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Ukraine war: entrenched positions mean stalemate continues [1]

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Date: 2023-05

With the Ukrainian army likely to start a military offensive in Donbas, is the war becoming too costly for Vladimir Putin, or is the current violent stalemate set to continue?

Until recently, the assumption has been the latter. If Russia was winning and Ukraine was losing, NATO would have far too much riding on the war to allow that situation to continue and would increase its interventions, but if Ukraine was winning and Russia losing, Putin could always threaten to escalate to more devastating weapons.

Is that still the case? Or are there now changes under way in the political outlook in Washington or Moscow?

In the US, Joe Biden may be continuing with an unexpectedly progressive domestic policy, but his administration remains hardline when it comes to foreign policy, especially with Russia and China. That is not likely to change any time soon, or at least until the primaries for the 2024 presidential election have their full impact.

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Commentators on the Democrat right are much in evidence and ready to point to the experience of the Cold War era, calling for total victory over Russia. An example, from the current issue of The Atlantic, sees journalist and historian Anne Applebaum and the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeff Goldberg, argue for full support for Ukraine to end the Russian presence in the country, including the retaking of Crimea. Usefully critiqued by Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute, this does represent a view common in traditional Democrat policy circles and contrasts with a more isolationist stance among Republicans.

Given that the war is proving to be very profitable for the world’s arms companies, especially in the United States and western Europe, the military-industrial lobbies will be pushing their sales for all they are worth, with the advantage that it is Ukrainians doing the actual fighting and dying, not them.

Support for Ukraine among European NATO members may decline, but that will not be crucial if the United States maintains its stance. Given that Ukraine shows little sign of flagging if US support remains, a break in the stalemate will have to come primarily from Russia, with war weariness and internal opposition the most likely catalysts for change.

Are there parallels with other conflicts that might give a clue as to whether this is likely? From the quite recent past, one sticks out – the Soviet attempt to maintain control of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. The withdrawal towards the end of that period was very nearly total, if not rapid, and followed largely from three factors.

One was the transition from the successive semi-moribund leaderships of the ailing Brezhnev, Chernenko and Andropov regimes to the radically different governance of Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985 onwards.

Second, Gorbachev bought into the arguments of some of his younger economic and political advisers that the Soviet Union was spending itself into an early grave by trying to keep up with the West and its far greater economic potential.

Instead of trying to match the West missile for missile Gorbachev sought to move away from this costly excess and opt for what was known as ‘reasonable sufficiency’, while engaging in arms control talks. These even went as far as that rarity, the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which actually scrapped current weapons rather than obsolete ones.

Finally, Afghanistan was becoming an economic millstone and the cause of growing anger within Russia at the continual loss of life of young conscripts. The seemingly never-ending counter-insurgency war was even having a slow but persistent impact on support for the Kremlin, and before the end of the decade the Soviets had withdrawn.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ukraine-war-putin-us-nato-internal-russian-opposition-stalemate/

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