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What reflects Putin’s change in military strategy and what can stop him in Ukraine
In the last week there have been signs, stronger than ever, that Russia recognizes that it is not capable of achieving the goal of conquering Ukraine by military force. These signals linked to peace talks in Ukraine, which would indicate that Russia he is giving up his attempt to encircle kyiv, coincide with the previous statement that their war objectives were limited to conquering the eastern part of the country. And even before that both Russia and Ukraine had declared that the peace negotiations were entering a phase of substantive discussions, as opposed to Russia limiting itself to presenting ultimatums.
Russia’s claim that it is winding down operations around kyiv and focusing its offensive in the east of the country is one of those occasions when a Russian Defense Ministry statement recognizably fits the truth. The “reality gap” is not in what Russia is doing, but in why it claims to be doing it. Russia has presented this withdrawal of its troops from the outskirts of kyiv as a kind of concession to “boost mutual confidence” in the peace talks. But it was already clear that their offense in that area had stalled, and in some cases was backing down, because of the Ukrainian resistance. The shift in plans to operations in the east and the rotation of battered Russian units from Ukraine’s northern flank are an acknowledgment by Moscow that—as many military analysts had predicted before the current conflict— does not have the strength to deploy it would take to conquer all of Ukraine along multiple axes of advance.
In fact, Russia it is having to make do with what is available to maintain its current operations. The buildup of troops on the eve of the offensive against Ukraine saw units brought in from as far away as the Arctic and the Far East. Now that many of these units have been disrupted in the fighting in Ukraine, Russia is turning to every possible source of additional bodies, including the incorporation of mercenaries and the recruitment in syria.
But while Ukraine’s success in fending off at least some of the Russian offensives may mean that the country as a whole is not in immediate danger of being invaded, the risk to the future of Ukrainian sovereignty remains. Russia has a long history of starting wars disastrously and then employing enough soldiers and equipment in the conflict to crush their opponents through sheer accumulation. Russia can continue a war of attrition, no matter the cost in casualties among the troops poorly trained or the damage caused to one’s own russian economyfor longer than Ukraine can maintain the interest and support of the West.
And in the meantime, Russia will continue to engineer humanitarian catastrophes in order to put pressure on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to make concessions that will put an end to the fighting. The capital itself will continue to be under threat. The suspension of attempts to advance and seize more territory around kyiv does not mean that Russia will stop launching long-range missile and artillery attacks on Ukrainian cities from areas it already controls.
That Russian pressure will be both direct, by offering Zelensky the disastrous choice of continuing the fighting at the cost of innocent lives or making concessions to end the suffering, and indirect, should Zelensky’s Western supporters change their advice—and their support – because they do not believe that Ukraine should put up any more resistance in the face of the humanitarian catastrophe.
Zelensky has already indicated that he would accept the status of “neutral” for Ukraine, which would consequently end the fighting. But this in itself is fraught with danger. Zelensky knows as well as anyone that “neutral with security guarantees” was precisely Ukraine’s status a decade ago, and that it did nothing to prevent Russia from took over Crimea and started his war in eastern Ukraine. So, to make any sense, the very words would have to carry radically different international status and international support for Ukraine than in 2014. And there is always the danger that a temporary ceasefire — encouraged by a West reluctant to conflicts – can become a permanent division of the country, thus consolidating Russian territorial gains.
Optimism about the resistance to occupation by the Ukrainian population in the areas controlled by Russia, as well as in those that could still be conquered in the eastern offensive, hides a grim truth. The sad reality is that Moscow has a very high success rate in the crushing of resistance movements and insurgencies, largely thanks to the application of unlimited barbarism against the civilian population that supports them. So if Russia decides to occupy territory it already has under control, the only thing that could drive it out are new and much more substantial Ukrainian military offensives, which may not be within kyiv’s reach.
In the end, much depends on what Russia itself defines as “victory.” It has already reinvented its original war goals after failing to achieve them. The expectation that the Ukrainians were just frustrated Russians waiting to be freed from a imaginary neo-Nazi political elite that had taken power in kyiv was torpedoed by the first clash with the concrete reality on Ukrainian territory. Far from having the entire country in her hands, Russia must fight for every inch of Ukrainian territory.
So whatever victory Russia ultimately claims, it’s unlikely to be anything like what it thought it was going to do in the first place. But that matters little when she has established such control over public opinion in her country that much of her population thinks that a defensive warfare. Indeed, a Russian declaration of success does not depend at all on the reality of the outcome of the war. The longer-term problem is that if Vladimir Putin comes out of this war convinced that Russia has scored more than a substantial defeat, there is nothing to deter him from continuing his plans for wars of conquest to reassert Moscow’s control. over the territories and peoples that he claims they are independent by mistake.
Russia may need time to rebuild its military and reorient its economy under the new sanctions regime, but the only thing that will change Putin’s ambition is a clear and indisputable failure that cannot be explained away by trickery that redefines what Russia wanted with this war. Now, as at the beginning of the war, the West has a responsibility to help Ukraine bring about that failure.
Keir Giles works on the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, and is the author of Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West.
Translation of Julian Cnochaert.