Lawrence Freedman. Survival. Volume 57, Issue 5, October 2015.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is now well into its second year. The contested area in eastern Ukraine is still marked by regular exchanges of fire, and equally regular losses of life. The United Nations reported in late July 2015 that at least 6,832 people had perished since April 2014, along with over 17,000 wounded. There have been frequent warnings of new Russian offensives, but these have yet to materialise. For all the effort put in by both sides, the basic contours of the conflict have barely changed since September 2014.
It is not evident that either side has a strategy for bringing the war to a conclusion. The situation can be described as one in which they are each seeking the exhaustion of the other. Exhaustion here does not so much describe a physical state of being unable to continue with the struggle as it does a mental state: the sense of weariness and futility that can induce combatants to accept a political compromise that would previously have been rejected. Exhaustion can be the result not only of frustration with a military position, but also of economic pressure and political discontent. Indeed when exhaustion truly takes hold, it does so at the highest political level where the key strategic decisions about a war’s future conduct must be made.
It is not unusual for conflicts to settle down to a pattern of probes and pushes, after an initial period marked by big movements and exchanges of territory, and reach a point where both sides are tired without either being ready to concede. In such situations, there are temptations for occasional offensives intended to achieve a breakthrough, or at least cause attrition. There may also be attempts by third parties to mediate ceasefires and peace treaties. A conflict that has reached the state of a ‘mutually hurting stalemate’ is often seen to be one ripe for negotiated settlement. Yet this does not mean that such efforts will succeed: they can instead provide breathing space, a chance to regain energy, and so in the end can prolong the struggle.
Such situations have been largely ignored by students of strategy, who show far greater interest in surprise attacks and knockout blows, or in deterrence and preventive measures. Yet military history is full of instances of states needing to cope with the aftermath of military initiatives that have not yielded as much as hoped, or with defensive efforts that have stemmed losses without recovering what was already taken. The Russia-Ukraine war fits in with this pattern, and so provides an opportunity to examine this less glamorous and more dispiriting aspect of modern conflict. In this article, I consider whether there can in such circumstances be a strategy of exhaustion, in the sense of deliberate measures to change the opponent’s mental state and to extract compromises that might not otherwise have been available in any negotiated outcome. The idea of a strategy of exhaustion has a respectable pedigree in the literature, but it tends towards making the best of a bad job rather than an optimum route to victory. This is for a good reason: it is hard to pin down the effects that will have the necessary impact on another’s political will.
This article provides the third instalment in my account of the Russia-Ukraine war. In May 2014 I considered the war’s origins and development after the sudden departure of former president Yanukovich from Kiev in February 2014, and in November 2014 I took the story up to the signing of that September’s Minsk agreement and NATO’s Cardiff summit. This instalment describes events since then, including a further Minsk agreement as poorly observed as the first.
In these previous articles, I also sought to explain the current stage in the conflict by reference to familiar strategic concepts, considering crisis management and limited war, respectively. These concepts could both be traced back to the eighteenth century, when war was an accepted and contained means of regulating relations between states. Sustaining limitations then became more difficult as a result of the increased range and lethality of weaponry and the democratisation of war. This allowed for mass mobilisation and objectives informed by strong popular sentiments. The idea of limited war was recaptured and refined during the early stages of the Cold War in light of the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. The challenge then was to combine tentativeness about resorting to major war with a desire to avoid abandoning vital interests. As a result, crisis and war came to be seen as forms of deadly bargaining, geared to maximising gains while minimising risks. The art in this approach depended on being able to employ limited force, construct credible threats and retain lines of diplomatic communication in order to generate a lasting political advantage. Military moves had to be synchronised with negotiations, bringing the emotional heat of war and the cool calculations necessary to strike a deal into the same space, despite their uneasy coexistence.
These challenges were evident during the first six months of the Ukrainian crisis. Significant levels of fighting and associated economic costs were sufficient to create a desire for a ceasefire, but not the conditions necessary for a long-term settlement that could satisfy the key players. Without a settlement, a cease- fire became hard to sustain, so it became preferable to live with the conflict rather than make irrevocable compromises. Ukraine, supported by Western countries, demanded the return of occupied territory. Russia demanded that Ukraine come to terms with the new reality by accepting the annexation of Crimea and negotiating directly with separatist groups on a new constitutional settlement. Neither side has fully mobilised. Both had (and continue to have) substantial resources in reserve. At this apparent impasse, attention switched to non-military forms of pressure, and in particular each side’s ability to cope with economic stress.
The lack of movement at the heart of the conflict has been combined with speculation about substantial geopolitical shifts, as the belligerents seek to sustain their position for a prolonged struggle. These include a Russian pivot toward China while neutral Europeans, such as Sweden and Finland, consider joining NATO.
The possibility of new alliance formations might be expected to put greater urgency behind efforts to resolve the conflict, or at least contain its wider impact. For the moment, however, neither belligerent shows signs of chronic fatigue, while major powers are either distracted by other large and complicated international issues or just bereft of new ideas. The obvious basis for a settlement lies in the Minsk agreements, but their inherent design flaws require that one side must abandon its core position for a deal to be made and sustained. The question of how well both sides will cope with a conflict that has no obvious terminus brings us back to the concept of exhaustion.
Annihilation and exhaustion
The German military historian Hans Delbrück distinguished between two basic forms of military strategy. Niederwerfungsstrategie referred to a strategy that would knock down the enemy’s army, eliminating it as a fighting force through decisive battle, leaving the enemy state with no choice but capitulation. This is normally described as a strategy of annihilation. The alternative was a strategy of exhaustion, Ermattungsstrategie. In this strategy, the ends of war might be achieved by a variety of means including battle, but also forms of economic pressure such as blockade. This was not a means of avoiding battle, but rather acknowledgement that battles might not be conclusive on their own. Instead, they would have a cumulative effect as part of an effort to wear the enemy down. Writing in the late nineteenth century, Delbrück was taking on the German military establishment, which was wholly committed to the idea of a decisive battle. Delbrück warned that whatever the General Staff’s preferences, the conditions might not fit the plans, and war might take a quite different form to the one intended.
Ermattungsstrategie was also translated as a strategy of attrition, and it was attrition that became the more prominent concept. Its meaning shifted, however, during the course of the twentieth century. In the light of the experience of the First World War, when attrition was explicitly adopted as a strategy by both sides on the Western Front, it was taken to represent a harsh and remorseless approach to campaign casualties. It reflected the failure of shortcuts to victory, leaving little choice but to inflict unsustainable losses on the enemy, even though that meant accepting heavy losses of one’s own.
Victory would go to the side with the most manageable ‘rate of wastage’. There was also a narrower sense of attrition, referring to attempts to weaken enemy forces prior to a coming battle, for example by pounding forward positions with artillery barrages so that they might then be overwhelmed by an advancing army. This required careful coordination of shelling and the forward movement of ground forces. Unfortunately, when implemented at the Battle of the Somme, the plan left no opportunity to assess the effects of the artillery before the advance began, a flaw that was painfully exposed on its first day, 1 July 1916.
In either its broader or narrower sense, the idea of attrition never quite escaped association with a wanton tolerance of carnage, a desire to inflict maximum casualties on the enemy for want of an alternative. The strategic theorists of the interwar years, such as Basil Liddell Hart, sought ways to win wars without mass slaughter, by outsmarting the opponent. Advantage was to be gained through manoeuvre, so that the enemy was caught by surprise and left disoriented. It was imperative to avoid frontal assaults against a well-prepared enemy. In wars that promised to be long hauls because of the resources of the belligerents, it was best to conserve manpower and not waste it in futile set-piece encounters. The experience of both world wars, albeit that the second was more of a war of movement, demonstrated that attrition was a consequence of battle, rather than an alternative to battle.
In this way, the distinction between manoeuvre and attrition came to be about different ways of fighting. Attrition’s reputation as a callous and unimaginative approach to warfare took hold, reinforced in the Korean War after an impasse was reached in 1951, and then again in Vietnam, as the United States cast around for a way of defeating a persistent opponent. The instinctive approach in Vietnam appeared to be to kill off as many of the enemy forces as possible with superior firepower, in the hope that at some point they would be left militarily ineffective and Hanoi would decide that supporting the southern insurgency was no longer worth it. This attitude, symbolised by a focus on body counts, earned the scorn of military reformers in the United States during the 1970s. The reformers urged the United States to rediscover operational art, damned attrition as an inferior form of strategy and offered manoeuvre as a far more attractive alternative. This caricatured version of attrition presented it as a warped mindset, marked by a lazy reliance on firepower and the systematic destruction of known targets, sufficiently predictable to be readily countered by a more talented opponent. All this reflected the offensive bias prevalent in classical strategic thought, with its preference for dramatic manoeuvres, rapid advances and knockout blows.
Attrition was left as the orphan of strategy, derided for its tolerance of casualty, its lack of dash and ambition, and its indistinct route to victory. No prominent theorist acted as a champion of attrition, and while practitioners often embraced it, they would only claim to do so grudgingly. On the rare occasions when it was adopted from the start as a deliberate strategy, the results were unimpressive. An explicit war of attrition was launched by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in March 1969. He believed that the Israelis could not cope if their forces arrayed on one side of the Suez Canal suffered regular casualties as a result of persistent shelling, and hoped that as a result they would be persuaded to move away from the canal area. Israel responded with deep air raids, in the hope that this might topple Nasser. This war ended in August 1970 with a ceasefire that left Israel still in position along the canal and Nasser still in power (although he died the following month). The next war launched by Egypt, in October 1973, was much bolder.
Carter Malkasian, a rare student of attrition, has argued that the strategy can involve far more than mindless exchanges of firepower, but also ‘indepth withdrawals, limited ground offensive, frontal assaults, patrolling, careful defensive, scorched-earth tactics, guerrilla warfare, air strikes, artillery firepower, or raids’. Successful attritional campaigns work because they wear down the enemy through a process that is likely to be protracted, gradual and piecemeal. It might end with a battle, when the enemy can no longer cope, but it could also end with a negotiation. Such strategies work best, he noted, with limited aims. His case studies, however, involved campaigns within wider wars—Britain’s Burma campaign against the Japanese in 1942-44, for example, and the later stages of the Korean War.
As strategic concepts, attrition and exhaustion are therefore not synonymous, although they are clearly related. To distinguish between them we can define attrition as a strategy based on affecting the opponent’s physical state, while exhaustion affects the opponent’s mental state. J. Boone Bartholomees suggests something along these lines. He construes attrition, narrowly, as inflicting casualties until an enemy is unable to defend itself. Exhaustion is about eroding the will of the enemy to continue the fight, by denying it resources and undermining economic capacity, by such means as a blockade. We can describe attrition as the progressive erosion of enemy capacity, which means it can be a consequence of any sustained military engagement. This can weaken an enemy so it loses battles, and as a second- order consequence attrition might also undermine political will. By contrast, we can describe exhaustion as a strategic effect, marked by a progressive loss of capacity, energy, commitment and eventually political will. This effect might be caused by attrition, but also by other measures designed to stifle economic activity and reduce access to supplies.
Bartholomees argues that in circumstances of either attrition or exhaustion the stronger side is likely to prevail, either because of superior firepower or superior resources. One can see why this might be the case with attrition: as each side’s capacity is depleted, the side with greater capacity should eventually come out on top. Exhaustion is different, however, which is why it is a strategy favoured by an underdog. With inferior resources, the underdog has no interest in conventional battle. The interest instead lies in playing for time. For the weaker party—such as an irregular force resisting invasion or fighting oppression—the challenge is to stay in the game, which may require coping with, and absorbing, pain. This superior staying power will depend on having a greater stake in the fight, which is why such campaigns rarely prosper against a stronger side with an even more substantial stake, for example because it feels that its heartland is under threat.
Where the stronger side is less sure of its position, for example in helping a friendly country deal with an insurgency, it may struggle to cope with irregular forces able to exploit familiarity with local conditions and popular feeling. Such forces can harass the enemy, leaving it susceptible to fatigue, disenchantment and a growing sense of futility. Even though the stronger may prevail in the occasional battle, endurance and political will can sustain the weaker. The main challenge with a strategy of exhaustion lies in how to take advantage of an apparent decline in the enemy’s political will to continue with the fight. With attrition, there is an implication of a notional breaking point, when the enemy can cope no longer because it has run out of troops or money. Exhaustion accepts that opponents can adjust to pain and hardship, so that any turning point may not be sudden, or easy to identify when it arrives, and may be largely dependent upon internal political developments on the enemy side.
A limited war, in which neither side is fighting at full capacity, aggravates this difficulty. A purely attritional strategy cannot be expected to work, because both will retain spare military capacity. The risk of escalation into a more substantial, damaging and costly war holds back both sides; they must seek to prevail within self-imposed constraints. This logic points towards a bargain to end the conflict, but if a bargain cannot be found and escalation is still eschewed, then non-military factors are likely to become increasingly important. These will include the functioning of the economy and the ability to maintain domestic political support. Strategy in such circumstances consists of a combination of conserving and building up capacity to stay in the game, while probing for the weak spots in the enemy’s position and working out how to exploit them. Satisfaction will come in the form of small gains and an enemy whose losses and pain exceed one’s own, but it will also be important to pay as much attention to attitudes and conditions at home as to those on the enemy side.
All this helps explain why strategies of exhaustion tend to be arrived at by default, taken up when stuck in a defensive stance or caught out by a disappointing offensive. They will not be advocated by proponents of war, who are much more likely to promise a quick victory and dismiss the possibility of a protracted, miserable hard grind. When first hopes are dashed, strategies of exhaustion are adopted for want of anything better, in the spirit of Churchill’s maxim during the Second World War: ‘keep buggering on’. Too much may have been invested in the fight, and too much reputation may be at stake, to simply walk away. This, then, is the sort of strategy belligerents stumble into—requiring improvisation, lacking any clear theory of cause and effect, and without an obvious route to victory. Yet the circumstances in which such strategies come to be adopted are quite common, and the difficulties they face in implementation help alert us to some of the messy realities of modern conflict.
The offensive that wasn’t
Both Russia and Ukraine are currently following strategies of exhaustion. Neither can see a route to a military victory. Neither is wholly committed to the implementation of the Minsk plan, although neither is suggesting an alternative framework for a settlement. The continuing conflict hurts both sides, but not yet to the point at which either feels any immediate pressure to abandon core positions. At some point they will need to conclude the matter, but if this is to be done under more favourable circumstances, they will need to find ways of increasing the wear and tear on their adversary. Although Russia is much stronger than Ukraine, it also has a more difficult position to uphold. It is seeking to retain annexed territory, in addition to an enclave in eastern Ukraine, against the wishes of the bulk of the international community and in the face of economic sanctions. Its main problem lies in the Donbas enclave. Under the Minsk plan, it is to remain part of Ukraine, albeit one with a different constitutional configuration. For the moment, it is not self-sufficient economically or militarily. While it is hard (although not impossible) to see Russia returning Crimea to Ukraine, it is possible that it will abandon Donbas. That possibility gives Russia’s opponents hope.
Assessing Russian strategy, however, is not straightforward. One challenge is the total lack of candour with which Russia discusses its intervention in Ukraine. By constantly denying its role, Russia has introduced a huge complication into the conduct of the war, the associated diplomacy and attempts at analysis. This has been presented as a deliberate and (according to some) clever strategy, referred to as ‘hybrid warfare’. Perhaps Russia believes that foreign minds can be turned by propaganda, or at least left uncertain as to where the truth lies. Yet if the intention was to spread an invisibility cloak over military preparations and operations, this effort has failed. The Kremlin’s fiction might have initially facilitated the Russian intervention, but it has also become a restriction. Its wider consequences include a growing distrust of all Russian government pronouncements, at least outside Russia. The natural corollary has been increased authoritarianism inside Russia, and a clampdown on domestic news outlets and independent organisations that might challenge the official line.
Russia’s duplicity about what it is up to in Ukraine means that the nature and purpose of Russian military strategy must be inferred from actual activity. Initially, Russian strategy was politically defensive and militarily offensive. Faced with an abrupt loss of influence in Kiev and the prospect of Ukraine turning to the West, it used local militants and Russian special forces to push Ukrainian authorities out of Crimea, and out of key towns and cities in eastern Ukraine. One interpretation of this effort is that Moscow hoped to foster a broad-based anti-Kiev movement. At a minimum, this could put irresistible pressure on the post-Maidan Ukrainian government to back away from its pro-Western course; at a maximum, it could help reconstruct the old territory of Novorossiya, which might then attach itself in some way to Russia. Whatever the original aspiration, by the spring of 2014 Russian efforts were concentrated in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. At first, considerable territory was taken, but over the summer significant amounts were lost to what Kiev called an ‘anti-terrorist operation’. That prompted a more overt Russian intervention using regular forces, which pushed back until the separatist enclave had more defensible borders. A ceasefire was agreed in the first Minsk agreement in September 2014.
Fighting continued, though not at the same levels as before, as efforts were made to expand the enclave. These were largely undertaken by separatist irregulars. They had limited success relative to the energy expended. Ukrainian units held out in Donetsk airport for a number of months. No sustained attempt was mounted to take the presumed next major target, the coastal city of Mariupol. It was suggested that this would open up a land bridge to Crimea, although as likely a function was to put even more industrial centres of Ukraine at risk. In January 2015, the airport fell and, weeks later, the town of Debaltseve was abandoned by Ukrainian forces after they were surrounded. This was the point at which the second Minsk agreement was reached. As a ceasefire, this was no more effective than that agreed to the previous September. It was at most a ‘less-fire’.
Russian-backed separatists took more territory, but there were no major breakthroughs. This confirmed the basic pattern of the fighting: Ukrainian forces could cope with the separatist irregulars, but not well against Russian regulars. The biggest threat to the Ukrainian position, therefore, was assumed to be a far greater engagement of Russian forces. Through April and May 2015, there were regular reports of a major build-up and movements of Russian men and equipment within separatist-held territory and in border areas. General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, warned at the end of April that Russia was taking advantage of the nominal ceasefire to reposition its troops and equipment and to train and supply the separatists who were preparing for a new offensive. There were also suggestions that Russia had sought to get the separatist command and control in better working order. In May, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko claimed:
the total number of the enemy force in Donbas taking into account members of illegal armed groups is more than 40,000 people, while the Russian military grouping near the state border totals over 50,000 servicemen, almost 1.5 times more than in July 2014.
A consensus was reported to be building ‘among NATO officials and military analysts of the situation in Eastern Ukraine that Russia will renew its invasion of the region in the next two months’.
At the start of June, a separatist offensive was launched against the town of Maryinka, some 30 kilometres away from the rebel stronghold of Donetsk. The assault was beaten back by Ukrainian forces, with the separatists taking the heavier casualties. But it led Kiev to move men and equipment to what now seemed to be a vulnerable point: an area well on the Ukrainian side of the ceasefire line. The next day, Poroshenko again warned of the prospect of the possibility of a ‘full-scale’ Russian invasion. This was followed by persistent shelling, and smaller operations around Donetsk. On 10 August there was a further push by separatists (with Ukrainians claiming Russian regulars were in the lead) against Starognatovka, another town between Donetsk and Mariupol. Again they were beaten back by Ukrainian forces, with both sides taking substantial casualties. The separatist offensive thus far has been more about keeping Ukrainian defences under pressure than achieving major territorial gain.
Observers and officials continue to make predictions of a much more substantial Russian offensive, but one has yet to occur. Why might this be the case? The Russians now know to expect tough resistance from the Ukrainians, whose armed forces are assumed to be steadily improving as they learn from experience and benefit from Western-supported efforts at reform and improved training. The greater the improvement, the greater the mainstream military commitment required from Russia to gain ground in an invasion. For all its attractions as a target, Mariupol is well defended. Here, the Russian pretence not to be directly engaged in fighting in Ukraine created a problem. Despite its regular exposure, this is a fiction that the Russian authorities have been desperate to maintain. An offensive that went far beyond anything the separatists could manage by themselves would make it even harder to deny Russia’s role, especially as more prisoners were taken and casualties suffered. Already soldiers who have been caught by Ukraine have been disavowed by Moscow, which is poor for morale. Casualties are an even more sensitive matter. Documenting losses was the most newsworthy aspect of the report begun by opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and completed after his assassination. It referred to the deaths of at least 220 soldiers, and suggested that the actual total was higher. This issue has become so sensitive that disclosure of combat deaths as a result of ‘special operations’ in peacetime is now prohibited. There have also been reports of desertion from the Russian army.
Even if an invasion prospered, Russia would still face the problem of administering large areas of Ukraine, without popular support and with a militarily damaged infrastructure. The experience of the Donbas enclave in this respect was not encouraging. It was left depopulated and chaotically governed, with a collapsed economy dependent on Russian subsidies. An overt and large-scale invasion in addition could well lead to more sanctions, most drastically an effort to kick Russia out of SWIFT (through which organisations and countries access the international financial system). The severity of this potential sanction is shown by the intensity of Russian reactions, to the extent of describing it as being tantamount to an act of war. The G7 (as it is now, without Russia) stated in its communiqué after the June 2015 summit:
We recall that the duration of sanctions should be clearly linked to Russia’s complete implementation of the Minsk agreements and respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty. They can be rolled back when Russia meets these commitments. However, we also stand ready to take further restrictive measures in order to increase cost on Russia should its actions so require. We expect Russia to stop trans-border support of separatist forces and to use its considerable influence over the separatists to meet their Minsk commitments in full.
If such an escalation had taken place, it would also have undermined the argument that it was best not to supply the Ukrainians with weapons, as opposed to non-lethal equipment, lest it lead to escalation.
Another explanation for Russia massing forces and shelling Ukrainian positions, while not launching a major offensive, is that this was part of a strategy of exhaustion. The Russian build-up had an obvious defensive role—to deter Ukrainian forces from mounting an attack against separatist positions. It also tied down Ukrainian forces that were moved to the region in response. Ukrainians could not be sure about the targets of separatist attacks, and exposed units could be caught out. Those in fixed positions were vulnerable to shelling. There were regular casualties. The possibility of a more substantial operation, even if short of a full invasion, might embarrass Ukrainian forces, as had the failure in Debaltseve, and weaken Ukrainian resolve. To this was added a developing campaign of terrorism and subversion within Ukraine in order to further unsettle the country. The challenge for Moscow is to sustain this pressure. Maintaining some 50,000 troops close to Ukraine, and having some operating within its borders, is expensive and wearing on the troops, especially when their role is denied, deaths are covered up and they are disavowed if captured within Ukraine.
An exhausting war
The conflict has hurt both economies. Ukraine was already struggling, and the costs and distractions of war have added to its troubles. Ukraine’s GDP is forecast to contract by some 16% over 2014 and 2015. The economist Anders Aslund attributes 7% to lost production in occupied territory (including Crimea), 6% to lost trade with Russia and 3% to lost foreign direct investment. At the same time, Ukraine must cope with a humantarian crisis resulting from the war, including 1.3 million people internally displaced. Aslund has also described the deliberate methods being used by the Russians to exacerbate Ukraine’s economic difficulties, in keeping with a strategy of exhaustion. Not only has coal production fallen by roughly two-thirds and steel production by one-third, because of the loss of mines and steel mills in the occupied area of the Donbas and regular shelling by separatists of key infrastructure, but also all exports to Russia have been cut by half using illicit measures, despite Russia’s membership of the World Trade Organization.
Ukraine agreed a favourable debt restructuring in late August 2015, involving a 20% ‘haircut’, and repayments only when growth returns. A major payment to Russia is due in December 2015. While Russia was not part of the restructuring effort, Ukraine has warned that it will not be offered better terms than agreed by other lenders. This could lead to a Russian attempt to push Ukraine into default. Ukraine, of course, can also make counter claims against Russia, referring to the confiscation of private and public property in Crimea.
There is still a significant financing gap for 2015 and 2016: around $8 billion has been committed of a total $15bn needed. The Ukrainian parliament, prodded by the IMF, has adopted a number of reforms, including measures to reduce Ukraine’s dependence on Russian gas and institute anti-corruption laws. The measures are painful, with energy subsidies and pensions cut, while the pressure of the war has led the military budget to jump from 3.36% of GDP in 2015 to 5.67% by 2018.
Ukraine’s social and political system has, by and large, coped better than might have been expected. Corruption remains high, but is declining and not as well organised as before. Many ministers are now young and Western-educated, and pro-European reformers are now in strong positions in parliament and government. Party discipline is weak, however, and old habits die hard. Many in entrenched positions of power in the police and judiciary have shown no interest in modernising. There have been some serious challenges to political order, although not from supporters of Russia as much as from the more nationalist members of the Right Sector. Some Ukrainian units fighting separatists are essentially militias that developed out of the uprisings of early 2014, with fragmented command structures, tending to act as the military cells of political factions as much as a disciplined national force.
In this stressful situation, it will be difficult for the government to maintain reforming zeal and prosecute the war at the same time. That being said, the war seems to have made Ukraine more united rather than less. Positive feelings among Ukrainians towards Russia have declined from 88% in September 2013 to just 30% in May 2015, according to the Kiev International Institute of Sociology. Even those in eastern Ukraine, supposedly more sympathetic to Russia, have come to view their neighbour less positively—down from 83% to 51%. Another poll showed a majority of Ukrainians outside the areas controlled by separatists supporting membership of the European Union, but only 13% wanting to join Russia’s customs union. Another survey by the same institute showed that only 15.3% of Ukrainians would be willing to hand Donbas over to Russia in exchange for peace, and only 26.4% would be willing even to meet demands for substantial autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk. This poll showed general support for the peace process, although less so in western Ukraine, but only 28.3% were in favour of the Ukrainian army liberating the occupied area of Donbas by force. Most would not agree to renouncing integration with the EU for peace, although on membership of NATO the population was evenly divided.
All this has made Ukraine dependent upon its Western friends for economic and diplomatic support, and military assistance. However frustrating it might find the reluctance of Germany and the United States to supply it with ‘lethal’ military equipment, or the limited financial support on offer, it has to hold back because in the end these countries are vital if it is to stay afloat. It is vulnerable to Western countries tiring of the conflict and looking to mend fences with Russia, easing off sanctions and demanding concessions from Kiev in the context of the Minsk framework. In this respect it has been fortunate in its opponent. Although Western countries are anxious about a long period of tension with a nuclear power (as Moscow continues to emphasise), Russia has given Europeans who might be thinking along conciliatory lines little with which to work. In addition, the events of the past two years have diminished Russia as an international player.
Russia’s problems start with its economic contraction. While Ukraine suffered from punitive Russian measures, Russia was subjected to economic sanctions, said to have so far cost some $100bn, and other irritants such as a Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling that a $50bn fine must be paid to former investors in the Yukos oil company, which was dismantled by the Russian state over ten years ago. In addition, the Russian economy has been hit by falls in the price of oil and the rouble. Its GDP is forecast to contract 3.5% in 2015. Capital flight continues, amounting to $150bn in 2014 and forecast for $100bn in 2015. More seriously for consumers, inflation is running at some 15%, well ahead of growth in wages, and the indexation of pensions.
Unlike in Ukraine, little has been done to increase Russian competiveness and tackle corruption. Efforts have been made to encourage import substitution but this cannot provide short-term relief, and in the long term will only work if there is considerable investment and economic reform. Progress in both was faltering even before the crisis began. There are declining resources available for investment, however, and a lack of interest in reform. The military’s budget accounts for some 8% of Russian GDP (twice the US amount and four times the Chinese) and it has started to feel the pressure. Because of sanctions, more resources are required for equipment programmes, while export orders have declined, although any decline is still from a high base.
In the face of this pressure, Putin’s strategy has been described as being largely one of ‘hunkering down and playing for time’, waiting for petroleum prices and the rouble to recover so that he can continue to pursue his geopolitical priorities. In a speech directed to the West in St Petersburg in June, the president reminded his audience of past warnings that there would be a ‘deep crisis’. Instead, he observed, Russia has ‘stabilized the situation … mainly because the Russian economy piled up a sufficient supply of inner strength’.
Despite Russian efforts to encourage defections from the European Union, the sanctions imposed as a result of Crimea were re-enacted in June, displaying European consensus. If oil prices do not perk up, Russia will continue to struggle. It has few other obvious means of improving its financial position. China may be content for Russia to seek to get closer to offset its deteriorating relations with the West, but Beijing is not going to do Moscow any economic favours. Trade has declined over the past year and little has been done on proposed new oil pipelines. Beijing is certainly not discriminating against Ukraine in its economic relations; Ukraine has become the largest corn exporter to China. The most important prize China can offer to Russia is strong economic performance of its own to help boost oil prices, but the most recent evidence suggests a trend in the opposite direction. The currency reserves accumulated during the good years of high commodity prices still look healthy at $360bn, although they have still decreased by some $140bn since the start of 2014, and if they continue to decline at the same rate they will constrain further Russia’s economic freedom of manoeuvre.
Russia’s official narrative now portrays a country under attack from the West, with every blow traced back to an American initiative. The spirit of the Second World War is constantly invoked, encouraging a militarisation of Russian culture. If Putin’s personal popularity is anything to go by, this has worked: one poll put his approval rating at a stratospheric 89%, higher than the 64% who say that they approve of the country’s direction. This can be explained by Putin’s assuming the role of Tsar, above politics, a supreme authority to whom the masses can appeal in troubled times—but also to a conviction that with the Sochi Olympics and the annexation of Crimea, Putin has restored Russia’s international standing. It has been suggested that this support is not wholehearted: not necessarily translating into voting intentions, for example, and weaker among educated middle classes and urbanites. One risk in this situation is that any weakening of public support, for example in response to harsher economic conditions, could lead to efforts to heighten, rather than calm, international tension in a bid to rally the people behind Putin. Nonetheless Russia still appears to be less of a great power ascendant than one struggling to cope with a set of reverses.
Few episodes illustrate this better than the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Donbas in July 2014. From the start, the simplest and most credible explanation was that it had been shot down by separatists with a Buk anti-aircraft missile by mistake. More evidence to support that view has come in over time. Because Moscow could not admit that its proxies could be responsible for such a crime, it has put forward a series of fanciful and contradictory alternative theories, from a shoot-down by a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet, to a Ukrainian Buk, to a bomb on board, none of which have survived scrutiny. Russia’s refusal to admit its mistake left it casting the solitary veto on a UN Security Council vote on the establishment of an international tribunal to investigate the incident.
The Kremlin hopes to stifle discontent by marginalising opposition figures, closing independent media outlets and making it impossible for international NGOs to operate freely in Russia. Elections are due in September 2016, but are unlikely to trouble President Putin’s grip on power. His nightmare will be more of a Moscow-Maidan, his own colour revolution that will prove impossible to manage and which his security forces will be reluctant to suppress. This may be more of an animating fear than a real prospect, but it is one that may well lead Putin to view the deteriorating economic situation and palpable lack of international clout with some alarm.
The choice facing Putin is the same as it has been since the counter-Maidan operation launched in the spring of 2014 failed to catch fire: whether to escalate or retreat, either raising the stakes or effectively abandoning the separatist project. He has prepared for both options, but has been unable to choose between them. The result has been for Putin to continue with the status quo and hope that pressure on Ukraine will lead to political concessions in the context of the Minsk agreement that will allow Russia to disengage. This will require cooperation from the separatist leaders who have been wary about a political process that could put their own positions under threat. They are not simply puppets, although they owe their positions to Moscow and could not endure without Russian support. The Russian foreign minister has acknowledged Moscow’s influence with the separatists, but also insisted that it is not ‘as great as 100%’.
In the past, separatist leaders have asserted their wish to be wholly independent of Ukraine and preferably part of Russia. Whatever else might be said of the Minsk agreements, they gave no support for the so-called Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk outside Ukraine. The idea of recreating the old Novorossiya as a grand project seems to have been abandoned. While militarily the territories can be held, economic and social conditions within are becoming difficult. There have been reports of shortages, discontent and criminality. Their governments are immature, unstable and suffer from power struggles. Significant numbers of men are under their command, but their training and discipline often appears poor, and, as is often the case with militias, their activities can veer towards criminality.
The second Minsk agreement clarified Russia’s objectives: getting Kiev to pick up the bill for social spending and economic survival for these territories, while allowing them to integrate back into Ukraine with a special, autonomous status and a veto on Kiev’s membership of the EU or NATO. In a June interview with an Italian newspaper, Putin provided a rare acknowledgement of the Russian role while claiming modest ambition:
All our actions, including those with the use of force, were aimed not at tearing away this territory from Ukraine but at giving the people living there an opportunity to express their opinion on how they want to live their lives.
He described the implementation of the Minsk agreements in terms of ensuring ‘the autonomous rights of the unrecognized republics’, which would give them the ‘right to speak their language, to have their own cultural identity and engage in cross border trade’. This would require a law on municipal elections and an amnesty. Instead, he lamented, Kiev was not prepared to have such a conversation, hence the deadlock. Even worse, the Ukrainian government ‘have simply cut them off from the rest of the country. They discontinued all social payments—pensions, benefits; they cut off the banking system, made regular energy supply impossible, and so on.’
The proposals put forward by the separatists involve amendments to the Ukraine constitution combined with local elections. They announced that they would hold their own elections in October 2015, although the Minsk agreement stipulated that local elections should be held only on the basis of Ukrainian legislation. The assumption is that the impasse suits Moscow, because it puts off the day when it must pull back its forces (which it denies are present) and Ukraine reasserts sovereignty over its own territory. By keeping the pressure on Ukraine, Russia makes it harder for Ukraine to get even closer to the European Union or consider joining NATO. Both institutions will take care before they grant Ukraine formal membership. Yet for the moment both are stepping up informal connections and providing additional support, while the drain on Russian resources and the pressure of sanctions continue.
Nor does it seem that Ukraine is in a hurry to implement Minsk. President Poroshenko has also acknowledged the end of the Novorossiya project, which in principle could have covered nine out of the 24 regions of Ukraine, and observed that Donetsk and Luhansk are not viable on their own. They can ‘exist solely within united, independent and sovereign Ukraine’. The separatists have no democratic legitimacy and were put in position by a foreign power. At the same time, in response to pressure from Western countries, Poroshenko has also sought to demonstrate some commitment to the Minsk process, by developing constitutional legislation that offers a degree of decentralisation. The degree is too small to satisfy Moscow, yet too large to please Ukrainian nationalists. As the proposals passed their first stage in the Ukrainian Duma on 31 August, nationalists rioted outside, leaving a number of national guardsmen dead after a stun grenade was thrown. This demonstrates the delicate balance the government must find between showing sufficient interest in Minsk to keep international support, while not doing so much that domestic support is undermined. In explaining the move to the Duma, Poroshenko insisted that the measures proposed would not give Donetsk and Luhansk a special status and, at any rate, would only be taken to the next legislative stage if Russia and the separatists met their Minsk obligations.
The instability threatened by measures that would force Ukraine into a federal structure is one of the attractions of the Minsk process to Moscow, in addition to the need to find relief from the political and economic pressures resulting from the conflict. This helps explain the persistent military pressure. Just as in February 2015 when, frustrated with the slow progress on the initial agreement of September 2014, Moscow pushed harder against Ukrainian defences with some success and then achieved the slightly more favourable Minsk II, it now seeks at least to protect the Donbas enclave, and at most extract even more concessions within the Minsk framework. It has insisted on December 2015 as a Minsk-imposed deadline for constitutional change. Ukraine will not do more, however, unless it is able to regain control of its border with Russia and sees Russian military support for the separatists withdrawn—measures also supposed to be achieved by the end of 2015.
Moscow’s diplomatic effort has focused on persuading Kiev’s allies to put pressure on it to be more conciliatory in its interpretation of Minsk. Following a meeting in May between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a new diplomatic channel was developed, involving Lavrov’s deputy Grigory Karasin and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. Along with France and Germany, as key figures in the Normandy group, they pressed Ukraine on the need for a constitutional amendment that might allow separatists a voice in Ukrainian affairs. Ukraine gave what it could, but not yet enough to satisfy Moscow’s demands. And even if it went further, that would still leave Russia struggling to get the separatists to engage with Kiev. Their preference is still integration with Russia.
Russia has also attempted to make its point about the legitimacy of the local separatist leadership by encouraging special arrangements that would require representatives of Kiev to work directly with separatists monitoring ceasefires in areas of territorial contention. This has been tried at Shyrokyne, where, after separatist forces left as ‘an act of good will and the demonstration of peaceful intentions’, Ukrainian forces were asked to withdraw from the town and accept its demilitarisation, and then join separatists as part of a mixed observer group. Ukraine was unsurprisingly lukewarm about a proposal that would have conceded sovereignty, left exposed a defensive position and given legitimacy to the separatists. Nonetheless, heavy equipment was moved back from the Mariupol area, leaving only infantry and small arms, meeting the Minsk requirement for a 30km buffer zone free of heavy weaponry. Ukraine has been fortifying its positions, demonstrating not only the strength of its defences but also its readiness to live with the current situation rather than make any formal concession of sovereignty.
Perhaps surprisingly, Russia has appeared more vulnerable to exhaustion than Ukraine. August 2015 saw a push to resolve the conflict, ending in a ceasefire and preliminary constitutional moves by Ukraine, but without providing evidence that the gap between what the separatists want and what Ukraine will offer can be bridged. While Ukraine may be suffering more, it has the political will to maintain its position. Unlike Russia, it has no aspirations to be treated as a great power, and can concentrate on sorting out its domestic affairs with whatever help it can get. It has therefore been more successful in finding its way to a strategy of exhaustion, albeit because alternatives have always looked less promising. It has not attempted to go on the military offensive, after getting bloodied the last time it tried, but has concentrated on improving its defensive position. It has listened to the entreaties of its international supporters, while trying to avoid too many concessions on the fundamentals, and has a way forward on economic reform and addressing corruption. Russia, by contrast, has a weaker strategy because to resolve the crisis it must abandon its original geopolitical objectives for Ukraine, and this must involve disappointing the separatists and their supporters. Since the start of the crisis its economic and diplomatic position has taken a turn for the worse. It must sort out an economy that has become overdependent on commodities and now has a bloated military sector. The oil price is unlikely for some time to recover to the level that Russia once considered essential for its economy. Meanwhile the risks associated with buying gas from Russia have led past customers to diversify, so its once-potent ‘energy weapon’ has lost much of its sting.
Russia has backed away from the West and protected some of its more dubious friends, but has yet to form strong partnerships with the East. Friends such as Bashar al-Assad in Syria or Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela are in trouble, while Cuba and Iran may get closer with the West. Its propaganda campaign has mainly backfired, with international opinion of Russia at a low ebb. One report shows only 30% of those in countries surveyed to have a favourable view of Russia, with its image trailing behind that of the United States in most regions. It has serious national-security issues other than Ukraine, including worrisome borders such as those in Central Asia. Moreover, the measures it has taken to sustain a sense of menace in Europe, such as questioning the independence of the Baltic states, provocative air patrols, nuclear sabre-rattling and military exercises may have encouraged NATO members to stay cautious, but it has also led them to take security issues more seriously. So, no doubt inadvertently, Russia has strengthened NATO. Putin has even found it necessary to insist that Russia has no designs on the rest of Europe. Its most serious difficulty may lie in sustaining an enclave in Ukraine that is no longer yielding any substantial political benefits, and is suffering from economic degradation and lawlessness.
A strategy of exhaustion in a major war must involve breaking the will of the opponent so that it cannot summon the energy to continue. In a limited war, the position is different. The pressures on Kiev and Moscow are insufficient to force regime change. In the absence of dramatic escalation, and with a stalemate on the ground, neither side is likely to abruptly abandon established positions. Unless the current diplomatic push makes more progress, there is likely to be a progressive reappraisal of the costs and benefits of sustaining these positions, perhaps leading to preparation of the ground for further concessions. This does not mean that the conclusion will necessarily be gradual. A crisis may develop at some point, perhaps because of tensions among the separatists or a desperate attempt to gain or regain territory that will force one side to confront the realities of the situation.
The fact that it is hard to be sure reflects the inherent problems with strategies of exhaustion. They are not a means of exerting control over events so much as a way to reduce the enemy’s freedom of manoeuvre while holding on to as much as possible of one’s own. Both Russia and Ukraine have had to prioritise making their own societies more resilient in the face of conflict. In such circumstances, the key strategic virtues may be patience and fortitude. There are many particular features of this conflict that deserve continued study and attention, including the role of information warfare and the large questions raised about the future of European security. But it is also important as a reminder of the limits of strategy: sometimes it is harder to do much more than cope with a bad situation, try to adjust better than one’s opponent and hope that something turns up.