“It all boils down to political will.”
Whilst Russia’s war on Ukraine appears to be a bloody stalemate it would be a mistake to believe that is an accurate assessment. Rather, having failed in its original war of conquest Russia has now adopted a two-prong strategy: a war of devastation against those parts of Ukraine it cannot conquer and a war of coercion against free Europe.
The overall aim of the strategy is to force Ukraine and all smaller states that form NATO’s eastern flank into a renewed Russian sphere of influence to create a de facto strategic buffer between Russia and the Alliance. Any such sphere would extend significantly to the east of Russia’s current border with the Alliance but could only succeed through American decoupling and Western European indifference.
Moscow’s method is to first attrit the Ukrainian state to the point of failure and to threaten war against the Alliance but in fact focus on information war, cyber war, sabotage, and espionage to bleed NATO Europe’s will to fight. It is a profound mistake to believe that whilst Russian forces are embroiled in the war in Ukraine the rest of Europe is ‘safe.’ Rather, strategic asymmetric warfare against NATO IS the primary instrument of Russian power against free Europe, particularly Moscow’s efforts to destabilise all states along its western border and across the Black Sea Region. These states not only include Moldova, but also Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. The aim is to force them to deal with the Kremlin on its terms.
Current US policy is implicitly supporting Russia’s war aims because President Trump “does not care what peace looks like.” However, Russian strategy has only been partially successful as evidenced by the spate of air space violations and drone disruptions. Moscow seems increasingly willing to take overt as opposed to covert risk which suggests it is acting “from a position of weakness” due to economic pressures and cost of maintaining the military force needed to fight in Ukraine and maintain an aggressive posture elsewhere.
Russia will not suffer an economic collapse. This is not just because of Chinese support or European sanction-busting, but also because states such as India seem indifferent to Russia’s war. Therefore, whilst efforts must continue to be made to convince China that ever-closer ties with the Putin regime will eventually work against the Chinese interest, it is India that should be the focus of a Global Free diplomatic demarche to ween New Delhi off cheap Russian petrochemicals. The importance of such support is evident from the growth in Russian GDP in 2024. Russia is also self-sufficient both energy and food.
Ukraine also has to demonstrate to its Western supporters that is willing to use all its resources to fight what is for Kyiv a war of existence. Kyiv has yet to mobilise the cohort of 18–24-year-olds and over 100,000 Ukrainian fighting age men are dispersed across Europe. The Allies also need to do more to force Russia to divert resources away from the Ukrainian front. Whilst European concerns about the diversion of US forces to the Pacific theatre “are overblown” any such increased effort will need to be primarily European.
At some point the current ‘stalemate’ will collapse and both Ukraine and its allies need to be sufficiently robust to cope with the consequences. To that end, the allies need to be much clearer about how they define victory in Ukraine and beyond against Russia’s twin wars of devastation and coercion. In Ukraine that means primarily the preservation of the Ukrainian state and Kyiv’s capacity to begin a long-term diplomatic effort to recover its lost lands. For NATO to prevail against Russia’s war of coercion will require a much more aggressive counter-hybrid war strategy against Moscow as well as a sufficiently credible deterrent posture. Whilst the failure of Ukraine as a state might not pose an immediate existential threat to the rest of free Europe it would have the most profound of strategic and political consequences because it would re-draw European security architecture.
NATO needs a much more robust set of hybrid warfare countermeasures allied to a new and escalatory inventory of asymmetric responses to Russian “active measures.”
Julian Lindley-French