After winning back territory in the fall and holding most of those gains through winter, the world awaits Ukraine’s much-anticipated spring offensive to drive Russian invaders out of the nation’s eastern provinces.
Coffey said if the United States and Western Europe want to defend Ukraine and contain Russian aggression, it will need a long-term plan few are now contemplating.
“Instead of seeing the war in Ukraine as a series of individual battles, we have to start seeing the war in Ukraine as a continuous campaign where the U.S. prepares Ukraine for one counter offensive while laying the groundwork to help Ukraine survive the next winter and then prepare for the following year’s offensive,” he said.
The “disconnected approach” could devolve into a disconnection between Ukraine and its allies if the anticipated offensive fails to extricate Russian forces from Ukraine and the war bogs down into a stasis of attrition, Coffey said
“Expectations are so high for this counter-offensive that there are already some people suggesting future Ukraine assistance will rely on the success of the campaign,” he said. “We cannot base assistance to Ukraine on one event. We have to look at the big strategic picture. [We need] a little more leadership from the White House explaining why Ukraine matters, explaining to Capitol Hill why it’s in our interest to support Ukraine.”
Coffey said the president and administration officials have failed to make a solid case to the American people about the gravity of Russia’s threat and what is at stake in Ukraine.
“The problem with the administration’s language in saying the U.S. will be with Ukraine for ‘however long it takes’ is no one has defined the word ‘it,’” he said. “Does that equal victory, some kind of negotiated settlement? To be fair, the problem the White House has is, only the Ukrainians can define ‘it’.”
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky “has been very clear that he sees the full restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the restoration of 1991 borders, as their definition of ‘victory,’” which would include retaking Crimea, he said.
“We should be planning our aid and support to Ukraine based off those lines,” Coffey said.
Putin Will Keep Attacking Ukraine
Pavlo Klimkin, who served as Ukraine’s foreign minister 2014-19 and now leads Kyiv-based Center for National Resilience and Development, agreed that the “endgame” in Ukraine will likely require long-game strategies because regardless how the offensive fares, Putin won’t be done with Ukraine, and Russian forces will attack again.“Putin will again use a pretext” to assault Ukraine, and resistance will be “a continuous circle, a kind of spiral” that can only end if Europe and the United States continue to funnel military and economic assistance to the besieged country and put more teeth into economic sanctions.
“Of course, we are confident [we will make] decisive gains on the battleground” this spring, he said. “I believe negotiations with Russia are only possible from the clear position of strength. You can only effectively negotiate with Russia from the position of strength. Such a position of strength will be achieved by military advances [but] could be, and should be, sustained by economic pressure … and economic isolation of Russia.”
But first things first, Klimkin said. “If you believe we need to win—and we can discuss what ‘victory’ is for Ukrainians, for the West—at least one point has to be clear: we have to win. We cannot just win militarily. The victory should be comprehensive.
“We need to embrace this mentality—of winning,” he continued. “If you like to win against the Russians—and it is possible, it’s really possible—it’s a game-changer mental change that you must have, that you can win the game against Russia and a regime is dangerous for everyone, not just Ukraine.”
Europeans Waking Up to a New Reality
International Republican Institute Senior Advisor for Transatlantic Strategy Reka Szemerkenyi, an economist who served as Hungary’s ambassador to the U.S. 2015-17, said Central European nations also recognize that the threat Putin’s Russia poses will not go away, even if its troops are roused from Ukraine.For many Europeans, especially Western Europeans, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted the “collapse of several big theories” they “based relations with Russia on,” Szemerkenyi said.
“One, for instance, mutual trade; that expanding trade relations will create stability and security,” she said. “Another one, cooperation across various sectors can lead to strategic cooperation.”
‘Endgame’ Scenarios
Klimkin identified three potential “endgame” scenarios.“One, I like to call the ‘porcupine scenario’” in which U.S. and European allies are “giving Ukraine ways to deter Russia, to give us as much weapons as possible, as sophisticated as possible,” he said while dismissing it as “not a sustainable option.”
Such a scenario is, essentially, a continuation of the current state of affairs. “It is unfair towards Ukraine and Ukrainians. It would not work. It would create another spiral of uncertainty” that would eventually fail because of “the sheer scope of Russia. This option is fundamentally wrong.”
The second scenario Klimkin called “the Ukrainian Fortress of Guarantees,” which could include “a set of bilateral guarantees, or one comprehensive set of guarantees, possibility by NATO,” ensuring the defense of Ukraine against Russia.
This, too, “is quite problematic,” he said. “We could imagine a network of security guarantees, but for me, it could be just a transitional sort of solution towards NATO membership.”
The third option is for NATO and the European Union to approve Ukraine’s admission into both bodies, Klimkin said.
There are anxieties from some NATO nations that admitting Ukraine risks “direct conflict with Russia. There’s all kinds of fears and lack of will to raise the stakes and kind of difficult discussions about how Russia would react,“ he said.
Klimkin said Putin has already reacted, claiming it is Ukraine’s pending NATO and EU membership applications that enraged the Russian leader and prompted a decade of agitation culminating in the February 2021 invasion.
Klimkin has “spent 20 years” working on getting Ukraine admitted into NATO and the EU. “I believe there is an intrinsic link between our drive towards the European Union and Russian and Putin’s attempts to destroy Ukraine,” he said.
If Ukraine is admitted to NATO, especially in the wake of its clumsy, poorly executed invasion, Putin will blink if Europeans stay solid, Klimkin predicted.
“My sense, my educated guess, is Putin would not be able to react in a forceful way” to Ukraine joining NATO, but first NATO nations need to face “the moment of truth” and risk direct conflict with Russia. Backing down, he said, guarantees conflict with Russia.
“Any sort of end game—and this exceptionally is my point—is not possible without getting ambitious,” Klimkin said. “We need this clarity [of NATO membership]. Without that, it [Russian invasion] is all going to come back.”
Ukrainians are not just being targeted as citizens of a nation, he said, but for being Ukrainians, and that makes it personal—and existential, he said.
Putin “is unable, fundamentally not able, to see Ukraine as Ukraine. For him, Ukraine is either Russia or anti-Russia,” Klimkin said, recalling Putin’s essays and speeches in which the Russian leader maintains, “Ukraine is artificial. There is no Ukrainian language, no statehood, no history, basically nothing. And it’s a fundamental part of the Russian ideology, how he understands it.”
The seeds for the war—the first large military conflict in Europe since World War II—were planted in the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which left a “deeply entrenched sense in Russia of being offended because of the whole Soviet Union empire program was broken,” he said. “It’s how it all started.”
So Europe should not have been surprised that Putin would send Russian troops into Ukraine and should have responded to U.S. intelligence warnings sooner that an invasion was being planned, Klimkin said.
“It’s not an out-of-the-blue reaction by Putin. Two years ago, one year ago, or 2014, or before that, for him, it is a sense of mission to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainian identity,” Klimkin said. “Having Ukraine as a European country would destroy his sense, and Russians’ sense, of what Ukraine should be.”
Unfortunately for Putin, his effort to destroy “Ukrainian identity” has backfired spectacularly since the invasion, he said.
“Ukrainians are fundamentally different intellectually from the Russians,” Klimkin said. “Many people started understanding that only in 2014 [when Russia seized and occupied Crimea] and even more so in the moment of [Russia’s] all-out invasion.
A decade ago or so, if you told a Ukrainian that Russia insists Ukrainians are Russians, “the mantra was, ‘So what?’” he said.
Now, thanks to Putin, Ukrainians are convinced they are not Russians and, in opinion polls, more than 90 percent “are against entering any type of negotiation with Putin,” Klimkin said.
“It is now understood,” he said, “that Ukraine is Europe and Ukrainians are Europeans.”
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