What Does a Ukrainian Victory Look Like?

And what comes after?

Map of military situation as of September 11, 2022, in the wake of Ukrainian advances

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The speed with which Ukrainian forces have advanced to retake most of Kharkiv oblast has startled much of the commentariat and, if reports are to be believed, the Russian leadership as well. But it’s been striking to me how little it has changed anyone’s opinions on the conflict—my own included. Those who have been cheerleaders for Ukraine all along have delighted in crowing “I told you so!” and anticipating the further collapse of the Russian occupying forces, perhaps even of the Putin regime itself. Those who have always opposed American involvement in the war have, in many cases, also claimed vindication, albeit on ever-shifting grounds. If, before, the main reason not to get involved was that Ukraine was doomed to lose, now the reason never to have gotten involved is that Ukraine didn’t need our help.

As for me, I remain worried about the same things I’ve fretted about since the start, namely: how does it end?

In keeping with his interest in media criticism, Freddie deBoer recently analogized the war in Ukraine to Desert Storm, arguing that the cheerleading for Ukraine is motivated by a desire for a “good war” that can erase the memories of failure in Afghanistan and Iraq (and I would add Libya if anyone remembers that we fought a war there, which nobody does), much as with victory in Desert Storm America finally overcame the “Vietnam Syndrome.” I think there’s a fruitful comparison to be made there, but not quite the one deBoer makes. For one thing, my recollection of the run-up to Desert Storm is rather different from deBoer’s. I remember plenty of anxiety about how tough the war might be, and lots of Democrats voting against the authorization to use force; the Senate vote was 52-47, after all, a pretty thin margin for a major war. As I remember it, widespread cheerleading for a more militarily adventurous American foreign policy was more a product of the victory in Desert Storm than its cause.

Where I think the comparison has force, though is in terms of our national aversion to thinking about the day after. The United States entered into our first war against Iraq with an admirably clear, defined and limited objective: to expel Iraq from Kuwait and restore the Kuwaiti monarchy. We achieved those objectives with exceptional speed and at remarkably low cost. But we had almost no idea what to do next. Having described him as the new Hitler, we halfheartedly encouraged the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, then stood back as he massacred the people who rose against him. We then imposed a regime of “containment” that required a continuously active American military presence in Saudi Arabia and in the skies above Iraq itself, often extending to dropping bombs and firing missiles, along with a sanctions regime that caused massive suffering among the Iraqi people. America’s military presence on Saudi soil and our low-level war against Iraq were the two most important grievances (along with support for Israel) that al Qaeda cited to justify its attacks on the United States, while American frustration with the lack of an end-game was a major driver of support for regime change in Iraq, which became American policy long before the atrocities of September 11th.

In other words: even when America didn’t start out with outlandishly hubristic ambitions, but tried to fight a limited war for limited objectives and stuck to those objectives in the actual military campaign, we couldn’t pull it off. The war ended with an open-ended commitment, and we wound up getting involved in a much bigger war that made everything even worse.

That’s what I worry about most with respect to Ukraine, and deBoer worries about it too. It’s what I worried about back in late March when I thought the war could well grind on for years—which it still might well do!—and it’s what I still worry about in the wake of these dramatic Ukrainian battlefield victories. We like to imagine that, in the wake of defeat, the “bad guys” will simply fold, but it almost never works that way. If they don’t, then what happens after a Ukrainian victory?

My base-case assumption would be that in the wake of defeat, Russia won’t change its view of its own interests in the slightest. Whatever Russia is de facto forced to accept due to battlefield losses, it will never truly accept a Ukraine that is not part of its sphere of influence, much less a Ukraine that is part of (or massively supported by) an alliance that excludes them. If that is the case, then the end of the war won’t actually be the end. Even if Ukraine recaptures all of the territory lost from the Russian invasion, it won’t have peaceful relations with its Russian neighbor, but will anticipate a new conflict at some point in the future. An analogy might be made to the situation of Israel in the wake of its battlefield victories in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Until the Camp David Accords with Egypt, which dramatically changed its strategic position, Israel had every reason to assume that every victory was just a prelude to another war. It’s not hard for me to imagine Ukraine rationally thinking similarly in the wake of a victory over Russia, in which case Ukraine’s internal politics and its external relations will be dominated by the question of how to sustain its independence into the indefinite future, and other powers’ relations with Russia will be dominated by what kind of relationship they have with Ukraine.

Maybe that’s too pessimistic of me. We can always hope that battlefield defeat will awaken Russia to the folly of the course it has set on, and that neighborly relations with Ukraine become plausible in the wake of a Ukrainian victory, if not immediately then after a few years have passed and a leader or two has passed from the scene. But as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. And if hope is not a strategy, then standing with the “good guys” against the “bad guys” isn’t a strategy either. Ukraine today is succeeding on the strength of its own people, but with American and other allied arms and intelligence and with Russia substantially cut off by sanctions from key trading partners that it needs to resupply its own armed forces. Are we willing to sustain that posture indefinitely? Can we, even if we want to? Russia isn’t quite as formidable as it wished the world to believe, but it’s nowhere near as pathetic as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and after twelve years of containment and sanctions that failed to achieve regime change in that country we got fed up and decided to make the situation worse by invading.

If it makes sense for the United States to support Ukraine against Russia in its current war, then ipso facto the United States must strive to achieve a better end-game than the one I describe above, and achieve it on the assumption that Russia’s conception of its national interests will not change in any material way. A Ukrainian battlefield victory, if it comes, will be a victory for a stubbornly independent people against an aggressive invader; it’s impossible for any lover of freedom not to cheer for such an outcome. Achieving peace in the wake of victory, though, is at least as important, and at least as challenging. Perhaps peaceful coexistence is impossible unless Russia changes fundamentally. But if you don’t believe Russia will change fundamentally, then that means peaceful coexistence is impossible, full stop. I wonder how many cheerleaders for Ukraine are ready to cheer for that.