The Long War in Ukraine, With Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the long war in Ukraine. 

 

With me to discuss where the war in Ukraine is headed and how U.S. policy should respond are Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe. Sam is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He served in the U.S. Department of State as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, and he has been a member of the State Department's policy planning staff working on Russia and Eurasia.

 

Miranda is the director of the Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. She has written extensively on grand strategy, the future of the international order and multi-domain command and control. Sam and Miranda recently wrote a report for RAND entitled, "Avoiding a Long War: U.S. Policy in the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict." You can find it at rand.org. Sam and Miranda, thank you for joining me.

 

PRIEBE:
Thanks so much for having us.

 

LINDSAY:
Sam, if I may, I'd like to begin with you. We're coming up on the one year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Can you fill us in on where we stand?

 

CHARAP:
Well, in terms of the battlefield situation, Jim, basically the lines have been more or less static now since mid-November, when Russia retreated essentially from the west bank of the Dnipro River, where its forces were essentially cut off in the Kherson region. Since then, and we haven't seen much movement on what is an over 700 kilometer line of contact, there have been marginal Russian gains in parts of the Donbas, particularly around the town of Bakhmut, but nothing major in terms of when compared to the major movements that we saw in the fall. I should add that both sides now seem to be gearing up for an offensive or a counter offensive, depending on your perspective.

 

Arguably, the Russian one has already started, but we have not seen spectacular breakout, lines collapsing or anything like that. On the political side, it's basically been remarkable for its absence. That is, any sort of negotiation process, except surrounding discreet issues like prisoner exchanges, which the latest of which they almost occur weekly. Or the grain deal. But on the big political questions, the settlement issues, talks have been essentially dormant since May of 2022. At this point, neither side seems to be making any particular efforts to begin them. I think that's where we are in the big picture. No sign, really, of any either definitive military outcome or movement towards talks.

 

LINDSAY:
Miranda, I would like to bring you into the conversation right now. I'm curious, are you surprised that the war didn't end quickly, especially given Russia's presumed sizable military advantage?

 

PRIEBE:
Yes. I think, like most observers, I expected before the war that Russia would prove to be much more militarily capable than it has been. This has been a real learning opportunity for all of us, even those of us who believed that we might have been overstating Russian power before the war, that it's turned out to have much deeper problems in its military than we expected. So yes, like many people I'm surprised.

 

LINDSAY:
So we have continued fighting. We don't have any ongoing peace negotiations. I do want to get to the question of how the war might end or how you see the war ending. But before I do, I'd like to hear your thoughts on what you see as U.S. interests in the war. It's obvious that some Americans don't see the United States as having significant interests in the war. People may have heard, for example, now Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, having said last year, he really didn't care what happens to Ukraine one way or another. Conversely, we have some people criticizing the Biden Administration for not doing more to help Ukraine win the war. You've written that U.S. interests often align with but are not synonymous with Ukrainian interests. I'd like to get a sense from you what you think those interests are that align and which interests don't. Sam, you want to take a shot at that?

 

CHARAP:
Okay. I think starting from the broader U.S. perspective, obviously the paramount interests we have are in avoiding consequences stemming from this war that would directly affect the national security of the United States. Be it a horizontal escalation into a Russia-NATO conflict or the use of nuclear weapons within Ukraine or even beyond. Avoiding those kinds of escalatory dynamics are, I think, people debate about how likely they are, but I think no one debates how significant they would be if they happened. Beyond that, it gets more complicated. And I think we understand that Ukraine's interest is in, at least as articulated by its leadership, in retaking as much territory as they possibly can militarily and ejecting the Russian occupiers from their sovereign territory. And that is totally understandable. The question we've tried to grapple with, I think, is: how important is further Ukrainian territorial control for the US?

 

Both in itself, of course, it is important. The question is how relatively important that is to the potential cost associated with that further Ukrainian territorial control. And the related question of: in facilitating that greater Ukrainian territorial control, do we end up in a long war that poses other significant costs to the United States? So really, I think the question of duration and Ukrainian territorial control is where you could potentially see an eventual possible divergence between the United States and Ukraine and its Ukrainian partners. Now just to be clear, I don't think that divergence has emerged yet and it's an open question as to when it might.

 

LINDSAY:
Miranda, you want to jump in here?

 

PRIEBE:
Yeah, I'll just expand a little bit on what Sam said about territorial control. I think the Biden administration has really emphasized that the U.S. also has an interest in territorial control. And, as Sam said, that is true to some extent. But the U.S. focus has really been on helping Ukraine regain all of its sovereignty so that it can send a message to aggressors everywhere, including potentially China, that aggression doesn't pay. That you can't gain territory through military force. While that's certainly true to some degree, part of the divergence for us is a recognition that the United States can show that aggression doesn't pay in different ways. We've already shown that through massive economic sanctions, through strengthening the NATO alliance with including new members. I think the world economy is adjusting to ways that are to Russia's detriment in the long term. I think part of this is a framing issue where the United States has framed our focus on Ukrainian territory as a key U.S. objective when I think it's a little bit more complicated.

 

LINDSAY:
I'm just curious on that point, Miranda, about the importance of sending the signal that aggression does not pay. The fact is that Russia annexed Crimea back in 2014 and the United States and its Western allies criticized the Russian move but did not go so far as to take any military steps. It seemed to be that the decision was that they would live with the Russian occupation of Crimea, which is illegal under international law, but we were not going to use force to change the new status quo. How does that figure into this conversation?

 

PRIEBE:
I think you've raised a really important point. Certainly agree with your assessment that we have, unfortunately, we've seen territorial aggression in the past, including in Crimea, and it's something the U.S. objects to and shows its objection to by not recognizing and not validating that seizure. We don't always choose to go so far as to use military force to show our objection because sometimes the trade-offs are just too high. I think we've sort of lost sight of those trade-offs in the current conflict. I think Sam has more to say about this because this is something he and I have talked a lot about.

 

CHARAP:
That's sort of one of my hobby horses. In other words, to paraphrase your question, Jim, Russia has been in violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity since March of 2014. Going on eight years now, arguably the end of February. Or no, almost nine, I suppose. Territorial integrity, you're either in violation of it or you're not. So yes, the norm is broken and has been broken. So I, often, there's an important question to be asked about how clearly if Russia had taken the entire country, it would've done much more damage to that norm. In the context of marginal territorial gains, if our concern is with the norm of respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, it's unclear to me how much the territory they control now is what they controlled before the full scale invasion on February 24th, 2022, how that gain, as morally repugnant as it is, does more grievous harm to the international norm that we're discussing than Russia's actions before February 24th, 2022.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. Let's talk about how this war might end. Obviously one way a war can end is with an absolute victory by either side. That's, for example, how World War II ended. The United States and its allies defeated Nazi Germany and its allies. Do either of you think that an absolute victory either by Russia or by Ukraine is in the cards?

 

PRIEBE:
No, it doesn't appear that either side is capable of an absolute victory. It looked early in the war like Russia had that aim, that it aimed to topple the regime in Kyiv and that it thought it had the military capability to do so. I think the months have passed and shown that Russia's capabilities are more limited. At the same time, although the Ukrainians are showing incredible will to fight and have been much more militarily effective than anyone expected, they aren't going to be marching on Moscow or overthrowing the Putin regime anytime soon. We don't anticipate that we'd see an absolute victory where one side can really impose its will on the other side. That's what we really mean by an absolute victory.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, Sam, let me jump in here for a second and ask you a question because I may have jumped too far ahead in the story. I can already hear some people saying, "But wait a second, who says the war has to end? Can't this war just go on and on?" Let me ask you, can it go on and on given what we know about military stocks being depleted and the real human costs, whether on the battlefield or in civilian areas?

 

CHARAP:
Well, I think basically the short answer is it can't go on at this level of intensity with this level of munitions utilization forever. Some have said that there aren't enough artillery shells manufactured in the world to keep up this pace for more than another year or so, given just how rolled back artillery shell production has been over the course of the post-Cold War period. But that doesn't mean a reduced, but nonetheless systemically important level of intensity that it certainly could go on for a while. Conflicts that go longer than a year, most of them have a tendency to go longer than ten. Yes, I think a long war is a plausible future scenario, but even long wars come to ends. Right? The Iran-Iraq War, seven years, half a million people dead, still it ended. I think that the duration is the intermediate step before the question of war termination, which Miranda was just getting into.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. I take it that, again, you can have a war that lasts a long time, that could have periods of lower level fighting, perhaps temporary ceasefires that may hold for a while or may not hold for very long at all. What we're presumably interested in is somehow getting to that end in which the fighting ceases and it's not merely being held in abeyance. I guess we're talking then if victory in the battlefield isn't likely to happen, the way you would come to a war's end is some kind of negotiated settlement. Either, I guess something that's like the armistice we had that ended the Korean War. Technically the United States and North Korea are still at war as is South Korea. Or you can have a full out peace settlement. So, talk to me about how you can get to either of those negotiated outcomes.

 

CHARAP:
I guess what we found is that, barring an absolute victory, particularly if we're talking about interstate wars like this one, they tend to end in negotiated outcomes. Those exist on a spectrum from the sort of pure armistices which deal exclusively with matters associated with the ceasefire and maintaining the ceasefire to peace treaties on the other hand, which sort of lay to rest a lot of the political causes of the conflict and normalize relations between the former belligerents. There's a lot in between that. Of course, you get there through a process of negotiations, which often can go on for a long time. The Korea case, I believe, was negotiated over dozens and dozens of meetings over the course of, I believe two years. This, it does take work. This doesn't just happen organically. I think that's one thing that becomes clear through the historical literature.

 

LINDSAY:
I'm curious, Miranda, how do you think about this issue of trying to get negotiations going? As Sam mentioned a while back, the Ukrainians and Russians haven't had negotiations on these set of issues since last May. I'm reminded of the old saying that, "I am losing, how can I negotiate? And if I'm winning, why should I negotiate?" How do you think about that in this context? Because the consequences of the war for Russia, but even more so for Ukraine, are immediate and they are severe.

 

PRIEBE:
Yeah, I think there's a lot of reasons that we see discussed about why the two sides aren't negotiating. One way that Sam and I have tried to think about this in order to get through the noise and focus on things that U.S. policy can affect is to come back to some fundamentals that come from the history of long wars and negotiations. Thinking about the current war, there's so many details that we can get wrapped around, and so we try to zoom back out and think about some of the fundamentals. And two big lessons that come from the history of longer wars and terminating those wars is that wars tend to go on and negotiations are hard to get to when both sides are optimistic that victory's just around the corner. That something they do is going to change the trajectory of the battlefield, just like your old saying was suggesting.

 

And so one thing we try to look at is, well, do we see that happening today? And I think we really do. We see the Ukrainians hoping that new and more advanced Western capabilities are going to help them with their spring offensive. The Russians also seem equally optimistic that their mobilization is going to help them and maybe some other improvements are going to help them turn the tide. So when we see that kind of mutual optimism, that's not unique to this war. That's something that we see in other wars as well. Another thing that we can learn from the history of wars is that it's hard to get to negotiations when the two sides are pessimistic about peace. So it's not just about the war itself, but it's about the world after the war. What we want to do is really help the two sides find a way to overcome that pessimism about peace and to kind of turn the tide on that optimism about war.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. Those are two fascinating points and I want to work through each of them. Let's begin with the second point, Miranda, about expectations of what a post-war environment will look like. You talk about the issue of credible commitment. Tell me a little bit about what that means and what it means from the perspective of both Ukraine, Kyiv, and Moscow, Russia.

 

PRIEBE:
It's not surprising that a country like Ukraine who's been attacked seemingly out of the blue, is going to be nervous that, just because they make some kind of negotiated settlement with Russia, that Russia might not do the same thing again in the future. So Ukraine has every reason to worry that Russia might use some kind of ceasefire or some kind of negotiation to reconstitute its military and to re-attack Ukraine when conditions are better. And on the other side, the Russians might also fear that the Ukrainians, any deals that they make as part of a ceasefire or more lasting peace settlement might not hold as domestic politics within Ukraine change or as Ukraine gets more aid from the West. I think what we see is on both sides, there's reason to worry it that peace will last and that peace on acceptable terms will last.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. I understand the dynamic. How it works, why you would worry that, in essence, if you struck a peace deal, you would end up being the sucker at the end of the day because the other side would use the settlement to go off and do something that severely damages your interest. But let's talk about the flip side, the question you raised or the issue you raised, Miranda, that each side is sort of making expectations about the future. Here I want to come to you, Sam, because I know you've spent a lot of time thinking about Russia. It seems to me that Vladimir Putin's strategy right now is simply one of outwaiting the West, that if he waits long enough Western interest, support, enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine will evaporate, crack, break, whatever verb you wish to use. Then Ukraine is there for the taking. How do you get negotiations going on when that is Putin's strategy and people can come up to Putin and show him polling data from countries, take the United States for example, suggesting at least among some portions of the public enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine is declining?

 

CHARAP:
It's a really good question, and I think it's definitely the narrative you hear from a lot of Russians: that this can't last forever, that there's going to be increasing political resistance to the kind of levels of support that we've seen so far, and that essentially they just have to wait the West out. The way the United States might be able to affect that is by essentially committing to a long term and credible plan of security assistance to the Ukrainians that demonstrates a longer term commitment that won't be just finished up by the fall, that you need to probably have Congress involved in this case, couldn't just be the executive branch, but you basically are trying to diminish Russian optimism by making it clear that U.S. and allied assistance has staying power if your primary concern is Russian optimism.

 

 

LINDSAY:
I would imagine if you were to do that, if you could do that, and given concerns I'm hearing in Washington, DC, it's not obvious that the Biden administration could get the United States Congress to sign up at this moment to the kind of long-term commitment to Ukraine that you mentioned, there is the risk, isn't there, that if the Biden administration could make that happen, that that would embolden Ukraine, make Kyiv less willing to negotiate for the reason Miranda mentioned before; you're making assessments about the outcome of the war based on your ability to win, and that would make the Ukrainians feel much more comfortable.

 

CHARAP:
I think at the moment both sides are optimistic and that's a problem. I think both look to the question of the future of Western military assistance to Ukraine and find sources of optimism in it. And so calibrating that policy to neither provide the Ukrainians too much optimism nor the Russians too much optimism is going to be very difficult. I don't think we've been thinking about it in those terms. I think that's the case that we would make is that basically you got to think about the military assistance tool, not just as a means of enabling further Ukrainian territorial control, but affecting the views of the parties about the prospect of fighting a long war and the desirability thereof. In the short term, there's inevitably going, both sides are going to try their hands at an offensive or counter offensive, again, depending on your perspective, this spring or summer.

 

How they behave after that will likely depend on their assessment of this question. You could calibrate assistance for example, you could say to the Ukrainians, "We're only giving you up to X so long as the fighting goes on, but we'll give you X plus Y once the settlement is reached." The U.S. has operated on somewhat similar logic before with the Camp David Accords, when in the context of a peace deal between Egypt and Israel, significant post-war security assistance was promised to actually both parties in that case. That's sort of in calibrating the pre- and post-settlement offers might help limit the political fallout. But also, again, it depends at the end of the day, which party's optimism is the bigger problem. That might change depending on what period of the conflict we're in.

 

LINDSAY:
I'm curious on that score Miranda, and this may be an unfair question to ask, but how does domestic politics factor into how you view all of this? Because I would imagine for the Biden administration, floating ideas about trying to use aid to, I'll say nudge, others might say coerce, Ukraine into being more open to negotiations while at the same time trying to give the Russians an incentive  to negotiate will be attacked for essentially undercutting Kyiv by limiting in some way our support. The argument being if this were to end, you should arm Ukraine to the hilt right now to compel the Russians to negotiate or lose.

 

PRIEBE:
Yeah, it's a really great question and unfortunately I don't think there are any easy answers. I think the policies, the options that Sam and I have been able to come up with that the Biden administration might have it available to it to sort of affect the trajectory of the war, they're politically challenging, not just domestically, but also with our allies. We've thought a little bit about ways to maybe mitigate some of the political impact of these policies. Sam was just talking about using conditions on aid to Ukraine as one tool, and rather than saying we're going to cut off aid to Ukraine, maybe you say, "We're no longer going to keep it on an upward trajectory, we're going to let it level out." Maybe that's something that domestically could be worked through more effectively. I think right now we're trying to tackle the really hard problem of, what are even the tools that we have available? Then, the next step is to say, "Okay, which of these are the most politically viable at home and abroad?"

 

LINDSAY:
We've been talking in this conversation solely about the United States in terms of what it can do. What role, Sam, do the allies play? Is it possible that Washington could encourage allies, maybe the Germans, maybe the French, maybe the British to take the lead in this? Is there some way to square this circle?

 

CHARAP:
So I think that the Biden administration is, and we've seen this in the recent example with their agreement to provide Abrams tanks against their own best judgment, seemingly in order to enable the Germans to provide the Ukrainians their own Leopard tanks as a sort of gesture of commitment to that relationship and that alliance. This is an administration that cares about maintaining NATO and keeping those ties within the alliance strong, but therefore, I think also has gained some credibility with allies and can, and is even expected in a way, to take a leadership role on these big questions of security and geopolitics. I don't see any European state by itself or in Germany and France for particular reasons, but even just relative to their role within the alliance and other allies trust or lack thereof towards them, that being able to capable of doing it by themselves. Without, I think, U.S. support, having a solution that sticks is, it seems to me less likely. We need to maybe bring the allies along with us or maybe allied interest in this kind of an outcome could shift U.S. policy.

 

The other piece of this, of course, is that for both the Ukrainians and the Russians, as far as external security actors go, the U.S. is the most important for very good reasons. If we weren't party to a negotiation, it would be seen as something very significant to either of them. There of course is a recent historical track record problem that the Europeans have here, which is that the French and the Germans took a leadership role on the so-called Minsk agreements, which were the ceasefire arrangements that at least brought the fighting significantly down in 2015, but were never fully implemented. That's seen as a failure diplomatically. In that case, that was very much a case when the U.S. deferred and sort of gave its allies the opportunity to take a greater leadership role and didn't really work out by anyone's estimation.

 

PRIEBE:
I think Sam is right, that the allies may not be able to lead to negotiations without U.S. involvement, but that's not to say that there aren't important roles for allies in some of the options that Sam and I have been thinking about. For example, we think a little bit about creating a pathway to sanctions relief for Russia as part of a negotiated settlement. That's really only possible if the U.S. allies get on board as well because the United States is not the only country that has imposed major sanctions on Russia. There really is a lot of role for allies in, I think, in any steps we take towards trying to bring about negotiations.

 

LINDSAY:
Miranda, you're jarring loose some synapses in my head. I'm having flashbacks to reading articles in the 1980s about so-called two level games in international relations that if you're the leader of the country, you not only have to negotiate with your copartners or counterparts abroad, you have to negotiate with domestic groups as well. I listen to what you just said, I'm thinking for the Biden administration, it has to negotiate with Kyiv and Russia, but also has to negotiate with its allies, but its allies are not all of one mind.

 

I would imagine if you talk to most Polish and Baltic officials, they would say, "We should arm Ukraine to the hilt. That's the way you compel the Russians to cry uncle." Whereas if you go to other parts of Europe, they would be much more inclined to want to put pressure on Kyiv to find some negotiated settlement. Then, of course, when you come back home, you have to navigate the various currents of American domestic politics. We have entered the presidential season. 2024 isn't that far off and it can be very hard to square that circle. I'm just left, Sam, what is your advice to the Biden administration at the end of the day, given those treacherous currents it has to navigate?

 

CHARAP:
Well, it's interesting. Clearly you're absolutely right on the Eastern Europeans, the Poles and the Balts having more perhaps hard line views on this question, but the dissenters on this from the consensus really aren't the usual suspects of the French and the Germans. It's the Hungarians and the Turks for perhaps their own reasons. What's been striking about this from the beginning is, although Macron has always maintained a sort of rhetorical commitment to negotiation, and he in fact kept lines open to Putin much longer than any other leader-

 

LINDSAY:
And took a lot of flack for it.

 

CHARAP:
Yes, he did, and still does I should add, but there's no demand signal from Paris or Berlin to change course. Those views might be expressed behind the scenes, but I think that speaks to both the Biden administration's better handling of these relationships and the fact that Russia's actions have so dramatically transformed threat perceptions and willingness to engage in kinds of policies that France and Germany have been engaged in the last year that sort of no going back in that respect. I do think that this is an opportunity for the United States because it can take a leadership role and bring along both our more hard line allies and the less ones on this question. I think if the U.S. were to begin to at least try to talk through some of these questions and think about medium to longer term paths to negotiated outcome, that it could bring allies along with it in a way that perhaps previous administrations might not have been able to.

 

LINDSAY:
I take your point, Sam and Miranda, that you're arguing that the United States needs to try to shape the environment in which it has to make some policy choices. Maybe I'll just conclude with you, Miranda, any parting words of advice for the Biden administration as it tries to figure out how exactly to shape this environment in a way that is just, that is fair, and effective?

 

PRIEBE:
Yeah. Well, I think I'll just come back to a point that Sam raised a little bit ago, which is that negotiations take time and they take creativity. I think, you know, gave such a good description of the difficulty of bringing along so many different parties, the domestic politics of all of these countries, as well as the alliance dynamics. I think the real message that Sam and I want to leave people with is that we need to start talking through these options. We need to start thinking more creatively about how you can navigate each of them and the time to start on that is now, it's not six months from now when we decide we want to negotiate, it's now so that we're ready in six months or we're ready in a month or whatever it might be.

 

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guests have been Samuel Charap, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and Miranda Priebe, the director of the Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy and a senior political scientist at RAND. They are the co-authors of the recently released RAND Report, "Avoiding A Long War: US Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict." You can find a copy of the report at rand.org. Sam, Miranda, thank you for joining me.

 

PRIEBE:
Thanks.

 

CHARAP:
Thanks, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen in, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Molly McAnany was our recording engineer. Thank you, Molly. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.