thesis statement on the war in ukraine

ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Voice for the army - support for the soldier, the russo-ukrainian war: a strategic assessment two years into the conflict.

by LTC Amos C. Fox, USA Land Warfare Paper 158, February 2024  

In Brief Examining the strategic balance in the Russo-Ukrainian War leads to the conclusion that Russia has the upper hand. In 2024, Ukraine has limited prospects for overturning Russian territorial annexations and troop reinforcements of stolen territory. Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russian offensive action decreases as U.S. financial and materiel support decreases. Ukraine needs a significant increase in land forces to evict the occupying Russian land forces.

Introduction

The Russo-Ukrainian War is passing into its third year. In the period leading up to this point in the conflict, the defense and security studies community has been awash with arguments stating that the war is a stalemate. Perhaps the most compelling argument comes from General Valery Zaluzhny, former commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, who stated as much in an interview with the Economist in November 2023. 1 Meanwhile, there are others, including noted analyst Jack Watling, who emphatically state the opposite. 2  

Nonetheless, two years in, it is useful to objectively examine the conflict’s strategic balance. Some basic questions guide the examination, such as: is Ukraine winning, or is Russia winning? What does Ukraine need to defeat Russia, and conversely, what does Russia need to win in Ukraine? Moreover, aside from identifying who is winning or losing the conflict, it is important to identify salient trends that are germane not just within the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War, but that are applicable throughout the defense and security studies communities.

This article addresses these questions through the use of the ends-ways-means-risk heuristic. In doing so, it examines Russia and Ukraine’s current strategic dispositions, and not what they were in February 2022, nor what we might want them to be. Viewing the conflict through the lens of preference and aspiration causes any analyst to misread the strategic situation. The goal of this article, however, is to take a sobering look at the realities of the conflict, offer an assessment of the situation, and posit where the conflict is likely to go in 2024. 

The overall conclusion is that Russia is winning the conflict. Russia is winning because it possesses its minimally acceptable outcome: the possession of the Donbas, of the land bridge to Crimea, and of Crimea itself. This victory condition, however, is dependent upon Ukraine’s inability to generate a force sufficient to a) defeat Russia’s forces in each of those discrete pieces of territory; b) retake control of that territory; and c) hold that territory against subsequent Russian counterattacks. No amount of precision strike, long-range fires or drone attacks can compensate for the lack of land forces Ukraine needs to defeat Russia’s army and then take and hold all that terrain. Thus, without an influx of resources for the Ukrainian armed forces—to include a significant increase in land forces—Russia will likely prevail in the conflict. If U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen, as it is at the time of this writing, then Russian victory in 2024 is a real possibility.   

Laying the Groundwork: Situational Implications

Moreover, several other important implications emerge for the defense and security studies community. First, land wars fought for control of territory possess inherently different military end states than irregular wars, counterinsurgencies and civil wars. Therefore, militaries must have the right army for the conflict in which they are engaged. A counterinsurgency army or constabulary force, for instance, will not win a war for territory against an industrialized army built to fight and win wars of attrition. This is something policymakers, senior military leaders and force designers must appreciate and carefully consider as they look to build the armies of the future. 

Second, land wars fought for control of territory require military strategies properly aligned to those ends. Therefore, militaries must have the right strategy for the conflict, or phase of the conflict, in which they are engaged. A strategy built on the centrality of precision strike but lacking sufficient land forces to exploit the success of precision strike, for instance, will not win a war for territory—especially against an industrialized army built to fight and win wars of attrition. Policymakers and senior military leaders must periodically refresh and reframe their political ends and military strategies according to their means; otherwise, they risk a wasteful strategy that fritters away limited resources in the pursuit of unrealistic goals. 

Third, despite statements to the contrary, physical mass—in this case, more manpower—is more important than precision strike and long-range fires where the physical possession of territory is a critical component of political and military victory for both states. Physical mass allows an army to hold and defend territory. The more physical mass an army possesses, the more resilient it is to attacks of any type and the more difficult and costly it is to defeat—whether that be in munitions expended, number of attacks conducted or lives lost. 

Fourth, a prepared, layered and protected defense, like that of Russia’s along the contact line with Ukraine’s armed forces, is challenging to overcome. This challenge grows exponentially if the attacker lacks sufficiently resilient and resourced land forces that are capable of a three-fold mission: (1) defeating the occupying army; (2) moving into the liberated territory; and (3) controlling that land. Armies that are designed to deliver a punch but lack the depth of force structure to continue advancing into vacated or liberated territory after a successful attack, and subsequently are unable to stave off counterattacks, are of little use beyond defensive duty. This finding is at odds with conventional wisdom regarding future force structure that posits that future forces should be small and light and should fight dispersed. 

Fifth, Carl von Clausewitz warns that, “So long as I have not overthrown my opponent, I am bound to fear he may overthrow me. Thus, I am not in control: he dictates to me as much as I dictate to him.” 3 The Russo-Ukrainian War has reiterated Clausewitz’s caution: as neither army is able to outright defeat the other, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a long war of attrition, which is fueling the stalemate to which Zaluzhny refers and Watling rejects. The writing between the lines thus suggests that, when confronted with war, a state must unleash a military force that is capable of both defeating its adversary’s army and simultaneously accomplishing its supplemental conditions of end state, to include taking and holding large swaths of physical terrain. Without defeating an adversary’s army—regardless of its composition—one must then always contend with the possibility that tactical military gains are fleeting. Moreover, by first defeating an adversary’s army, one might turn what would otherwise be a long war of attrition into a short war of attrition.  

Russian Strategic Assessment

Russia’s strategic ends can be summarized as: 

• fracture the Ukrainian state—politically, territorially and culturally; 
• maintain sufficient territorial acquisitions to support a range of acceptable political-military outcomes; 
• maintain strategic materiel overmatch; 
• exhaust Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting—both materially and as regards Ukrainian support from the international community; 
• normalize the conflict’s abnormalities; and 
• undercut and erode Ukraine’s ability to conduct offensive operations to reclaim annexed territory. 

When viewing all of these ends collectively, it is clear that denationalization of the Ukrainian state is Russia’s strategic end in this conflict. Raphael Lemkin defines denationalization as a state’s deliberate and systematic process of eroding or destroying another state’s national character and national patterns (i.e., culture, self-identity, language, customs, etc.). 4 Russia’s policy and military objectives have evolved ever so slightly since February 2022, but Ukraine’s denationalization remains at the heart of the Kremlin’s strategic ends. The Kremlin’s objectives in 2022 included unseating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, ending Ukrainian self-rule and replacing it with a Russian partisan political leadership, and annexing a significant portion of Ukraine’s territory. To that end, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the time of “denazifying” and “demilitarizing” Ukraine, while also forcing Kyiv to remain politically and militarily neutral within the international community’s network of political and military alliances. 5 Putin reaffirmed these policy aims during a December 2023 press conference in Moscow. 6 Nonetheless, Russia’s military activities—which have not made advances toward Kyiv since Moscow’s initial assault on the capital failed in April 2022—do not indicate any renewed effort to remove Zelenskyy or Ukraine’s government from power. There is, though, a real possibility of this occurring in 2024, especially if U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen for the foreseeable future. 

It does appear, however, that the Kremlin is attempting to elongate the conflict in time and cost such that Moscow outlasts both Kyiv’s financial and military support from the international community and Ukraine’s material means to continue attempting offensive military activities to reclaim its territory. In doing so, the Kremlin likely intends to accelerate Ukraine to strategic exhaustion and subsequently force Kyiv to broker a peace deal.

As noted recently, Russia’s territorial ambitions of Ukraine likely operate along a spectrum of acceptable outcomes. 7 Presumably, as noted above, Russia’s minimally acceptable outcome—or the minimal territorial holdings that the Kremlin is satisfied to end the war possessing—include retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea (see Figure 1). For clarity’s sake, the land bridge to Crimea includes the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts—the two oblasts that provide a unified ground link between the Donbas and Crimea. The land bridge is important because it provides Russia a ground-based connection from Russian territory between the occupied Donbas and occupied Crimea, thus simplifying the governance, defense and retention of Crimea.  

2024 will be a pivotal year for Ukraine. If the United States elects a Ukraine-friendly president, then Kyiv can likely expect continued financial and military support from the United States in 2025. On the other hand, if it does not elect a Ukraine-friendly president, then Kyiv can anticipate a range of decreasing financial and military support in the defense of their state against Russian denationalization efforts. 

At the same time, the appearance of Chinese, North Korean and Iranian weapons and munitions on the Ukrainian battlefield indicate that Russia is facing its own challenges keeping up with the conflict’s attritional character. 8 Though the degree to which external support is helping keep its war-machine going in Ukraine is challenging to discern through open-source information, we do know that external support allows the Russian military to overcome some of its defense industry’s production and distribution shortfalls. In turn, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support allows the Kremlin to continue elongating the conflict in time, space and resources with the goal of exhausting Ukraine’s military and Kyiv’s capacity to sustain its resistance to Russia.   

Russia has already weathered much of the risk associated with invading Ukraine. Economic sanctions hit hard early on, but Russian industry and its economy have absorbed those early hardships and found ways to offset many of those challenges—including through Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support. 9 Further, the West’s gradual escalation of weapon support to Ukraine allowed Russia to develop an equally gradual learning curve to those weapons, and, in most cases, nullify any “game-changing” effects that they might have generated if introduced early in the conflict and with sufficient density to create front-wide effects. 10 Instead, the slow drip of Western support allowed Russian forces to observe, learn and adapt to those weapon systems and develop effective ways to counter Western technology and firepower. 11 The Russian military’s learning process has allowed it to recover from its embarrassing performance early in the conflict and draw into question the U.S. and other Western states’ strategy of third-party support to Ukraine. 12  

The primary risks that the Russo-Ukrainian War poses to Russia today are: (1) The United States and/or NATO might intervene with their land forces on behalf of Ukraine; and (2) political upheaval might occur as a result of domestic unrest. The risk of U.S. and NATO intervention with land forces is low, and will likely remain that way, because of the fear of Russian escalation with tactical or strategic nuclear weapons. 13 Although the likelihood of Russian nuclear strikes in Ukraine is also low, Russian political leaders regularly unsheathe nuclear threats to oppose and deter unwanted activities. 14 Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, recently threated Ukraine with a nuclear response if Ukraine attacked Russian missile launch sites within Russia with Western-supplied, long-range missiles. 15 This follows Russia’s repositioning of some of its nuclear arsenal to Belarus in the summer of 2023. 16 Nonetheless, short of the commitment of U.S. or NATO land forces, or the potential loss of the Crimean peninsula, Russia’s likelihood to actually use nuclear weapons remains low. 

To the second risk—that of domestic unrest creating political instability—Putin and his coterie of supporters continue to use old Russian methods to offset this problem. Arrests, assassinations, disappearances and suppression are the primary methods employed against this challenge and to deter domestic opposition to his policies vis-à-vis Ukraine. 17 The assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, in August 2023, is perhaps the most high-profile example of this technique. 18 Further, the periodic disappearances and imprisonments of Alexei Navalny is another example of the Putin regime attempting to keep political opposition quiet. 19 Longtime Kremlin henchman, Igor Girkin, who was extremely critical of Putin and of the Kremlin’s handling of the war in Ukraine during 2023, was sentenced to four years in prison in January 2024. 20 Moreover, the suppression of journalists within Russia is spiking as Putin seeks to silence opposition and punish dissent in the wake of the strong economic and domestic upheavals caused by his war. 21

In addition, former U.S. Army Europe commander, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, USA, Ret., states that Russia mobilizes citizens from its peripheral and more rural areas for its war in Ukraine. 22 Many of these individuals are ethnic minorities and therefore of lesser importance in Putin’s (and many Russians’) social hierarchy. 23 According to Hodges, by pulling heavily from the areas outside of Russia’s major population centers, to include Moscow and St. Petersburg, Putin is able to offset a significant potential domestic unrest by thrusting the weight of combat losses into the state’s far-flung reaches, to be borne by those with less social status. 24 Doing so buys Putin more time to continue the conflict and attempt to bankrupt both Ukrainian and Western resolve.   

Means are the military equipment and other materiel that a military force requires to create feasible ways. Moreover, means operate as the strategic glue that binds a military force’s ends with their ways. As mentioned in the Ends section, Russian industry appears to be challenged by the Russian armed forces’ demand for military equipment and armaments. The Russian armed forces’ ways—or approach to operating on the battlefield against Ukraine—is resource-intensive. Early Russian combat losses—the result of stalwart Ukrainian fighting coupled with inept Russian tactics—generated massive logistics challenges for Russia. Further, Russia has continued to fight according to long-standing Russian military practice: lead with fires, and move forward incrementally as the fires allow. The incremental advances, however, have also come at extreme costs in men and materiel. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, for instance, refer to Russian fighting at the battles of Mariupol and Bakhmut as relying on “meatgrinder tactics” in which human-wave attacks are used to advance Russian military interests. 25 As of 20 February 2024, Russia has lost 404,950 troops, 6,503 tanks, 338 aircraft and 25 ships, among many other combat losses; the losses that they have afflicted on Ukrainian forces remains largely unknown. 26  

As noted by Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s chief intelligence officer, Russia’s use of proxy forces is the primary way in which they have sought to offset land force requirements and to relieve some of the stress on their own army. 27 The contractual proxy, the Wagner Group, and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Armies (DPA and LPA, respectively)—both cultural proxies—were the primary proxies used between the renewed hostilities of February 2022 through the summer of 2023. The Wagner Group’s attempted coup in June 2023 naturally cooled the Kremlin’s reliance on it. At the same time, Russia’s military operations have become less offensive and more defensive, seeking to retain land already annexed, as opposed to confiscating more Ukrainian territory. Consequently, Moscow’s demand for more land forces and disposable infantry has somewhat diminished. 

Nonetheless, fighting a defensive war along the contact line across the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea has increased Russia’s need for drones and strike capability. As noted previously, Russia has maintained good diplomatic relationships with China, North Korea and Iran; this has allowed the Russian armed forces access to important weaponry from those states for use on the battlefield in Ukraine. Thus, despite the potential for economic sanctions to cripple Russia’s ability to wage war, the Kremlin has diversified its bases of economic and military power to ensure that it has the means it requires to continue the conflict with Ukraine. Moreover, this has allowed Russia to overcome many of the advantages that Ukraine obtained through the introduction of U.S. and other Western-supplied military aide and so to return theater-level stasis to the battlefield. Put another way, Russia’s ability to diversify its means has allowed it to generate a stalemate—which works in Moscow’s favor—and to keep the conflict going, with the goal of outlasting the international community’s military support and exhausting Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting. 

Considering Russia’s diverse bases of power, it is likely that battlefield stasis—or stalemate—will continue through 2024. In fact, this is probably Russia’s preferred course of action. It is likely that Russia is seeking to elongate the conflict through the upcoming U.S. presidential election, in hopes that the United States will elect a president who is not as friendly toward Kyiv and the Ukrainian fight for sovereignty—namely, one that will eliminate U.S. support to Ukraine’s war effort altogether.   

Ways are the specific methods an actor seeks to obtain their ends, with deference to their means. Ways consist of many supporting lines of operation or lines of effort. Moreover, many complimentary campaigns and operations can exist simultaneously within a strategy’s ways. Further, from a taxonomical position, the dominant approach or line of operation (or effort) within a strategy’s ways often becomes shorthand for a combatant’s general strategy. To that end, Russia’s strategy can be considered a strategy of exhaustion. 

Russia’s strategy of exhaustion can be broken into five lines of effort: 

• incrementally increase territorial gains to support negotiations later down the line; 
• fortify territorial gains to prevent Ukrainian efforts to retake that land; 
• destroy Ukraine’s offensive capability to prevent future attempts to retake annexed territory; 
• temporally elongate the conflict to outlast U.S. and Western military support; and 
• temporally and spatially elongate the conflict to exceed Ukraine’s manpower reserves. 

Early in the conflict, Russia’s strategy focused on the conquest of Ukrainian territory. The scale is up for debate, but Russian military operations indicated that they intended to take Kyiv, the oblasts that paralleled both sides of the Dnieper River, and all the oblasts east of the Dnieper to the Ukraine-Russia international boundary. This operation floundered, but Russia was able to extend their holdings in the Donbas, retain Crimea and obtain the land bridge to Crimea—which had been a goal of their 2014–2015 campaign, one that they came up short on at that time. 28  

As noted in the Means section above, Russia attempted limited territorial gains through 2023. 29 The attainment of any further Ukrainian territory is likely only for negotiation purposes. With that, if and when Russia and Ukraine reach the point in which they must negotiate an end to the conflict, Russia can offer to “give back” some of Ukraine’s territory as a bargaining chip so that it can hold onto what it truly desires: retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. This is a trend that will likely continue through 2024; we can expect to see Russia attempting to extend their territorial holdings along the contact line, arguably for the purpose of improving their bargaining position if and when negotiations between the two states come to fruition. 

Further, Russia seeks to cause Ukraine’s war effort to culminate by depleting Ukrainian materiel and manpower—both on hand and reserves. Putin states that Russia currently has 617,000 soldiers participating in the conflict. The number of combat forces within Ukraine is unknown. 30 Nonetheless, significant battles, such as Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and others, while tough on Russia, are of serious concern for Ukraine. Russia’s population advantage in relation to Ukraine means, quite simply, that the Kremlin has a much deeper well from which to generate an army than does Kyiv. Therefore, Russia continues to leverage its population advantages over Ukraine in bloody battles of attrition to exhaust Ukraine’s ability to field forces. The Kremlin’s attempt to cause the Ukrainian armed forces to culminate shows signs of success. In December 2023, for instance, Zelenskyy stated that his military commanders were asking for an additional 500,000 troops. 31 Zelenskyy called this number “very serious” because of the impact it would have on Ukrainian civil society. 32 Budanov more recently echoed Zelenskyy, stating that Ukraine’s position was precarious without further mobilizations of manpower. 33  

Russia’s strategy of exhaustion, therefore, appears to be working. Russian mass has generally frozen the conflict along the lines of Russia’s minimally acceptable outcome noted previously, i.e., the retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. This reality flies in the face of General Chris Cavoli, commander of U.S. Army European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who emphatically stated: “Precision can beat Mass. The Ukrainians have showed that this past autumn. But it takes time for it to work, and that time is usually bought with space. And so, to use this method, we need space to trade for time. Not all of us have that. We have to compensate for this in our thinking [and] our planning.” 34  

While U.S. and Western-provided precision strike might have helped Ukraine in some early instances within the conflict, Russian mass, coupled with Russian’s intention on retaining territory, is disproving Cavoli’s hypothesis. Further, the sacrifice of territory for time that Cavoli refers to actually plays to the favor of Russian rather than Ukrainian political-military objectives. The land that Ukrainian forces have involuntarily ceded to Russian land forces is not likely to be retaken by precision strike. Ukraine will require a significant amount of land forces, supported by joint fires and precision strike, to dislodge Russian land forces, to control the retaken territory, and to hold it against subsequent Russian counterattacks.   

Russian Strategic Assessment: Summary

If winning in war is defined by one state’s attainment of their political-military objectives at the cost of their adversary’s political-military objectives, then Russia appears to possess the upper-hand through two years of conflict (see Table 1). Russia’s strategy of exhaustion and territorial annexation appears to be working, albeit at high costs to the Russian economy and the Russian people. Russia has had to diversify its bases of power to maintain the war stocks required to execute its strategy of exhaustion, and it has had to exact a heavy toll on the Russian people to conduct the bite-and-hold tactics needed to make its territorial gains. Considering that Russia is largely on the defensive now, holding its position along the time of contact, the toll on the Russian people will likely decrease in the coming year. Moreover, considering its heavily fortified defensive position, it will likely maintain the upper hand on the battlefield through 2024.  

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment

Ukraine’s focus remains to liberate its territory from Russian occupation and restore its 1991 borders with Russia, which includes restoring its sovereignty over the Donbas and Crimea. 35 Beyond that, Ukraine continues to work to strengthen its bonds with the West. From security assistance partnerships to working on joining the European Union (EU), Zelenskyy and his government continue to press the diplomatic channels to maintain and gain political, military and economic support from the international community. 36

Kyiv’s efforts to join the EU and continue to maintain support from the international community are arguably much more realistic than its objective to remove Russian military forces—to include Russian proxies—from Ukraine’s territory. The classic board game Risk provides an excellent analogy for what Ukraine must do. In Risk, to claim or reclaim a piece of territory on the map, a player must attack and defeat the army occupying a territory. If (and when) the attacker defeats the defender, the attacker must then do two things—not just one. The attacker must not only move armies into the conquered territory, but he must also leave at least one army in the territory from which he initiated his attack. In effect, any successful attack diffuses combat power, and this is on top of any losses suffered during the attack. And yet, the attacker must identify the appropriate balance of armies between the newly acquired territory and the territory from which he attacked. An imbalance in either territory creates an enticing target for counterattack by the vanquished occupier. 

Ukraine finds itself in just such a position; however, instead of just attacking to retake one small portion of its territory, Ukraine must work to reclaim nearly 20 percent of its territory. 37 Compounding this problem is the size of Russia’s occupation force. As noted previously, Putin indicated that Russia has 670,000 soldiers committed to the conflict—this is more than a 200 percent increase from Moscow’s initial 190,000-strong invasion force. 38 It is challenging to verify Putin’s numbers, or to identify how those numbers are split between combat and support troops, and troops operating in Ukraine vice support troops committed to the conflict but operating in Russia. Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, let’s assume all 670,000 Russian troops are in Ukraine. Using the traditional attacker-to-defender heuristic, which states that a successful attack requires three units of measure to every one defensive unit of measure (3:1), and using individual troops as the unit of measure, we find that a successful Ukrainian attack would require more than two million troops to execute the sequence outlined above. 

Are two million troops really what’s required to evict Russian land forces from Ukraine and hold it against a likely counterattack? Some analysts—both old and current—suggest that the 3:1 ratio is flawed, not relevant, or both. 39 Or does modern technology obviate the need for some of those land forces, as Cavoli suggested? 

The fact of the matter remains: Long-range precision strike, drones of all types and excellent targeting information have done what complimentary arms and intelligence have always done—they have supported the advance or defensive posture of competing land forces, but they have not supplanted it. Moreover, technology must be viewed in the context of both the operations that it is supporting, but also the adversarial operations that it seeks to overcome. If it is correct that Russian strategy is primarily concerned with retaining its territorial acquisitions at this point, and thus Russian military forces are focused on conducting defensive operations, and that Ukrainian land forces do not have the numbers to conduct the attack-defeat-occupy-defend sequence in conjunction with those other components of combined arms operations, then the precision strike, drones and targeting information might be the window dressing for a futile strategic position. Seen in this light, Kyiv’s strategy is out of balance; that is, Kyiv’s ends exceed the limits of its means. The effect of this situation has contributed to the conflict being characterized as a war of attrition.  

The greatest risk to Ukraine’s strategy for winning the war against Russia is the loss of U.S. political, financial and military support. The loss of support from other European partners closely follows in order of importance. A great deal has been written about this in other publications, and as a result, this section will examine other strategic risks. 

One of Kyiv’s biggest strategic risks is exhausting or diffusing its military force so much so that Russian land forces might attack and confiscate additional Ukrainian land through increasingly vulnerable positions. For instance, Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 could have very well created so-called soft spots in Ukraine’s lines through which a localized counterattack might create an operational breakthrough. That did not happen, but this situation is something that strategic military planners must consider if Zelenskyy and his government truly intend to liberate all of Ukraine’s territory from Russia.

In addition, the reclamation of Crimea is something that is potentially a game-changing situation. Putin has stated the Crimea is Russia’s red line, indicating that a nuclear retort could likely coincide with any legitimate Ukrainian attempt to retake the peninsula. 40 Therefore, Putin’s red line is something policymakers and strategists in Kyiv would have to consider before enacting any attempt to seize and hold Crimea. Might Putin’s red line be a bluff? Perhaps. But the threat of nuclear strike, coupled with Putin’s move of nuclear weapons into Belarus and his repositioning of nuclear strike weapons close to Ukraine earlier in the conflict, demonstrate some credibility to the threat.   

As noted extensively in the section on Ukraine’s strategic ends, manpower is the biggest resource inhibiting Ukraine from attaining its political-military objectives. 41 As Zaluzhnyi notes in a recent essay, Ukraine’s recruiting and retention problems, coupled with a fixed population, no coalition to share the manpower load and two years of killed in action and other casualties, have put Ukraine in this position. 42 It is not a position that they are likely to overcome, even if Kyiv initiates a conscription system. Considering the 3:1 math outlined above, Kyiv theoretically needs to generate a trained army of more than two million troops if it hopes to remove Russian land forces from Ukraine. Moreover, if technology enthusiasts are correct and precision strike weapons, drones and advanced intelligence could shift the 3:1 ratio to perhaps 2:1 or even 1.5:1 in open combat, that advantage would shift back toward the defenders in urban areas. This is because of considerations of International Humanitarian Law and the challenges of targeting in more respective operating environments—a useful segue to discuss combat in urban areas. 

The math gets even more challenging when this context is applied. Trevor Dupuy writes that, “The 3:1 force ratio requirement for the attacker cannot be of useful value without some knowledge of the behavioral and other combat variable factors involved.” 43 As such, factors such as the operating environment, the type of opponent and the method in which they have historically fought must also be applied to the situation. Theory and military doctrine both suggest that the ratio for attacker to defender in urban operating environments increases from 3:1 to 6:1. 44  

Considering the large number of cities in Ukraine’s occupied areas, as well as their breadth and the depth of the front that Kyiv’s forces would have to work through, this poses a significant challenge. Hypothetically, Russian forces might strong-point places like Donetsk City, Mariupol, Melitopol, Simferopol and Sevastopol, creating a network of interlocked spikes in required strength—from 3:1 to 6:1—and thus increasing the overall combat power required by Ukraine to remove Russian military forces from the country. 

Moreover, if Ukraine is able to remove Russian land forces from Ukraine, the question of insurgency must also come into the equation. Retaking physical territory is one thing; securing the loyalty of the people in that territory is quite another. Vast portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as well as the entirety of Crimea, have been occupied by Russia for a decade. The political loyalties, cultural affiliation and domestic politics of the population in those areas are far from certain at this point. Thus, the chance for an insurgency in the Donbas and Crimea must also be considered when calculating the means—in this case, human capital—required to conduct operations to reclaim and hold lost territory. 

Already running short of needed ammunition, to include artillery, missiles and air defense missiles, Ukraine’s ammunition crunch is likely to accelerate through 2024. This is yet another concern raised by Zaluzhnyi in his recent essay on what Ukraine needs to survive and win against Russia. 45 At the time of this writing, Congress has failed to approve the Department of Defense’s latest funding requests for Ukraine. Whether they move forward on that remains to be seen. Nonetheless, for the purpose of continuing the discussion, let’s assume that Congress approves the funding in March 2024. But by that time, that lapse in funding will have created a lapse in support to Ukraine, exacerbating an already tenuous ammunition situation and potentially creating something far more critical. As it currently stands, Ukrainian units are approaching the point at which they are able to do little more than defend their positions and maintain the front lines. 46 Moving forward in time, Ukrainian units will not be able to conduct robust offensive operations—which would require methodically penetrating Russian defensive belts and destroying Russian land forces in stride—because they will not have enough ammunition. 

A lag will also develop between the time in which Congress authorizes funds for Ukraine, the time that the military can deliver the equipment associated with those funds to Ukraine’s armed forces and the time that the Ukrainian armed forces can put that equipment to use on the battlefield. In the interim period between Congressional approval and the Ukrainian forces putting the equipment to use in the field, the risk of Russian tactical and operational military offensive operations increases, while Ukraine’s risk of successful defensive operations decreases. Therefore, one might expect to see Russian land forces attempting to penetrate Ukrainian lines in the coming months in an effort to exploit Ukraine’s ammunition crisis and, as noted earlier, to take additional territory to strengthen its bargaining position later down the road.   

Having examined Ukraine’s strategic ends and the challenges presented to those ends by both Ukraine’s risks and means, the ways is a fairly simple discussion. Ukraine’s limited manpower and ammunition base already limits what Ukraine can do offensively. If Russian forces in Ukraine do actually approach 670,000, and the 3:1 ratio (or 6:1 ratio) are accurate planning considerations, Kyiv would have to generate, at a minimum, the men, materiel and ammunition for a two million-soldier army to retake the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. Moreover, this does not account for any counterattacks that might follow Ukrainian success or for potential insurgencies in any of those newly liberated areas. 

In recent conversations on the subject, Michael Kofman and Franz-Stefan Gady made mention of this and suggested that, for the foreseeable future, Ukrainian forces are limited to defensive operations along the contact line and to small, limited objective offensives with operations rarely exceeding platoon size. 47 Hardly a way to win a war. Although Gady’s assessment of Ukraine’s position was more optimistic than Kofman’s, both analysts suggest a very challenging 2024 for Kyiv’s armed forces. Considering the strategic balance, Gady and Kofman are correct—Ukraine will be quite challenged in 2024 to do much more than defend the contact line with sufficient force to prevent Russian breakthroughs. Avdiivka is a case in point. 

Avdiivka—located along the contact line in Donetsk oblast—is the conflict’s current hot spot. Russian land forces continue to use “meat assaults” to attrite Ukrainian men, materiel and equipment in the city in hopes of extending their territorial annexation and exhausting Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting. 48 After months of fighting, Russia appears to be on the cusp of claiming the city. 49 Accurate casualty numbers are challenging to identify at this point, but reports indicate that thousands of troops on both sides have died as the struggle for the city churns through men and resources. Holding the line against robust Russian attacks, like that at Avdiivka, is likely to be the maximum extent of Ukrainian operations through 2024.  

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment: Summary

The most basic finding is that Ukraine has culminated and is not capable of offensive operations at the scale and duration required to retake the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea or Crimea. What’s more, the Ukrainian armed forces will require a significant augmentation of land power to remove Russia from Ukraine’s territory. Precision strikes and air power will help in this endeavor, but Ukrainian infantry and armored forces must still move into the terrain, clear the terrain of Russian land forces, hold the terrain and then prevail against any Russian counterattacks. Therefore, onlookers should not expect any grand Ukrainian offensive through 2024. Ukraine might attempt one or two smaller scale offensives to nibble away Russian held territory, but anything larger exceeds Ukraine’s means. 

If U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen for an extended period of time, Ukraine’s ability to just hold the contact line with Russia will deteriorate further. U.S. weapons, ammunition and military equipment are vital to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Each day without that support adds more fragility to Ukraine’s supply network, its artillery forces and its land forces. It means increasing weaknesses proliferating through the Ukrainian armed forces and Kyiv’s inability to develop useful military strategy. In short, 2024 looks bleak for Ukraine and for its ability to meet its political-military objectives.   

If, however, U.S. support to Ukraine is unlocked relatively soon, Ukraine’s ability to defend itself will still see a slight dip in capability, but it will likely rebound quickly. Nonetheless, Ukraine’s manpower challenges will still prevent it from any large-scale offensives during 2024. The influx of long-range precision strikes, air power and intelligence from the United States—and other Western nations—will help mitigate some of the personnel challenges, but certainly not completely obviate that concern. Therefore, the attritional grind of forces aligned on opposing trench networks is likely to characterize the conflict throughout 2024.   

The Russo-Ukrainian War is currently in stasis. This stalemate is the result of competing strategies, one of which is focused on the retention of annexed territory—and the other on the vanquishment of a hostile force from its territory without the means to accomplish that objective. Considering the balance in relation to each state’s ends, Russia is currently winning the war (see Table 3). Russia controls significant portions of Ukrainian territory, and they are not likely to be evicted from that territory by any other means than brutal land warfare, which Ukraine cannot currently afford. What’s more, it is debatable if Ukraine will be able to generate the forces needed to liberate and hold the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. It would likely take an international coalition to generate the number of troops, combat forces and strike capabilities needed to accomplish the liberation of Ukraine’s occupied territory. This international coalition materializing is extremely unlikely to happen.

As stated in the Introduction, land wars fought for territory possess different military end goals than irregular wars, counterinsurgencies and civil wars. Moreover, a strategy’s ends must be supported first by its means, and secondarily, by resource-bound ways to accomplish those ends. Thus, precision strike strategies and light-footprint approaches do not provide sufficient forces to defeat industrialized armies built to fight wars based on the physical destruction of opposing armies and occupying their territory. Robust land forces, capable of delivering overwhelming firepower and flooding into territory held by an aggressor army, are the future of war, not relics of 20th century armed conflict. This is not a feature of conflict specific to Europe, but, as John McManus notes, something that has also been proven in east Asia during U.S. operations in the Pacific theater during World War II. For instance, McManus notes that the U.S. Army employed more divisions during the invasion of The Philippines than it did during the invasion of Normandy. 50 Given the considerations that policymakers face regarding a China-Taiwan conflict scenario, it is useful to take into account McManus’ findings, as well as the realities of war laid bare in Ukraine. If China were to invade Taiwan, with the intention of annexation, then similar factors to that of the Russo-Ukrainian War are worth weighing. Large, robust land forces would be required to enter, clear and hold Taiwan. 

Moreover, Russia’s operations in Ukraine illustrate that mass beats precision, and not the other way around. Precision might provide a tactical victory at a single point on the battlefield, but those victories of a finite point are not likely to deliver strategic victory. Further, denigrating Russia’s mass strategy as “stupid” misses the point. If Russia delivers strategic victory, it cannot be that illogical, regardless of how dubious the methods. Ultimately, Russia’s operations in Ukraine show that mass, especially in wars of territorial annexation, are how a state truly consolidates its gains and hedges those military victories against counterattacks.   

Finally, the Russo-Ukrainian War illustrates how important it is to eliminate an enemy army to insulate one’s state from see-saw transitions between tactical victories. Clausewitz asserts that an undestroyed army always presents the possibility of returning to the battlefield and undercutting its adversary’s aims. Ukraine’s inability to eliminate Russia’s army and remove it from the battlefield in Ukraine means that Kyiv will have to continually wrestle with the Kremlin aggressively pursuing its aims in Ukraine. Ukraine’s inability to generate the size of force, coupled with the destructive warfighting capabilities needed to destroy Russia’s army in Ukraine and to occupy and hold the liberated territory, means that this war of attrition will likely grind on until either Ukraine can generate the force needed to evict Putin’s army from Ukraine, Ukraine becomes strategically exhausted and has to quit the conflict, or both parties decide to end the conflict. Regardless of the outcome, 2024 will likely continue to see Russia attempting to strategically exhaust Ukraine; meanwhile, Kyiv will do its best to maintain its position along the contact line as it tries to recruit and train the army needed to destroy Russia’s army and to liberate its territory.

Amos Fox is a PhD candidate at the University of Reading and a freelance writer and conflict scholar writing for the Association of the United States Army. His research and writing focus on the theory of war and warfare, proxy war, future armed conflict, urban warfare, armored warfare and the Russo-Ukrainian War. Amos has published in RUSI Journal and Small Wars and Insurgencies among many other publications, and he has been a guest on numerous podcasts, including RUSI’s Western Way of War , This Means War , the Dead Prussian Podcast and the Voices of War .

• “The Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces on How to Win the War,” Economist , 1 November 2023.
• Jack Watling, “The War in Ukraine is Not a Stalemate,” Foreign Affairs , 3 January 2023.
• Carl von Clausewitz, On War , trans. and eds. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 77.
• Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Concord, NH: Rumford Press, 1944), 80–82. 
• Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin, “Putin Vows to Fight on In Ukraine Until Russia Achieves its Goals,” Reuters , 14 December 2023.
• Harriet Morris, “An Emboldened, Confident Putin Says There Will Be No Peace in Ukraine Until Russia’s Goals are Met,” Associated Press , 14 December 2023.
• Amos Fox, “Myths and Principles in the Challenges of Future War,” Association of the United States Army , Landpower Essay 23-7, 4 December 2023.
• “China’s Position on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” US-China Economic and Security Review Commission , 31 December 2023; Robbie Gramer, “Iran Doubles Down on Arms for Russia,” Foreign Policy , 3 March 2023; Kim Tong-Hyung, “North Korea Stresses Alignment with Russia Against US and Says Putin Could Visit at an Early Date,” ABC News , 20 January 2024.
• Tong-Hyung, “North Korea Stresses Alignment with Russia”; “China’s Position on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine”; Darlene Superville, “The White House is Concerned Iran May Provide Ballistic Missiles to Russia for Use Against Ukraine,” Associated Press , 21 November 2023.
• Matthew Luxmoore and Michael Gordon, “Russia’s Army Learns from Its Mistakes in Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal , 24 September 2023.
• Margarita Konaev and Owen Daniels, “The Russians Are Getting Better,” Foreign Affairs , 6 September 2023.
• Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Stormbreak: Fighting Through Russian Defences in Ukraine’s 2023 Offensive (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2023), 15–19.
• Bryan Frederick et. al., Escalation in the War in Ukraine: Lessons Learned and Risks for the Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023), 77.
• “Bluffing or Not, Putin’s Declared Deployment of Nuclear Weapons to Belarus Raises Tensions,” Associated Press , 27 July 2023.
• “Russia’s Medvedev Warns of Nuclear Response if Ukraine Hits Missile Launch Sites,” Reuters , 11 January 2024.
• “Ukraine War: Putin Confirms First Nuclear Weapons Moved to Belarus,” BBC News , 17 June 2023.
• Steve Gutterman, “The Week in Russia: Carnage and Clampdown,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , 19 January 2024.
• Samantha de Bendern et al., “Prigozhin May Be Dead, but Putin’s Position Remains Uncertain,” Chatham House , 24 August 2024.
• Gutterman, “The Week in Russia: Carnage and Clampdown.” 
• Robert Picheta et al., “Pro-War Putin Critic Igor Girkin Sentenced to Four Years in Prison on Extremist Charges,” CNN , 25 January 2024.
• Robert Coalson, “How the Russian State Ramped Up the Suppression of Dissent in 2023: ‘It Worked in the Soviet Union, and It Works Now,’” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , 31 December 2023.
• Ben Hodges, “Ukraine Update with Lieutenant General (Retired) Ben Hodges,” Revolution in Military Affairs [podcast], 1 January 2024.
• Sven Gunnar Simonsen, “Putin’s Leadership Style: Ethnocentric Patriotism,” Security Dialogue 31, no. 3 (2000): 377–380. 
• Hodges, “The Ukraine Update.” 
• Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in the Second Year of Its Invasion of Ukraine (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2023), 3–8.
• The Kyiv Post keeps a running tally of these figures and other Russian losses in a ticker across the top of their homepage: https://www.kyivpost.com .
• Christopher Miller, “Kyrylo Budanov: The Ukrainian Military Spy Chief Who ‘Likes the Darkness,’” Financial Times , 20 January 2024.
• “Ukraine in Maps: Tracking the War with Russia,” BBC News , 20 December 2023.
• Constant Meheut, “Russia Makes Small Battlefield Gains, Increasing Pressure on Ukraine,” New York Times , 22 December 2023.
• Jaroslav Lukiv, “Ukraine Seeks Extra Soldiers – President Zelenskyy,” BBC News , 19 December 2023.
• Lukiv, “Ukraine Seeks Extra Soldiers.”
• Lukiv, “Ukraine Seeks Extra Soldiers.” 
• Miller, “Kyrylo Budanov: The Ukrainian Military Spy Chief Who ‘Likes the Darkness.’” 
• Christopher Cavoli, “SACEUR Cavoli – Remarks at Rikskonferensen, Salen, Sweden,” NATO Transcripts , 8 February 2023.
• Olivia Olander, “Ukraine Intends to Push Russia Entirely Out, Zelenskyy Says as Counteroffensive Continues,” Politico , 11 September 2022; Guy Davies, “Zelenskyy to ABC: How Russia-Ukraine War Could End, Thoughts on US Politics and Putin’s Weakness,” ABC News , 9 July 2023.
• Angela Charlton, “Ukraine’s a Step Closer to Joining the EU. Here’s What It Means, and Why It Matters,” Associated Press , 14 December 2023.
• Visual Journalism Team, “Ukraine in Maps: Tracking the War with Russia,” BBC News , 20 December 2023.
• “Russia-Ukraine Tensions: Putin Orders Troops to Separatist Regions and Recognizes Their Independence,” New York Times , 21 February 2022.
• John Mearsheimer, “Assessing the Conventional Balance: The 3:1 Rule and Its Critics,” International Security 13, no. 4 (1989): 65–70; Michael Kofman, “Firepower Truly Matters with Michael Kofman,” Revolution in Military Affairs [podcast], 3 December 2023.
• Vladimir Isachenkov, “Putin Warns West: Moscow Has ‘Red Line’ About Ukraine, NATO,” Associated Press , 30 November 2021.
• Maria Kostenko et al., “As the War Grinds On, Ukraine Needs More Troops. Not Everyone Is Ready to Enlist,” CNN , 19 November 2023.
• Valerii Zaluzhnyi, “Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win It,” Economist , accessed 24 January 2024.
• Trevor Dupuy, Numbers, Predictions, and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1979), 12.
• Army Training Publication 3-06, Urban Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2022), 5-23.
• Zaluzhnyi, “Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win It.” 
• Olena Harmash and Tom Balmforth, “Ukrainian Troops Face Artillery Shortages, Scale Back Some Operations – Commander,” Reuters , 18 December 2023.
• Kofman, “Firepower Truly Matters”; Franz-Stefan Gady, “A Russo-Ukrainian War Update with Franz-Stefan Gady,” Revolution in Military Affairs [podcast], 30 November 2023.
• Joseph Ataman, Frederick Pleitgen and Dara Tarasova-Markina, “Russia’s Relentless ‘Meat Assaults’ Are Wearing Down Outmanned and Outgunned Ukrainian Forces,” CNN , 23 January 2024.
• David Brennan, “Avdiivka on Edge as Russians Proclaim ‘Breakthrough,’” Newsweek , 24 January 2024.
• “Ep 106: John McManus on the U.S. Army’s Pacific War,” School of War [podcast], 16 January 2024.

The views and opinions of our authors do not necessarily reflect those of the Association of the United States Army. An article selected for publication represents research by the author(s) which, in the opinion of the Association, will contribute to the discussion of a particular defense or national security issue. These articles should not be taken to represent the views of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, the United States government, the Association of the United States Army or its members.

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• Hypotheses on the implications of the Ukraine-Russia War

Barry Posen provides his perspective on the implications of the war in Ukraine. His analysis is available here  and was published in Defense Priorities .

How will the war in Ukraine shape international politics? In principle there are two ways to address this question. The first is simply to extrapolate into the future any actions or reactions that we can observe today. The second, which is explored below, is to organize our thinking theoretically, to ask what may turn out to be the long-term effects of the major causes set in motion by the war. I organize the discussion in terms of a theory of international politics—realism, mainly structural realism. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine serves as another reminder that war remains an ever-present danger in an international system that is anarchic—ie, devoid of any central authority with the wherewithal to protect states from aggression. States must therefore prepare to defend themselves. In the heady aftermath of the liberal West’s victory over the Soviet empire, and the apparent triumph of the US-led, liberal world order, many instead believed that interstate war would become a thing of the past. States now face strong incentives to reembrace tried and tested tools of self-preservation developed in earlier times.

Full story by Barry Posen is available here:  https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/hypotheses-on-the-implications-of-the-ukraine-russia-war

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Research Guide on the Conflict in Ukraine

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About this Guide

 A guide to improve access to information and increase understanding of the conflict in Ukraine starting in 2014 as well as the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Links to books, article databases, and other resources are provided for more in-depth research. Note: access for many of these resources is limited to current UMN faculty, students, and staff. See this page for resources accessible by the general public (non-UMN affiiates) .  

Source: Nations Online Project

Scholarly websites and webcasts

• "Russia's War on Ukraine" from Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute 
• Posts from scholars at the University College London's Dept. of Political Science's about the 2022 war
• "Panel Discussion - Crisis in Ukraine,"  from Indiana University's Russian and East European Institute
• " Princeton experts discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine," from Princeton University

News Sources for Keeping Up-to-date

• "Crisis in Ukraine" from EuroNews
• EuroTopics  -- Provides information on around 600 print and online media published in 32 countries.
• BBC News on Europe   -- includes coverage on Ukraine
• Russia’s war in Ukraine: complete guide in maps, video and pictures (The Guardian (UK))  -- ongoing coverage since late February 2022.
• Kyiv Post  : Ukraine's oldest English-language newspaper since 1995.
• Kyiv Independent : an English-language Ukrainian news site that contains a newsfeed of events as they unfold.
• Euromaidan Press : an online English-language independent newspaper, it focuses on events concerning Ukraine and provides translations of Ukrainian news, expert analyses, and independent research.
• Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
• Moscow Times (Web version) -- independent news in English from Russia

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• Academic Search Premier A great place to start your research on any topic, search multidisciplinary, scholarly research articles. This database provides access to scholarly and peer reviewed journals, popular magazines and other resources. View this tutorial to learn how to go from a general idea to a very precise set of results of journal articles and scholarly materials.
• ABSEEES Online (American Bibliography of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Search for journal articles and book reviews on East-Central Europe, Russia, Soviet Union and the former Soviet republics, with a vast collection of indexed sources published in the United States, Canada and some European countries.
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DATABASES COVERING THE UKRAINE CONFLICT WITH REGARDS TO POLICY & FINANCE

• EMIS Professional Find company and industry information, reports, statistics, proprietary mergers and acquisitions, credit analytics, benchmark indicators and trend comparisons to help understand emerging markets.
• FitchConnect (formerly BMI Research) This link opens in a new window UMN affiliates: Please email [email protected] to request an account. Detailed reports on global industrial and municipal markets, companies and nonprofits, emphasizing emerging markets. Include extensive country risk and credit ratings, macroeconomic and financial analysis, and ESG scores. Find intra-daily alerts on economic, industrial, and political developments, business deals, multinational joint ventures, and regulatory changes.
• OECD iLibrary This link opens in a new window OECD iLibrary is the online publications portal of the 38-country Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( https://www.oecd.org/about/members-and-partners/ ). OECD iLibrary contains thousands of e-books, chapters, tables and graphs, papers, articles, summaries, indicators, databases, and podcasts. All content will be Open Access beginning in July 2024. Content is also indexed via Policy Commons . Coverage: OECD Books, Papers and Statistics, International Energy Agency (IEA) Statistical Databases, & International Trade by Commodity Statistics
• PAIS Index (Political Science and Public Policy) PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) searches journals and other sources on issues of political science and public policy. This includes government, politics, international relations, human rights and more.
• Policy Commons Search millions of documents on thousands of topics from the world’s leading policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, IGOs and NGOs as well as from North American cities. Featured topics include Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, Climate Change, Gender Equity, and reports from the 500 largest cities in North America. UMN access includes both the Global Think Tanks and North American City Reports modules.

Detailed instructions on how to create a personal account are available at: https://libguides.umn.edu/capiqpro Note: Full Tunnel VPN is required to use this resource.

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Ukraine invasion — explained

The roots of Russia's invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep. The current conflict is more than one country fighting to take over another; it is — in the words of one U.S. official — a shift in "the world order." Here are some helpful stories to make sense of it all.

How the Ukraine-Russia war is playing out differently on 3 separate fronts

A damaged statue of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin in a central square in Sudzha, in the Kursk region of western Russia, on Aug. 16. Ukrainian troops say they've taken control of Sudzha, one of more than 80 towns and villages they've captured since a cross-border invasion of Russia on Aug. 6. -/AP hide caption

KYIV, Ukraine — The front line in the Russia-Ukraine war stretches for more than 600 miles. Yet roughly speaking, it breaks down into three separate fronts — in Ukraine's north, east and south — which are all playing out differently.

The latest front is just across Ukraine's northern border, where Ukrainian troops carried out a surprise invasion into Russian territory on Aug. 6, and are solidifying their positions two weeks after that breakthrough.

In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces are making steady advances and are closing in on a town that's crucial for Ukraine's military supply lines.

And in the south, in the Black Sea, Ukraine has delivered an ongoing series of powerful blows to the Russian navy and carved out a channel that allows it to export its wheat and other agricultural products.

Ukrainian forces attack a second border region in western Russia

Here's a closer look at all three.

In the north, a "buffer zone"

Ukraine said over the weekend it knocked out two bridges that cross the Seym River in western Russia, rendering them useless.

This cuts off key transportation routes that Russia could have used to send reinforcements into the Kursk region, with the intent of driving out the Ukrainian forces that have been taking and holding ground for the past two weeks.

However, it also suggests Ukraine is adopting a defensive position and is not looking to advance deeper into Russia, at least in this area.

In video remarks Sunday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was trying to keep Russia away from the border region it has used to stage attacks against Ukraine.

"The creation of a buffer zone on the aggressor's territory is our operation in the Kursk region," Zelenskyy said.

In May, the Russians attempted to advance on the city Kharkiv, just 20 miles inside Ukraine. Ukraine halted the Russian ground offensive, though the city and surrounding areas still come under frequent Russian airstrikes with glide bombs that are difficult to defend against.

Ukraine's Kharkiv has withstood Russia's relentless strikes. Locals fear what's next

After lightning advances in the first few days of its incursion, Ukraine's forces inside Russia have been making only limited gains in the past week. Ukraine is still providing limited details of the operation, but Zelenskyy, military analysts and a range of media reports indicate Ukrainian forces are solidifying their positions.

Ukraine's military says it has taken more than 80 villages and towns and now controls more than 400 square miles in the Kursk region. Those figures cannot be independently confirmed.

The Ukrainians have captured, at minimum, several hundred Russian troops. Ukraine's military allowed journalists to see more than 300 Russian prisoners of war who have been moved across the border and placed in a Ukrainian prison.

Meanwhile, Russia has not yet mounted a significant counterattack. Russian officials says additional troops are on the way, and Russian television has shown columns of troops and equipment heading to Kursk.

But so far, the fighting appears limited to mostly small-scale clashes. The Russians appear to be drawing their forces from other parts of Russia — and not from front-line troops already fighting inside Ukraine.

One of Ukraine's goals with the incursion into Russia is to draw Russian forces away from the front line in eastern Ukraine, but there's no evidence this has happened on any significant scale so far.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has not commented on the Ukrainian invasion for the past week, and made a visit Monday to Azerbaijan .

Smoke billows above a bridge on the Seym River in Russia's western region of Kursk. Ukraine's military released the footage on Sunday, saying this was the second bridge on the river it has destroyed in recent days. The bridge could have been a route for Russia to send in reinforcements to the area, where Ukrainian troops invaded Russia on Aug. 6. Ukrainian Armed Forces/via AP hide caption

In the east, Russian troops close in on a key town

Eastern Ukraine is still the main battlefront. The Russians claimed the capture of another small town Monday and are now less than 10 miles from the town of Pokrovsk.

Pokrovsk is a transportation hub that Ukraine uses to send troops and supplies to its front-line positions in the east. If the Russians take the town, Ukraine will have a tougher time supporting forces that are already outnumbered and outgunned.

For the past several days, Ukrainian officials have been urging civilians in Pokrovsk to evacuate to safer areas.

"With every passing day there is less and less time to collect personal belongings and leave for safer regions," local officials in Pokrovsk said in a recent statement.

Throughout the war, Ukraine has had a shortage of troops in the east. By sending thousands of its troops into Russia, Ukraine could be even more vulnerable in areas where it's struggling to stop Russian advances.

Weapons packages from the U.S. and European states are arriving, but not fast enough, according to Zelenskyy.

"We need to speed up the supply from our partners," Zelenskyy said in his Sunday night remarks. "There are no holidays in war. We need solutions, we need timely logistics of announced [weapons] packages. I am especially appealing now to the United States, Great Britain, and France."

In the Black Sea, Ukraine creates an export channel

One of Ukraine's biggest successes over the past year has been driving back the Russian navy in the Black Sea and establishing a shipping channel so it can again export grain and other agricultural products to world markets.

Russia dominated the Black Sea and blocked Ukrainian exports after its full-scale invasion in 2022. A subsequent deal that allowed limited Ukrainian exports fell apart last summer.

But Ukraine has found its own solution. Ukraine has fired missiles from land, hitting Russian ships that ventured too near the coast, and Ukraine also has developed its own sea drones to attack Russian vessels.

Retired U.S. Adm. James Foggo , who worked alongside the Ukrainian Navy in the Black Sea a decade ago, said the sea drones point to Ukraine's naval ingenuity.

"They're jet skis with explosives packed on them," said Foggo, who now heads the Center for Maritime Strategy in Arlington, Va. "They have some kind of remote control from some kind of command center. I don't know what kind of radio control they have on these things, but they're pretty darn good."

The Ukrainian missile and sea drone attacks have forced Russian ships to retreat from the western half of the Black Sea, opening the channel along the western coast for Ukrainian exports.

Ukraine announced last week that it's been one year since this option became available, and 2,300 cargo ships have used the route, an average of more than six a day. Ukraine also says it's approaching its prewar exports of wheat and other farm products at around 5 million tons a month.

Foggo called this a remarkable achievement.

"The Ukrainians, without a floating navy, have been able to destroy about one-third of the [Russian] Black Sea fleet," or about 25 ships and submarines. "That's absolutely amazing," he said.

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International Relations Theory and the Ukrainian War

Drawing on my qualitative and quantitative research I show that the motives for war have changed in the course of the last four centuries, and that the causes of war and the responses of others to the use of force are shaped by society. Leaders who start wars rarely behave with the substantive and instrumental rationality assumed by realist and rationalist approaches. For this reason, historically they lose more than half wars than they start. After 1945, the frequency of failure rises to over 80 percent. Rationalists allow for miscalculation but attribute it to lack of information. In most wars, information was available beforehand that indicated, or certainly suggested, that the venture would not succeed militarily or fail to achieve its political goals. The war in Ukraine is a case in point.

Modernity is a social construct, but a very useful one. Today’s social world is very different in important ways for that of earlier centuries. Among the most important theorized differences are the deepening of the inner self; a nearly universal quest for identity and self-expression; the emergence of equality as the most valued principle of justice; the breakdown of class barriers, and with it, the greater freedom of individuals from social constraints; a greater emphasis on wealth, and the claiming of status by its display ( Seigel 2005 ; Lebow 2012 ). International relations theories are to varying degrees anchored in this new social reality. The liberal, Marxist, and constructivist paradigms are rooted in modernity, but in different understandings of it. Realism, by contrast, relies on pre-modern and modern understandings of social relations, and makes little to no effort to distinguish between them. Modern framings of realism generally posit security as the goal of states, treat actors for the most part as substantively and instrumentally rational, and at the same time deny the possibility of progress. As did the ancients, they see order and decline as a repetitive cycle from which there is no escape. I argue that such an approach tells us next to nothing about the institution of war or about the causes of individual wars.

Wars between or among multiple great powers.

My argument is conceptual and empirical. I begin with a brief account of the substantive and epistemological assumptions of the several paradigms that address the problem of war. I focus on realism, where I make a sharp distinction between classical and modern formulations realism, neorealism being among the latter. The latter describes a variety of research programs that share in common more than they generally acknowledge. Modern realists of all kinds tend to treat war as an ahistorical process in the sense that they do not situate it in society but treat it as an independent institution. They do the same, of course, with the balance of power. Some realists are uninterested in state-level variation ( Waltz 1979 ). Others recognize some actors as more aggressive and war-like than others but offer no explanations to account for these differences ( Morgenthau 1948 ). To the extent that realists historicize war, it is with regard to economy and technology. I draw on my qualitative and quantitative research to show that the motives for war have changed in the course of the last four centuries, and that the causes of war and the responses of others to the use of force are shaped by society. The causes, frequency, and outcomes of wars cannot be studied in a social void.

I make a further point that is particularly relevant to the war in Ukraine. Leaders who start wars rarely behave with the substantive and instrumental rationality assumed by realist and rationalist approaches. For this reason, historically they lose more than half wars than they start. After 1945, the frequency of failure rises to over 80 percent ( Lebow and Valentino 2009 ). Rationalists allow for miscalculation but attribute it to lack of information. In most wars, information was available beforehand that indicated, or certainly suggested, that the venture would not succeed militarily or fail to achieve its political goals.

What accounts for such irrationality? I have argued elsewhere ( Jervis, Lebow, and Stein 1984 ; Lebow and Stein 1994 ; Lebow 2003 ) that war-threatening challenges of other states— and here, I extend the claim to war initiation—is often due a combination of domestic and strategic problems that leaders believe can only be overcome by successful brinkmanship or war. Not all initiators of crises and wars are driven by need. Some harbour aggressive designs, and for diverse political and psychological reasons seek to expand their territory at the expense of other political units. It is important distinguish between these different motives because they warrant somewhat different kinds of responses.

War has always been a legitimate form of state activity. Modernity, and social values associated with it, have nevertheless brought about significant shifts in that kinds of uses of force that are considered legitimate. These changes, I contend, are not linear in the sense of consistently seeking to limit or do away with war. They initially sought to legitimate certain kinds of wars and delegitimate others. The frequency of war has dropped in the modern era, and more so after 1945 ( Gleditsch 2004 ; Holsti 1991 ). In the post-war era the process has been more linear, with norms or laws coming into place that all but restrict the use of force to self-defence, aid of others who are attacked, or humanitarian intervention ( Zacher 2001 ). Today, the legitimate use of the force must be seen as defensive or require authorization by appropriate regional or international organizations. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is based on earlier understanding of what constituted a legitimate use of force: the building or rebuilding of empire. It is no longer acceptable to most of global society. The outcome of the war has important consequences for the future of these laws and norms and for the relative appeal of different research programs in IR.

1 Human Drives

In Cultural Theory of International Relations ( Lebow 2008 ) I follow the ancient Greeks in positing appetite, spirit ( thumos ), and reason as fundamental human drives. Each has distinct goals, generates different logics of cooperation, conflict and risk-taking, is associated with different principles of justice or combinations of them, and gives rise to different kinds of hierarchies.

Appetite is the drive with which we are most familiar. There are many appetites, including those for food, drink, shelter, and sex, but contemporary economists and political scientists focus on wealth. They assume it is the most important appetite, and the facilitator of all others. The ‘Economic Man’ so beloved by economists is thought to devote ‘himself’ to maximize wealth.

Early efforts at wealth accumulation often involved violence, as it was easier to take others’ possessions than to produce one’s own. Until recent times, piracy was an honoured profession, and slavery, often the result of raiding expeditions, was an acceptable means of generating wealth through the labour of others. Riches acquired through conquest became an important goal of empires. The norm against territorial conquest only developed in the twentieth century ( Zacher 2001 ). Earlier trading economies (e.g., the Carthaginians, Portuguese, French, and British) viewed wealth as a zero-sum game and sought to exclude competitors from access to raw materials and markets they controlled. Recognition dawned only slowly that generating surplus through production and trade made societies and their rulers richer than they could through conquest, that production and trade benefited from peace and that affluence was as much the result of cooperation as it was of conflict. It was not until the late eighteenth century that economists like Adam Smith (1779/1976) began to understand that the free exchange of capital, goods, people, and ideas is in the long-term common interest of all trading states.

Spirit ( thumos ) finds expression in the universal human desire for self-esteem. This sense of self-worth that makes people feel good about themselves, happier about life, and more confident in their ability to confront its challenges. Self-esteem is generally achieved by excelling in activities valued by one’s peers or society and gaining respect from those whose opinions matter. By winning the approbation of such people we feel good about ourselves. Self-esteem requires some sense of independent self, but also recognition of the central importance of society because it is impossible to achieve in the absence of commonly shared values and accepted procedures for demonstrating excellence. Self-esteem is closely connected with status. In contrast to appetite, where status is proclaimed through conspicuous consumption, spirit-based status must be conferred on actors by others in response to their achievements. In this connection, ancient Greeks distinguished between honour and standing. The former is standing achieved through rules-based competition, and the latter by any means available. Regional and international societies become more violent when rules are violated and ultimately break down, as happened in the years before both World Wars.

People can satisfy some appetites by instinct. They must be taught how to express and satisfy the spirit through pathways stipulated as appropriate by their society. Societies have strong incentives to nurture and channel the spirit. It encourages individual self-control and sacrifice from which the community as a whole benefits. In warrior societies, the spirit finds expression in bravery and selflessness. All societies must restrain, or deflect outwards, the competition engendered by the spirit and the anger that arises when it is challenged or frustrated. As noted, states are not people. They lack psyches and have no innate drives or character. They are what people make of them. In the modern era, people routinely project their needs for self-esteem on collective enterprises. They build self-esteem through the accomplishments of groups, sports teams, and above all, nations and religions, with which they affiliate. Arguably, the most important function of nationalism in the modern world is to provide vicarious satisfaction to the spirit. As their states rise and fall in power, status, and competitions of all kinds, people feel better or worse about themselves. States that encourage this association risk becoming prisoners of the passions they have helped arouse, as is arguably the case in China ( Gries 2005 ; Wong 2020 ).

Plato (1996 , Book 4) describes appetite and spirit as two distinct drives. He shows how they come into conflict, as when someone is thirsty but drinking in the circumstance would be socially inappropriate and result in a loss of standing. In Plato’s Athens, as in many societies, wealth was a prerequisite for honour ( Aristotle 1984b , 1286b922). In international relations until recently honour was restricted to great powers, and a state had to be rich to aspire to this status. In the modern world, it has become more difficult to separate wealth and standing. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1755/1964 , 147–60, 174–5) and Adam Smith (1759/2002 , I.iii.2.1) both commented on the extent to which wealth was becoming instrumental good because it was the principal means, or at least prerequisite, of gaining standing. Joseph Schumpeter (1983 , 82) believed that most entrepreneurs were motivated less by making money than by “the dream to found a private kingdom” in the form of an eponymous company that carries one’s name and fame across the generations.

Reason for Plato and Aristotle was an independent drive. It sought to understand what led to a happy life and to constrain and then educate appetite and spirit alike to cooperate with it toward this end. Reason-based worlds could not be found in practice so ancient and modern philosophers have had to imagine them. For Plato, it is Kallipolis of the Republic or Magnesia of the Laws . For Aristotle (1984a , Book 8), it is homonoia , a community whose members agreed about the nature of the good life and how it could be achieved. For Augustine of Hippo (426/1950) , it is a culture in which human beings use their reason to control, even overcome, their passions, and act in accord with God’s design. For Marx, it is a society in which people contribute to the best of their abilities and receive what they need in return. For Rawls (1999) , it is a utopia that conforms to the principles of distributive justice.

Most of these thinkers acknowledge that disagreements would still exist in reason-informed worlds. They nevertheless believe they would not threaten the peace because they would not involve fundamental issues of justice and could be adjudicated in an environment characterized by mutual respect and trust. Plato and Aristotle understand their fictional worlds as ideals toward which we must aspire, individually and collectively, but which we are unlikely ever to achieve. Their worlds are intended to serve as templates that we can use to measure how existing worlds live up to our principles. As Plato understood, even imperfect knowledge of a form motivates citizens and cities to work toward its actualization.

Fear is an emotion not an innate human drive. It arises when reason loses control of spirit and appetite. Spirit and appetite-based worlds are inherently unstable. They are intensely competitive, which encourages actors to get ahead by violating the rules by which honour or wealth is attained. When enough actors do this, those who continue to obey the rules are likely to be seriously handicapped. This provides a strong incentive for all but the most committed actors to defect from the rules. This dilemma is most acute in spirit-based worlds because of the relational nature of honour and standing, which makes it a zero-sum game unless there are multiple hierarchies of honour and standing. Actors nevertheless often frame the acquisition of wealth as a winner-take-all competition and behave competitively even when cooperation would be mutually beneficial. Here too, lack of self-restraint encourages others to follow suit in their pursuit of wealth. Disregard for rules accordingly takes two forms: non-performance of duties—including self-restraint—by high status actors, and disregard of these status and associated privileges by actors of lesser standing. The two forms of non-compliance are likely to be self-reinforcing and have the effect of weakening hierarchies and order the orders they instantiate.

Aristotle (1984c , 1382a21-35) defines fear “as a pain or disturbance due to imagining some destructive or painful evil in the future.” It is caused “by whatever we feel has great power of destroying us, or of harming us in ways that tend to cause us great pain.” It is the opposite of confidence and is associated with danger, which is the approach of something terrible. It is aroused by the expectation, rather than the reality, of such an event and encourages a deliberative response. It is often provoked by another actor’s abuse of its power and is threatening to the social order, not just to individuals.

Following Aristotle, I argue that the principal cause of the breakdown of orders is the unrestricted pursuit by actors—individuals, political factions or states—of their parochial goals. This leads other actors to fear for their ability to satisfy their spirit and or appetites, and perhaps for their survival. Fearful actors are likely to consider and implement a range of precautions which can run the gamut from bolting their doors at night to acquiring allies and more and better arms. Escalation of this kind is invariably paralleled by shifts in threat assessment. Images rich in nuance and detail give way to simpler and more superficial stereotypes of adversaries or, worse still, of enemies. This shift, and the corresponding decline in cognitive complexity, undermines any residual trust and encourages worst-case analyses of their motives, behaviour, and future initiatives. Mutually reinforcing changes in behaviour and framing can start gradually but at some point accelerate and bring about a phase transition into a fear-based world.

Fear triggers a desire for security which can be satisfied in many ways. In interstate relations, it is usually through the direct acquisition of military power (and the economic well-being that makes this power) or its indirect acquisition through alliances. It is also a catalyst, as it is at the domestic level, for institutional arrangements that provide security by limiting their capabilities and independence of actors who might do one harm. Table 1 below compares fear to appetite , spirit, and reason .

Motives, goals and means.

Table 1 below offers a typology of motives, goals, and instruments towards their end, or reduction in the case of fear. In international relations all these motives are generally in play; leaders are motivated by wealth, standing, well-being, and security for themselves or their states. Depending on the nature of the political system, they are also under pressure by their citizens to achieve these ends, although there may be no consensus about the most effective means of doing so. The relative strength and importance vary across actors, situations, cultures, and epochs ( Lebow 2008 ). As we see below, modern international relations theories build on single motives, with appetite and fear by far the most common.

2 IR Theory and Modernity

I turned to the Greeks because of their richer understanding of the human mind. Modern thinkers, by contrast, offer a stripped-down version of the psyche. In the course of the Enlightenment, Aristotelian telos —the end for which something as created—was rejected, appetite was upgraded, and thumos was correspondingly downgraded, if not altogether purged from the philosophical and psychological lexicon. Thumos had been valued by the aristocracy, who used it since ancient times to justify its claim to power and privilege. Moderns condemned it seen as the principal cause of war. Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees ( 1714/1957 ) and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ( 1776/1976 ) convinced many readers that the individual search for private wealth was the engine of prosperity and well-being. David Hume ( 1739 / 1994 ) argued that it also encouraged the virtues essential for a peaceful and well-regulated domestic order.

The rejection of telos required a corresponding reconceptualization of reason. Reason was reduced to a mere instrumentality, ‘the slave of the passions’ in the words of David Hume (1739/1978 , II.iii.3 (416)). Max Weber ( 1926/2000 ) later coined the term ‘instrumental reason’ to describe this transformation and explore some of its consequences. Freud incorporated it in his model of the mind; the ego embodies reason and mediates between the impulses of the Id and the external environment. Rational choice employs a similar understanding of reason; it assumes that actors rank order their preferences and engage in the kind of strategic behavior best calculated to obtain them. The modern reframing of reason as instrumentality is indicative of the shift in focus away from the ends we should seek to the means of best satisfying our appetites.

This shift in thinking about human beings is reflected in international relations theory. Liberalism and Marxism are the paradigm of politics and international relations based on the drive of appetite, reason conceived of only instrumentally, and fully autonomous actors. Theories and propositions rooted liberalism, including those associated with the Democratic Peace research program, do a comprehensive job of laying out the assumptions of a world in which interest is defined in terms of wealth and the behaviour to which it gives rise. Liberals assert—as a matter of ideology—that an international society of capitalist democracies would be war-free and is the only efficient response to the post-industrial world. Marxism also foregrounds wealth but offers a more negative take on it. In contrast to liberals, who describe untrammelled appetite and instrumental reason as the basis for a harmonious world, Marxists see them as the source of unrelieved class conflict, but many expect that that will culminate in socialism. Appetite and instrumental reason are foundational to both paradigms but developed in a diametrically opposed direction. For liberals, greed is a source of cooperation and peace, and for Marxists, the principal cause of war.

Realism is premised on fear-based worlds being the default. The anarchic nature of the international environment is said to make countries and their leaders fearful for their survival. This fear prompts arms build-ups, alliances, and balancing against perceived aggressors. John Herz (1950) theorized that these actions can make fears for security self-fulfilling in the absence of any aggressor because every state aims for a military advantage, and this quest can convince others of its malign intentions. In his view, this ‘security dilemma,’ and not anarchy, is what makes international relations so fear-generating war-prone. Realism has given rise to numerous variants and competing theories, but almost all rest of these assumptions ( Jervis 1978 ; Waltz 1979 ).

Classical realism is the exception. This tradition originates with Thucydides and finds modern expression in the writings of Hans Morgenthau (1948) and Ned Lebow (2003 , 2008 ). Classical realists do not attribute fear-dominated worlds to anarchy, in the sense of international politics being different by reason of its lack of government. They describe domestic and international politics as taking place within societies where behaviour is more governed by norms and habits than it is by empirical laws. When society breaks down because of the lack of constraint by powerful actors, it becomes anarchical. The logic of anarchy in modern realism assumes that those who are weak are the most threatened in fear-based world. They are also the most likely to balance or bandwagon. The breakdown of nomos thesis in classical realism suggests that it is elite actors who set escalatory processes in motion, and because they are overconfident, not fearful. The history of the last two centuries provides numerous examples of this phenomenon at the domestic and international levels. Multiple failed bids for hegemony by Spain, France, Germany are cases in point.

In traditional spirit-based worlds—those dominated by warrior elites—wars tend to be frequent but limited in their ends and means. Many of these societies (e.g., Greeks, Aztecs, Maoris) waged wars in conformity with a strict set of rules. In fear-based worlds wars may be less frequent but are more unrestrained in their ends and means and correspondingly more costly. They are also more difficult to prevent by deterrence and alliances, the stock-and-trade realist tools of conflict management. One of the most revealing aspects of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War is the absolute failure of all alliances and all forms of deterrence intended to prevent war. They almost invariably provoked the behaviour they were intended to prevent ( Lebow 2013 ; Thucydides 1996 ). General and immediate deterrence have failed more often than they succeeded in modern times for the same reasons; they tend to confirm worst-case fears of their targets, convincing them of the need to demonstrate more, not less, resolve, in the equally false expectation that it would deter their adversaries from further aggressive initiatives ( Lebow 1981 , chapts. 4–6; Chang 1990 ; Chen 2001 ; Hopf 1994 ). When target actors are focused on the own problems or goals, and commit to challenges or the use of force, deterrence is likely to fail. This is most apparent when challenges are need-based, but sometimes also apparent when they are purely aggressive and opportunistic. In both situations, would-be initiators of crises or wars are motivated to deny, distort, explain away or discredit obvious signs of adversarial resolve (Lebow 1983, chapts. 4–6; Jervis, Lebow, and Stein 1984 , chapts. 3 and 5; Lebow and Stein 1994 , chapt. 3). For these reasons deterrence is least likely to succeed in those circumstances where modern realists and strategic analysis consider it most needed and appropriate.

Fear-driven worlds are the opposite of honour and interest worlds in that they are like lobster traps: easy to enter and difficult to leave. Once fear is aroused it is hard to assuage. Worst-case analysis, endemic to fear-based worlds, encourages actors to see threat in even the most benign and well-meaning gestures. This creates a snowball effect, making fears of such worlds self-fulfilling. Actors who contemplate steps toward trust and accommodation rightfully worry that others will misunderstand their intent or exploit their concessions. Pure fear-based worlds are few and far between, but most political units for most of their history have had to worry to some degree about their security. For this reason, realists see fear-driven worlds as the condition to which human societies inevitably return. History gives ample cause for pessimism—but also for optimism. Competition for colonies in the late nineteenth century, sought primarily for reasons of standing, got out of hand, led to increasingly unrestrained competition in the Balkans and pushed the European powers toward World War I. Beggar-thy-neighbour policies during the Great Depression reveal how quickly a partially liberal trading world can be destroyed ( Kindleberger 1973 ). Europe’s phenomenal economic and political recovery after World War II, based in large part on the consolidation of democracy in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, has transformed that continent in ways that would have been dismissed out of hand as idle dreams if offered as a prediction as late as the early 1950s.

Classical realism ( Lebow 2003 ) puts as much emphasis on spirit as a motive as fear. It recognizes that it is powerful states, not weak ones, who most often feel humiliated. They are much more likely than weak ones to go to war to gain status or revenge. My explanation for this phenomenon draws on Plato ( Plato 1996 , 440c-441c) and Aristotle’s understanding of anger ( Aristotle 1984c , 387a31-33, 1378b10-11, 138,024–29). It is provoked by a an oligōria , which can be translated as a slight, lessening or belittlement. Such a slight can issue from an equal but provokes even more anger when it comes from an actor who lacks the standing to challenge or insult us—consider the American response to the Arab terrorists who took down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. Anger is a luxury that can only be felt by those in a position to seek revenge.

Modern realists maintain that survival is the overriding goal of all states, just as domestic politics explanations assert that it is for leaders ( Waltz 1979 , 92; Mearsheimer 2001 , 46). This is not true of honor societies, where honor has a higher value. Achilles spurned a long life in favor of an honorable death that brings fame. For Homer and the Greeks fame allows people to transcend their mortality. Great deeds carry one’s name and reputation across the generations where they continue to receive respect and influence other actors. In the real world, not just in Greek and medieval fiction, warriors, leaders and sometimes, entire peoples, have opted for honor over survival. We encounter this phenomenon in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe and Japan. In A Cultural Theory of International Relations , I document how such considerations were important for leaders and peoples from post-Westphalian Europe to the post-Cold War world. Perhaps the most compelling case is the origins of World War I, where defense of honour and the status that went with it, was the principal motive that prompted Austrian and Russian leaders to act in ways they knew threatened the survival of their respective empires ( Lebow 2003 , chapt. 7).

To summarize, honour-based societies experience conflict about who is ‘recognized’ and allowed to compete for standing; the rules governing agon or competition, the nature of the deeds that confer standing and the actors who assign honour, determine status, and adjudicate competing claims. Tracking the relative intensity of conflict over these issues and the nature of the changes or accommodations to which they lead provide insight into the extent to which honour and standing remain primary values in a society and its ability to respond to internal and external challenges.

Real worlds are mixed in that all four motives are usually to some degree present. Real worlds are also lumpy in that the mix of motives differs from actor to actor and often within their elites. Multiple motives generally mix rather than blend, giving rise to a range of behaviours that appear inconsistent, even contradictory. It is nevertheless possible to identify primary motives in many instances and establish through qualitative and quantitative analysis their relative importance for war.

3 Empirical Evidence

In A Cultural Theory of International Relations ( 2008 ), I developed a paradigm of politics and international relations based on the spirit. I spelled out its different logic from realism, liberalism, and Marxism, with regard to cooperation, conflict, and risk taking. I documented its relevance to foreign policy in case studies ranging from ancient Greece to the present century. The Greek, Macedonian, Roman, and Carolingian cases might be considered the easy ones because thumos and the quest for honour is widely understood as central to these cultures. This is thought less true in modern era, where appetite is believed to have replaced spirit as the dominant human motive. Nineteenth and twentieth century wars thus constitute the ‘hard cases’ for my theory. I nevertheless believe that I demonstrated the primacy of the spirit for the initiators of the two World Wars and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

I subsequently put together a data set to allow quantitative evaluation of my theory ( Lebow 2010 , chapt. 3). It included all wars since 1648—the conventional starting data of the modern era in international relations—that involved at least one or more great or rising powers. I defined as precisely as possible what constituted a great or rising power, and also a declining great power. For coding these categories I relied on standard historical treatments and consultations with prominent historians. I did the same when coding for initiators of my 94 wars, the motives of initiators, and the outcomes of the wars they started. I used two indicators of success: military victory, and a more restrictive criterion based on the Clausewitzian maxim that war is an extension of politics by other means. Success is the ability of initiators to achieve their political goals. Where there was a controversy among historians about any category of coding—as there was in a limited number of cases—I used multiple codings to see if they made any significant difference.

The data indicate patterns of war initiation strikingly at odds with the expectations of realist, power transition and rational theories of war.

The most aggressive states are rising powers seeking recognition as great powers and dominant powers attempting to achieve hegemony . There were 119 initiators of 94 wars, as some wars had multiple initiators or multiple components with different initiators. Dominant powers account for 24 initiations and rising powers for 27. Together they are responsible for 47 of my 94 wars (there were co-initiators of 4 wars), or 46 percent of the wars fought between 1648 and 2003. Great powers initiated 49 wars (52 percent), less than half of which were against a dominant or another great power. Great power wars against dominant powers were most often in alliance with other great powers and part of a collective effort to keep a dominant power from achieving hegemony ( Lebow 2010 , chapt. 4).

Equally revealing are their motives states have for starting wars. As some initiators had multiple motives, there are more motives (107) than wars (94). Standing, which I credit as the motives for 62 wars, or 58 percent of the total, is by far the most common motive. It is followed by security (19 cases = 18 percent), revenge (11 = 10 percent), interest (8 = 7 percent) and other (7 = 7 percent). The eighteenth century is commonly considered the great era of dynastic rivalry in which rulers went to war for honour and standing. However, there is only irregular variation in the percentage of wars caused by standing across the centuries. Eleven of 16 wars were motivated by standing in the eighteenth century, 21 of 24 in the nineteenth century and 17 of 31 in the twentieth. Standing is consistently a leading motive, something not true of other motives. Security is a decidedly more important motive for war in the twentieth century, where it is a dominant or contributing motive for 11 wars, and only a total of nine in earlier centuries. Six of 9 wars motivated by interest took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when mercantilism was the accepted economic wisdom and leaders believed that the wealth of the world was finite. Most wars of revenge took place in the eighteenth century. The category of other is relatively uniform and it is difficult to offer generalizations about its diverse causes, although, as I noted earlier, most, if not all of them can ultimately be reduced to fear, interest or standing at the domestic level ( Lebow 2010 , chapt. 4).

Whilst standing is a consistent motive for war it is not uniform in its manifestations. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it found expression within a context of dynastic rivalry; rulers sought to achieve gloire through conquest. Many of the rulers of this era personally led their armies into battle (e.g., Louis XIV, Frederick I and II, Peter the Great), greatly enhancing their claims to gloire . By the nineteenth century this had changed; Napoleon was the last major ruler to appear regularly on the battlefield. The search for standing increasingly became a national concern, even in countries like Germany and Austria that could hardly be considered democratic. Foreign policymaking elites were still overwhelmingly aristocratic in origin and perhaps more intensely committed to gaining or maintaining national honour now that traditional honor codes held less sway in interpersonal relations. Public opinion identified strongly with national states, also in countries where the intelligentsia and middle classes were kept at the peripheries of power and the status hierarchy. This phenomenon became more pronounced in the twentieth century and was a principal cause of World War I ( Lebow 2008 , 305–70).

Security has always been an important concern in international relations. My data nevertheless indicate that it is not a major cause of wars among the great powers. Only 19 of 94 wars appear to have been motivated by security all or in part. Seven of 18 initiators who appear to have acted out of concern for their security were also motivated by standing. World War I is a case in point. I contend that standing was a principal motive for German and Austrian leaders, while more conventional interpretations stress security ( Lebow 2008 , chapt. 7). Most of other nine war initiations I code as security-driven can confidently be attributed to this motive. They include the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviet attack in the same year on the Japanese Kwantung Army in Mongolia ( Lebow 2010 , chapt. 4). The relative insignificance of security as a motive is to some degree an artifact of my data set. I examine war initiation and, as we have seen, security only infrequently motivates initiators. It is unquestionably a primary concern for states who are the targets of their attacks.

Wars among the great powers are most often the result of miscalculation leading to unintended escalation . My data set includes nine wars among dominant and great powers. They account for about 90 percent of the casualties caused by great powers wars over the last five centuries ( Levy 1983 , chapt. 4).

Initiators lost all the systemic wars they began. There are two principal reasons for this remarkable outcome. In 6 of 9 wars, it was the result of miscalculated escalation. Initiators sought to win short, isolated wars against weaker powers. Their aggressions provoked the intervention of other powers and ultimately led to their defeat. The second and related reason is military: initiators were not powerful enough to defeat the states they attacked or the coalitions they aroused against them.

Miscalculation of the balance of power or the likelihood of escalation has deeper causes than incomplete information . Rationalist, realist, and neorealist theories acknowledge the role of miscalculation in war initiation. They nevertheless assume that would-be initiators make reasonable efforts to assess the military balance and to devise strategies to design around the military advantages of opponents. Rational actors can still miscalculate because the political-military environment is often difficult to read. Leaders cannot know the resolve and military capability of adversaries with certainty, or the likelihood that public opinion and allies will rally to their support of states that are attacked. War, as Clausewitz (1832/1996 , 119–22) famously observed, is characterized by friction and chance. Even in a world of incomplete information, rational leaders ought to have a better-than-even chance of getting it right if they gather pertinent information, assess its implications, and pre-emption aside, start wars only when they consider the likelihood of success to be high. The empirical record tells a different story. All but one initiator of a war that escalated into a systemic war ended up a loser. The figure is even higher for wars fought since 1945 for wars. Some eighty percent of initiators lost the wars they began, and an even higher percentage failed to achieve the goals for which they went to war ( Lebow and Valentino 2009 ).

What explains this anomaly? Case studies indicate two principal causes for both kinds of decisional failures. The first is motivated bias . Leaders facing a combination of strategic and domestic threats they believe can only be surmounted by war, or a challenge to adversary that raises the prospect of war, must reduce the anxiety associated with a decision to move forward. They generally do so by denying the risk associated with their policies. They solicit supporting information and encouragement from subordinates and intelligence agencies and become insensitive to information, even warnings, that their policies may, or are likely to, lead to disaster ( Janis and Mann 1977 ; 57–8, 197–233). Lebow (1981) and Stein, Snyder and Lebow (1984; Lebow and Stein 1994 ) documented this kind of motivated bias in a number of crisis decisions, including Germany, Austria and Russia in 1914, the US decision to cross the 38th parallel in Korea in 1950, India’s ‘Forward Policy,’ that provoked its 1961 border conflict with China, Khrushchev’s decision in 1962 to secretly deploy missiles in Cuba, Israel’s intelligence failure in October 1973, and Argentina’s in its invasion of the Falklands/Malvinas in 1982. Minimal or self-serving risk assessment is also typical of actors seeking honour or standing, which can only be won by assuming great risks.

Secondly , anger can have the same effect. It enters the picture when leaders believe they or their state has been slighted. I documented its critical role in the Austro-Hungarian decision in 1914 and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2004 ( Lebow 1981 , chapt. 4; Lebow 2008 , chapt. 9) where anger, associated with a concern for honour, combined to produce rash and ill-considered initiatives. Historical accounts indicate evidence for this phenomenon in Louis XIV’s wars against the Netherlands and the Rhineland-Palatinate, the Wars of the Second and Third Coalitions and the Crimean War ( Lebow 2008 , chapt. 6).

Rational and offensive and defensive realist theories impute too much instrumental reason to actors. Leaders capable and willing to make the kinds of calculations rational theories require would also attempt to make serious estimates of the risks of war and, extraordinary situations aside, not resort to force unless the evidence indicated they had a high chance of achieving their political goals. In practice, initiators win slightly less than half of the wars they begin. They won 46, lost 45, drew 3. We can count the American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq as additional defeats. Of the victories won by rising, great and dominant powers, 26 were against weak or declining powers. Even these wars can escalate into wider, unanticipated and undesired wars against great or dominant powers. In almost every case where such escalation occurred, leaders of the initiator were to varying degrees insensitive to the risks of escalation and ended up losing the war. Initiators lost all 9 of the systemic wars they provoked. Initiators of all kinds appear to do a relatively poor job of estimating the military balance. Evidence from cases studies indicates a general tendency to overrate one’s own military capability and to underestimate that of adversaries. Many initiators also expect their adversary to fight the kind of war they themselves are prepared to fight and win and are surprised when they resort to alternative strategies. As noted, this phenomenon has become even more pronounced since 1945 ( Lebow and Valentino 2009 ).

The behaviour most strikingly at odds with rational theories of war, but consistent with classical realism, is the aggressiveness of dominant powers. Dominant states are generally not content with their status and authority. They seek more power through additional conquests and by doing so hope to be able to impose their preferences on others. Habsburg Spain, France under Louis XIV and Napoleon, Wilhelminian and Nazi Germany, and the United States in the post-Cold War era are cases in point. None of these states were seriously threatened by rising powers or coalitions of great powers. They went to war because they thought they were powerful enough to become more powerful still. For relatively little prospective gain, they took great risks. These powers consistently defied the expectations of prospect theory. Aggressive dominant powers sought to control the European continent, if not the world. More troubling still for rational theories, their goals were clearly unrealistic. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth rightly observe that one of the enduring tragedies of great power politics “is precisely when decision-makers believe they can ignore counterbalancing constraints that they are most likely to call them forth with overambitious foreign policies” ( Brooks and Wohlforth 2008 , 26).

The realist concept of the security dilemma finds little support. Only 19 wars were (according to my data) motivated by security. War, however, may not be the most appropriate test of the security dilemma. John Herz (1950) , who introduced the concept, maintained that states only launched pre-emptive wars in extremis . Defensive realists attempt to define conditions, actual or perceptual, in which this occurs. The security dilemma may be responsible for insecurity, military build ups and the conflicts that result; I cannot use my data to evaluate this proposition. The data do suggest that the security dilemma can at most be responsible for only a few wars as security was the motive for less than 20 percent of great power wars. During the Cold War, the only so-called bipolar era in modern times, superpowers were as acutely sensitive to the loss and gain of Allies and clients as they were in eras of bipolarity. Such behaviour makes sense if we posit great power leaders as at least as much concerned with the effects on their standing, as they are with any military or economic benefits or costs from band wagoning or defection.

The logic of the security dilemma indicates that the most threatened states should be the weakest ones. More powerful states should feel less threatened, and dominant powers less threatened still. Kenneth Waltz (1979 , 169–70) relies on this last inference for his claim that bi-polar systems are more stable and less war prone than their multi-polar counterparts. Because the two poles are so powerful vis a vis everyone else, they are that much more secure and less affected by the addition or defection of third parties to or from their respective blocs. My data ( Lebow 2010 , chapt. 4) offer no support for this eminently logical conjecture, quite the reverse. Six of the 19 wars motivated by security took place during the Cold War and all but one of them involved a superpower.

Balance of power theories ( Kaufman, Little, and Wohlforth 2007 ; Morgenthau 1948 ; Waltz 1979 ) assume that security is, or should be, the first concern of all states because of the anarchical nature of the international environment. Threat arises from the environment itself in the form of the security dilemma or from the ambitions of predatory states. Either phenomenon encourages states to augment their military capability and form alliances to deter would be-aggressors. Following Morgenthau (1948 , 125, 155–9, 162–6), realists assume that war is least likely when the status quo powers have a clear military advantage and a demonstrable will to use force to maintain the status quo. Conversely, war is most likely when an ‘imperialist’ power, to use Morgenthau’s language, or a coalition of them, have a military advantage or the status quo powers, for whatever reason, are unable to combine against them.

The data indicate mixed support at best for balance of power theories. Unfavourable balances of power fail to deter states seeking hegemony but do prevent their victories. This claim must be advanced with some caution because my data set does not include ‘non-wars’ that might have been deterred by an unfavourable balance of power, buttressed perhaps by effective practice of immediate deterrence. What emerges from this data set and other studies is a striking pattern of miscalculated escalation by great and dominant powers and their failure to win any of the systemic wars for which they are responsible ( Jervis, Lebow, and Stein 1984 ; Kaufman, Little, and Wohlforth 2007 ; Lebow 2010 ). This outcome speaks well for balancing as a measure of last resort, but not of war prevention.

The evidence for standing as a motive for war is strong. Standing ( n = 62) accounted for 58 percent of the total motives ( n = 109), putting it far ahead of security ( n = 20, 18 percent), other ( n = 7, 6 percent), revenge ( n = 11, 10 percent) and interest ( n =8, 7 percent). It is the leading motive in every century of the almost four centuries included in the data set. Revenge, like standing, is an expression of thumos or spirit. Together, standing and revenge account for 73 of 107 motives. They are responsible for 68 percent of all wars ( Lebow 2010 , chapt. 4). These figures strike me as significant. The importance of standing as a motive of war may help explain the remarkable failure of so many initiators to make reasonable assessments of the military balance and the likelihood of escalation.

From the very beginning of civilization in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean basin individuals and political units have gained honour and standing through military prowess and secondarily through what Veblen (1934) calls conspicuous consumption. For almost the entire period of the data set, powers became great because of the military and economic might. In the late nineteenth century, war began to lose some of its appeal. This process accelerated after both world wars. Various European and non-European rising powers have been attempting, with some success, to claim standing on the basis of other criteria ( Lebow 2008 , 480–504). In the post-war period, Germany, Japan and now China have sought standing primarily by non-military means. This development seems long overdue as one of the defining characteristics of modernity is the opening of multiple pathways to honour and standing. To the extent that war is increasingly held in ill-repute, other means of claiming status will become more prominent and the frequency of war should decline.

4 Russia and Ukraine

Multiple analysts describe Vladimir Putin as a man with a mission. He sees himself as the descendants of Stalin, Lenin, and the czars, all committed to making Russia a great power, and its successor, the Soviet Union, a world power. As Lenin and the Bolsheviks sought to restore the territory of the former Russian Empire after the Civil War, so Putin is committed to restoring much of the former territory of the Soviet Union and, by doing so, making Russia a more respected and powerful player on the world stage ( Hill and Gaddy 2017 ; Kotkin 2022 ). He is also much taken by traditional conceptions of ruskii mir (Russian world) adopted by Russian nationalists, who believe all Russian speaking people should be united in one state ( Curanovic 2021 ; Laruelle 2015 ; Suslov 2020 ). Putin is on record as declaring the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century ( ABC 2005 ). Stephen Kotkin (2022) suggests that Putin’s aggression arises from the combination of the weakness of post-Soviet Russia and memories of its quest for grandeur. It produced “this paradoxical person who becomes more anti-Western than he was because the West is so powerful and Russia is so weak.”

Putin and those around him view Ukraine and Belarus differently from other former republics of the Soviet Union. They are culturally and linguistically more akin to Russia, and key events in Russian history took place on their territory. Kiev was the first capital of the Russian state and is considered a sacred place by Russian Orthodox Christians. Ukraine is also important by virtue of its population, strategic location, and grain and industrial production. For all these reasons, Russian nationalists have never accepted Ukrainian claims to be a separate people with a right to their own country. Ukrainian nationalism was brutally suppressed by Stalin, and Putin has modelled himself on the former dictator. Under his leadership, Russia reannexed Crimea and lent military support to Russian nationalists in eastern Ukraine who sought to break away and join Russia. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is an extension of this policy. Putin declared that Ukraine is not a neighbouring country, but “an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space” ( Reid 2022 ).

Viewed in this light, the principal motive for this war is spirit. Putin was consumed by anger at the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. He downplayed or ignored the extent to which this was attributable to the contradictions of communism and the Soviet state and its repressive policy towards non-Russian nationalities. He exaggerated the West’s role in the Soviet collapse and no doubt believes his often-repeated assertions that the United States is committed to the further weakening of Russia. Putin feels slighted by the West, seethes with anger, and seeks revenge. Invading Ukraine is a means to this end and of asserting Russian power. Putin was intent on rebuilding the Soviet empire as was feasible and gaining the same kind of figurative immortality as Peter the Great, Lenin, and Stalin.

Putin’s anger is also focused on Ukraine. He is prepared to accept the independence of Belarus because it is only de jure . In practice, the country and its dictator are under Putin’s thumb. Belarus participated in the invasion of Ukraine; its leader, dependent on Putin to stay in power, follows his orders. Putin sought a similar arrangement with Ukraine. It was briefly achieved during the presidency of Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych (2002–05), now in exile in Russia. He rejected closer ties with the EU in favor of those with Russia. The Ukrainian parliament removed him from office and he fled the country ( Wilson 2014 ). Ukraine’s turn toward the West and continuing assertion of cultural independence is a second unacceptable slight in Putin’s eyes. What Putin really fears is democracy. His complaints about NATO track nicely with pro-democratic developments in the Soviet near abroad—especially in Belarus and Ukraine. His declared goal of the invasion, the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, is a cover for anti-democratic regime change ( Person and McFaul 2022 ).

Deeply committed to integrating Ukraine into Russia, Putin convinced himself that his goal was realistic and readily achievable. Ukrainians would not resist, and many would welcome invading Russian forces. He dismissed the capability and commitment of Ukraine’s army to defend their country. These delusions help to explain why the Russian army was so uninformed and unprepared. The intended scenario was a lightning occupation of the country and its capital with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky killed or forced to flee the country. Putin and at least some of his advisors were so committed to this scenario and so blind to the likely response of Ukrainians because effective resistance was utterly inconsistent with their deeply held belief that Ukrainians were not a people, Ukraine not a country, and its army not a worthy opponent. They were correspondingly resistant to information that called these beliefs into question. Putin has been in power for twenty years and has become the classic autocrat, whose skilful manipulation of elites accounts for his political longevity, but also the brittle nature of his personalist dictatorship ( Frye 2021 ). He has surrounded himself with civilian, military, and intelligence lackeys ( Kotkin 2022 ). He has bought their loyalty by letting many rob the Russian state and people of resources ( Belton 2020 ; Dawisha 2015 ). He has narrowed the circle of his advisors to a few like-minded and subservient men from the security services ( Belton 2020 ). Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu is a long-time crony with no military background ( Curanovic 2021 ). Even if some of these officials had doubts about this venture, they almost certainly kept them to themselves. Thus, we have another example of the classic situation I described and documented in earlier books: a leader committed to a thoroughly unrealistic foreign policy who is not only deeply resistant to information warning him of the dangers involved but who has rigged the feedback networks so no such information is brought to his attention.

Were other motives in play? It is possible that domestic political considerations help drive his aggressive foreign policies ( McFaul 2020 ). Putin’s popularity increased significantly in the aftermath of the short war with Georgia and the occupation of the Crimea. Polls suggest that his popular support had declined significantly in past few years, and he may have thought that another close to bloodless foreign policy success would boost his standing ( Wilson 2017 ). But at most, I believe, this was regarded by him as an extra benefit of attacking Ukraine not a reason to do so.

To what extent was invasion a response to provocations by Ukraine or the West? Some analysts hold the West partially responsible for what has happened ( Charap and Colton 2017 ; Taylor 2018 , 170–9; Breslauer 2022 ). The most extreme version of this argument, and the one to receive the widest attention in the media, is made by John Mearsheimer (2014 ; Chotiner 2022 ). He argues that the West threatened Putin to the point where he saw war as his only alternative. NATO enlargement in the east, Western support for the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine, were directly threatening to ‘core strategic interests’ of Russia. The ‘final straw’ was the ‘illegal’ overthrow of Ukraine’s President Yanukovych. In its immediate aftermath, Putin occupied the Crimea. Mearsheimer is undoubtedly correct in thinking that Putin was deeply offended by these Western actions, the democratization of Ukraine, and its overthrow of an utterly corrupt leader who was taking the country in direction opposed by most of its people. But he exaggerates the extent to which any of this posed a strategic threat to Russia. No Western combat forces were stationed in any of the new members of NATO. There military forces were weak and trained for defensive strategies. There was no Western intention to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. NATO as a whole, and Germany especially, had reduced defence spending. The threat posed by the West was political, economic, and cultural, not strategic. Mearsheimer’s brand of realism blinds him and his followers to the real causes of Putin’s anger that have to do with the status of his country and, by extension, his standing as a leader.

Mearsheimer is not alone in treating Putin as a rational and calculating leader ( Sakwa 2015 ). This is even more questionable. As noted, Putin is guilty of the most serious political and military miscalculations. These errors were not due to lack of information but unwillingness to examine and make reasonable inferences on information readily available to ordinary observers. Putin also misjudged the Western response, but here he might in part be forgiven. The West did very little in response to Russia’s use of force in Georgia, occupation of the Crimea, and use of its military in support of Russian nationalists in eastern Ukraine. The sanctions it imposed, while not quite laughable, were readily circumvented, and might be dismissed as more for show than real. This was not true of the initial unified response to the invasion of Ukraine. The sanctions this time around were for real and have seriously affected oligarchs supportive of Putin and the Russian people at large. Equally unexpected was military support for Ukraine, and at a level that has allowed it to halt the Russian offensive. As this article goes to press, Western aid, training, weapons, ammunition, and intelligence information be giving Ukraine a battlefield advantage.

Putin viewed the West “decadent, but self-corrupting, self-flagellating” and unlikely to respond in a significant way to his invasion of Ukraine ( Kotkin 2022 ). He may also have inferred Western inaction on the basis of its acceptance of his invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. Linear projection is always questionable, and especially in international relations. The Ukraine invasion represents a radical departure from Putin’s prior actions. Crimea did have a 75 percent majority Russian population and was historically part of Russia from 1783 until Nikita Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in 1954 for domestic political reasons ( Kramer 2022 ). Eastern Ukraine also had a large Russian population, and Putin was careful to provide some political cover to his operations there arguing that the military forces there were Russian ‘volunteers’ ( Wilson 2014 , 129–30, 134–35, 140–41). His invasion involved Russian forces, in massive numbers. It was the first act of territorial aggression in postwar Europe, and against a democratic state. It violated a long-standing norm and aroused enormous popular opposition. So did Russian military strategy, especially the deliberate shelling of civilians and numerous atrocities against them. To almost everyone’s surprise, Germany did an about-face, supported sanctions, and committed itself to supplying weapons to Ukraine. Cracks in the Western coalition are beginning to show, but Russia has been militarily humiliated and politically and economically isolated.

This kind of miscalculation, I noted earlier, is typical of authoritarian leaders or elites who embark upon aggressive foreign policies. Cases in point are bids for European hegemony by Philip II, Louis XIV, and Napoleon, and Japan’s attack on China in 1937 and against the Western powers in 1941, and Hitler’s bid for world conquest. To varying degrees, each of these madcap and costly initiatives brought also about the opposite results of those intended. This is also true of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. NATO has been strengthened, its members are spending more on defence, traditionally neutral Finland and Sweden have applied to join NATO. Instead of dividing the West, Putin has united it. Instead of conquering the Ukraine, he has helped solidify its democracy and pro-Western orientation. Instead of demonstrating Russian military power, he has exposed his country’s military weakness, bad leadership, and strategy. Instead of strengthening his standing abroad and power at home, he has undermined both. If Putin holds on to the territories partially occupied before the war by Russian ‘volunteers,’ he may claim victory and some Russians may believe in. The analogy here is to Khrushchev claiming victory in the aftermath of the missile crisis on the basis of Kennedy’s pledge not to invade Cuba. Hardly anybody was fooled and Khrushchev’s days were numbered.

5 Conclusions

What are the implications of Ukraine for international relations theory? I offer epistemological and conceptual observations. They begin with the recognition of the frequent irrationality of the leaders and the shoddy nature of the policymaking process in countries that draw the sword. Leaders and their advisors do not collect good intelligence, evaluate what information they have on hand, or make careful assessments of the likely short- and longer-term costs and gains of their proposed initiatives. Rather, they plunge into deep water trusting their instinct, skill, perceived righteousness of their cause, and perhaps, their luck. Not surprisingly, they fail or even meet with disaster far more often than they achieve success. The substantive and instrumental irrationality of Vladimir Putin is the norm, not the exception.

Wars are about security for those who are attacked, but this is rarely so for the initiator. My data set indicates that most wars are begun for reasons of standing, honour, or revenge . These motives account in part for the failure to conduct careful and comprehensive evaluations of the risks and possible costs of war. This pattern of behavior indicates that rationalism and modern realism bring inappropriate assumptions to the study of war.

Many realists contend that the world is a nasty place because of the anarchy of the international environment. They further argue that liberals and constructivists have a misplaced and dangerous faith in institutions and norms. John Mearsheimer (2001 ; 2014 ; Chotiner 2022 ) has banged on this drum for many years. If Putin were allowed to get away with his attempted conquest of Ukraine, if NATO had fragmented rather than congealed in response, and if China had become likely to attack Taiwan as a result, realists would have a powerful argument. Despite all efforts at strengthening regional and international institutions, international law, and binding nations together through trade and investment, the world would resemble the 1930s redux. However, if Russia is forced back to its military starting line, and Putin ultimately removed from power because of his abject defeat, NATO enlarged and strengthen, and China more cautious because of all these developments, international norms and institutions will have been strengthened. So too will the norm against war and territorial conquest. It is too early to render a verdict, but there are some grounds for optimism.

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Statement on Russia’s War against Ukraine

We at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University are horrified by the Russian military attack on Ukraine and the pain and suffering it is imposing on Ukrainians and all those who hold them dear. 

The attempt by the Russian president to resolve longstanding grievances with both the Ukrainian government and the post–Cold War international order through violence is a grave mistake. The future historians of Russia, Europe, and Eurasia will describe this dark moment as a regrettable, avoidable turning point of twenty-first century geopolitics.

Since our founding as the Russian Research Center, the Davis Center has sought to understand Russia and the broader Eurasian region with all the tools scholarship has to offer. Not surprisingly, in 75 years we have grown into a community with close ties to the region we study. The social scientists, humanists, and artists in our midst have spent time, energy, and emotion building relationships with these countries and the people who love them. It is devastating to see the Russian government turn against its neighbor Ukraine, with whom it shares part—though far from all—of its history. 

The present-day Davis Center fosters understanding through dialogue, research, and scholarly exchange. Although geopolitical harmony has eluded us for many decades, we have always hoped for and promoted peaceful mutual understanding. Simmering violence in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere in the post-Soviet world has been alarming for years, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a definitive change in the political trajectory of the region. 

The Davis Center stands with the people of Ukraine and with the many people around the world who are and will be harmed by this war.

Rawi Abdelal Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management, Harvard Business School Director, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

Alexandra Vacroux Executive Director, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

February 25, 2022

See also: Statement on Suspension of Linkages with Russian Institutions of Higher Education (March 9, 2022)  

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Home > ETDs > HONORS > 46

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The issue of enforcement in international law: a case study of the war in ukraine.

Luana M. Denegre , University of San Francisco Follow

Date of Award

Spring 5-19-2023

Degree Type

Honors Thesis

International Studies

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

First Advisor

Professor John Zarobell

This thesis seeks to outline ways to enforce international law more effectively. Through the analysis of the current international legal framework and the different mechanisms created to enforce international law, it identifies why they are insufficient to enforce international law effectively, and it gives recommendations to ameliorate the way international law is currently enforced. This research focuses on the ongoing war in Ukraine as a case study, and provides specific examples of ways international law was grossly violated by Russia, a U.N. permanent Security Council member, in order to identify patterns in the non-enforcement of international law. To bridge the gap in the literature regarding the conflict in Ukraine, this thesis looks at information from social media, as well as testimonies from people in Ukraine. It identifies the impunity gap and the lack of corporate accountability as the two main areas of focus for the enforcement of international law. The research suggests the implementation of a shared governance model, the creation of more regional organizations, and more cooperation and transparency between national and international legal/judicial systems to strengthen the effective enforcement of international law. Moreover, it proposes to include corporations into the international legal framework to address corporate impunity.

Recommended Citation

Denegre, Luana M., "The Issue of Enforcement in International Law: A Case Study of the War in Ukraine" (2023). Undergraduate Honors Theses . 46. https://repository.usfca.edu/honors/46

Since February 14, 2023

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Statement on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Let me begin by offering my thanks to the Davis Center and the Ukrainian Research Institute, its co-sponsors, and our panelists. Universities are built to bring people together, and technology has increased our capacity to draw audiences from around the world. This gathering exemplifies our convening strength—and its tremendous value.

On Friday, I wrote the director and executive director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute of my deep concern about the capricious and senseless invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the situation has deteriorated further. Over the weekend, members of our community rallied at the heart of our campus and spoke clearly and forcefully against the crisis.

Now is a time for all voices to be raised.

The deplorable actions of Vladimir Putin put at risk the lives of millions of people and undermine the concept of sovereignty. Institutions devoted to the perpetuation of democratic ideals and to the articulation of human rights have a responsibility to condemn such wanton aggression.

Harvard will continue to support in whatever ways we can members of our community who face grave uncertainty. We will continue to share knowledge of Ukraine and advance understanding of its culture, history, and language. And we will continue to speak against cruelty, and to act with compassion as we hold to hope for resolution—and for liberation. 

Today the Ukrainian flag flies over Harvard Yard.  Harvard University stands with the people of Ukraine.

Opening remarks at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University event, Rapid Response Panel: Ukraine Under Attack .