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The Weakness of Xi Jinping How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s Future By Cai Xia https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-china-weakness-hubris-paranoia-threaten-future

The Real Key to Victory in Ukraine Why Sustaining the Fight Is Everything in a War of Attrition By Kirstin J. H. Brathwaite and Margarita Konaev The war in Ukraine has settled into a grinding fight for yards. Ukrainian and Russian forces are shelling each other with medium- and long-range artillery, leaving the already battered villages and towns of the Donbas caught in the crossfire. Like the brutal battles of World War I, the current conflict has seen only small swaths of territory change hands, often being captured and recaptured from one week to the next. Although talk of a rapid victory for either side has largely disappeared from the headlines, analysts and officials still debate what piece of heavy military equipment or new technology might turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. With Russia running low on supplies and manpower, for instance, retired U.S. Army General Ben Hodges told The Washington Post last week that an influx of more sophisticated Western weaponry could allow the Ukrainians to turn back Russian advances and go on the counteroffensive. This emerging war of attrition, however, is more likely to come down to “sustainment”—the ability of each side to ensure a relentless influx of troops, ammunition, and heavy equipment to the frontlines in the east, especially as the conflict drags on and international attention dissipates. Logistics, financial management, personnel services, and health services will all be central to this effort, determining which side is better able to replace its depleted units, resupply and maintain its equipment, and source food, fuel, and ammunition. The Russian military is clearly showing signs of strain, especially when it comes to reinforcing its troops after heavy losses. But so are the Ukrainians, who in recent weeks have warned that they are running out of ammunition and losing as many as 200 soldiers per day. In a conflict that is increasingly likely to end—or at least be contained—with a negotiated settlement or cease-fire, sustainment could provide vital leverage for Ukraine. By reinforcing its troops and resupplying and maintaining its equipment, Ukraine may not be able to beat the Russians back, but it could deny them major gains, sapping their resources and will to fight. Western military assistance, especially the provision of arms and training, will be critical for sustainment. But so will domestic factors such as the return of Ukrainian refugees, the recovery of the country’s economy, and the emergence of a Ukrainian resistance in Russian-occupied areas. Sustaining the fight against Moscow, in other words, will take political, economic, and military commitment from the Ukrainian people as well as from the United States and other NATO countries. The challenge, however, is that sustainment will become increasingly costly as the war continues and Western countries find it increasingly difficult to muster the political will to uphold their commitments to Ukraine.

The Source of Ukraine’s Resilience How Decentralized Government Brought the Country Together By Tymofii Brik and Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili In early March, the Ukrainian city of Melitopol fell to Russian forces. This largely Russian-speaking city was a place where the Kremlin had hoped its forces would be welcomed as liberators. After taking over, Russian troops abducted the city’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov, a Russian speaker. The Ukrainian government circulated a video showing a blindfolded Fedorov being dragged out of his office. This led to mass protests, with hundreds of people demanding the mayor’s release. He was eventually let go, hailed as a hero by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and transformed into a symbol of courage in the face of Russian aggression. Not all mayors have been as fortunate as Fedorov. In the village of Motyzhyn, outside of Kyiv, Mayor Olga Sukhenko and her family were tortured and killed by Russian forces because they refused to cooperate. After a month-long occupation, Russia withdrew its forces from the village. Across Ukraine, Russian troops have faced fierce resistance as citizens rally not just in support of Zelensky in Kyiv but also to defend their local mayors and elected city councils. For this reason, the world has gotten to know the names of many Ukrainian cities, including Kharkiv, Kherson, Lviv, Mariupol, Bucha, Hostomel, and Irpin, which have witnessed unspeakable war crimes. In Kherson, which has been under Russian control for more than three months, a recent café bombing near Russian headquarters showed that a resistance movement is alive and well there. Ukrainian guerrilla attacks are taking place in other Russian-occupied areas, as well, particularly around Kherson. A major source of Ukraine’s resilience is this strong sense of local civic identity. It is the backbone of the country’s self-defense, and it helps explain why so many Ukrainians—especially Russian speakers—are so willing to defend their communities against Russian invasion. And it’s no accident that local governments have so much authority. Decentralization reforms adopted after the Maidan revolution in 2014, which overthrew the Russian-backed government of Viktor Yanukovych and came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity, have played a pivotal role in building national unity. The devolution of power has facilitated greater social cohesion by transforming competing ethnic identities from zero-sum competition into positive-sum community pride. A more decentralized government has given Ukrainians the sense that they are building their own country. Paradoxically, Ukraine strengthened its state by devolving power. Political legitimacy in Ukraine has been built by citizens from the bottom up, and Ukraine must keep its focus on the local level as it begins to consider rebuilding the country when the war is over. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

How Ukraine Will Win Kyiv’s Theory of Victory By Dmytro Kuleba As Russia’s all-out war of aggression in Ukraine drags on for a fourth consecutive month, calls for dangerous deals are getting louder. As fatigue grows and attention wanders, more and more Kremlin-leaning commentators are proposing to sell out Ukraine for the sake of peace and economic stability in their own countries. Although they may pose as pacifists or realists, they are better understood as enablers of Russian imperialism and war crimes. It is only natural that people and governments lose interest in conflicts as they drag on. It’s a process that has played out many times throughout history. The world stopped paying attention to the war in Libya after former leader Muammar al-Qaddafi was toppled from power, in 2011. It disengaged from Syria, Yemen, and other ongoing conflicts that once generated front-page news. And as I know well, the rest of the world lost interest in Ukraine after 2015, even as we continued to fight Russian forces for control over the eastern part of the country. But Russia’s current invasion is graver than its past one, and the world cannot afford to turn away. That’s because Russian President Vladimir Putin does not simply want to take more Ukrainian territory. His ambitions don’t even stop at seizing control of the entire country. He wants to eviscerate Ukrainian nationhood and wipe our people off the map, both by slaughtering us and by destroying the hallmarks of our identity. He is, in other words, engaged in a campaign of genocide. To avoid growing weary of the war and falling for misleading narratives, the West needs to understand exactly how Ukraine can win, and then support us accordingly. This war is existential, and we are motivated to fight. Properly armed, our forces can stretch Putin’s troops—which are already exhausted—past the breaking point. We can counterattack Russian forces in both Ukraine’s south and Ukraine’s east, pressuring Putin to decide which of his gains to protect. To succeed, however, the United States and its European allies must swiftly supply our country with appropriate numbers of advanced heavy weapons. They must also maintain and increase sanctions against Russia. And, critically, they need to ignore calls for diplomatic settlements that would help Putin before he makes serious concessions. Compromising with Russia may seem tempting to some abroad, especially as the costs of the war grow, but bowing to Putin’s aggression will help him destroy more of our nation, embolden his government to carry out attacks elsewhere in the world, and allow him to rewrite the rules of the global order. His approach to talks could change; if we succeed in pushing back Russian troops far enough, Putin may be compelled to come to the table and deal in good faith. But getting there will require that the West exercise patient dedication to one outcome: a complete and total Ukrainian victory. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

A Ukraine Strategy for the Long Haul The West Needs a Policy to Manage a War That Will Go On By Richard Haass With Russia’s war against Ukraine having passed the 100-day mark, calls for the conflict to be brought to an end are multiplying in the United States and Europe. Italy has put forward a detailed peace plan, French President Emmanuel Macron has emphasized the importance of giving Russia an off-ramp, and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has suggested that Ukraine ought to consider ceding territory to Russia in exchange for peace. But wars end in only one of two ways: when one side imposes its will on the other, first on the battlefield, then at the negotiating table, or when both sides embrace a compromise they deem preferable to fighting. In Ukraine, neither scenario is likely to materialize anytime soon. The conflict has become a war of attrition, with Russian and Ukrainian forces now concentrated against each other in a relatively confined area. Diplomatically, the Ukrainians have little interest in accepting Russian occupation of large swaths of their territory. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his part, has little interest in agreeing to anything that could be judged at home to constitute defeat. The inescapable conclusion, then, is that this war will go on—and on. With victory and compromise both off the table for the foreseeable future, the United States and Europe need a strategy for managing an open-ended conflict. “Managing,” not “solving,” is the operative word here, because a solution almost certainly would require a fundamental change in Moscow’s behavior, caused either by widespread popular protest in Russia stemming from economic collapse or massive casualties or by Chinese pressure. No solution is likely to happen; it is more probable that one will have to await the emergence of a new Russian leader who is prepared to accept a truly sovereign Ukraine, and that, unfortunately, is beyond the West’s ability to bring about. What the West can do, however, is maintain and selectively ramp up its support to Ukraine, abide by the limits on its own direct military involvement, and increase the economic pressure on Russia. That would amount to a policy designed to deal with, rather than end, the war. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

No Peace at Any Price in Ukraine It’s Too Soon for a Lasting Diplomatic Settlement By Alina Polyakova and Daniel Fried As Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its fourth month, calls are growing in Western Europe and the United States for a diplomatic push to end the war. In late May, Italy proposed a four-point peace plan for Ukraine that would culminate in sanctions relief for Russia. Not long after, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, speaking at Davos, called on Ukraine to cede territory to Russia and to begin negotiations immediately. And at the beginning of June, French President Emmanuel Macron repeated his call to not “humiliate” Russia. In the halls of power, a consensus seems to be emerging: give Moscow land in exchange for peace. In Ukraine, however, the opposite view has taken hold. Speaking directly to Kissinger’s comments, President Volodymyr Zelensky retorted that “those who advise Ukraine to give away something to Russia . . . are always unwilling to see ordinary people.” He is joined in this view by most Ukrainians—82 percent of whom, according to a May poll, oppose any territorial concessions. Not surprisingly, a population attacked so brutally and unjustly is decidedly uninterested in rewarding the bully with pieces of its homeland. Zelensky and the Ukrainian people are right: pressuring Ukraine into a negotiated settlement with territorial concessions would not lead to long-term peace and stability in Europe. Rather, it would reward Russian military aggression in the short term, create a new swath of instability in the heart of Europe, and effectively condone Russian war crimes. A peaceful settlement sounds reasonable in theory. But in practice—in this war, at this moment—it would yield no lasting peace. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

What If Ukraine Wins? Victory in the War Would Not End the Conflict With Russia By Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage In recent days, many Western observers of the war in Ukraine have begun to worry that the tide is turning in Russia’s favor. Massive artillery fire is yielding incremental Russian gains in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, and Russia is bringing in new forces. Ukrainian troops are drained and exhausted. Russia is trying to create a fait accompli and to make reality conform to its imperial ambitions through “passportization”—the quick provision of Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens in Russian-occupied areas—and the forced introduction of Russian administrative structures in Ukrainian territory. The Kremlin likely intends to occupy eastern and southern Ukraine indefinitely and to eventually move on Odessa, a major port city in southern Ukraine and a hub of commerce that connects Ukraine to the outside world. Looking at the big picture, however, things look less than rosy for Moscow. The list of Ukraine’s military achievements is long and getting longer. Ukrainian forces won the battle of Kyiv; successfully defended the southern city of Mykolaiv, keeping Odessa out of reach for the invading armies, at least for the time being; and prevailed in the battle of Kharkiv, a city right across from the Russian border. Russia’s recent gains pale in comparison. And unlike the Kremlin, the government in Kyiv has a clear strategic purpose, buttressed by excellent morale and widening assistance from abroad. This momentum could outline a virtuous cycle for Ukraine. Should Ukrainian forces gain territory this summer, Kyiv’s power will continue to grow. The truth is that despite the setbacks endemic to all wars, Ukraine could still win—although the scope and scale of its victory would most likely be limited. The most plausible Ukrainian victory would be “winning small.” Ukraine could expel Russia from the western side of the Dnieper River, establish perimeters of defense around the areas Russia controls in Ukraine’s east and south and secure its access to the Black Sea. Over time, Ukrainian forces could move forward, breaking up the land bridge that Russia has established to Crimea, the territory in southeastern Ukraine that Russia seized and annexed back in 2014. Essentially, Ukraine could restore the status quo ante that existed before Russia launched its attack in February. This would not be the world-changing victory about which some Western pundits dream. But a smaller and militarily weaker state repelling an imperial power would nevertheless have ripple effects in the region and the rest of the world—by demonstrating that successful resistance against powerful aggressors is possible. There is, of course, a “winning big” scenario, as well, in which the war ends entirely on Ukraine’s terms. That would mean the full reclamation of Ukrainian sovereignty, including Crimea and the parts of the Donbas occupied by Russia in the years before it fully invaded in February. This seems far less likely than a more limited victory: attacking is harder than defending, and the territory in question is substantial and heavily fortified. At the very least, Russia would hold on to Crimea tenaciously. The region is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and a symbol of Russia’s return to great-power status after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to let Crimea go without a tremendous fight.

Ukraine’s Best Chance for Peace How Neutrality Can Bring Security—and Satisfy Both Russia and the West By Samuel Charap At this stage of the war in Ukraine, as Russia steps up its offensive in the Donbas and more revelations of the atrocities committed by its forces emerge, the prospect of any kind of negotiated peace between Moscow and Kyiv seems remote. Even earlier this spring, when delegations from the two sides were meeting, the talks had little impact on either Russia’s or Ukraine’s determination to keep fighting. And at times, both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been dismissive of the negotiations. Today, the sides have effectively suspended their diplomatic efforts. Amid the gloom, it would be easy to forget the real progress that negotiators have already made. In late March, Ukrainian diplomats introduced an innovative framework for a deal that could provide a pathway out of the war. And crucially, the proposal, which was leaked to the press following talks in Istanbul on March 29, has already received at least preliminary support from both sides. At the center of the proposed deal is a trade: Kyiv would renounce its ambitions to join NATO and embrace permanent neutrality in return for receiving security guarantees from both its Western partners and from Russia. Perhaps because of its novelty, the significance of the Istanbul proposal has yet to be appreciated in many Western capitals, where security guarantees have become synonymous with treaties of alliance. Unlike an alliance, which unites close partners in common defense, usually against a potential enemy, the proposed deal calls for geopolitical rivals to guarantee Ukraine’s long-term security jointly, outside of an alliance structure—and to do so despite one of the rivals’ ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. If the proposal were to become the basis of an eventual settlement, the result would be a mechanism, however counterintuitive, that would make Russia itself a stakeholder in Ukraine’s security. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

Putin’s Hard Choices Why the Russian Despot Can Neither Mobilize Nor Retreat By Michael Kimmage and Maria Lipman Russian President Vladimir Putin has landed in an unenviable position. His country has the resources to inflict damage on Ukraine in perpetuity. But because the first phase of the war has been so costly for Russia and because Ukraine’s military is mounting such stiff resistance, Russia faces serious difficulty achieving anything meaningful on the battlefield without committing much more manpower than it currently has available. Calling up large numbers of reservists while putting Russian society openly on a war footing solves the problem in theory. But it is something for which the Russian public is fundamentally unprepared. To date, Putin has referred to the war in Ukraine as a “special military operation” and held only one mass rally in support of the war. Full-out mobilization, which would make war an inescapable fact of Russian life, would revolutionize the regime Putin has constructed since coming to power in 2000. Putinism has been a formula: the government discouraged people from meddling in politics, while leaving them mostly on their own, and the people readily surrendered their responsibility for decision making. In 2014, he could achieve his military aims in Ukraine without radically redefining Russian politics. That is no longer an option. If Putin decides to mobilize, he will be altering the deal he’s made with the public and potentially destabilizing his regime. As the United States watches from the sidelines, it may feel tempted to encourage Russians to turn against Putin. Without having much or perhaps any real influence on Russian public opinion, however, the Biden administration can do its best to avoid costly mistakes. Most important will be its effort to understand how and why Russians think what they do. In the long-term conflict that is unfolding, curiosity will be a precious commodity. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

Putin Against History How His War Has Erased Russia’s Past—And Endangered Its Future By Andrei Kolesnikov If a Ukrainian grandmother with pro-Russian views did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her—or at least that is what the Russian government decided in April. At the time, Anna Ivanova inhabited a village near Kharkiv. One day, mistaking a group of arriving Ukrainian soldiers for Russians, she took out an old Soviet flag and waved it vigorously at them to remind them of their shared past and try to deter them from destroying the village. Instead, the Ukrainian forces, outraged at the sight of the hammer-and-sickle, took the flag from her and trampled it. Caught on video, the episode was immediately seized on by the Kremlin. Soon, “Granny Anya” as she was called—though she’s only 69, the same age as Putin—was adopted as a potent symbol of local support for Russia’s “special operation.” Here, apparently, was living proof that the people of Ukraine were desperately waiting to be “liberated.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, despite Anna Ivanova’s efforts, her own home was later damaged in a Russian mortar attack, and for some time she and her husband were both in a hospital in Kharkiv. “It was really miserable of Russia to attack us,” she said, in a statement she recorded from her hospital bed. Now, she and her husband have returned to their home village, Velikaya Danilovka. None of that matters, of course, in Moscow. Under the supervision of Sergei Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s PR mastermind, a monument to Granny Anya was swiftly constructed and unveiled in the devastated port city of Mariupol, and her image has become ubiquitous in Russian war propaganda. This war is full of paradoxes. Russian President Vladimir Putin insists he is fighting against a country that is overrun by Nazis, yet among the millions of Ukrainians who have fled the Russian advance were 78 Holocaust survivors who were evacuated—to Germany. Ninety-one-year-old Vanda Obyedkova survived the German occupation of Mariupol in World War II only to die during the Russian siege of the city in 2022. In Kharkiv, 96-year-old Boris Romanchenko, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, was killed when a Russian shell hit his apartment building. During World War II, the Ukrainian soldier Ivan Lisun was one of the Soviet soldiers who helped liberate Belarus and Poland from the Nazis. Now his own home in the Kharkiv region has been destroyed by the Russian army. Granny Anya is a character from the Kremlin’s world of paradoxes, a world in which history itself has been turned inside out. As her story makes plain, after nearly three months of deadly violence, the Russian regime has struggled to find coherent, positive symbols for its “special operation” in Ukraine. It has not captured any Nazis (although the Duma would like to present captured fighters of Ukraine's Azov Battalion as such) and has also failed to come up with a clear reason for what it is doing. Instead, it has plunged an entire country into a fantasy realm, where words and deeds have opposite meanings: Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, for example, invented the concept of “liberal fascism”; Maria Zakharova, the legendary Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, now reports that George Orwell’s 1984 was written about Western civilization. And now the Putin regime faces a more daunting challenge still: how to imagine a victory out of a war that has brought the country to the brink of disaster. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

The Russian Military’s People Problem It’s Hard for Moscow to Win While Mistreating Its Soldiers By Dara Massicot Six days before the invasion of Ukraine, a small group of Russian soldiers huddled together in their tents in Belarus. One of them had covertly acquired a smartphone—barred by the military—and together, the group logged on to Western news sites. There, they read a story that shocked them: according to Western intelligence reports, Russia was about to invade its neighbor. One of the soldiers called his mother in shock about what he had read. She told him it was only Western propaganda, and that there would be no war. She was wrong. Five days later, on the eve of the invasion, the soldiers’ commanders revealed they would invade Ukraine. The commanders also threatened to charge their subordinates with desertion if they didn’t come along. “Mom, they put us in cars, we are leaving,” the soldier told his mother in a call before the unit moved across the border. “I love you, if there is a funeral [for me], don’t believe it right away, check for yourself.” She hasn’t heard from him since, and despite pleas for information, the military authorities have provided her with no updates. (Eventually, she went to the press.) Despite its sophisticated military equipment and multiple advantages on paper, Russia has stumbled strategically, operationally, and tactically in Ukraine. It has been hampered by faulty planning assumptions, unrealistic timelines, and impractical objectives. It has suffered from inadequate supplies, bad logistics, and insufficient force protection. It has been impaired by poor leadership. These problems do not stop at technical equipment issues, poor training, or corruption. Rather, they are linked by a core underlying theme: the military’s lack of concern for the lives and well-being of its personnel. In Ukraine, the Russian military struggles to retrieve the bodies of its dead, obscures casualties, and is indifferent to its worried military families. It may spend billions of dollars on new equipment, but it does not properly treat soldiers’ injuries, and it generally does not appear to care tremendously whether troops are traumatized. This culture of indifference to its personnel fundamentally compromises the Russian military’s efficacy, no matter how extensively it has been modernized. In the United States, a good soldier is a happy soldier, one that’s properly fed, paid, and treated with respect. But the Russian high command behaves as if its troops are an afterthought, making tactical decisions as if it can simply throw people at poorly designed objectives until it succeeds. This is a self-defeating attitude that both lowers troops’ morale and degrades combat effectiveness. The results are plain to see. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

A Crime in Search of a Court How to Hold Russia Accountable By Oona A. Hathaway By invading Ukraine in February, Russia committed a blatant war of aggression, evoking memories of the death and destruction of World War II. Not only was the very launching of the war illegal, but so, too, has been its prosecution. Over the last three months, Russian troops have killed thousands of civilians and laid waste to cities in Ukraine. As Ukrainian forces have begun retaking towns from Russian occupying forces, they have discovered mass graves and widespread evidence of other atrocities. International institutions and an unprecedented coalition of states have taken early steps toward holding Russia accountable for these war crimes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has launched an investigation, and it is already sending officials to Ukraine to gather evidence. But when it comes to prosecuting those most responsible for the most notorious crime—waging an aggressive war—there are no international venues for doing so. That may seem surprising, given that this crime was the lead charge of the Nuremberg trials, in which Nazi officials were tried after World War II. Indeed, in its judgment, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared, “To initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Now, the world is once again witnessing “the supreme international crime.” To prosecute those responsible, it will be necessary to create an entirely new court. That should be done through an agreement between Ukraine and the UN, with the authorization of the General Assembly. Setting up such a court will not be easy, in no small part because it would require building a global consensus in a time of division. Yet doing so is essential to sustaining the postwar international legal order founded on the prohibition of war. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

The Right Way to Sanction Russian Energy How to Slash Moscow’s Revenues Without Crippling the Global Economy By Edward Fishman and Chris Miller Western sanctions are beginning to hit Russia where it hurts most: its energy exports. Over the last few weeks, the European Union, the biggest buyer of Russian oil, has been working on a plan to ban imports by the end of this year, although objections by Viktor Orban of Hungary have slowed progress. For energy sanctions to work, however, they must be carefully designed to hurt Russia more than they hurt Western states. Their primary goal should not be to cut the volume of oil and gas leaving Russia, which would further drive up world energy prices and endanger domestic support, but to reduce the dollars and euros flowing into Russia. Moving forward, the EU should therefore focus collective efforts on a more ambitious approach: partnering with the United States and other allies to impose a global regime, backed by the threat of secondary sanctions, to cap the price of Russian oil and slash the Kremlin’s revenue. Prior rounds of sanctions against Moscow restricted investment and technologies destined for Russia’s energy sector, targeting the country’s refineries and its construction of liquefied natural gas infrastructure. Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States also banned Russian energy imports, but this had limited impact because all three were small consumers of Russian oil and gas. Until recently, the biggest buyer of Russian energy—the EU—not only declined to sanction energy exports but also designed its financial sanctions to explicitly allow Russian fuel to keep flowing. But now, the Russian-European energy relationship is unraveling. On top of its discussions about phasing out Russian oil imports, the EU also announced plans to completely end Russian natural gas imports over the coming years. Europe buys slightly over half of all Russian exports of crude oil and refined products such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Taxing these exports, meanwhile, currently provides around a quarter of Moscow’s budget. The EU effort to halt Russian oil purchases therefore represents a dramatic and welcome shift in the global response to Russia’s invasion. But Europe’s plans also pose a challenge for Washington. Thus far, the United States has declined to impose the toughest sanctions on Russian energy, including the kinds of secondary sanctions that have been used against Iran to limit oil sales to third countries. This reluctance is explained by the Biden administration’s deference to the EU on matters affecting Europe’s energy security and concerns that reducing global oil supplies would send gasoline prices—and thus inflation—spiraling higher. But now that many Europeans are signaling that they are serious about cutting off Russian energy imports, the United States and its allies need a coordinated strategy. Together, they must figure out how to slash Russian energy revenue without unduly damaging the global economy. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

Escape From Moscow The New Russian Exiles—and How They Can Defeat Putin By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan Russians are fleeing their country in droves. Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan; Estonia, Latvia, Montenegro. In the first two weeks of the war alone, Georgia took in 25,000 Russians, and Armenia was receiving some 6,000 Russians per day. By the end of March, 60,000 Russians had gone to Kazakhstan. And many more have sought refuge in a number of different countries in eastern Europe. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began, Russians who have the means to do so have been racing for the border in what has become the largest exodus since the Bolshevik Revolution. The dramatic flight underscores the far-reaching effects of Putin’s war. For Russians who came of age in the 1990s, it seemed at first that the days of having to abandon the country for political reasons were over. One could leave for economic reasons, but there was no longer a fear of persecution or restrictions on personal freedoms. In recent years, as the Putin regime has become increasingly autocratic, all that has changed. The first large group to be affected were opposition politicians, independent journalists, and political activists, who started fleeing to Europe and the United States after 2013 (Putin reintroduced political emigration as early as in 2000, but back then, it was mostly limited to the oligarchs who fell out with the Kremlin). The outflow accelerated in 2020, after Putin intensified his crackdown on civil society and changed the constitution to allow him to stay in power at least until 2036. But it was the assault on Ukraine that has turned this trend into a giant wave. During the initial weeks of the invasion, amid ever-tightening repression at home, hundreds of thousands of Russians are believed to have left the country. Those who have fled come from many different professions and backgrounds. Many had never contemplated emigration before. But nearly all of them have three things in common: they have a high level of education, are from the bigger cities, and have a liberal outlook. For Russia, the departure of so many educated professionals, academics, and businesspeople raises profound questions about the future makeup of the country. For those seeking large-scale political change, it also poses a new challenge: whether it will be possible to effectively pressure the regime from abroad, with so much of the domestic opposition now in jail or simply gone. And for those left behind, the hollowing out of civil society means that they may be stuck with a country that is culturally impoverished, paranoid, and hard line. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

The Coup in the Kremlin How Putin and the Security Services Captured the Russian State By Nina Khrushcheva On December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin addressed senior officials of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) at its Lubyanka headquarters near Moscow’s Red Square. The recently appointed 47-year-old prime minister, who had held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the FSB, was visiting to mark the holiday honoring the Russian security services. “The task of infiltrating the highest level of government is accomplished,” Putin quipped. His former colleagues chuckled. But the joke was on Russia. Putin became interim president less than two weeks later. From the start of his rule, he has worked to strengthen the state to counteract the chaos of post-Soviet capitalism and unsteady democratization. To achieve that end, he saw it necessary to elevate the country’s security services and put former security officials in charge of critical government organs. In recent years, however, Putin’s approach has changed. More and more, bureaucracy has displaced the high-profile personalities that previously dominated. And as the Russian president has come to rely on these bureaucratic institutions to further his consolidation of control, their power has grown relative to other organs of the state. But it was not until February, when Putin gave the orders first to recognize the independence of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and then, a few days later, to send Russian troops into Ukraine, that the complete takeover by the new security apparatus became apparent. In the early days of the war, most branches of the Russian state seemed blindsided by Putin’s determination to invade, and some prominent officials even seemed to question the wisdom of the decision, however timidly. But in the weeks since, government and society alike have lined up behind the Kremlin. Dissent is now a crime, and individuals who once held decision-making power—even if circumscribed—have found themselves hostages of institutions whose single-minded purpose is security and control. What has happened is, in effect, an FSB-on-FSB coup: Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now a faceless security bureaucracy has become the state, with Putin sitting on top. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

Putin’s Orange Obsession How a Twenty-Year Fixation With Color Revolutions Drove a Disastrous War By Lincoln Mitchell In the United States, the color revolutions seem like events from a past era: the term is usually used to refer to the peaceful political transformations that occurred in Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005. These movements were supported by the West, particularly by Washington, but they were primarily driven by the people of those countries themselves, who were rising up against failing and corrupt regimes to demand freedom and democracy. In Moscow, however, the continual fear of anti-regime pressure from below has given those events a central place in the Kremlin’s anti-democratic and anti-Western ideology. As Russian officials and Putin himself have long maintained, almost any popular uprising in Russia and its surrounding region is an attempt at a color revolution, and therefore must be backed, if not instigated, by Europe and the United States. In Belarus in 2020, as with the recent events in Kazahkstan, when huge protests broke out following Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s blatantly rigged election, the Kremlin immediately began warning of a “color revolution.” At the center of this legacy is Ukraine, which has had not one but two upheavals that could be considered color revolutions—a decade after the 2004 Orange Revolution, Ukraine experienced the Maidan uprising—and which in recent years has increasingly oriented itself toward the West. The Kremlin has sought to portray the Ukrainian government as a dangerous, Western puppet in Russia’s historic heartland, ruled by a government that is the product of an American-backed coup rather than an expression of the democratic will of the Ukrainian people. It matters little that such claims have no grounding in fact or that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won almost three-quarters of the vote in a 2019 election that was generally regarded as free and fair. For the Putin regime, the possibility that what has happened in Ukraine over the past two decades could be replicated in Russia itself has become an almost existential obsession. But the Kremlin’s narrative of growing political interference by the West does not merely underpin Putin’s decision to pursue a maximalist invasion aimed at toppling the Ukrainian leadership. It also helps explain why the invasion has gone, from his perspective, so badly. Convinced by their own propaganda that the government in Kyiv was a creation of the West and the Ukrainian far right, Putin and those around him assumed that it would collapse almost as soon as Russian troops crossed the border and that the Russians themselves would be widely embraced. Instead, the Russian operation has quickly foundered, while unifying the Ukrainian population against Moscow more strongly than ever. Paradoxically, in framing its own political opposition, and that of all of its allies in the surrounding region, in color revolution terms, the Kremlin has led itself to embark on a disastrous war that may ultimately do more to undermine Putin’s support at home than any other event in his two decades in power. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

The War Over Ukrainian Identity Nationalism, Russian Imperialism, and the Quest to Define Ukraine’s History By Georgiy Kasianov Europe’s first twenty-first-century war is very much about the past. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ventured on wild forays into the depths of history to insist that Russians and Ukrainians are a single people, that Ukraine never truly existed as a sovereign entity until the Bolsheviks mistakenly brought it into existence, and that the territories of Ukraine are fundamentally Russian lands. He published an essay in July 2021 making this case at length, a bloated historical exegesis that few expected would lead to an actual war. Russian forces have been smashing their way through Ukraine for over two months now, spurred in large part by historical fiction. But history also propels the fierce Ukrainian resistance. Ukrainians, too, harbor a particular understanding of the past that motivates them to fight. In many ways, this war is the collision of two incompatible historical narratives. Putin’s desire to restore an imperial Russia (of which Ukraine is but a constituent part) has crashed into a Ukrainian nationalism that imagines a sovereign Ukrainian state and a distinct Ukrainian people persisting in various forms for over a thousand years. Like all grand narratives, both have their share of mythology. But for Ukrainians, the stakes are more existential: Putin’s reading of history would deny them the very right to exist. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

China’s Ukraine Conundrum Why the War Necessitates a Balancing Act By Yan Xuetong Russia’s war in Ukraine has produced a strategic predicament for China. On the one hand, the conflict has disrupted billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese trade, heightened tensions in East Asia, and deepened political polarization within China by dividing people into pro- and anti-Russia camps. On the other, China blames the United States for provoking Russia with its support for NATO expansion and worries that Washington will seek to prolong the conflict in Ukraine in order to bog down Russia. Beijing sees little to gain from joining the international chorus condemning Moscow. Regardless of what China says or does in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to wage war in Ukraine, Washington is unlikely to soften its strategy of containment toward Beijing. And as China’s largest and most militarily capable neighbor, Russia is not a power that Beijing wishes to antagonize. Chinese policymakers have therefore sought to avoid unnecessarily provoking either rival power—abstaining from votes to condemn Russia in the UN General Assembly and carefully selecting its official statements about the war. This balancing strategy is not without costs. Refusing to condemn Russia has strained China’s relations with some of its neighbors and distanced Beijing from many developing nations that have lined up against Russia’s war in Ukraine. It has also incurred economic costs stemming from Russia’s war that could continue long into the future. Nonetheless, in order to minimize its strategic losses, China will likely hew to this middle path until the war in Ukraine is over. One thing that might shift Beijing’s calculus and push it to side with Russia is if the United States provides military support for a Taiwanese declaration of de jure independence. Barring that, Beijing will likely continue its balancing act, since Washington’s policy of containment toward China makes it very difficult for Beijing to side with the United States on the war in Ukraine. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com

NATO’s Nordic Expansion Adding Finland and Sweden Will Transform European Security By Carl Bildt Before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, the question of NATO membership was barely part of the political debate in Finland and Sweden. Both countries have a long history of military nonalignment, and although they have gradually pursued closer cooperation with the United States and NATO—and politicians in both countries have long advocated membership—NATO accession was hardly seen as a pressing issue. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine changed all that. In response to Russian aggression, both countries are reassessing their security policies, and seeking NATO membership is rapidly emerging as the most realistic option. Recent polls show that clear and increasing majorities in both countries support joining the alliance. In addition, both countries have delivered substantial amounts of weapons to Ukraine, including 10,000 man-portable antiarmor weapons from Sweden. By invading Ukraine, Putin sought not only to bring that country back under its influence but to also change the security order of Europe. On the latter point, he has succeeded—just not in the way he likely intended. Russia’s assault has unified NATO and made its expansion much more likely. If Finland and Sweden join the alliance, as they look poised to do, they will bring substantial new military capabilities, including advanced air and submarine capabilities, that will alter the security architecture of northern Europe and help deter further Russian aggression. Continue reading at ForeignAffairs.com