Ukraine: All Wars Must End….But How? - Mackubin Owens
Wednesday, October 05, 2022
The Russo-Ukrainian war is entering a particularly dangerous phase. Having failed to achieve his initial objective of seizing Kyiv by mean of a coup de main in February, Vladimir Putin shifted Russia’s forces to eastern Ukraine, intending to incorporate the Donbas region, the Russo-phone Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. On 30 September, despite serious military reversals, Putin announced that these regions had been annexed.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTPutin’s action was widely condemned in the West. As James Gilmore, former US ambassador to the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OCSE) has observed, there is no authority in international law for the Russian Duma, or President Putin to "annex" anything….Any implied acknowledgment of East Ukraine or Crimea being "annexed" suggests the Russian invasion has been successful, which it has not. It would be better to describe the area as "occupied" or "invaded", which communicates illegality and criminal attack.
Illegality aside, what makes this development so dangerous is that by declaring these disputed borderlands as “Russian,” Putin can claim that Ukrainian military efforts there constitute offensive operations inside Russia, in response to which he has threatened escalation, including possible attacks on NATO members that are providing material aid to Ukraine. The danger is increased by a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive that has forced Russian units in these regions to retreat.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which I believe provides the most objective commentary on the conflict, "Ukrainian forces continued to liberate settlements east and northeast of Lyman on October 2 and have liberated Torske in Donetsk Oblast….Russian sources are voicing concern that Ukrainian forces are targeting and preparing to cut the critical Svatove-Lyman ground line of communication that was supplying the Russian grouping in Lyman…”
Ukrainian success in the east is a function of Russian tactical, operational, and logistical shortcomings on the one hand and the combination of Ukrainian courage and western material and intelligence support on the other. Many Western observers, including the President of the United States, see Ukrainian success as a means of weakening Putin. But they might discover that what comes after Putin is worse.
Putin’s call-up of 300,000 reserves is extremely unpopular. The Russian economy is suffering. Putin’s appeal to Mother Russia is increasingly falling on deaf ears. But Putin is in far more danger from hardliners than from any imagined “liberal reformers.” For example, the influential Russian geopolitical theorist Aleksandr Dugin, has called for Putin’s removal from power and his replacement by a more ruthless leader, willing to finish the war with Ukraine by any means necessary.
And therein lies the danger. How does a more desperate Putin, beset by enemies from all side, respond? We know that all wars must end. In this case, we just don’t know how it ends.
Mackubin Owens is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as editor of Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs (2008-2020). From 2015 until March of 2018, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. From 1987 until 2014, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
He is also a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, where as an infantry platoon and company commander in 1968-1969, he was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star medal. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a Colonel in 1994.
Owens is the author of the FPRI monograph Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime (2009) and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain (Continuum Press, January 2011) and coauthor of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower (Georgetown University Press, spring 2015). He is also completing a book on the theory and practice of US civil-military relations for Lynne-Rienner. He was co-editor of the textbook, Strategy and Force Planning, for which he also wrote several chapters, including “The Political Economy of National Security,” “Thinking About Strategy,” and “The Logic of Strategy and Force Planning.”
Owens’s articles on national security issues and American politics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Security, Orbis, Joint Force Quarterly, The Public Interest, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Examiner, Defence Analysis, US Naval Institute Proceedings, Marine Corps Gazette, Comparative Strategy, National Review, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor; The Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, The Washington Times, and The New York Post. And, he formerly wrote for the Providence Journal.
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