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IDEAS

Ukraine Must Win

Ukrainians and the world’s democratic powers must work toward
the only acceptable endgame.
By Anne Applebaum
Ismail Ferdous / Bloomberg / Getty

MARCH 22, 2022, 9 AM ET

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About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the
SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of
Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
The war in Ukraine has reached a turning point. The Russian troops that
invaded the country from the north, south, and east are now scarcely
moving. They have targeted schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and
a theater sheltering children, but they are not yet in control even of the
places they occupy. And no wonder: Few Ukrainians are willing to
collaborate with the occupiers. The overwhelming majority, more than
90 percent, believe they will defeat them. The Ukrainian army refuses to
surrender, even in cities badly damaged by bombardment.

Russian planners expected the entire war, the conquest of Ukraine, to

last no more than six weeks. More than half that time has already passed.
There must be an endgame, a moment when the conflict stops. The
Ukrainians, and the democratic powers that support Ukraine, must work
toward a goal. That goal should not be a truce, or a muddle, or a decision
to maintain some kind of Ukrainian resistance over the next decade, or a
vow to “bleed Russia dry,” or anything else that will prolong the fighting
and the instability. That goal should be a Ukrainian victory.

Eliot A. Cohen: Why can’t the West admit that Ukraine is

winning?

Before you can achieve something, you have to imagine what it will look
like. And in this war, victory can be imagined without difficulty. It means
that Ukraine remains a sovereign democracy, with the right to choose its
own leaders and make its own treaties. There will be no pro-Russian
puppet regime in Kyiv, no need for a prolonged Ukrainian resistance, no
continued fighting. The Russian army retreats back over the borders.
Maybe those borders could change, or maybe Ukraine could pledge
neutrality, but that is for the Ukrainians to decide and not for outsiders
to dictate. Maybe international peacekeepers are needed. Whatever
happens, Ukraine must have strong reasons to believe that Russian
troops will not quickly return.

Imagine, too, the consequences of such a victory. In Washington, most

people have long believed that Ukraine is part of a regional conflict, and
that Ukraine is a piece of territory that the Russians care more about
than we do and always will. But this is no longer true. The Ukrainians,
and especially their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, have made their
cause a global one by arguing that they fight for a set of universal ideas—
for democracy, yes, but also for a form of civic nationalism, based on
patriotism and a respect for the rule of law; for a peaceful Europe, where
disputes are resolved by institutions and not warfare; for resistance to
dictatorship. Zelensky has urged Americans to remember Pearl Harbor.
He appealed to the German Parliament with the phrase “Never again”—
a mantra used to mean that no Hitler would be allowed to arise again—
and told members that, in light of the brutal war in his country, those
words are now “worthless.” He called on the European Parliament to
“prove that you indeed are Europeans” and admit Ukraine to the
European Union.

This language is effective because it evokes the principles that bind

together the majority of Europeans, Americans, and many other people
around the world, reminding them of how much worse the world was in
the bloodier past, and how much worse it could be in the future if those
principles no longer matter. The words Zelensky uses also reverberate
because they are true. A victory for Ukraine really will be a victory for all
who believe in democracy and the rule of law. Citizens of existing
democracies and members of the democratic opposition in Russia, Cuba,
Belarus, and Hong Kong will all be emboldened. “Their struggle is ours,”
a Venezuelan acquaintance told me last week. The institutions protecting
the states that embody those ideas, most notably the European Union
and NATO, will be strengthened too.

Zelensky’s words resonated further because the Russians have also given
this conflict enormous significance. The Russian foreign minister has just
declared that this war will change global politics: “This is not about
Ukraine at all, but the world order. The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-
making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the
world order will look like.” Much as Stalin once declared that, when the
Second World War ended, “everyone imposes his own system as far as
his army can reach,” President Vladimir Putin had planned for the
Russian army to impose Russia’s autocratic, kleptocratic political
system on all of Ukraine. Already, the Russian occupation of some
eastern-Ukrainian towns resembles the Soviet occupation of Central
Europe at the end of World War II. Public officials and civic leaders—
mayors and police but also members of Parliament, journalists, museum
curators—have been arrested and not seen since. Civilians have been
terrorized at random. In Mariupol, authorities report that citizens are
being forcibly deported to Russia, just as Soviet secret police deported
Balts, Poles, and others to Russia after the invasions of 1939 and 1945.
In the case of a Russian victory, these tactics would be applied all over
Ukraine, creating mass terror, mass violence, and instability for years to
come. And, yes, if we accept that outcome, autocrats from Minsk to
Caracas to Beijing will take note: Genocide is now allowed.

Precisely because the stakes are so high, the next few weeks will be
extremely dangerous. Putin will do what he can to create fear.
The extraordinary speech he made last week, describing Russian critics
of the war as “scum,” “traitors,” and “gnats,” had exactly that purpose.
He spoke of Russia’s need for “self-purification” using a word with the
same root as purge, the term that Stalin used when ordering the
liquidation of his enemies. Putin is deliberately evoking the worst and
bloodiest era of Soviet history to avoid even a hint of domestic
opposition. He has just thrown away 30 years of economic gains, 30
years of Russian integration with the outside world, 30 years of
investment in order to turn the clock back to the era of his youth—an
era that the majority of Russians no longer remember and few wish to
see restored. He seems to believe that only elevated levels of fear will
prevent them from protesting, once they understand what has happened
to their country. He may be right.

Putin and his propagandists are dropping hints about chemical and
nuclear weapons for the same reason. They want outsiders, and
especially Americans, to fear the consequences of helping Ukraine. The
use of hypersonic weaponry; the threats of nuclear war made on Russian
television; even the habit, established a few years back, of practicing the
use of nuclear weapons during military exercises, sometimes to simulate
a hit on Warsaw, sometimes to simulate a bomb exploding in the air—all
of that has a purpose. So does the strange, ranting, anti-Polish
letter issued by Dimitri Medvedev, the Putin crony who briefly served as
president of Russia before Putin decided he wanted the job back again.
This screed contained insults, veiled threats, and an old Soviet-era
complaint that the Poles were “ungrateful” that the Red Army pushed
Hitler out of Poland, and then established a brutal new occupation
regime in Hitler’s wake. Among other things, Medvedev was sending a
reminder: Poland could be next. The recent Russian strike on a base near
the Polish border sent the same message.

How should the West respond? There is only one rule: We cannot be
afraid. Russia wants us to be afraid—so afraid that we are crippled by
fear, that we cannot make decisions, that we withdraw altogether, leaving
the way open for a Russian conquest of Ukraine, and eventually of
Poland or even further into Europe. Putin remembers very well an era
when Soviet troops controlled the eastern half of Germany. But the
threat to those countries will not decrease if Russia carries out massacres
in Ukraine. It will grow.

Instead of fear, we should focus on a Ukrainian victory. Once we

understand that this is the goal, then we can think about how to achieve
it, whether through temporary boycotts of Russian gas, oil, and coal;
military exercises elsewhere in the world that will distract Russian troops;
humanitarian airlifts on the scale of 1948 Berlin; or more and better
weapons.

The specific tactics will be determined by those who best understand

diplomacy and military strategy. But the strategy has to be clear. A
month ago, nobody believed this war would matter so much, and I’m
sure many people wish it did not. But it does. That’s why every move we
make must have a single goal: How does it help Ukraine win?

“It’s not our war” was something we might have been able to say three
weeks ago. Not now.

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This Isn't History's Most
Dangerous Moment. Yet.
When it comes to the risk of nuclear destruction, parts of the Cold
War were more terrifying. But the Ukraine crisis could yet spiral.
By Uri Friedman
About the author: Uri Friedman is the managing editor at the Atlantic Council and a
contributing writer at The Atlantic. He was previously a staff writer and the Global
editor at The Atlantic, and the deputy managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine.
WORLD WAR III , this time with multiple nuclear-armed states.

That’s the nightmare scenario haunting many people as Russia’s horrific

war on Ukraine metastasizes, moving toward NATO’s borders, stoking
further Western involvement, sucking in other powers, and
spurring nuclear threats from President Vladimir Putin. Discussion of
the conflict is rife with comparisons to the Cold War’s darkest days.

We are undoubtedly living through dangerous times, and the risk to

Ukrainians is obviously grave. But to better understand the nature of the
peril we face, it helps to dig deeper into history. The lesson: For the
wider world, in terms of the chances of direct conventional or even
nuclear war pitting Russia against the United States and its NATO allies,
this is not the most precarious moment since the lowest points of the
Cold War—at least not yet.

That was the consensus of several Cold War historians I corresponded

with. On balance, they gave me some reason to temper my alarm about
the war on Ukraine spiraling into a broader conflagration between
nuclear-armed powers. Of the six historians I consulted, four said the
present moment was less dangerous than the Cold War’s most hazardous
moments; one said it was equally dangerous, just in different ways; and
one said it was more dangerous.

The scholars emphasized how close the Soviet Union and United States
came to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, as a result of several
factors that so far aren’t at play today. Most noted the reassuring ways in
which the Biden administration is aiming to avoid an escalatory
confrontation with Russia. But they also stressed that escalation
stemming from mistakes or miscalculation, which was the most salient
source of danger during the Cuban missile crisis, poses a significant risk
now as well.

And several cited troubling reasons—including how prolonged the

current crisis is likely to be, and modern-day Russia’s weakness
compared with the Soviet Union in every domain but nuclear-weapons
power—for why the eruption of hostilities in Ukraine may have ushered
the world into uncharted territory, limiting the utility of historical
analogies and rendering the present moment potentially more precarious.

CERTAIN DYNAMICS that made the Cuban missile crisis so treacherous

are, at this point, absent in the conflict over Ukraine. Whereas the 1962
incident was sparked by the U.S. discovery of Soviet efforts to deploy
nuclear-capable ballistic missiles to Cuba, today Russia has not taken a
comparable step to directly threaten vital American interests, such as
relocating “nuclear missiles closer to the U.S. or West,” Mary Elise
Sarotte, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies, told me.

The Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, who co-wrote a

book, Essence of Decision, on the Cuban missile crisis, also drew a
distinction between the brinkmanship 60 years ago and President Joe
Biden’s determination to keep his confrontation with Putin from sliding
“into hot war between U.S. and Russian forces that could escalate to
World War III.”
To illustrate his point, Allison asked me to imagine some alternative
history: It’s the last Saturday of the Cuban missile crisis, with tensions
thick after an American spy plane was shot down. Instead of accepting
the U.S. government’s proposed deal for the Soviets to swiftly remove
their nuclear missiles from Cuba in tacit return for a U.S. pullout of
similar missiles from Turkey, Soviet Premier Nikita
Khrushchev rejects the offer.

In the event that Khrushchev rebuffed his ultimatum, President John F.

Kennedy had approved strikes against the Soviet missiles and then an
invasion of Cuba. What he didn’t know at the time: The 40,000 Soviet
forces deployed to the island possessed more than 100 tactical nuclear
weapons, relatively low-yield, short-range arms that can be used on a
battlefield. Catastrophe could have ensued.

Near the end of the crisis, Kennedy put the odds that it would result in
nuclear war at “‘between one in three and even,’” Allison said, adding
that “nothing historians have discovered since has done anything to
lengthen those odds.” By contrast, Allison estimates the probability that
the Ukraine crisis will devolve into nuclear war between Russia and the
United States as “less than one in 100—and in my best estimate, closer
to one in 1,000.” Despite “Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling,” Allison judged
it “extremely hard” to “sketch a scenario from the current tragedy to
Russian nukes exploding on American soil.”

Sergey Radchenko, also at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced

International Studies, pinpointed the decision by the United States and
NATO to explicitly rule out engaging in a direct conflict with Russia
over Ukraine as the main reason the current war is less perilous than
both the Cuban missile crisis and the lower-profile 1983 Able Archer
incident, when the Soviets had twitchy fingers on the nuclear trigger
during a U.S.-NATO military exercise that they feared could be cover for
a preemptive U.S. nuclear strike. (To get a sense of the high-stakes
jitters around the time of Able Archer, consider that a month earlier, a
Soviet duty officer named Stanislav Petrov had, in the span of five
frantic minutes, correctly determined that a satellite warning of incoming
American intercontinental ballistic missiles was a false alarm, narrowly
averting a nuclear calamity.)

The historian Melvyn Leffler similarly felt that the Western policy to not
directly use force against Russia in Ukraine has reduced the chances of
escalation with Moscow today relative to the worst crises of the Cold
War, when each side was highly uncertain about what the other might do
militarily. (He referenced not just the Cuban missile crisis but also
the Soviet blockade and U.S.-British airlift, in 1948; the follow-on
standoff over the status of Berlin, in 1961; and the U.S.-Soviet
confrontation that accompanied the Yom Kippur War.)

ACOUPLE OF THE HISTORIANS , however, expressed greater worry.

Michael Dobbs, the author of One Minute to Midnight, an account of the
Cuban missile crisis, told me that the debate about whether Putin is a
“rational actor” misses the central lesson from the 1962 incident.
Kennedy and Khrushchev were “rational actors,” he noted, “but they
still brought the world to the edge of the nuclear abyss” because of
mistakes and miscalculations.

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Echoing concerns from Radchenko and Leffler about inadvertent

escalation, Dobbs listed various forms that these missteps could take
today: a warplane straying over NATO or Russian borders, a
confrontation between naval forces, a cyberattack gone awry. And
whereas the Cuban missile crisis transpired over just 13 days, Russia’s
military intervention in Ukraine has already lasted longer than that
with no clear end in sight, and numerous signs point
to further escalation, increasing the likelihood of blunders.

Vladislav Zubok, at the London School of Economics, told me he views

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as more dangerous than episodes such as
Able Archer and the Cuban missile crisis. Not only is Putin less
politically constrained than his Soviet predecessors, who had the
politburo to reckon with, but he is also presiding over a country that is
far weaker than the Soviet Union was in its heyday, producing a uniquely
destabilizing dynamic.

The weakness of Russia’s conventional military and economy, now on

vivid display, has likely produced “cognitive dissonance” among Russian
leaders, who consider their country a great power but are confronting a
reality that suggests otherwise, Zubok noted. Recent weeks have revealed
“that they don’t have very many cards to play” in terms of “conventional
forms of power,” but there is one domain in which Russia remains a
superpower: nuclear weapons. Zubok’s fear is that a cornered,
existentially threatened Putin will use nuclear weapons as the “ultimate
joker [card] that can change the game.” Perhaps in the future we will
discover records showing that Putin was bluffing with his nuclear taunts,
he mused, “but something tells me this is not the story.”

Zubok’s comment reminded me that although applying historical lessons

to contemporary circumstances has value, an asymmetry of analysis is at
play. Historians can access a wealth of information about the periods
they study—declassified documents, oral histories—that we simply don’t
have in our foggier present.

And the fog of this war is heavy with possible hazards.

FOR FOUR DECADES during the Cold War, with a nuclear sword of
Damocles hanging over their struggle, the Soviet Union and the United
States and its NATO allies sought to avoid direct military conflict with
one another, instead waging war through proxies. Yet developments
such as the recent Russian strike on a Ukrainian military facility near the
border with Poland, a NATO member, and the Kremlin’s threat to target
Western weapons shipments passing through that area raise the
specter of a head-on conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries. The
very definition of a direct clash, and even whether we’re already engaged
in one, is up in the air as the United States and Europe effectively
prosecute a financial war against Russia in reaction to Putin’s assault on
Ukraine.

Nuclear weapons were never used during the Cold War in substantial
part because of the belief in both Washington and Moscow, as Ronald
Reagan put it when describing the logic of mutual assured destruction,
that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But the
world’s fragile system of nuclear deterrence could crumble, as the writer
David French warned, if Putin decides that the only way he can win
against Ukraine and the West is by making use in some form of his
advantage in tactical nuclear weapons. This might not generate the sort
of nuclear conflict envisioned by some of the historians I turned to—
with nukes raining down on U.S. or NATO territory and Western
retaliation in kind—but it would still be a nuclear conflict.

Although several historians favorably cited the move by the United

States and NATO to exclude the possibility of a fight with Russia over
Ukraine, that approach too could have hidden costs. It means Putin can
conduct his war without worrying about a response from Western
conventional or nuclear forces; the terrible trade-off for less concern
about a direct conflict between Russia and the West may be a higher
probability of the Kremlin escalating its aggression against Ukraine.

And whereas the Cold War materialized relatively gradually in the years
after World War II, a new iron curtain—sweeping in
its economic, diplomatic, political, informational,
and digital dimensions—is now descending with unprecedented speed.
As Sarotte, at Johns Hopkins, fears, that could potentially leave two
nuclear-armed powers largely operating in isolation from each other.

In comparing Ukraine today with the Cuban missile crisis, Dobbs arrived
at a grim calculation. “The risks of a direct confrontation between U.S.
and Russian forces may be fairly low at present,” he conceded. “But if
you multiply that by X months or X years and the number of things that
could go wrong, they turn out to be similar mathematically.”

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