Russia-Ukraine war: What do we know about Russia's actual war aims?

Deutsche Welle English has this recent panel discussion on the state of the Russia-Ukraine war this past week, After capturing large parts of Donbas: will Putin have an appetite for more? 07/14/2022:

What are Russian war aims in Ukraine?

The new Cold Warriors tell us confidently that Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin is a dictator and Russia is a chronically expansionist power driven by a religious and nationalistic mission to conquer as many of its neighbors as it can. And that can only be changed by bringing about the complete collapse of Putin's government and of Russian as a major power.

Moritz Gathmann of the "highbrow"-conservative German magazine Cicero represents a version of this view in the DW English panel above. And there are other variations on that beloved theme, of course, some more heavy-handed than others. It's not considered polite in respectable commentary to note that this general outlook fits nicely with the marketing goals of weapons manufacturers.

One advantage of this viewpoint is that since it reflects stereotypical, Dr. Strangelove-type Cold War thinking, it doesn't require much tedious thought to apply it to any and all situations involving policy toward Russia. The downside is that it's practically useless in evaluating the motives and goals of specific Russian actions in the real world. That is a not-insignificant drawback in what is currently a proxy confrontation between the world's tow biggest nuclear powers. (Russian propaganda calls the Ukraine conflict a "proxy war" against Russia, so it's a touchy characterization. But the fact that one side uses/misuses it from propaganda doesn't mean it's not so. But such proxy wars in Europe were something that the US and the USSR managed to avoid after the initial Cold War civil conflicts in Greece and Turkey.)

But as George Shatzer recently observed in the context of military strategy (Russia’s Strategy and Its War on Ukraine Parameters 52:2 Summer 2022:

Even “understanding the enemy” as a concept itself is misunderstood. It is a mistake to think the aim is to predict how an enemy will behave in a given situation. Not even the enemy can predict this about themselves. Instead, it is about knowing their habits and weaknesses to understand better how they are vulnerable.

Anatol Lieven, also of the Quincy Institute, uses the military approach Russia has taken to evaluate its goals and how they may have shifted already in Why Russia has failed to achieve its goals in Ukraine Responsible Statecraft 07/12/2022:

A key reason [for Russia's surprisingly slow advances] is that the Russian government pursued two mutually contradictory goals in Ukraine. On the one hand, Moscow sought to retain influence over Ukraine as a whole. On the other, it sought the “return” to Russia of territories that it considers historically Russian.

That contradiction has been resolved. From now on, Russia’s goal is land in the south and east. As to the rest of Ukraine, Russia will still try to keep it from formally joining NATO, but Russian elites with whom I have spoken now accept — as Putin himself presumably accepts — that it will be an enemy of Russia and a de facto ally of the West for the foreseeable future. [my emphasis]

Lieven doesn't expand on who his "Russian elite" sources are, though they are presumably in some way part of the broader Russian foreign policy establishment. It's important to remember that governments at war put out various versions of their shifting positions through multiple channels. Apart from propaganda reasons, this also serves as a way of floating talking points and testing other country's responses.

What the Russian government has been saying since the 1990s, and even more explicitly since the 2007 Munich Security Conference, is that they view the enlargement of NATO as a security threat. The New Cold Warriors are especially eager to quash the idea that there was any kind of validity or even seriousness to those stated views. It probably doesn't help their argument when Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky declares confidently that the outcome of the current war is going to be that Russia "will remain paralyzed for generations." That sounds like a considerably more expansive set of war aims than restoring Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea and the Donbas region.

Here we come across the difference between the liberal-internationalist view of international relations, including its humanitarian-intervention variant, and the "realist" IR view. In terms of formal international law, any nation can join any military or political alliance it wants and their neighbors have no legitimate complaints to make about it. So taken dogmatically, the liberal-international IR view can wind up arguing that it's impossible that Russia could be motivated by any kind of legitimate security concern regard Ukraine and NATO. Even when the Ukrainian President recklessly implies that the goal of the current war is to paralyze Russia "for generations".

The realist IR view can come off as cynical. And for some of its practitioners like Henry Kissinger, it often produces cynical and brutal policies that could have and should have been avoided. But realists take full account of the painfully obvious reality that nations pay attention to their security interests and what military capabilities of other countries - obviously including their immediate neighbors - might threat their own security. John Mearsheimer even argues that big parties are particularly subject to paranoid exaggerations of security threats. But to pretend that a country has no real or legitimate interest in what their neighbors' military capabilities and intentions are is just silly.

In fact, the Russian government and Putin himself have given a range of perspectives on Russian policy toward Ukraine over the years, including talking about Belarus and Ukraine as an integral part of Russian civilization. Some of Putin's more recent statements have suggested that Russian policy is to incorporate Ukraine formally into the nation of Russia.

The specific justifications for the current war have included the claim that Ukraine is run by Nazis or fascists and is therefore inherently hostile to Russia. There are also been claims that Russian-speaking populations have been subject to serious persecution by the Ukrainian government. Neither claim holds up to serious scrutiny and are pretty obviously designed to rally Russian popular support for the military action. Factually, the first claims is largely frivolous. There is some substance to the charges that Russian-speakers in the Donbas have been discrimination against - the Minsk Agreements of 2014-15 implicitly recognized that - but it doesn't remotely justify a unilateral Russian military aggression.

What does the current state of the war tell us about Russian goals?

Lieven writes about the present situation:

This invasion plan was bedeviled by the same contradiction visible since 2014 and in Putin’s essay. Russia deployed fewer than 200,000 troops — far too few in any case to invade a country the size of Ukraine. Even more important, in pursuit of its two contradictory political goals, the Russian military divided its forces roughly equally between those intended to capture Kyiv, and those intended to occupy territory in the east and south. The first were intended to subjugate or replace the Ukrainian government and turn the whole of Ukraine into a Russian client state; the second, to seize as much Russian-speaking territory as possible in the east and south.

Largely as a result of seeking both these goals simultaneously and dividing its forces in this way, the Russian government failed completely at its first objective, and very largely at its second. On March 29, the Russian government announced that it was withdrawing its forces from around Kyiv; and, instead of a triumphant march across eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea coast, the Russian army has been reduced to a grinding war of attrition to capture small cities in the Donbas.

Moreover, this initial failure fatally undermined the war’s political goals. Russia’s ability to appeal to the population of eastern and southern Ukraine depended critically on a quick and painless victory. Instead, Russia has only been able to capture cities in the region by reducing them to rubble in months of fighting, and the invasion has been bitterly denounced by most local elected officials. [my emphasis]

This seems consistent with the commentary of Christian Ferdinand Wehrschütz, head of the Ukraine bureau of Austria’s public news agency ORF since 2015 and has established a good record in doing so. Did a did a post in German on Facebook 02/06/2022 that I quoted in this 07/16/2022 post making the point that the current level of troop numbers Russia was reported to be massing on Ukraine’s border, which is that they would be enough to take control of additional territory in the Donbass region, they didn’t sound remotely sufficient for a planned complete occupation of Ukraine.

My translation of a relevant portion:

First, as is so often the case, the question is not asked [in the article on which he is commenting] how great the expected Ukrainian (military) resistance would be! Because the Russian figures alone say nothing about the possibilities that are associated with it after an attack.

An example: for a peace mission for Donetsk and Lugansk [portions of the Donbass region currently under Russian control] – not a combat mission!!! - military planners have calculated that this would require an international force of 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers. This involves about 4 percent of Ukraine's territory. I have not met any ([Ukrainian] General Staff) officer who considers 100,000 /120,000 soldiers to be sufficient to conquer the left-bank [western portion of] Ukraine including Kiev.

In addition, this would not be a play war, but a real war with an occupying power, not to mention the Western sanctions. If the Ukrainians in Kharkiv and other cities do not capitulate without resistance, this means a war in the urban area with high losses, including for the Russians, and catastrophic images of destruction, death and misery. Apart from the Western reactions, is this so easy to "sell" to the population in Russia? [my emphasis]

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides regular updates on the military situation in Ukraine. The July 15 report notes of the recently renewed Russian offensive after a short pause:

A 10-day-long operational pause is insufficient to fully regenerate Russian forces for large-scale offensive operations. The Russian military seems to feel continuous pressure to resume and continue offensive operations before it can reasonably have rebuilt sufficient combat power to achieve decisive effects at a reasonable cost to itself, however. The resuming Russian offensive may therefore fluctuate or even stall for some time.

It's always possible that Russian officials underestimated their own military capabilities against Ukraine and excessively discounted the US-NATO response. Arrogance and overconfidence are chronic foreign policy problems for great powers, as the US has experienced on more than one occasion since the Second World War.

Role of Belarus

It's also worth noting that while Belarus actively participated in the threatening military maneuvers prior to the February 24 invasion, its direct military role in the conflict so far has been limited. Alla Leukavets in The Role of Belarus in the Ukrainian Crisis notes Focus Ukraine (Kennan Institute blog) 04/04/2022:

While everyone’s attention is focused on the dramatic events unfolding in Ukraine, the West should not forget that the Kremlin is currently waging two wars, one in Ukraine and another in Belarus, though by different means. Whereas Ukraine is presently under military attack from Russia, Belarus is being “softly” occupied without the Kremlin having to fire a single shot. Even if Putin does not succeed in overtaking Ukraine, it can be argued that Belarus under President Aliaksandr Lukashenka is quickly turning into an extension of Russian territory. It is crucial that Lukashenko’s regime not be equated with the rest of Belarus and that the pro-democratic Belarusian movement and its antiwar efforts be supported by the West.

She also mentions, "Belarus is the shortest way to Russia’s Kaliningrad oblast through the so-called Suwalki corridor, a sixty-five mile long strip of land on the Polish-Lithuanian border that provides Russia with access to the Baltic Sea but is not under Russian control." This is important to keep in mind that Lithuanian policy is closely connected with the Belarus-Russian relationship. ("Some Russian analysts suggest that Lithuania’s move to block Russia’s access to its own territory could, to some extent, be considered a ‘casus belli’ – a cause for the declaration of war." - Suwalki Gap GlobalSecurity.org n/d, accessed 07/17/2022)