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Russia Wants a
Long War
!e West Needs to Send
Ukraine More Arms, More
Quickly
By Sam Greene and Alina Polyakova
March 16, 2023

Ukrainian personnel at a military base in Dorset, United

Kingdom, February 2023
Toby Melville / Reuters

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U.
S. President Joe Biden’s historic
visit to Kyiv days before the one-
year anniversary of Russia’s full-
scale invasion of Ukraine sent an important
message to Ukrainians and, indeed, to
Russians. “Ukraine will never be a victory for
Russia,” Biden proclaimed, adding that the
United States will support Ukraine “as long as
it takes.” Indeed, “as long as it takes” has
become the new talking point for Ukraine’s
allies, repeated by French President
Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor
Olaf Scholz. But “as long as it takes” also
signals to many Ukrainians that the allies
expect the war to drag on for years, with
Ukraine bearing the brunt of it. And they are
right: even as the United States and its allies
have sent billions of dollars’ worth of military
equipment to Ukraine, there remains one
thing they seem unable to supply: a clear,
united commitment to a rapid Ukrainian
victory. Unless the United States wants to
"nd itself embroiled in another forever war,
on terms that very much suit Russian
President Vladimir Putin, it’s time for that to
change.

A clear pattern has emerged in the past year:

the Ukrainians request a weapons system and
Western governments refuse to provide it,
only to change their minds a few months later
after public debates and disagreement among
allies. !e news in January that German
Leopard tanks and U.S. Abrams tanks would
be delivered to Ukraine later this year was, of
course, welcome. But it came after months of
debates between allies, culminating in an
ultimatum from Germany that it would allow
its tanks to be sent to Ukraine only if the
United States pledged to send its own at the
same time. !e same is true of Patriot missile
defense batteries, which Washington saw as a
redline for Putin at the beginning of the war,
only to send them months later after
thousands more lives had been needlessly lost.
!e multiple launch rocket system known as
HIMARS, which has proved so e#ective in
helping Ukraine regain territory, was
delivered only after extensive pressure and
lobbying by Ukraine.

!e same debate is now playing out over

"ghter jets and long-range missile systems.
!e Ukrainians are asking for F-16s and
ATACMS, the long-range surface-to-surface
missile systems that they need to reach into
Russian-occupied parts of the country such as
Crimea. When asked on January 30 whether
Washington would deliver F-16s to Kyiv,
Biden said no, which his advisers later revised
to “not now.” On the same day, at !e Hague,
Macron, asked whether France was
considering sending "ghter jets to Ukraine,
said that nothing was excluded in principle.
Speaking about providing Ukraine with
military assistance on February 8, British
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said, “Nothing is
o# the table.”

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By the same token, nothing is exactly on the

table, either. !is ambiguity has resulted in a
Western policy of incrementalism, setting the
United States and Ukraine’s other allies up
for a protracted con$ict. !is approach is
encouraging Putin to believe that time is on
his side and that the United States will
eventually tire, as it did in Afghanistan,
especially as political winds shift with a U.S.
presidential election on the horizon. !e
policy, while ostensibly seeking to avoid
escalation, is laying the ground for something
far more dangerous for the United States and
its allies: a potential Russian win.

THE STAKES COULD NOT BE HIGHER

It is clear that Russia cannot win its war in

Ukraine on the maximalist terms initially set
out by Putin. Putin can never occupy or hold
the entirety of Ukraine. He cannot impose a
Russian-backed government on the
Ukrainian people. And having set out to
forestall Ukraine’s integration with the West,
he has made it an inevitability. But it is
equally clear that Putin can and will spin
anything short of a complete military collapse
into a victory for the domestic constituencies
that keep him in power. In fact, Putin has
given himself an increasing amount of
rhetorical wriggle room over his war aims,
and he speaks of demilitarizing and de-
Nazifying Ukraine with waning enthusiasm.
It must become clear to the West, however,
that anything short of the full restoration of
Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity
will represent a catastrophic defeat for the
United States and its European allies.

If Russia were allowed to keep any of its ill-

gotten gains in Ukraine—whether via peace
treaty, cease-"re, or stalemate—the deterrent
power of the United States and the
transatlantic alliance would be lost. No longer
would any would-be aggressor need to
consider the Western response before
invading or even just threatening a neighbor.
!e United States’ nuclear deterrent would
remain, but that extends only to those
countries with whom the United States has a
formal alliance. Even there, revisionist powers
such as China, Iran, and Russia would soon
begin to look for holes in NATO’s nuclear
umbrella.

Ukrainians may themselves decide that they

want to stop "ghting, and that is their
sovereign and democratic right. If that
happens, Western governments should stand
ready to support Kyiv in negotiating an
agreement that would guarantee the country’s
security and set it on a path toward NATO
and EU membership and the ability to
defend its own sovereignty and prosperity.
But Western leaders and publics should be
under no illusion about what would happen if
that choice were forced on Ukraine simply
because Western publics grew tired of a war
they weren’t even "ghting. It would be more
than just an abdication of moral responsibility
to support a people facing genocide and
repression. In very short order, it would mean
more war, not less.

If Russia’s invasion ends on anything other

than Ukraine’s terms, Moscow will have been
proved correct: might would be seen to make
right. Regional powers will look at their
neighborhoods with increasing appetites,
con"dent that the consequences of aggression
would be minimal. !e message received by
smaller states would be equally clear: the only
way to avoid Ukraine’s fate is either to yield
preemptively to the regional hegemon or, if
they are lucky enough to have the right
neighbors, to seek a formal alliance. !e race
to dominate or be dominated will be deadly.
NATO, the EU, and the United Nations all
emerged in response to the endless wars to
which this logic gives rise. !e order these
institutions engendered has been far from
perfect, but if Russia is allowed to undermine
that order by procuring a favorable outcome
in Ukraine, what comes next—an era of
permanent border wars, regional con$ict,
arms races, refugee crises, and disrupted trade
—will be far, far worse than anything faced
since World War II.

ESCALATION EXAGGERATION

In practice, making a strategic commitment

to victory on Ukrainian terms means $ipping
the logic of deterrence and escalation. !e
current slow-drip, reactive approach to
providing Ukraine with additional weapons
systems was designed in part to manage the
potential that Putin might escalate the war.
He could do so either through the use of
weapons of mass destruction or by attacking
NATO members themselves. Early on in the
war, when Western leaders had very little data
on which to gauge Russian intentions and
strategies, this caution may have been
justi"ed. A year into the war, however, two
truths are clear: "rst, the provision of
increasingly powerful arms has not led to
rampant Russian escalation; and second,
relative Western restraint has not prevented
Putin from bombing Ukrainian civilian
targets.

Russia’s relentless war on Ukraine’s civilians

is, in fact, the strategy that most analysts
expected Moscow to pursue from the very
beginning, replicating the tactics it used in
Chechnya and Grozny in the 1990s and more
recently in Syria. !e fact that it took
Moscow months to begin its systematic
bombardment of cities far from the frontlines
re$ects the Kremlin’s initial, erroneous
assumption that Ukrainian resistance would
collapse more or less instantaneously. When
that analysis itself collapsed, it took time for
Russia to gear up for the brutality it has
undertaken since September. To the extent
that Russia escalated its attacks, then, it did so
in response not to Western aid to Ukraine—
and, indeed, Moscow hasn’t targeted the West
or Western supply lines—but, rather, in
response to Ukraine’s own resilience. As more
and more Western aid has $owed into the
country since September, the scope and scale
of Russia’s assault has remained largely
unchanged.

It is thus hard to argue that there is any causal

relationship between Western arms supplies
and Russia’s prosecution of the war—except
in one respect. !e West’s willingness to
backstop the Ukrainian military has, in fact,
reduced Russia’s war aims. Whatever the
rhetoric, the size and shape of Russia’s
unfolding spring o#ensive appears designed
only to bolster its positions in the eastern
Donbas region of Ukraine. Its current assault
appears insu%cient even to attempt to retake
all the territory Russia claims, illegally, to
have annexed, to say nothing of threatening
Kyiv and taking political control over the
country as a whole. Militarily, then, Russia
has responded to Western support for
Ukraine not by upping its "repower but by
reducing its de facto objectives.

The provision of increasingly powerful

arms has not led to rampant Russian
escalation.

Unfortunately, the incremental pace with

which arms have been provided, and the very
public deliberations over which arms to
provide and when, has given the Russian
military time to adjust and learn. Flipping
that approach on its head would see the West
make an immediate and open-ended
commitment to giving Ukraine whatever it
needs to win, even if not all of those arms can
be delivered today. !e transatlantic alliance
should take a cue from the United Kingdom
and begin training Ukrainian forces now to
use the full range of weaponry the West can
provide—but that should be just the
beginning. In the immediate term, the West
should make a credible commitment now to
providing Ukraine with all feasible military
support in the shortest time frame possible.

Some things, to be clear, would remain

permanently o# the table—including nuclear
arms, other weapons of mass destruction, and
arms banned by international law, which have
no legitimate place in this or any other
con$ict. For everything else, though, allies
should lay in the logistics for supply and
maintenance now, and deliveries should be
preapproved, ready to go on a hair trigger. !e
message to Putin and his generals would
"nally be clear: there is no compromise
solution available, no line of defense except
the Russian border itself, and no limit to
Western resolve.

Faced with the certainty of defeat, Putin’s

calculus would shift. For the past 12 months,
Western ambiguity has emboldened Putin to
prolong this war, allowing him to believe that
there may perhaps come a time when the $ow
of support will stop, and thus that he can
outlast the West and Ukraine. Replacing that
ambiguity with strategic clarity—robbing
Putin of any viable option other than an
organized retreat—can help bring this war to
an end. To borrow a phrase from Biden’s State
of the Union address in February, it’s time for
the West to "nish the job.

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SAM GREENE is Director of Democratic

Resilience at the Center for European Policy
Analysis and Professor of Russian Politics at
King’s College London.

ALINA POLYAKOVA is President and CEO of

the Center for European Policy Analysis and
Adjunct Professor of European Studies at the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies.

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