State of the Russia-Ukraine War in early January

There are a lot of issues involved in the Russia-Ukraine War, obviously. And war diplomacy is thought to require muddling them as much as possible in public so that the preferred narratives can be emphasized: Democracies vs. Autocracies, Russia vs. a nazified Ukraine, European Zeitenwende (turning point).

But whatever Grand Narratives the participants prefer, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers are on opposite sides of a hot war in Europe, right on Russia’s border. One of the polemic points of contention is whether it’s a proxy war between the US and Russia. It’s seems obvious that it is, at least in the sense that US and other NATO countries are heavily supporting Ukraine, even though it’s not a formal military ally. Russia itself invaded Ukraine and is fighting with its own forces inside Ukraine, so Russia it’s a direct role rather than a “proxy” one.

But there is no near-term end to the war in sight.

This is a Deutsche Welle report on the state of the war in mid-January.



Phillipp Ther has a helpful summary of the current state of the war.

Goals: “Lessons from this most recent history warn us to always clearly state one’s own goals, to recognize one’s own weaknesses, to never underestimate Putin and to be mindful of a brutal dictatorship’s ability to hang on for a long time.”

The war polemics often obscure these issues: triumphalist rhetoric about Our Side, mocking the weaknesses of the Other Side while ignoring their strengths, fanciful hope for more-or-less magical solutions (Putin gets overthrown and Russia again becomes and End of History liberal democracy that gets along with the West), and ignore real weaknesses and divergences of interest on Our Side.

US interests and goals are not identical to those of the EU countries or even that of Ukraine. There closes his article with: “Even though it may sound a bit trite, it is nevertheless true: Ukrainians really are defending Europe’s freedom: they are fighting for their democracy and ours.”

At this level of abstraction, this is valid enough. But in geopolitical terms and international law, the central consideration here is that Russia has invaded Ukraine and illegally annexed parts of its territory. Given that Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear wepaons in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 with security guarantees from the signatory powers including Russia. “You give up your nuclear weapons and we inavde you” is a devastating message for nuclear nonproliferation. (The fact that similar charges can credibly be leveled against the US over the Iraq War and other incidents as well does not diminish the seriousness of the Russian nvasion of Ukraine.)

Although so far as I’m aware, Russia has never explicitly said it intends to take over all of Ukraine’s territory, we can see from their actions this year that they have formally if illegally annexed parts of Ukraine and attempted to seize the capital Kiev to install a friendly puppet government. So in that sense, Ukraine is fighting for freedom in the sense of national sovereignty.

But respect for national sovereignty does not formally or practically depend on whether a country has a form of government that the US or the EU formally annoint as “democracies.” Even “autocracies” (the bogeyman word of the New Cold Warriors at the moment) have a right to national sovereignty. The whole international system is structured around such national sovereignty.

It’s a huge problem with both the “liberal internationalist” foreign policy ideologty as well as that of the neoconservatives that they are willing to ignore the sovereign rights of countries they want to invade, which has seriously undermined the international order in important ways.

Threat inflation: The problem of threat inflation is a big theme of mine. It can be easily summarized as the American tendency even now to set up its war adversaries as the new “Hitler.” This leads to bad judgments, dangerous overreactions, and a loss of focus on conflict termination.

So it’s important to pay attentioin to how officials are publicly stating their war aims. Here is US State Department spokesperson Ned Price on January 9:

[W]e are starving the Russian state of the inputs that it needs to prosecute its war against Ukraine most effectively.  And again, that is putting it euphemistically.

We are starving systematically the Russian Government of what it needs, what it thinks it needs, to fulfill what it deems as its mission to kill the Ukrainian people, to target Ukrainian infrastructure, to go after Ukrainian cities and towns – hitting in the process civilian targets, apartment buildings, residential buildings, schools, hospitals, nurseries. Nothing, it seems, has been off limits to the Russian state and its pursuit of this brutal war.

This could be just a polemical way of saying how bad the Other Side is. But it’s also worth asking how literally this is meant. It’s one thing to say we want to push Russia out of Ukrainian sovereign territory. It’s another to say we want to deprive Russia of the military ability to strike the named target.

Yes, deliberately striking hospitals is a war crime. The same goes for other kinds of infrastructure. State Department scruples over such things are notably more muted in war conducted by the US, of course.

But what would it literally mean to deprive a country of the means to make such strikes. Neocons and other New Cold Warriors are especially touchy about analogies involving the US, no matter how appropriate they are. But what would it take to deprive the US of the ability to strike such targets in Toronto, Canada, or Matamoras, Mexico, just acroos the border? Obviously, it would require basically the near-complete military disarmament of the United States.

Similarly, to remove Russia’s ability to strike Ukrainian cities and towns and infrastructure means literally to deprive Russia of the ability to operate militarily outside of its borders. Near-total disarmenent in other words. If that’s what Price meant in his brief, some people in the US government clearly intend for this to be a long war.

It’s worth remembering Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s never-retracted public statement of US war aims last April: “We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.” [my emphasis]

Congress and the press should really be asking more questions about this!

The EU’s geostragic situation: To put it crassly, Ukraine is paying by far the highest price for the war. The United States weapons manufacturers and oil-and-gas corporations are making good profits off the situation. The EU countries face new pressure for a near-term energy transformation off fossil fuels and more immediate supply and pricing issues. The EU currently has about five million Ukrainian refugees, and the chances are high that even more will come. Many of them can be expected to remain permanently.

The costs for the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine will fall very heavily on EU countries. As Ther observes:

The goals of Ukraine and the West aren’t free of tensions either. At the beginning of the war, when the military situation was quite desperate, Volodymyr Zelensky hinted at giving up Crimea and parts of the Donbas. But since the summer, Ukraine has been confidently demanding the liberation of all of its occupied territories – including Crimea and the eastern Donbas. These demands presuppose further rearmament, which the Zelensky government currently cannot afford.

Will western powers be prepared to finance this, despite a recession and rising inflation? It would be wise in terms of their own security interests. But it would also require political and social consensus. Funding Ukraine’s rearmament would also imply a realization that the EU, and Germany within it, have already become belligerents.

Ther’s last sentence quoted there is a reminder of the fuzziness of the terminology being used. Germany is already supplying military aid to Ukraine right now, though one might not know it from the griping of some of the eastern NATO allies.