to some of the predictions from this summer.

Just a few of the most hyperbolically optimistic takes from this summer.

So it’s not a surprise that the campaign failed to meet this high bar, but it also doesn’t bode well for Ukraine’s ability to retake territory that it failed to meet even the lowest bar for success.  And the problems run bigger than battlefield setbacks. A few highlights:

• Public support for Ukraine is in decline across western countries, particularly in the United States, and in western Europe. Here in Washington, Republicans in congress have swung strongly against continued funding for the conflict; the new speaker’s ability to maintain his hold on the majority may make it more difficult for him to bring the administration’s supplemental request for funding to the floor without some kind of sleight of hand. Currently, GOP leaders are insisting that any Ukraine funding will need to be part of a larger package involving immigration reform. If U.S. funding fails, Ukraine will become dependent on European states to step into the breach; there are limits to how much they can do this simply in terms of their own defense-industrial capacity.

• Even if aid does come through, the defense-industrial concern still looms. Production has increased across the West since 2022, but not by the amount needed; countries have been raiding stockpiles to supply enough shells and ammunition to Ukraine throughout 2023. Those stockpiles are starting to run dry. Concerns about tradeoffs between Ukraine and Taiwan may be overblown, but the US does face real and growing capacity constraints on its ability to supply other states with arms.

• Russia is not thriving, but neither is it collapsing. Sanctions haven’t destroyed the Russian economy, and leaders in Moscow have been able to draw on the country’s deep pool of manpower and industrial capabilities to sustain the war.² Sure, these carry costs: we’re not likely to see another wave of mobilization prior to the Russian presidential election next year, and a reliance on war to power the economy means it will remain stagnant at best. But even if Russian elites want out of the war, there is no real sign that the Kremlin is facing significant pressure to do so.³ 

What is To Be Done?

Of course, unlike the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive failure, these problems were eminently predictable.

Declining Western public support for a long, grinding war of attrition? What a surprise! Sanctions can’t cut a great power and major oil exporter out of the global economy entirely? 
You don’t say. Leaders prioritizing other things over costly investments in the defense-industrial base? Hold the phone. 

Sorry, I got stuck in sarcasm mode for a moment there.

Regardless of whether it was foreseeable, though, it’s more concerning that the Biden administration has been almost willfully incurious about the future course of the war and whether it is sustainable. They appear surprised that their messaging strategy – linking Ukraine aid to Israel, and highlighting the US jobs created by defense spending – isn’t particularly moving the needle. And while I assume (I hope!) they have an internal Plan B for what to do as existing Ukraine funding runs out, thus far nothing has been said publicly. Instead, Biden doubled down today, telling congress in a speech that they must vote for aid or let Putin win.

What should he be doing instead? Let’s look at the most common suggestions, and then I’ll tell you what I think a more viable approach is.

The first option, and one you’ll hear regularly in DC, is that Ukraine just needs more time and more equipment to triumph. This opinion, perhaps unsurprisingly, often goes hand-in-hand with the theory that the counteroffensive failed largely because the United States did not provide Ukraine with everything it needed quickly enough.

But this is not a terribly plausible option. If the Biden administration is already struggling to get a Ukraine supplemental through the House, the prospects for significantly increased aid are slim. Whether or not this tranche of aid passes, there will probably be no additional funding prior to the 2024 election. The stockpile problem is also acute. Just to resource this year’s operations, U.S. and European officials have had to dig deep, sourcing artillery shells from South Korea, and sending cluster munitions from US stores to provide enough firepower for this offensive. The cupboard is starting to look a bit like a Soviet supermarket: empty.

Even with a significant further infusion of cash and weapons, it’s not clear that the Ukrainians would be ready to fight an offensive campaign any time soon; they’ve suffered significant losses and need time to train and replace these personnel. There aren’t many plausible ways to increase Ukraine’s fire power in the next year, which is why most folks advocating this option either gloss over these problems, or talk about a multi-year process, with the next significant Ukrainian push in 2025 or later.

The second option is that the United States should push Ukraine to sue for peace in the near-term. I'm deeply sympathetic to elements of this argument, and agree with those like RAND’s Sam Charap, who argue that even if the prospects for an agreement are low now, it is still worth opening the lines of communications and exploring Moscow’s willingness to talk about an armistice. And while I don’t think Kyiv should be pressured into a ceasefire, it’s past time that Washington and Kyiv had an open and honest conversation about negotiations and the endgame of the war.⁴ It would be far better from the point of view of human lives and of cost to try and at least freeze the conflict in place rather than continuing the slaughter.

At the same time, conditions are hardly ripe for a deal.⁵ Everything above suggests Moscow would probably benefit from continuing the conflict. And the biggest wild card remains the 2024 US election; the prospect of a second Trump presidency offers a way out for Putin that cannot be ignored.

So negotiation isn’t likely to work either. But whether the supplemental passes or not, I think there’s a third option that the administration should pursue: turn this into a low-stakes defensive war.

There are two components to such a strategy. The first is refocusing from offense to defense inside Ukraine. This, luckily, is both the path of least resistance, and what a responsible military strategy should look like in the short term given the exhaustion of Ukrainian forces after the fall offensive. It means less focus on high-level systems designed to give Ukraine a qualitative or technological advantage in offense (i.e., F16s, mine clearing equipment, long-range strike capabilities) and more focus on items like artillery and small arms ammunition, or spare parts for existing equipment. The White House should encourage Ukraine – if it is not already doing so – to build fortifications, dig in, and consider where they might be most vulnerable to Russian attack in the next year. Even without US funding, some variant of this approach might be a feasible strategy for European assistance.

The second part of this approach is changing the narrative. For much of the last year, the White House’s narrative has been that US support is essential to help Ukraine retake its territory, and to avoid a Russian win. But this necessarily paints U.S. policymakers into a box where any failure by Ukraine to retake all of its territory looks like a loss.⁶

Instead, the White House should promote an alternative narrative:

This is a war of defense for Ukrainian sovereignty. It's already a strategic defeat for Russia. The US can support Ukraine in this war while also acknowledging that there are other national security priorities that might need to take precedence. 

This narrative has the big benefit of being entirely true. It’s also far less aspirational, in ways that make it more salable to the public, and that lower the stakes of Ukrainian battlefield wins or losses. It should be matched by attempts to encourage the Ukrainians to engage in dialogue with Russia on the potential for an armistice, along with direct US-Russia dialogue on related security questions.

Attempting to transition the war in Ukraine to a lower-cost, lower-stakes conflict in the next year will not necessarily be popular, either in Kyiv, or among US allies in Europe. Nor is it a plan that would win the war or offer significant gains over the current situation. But it is a plan that can prevent Ukraine from making significant losses to Russia, and – if the Biden administration is re-elected in November – this plan would allow them to open the possibility of ceasefire negotiations in late-2024 from a much stronger position.

Or they could just keep sticking their heads in the sand.

1. Indeed, in many ways, it was inherently strange to be discussing what might cause Russia to escalate when they are arguably holding the upper hand in the war at the moment.

2. It’s certainly ironic that in our tech obsessed world – and even in a war where innovative tech is playing a big role on the battlefield – the old Russian standbys of men and industrial capability are still playing such a big role.

3. In all seriousness, Western leaders should be concerned about Russian gains and Ukrainian setbacks. Given the state of both sides forces, this is unlikely to be anything earth-shattering, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

4. I argued this almost exactly a year ago.

5. There was a time about six months ago - prior to the counteroffensive - when Ukraine’s leverage was higher and negotiations might have been more effective. But that moment has passed.

6. It’s also a potentially losing political strategy, given the likelihood that Biden’s support for Ukraine becomes an electoral debate during the 2024 campaign.