Russia’s strategic nightmare in Ukraine

By Michael Kimmage

The Biden administration has stated its core war aim repeatedly. It is Russia’s strategic failure. Such failure is not equivalent to Russia’s outright defeat, which the United States and its allies cannot bring about. The United States is not at war with Russia, which possesses a sizable military and an immense nuclear arsenal. Strategic failure, a more elusive notion than defeat, must amount to more than Russia’s day-to-day battlefield setbacks. Neither is it Ukrainian troops marching to Moscow, setting the Ukrainian flag atop the Kremlin, and ending the war once and for all.

As a turn of phrase, “strategic failure” has been atmospherically correct at times. Russia conspicuously failed to take Kyiv in the opening weeks of the war and was forced to retreat in northern Ukraine. The Ukrainian military took the initiative in the fall of 2022, one of the war’s most dramatic turns, reclaiming large swathes of territory around the city of Kharkiv. The Kremlin’s stra­tegic failure could amount—retro­spectively—to its hubristic decision to wage war against a determined adversary; to Russia’s inability to achieve its stated objectives, such as the annexation of four southern Ukrainian oblasts; and the Russian army’s well-documented brutality, which motivated Ukrainians to fight and non-Ukrainians to support Ukraine.

Yet, over time, Russia’s strategic failure, either as an end state for Western policy or as a metric for assessing this policy, has made less and less intuitive sense. For Russia to fail, the Kremlin must believe its war effort to be a failure, or some significant portion of the Russian population must believe this, exerting political pressure on Russia’s president, Vladmir Putin, to end the war. This is not yet the case, and Russia has shown real ingenuity in perpetuating its hapless war. For Putin, the war is too big for Russia to fail explicitly, to pull back, or to admit publicly to errors in the fighting of it. In the spring and summer of 2024, momentum has been on the Russian side. Ukraine’s counter-offensive—in the summer of 2023—did little to bring Ukraine closer to victory. It will be a long time before Ukraine has the resources to go on the offensive again.

Failure is in the eye of the be­holder. Russia may well spend years, and possibly decades, trying to spin strategic success or the veneer of strategic success from this war. If so, it would not be the first formidable military power to cling to an ener­vating, counterproductive war—out of self-delusion, out of stubbornness or out of the gambler’s conviction that by rolling the dice repeatedly, good fortune will one day materialize.

Putin’s war might more accurately be framed as a strategic nightmare for Russia. Enormous incentives exist within the Russian political system not to characterize the war in these terms. It is a truth nobody in the Kremlin can admit, but that does not make it any less of a truth. Russia’s ongoing night­mare has a military and an economic component. The war is also a night­mare for Russian statecraft.

Western policymakers need to have a big-picture understanding of Russia’s strategic nightmare. Without this understanding, the inevitable bad days and bad months experienced by Ukraine will weigh too heavily. Without this understanding, support will waver for a war that at best will be grinding and difficult for Ukraine and its partners. Without this under­standing, Putin’s attempts to spin the war as a Russian triumph are likely to gain traction. Without this understanding, Ukraine and the West will focus too much of their attention on a victory that is out of reach, while missing chances to exploit the ongoing strategic nightmare that Putin im­posed on Russia on February 24, 2022, when his full-scale invasion began. For analytical clarity and for sound policy, the daily headlines and the minutia of the war need to be placed against the broader context of Russia’s self-willed strategic nightmare.

The war has led Russia into a military trap. The Kremlin cannot tie its military actions to any viable political program for the territory Russia currently occupies and for the territory Russia may occupy in the future. Had Russia taken Kyiv in the first few weeks of the war, this story would likely look very different. Absent the decapitation of the Ukrainian government, Russia must contend with the reality that Ukraine has a government, that this govern­ment will endure, and that the war has given it high levels of support from the population. Because Ukraine has a working government and because Kyiv has a global coalition of countries that are offering assistance, Ukraine remains in control of most of its territory (around eighty percent) and is able to contest territory that is under Russian control.

Russia, which may not struggle to hold territory in Ukraine, will be unable to turn this territory into a thriving imperial periphery. Russia can extract some resources from the territory it occupies; this it has already done. To make its Ukrainian colony economically vital, however, Russia would have to end the war on its terms, which it cannot do. With an unended war, Russia runs the risk of losing territory or of having the terri­tory under its dominion attacked from without. For Russia, Crimea is a microcosm of this dilemma. Crimea has been a Russian colony from 2014 to 2022, a treasured imperial possession that helped Russia to project military power into the Black Sea and into Southern Ukraine. Now it is mired in a devastating war, and, having become more of a liability than an asset for Russia, Crimea is regularly under Ukrainian attack.

With almost mathematical precision, Russia’s military actions in Ukraine have been politically counterproductive. Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian civilians has deprived Russia of any leverage in Ukraine that is not military force or that is not backed up by military force, under­mining what was among the Kremlin’s most important pre-invasion war aims—control over the Ukrainian polity or the construction of a Russian-led polity within Ukraine. Beyond Ukraine, although political cycles run their course and support for Ukraine waxes and wanes, the general trajectory is toward the integration of Ukraine into Western security structures. Another of the Kremlin’s most important pre-invasion war aims was to sever Ukraine from the West. The war has had the opposite effect.

With almost mathematical precision, Russia’s military actions in Ukraine have been politically counterproductive.

Russia cannot resolve these political conundrums simply by applying a greater degree of military force, not least because these conun­drums have been created (in part) by the misapplication of military force. Regardless of the square miles Russia can claim to control in Ukraine, Russia will forever be in the political wilderness in Ukraine.

The war has not been an economic catastrophe for Russia. Sanctions have not brought Russia to its knees, and instead of isolation the war has witnessed new forms of global engage­ment from Russia. As a result, Russia has experienced modest economic growth since 2022. It has found ample markets for Russian gas and oil, and materiel flows into Russia, fueling the Russian war machine—through con­ventional trade, through “roundabout” trade and through smuggling. Russia is outproducing the West when it comes to artillery shells. In partnership with Iran, Russia has also been innovative in drone warfare. Russia has been dynamic in the domain of defense-industrial capacity. The production and purchase of weapons and the humming along of the Russian economy have kept Russia in the war.

Funding the war effort and con­structing a strong Russian economy are not the same thing. Rather than the war serving the larger needs of the Russian economy, the Russian economy has been reshaped to serve the needs of the war. Putin can justify his break with the West as Russia’s liberation from Western decline and decadence. In reality, Putin has cut off Russia from its natural trading partners in Europe, depriving Russian companies of access to Western markets and Western investment. The costs of normalizing relations with the West will be exceptionally high for Russia, nothing short of war termina­tion, a Russian departure from Ukraine, the paying of reparations to Ukraine and the prosecution of Russian political and military leaders for war crimes. If domestic Russian politics cannot bear these costs, Russia will be economically alienated from Europe in perpetuity.

Russia’s wartime economy carries great risks. Government spending has supercharged the Russian economy. Hundreds of thousands of young men have been put into uniform, and facto­ries are running overtime to meet the demands of an overstretched military. Unemployment is low, and for most Russians their quality of life has either not declined or it has improved since February 2022. Yet the economy has grown dependent on war, locking Russia into cycles of militarism that may extend beyond Ukraine. The possibility that Russia’s economy will overheat, that inflation will run amok, is non-trivial, and Russia’s globalized economy is hardly free from potential exogenous shocks, which for Russia would most likely be a dip in energy prices. The war, which is enormously expensive, has diminished Russia’s economic resilience.

A third element of Russia’s strategic nightmare concerns Putin’s statecraft. It is an ironic turn of events, because Putin rose to power as a gosudarstevenik, a “statist” obsessed with stabilizing and empowering the Russian state. Putin’s preoccupation with history runs in this direction—his admiration for Peter the Great, the architect of modern Russian statehood, and for Pyotr Stolypin, the administrative genius of late imperial Russia. In the Soviet Union, Putin had served the Soviet state by working in the KGB. In the Putinist mythology, Putin rescued Russia from the state collapse that had manifested once in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then again in the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, whose “era” could be made synonymous with chaos. As president, Putin loves the image of himself as a statesman, a transformative leader who is returning Russia to its proper greatness.

Though from a global purview Putin is not a pariah, his statecraft has been baffling. Prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia had a wide range of diplomatic relationships. This gave Moscow quite a bit of flexibility and the chance to play other countries off each other—Turkey off the United States, Israel off Iran, India off China. Russia gained leverage from being in the middle. Situated between the wealth of Asia and the wealth of Europe, Russia had the potential to be between East and West, North and South, a bridge or a crossroads among nations. The war destroyed this arrangement, pushing Russia into the arms of North Korea and Iran, making Russia acutely dependent on China, reducing the efficacy of Russian diplomacy in the South Caucasus and in the Middle East. The war is a geopolitical albatross around Russia’s neck.

Had Putin sought a method for gradually making Russia hidebound and stagnant, he could hardly surpass his 2022 invasion of Ukraine. His war has been an act of reverse statesmanship.

The essence of statecraft is the art of building up future capacity. This cannot come from the augmentation of military alone. Future state capacity in Russia will derive from the buoyancy of its economy and its society, which will itself derive from a myriad of factors. If Russia can assimilate new ideas, if it can generate and reward new ideas, if it can be a place of creativity where business and technol­ogy are concerned, its economy will expand and so too will the clout of the Russian state. By this standard, Russia was not competitive with Europe, with the United States, or with China before the war, and by detaching Russia from the West and by driving talented young Russians into exile the war has radically degraded Russia’s long-term competitiveness. Had Putin sought a method for gradually making Russia hidebound and stagnant, he could hardly surpass his 2022 invasion of Ukraine. His war has been an act of reverse statesmanship.

Russia’s war-induced strategic nightmare underscores two policy priorities for the West. The first is not to furnish Russia with a way out, not to indulge the dubious thesis that all wars end with negoti­ated settlements and not to despair at Ukraine’s chances for survival. Ukraine has already proven that it will survive. A hasty negotiated settlement is worse than no settlement at all, and unless it were to fundamentally transform its strategic posture Russia would use any reprieve in the war to regroup, rearm, and reinvade. The second—and related—priority is patience. The only country that can defeat Russia in its war against Ukraine is Russia. This eventual defeat will be Russia’s failure to achieve its military and political objectives, and it will follow from the fact that for Russia the war is futile. More precisely, Russia’s defeat will equal the realization by Russians in power and not in power that the war is futile for Russia. Only with this realization, whenever it comes, will an end to the war begin to materialize.

This essay was published in the 2024-25 issue of the Berlin Journal.

Photo by FlyD on Unsplash