A Containment Strategy for Ukraine

On November 1, Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, changed the debate about his country’s war with Russia with a statement. “Just like in the first World War,” he said in an interview with The Economist, the Ukrainian and Russian militaries “have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.” Unless a massive leap in military technology gives one side a decisive advantage, “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.” These words prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to issue a rebuttal. The war “is not a stalemate, I emphasize this,” Zelensky argued. A deputy head of the office of the president noted that the comments stirred “panic” among Ukraine’s Western allies.

Such fear is understandable at a moment when the U.S. Congress, by far Ukraine’s largest source of aid, is deciding whether to sustain its military support. Before Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in June 2023, Washington evinced optimism that the Ukrainian military could swiftly achieve major military successes and secure Kyiv a stronger negotiating position to force concessions from Moscow. This has not happened. Not much territory has changed hands, and high hopes have yielded to a dispiriting narrative of impasse. A divided Congress likely has no “mountain of steel,” as U.S. officials have called the materiel they gave Ukraine in early 2023, to provide for a renewed counteroffensive in 2024, and European countries are falling short in the assistance they have promised. In purely military terms, Ukraine’s path to victory is unclear.

But Ukraine and its allies must face, not fear, the war’s current reality. They should accept and prepare for a multiyear war and for the long-term containment of Russia instead of hoping for either a quick Ukrainian triumph or, absent that, an imminent negotiated solution. An overwhelming victory is not guaranteed by either Ukrainian valor or Russian folly. And any hope that negotiations right now could benefit Ukraine is naive: Russia is not becoming more malleable or more amenable to compromise. In fact, the Kremlin’s aspirations to reshape the whole international order through violent conflict may be more ambitious now than they were a year ago.

Russia continues marshaling resources for its devastating war. And Russians’ support for Putin’s invasion has not collapsed: not when Ukraine’s Western allies imposed sanctions on the Russian economy, not when some Russians protested mobilization, and not when the mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin staged his curious rebellion in June 2023.

But the war is not lost for Ukraine. Far from it. Enamored of Kyiv’s early successes and high morale, Ukraine’s supporters became accustomed to stunning Ukrainian triumphs. Yet this David-versus-Goliath framing of the war now generates too much pessimism when Ukrainian forces struggle or come to a deadlock with Russian troops. Even a stalemate, as frustrating as it seems, represents a huge accomplishment. Before February 2022, the idea that Ukraine could achieve military parity with Russia would have seemed fanciful. With the West’s help, however, Ukraine has deterred its much more powerful neighbor. Over a year into the war, Russia has been unable to take Kyiv or any major Ukrainian city besides Mariupol. Despite its vast economic and military resources, Russia has not been truly on the offensive since the early summer of 2022.

To make progress now, Western and Ukrainian leaders need to rally around achievable strategic goals. The most pressing is the containment of Russian forces—not only to protect all that Ukraine has already accomplished but also to render Russia’s presence on Ukrainian territory as insecure as possible. Russian positions must be continuously pressured in a forward-leaning approach. This will not be doable without U.S. military support, justified not by the claim that victory is around the corner but by the argument that containing Russia is a core European and U.S. interest. Containment is a policy that is already succeeding in Ukraine. Failure would be giving up on it.

SWERVING FORTUNES

During the war’s first six months, Ukraine was chronically underestimated. Then in September and October 2022, Ukrainian forces punched through Russian lines around Kharkiv and expelled Russian forces from Kherson. Western allies came to see these battlefield triumphs as setting a precedent. Ahead of last June’s counteroffensive, which was planned over the course of months, many in the West believed that the Ukrainian military’s innovativeness, determination, talent for strategy, and flexible command structures would confer the same advantages they did in 2022. By the summer of 2023, the war had already become grueling and devastating, and the hope was that Ukraine could fairly quickly change the momentum for good.

The West’s optimism about the counteroffensive also stemmed from the scale and quality of its military assistance to Ukraine. Over the course of the spring of 2023, the United States and European countries sent Kyiv some of their best weaponry: advanced tanks, rockets, and missiles, although their pace was initially slow, and they withheld certain systems such as F-16 fighter jets and long-range ATACMS missiles. In Foreign Affairs in June 2023, Gideon Rose argued that “Western military support and Ukraine’s remarkable ability to transform it into battlefield success” could carry Ukraine to victory and restore its pre-2014 borders.

The Russian military, meanwhile, appeared to suffer from poor coordination, poor motivation, and a general sense of purposelessness. With the counteroffensive, Kyiv planned to cut through Russia’s land bridge to Crimea and destroy Russian morale. Just two weeks after the counteroffensive began with assaults in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts and drone strikes inside Russia, Moscow’s accelerating misfortunes culminated in Prigozhin’s mutiny. For weeks, Putin’s grip on power seemed more fragile than it had ever been.

Even if the West fulfills its commitments to help Kyiv, the war may not swing decisively in Ukraine’s favor.

Just a few months later, however, the situation looks less propitious for Ukraine. Putin has stabilized his government and his military command structure. As of late 2023, constraints on resources and manpower are more evident on the Ukrainian side than on the Russian one. The long preparation time required to ready the counteroffensive allowed Russia to build defenses, particularly mine belts, which nullified many of Ukraine’s advantages in sophisticated weaponry. To regain momentum, Ukraine has asked the West for ammunition, electronic warfare and mine-breaching technology, longer-range missiles, and more planes. But as Ukraine’s needs grew, the United States fractured politically. A small band of Republican legislators are now using their leverage over moderate Republicans to try to halt funding for Ukraine. Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, has voted repeatedly against Ukraine support packages but recently spoke more favorably about backing Kyiv. It is impossible to know, however, if he has the intent or the ability to ensure a useful level of assistance.

Ukraine’s stocks of ammunition and weaponry are already running short. A diminution of or end to U.S. military support would have an immediate effect on Ukraine’s battlefield performance, especially its air defenses. Those air defenses rely on interceptors, a component the United States can provide. If the U.S. government becomes less willing to fund Ukraine’s military efforts, no other country can fill the vacuum. European countries lack the ammunition stockpiles and the military production capacity. In March 2023, the EU pledged to send a million rounds of ammunition to Ukraine by March 2024, but they are at risk of falling short. As of late November 2023, less than a third of the promised supplies had been delivered.

Even if the United States and Europe fulfill all their commitments to help Kyiv militarily, the war may not swing decisively in Ukraine’s favor. The United States has approved the delivery of coveted F-16s in 2024, but they may be less helpful when they eventually arrive. According to Zaluzhny, Russia has improved its air defenses and will maintain “superiority in weapons, equipment, missiles, and ammunition for a considerable time.” As the war enters its second winter, Russia has been stockpiling missiles to attack the Ukrainian electrical grid and thus undermine Ukraine’s morale and economy.

NO INTERVIEWS WITH A VAMPIRE

Extensive media coverage drove political support for Ukraine’s war effort in the United States and elsewhere. That coverage has faded from newspapers’ front pages as another war rages between Hamas and Israel. The worry that the Israel-Hamas war would widen now seems less probable, and a more limited war would save the U.S. government from having to make a stark choice between helping Ukraine and intervening in a hot war in the Middle East. But Russia has already benefited considerably from the chaos unleashed on October 7.

Russian diplomats and media platforms fuel the accusation that Washington applies principles of international conduct unevenly and has a double standard about civilian casualties when it comes to Ukraine and Gaza. This accusation is now echoing across many countries in the global South. Moscow would be delighted if skepticism about Western policy in the Middle East turns into skepticism about Western policy in Ukraine.

Despite the stalemate on the battlefield, negotiations are not the right way out of the current impasse. The Kremlin would happily negotiate Ukraine’s near-unconditional surrender. But given that Ukraine has not advanced on the battlefield for over a year, negotiations held now risk, at best, recapitulating the diplomacy behind the ineffective Minsk agreements, which ended the Donbas war of 2014–15 without constraining Russia’s will to control Ukraine. The agreements left Russia too free to build up military assets on Ukrainian territory, paving the way for a much more aggressive invasion eight years later.

Putin has no obvious reasons to make good-faith concessions to Zelensky. Russia’s economy has, thus far, weathered the war. In fact, the Kremlin has been increasing military spending and digging in for a long haul. Russia retains the option of ordering additional mobilizations. Prone to hubris, Putin likely envisions his erstwhile “special military operation” as a years-long war in which Russia will have the fortitude to prevail. As long as he retains that attitude, then negotiation offers no escape from the labyrinth of this terrible war.

CONTAIN AND COMBINE

Ukraine and the West are in a difficult strategic predicament. But not everything is gloomy, and both Kyiv and the West should guard against defeatism. Victories in war can come unexpectedly, and going forward, the countries supporting Ukraine will have to strike a balance between self-confidence and sobriety. Sobriety requires honesty: neither a battlefield victory for Ukraine nor negotiations in which Kyiv starts from a strong position are near at hand. Self-confidence requires the patient and steady pursuit of containment, never letting up on pressure applied on the Russian presence in Ukraine.

Militarily, the West should conceive of the war not just as stopping Russian territorial advances and defending Ukrainian citizens but as keeping Russia off balance. Ukraine’s improved ability to strike at Russian naval assets offers a pivotal opening. Long a prized trophy for Putin, Crimea is no longer an attractive place for Russians to live or vacation. Ukraine has put it within range of missile strikes, and Russia must think twice before anchoring ships or submarines there or making Crimea a logistics hub. By degrading the Russian navy, Ukraine has already restored some blockaded shipping lanes in the Black Sea.

The right strategy in Ukraine is a patient and steady pursuit of containment.

The more Ukraine can target Russian naval assets and put Crimea at risk, the more it can make the war seem purposeless to the Kremlin and the Russian population. But containment requires Western policymakers and publics to accept the need for a long and demanding war in Ukraine. Implying that victory might be just around the corner will only create the dangerous impression that Ukraine is underperforming and that for some inexplicable reason it cannot triumph in an easily winnable war.

During the U.S. presidential campaign season, the accusation that U.S. support for Ukraine is just another one of Washington’s “forever wars” could sting, precisely because it would resonate with familiar examples going back to the Vietnam War—which ended for the United States after Congress decided to stop funding it. The crucial difference, of course, is that the United States had troops on the ground in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and all those wars were vastly more expensive than the war in Ukraine. In Kyiv, the United States has a more receptive, more independent, and more democratic partner than it ever did in Saigon, Kabul, or Baghdad.

Victory will not be defined only on the battlefield. Strategically, Western countries should ramp up their efforts to integrate Ukraine into their institutions. The conflict between Ukraine and Russia began in 2013, when Ukraine’s government yielded to Russian pressure to withdraw from a trade agreement with the EU, prompting the Maidan revolution, which swept a new, more pro-Western government to power in Kyiv. Since then, Ukraine has received EU candidate status, drawing closer to Europe through legal and political agreements and through the bonds of sentiment. This is already a victory for Europe and Ukraine. Policymakers must deepen Ukraine’s ties to the West by connecting it to Europe, even if full EU and NATO membership likely cannot occur until the war ends.

A NEW NARRATIVE

Russia’s long-term containment can only redound to Ukraine’s benefit, though it may seem a less grandiose goal than a resounding battlefield victory. Ukraine’s leaders are acutely aware of domestic tensions in Western countries and of the military challenges Kyiv faces. To encourage continued Western support, Kyiv should base its case for Western investment in Ukraine on the containment of Russia, emphasizing that ultimately prevailing over Russia is as much in the West’s interest as it is in Ukraine’s.

The Russian military is bogged down in Ukraine, and as a result, Moscow’s regional influence in Central Asia and the South Caucasus has diminished. (Had Russia taken Kyiv, the opposite would now be the case.) But at present, Russia is only imperfectly, and perhaps temporarily, contained in Ukraine and beyond. For years to come, containment will have to be supported with more European and sustained U.S. military aid; the West must also maintain its sanctions on Russia and better enforce their implementation. Aid to Ukraine is not philanthropy. For Europe, the success or failure of containing Russia will shape the whole continent’s security. For the United States, the success or failure of containing Russia in Europe will define the future of the international order it leads.

Containing Russia should be conceptualized—and celebrated—as a steady continuum of action that started before February 2022 and came into its own with the Ukrainian defense of Kyiv and battlefield advances in the fall of 2022. Containment, by definition, can deliver only a partial victory, and for this reason, ups and downs in public sentiment in countries allied with Ukraine are to be expected. These ups and downs make it all the more worthwhile for Western leaders, who are sensitive to surges of optimism and disappointment, to adopt containment as their unchanging compass. Doing so will help both Ukraine’s war efforts and morale in Ukraine’s allies. Sticking to a consistent, realistic strategy amid the ebbs and flows of sentiment in a major war is its own source of self-confidence.