Russia’s War in Ukraine and the Prospects for Peace

This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on February 24, 2025. Watch the full video here.

Seth G. Jones: Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My name is Seth Jones. I run the Defense and Security Department at CSIS. We’re here to talk about the War in Ukraine and the Prospects for Peace. I’ve got a great group of folks here.

To my left is Mike Vickers, former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, worked as a CIA operations officer, as well as was a Green Beret. And he’s the author, most recently of, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy.

I also have Emily Harding. She’s the director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at CSIS, and also vice president of the Defense and Security Department. She served as deputy staff director on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and also worked both at CIA and at the National Security Council, the NSC.

And then, finally, Dr. Eliot Cohen, Arleigh Burke chair in strategy, and former dean and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has a forthcoming book on strategy.

Eliot, let me start with you. And welcome to all of you. I wanted to start by asking how we got to where we are today. So can you talk a little bit about the origins of the war here? And then we’ll move that up to where we’re at right now.

Eliot A. Cohen: Sure. Well, I think we should begin by noting this is literally the third anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. In one way, one could say that this is a war that began exactly three years ago. And that’s the way it looks to American eyes. The origins are very straightforward. There’s not a whole lot of nuance here. It was Vladimir Putin’s determination to essentially re-establish the Russian imperial state, in a somewhat different form, but to either completely neutralize Ukraine or really to absorb it. And his own writings before the war make that very clear.

I think the interesting part about this, as I said, to Americans this looks like a war that began three years ago. If you talk to Ukrainians they’ll say, no, this is a war that began in 2014 with the Russian invasion of Crimea and also of Donbas. I think in the mind of Vladimir Putin, it’s a war that began really around 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. He doesn’t particularly care about the death of communism, but he is still outraged by the end, again, essentially, of the Russian empire. So I think that’s the key to this. This is a Russian imperial project. And on the Ukrainian side, it’s a fight for existence. It’s a fight for independence. It’s a fight to be part of Europe, and with the liberal democratic values that that entails.

Dr. Jones: Just one issue. You mentioned the essay that Vladimir Putin penned, or had someone pen, as the case, may be, about a year before the war, so around 2021. It was an essay that I think was mandatory reading for his soldiers. And it was pretty straightforward that Ukraine is and was historically part of Russia itself. So he has been crystal clear about it, because we will come back to that issue, I think, when we talk about peace negotiations. And it’s important.

Dr. Cohen: Yeah, and if I could just make one point. The title of the essay was, “On the Historical Unity of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Peoples.” And it’s part of a Russian imperial understanding of history in which the Ukrainians are sort of the little brothers and they have no autonomous cultural existence. Their language is kind of a peasant dialect. They aren’t really a people. And I think it’s very important that everybody understand that. From Vladimir Putin’s point of view, they do not deserve to be an independent state.

Dr. Jones: Which is ironic, of course, because the war has brought the Ukrainians together in ways that –

Dr. Cohen: Absolutely.

Dr. Jones: – most people, I don’t think, would have guessed at the beginning of the war; a vibrant sense of Ukrainian nationalism. They have broken away, in many ways, from the Russian Orthodox Church, so a very different religious view now than certainly the Russian Orthodox Church.

So where do – Eliot, and Emily, where do we – where does the war stand today, then?

Dr. Cohen: So let me just try to paint with very broad brushes. On the one hand, it looks – it is very much a stalemate. The Russians are launching these grinding offensives. They’re getting some very marginal gains. The Ukrainians were able to take a piece of the Kursk province.

But, you know, the – sort of, at one level, it looks like the front has simply stabilized and it’s, you know, our image of World War I trench warfare. But there’s actually a lot of other stuff going on; first, on the Russian side, enormously high attrition, which has just been going up monthly. Perhaps at one point we’ll show the data on that.

There is a kind of an air campaign going on of Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure, but also increasingly successful Ukrainian defense against that and Ukrainian strikes into Russia, particularly against the Russian oil industry. And there is a naval campaign, which is sometimes overlooked, where the Ukrainians have been able to sink something like about a third of the Black Sea fleet. And what’s really important is they’ve been able to restore their grain exports almost to prewar levels, and which go out through the Black Sea. That is a tremendous accomplishment.

So there’s a lot of stuff that’s going on which isn’t reflected in the movement of lines on the battlefield.

Dr. Jones: So if we could pull up the battlefield situation – this is a British defense intelligence map right now. Before I go to Emily, I just want to highlight a couple of quick things. First, as Eliot mentioned, the war began, from the Ukrainian perspective, in part with the Russian illegal annexation down here of Crimea. They did it with so-called little green men, barely without firing a shot.

And then they began the war here in eastern Ukraine around the Donbas, largely with Luhansk and Donetsk militia forces, and then also deployed conventional Russian forces. So this is unquestionably the Russians starting this war, largely through asymmetric or unconventional means, and then gradually, by 2022, moving into a full-scale conventional invasion.

So if you look at a map right now, as Eliot just sort of walked through, a bulk of the most significant fighting has taken place here in the east, where we have Russian military initiative. They are making very limited progress on the ground and suffering enormous casualties. We also see the Ukrainians continuing to hold some territory in Kursk Oblast, in Russia itself.

We see down here in the Black Sea where the Ukrainians have conducted – and Eliot mentioned some pretty impressive strikes; pushed the Russian Black Sea fleet really into Russia itself, taken them largely out of the game; and then a lot of the activity we’re seeing in Ukraine, where the Russians continue to strike targets in the country, and then also in Russia itself here, where the Ukrainians have largely used drones to conduct strikes with higher payloads and longer range against Russian targets, generally military targets and industrial-base targets.

And then one last area, which is not on this map, but which is, I think, important to remind everyone, which is the Russians continue to conduct a very aggressive and violent campaign in Europe. And in 2024, by our estimates at CSIS, they have nearly tripled the number of attacks in Europe, largely by the main intelligence directorate, the GRU. These are strikes, bombings and explosions, incendiaries, at companies, many of which have provided assistance to Ukraine. There are assassinations of defectors. They’re cutting cables, fiber-optic underwater cables, in the Black Sea. So there’s another area where, as part of this war, we see the Russian acting aggressively.

So, Emily, what have we missed here on kind of where we’re at right now?

Emily Harding: You’ve covered a lot of ground right there. It is a truly amazing thing to be sitting here three years in and looking at that map and the back and forth and where we are right now in this grinding front line.

One element that I think Eliot didn’t mention in his long list of things that are going on sort of on the outskirts that you haven’t necessarily seen is the grind back and forth of industrial bases.

You see the Ukrainians trying to keep their industrial base moving, depending heavily on aid from the U.S. and from Europe to keep up this just very high rate of fires that’s going on, and then on the Russian side you see them ramping up their industrial base and really just barely being able to keep up with need if they’re keeping up at all.

We saw the North Koreans send in a ton of ammunition, a ton of resources in addition to the people they’ve sent to the front lines. I mean, the fact that Russia has to turn to North Korea to keep their war going is a little bit shocking.

And I just want to flag that the Institute for the Study of War put out a really great article, I think, last week where it talks about the weaknesses in the Russian defense industrial base and sort of the systemic weakness going on inside Russia right now.

There are some things that are really about to bite and those things include stuff like the amount of ammunition they have to bring to bear. Also, economically the oil sanctions are finally really starting to bite. The designation of a Russian shadow fleet with oil tankers is going to be, I think, a significant impingement on the Russian economy in the next six to 12 months. But only if we can actually keep the pressure up.

Dr. Jones: So, yeah, Mike, let me go to you, and then after you’re done I’ve got a follow-up question for you.

Michael G. Vickers: OK. So I just wanted to add a bit about, you know, sort of the stalemate that Eliot was talking about and then some of the vulnerabilities that Emily mentioned.

You know, the real big change recently is the change in U.S. policy where we have gone from supporting Ukraine and its defense against Russian aggression to now ending the war essentially on Russian terms and allowing the Russians to achieve at least a partial victory based on the map and then who knows what down the road.

And, you know, as someone who almost 53 years ago now joined the Special Forces, one of the things that attracted me to the Green Berets was their motto of the “De Oppresso Liber” – to, you know, free the oppressed from oppression, and to now see it switched from supporting the oppressed to the oppressor is heartbreaking, to say the least.

And then the final point I’d like to make, piggybacking on what Emily said, is that, you know, it’s been said that Russia has more cards than Ukraine. Well, that may or may not be true, but what is abundantly clear is that the U.S. has way more cards for all the reasons Emily and Eliot talked about than Russia does, and Russia only has cards if the U.S. folds its cards.

Dr. Jones: So, Mike, one issue that I wanted to touch base, and if we could pull up the graphic here. This is of Russian military personnel casualties in 2024. These are still quite staggering. These are casualties by month, and one of the things that is interesting is how much the Russians continue to suffer on the battlefield.

Their way of fighting – we see a lot of dismounted infantry moving and losing limbs and being killed on the battlefield, trying to push and take control of areas. The North Koreans, as we took a close look at how they were being used on the battlefield, was quite similar.

The casualty rates for the North Koreans fighting in the area of Kursk was incredible. I mean, somewhere between a third to a half of the North Koreans suffered casualties of some sort.

So, Mike, using the casualty estimates here can you talk a little bit more about some of the costs the Russians are suffering? There, certainly, are economic costs and others as well but there is a little bit of a PR campaign that the Russians are playing right now that they’re winning and that the Ukrainians are losing. But the Russians are suffering pretty significantly, aren’t they?

Dr. Vickers: Oh, absolutely. So, you know, if you look at the Russian economy it’s been heavily tilted now toward defense. You know, this war may have cost the Russians a trillion dollars. The ruble is worth a penny. We’re getting rid of pennies now because they’re not worth anything.

And then, you know, the casualties are somewhere around 800,000 killed and wounded and then, you know, monthly rate is increasing it as well. So it’s very costly.

Dr. Jones: We’re getting close this spring to a million Russian casualties since the war began. And if you look at fatalities, by the way, somewhere upwards of 175,000 Russians killed in Ukraine, which is by our estimates four times the total of all Russian and Soviet forces killed combined since World War II. So it’s staggering, the costs, relatively speaking, that they have faced over the last 70 years or so.

Dr. Cohen: So just a couple of points on that – so, we’re talking about casualty rates that have – were at about 1,200 a week; they’ve gone up to almost 2,000 a week during the most intense periods. There are a couple of things to bear in mind about that. One is, it is very, very hard to rebuild an army while you’re suffering those kinds of loss rates. And in fact, as, you know, we look at most of the numbers on the whole, the Russians are not able to grow their military. They can sort of replace it – they’re using North Koreans; they’re emptying out the jails; they’re taking a lot of their Central Asian population.

What they are not willing to do – and this I think is a really important point – is to conduct a mass mobilization. They have been afraid to do that, and I think this is a – it’s a point that is missed by people including the vice president of the United States. There is a vulnerability here. Putin is not – knows that this war does not have enough support that he can go out and say, you know what, young and middle-aged men of – from Moscow and St. Petersburg and other major cities, you’re going to be going to the front. They’re not willing to do that. And I think it’s very important that we understand that particular weakness in addition to the kind of broader military weakness that this indicates.

Ms. Harding: I pulled the stats right before we walked in here. The range of Russian killed estimates go from about 170(,000) to about 200,000 on the upper end. And then wounded, somewhere between 600,000 and 400,000, but with a large chunk of those wounded so severely they can’t come back to the battlefield.

Just in Kursk, that little tiny, like, enclave that the Ukrainians have taken, Russia has lost 40,000 troops in the last six months fighting there, including 16,000 killed. And over a third of the North Korean troops, as you mentioned, Seth, have been killed or wounded.

There was an interesting article in the New York Times, I think this morning, where they were interviewing a bunch of Ukrainian soldiers about how they view the battlefield now, and they said that the North Korean troops will fight to the end, that when they run across a North Korean troop, they are far more likely to, you know, blow up a grenade and take a bunch of Ukrainians down with them than they are in actually surrendering. So it’s really terrible fighting there, but that just shows you, like, the desperation on the Russian side, just how high their casualty rates really are.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. And on the North Korean front, you know, what is interesting is that the North Koreans haven’t fought a war. None of these North Korean soldiers have any experience in – on the battlefield. In fact I suspect that’s part of the reason why there was some North Korean interest, is to see what is going on.

But from a Putin perspective, I mean, bringing in forces with no battlefield experience and putting them in – I think you do that as a sign of weakness rather than strength, because you don’t want to mobilize. And if you can get 13(,000), 14,000 North Korean soldiers, which is what the Russians have gotten from North Korea, with no battlefield experience, they’re not going to help much on the battlefield except to be used – which they have been used as cannon fodder. But this is a sign of Russian military weakness on the battlefield.

So I think this is all a reminder that the Russians do not have the upper hand in all these areas. And if you look – if we can pull up the figures on Russian inflation, too, since the war began, we’ve had significant increases in Russian inflation.

Dr. Vickers: Right.

Dr. Jones: You know, that’s not to say that the Russians haven’t been able to find alternative sources for their oil exports, for example, which they have. But they have suffered economically because of this war; they have been isolated at least by the West in the war. We don’t – we didn’t see them involved in any of the athletic – major athletic games. They were banned from the World Cup of soccer; same thing, hockey, most recently. So there is this – there is this, at least in the West, this decision right now that you don’t want to get the Russians involved in anything. So they have suffered to some degree.

Dr. Cohen: Which makes our government’s policy, frankly, all the more bizarre, because on one level, you know, we are going to increase pressure on them in one way, no matter how much we tilt towards them, and that is to the extent that the Trump administration takes restrictions off of oil production and fracking and all that. That’s going to drive down the cost of oil, and in some ways Russia is a big gas tank with nuclear weapons. You know, they are very dependent on the ability to export hydrocarbons. And, you know, one of the things that’s been quite clever about the Ukrainians in their long-range drone and missile strikes, which are quite impressive one has to say. I mean, that’s a story we should – we should definitely discuss. They’re going after the oil industry. So there’s a – there’s also a tremendous direct economic vulnerability because of this question of Russian dependence on hydrocarbon exports.

Ms. Harding: Yeah. So let’s talk about that, the Russian fossil fuel exports by region. So, to Eliot’s point about a gas station with nuclear weapons – that’s it’s a good line – China has been a huge importer of Russian gas. So has India. And you see just how much that is sustaining the Russian economy. But as I mentioned before, some of those oil sanctions are finally starting to bite. The Biden administration on its way out the door sanctioned this shadow fleet, so all of these Russian oil tankers that were pretending not to be Russian and moving oil from Russian ports into China, into India. Those sanctions have really shut down a lot of that capability.

So now we’re seeing numbers like shipments to India have risen from $3 million to $9 to $10 million per one-way trip. That’s the cost of shipping. That’s a threefold increase. That’s not sustainable. Russian crude accounted for only 25 percent of Indian oil corporations’ imports this year, down from 30 percent in the last quarter of last year. So, like, you’re seeing that number start to come down, at the same time that Russia is having to spend more money on things like rearming itself and on paying people to come join the military. And those two trend lines are a really bad sign, which, as you point out – (laughs) – is the perfect time to increase pressure on Moscow, as opposed to lighten it.

Dr. Cohen: Yeah, they got – you know, Putin’s strategy, his theory of victory, is that he thinks he can outlast us, and we will do his bidding by helping to disarm Ukraine so that then he could prevail. Because otherwise – that’s why I said, you know, the U.S. actually holds all the cards here.

Ms. Harding: Mmm hmm.

Dr. Jones: So, Mike, I wonder if I can ask you this, and others may want to join in as well. Can you talk a little bit about what the Russians have received? One of the things that’s interesting is as the war begins, and as it becomes pretty clear as you get deeper into 2022 that this may be a protracted war, the Russians reach out to the Chinese, the North Koreans, and the Iranians. So can you talk a little about the types of help that the Russians have been getting from other countries?

And, you know, I do want to highlight that the February 22nd and 23rd strikes on Ukraine that the Russians have conducted were interesting because they were heavily reliant on KN-23 ballistic missiles from North Korea and drones from Iran. So even some of their most recent surges, that was one of the – it was a record number of strikes by the Russians on Ukrainian targets, reliant to a great extent on foreign governments for the provision of military assistance. So what does that foreign aid look like, more broadly?

Dr. Vickers: Well, you kind of hit it, which is a mixture of drones, missiles. It began with, you know, artillery ammunition, when they were short of that, a lot of it defective. And then in the Chinese case, it’s more subcomponents for defense industry that have helped as well. And then you mentioned North Korean troops.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. Anything else you wanted to add on assistance from other countries?

Dr. Cohen: You know, one thing that’s interesting is, as Mike pointed out, the Chinese have not provided arms directly to the Russians, as far as we know. That would be a gamechanger if they did it. What I find interesting – all this, again, as Emily pointed out, that they’re dependent on the North Koreans – (laughs) – for basic artillery ammunition. But they also are not able to produce things like advanced tanks. You know, they’re still – they’re still drawing down the inventories that they had stockpiled from the Cold War. So there’s a challenge with the Russian industrial base which I don’t think anybody fully understands. But it is unquestionably there. And that it is not being met in a fundamental way by the North Koreans, the Chinese, or even the Iranians, who are also giving them a lot of help in the kind of drone – the drone area – the long-range drone area.

Ms. Harding: So, to take that also to sort of a bigger picture place, our colleague Heather Williams and her team, PONI, have done a lot of really excellent work looking at how China has served perhaps as a restraining force on some of Putin’s more dramatic nuclear rhetoric, the idea being that China really doesn’t want Russia to use nuclear weapons because that would change this conflict and kind of embarrass them. I think the jury is out on just how effective and how strong that’s been, but they may be a moderating influence on that one piece.

Also, to give the Trump administration a little bit of credit for some strategic thinking, they seem to be approaching the potential for negotiations with the Russians with an eye towards breaking this nascent collaboration we’re seeing between the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians and the North Koreans.

Coming out of the talks in Saudi Arabia, one of the talking points was, yeah, yeah, we know that Ukraine wasn’t at the table, but really the goal here was to draw the Russians away from the Chinese and away from the Iranians and away from the North Koreans and to break that alliance.

I think that is a noble goal. I seriously question whether this is the way to go about it and whether it would actually work. I also think a lot more scholarship needs to be done, frankly, on the strength of that alliance, whether you call them the legion of doom or I heard somebody call them – the Australians called them the other day the evil quad, which is kind of awesome. But just how strong, really, is that collaboration? Is it strategic? Is it tactical? Is it temporary? Is it longer term? But honestly, we cannot sacrifice Ukraine on the table of trying to break up that alliance that may or may not exist.

Dr. Vickers: Well, and I would add, I’m skeptical, as Emily is, that this strategy can succeed. I agree, one of the goals is to try to separate Russia from China. But let’s not forget what Putin’s goals are. One, it’s to break up NATO. Two, it’s to – you know, if you look at the beginning of the war, his aims were to have all NATO enlargement pulled back, all of Eastern Europe basically back to the Russian sphere of influence. And he has designs on broader Europe.

And so weakening Europe across the board, even if we could trade Russia for that, it would be a poor trade. I mean, it would still weaken us vis-à-vis China at the end of the day.

Dr. Cohen: I’m even more profoundly skeptical about it. First, you know, it is, from the point of view of statecraft, a very bad idea to say you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to split you from your best friend.

Dr. Vickers: Yeah.

Dr. Cohen: Really, I mean, that’s quite doubtful. It also, I think, reflects the Trump administration’s disdain for fundamentals of, you know, what’s the nature of this regime? Am I dealing with a dictatorship or a democracy? I don’t think they care a whole lot about that. But the fact is, Vladimir Putin will always have much more in common with Xi Jinping. I mean, those regimes, they are authoritarian regimes. They’re regimes that have to be afraid of their own people. They’re regimes that have to be afraid of democracy.

I think that’s one of the things that frightened Putin about Ukraine evolving into a thriving democracy. The idea that we can split them by being clever and sending a delegation to Riyadh, I just think it’s a foolish – it’s a foolish policy which will come back to bite us, plus everything that Mike just said.

Ms. Harding: Yeah.

Dr. Jones: Yeah, I think, you know, it is interesting. The Chinese, as everyone has noted, have not provided wholesale weapons to the Russians. But they are providing significant amounts of assistance. You mentioned components. But it is widespread from components that go into radar systems, including S-400s, to chips that go into precision strike to a range of different types of systems in virtually all of their main land platforms, air platforms. They’re providing drone and drone components to the Russians. And they’re buying oil. So the relationship is significant.

It is noteworthy that Putin and Xi have met roughly 50 times, which is a testament to the way that relationship has evolved over time. Now, you know, I’m sure, to some degree, among some Russians, there are – there’s probably some overt racism towards the Chinese and some concerns. But the relationship at the top appears to be good right now. They’ve flown strategic bombing missions, including off the coast of Alaska.

So I do worry strongly about trying to pull a Russian government that is so evil to its own population, has started a war against Ukraine, and that is allied with all of the major enemies of the United States, and thinking this is likely to end up in a positive way, which brings us to – if I can start with Emily – sort of what are the interests of the parties now coming to the table? Because part of where we’re at right now is the beginning of the contours of negotiations. And I do want to talk about sort of, how likely this is, but can you talk a little bit about the contours of this right now?

Ms. Harding: Absolutely. I’m going to ask you to pull the map back up so that we can talk a little bit about that. And while you do that, I’m going to talk about which table we’re even talking about. (Laughs.) Because right now the way you look at it there are sort of three and a half tables perhaps going on. There’s one that’s sort of the global table, that we just saw play out today at the U.N. And there was a vote about competing resolutions over whether or not Russia was, in fact, responsible for this war. So there’s, like, a global discussion going on. There’s also the table that took place in Saudi Arabia, where you had –

Dr. Jones: Here’s your map, by the way.

Ms. Harding: Oh, thank you. Where you had the U.S. and Russia sit down together and have a conversation. And there’s also a European table, where you’re having meetings amongst various European powers about how to approach this. And then, I mean, there’s theoretically, anyway, a Ukrainian-Russian table that doesn’t even quite exist yet.

So if you look at all these players and their competing interests, I mean, the Russians, this is it, territory. They definitely want to keep Crimea. They definitely want to keep the land bridge that goes between Crimea and mainland Russia. If you look over there at Moldova, there’s that tiny little sliver of land right there that’s dotted, right? Ideally, they would like to keep control of that and use that as a jumping off point for perhaps some aggression against the rest of Europe. They want to be able to control, I think, the critical minerals that now the Trump administration has definitely put a very high premium on. A lot of those are in currently Russian-controlled areas. You know they’re going to fight hard to keep some of those.

So they want – they want territory. They want to be able to walk away from this saying, number one, we won. Number two, we protected the, quote, unquote, “Russians” who are in that part of Ukraine, and thus want to be a part of Russia. And they want to preserve the opportunity to do more damage later. They also definitely want to be able to threaten the rest of Europe. Do you want to jump in there, Mike?

Dr. Vickers: Just to add on the Russian part, agree with everything you said. Putin just made it clear that he also wants, essentially, a regime change in Kyiv. And he also wants a defanged Ukrainian military. And that this needs to be part of a larger, comprehensive settlement, which he means beyond Ukraine. Which is back to Eastern Europe and NATO as a whole.

Dr. Cohen: Yeah. I mean, I think part of what makes the situation now so perilous, at a time when the United States really has completely reversed its positions – we should talk about that – is, you know, we are encouraging the Russians to be even more ambitious in their objectives than they otherwise would. And you can understand why Vladimir Putin might think, OK, now’s the time where I can not only, you know, get Ukraine where I want it, but I can also get NATO out of the Baltic states. And it’s quite clear that the Baltic – and the Baltic states are completely convinced, and I think with reason, that they could very well be next. So, you know, there’s – we’re playing a very, very dangerous game in encouraging the Russians to amp up their objectives.

And I’ll add one other thing on this, by the way, if I may. Which is one of the things that has gone somewhat unnoticed is that Belarus, which was always sort of a client state of Russia, never really managed to be independent, is increasingly being absorbed by Russia. So this is – if we bear in mind what I said at the beginning about Putin thinking about this as kind of unification of the little Russian peoples, Belarus and Ukraine, he’s actually already had a great deal of success in Belarus.

Ms. Harding: So that’s what the Russians want. Can we flip over to what the Ukrainians want here? (Laughs.) I mean, so clearly they want the territory back. (Laughs.) And that is not an unreasonable ask. We should just say that. That is not an unreasonable ask. I think, you know, barring getting all of their territory back, the security guarantees they’re asking for are completely legitimate, also very difficult to execute.

And some of the numbers being thrown around about various European forces being on the ground in Ukraine, I’ve seen estimates anywhere from 30,000 to 150,000. And then with this idea that the U.S. would have to backstop, to try to do things like overwatch, or, you know, air defense, or evacuation. It’s not clear at all the Europeans are going to get that kind of backstopping out of this administration. So the Ukrainians want some kind of guarantee that the Russians aren’t going to turn around and just do this again in six months or a year, or whenever they rebuild their stocks. Totally reasonable.

I’d like to talk a little bit about what the Europeans want out of this too, but you all want to jump in on the Ukrainians at all?

Dr. Vickers: Just that, you know, the Ukrainians are willing to trade some territory for a security guarantee. But, you know, what the U.S. has on offer is, essentially, you give us half of your mineral resources and you don’t get a security guarantee, which is about the worst deal one can imagine.

Dr. Cohen: Yeah, as was pointed out on a very good podcast called “Ukraine the Latest,” which comes out of The Telegraph, those would have been harsher terms that were imposed on Germany after World War I. And they lost the war and they were the enemy.

Dr. Vickers: Yeah. Yeah. Well, when you treat your friends like enemies, and your enemies like friends, it’s probably not a great foreign policy.

Ms. Harding: Right. I mean, there does seem to be some trade space between the Ukrainians saying, yes, we would love for you to help us develop our critical mineral stores, which have been relatively undeveloped and could be very useful both for the world and also for the Ukrainian economy. But give us half? Give us $500 billion worth of resources when, as Zelensky points out, the U.S. has spent, depending on how you count it, at most 100 billion (dollars)? And most of that came back to our own economy, let’s not forget. That does seem like just about one of the worst deals in history for the Ukrainians.

Dr. Jones: So, Emily, if I can ask you just to pick up on – Eliot did mention early on the essay that Putin penned, or had penned for him, on the views of Ukraine as being historically Russian. And we’ve seen in Crimea first, then in the Donbas, and then in all of Ukraine itself, the Russians trying to take control over those areas. We’ve heard inklings out of the Kremlin about Moldova, as you mentioned, the Baltic states as being part of the former Soviet Union.

So if I can ask you, to what degree do you think a deal that is starting to formulate along the lines that it is right now – and we’ll get into specifics – to what degree is that likely to decrease the Russian appetite for more or increase the Russian appetite for more? Because I think there’s this – there’s this really interesting question – and this is one that I think people struggle with during the Obama administration, during Crimea – is there really wasn’t much of a cost put on the Russians for starting to take territory. And they proceeded to expand their territorial interest. Putin has talked about Peter the Great. So it’s not – I mean, there’s a historical interest here, but just to – just to put a fine point on it, what’s your sense about the deal that’s starting to form? Are the Russians likely to want more or less out of this?

Ms. Harding: Yeah. As much as I tend to be an eternal optimist, and, you know, hope for peace, I do think that this will increase their appetite, not decrease it. Putin is a bully. Bullies respond to strength. And what we’ve seen with him over the last, what, 15, 20 years now is that whenever he senses weakness he pushes forward. And in a sense, the Trump administration’s eagerness to get to the table to get a deal done, partially I’m sure, because of the campaign promise he made to end the war on day one, means that they’re willing to just throw concessions at the Russians to try to get them to come to the table and to make peace.

Putin’s very smart. He knows that time is on his side. He knows that if he can draw out these negotiations over a longer period of time, he’ll get more concessions. At the same time, he’ll probably be able to rebuild some of his stocks, rebuild some of his forces. He will get stronger during the six months, or however long this takes to actually finalize. And then perhaps after a strategic pause it becomes much easier to do things like pursue the sabotage campaign they’ve been pursuing throughout Europe, to intimidate the Baltics, to really push on the Poles, to try to divide NATO. And then it does seem like the Trump administration has at least opened the door to a real strategic division between the U.S. and NATO. And that’s exactly what Putin wants. If he feels like he has free rein to do whatever he wants in Europe, I can’t see him saying, no, I’m good here, I think I’ll wait. I mean, why would he?

Dr. Jones: And that is the way – just talking to a number of leaders from some of the border states – Finland, the Baltics, Poland – they are extremely nervous right now about the way these negotiations are going, essentially just handing concessions to the Russians. There is a great deal of nervousness among anyone that shares a border with either Russia or Belarus right now, that the Russians two years from now, four years from now, five years from now will be looking at where they can go next.

Eliot, you had a – you had a point on this.

Dr. Cohen: Yeah. So two points, really. One is, we’re understandably focused on Putin, but I think it’s really important for us to understand this is – you know what he does – what he is doing and the way he thinks about it is quite deeply rooted in Russian thinking about the world. You know, there’s a saying, Russia has no borders, and the truth is Russia has never recognized borders. When we think, say, about the Napoleonic Wars, you know, we think about Europe. Actually, they’re beginning the conquest of Central Asia, fighting wars against the Turks at the same time, always expanding. It is an imperial power and what Putin – it’s not that Putin is trying to restore the Soviet Union. He’s trying to restore the Russian Empire, which is a lot older and deeper.

I think there’s another thing at work too, though, which is why even if there’s some sort of deal it is an armistice. It’s not a peace. I think they have to be afraid of their own people. There was a very interesting article I was reading. They may not want to bring home 700,000 traumatized PTSD soldiers from Ukraine.

They may not want to have that reckoning with their people who said, what, we’ve spent a trillion dollars and we lost 800(,000), 900,000 people killed and wounded for – you know, for what? Because whatever they’ll get, it’ll – you know, it’s completely devastated.

They’re putting in place, moreover, things which will keep them, I think, aggressive. So, for example, one of the things – if you look at what’s happening to the education of young children it is increasingly militaristic, having them parade around in uniforms and, you know, military songs and military education, and that means Russia has the potential to be even more dangerous in the future and, as I said, the biggest mistake we can make, which I think we’re about to make, is to think that some kind of deal is a peace deal. It’s not going to be a peace deal.

Dr. Jones: So, Mike, if I could turn to you for a second on the Ukrainian side. I do want to come back to the Europeans in a moment.

But to the Ukrainians, can you give us a little bit of a sense of how they’re thinking about the negotiations and their current and future security?

If you look at how the Ukrainians came out of the Soviet Union, they gave up nuclear weapons in return for what they thought were security guarantees that –

Dr. Vickers: Including from Russia.

Dr. Jones: Including from Russia. That did not turn out to be a good deal.

So what are they looking for right now?

Dr. Vickers: Well, they would like to end the war, of course, too, and rebuild their society, and as Emily noted, you know, they want a partnership with the United States. They want to preserve their sovereignty. But they – to prevent a reprise of this they need a security guarantee and that’s what’s been elusive.

Dr. Jones: So what does that actually mean in practice? What – they’re looking for weapons that would make it much more difficult for the Russians to do what they’ve just done? I will highlight before you answer that it’s worth going back and looking at the way the Chechen wars were fought.

The Russians began that with a three-year phase from 1994 to 1996. They didn’t perform that well. They paused, and then in 1999 they went back at it for another 10 years and did succeed in bringing Chechnya back into the Russian fold. So they have a history of pausing, rearming, and then fighting again.

Dr. Vickers: Yeah. And, again, I don’t think you can discount the larger objectives of breaking up NATO and restoring the greater Russian Empire including the Baltics and the southeast, as Emily mentioned.

Dr. Jones: So understandable that the Ukrainians are asking for security guarantees.

Dr. Vickers: Yeah. And besides the effect on Europe and Ukraine and emboldening Russia, I also think this will embolden China, you know, against Taiwan. So you may get way more than you bargained for here.

Ms. Harding: As far as the – like, what a security guarantee might look like, I mean, any force that you’re going to put on the ground is going to be basically a trip wire force. So if the Russians try to roll in then those troops are either wounded, killed, or in danger of being wounded and killed, and that in theory brings the rest of Europe back into the fight.

So what does a trip wire force look like and where do you put it is a key question. Do you try and spread a bunch of troops out along a gigantic frontier? Do you have them move around? Do you have them patrol?

And then Putin came out, I think, yesterday or something and said that any forces from a NATO nation – not NATO forces but forces from a NATO nation – he would see as NATO encroachment on Russian territory, which is an extraordinary negotiating position.

If you’re not going to allow any NATO – I mean, what does that leave you, the Swiss? (Laughs.) You’d have the Swiss come in and camp out in Ukraine?

Dr. Cohen: Well, you know, of course, what the Russians understand about negotiating is, you know, if you see that the other side are a bunch of stooges then, you know, you throw out ever more outrageous objectives.

I’ll disagree a little bit with Emily. I think that, for a security guarantee to be a real guarantee, it is not enough to be a tripwire for us. It has to be something substantial. And some of the numbers that people have been throwing out – 30,000 on up – that is substantial.

The big issue is this. Unfortunately, the Trump administration, and the Biden administration before it, to be fair, ruled out the deployment of American forces to Ukraine. I don’t know why we did that. I think that’s stupid. We, after all – remember, for a long time, we refused to deploy American forces to Poland. I think we now have, what, 12,000 troops, something like that, in Poland. The world did not come to an end.

The question is going to be, will the Europeans be willing to deploy substantial forces? The British have stepped up, but the British army is tiny. You know, with a German government, the Germans may be in a different place; I suspect the Baltics, the Nordic states.

For me the most interesting question is Poland. And as I think you know, I’ve been talking a lot to senior Polish officials. They have basically said if the Americans aren’t there, we’re not going to be there. And I’ve been telling them that’s a mistake. The Poles have the most – the largest army in Europe. In very short order it’s going to be the best-armed army in Europe, with something like 1,200 tanks. They are very well trained and they sure as heck are willing to fight Russians.

So I think what’s important for a security guarantee to work is that it be a really substantial force that would fight and not just get steamrollered by the Russians.

Parenthetically, I’ll just say, you know, the experience we have with this is in some ways from the Cold War in Berlin, where, you know, Berlin was completely surrounded by East German territory, but we kept, I think, about 10,000 troops in Berlin, the Berlin brigade; so that if the Russians were going to try to take it from us, maybe they’d be able to overrun but it would be one heck of a fight.

Dr. Vickers: And so add to that, besides what would be credible in Ukraine, Ukraine as part of Europe by whatever mechanism, security guarantee or something short of NATO membership, you know, adds the most experienced and biggest army to the European arsenal.

Dr. Jones: It is worth noting that from the beginning of this war, the Russians have threatened escalation at every stage of the war. And just as a reminder, the Russian army has performed extremely poorly throughout this war. It has – the army itself has failed in any meaningful way to conduct effective joint operations with its air force, which does not control the territory over Ukraine. It’s not been effective in conducting combined arms operations. Even on the offensive over the last year or so, it is inching forward on territory. It’s not able to maneuver. It’s dying in extraordinary numbers.

So I think one would expect the Russians to threaten European forces if they’re to place their soldiers on Ukrainian territory. But I think to highlight, at every stage they’ve done this, and being that the Russians on the ground have turned out not to be a particularly effective military force, so they’re going to – one would expect them to show lots of bluster.

OK, Europeans, Emily.

Ms. Harding: The Europeans, yeah.

Dr. Jones: Where – I mean, how do you – there are a lot of different countries there. So what are some of the European interests here?

Ms. Harding: I mean, when you come down to it, what they want to feel is safe from a potential Russian aggressor that they feel is very close to their borders. You mentioned the Finns. I mean, they’ve been staring across that border at the Russians for decades. They experienced a war against the Russians in 1940-41 with the winter war. They’re going to –

Dr. Jones: ’39-’40, yeah.

Ms. Harding: Yeah. And they are deeply aware of just how brutal a Russian army can be. What they want is for the fighting to stay in Ukraine. They want Ukraine to be able to win this war and to bruise the Russians enough they don’t feel like they can come back across the border.

Now, one can argue about whether or not the number of resources they have contributed to this fight match that objective. The Americans have been saying for a very long time to the Europeans that we need you to step up your military production. We need you to be able to stand on your own two feet a little bit more. And that has now become a real critical ultimatum in a way that it hasn’t been before. And I think they’re starting to understand the true implications of that.

But what they want is to be able to push back against the Russians where they are right now and to try to preserve what they have for a fight in the future. I had some – to your point about Taiwan, Mike, I had some hard discussions with some European allies back in January about what the U.S. would expect out of them in a Pacific contingency. And the sort of back and forth there was, but if you abandon us in Europe, then why on earth are we going to come help you in a Pacific contingency? And that’s a fair point.

Dr. Jones: I mean, I was in Taiwan last week. Taiwan senior officials said last week to me that they are extremely nervous about the evolution of the situation in Ukraine, largely because the U.S.’s negotiating directly with the Russians, not always with the Ukrainians at the table – what’s the lesson you take if you’re Taiwan right now? What happens about your future? Is it a U.S.-China decision? I think there’s a lot of nervousness if – for those people sitting in Taipei right now about their future, particularly when you look at the series of Joint Sword exercises that the PLA navy and air force have conducted around the island, which are – they’re not just exercises. They are practicing for an invasion and, at the very least, blockade and quarantine scenarios. So these are – they are running how they would conduct an invasion or a blockade.

Mike, if I can ask you, you know, I think it’s certainly true that when you look at – to pick up on Emily’s point on that some of the Eastern Europeans’ defense spending has gone up, if you look at Poland; Baltic states, it’s reasonably high. But what about the rest of Europe? You know, the Germans, the British. Eliot mentioned the relatively small British army right now, but British defense budget is still somewhere around 2.5 percent, as a percentage of GDP. It’s not very large.

Dr. Cohen: About 2.3 (percent).

Dr. Jones: Two-point-three percent?

Dr. Cohen: And then they’re saying maybe we can get up to 2.5 (percent) in a few years, which is not enough.

Dr. Jones: So why aren’t many Europeans stepping up, and how do you get them to do that?

Dr. Vickers: Well, it’s really a tale of two Europes, the east and then the west. And of course, the west feels a little more removed from the threats and have bigger social programs than others, and so they’re far more reluctant, the further, you know, west you go.

Dr. Jones: Eliot, if I could ask you – and then I want to go around and get everyone’s views along these lines – what would you recommend right now that the U.S. negotiating position should be? Not necessarily what it is right now or what you suspect it might be, but what should it be right now based on what we just discussed?

Dr. Cohen: So, you know, I – there’s a temptation, particularly in Washington, to assume that, well, negotiations are always a good thing, right? I don’t think negotiations right now are a good thing. I think my position would be, first, maximum pressure on the Russians, then maybe have a negotiation. And maximum pressure would be dialing up the sanctions, the way the administration has been willing to do on the Iranians; increase aid to Ukraine, particularly helping them develop – something we haven’t talked about – quite amazing arms industry. I would think they’re going to manufacture 4 million drones a year. That is staggering.

So what I would do is do lots of things that would put the Russians on the back foot. Do I think that it’s realistic that the Ukrainians are going to be able to get back all the territory that they had in 2022? Alas, no, I don’t think that’s plausible. But I do think if Putin is really feeling the pressure that he will accept a bad deal, particularly if he thinks that the alternative is to be threatened.

So my argument is, first, dial up the pressure; be as, you know, outlandish, if you will, in our demands as they are in theirs. And once they are really feeling the squeeze, then you have a negotiation, but with Ukrainians and Europeans at the table, because that’s – the last thing I’ll just say is the thing that was disgraceful about the Riyadh meetings was that it was a discussion about Ukraine without Ukraine and without our allies, and that was just bad statecraft.

Dr. Vickers: And when we do that in our history, of course, looking at Vietnam and Afghanistan, we end up losing because you have no leverage.

Dr. Cohen: Exactly.

Dr. Vickers: And I would agree with everything Eliot said. And, you know, ending the war is good. I mean, we should try – strive to end the war as soon as possible, but on Ukrainian terms and on Western terms, not on Russian terms.

Dr. Jones: And noting that the Russians are actually suffering quite a bit more than they let on, both in terms of blood and treasure.

Ms. Harding: Yeah. So first I want to make very clear that the Ukrainians were not invited to the table in Riyadh. It’s not that they didn’t show, like some people in the administration seem to be saying right now.

Dr. Vickers: Right.

Ms. Harding: It’s that they were not invited. They’ve offered to come sit down at the table with the Russians many times over the last three years. And it’s always been Putin being, like, no, we’re good; I’m going to keep fighting.

As far as my recommendation, I would flip the script on Moscow. I’m in favor of talk-fight in this case, where you sit down at the table and you start the conversation but you keep fighting at the same time. And rather than letting Putin think the time is on his side, I think you make it very clear that time is not on his side. You double down on the sanctions on the shadow fleet. You work really hard to shut down those oil exports. I think you push back in gray zone hybrid activity against the Russians. I didn’t say this, but I’m saying it on camera, if some of those ships were to disappear I think that would be a very good thing.

Dr. Jones: Sink. Sink.

Ms. Harding: Uh-huh. I also think that you say to them that these measures are going to increase every month that you don’t agree to concede Ukrainian territory back. So next month, we’re going to deliver this weapons system. The month after that, we’re going to deliver this weapons system. The month after that, we’re going to do this. And you lay out for him just how much worse it’s going to get over the course of the next year, so that twelve months from now when they haven’t been able to rebuild their conscription services, when they haven’t been able to rebuild their military, when they haven’t been able to backfill for all the ammunition that they’ve thrown, that it really hurts. And maybe at that point they’re willing to actually make concessions and come to the table.

Dr. Jones: It is worth noting, by the way, that no American soldier has lost his or her life in Ukraine. American blood has not been shed. And even the American assistance that has gone has generally come from American workers that are building weapon systems in U.S. cities and states like Texas, and Florida, and Ohio, that are building weapon systems – Missouri – that are building weapon systems and exporting. Those are going into the paychecks of Americans. So we have reaped some, you know, financial benefits, but also the costs have been limited. And I think that’s worth noting.

This is not the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq where the – there was a discussion about is this worth the cost of American casualties? There aren’t any American casualties there. If I could ask you, Mike, what is your sense that, if there is some kind of a deal along the lines of where the U.S. administration is heading with the Russians, what is the likelihood do you think that is permanent? Or do you think that is – the Russians will likely use that as an opportunity, as violence declined for some period of time, to rebuild and live to fight another day?

Dr. Vickers: Oh, I think it’s the latter. I think the likelihood that this is permanent, without further moves against Ukraine or against Eastern Europe to rebuild the Russian empire, is next to nil.

Dr. Jones: Eliot, what’s the likelihood that a peace deal, if it is signed between the U.S. and the Russians, will be permanent?

Dr. Cohen: Nil.

Dr. Jones: Emily.

Ms. Harding: Yeah. I mean, I hate to – hate to be the harbinger of bad news but, yeah, no way it lasts.

Dr. Jones: All right. Well, thank you all for participating in an interesting discussion. Stay tuned. This will not be the last discussion on Ukraine, Russia, and the war. Thanks to Mike Vickers, Eliot Cohen, and Emily Harding for a fantastic and frank assessment of both war and peace.

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