TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

3 November 2024: Bonfire night, plus texts and tunes

Ok: Cards on the table. Most readers of this newsletter will know that I am both an American and a British citizen, and that I have reasonably strong views about politics in both of those countries. Regular readers will also, I think, have been able by now to form a good sense of how I hope the US election will be resolved on (or after) Tuesday night. I do not disown those views and hopes. They are mine, and I believe I come by them honestly.

That said, I have tried (maybe not always successfully) to prevent those views and hopes from clouding my analysis. I do not think I have shied away from criticizing members of my party when I think they are wrong, or from praising members of the opposing party when I think they get something right. More importantly, I have tried to avoid allowing the emotions that are often bound up in hope—emotions that can range from euphoria to bitter disappointment—from shaping my agenda.

Come what may on 5 November, my aim is for this newsletter to remain accessible and useful to those who are happy with the result, those who are outraged, and those who are somewhere in the middle. That does not mean that I will pull my punches, at least not any more than I usually do. But I may not go looking for a fight, a fact that may in turn irk some readers who are justifiably up in arms. If that’s you, please don’t cancel your (free) subscription!

What I’m thinking about

It is, of course, hard to think about much of anything these days beyond the US election. Unfortunately, that will only get worse in the days after this issue of the newsletter is published, and probably well beyond. So, there kind of wasn’t anything else I could have written about, I suppose.

What I’m not going to do—surprise!—is predict the outcome. For the sake of your own sanity, I’d highly suggest that you do the same. No one knows. No one can know. Forecasts, as is so often the case, tell us more about our own hopes and fears than they do about what we’re actually facing. Engaging in that sort of exercise is thus an odd and generally destructive form of psychotherapy, and—having indulged in it way too much in the past—I highly recommend steering clear.

I do, however, think it would be useful to spend a little bit of time thinking about what the various potential outcomes might mean for Ukraine, for Russia, and for Europe. Even as I say that, of course, I cringe. One of outcomes I’m going to explore will, of course, come to pass. The implications I assign to that outcome here thus amount to a prediction, and virtually all predictions, at least in political science, turn out to be wrong. So please take this for whatever it may be worth.

What if Trump wins?

The conventional wisdom in Washington, Kyiv, Europe and a lot of other places—maybe, or maybe not, including Moscow—is that a Donald Trump victory is a win for Russia and a loss for Ukraine. While I am not here to defend Trump in any way, I think that assumption needs re-examining.

I’ve said before (and repeatedly) that I don’t buy the idea that Trump will simply hand Ukraine to Russia. To be clear, Trump himself has never said that this is his intention, but it’s not unreasonable to think it might be. He has, after all, repeatedly claimed that he will bring the war to a negotiated solution extremely rapidly, perhaps within days of being elected (i.e., long before actually taking office). He and JD Vance have also been reasonably clear that they do not think continuing to provide military aid to Ukraine is a good idea. That, combined with the revelations of Trump’s post-White House interactions with Vladimir Putin, all conspire to suggest that, given the opportunity, Trump might well seek to negotiate Ukraine away.

The first problem for Trump in this equation, though, is that it’s not clear he would have the opportunity. As Sergey Radchenko pointed out recently, there is precious little reason for Putin to negotiate, and it’s not clear why that would change just because Trump is in the White House. Negotiations, even with Trump, aren’t likely to give Putin very much more than he has now, while continuing to fight leaves open the possibility of further gains. What’s more, there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that the realities of domestic politics and economics in Russia will make it highly problematic for Putin to end the war. It’s hard to imagine what Trump might be able to put on the table that would overcome those barriers to negotiation.

The second problem, meanwhile, is that even if negotiations were to begin, they’re unlikely to deliver a solution that either Trump or Putin could accept. Both men are transactional, and both place a heavy emphasis on winning, or at least being seen to win. Given the circumstances, it is far from clear that there is anything Putin could offer Trump in exchange for Ukraine that would allow Trump to emerge looking like a winner.

As a result, I’m reasonably confident that Trump would continue at least some level of support for Ukraine—but that doesn’t help me sleep any better. The reason for this anxiety comes down, again, to transactionalism. A Trump White House is likely to look for opportunities to use support for Ukraine as leverage in relations with Europe, extracting pounds of flesh from Washington’s NATO allies, or from Ukraine itself, much as was alleged in Trump’s first impeachment. That, in turn, would likely lead to delays in the delivery (if not the appropriation) of US aid to Ukraine, and a breakdown in transatlantic communication, all to the severe detriment of Ukraine’s war effort.

The impact of Trump’s transactionalism, meanwhile, goes well beyond Ukraine. European policymakers and analysts are already fretting over how he may reinsert himself into affairs in the Western Balkans, where hamfisted, unilateral interventions in his first term contributed to the re-ignition of violence between Serbia and Kosovo. One result may be the destabilization of a number of key conflict zones—including latent conflicts—around the European periphery, multiplying the vulnerabilities of Washington’s European allies and thus multiplying the opportunities for Washington to extract transactional ‘taxes’ from its European allies. The allies, in turn, may be expected to defend themselves by becoming increasingly proactive in their neighborhood (a good thing) and cutting the US out of processes where it might be disruptive (also not a bad thing, but one that is likely to provoke further retribution from Washington).

Taken together, then, this may not all point to an immediate loss for Ukraine, but if the US and Europe cannot reliably conduct the business of security, pursue the ramped-up defense-industrial renewal mooted by NATO capitals, and agree on what is and is not good for the community, it will look and feel a lot like a mid- to long-term win for Putin.

What if Harris wins?

Here, too, I think it’s important to puncture some elements of the conventional wisdom. For one thing, it is tempting and even common to see a Harris Administration as a redux of a Biden Administration, with all of the good and bad things that might imply. I’m not sure that’s the case. Yes, Kamala Harris has committed to maintaining the foreign policy priorities of Joe Biden, including support for Ukraine. But she is not Biden, and faced with difficult decisions, she will not have Biden’s instincts—she will have her own.

If you are in the camp that believes that much of the slow-walking of military aid to Ukraine has been the result of Biden’s own fear of escalation, then a transition to Harris may end up being quite refreshing. Biden, after all, cut his foreign policy teeth in the Cold War, gripped by the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. Harris may not share these sensibilities and may thus be willing to take greater risks. Again, whether you see that as a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, but my guess is that a Harris White House will be more willing to call Putin’s bluff than Biden’s has been.

On the flip side, while Harris’s foreign policy team is made up of committed multilateralists—not a given on either side of the aisle these days in Washington—they are not as committed to Europe as Biden’s team has been. Biden himself, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan all seem to center their foreign-policy worldview on Europe and the transatlantic relationship. Again, this has frustrated some, particularly those irked by the lengths to which the White House has gone and the compromises it has made in order to keep Berlin on board with the response to Russia in Ukraine. But if a Harris Administration accelerates the long-mooted pivot to the Indo-Pacific, the valence of those concerns may shift.

Whether a Harris victory translates into a win for Ukraine, however, is difficult to say. First of all, Congress will still have a role to play, about which more in a few moments. Second, if things heat up in the Taiwan Straits, say, Harris may be more likely than Biden to draw down American support to Ukraine and ask the Europeans to do more—regardless of whether the Europeans have the resources to do so. And even if Harris is able to maintain the current level and pace of aid to Ukraine, it should be clear by now that the current level and pace of aid to Ukraine are manifestly insufficient.

As I’ve written before, then, the key to a Ukrainian victory may not be how much Kyiv can get from Moscow, but how much Kyiv can get from Washington, in terms of hard and fast security guarantees. Those negotiations can happen with a Harris Administration and they have at least some chance of success. I’m not confident the same can be said about a Trump Administration. Putin, then, is likely to find a Harris Administration to be frustrating at best (for him), and challenging at worst. None of this, however, is automatic.

What about Congress?

Lest we forget, all 435 seats of the House of Representatives and 34 of the 100 seats of the Senate are up for grabs on 5 November as well. Though they’re garnering less attention, how those elections shake out will be at least as important to all of these issues—Ukraine, Russia, and Europe—as the presidential vote.

Part of the reason I say this is obvious: Congress controls the purse strings. As we’ve already seen, a structurally empowered minority of Republicans in the House was able to hold up aid to Ukraine for about six months. Even if Harris is elected, the likelihood is that she’ll face at least one Republican-controlled chamber of Congress, and they will be minded to be at least as obstructive of her agenda as they have been of Biden’s. The same, of course, is true for Trump. Faced with at least one Democrat-controlled chamber, he may find himself bound by foreign policy legislation, much as he was in his first term.

There’s more to it than that, though. I, for one, will be paying attention not just to how many Republicans win, but to which ones. I’ve mentioned already that Trump is a transactionalist, but the reality is that there is an increasing section of the Republican party that shares that sensibility. Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the core of the Freedom Caucus have lined up more or less behind the foreign policy vision set out in Project 2025, which calls for politicizing the diplomatic service, scaling back American involvement in multilateral institutions, and (though not in so many words) extricating the US from the kinds of rules-based arrangements that help create global stability but make it more difficult for the White House to transact. Thus, the balance between mainline Republican foreign policy thinkers and the Freedom Caucus matters, regardless of who wins the presidential election. And leadership matters, too. To the extent that many Republicans have rallied to support Ukraine, it has been because of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. There are few Republican senators who fully share his sensibilities on the subject, but even among those who don’t, there is significant diversity. How the new caucus take shape, then, may be determinative not just of the course of the war in Ukraine, but the general direction of American foreign policy at least for the next four years.

What I’m reading

For reasons of cosmic coincidence, this was a bumper week for attempts to reevaluate what we know and don’t know about how Russia, Ukraine and the West ended up where they are. We’re still a long way from definitive answers, but social science is working, and I think we’re gradually becoming more confident as a discipline in our ability to reestablish analytical traction on Russian politics and decision-making.

Thus:

• The academic journal Nationalities Papers—despite the title, one of the best venues for first-rate research on Russia and the post-Soviet space (for lack of a better term)—published two excellent and intriguing papers Thursday on the Kremlin’s calculus in the lead-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In one, Tatsiana Kulakevich, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, deploys a game-theoretic analysis to show that signals sent both by Western governments and by Kyiv likely undermined deterrence by encouraging Putin to believe that a rapid victory was available. In the other, Mikhail Polianskii, a doctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, seeks to understand how the Kremlin miscalculated on Western willingness to respond. His analysis of Russian elite discourse hones in on two persistent misunderstandings: the degree to which the West believed itself to be dependent on Russia, and the centrality of Ukraine to Western thinking.

• And on Wednesday, Re:Russia published an unsigned essay analyzing the history of Russian military engagement going back four centuries and finds that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shares two things in common with most of the wars Russia has lost: a failure to appreciate the ability of the opponent to defend itself, and a resulting disillusionment not just with Russia’s military capacity, but with its overall governance. The authors are careful, however, not to suggest that this means Russia will inevitably lose the war. Western and Ukrainian resolve and resources can be overestimated, as well as underestimated.

Meanwhile, the week also produced valuable insights on where things may go from here. To wit:

• On Tuesday, Anastasia Morozova reported in Forbes (Russia) reported that large swaths of the Russian economy are struggling to manage import substitution and thus adaptation to Western sanctions, as well as with logistics and cross-border payments. Among other things, this reinforces the increasingly prominent contention that the primary impact of Western sanctions has been gradually to ratchet up the transaction and opportunity costs for the Russian economy.

• And on Wednesday, Andrei Pertsev reported in Meduza that the Kremlin’s political advisory team is beginning to look ahead to the 2026 Duma elections and are struggling to arrive at workable strategies for a scenario in which Russia is no longer at war. To be clear, no one is predicting that the war will be over by then. But the job of these political advisers is to figure out a way to get the results they need regardless of the context, and this report thus resonates with a number of others—mostly from the world of economics—suggesting that the demands of domestic political and economic control may require a war that never ends.

Finally, if I may be allowed a moment of self-promotion, a group of CEPA colleagues—Marija Golubeva, Volodymyr Dubovyk and Jessica Berlin—and I published a short paper outlining what we believe should be eight foreign and security policy priorities for Ursula von der Leyen’s new European Commission.

What I’m listening to

So good. So right. So right now.