The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began Feb. 24 has left tens of thousands of people dead, countless others maimed and millions displaced. It’s caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage and its fallout has echoed throughout the global economy. It’s forced European nations to revamp decades-old security policies and has influential voices in foreign affairs warning about the threat of nuclear war. Little wonder that Western policy shapers are keen to better understand their nations’ role in the conflict.

Two prominent American analysts see the U.S. role very differently. On one side of the debate is international relations scholar John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago; on the other is national security expert Joe Cirincione, who for many years headed nuclear arms control initiatives such as the Ploughshares Fund and the Carnegie Endowment’s non-proliferation program.

Ever since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 Mearsheimer, a leading proponent of the realist school of international relations, has argued that the principal responsibility for “the Ukraine crisis” lies with the U.S. and, to a lesser degree, with the allies that have followed its lead. He most recently made this point in a June 16 speech reprinted below. Although Mearsheimer acknowledges that Putin started the war and is responsible for Russia’s conduct of it, his “central claim is that the United States has pushed forward policies toward Ukraine that Putin and other Russian leaders see as an existential threat, a point they have made repeatedly for many years.” Key among these policies has been the U.S. push to bring Ukraine into NATO and make it “a Western bulwark on Russia’s border.” It does not matter, Mearsheimer writes, what the authors of these policies intended; what matters is how Moscow saw them. His second main point in the speech is that Washington’s reaction to the outbreak of war has focused, together with its Western allies, on “decisively defeating Russia in Ukraine.” This, he believes, has prolonged the war there, subjected Ukraine to “even greater harm” and raises the risk of escalation, all the way up to the possible use of nuclear weapons. The key to a peaceful settlement from Russia’s perspective, he argues, “is making Ukraine a neutral state, ending the prospect of integrating Kyiv into the West.”

Cirincione rejects these arguments in an article written for Russia Matters, also reprinted below. While he has long criticized certain NATO policies threatening to Russia—like the initial inclusion of Eastern European countries in the military bloc and the placement of missile systems in Romania and Poland—he argues that the drivers behind them were numerous, mundane and often influenced by the Eastern Europeans’ own security imperatives. Even if the presence of significant NATO footholds in Ukraine did constitute a red line for Moscow, Cirincione feels that the West cannot “militarily abandon Ukraine and … cede it to Russia’s sphere of influence,” as Mearsheimer implicitly suggests. Cirincione also believes that Putin’s fears about Ukraine and other ex-Soviet republics growing “too close to the West” stem from his fears that such closeness would foment “popular resistance to his increasingly authoritarian rule at home.” And he presents thought-provoking evidence against Mearsheimer’s earlier claims that Russia’s actions in Ukraine have been primarily defensive, spelling out the various ways Moscow has been taking control of Ukrainian territory. Cirincione’s final objection to Mearsheimer’s arguments is on moral grounds: that now, amid the blood-curdling brutality of Russian forces’ targeting of Ukrainian civilians, is not the time to analyze which past policies led to the problem; now, he writes, the West’s singular focus should indeed be to “defeat Russia’s invasion.”

As is customary in such debates, we have invited Prof. Mearsheimer to write a rebuttal, but he declined.

As the West’s increasing punitive measures bear down on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is in Africa this week, trying to develop economic ties and rally political support from governments there. Why Africa? For one, the continent is forecast to become the world’s “next growth miracle.” As important, not one African country to date has imposed sanctions on Russia, and when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the African Union via videolink, only four African heads of state reportedly attended. While some analysts and Western officials claim that Russia is isolated, the inconvenient fact is that condemnation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine is far from universal. The U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was met with abstention or outright opposition from countries accounting for about half of the world’s population, while the resolution to remove Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council was abstained from or opposed by nations representing a whopping 75% of the world’s population.

This week’s reports that Russia’s invasion seems to be “entering a more aggressive phase” throw into stark relief one recurring theme in analysis of the Ukraine war: the prediction that Russian forces will soon exhaust their capabilities, reaching what the famous Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described as a Kulminationspunkt, or “culminating point,” of attack. In his book “On War,” Clausewitz defined this as a “point at which the forces remaining are just sufficient to maintain a defensive, and to wait for Peace.”

We have put together a compilation of such predictions, beginning in March 2022. Some were made that month, and may have rested on a looser definition of culminating point than Clausewitz’s original, predicting that Russian forces would not be able to sustain their offensive on the many fronts of their initial invasion; indeed, by late March, Russia started moving troops away from Kyiv, marking Moscow’s new strategic focus on eastern Ukraine.

However, the predictions continued even as Russian forces made advances in the east, most recently capturing nearly all of the Luhansk region that remained in Ukrainian hands. If nothing else, this timeline reaffirms the truism that making predictions can be an ungrateful business, particularly amid the fog of war.

Check out the compilation here.

Predictably, war was the talk of the town in Davos this past May. In speeches at the annual World Economic Forum, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and billionaire philanthropist George Soros both offered their own, diverging takes on what the West should and could do to end the hostilities initiated by Russia in late February. Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russel Mead succinctly captured the differences between the two men's positions: Kissinger "urge[d] against attempts to defeat or marginalize Russia, calling on Ukraine to accept the territorial losses of 2014 to end the war," while Soros "warned that victory in the war against Vladimir Putin's Russia was necessary to 'save civilization' and urged the West to provide Ukraine with everything it needs to prevail."

Russia Matters has decided to advance the indirect debate between Kissinger and Soros by asking Nikolas K. Gvosdev of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Melinda Haring of the Atlantic Council to explain why they agree or disagree with the key propositions put forward by Kissinger and Soros at Davos (listed below) with regard to the Russian-Ukrainian war and, more widely, how to deal with Russia.

1. Kissinger has long said Ukraine should have some form of neutrality in order to be a "bridge between Russia and Europe"; at Davos he said that, while "that opportunity ... does not now exist in the same manner, ... it could still be conceived as an ultimate objective."
2. Soros said at Davos that Russia's invasion of Ukraine "may have been the beginning of the Third World War and our civilization may not survive it."
3. Kissinger said at Davos that "negotiations on peace need to begin in the next two months," implying that otherwise the war could spill over into other parts of Europe; "ideally," he said, "the dividing line [between Ukraine and Russia] should return the status quo ante," i.e. with Moscow exercising de facto control over Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
4. Kissinger cautioned against turning the war into a battle “against Russia itself,” rather than for “the freedom of Ukraine,” because “Russia has been, for 400 years, an essential part of Europe,” critical to maintaining a “European balance.” The West’s policies, he said, “should keep in mind the restoration of this role is important to develop, so that Russia is not driven into a permanent alliance with China.”
5. Soros said that “we must mobilize all our resources to bring the war to an early end. The best and perhaps only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat Putin as soon as possible.”

In his response, Gvosdev sees the two men’s differences flowing from “fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of the international system and whether ‘means’ or ‘ends’ should have primacy in the formulation of policy, as well as their respective sense of time frames for action.” Haring, in turn, believes that Russia is an imperial power that must be defanged; in her response, she largely agrees with Soros, arguing for the Kremlin’s complete defeat, which she defines as “pushing Russia out of the Donbas completely, bringing Russia’s war criminals to justice … and forcing Moscow to pay for the damages it has caused.”

Eminent U.S. observers from presidents to a powerful senator have derided Russia’s role in the global economy as second-rate, with the late John McCain calling Russia “a gas station … masquerading as a country.” Russia’s share in world economic output is indeed in the low single digits. But that macro-level view obscures the key role that Russia, and to a lesser extent Ukraine, plays in some critical sectors of the global economy—all of which have been hard hit by the ongoing war between the two neighboring countries and its fallout. Below is a snapshot explainer of the damage done so far not just to the global energy sector, but to food supplies for millions of people worldwide, high-tech goods and services, metals and aerospace/aviation.

This week, the United States’ deputy national security adviser for cyber indicated that Washington had passed Moscow intelligence about criminal hackers operating on Russian territory and was “really looking for continued, real action”—a clear euphemism for arrests or other measures to curtail such groups’ activities against U.S. victims. For the Biden administration, what happens next could serve as a litmus test of Russia’s willingness to engage in substantive cooperation on cyber crime.

In the past, analysts have linked U.S.-Russian cooperation on cybersecurity with cooperation on counterterrorism—in part, because both rely heavily on intelligence sharing. This year we have been fortunate enough to have two Russia-focused former CIA officers write about prospects for the latter, and their views diverge considerably.

Paul Kolbe of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs argues that Russia’s only genuinely significant input into U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the past 20+ years was its “political support for U.S. bases and overflight in Central Asia” after 9/11. Other than that, due to “fundamentally divergent interests and worldviews,” as well as incompatible intelligence practices, neither of the two countries “found the other’s [shared] information compelling or of truly strategic value.”

George Beebe of the Center for the National Interest, on the contrary, believes that, although combatting terrorism is unlikely to transform the troubled U.S.-Russian relationship, “Russia has demonstrated a strong ability to help the United States prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. targets.” He points out that “counterterrorism cooperation is not binary but exists in varying degrees”; successful elements of such cooperation, such as exchanging threat warnings, should continue, he writes, and roads to more sharing of “both intelligence and expertise” should not be closed off.

In December 2020, Reuters first reported that hackers suspected to be working for Russia had been monitoring emails at U.S. federal agencies. While there are still few details as to the scope, scale and impact of the hack, what is known is that multiple U.S. federal agencies and dozens of private-sector companies were compromised through malware attached to a software update received by nearly 18,000 customers of Texas-based company SolarWinds. The massive, months-long cyber operation has garnered widespread calls for retribution, with some U.S. politicians going so far as to call it an act of war. As of publication of this debate, Russia continues to deny responsibility for the breach. So how should the U.S. respond to this extensive hack? We've asked three experts to weigh in on the issue.  

In the opening entry, the Belfer Center's Paul Kolbe writes that while a natural inclination is to strike back at Russia, such responses have been tried in the past with little to show for it. A carefully calibrated shot across the bow is appropriate in response to SolarWinds, according to Kolbe, but such responses will not stop cyber espionage or assaults. Russia is but one wolf in a growing pack of cyber predators, he writes, and the U.S. is simply too fat and easy a target.

Erica D. Borghard, a senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council and a senior director on the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission, argues that while Kolbe is right in saying that retaliatory measures aiming to impose costs against Russia are unlikely to shift the Russian government’s risk-benefit assessment, he’s right for the wrong reasons. The pursuit of deterrence strategies to address other types of malicious behavior in cyberspace, beyond espionage, is not a fool’s errand, Borghard writes, and deterrence is not a one-size-fits-all concept in cyberspace—or in any other domain.

Finally, Anatol Lieven, a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and a senior fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington D.C., writes that Kolbe and Borghard are both correct in warning of the need for distinguishing between cyber espionage and cyber sabotage or terrorism. Lieven adds, however, that to be effective in constraining behavior, limiting disputes and maintaining peace, shared international conventions are necessary. Few things have been more damaging to U.S. and European hopes of a “rules-based global order,” according to Lieven, than the perception that the U.S. both makes the rules and breaks them whenever it sees fit, including in cyberspace.

Photo by Christiaan Colen shared under a Creative Commons license. 

The following is a four-part debate between Thomas Graham, George Beebe, Steven Pifer and Michael McFaul about the future of Russia. The exchange was hosted by Pairagraph—a new platform that brings together distinguished individuals for conversations about great events and great ideas. For the exchange in its original form, click here.

Photo by Evgeny shared under a Pixabay license.