TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

20 October 2024: Fight, flight or freeze, plus texts and tunes

“The Demon Seated”, Mikhail Vrubel, 1890 | Tretyakov Gallery

First things first: apologies for missing a week. Life intervened, alas.

Second things second: Am I allowed a moment of shameless self-promotion? This past Thursday, I got to share a bit of air time with Ola Onuch, Michał Baranowski and Orla Barry on PRI’s The World, unpacking the implications of the upcoming US elections for Ukraine. For my money, at least, The World regularly puts together some of the smartest reports on critical issues, and it was both fun and an honor to be part of this one.

What I’m thinking about

The big news this past week was Wednesday’s presentation of Volodymyr Zelensky’s long-awaited victory plan to the Ukrainian parliament. Or, at least, it was meant to be. Politicians and commentators mostly either ignored it or criticized it as vague and toothless, until Israeli forces killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and the world once again forgot about Ukraine. With your permission, I’d like to spend a bit of time bucking both of those trends.

What Zelensky’s plan was not, was a detailed strategy for a military victory. As a DC colleague of mine is fond of saying (paraphrasing, I think, Thomas Edison), a vision without resources is hallucination. Ukraine does not have the military means to shift the tide in this war. It does not have those means because the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and others have not made those resources available. And so it is more than a bit rich for anyone in Washington, London, Berlin or Paris to complain that Zelensky has not provided a roadmap to victory. Zelensky, for all his faults, is the sober one in this conversation.

Rather than design a military strategy predicated on non-existent weapons, Zelensky put forward a five-part plan:

1. An immediate invitation for Ukraine to join NATO, with accession to occur after a durable cease-fire is in place;

2. A significant strengthening of Ukraine’s defensive capabilities, including permission to use Western weapons inside Russian territory to disrupt Russian offensives;

3. The creation of a strategic military (but non-nuclear) deterrent based on Ukrainian territory, to prevent renewed Russian aggression;

4. Strategic US and EU protection of and investment in Ukrainian natural resources; and

5. The integration of Ukraine’s defense capability into the European security architecture, including using Ukrainian troops to replace some US troops.

An additional set of proposals have been delivered, in secret, to key Western supporters, likely relating to point 2 above, and to tactical developments in the war.

Zelensky, of course, remains committed to the full eviction of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory, and his own military leadership and Western officials have said that they are aiming to boost both defensive and offensive capabilities in order to allow Ukraine to begin to retake territory by the middle of 2025. Indeed, much of the discussion of this victory plan has centered precisely on that commitment, with critics noting, again, the lack of any clear pathway to achieving those aims.

It’s worth noting, however, that, while the plan includes a refusal to cede territory to Russia, it does not actually include territorial restoration as one of the five pillars of victory. Some might see that as a fudge. I don’t. As I wrote back in late September, when the broad contours of this victory plan were mooted, Zelensky’s approach is focused on ensuring Ukrainian security and sovereignty regardless of what portion of its legally recognized territory Kyiv actually controls.

Let me put it this way. Faced with Russia’s invasion (and with apologies in advance for the metaphor), Ukraine has the same three basic response options as anyone who is chased by a bear in the forest: fight, flight or freeze.

Option one — fight — might seem like where we are, since Ukrainians clearly decided to fight, and not to flee or to freeze, back in February 2022. But, of course, Russian aggression is renewed daily, and so Ukrainians face the decision of whether or not to keep fighting on a daily basis. Continuing to choose the fight response, meanwhile, imposes a particular logic on the outcome of the war: it will only end when one side departs the field, either because it has lost the will to fight, or because it has lost the ability. Attrition aims to sap both will and ability, and the outcome is not only uncertain, but it depends on variables largely outside Ukraine’s control, including the willingness of Western governments to keep providing aid, their ability to impose and enforce sanctions on Russia, and the dynamics of Russian internal politics.

Option two — flight — is surrender. Unlikely as a collapse in Ukraine’s will to fight may seem, Ukrainian resilience is not metaphysical. Soldiers cannot be expected to hold out indefinitely and at any cost, particularly if shells and reinforcements become even more scarce than they already are. Civilians, too, can only bear so much. To be clear, no one I know envisages a scenario in which a collapse of the Ukrainian defense leads to the wholesale Russian occupation of the country. Surrender would be more subtle than that, but it would be no less pernicious, leaving the Ukrainian state and society broken, subject to Moscow’s continued dominion, and abandoned by those who once said “as long as it takes.”

Option three — freeze — is where many, including Zelensky, fear this conflict is really headed. To wit, a recent paper by Sam Charap and Miranda Priebe seems to encapsulate rising sentiment in some parts of the US and European foreign policy establishments. Russia, they argue, has already lost much, if not all, of what it sought to gain: Kyiv remains unconquered, NATO is united and larger (thanks to Finland and Sweden), and the West has begun rearming. Whatever additional Ukrainian territory Moscow might walk away with, Charap and Priebe suggest, would be hard for the Kremlin to spin as a victory unless the West spins it that way for them. This being the case, however, they go on to argue that once the fighting stops, the West should resist the temptation to bring Ukraine swiftly into NATO, or even to do so at all without first obtaining Russia’s consent, as such a move would be among the most likely potential triggers for full-scale war between Russia and NATO itself. Charap and Priebe genuinely don’t want Ukraine to lose — but they don’t quite want it to win, either.

Although articulated differently, the general approach taken by core NATO allies — to give Ukraine enough aid to avoid losing, but not enough to win, while kicking the NATO can as far down the road as possible — has the same effect. Zelensky and many others in Ukraine have been clear that a partial victory is only a defeat delayed: it sets up Ukraine for decades of dysfunction and domination, sowing the seeds of domestic discord and, eventually, more war. That, more than anything, is the outcome Ukrainians are most desperate to avoid.

And so the challenge for Zelensky and his compatriots is to alter the terms of the fight. Recognizing that so much of this war is outside his control — that he cannot force Western politicians and publics to send arms and money, that he cannot singlehandedly strangle the Russian war machine, and that there are only so many sacrifices his people can make — Zelensky has chosen to focus on the variables that matter most: the variables of what comes next. Without a strengthened military, without inclusion in the European security architecture, and without committed economic partners, no amount of territorial liberation will make Ukraine safe. But with those things, Ukraine will be safe regardless of how the rest of the war goes.

Maybe next year will be the critical turning point. Maybe it won’t. Maybe Ukrainians will have to wait generations to reclaim what is theirs. Or maybe longer. No one can know the answer to those questions. But Ukrainians in the meantime need to know that they will be able to rebuild their lives in peace. That’s the victory Zelensky is seeking. And that’s the victory that the West, if it wants to, can deliver.

What I’m reading

It’s a long list this week, so the bullet points are back, I’m afraid.

• The piece everyone was talking about this past week — and which I imagine you’ve already seen — is Peter Pomerantsev’s article in Foreign Affairs on how to attack Putin’s domestic legitimacy. The answer, he says, is to help Russians see that Putin’s not really in control, by playing up the chaos of events like the Prigozhin mutiny or the Wildberries affair or any number of other episodes. It’s intriguing, and there’s some analysis in the piece to back it up, but color me skeptical. By all indications, most Russians are already aware of these episodes, and of the fact that Putin failed to stop them from exploding. He has faced little observable consequence.

• On 7 October, Elena Panfilova, the former head of Transparency International-Russia and one of my favorite people to read, had a long piece in Novaya Gazeta on the feudalization of power in Russia. The idea of feudalization in Russia has been around since the early 2000s and, to be honest, I’ve always found it a problematic metaphor. Elena’s piece, however, is less focused on how elites have carved up the economy, and more on how the entirety of the state machinery increasingly sees citizens and their lives — from their economic activity to their social behavior to their reproduction — as a resource rightly belonging to the state.

• On 8 October, Carnegie’s Michael Kofman published a new report on how Russia’s military adapted in 2023. The resulting picture is of an army that remains committed to victory, but which is imposing an increasing cost on itself and on the Russian state and society in the process.

• Also on 8 October, Anastasia Manuilova reported in Kommersant on the difficulties Russian companies are having finding workers, in the face of the country’s increasingly draconian restrictions on labor migration.

• On 10 October, Maria Lisitsyina, Polina Khimshiashvili and Elena Sukhorukova had a fascinating report in RBK on the sense of abandonment pervading Russian farmers affected by the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk oblast. Unsurprisingly, they have their grievances towards the Ukrainians, but that is far from the point.

• On 14 October, my King’s College London colleague Ruth Deyermond published a monster thread on X Twitter, outlining the history of the failure of successive American administrations to take Russia seriously. Before you yelp, by “take Russia seriously,” she most certainly does not mean “let Russia have what it wants”. Rather, the failure she points to has been to recognize the degree of challenge — and threat — that Russia can actually pose.

• On 16 October, another KCL colleague, Ivan Grigoriev, published a paper together with Kirill Zhirkov in Business and Politics, showing how Russia’s economic elite began disengaging from politics at precisely the time that Putin began to consolidate authoritarian power in the late 2000s.

• Also on 16 October, CEPA published an intriguing paper by OSW’s Maria Domańska on the propensity of Western policymakers to assume that Russia’s strategic culture mirrors their own.

• And on 19 October, Meduza published three brief pieces that are beginning to call into question my analysis of ideology in Russia. In no particular order: The Tretyakov Gallery announced that it would close its modern art department, pregnant women in 16 Russian regions have begun receiving letters from Patriarch Kirill as part of an effort to reduce abortions, and prosecutors in Moscow declined (for the second time!) to open a case against two brothers who beat up an 87-year-old man because they thought he was saying bad things about PMC Wagner mercenaries. I’ve written before that, while ideology is clearly playing an increasingly important political role, I had yet to see it become a reliably material factor in shaping internecine competition, or in helping people navigate uncertain political waters. Something about these three episodes, however, is making me wonder whether that’s still true. I’ll think about it some more.

What I’m listening to

I’ve been in a bit of a nostalgic mood of late, so I was all ears when I came across this track. It’s unfair that Pomplamoose are probably best known for their viral mashup jam sessions (like this one, melding A-ha and Nena), because they’re incredibly talented. So are Lawrence, their collaborators here. (If you want something that rocks a little harder, check out their “Watcha Want”.) I grew up listening to Paul Simon, and I’ve never heard anyone do a cover I thought was any good. Until now.