In a recent piece published on the Foreign Affairs website I considered Russia’s war in Ukraine as a textbook example of the problem of forever wars (about which I had previously written in the same journal, republished here).
How do countries cope when wars meant to be short and decisive turn out to be protracted and inconclusive? In such situations strategy needs to rethought to bring military means and political objectives into a new alignment – more appropriate means and more realistic objectives. The more a war drags on the harder this becomes for added to the original objectives comes an additional one, the need to avoid the humiliation of defeat.
This additional factor helps explain why Vladimir Putin persists with a war that he is not winning and cannot win. Limited territorial acquisitions do not mean that Putin is winning. Victory depends on achieving his political objectives and here he is not even close.
Putin has made no secret of his objectives. They were first set out as the full-scale invasion was launched in February 2022. Then he focused on the ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarisation’ of Ukraine, along with constitutional changes to protect Russian speakers. In September 2022 he added to these the claimed annexation of four oblasts (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kerson, and Zaporizhzhia) in addition to Crimea, taken in 2014.
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