Putin’s Fight Won’t End With Ukraine

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Andrea and Mike, thank you for the essay in our current issue, it’s called “Putin’s Point of No Return.” It follows a couple of other fantastic essays the two of you have co-authored over the past few years. I would point back especially to a very prescient one from 2021 about what you called “Russia’s persistent power” and the then common mistake of writing off Russia as a disruptive force in geopolitics. It was the kind of argument that ran against conventional wisdom when you wrote it and then seemed totally obvious and undeniable a year later. So all to say, it’s a pleasure to have both of you joining me today and there’s a lot to talk about.

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

Thanks for having us.

MICHAEL KOFMAN

Yeah, thanks.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So I thought it would be useful to start by getting a sense of where things stand in Ukraine, in Russia, and in U.S. interactions with both, given what a tumultuous and high stakes stretch we’re in with Trump’s recent return to the White House. We’re also, of course, approaching three years since the start of Putin’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, launched on February 24, 2022.

So Mike, I want to start with you on the state of the battlefield. There’s a dominant sense, in Washington at least, that Russia is, even at immense cost in men and materiel, grinding along day by day with momentum on its side and with very little to suggest that Ukrainian forces can and will reverse that momentum. Is that, I think that common view, is that roughly accurate? How would you describe the current balance in the war?

MICHAEL KOFMAN

Yeah, I think that’s a fair view. Russia’s had the initiative along most of the front line and the material advantage for well over the last actual year of the war. I think particularly in the last six months of 2024, the Russian rate of gain began to accelerate on the battlefield. It slowed down some over the course of December going into January, but it’s not clear that the Russian offensive is really being exhausted yet. And as we enter 2025, Ukraine’s in a rather difficult position. The front line is not imploding, the situation isn’t catastrophic, but the war’s been on a rather negative trajectory and visibly so for the past year. And it’s not clear that much of that’s going to change in 2025.

If we look at where Washington, D.C., is, if we look at where European capitals are, not only is there a great deal of political uncertainty, it’s not clear what funding will be available. Inventories are not doing great in terms of equipment availability for Ukraine. Ukrainians have proven very resilient. They’re holding on. But it increasingly looks as though Russia will keep making steady incremental gains over the course of the coming months. And if you look at some of the key battles or reactions from last year, Ukraine is holding maybe around 30 percent or a little more of the Kursk salient that they captured last year. It’s steadily dwindling. Russian forces are still advancing in the east of Donetsk and in Kupyansk by Kharkiv Oblast. They’re not able to achieve big operationally significant breakthroughs, but the way they’re fighting, they’ve been able to sustain pressure across parts of the front and have been able to replace those losses.

So their gains are very costly, but nonetheless they’ve been able to sustain them. And so that’s where we are this year. A lot of folks are hoping that maybe the Russian economy, which is increasingly creaking and showing visible cracks, that that is going to be a decisive factor. But many of the people I deal with, they’re very skeptical that that’s going to be decisive in 2025.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We’ll pick up some of those economic questions, but just to stick with the battlefield for a moment, Mike, I know you’re too smart and too judicious to make predictions along these lines, but as you look at the risk of a really precipitous collapse in Ukrainian lines or, conversely, a massive shift in momentum in Ukraine’s favor, do you see any signs that either one of those could come or is there anything that would lead to that kind of change in the war we’re seeing?

MICHAEL KOFMAN

So I do think that Ukraine’s manpower situation is quite precarious. And the way I look at it is that while the Russian military, the way it’s fighting, does not have the potential for some kind of big breakthrough—and people when they try to think of a breakthrough or collapse of the front, they sometimes struggle to conceptualize, well, what does that mean in this war? We don’t see big combined arms maneuver operations very much in this war. And so Russia is not likely to capture major cities such as Kharkiv and Dnipro. It’s not even necessarily likely to be able to punch through all the way to the Dnipro River. But if Ukraine is not able to stabilize the frontline, then the Russian rate of gain may accelerate month by month, which is exactly what was happening in the second half of 2024. And as Ukrainian manning levels decrease, and as the force becomes less and less cohesive because it fragments, as you’re trying to defend with fewer and fewer people, then you can see real problems where Russians begin to either march steadily west towards Dnipro, or they basically are advancing in a rate such that it’s much harder to organize a defense.

And the point of discussing that isn’t that I think Ukraine is at risk of Russia suddenly seizing a lot more territory. It’s that if you appreciate that both sides are positioning for likely negotiations this year to achieve some kind of armistice or ceasefire, if one of them has clear momentum on their side and is visibly winning in a decisive manner on the battlefield, that has very significant implications for anything that happens at the negotiating table. The fighting and what’s happening in the war provides information about both sides’ leverage and their prospects in this war. And so it’s going to be very difficult for Ukraine to achieve war termination on favorable or even acceptable terms if that is the case six months from now.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Andrea, let me turn to you, and that’s a good segue, to try to understand the Trump and Putin dynamic right now. How do you read signals from Putin about both the war and the U.S.-Russian relationship and of course the crucial interaction between those two things, and how do you read signals from Trump and the people around him over the last several weeks, I suppose, since the election?

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

Yeah, I think it’s like a tale of two different stories, where with Putin it’s been steady as she goes, whereas with Trump we’re really seeing some more significant changes in how he’s approaching it. So I think from Putin’s perspective, it picks up exactly from where Mike left off, which is that Putin does see that they’re still able to accomplish some of their aims on the battlefield. And so he really has very little interest in any genuine negotiation. And as Mike said, the economy might be pinched or tightened, but still, for at least 2025, I think he believes that he can ride this out and the pain isn’t sufficient to force any significant change in his approach to the war in Ukraine.

Where we’re seeing more change is I think on the U.S. side. And of course in the run-up to the election through the campaign, I think there was a whole lot of anxiety in Europe, in Ukraine, and certainly in parts of Washington that Trump would come in and really pull the rug out from under the Ukrainians and force them to make significant concessions. And he famously talked about ending the war in one day. That rhetoric has really changed quite significantly, and I think that there’s a realization whether he’s being told by the people around him or what it is that Putin isn’t interested in the deal that Trump and his team had put on the table. One of the big sticking points I think is not so much over territory, but really about Ukraine’s ability to defend itself in the future. So there’s certainly the question about NATO membership, there’s the question about the size and disposition of the Ukrainian military moving forward, and those are concessions that Putin is not yet willing to make, whereas the Trump team is saying, “We’re going to come in and continue to support the Ukrainian military and Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.”

So now in the last week, Trump’s rhetoric has changed. He’s saying to Putin, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” He’s talking about putting “sanctions” on Russia. It’s hard to know exactly what he means, given that they’re still so sanctioned and the United States really imports very little, if anything, from Russia, but the shift is meaningful I think. And I do think that maybe that there is this realization that Putin is not yet ready to engage, and so I think we’re seeing a President Trump who’s trying to increase leverage, but it’s clear that it will take much more than the cheap talk, and it will take some real action, I think, to convince Putin that he means business.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I mean, if you do take seriously that increase in leverage—or I guess some people call this the U.S. version of escalate to de-escalate, to create pressure on Putin—is there anything that could be meaningfully done there? I mean, are there steps that you would look to that might change Putin’s calculus in some meaningful way or change momentum on the battlefield?

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

I think the most meaningful thing that the Trump administration could do would be to renew military aid to Ukraine, to go back to Congress, ask to pass a new supplemental package, and really help Ukraine to stabilize the frontline. I mean, I think at the end of the day, that’s going to be what it takes. Putin has to understand that they can’t achieve their aims through the battlefield while continuing to feel the economic pains. I mean, Putin has to come to the realization that he can’t sustain this war indefinitely, and in order to get there, it does require Ukraine to stabilize the frontlines. I personally think that Trump could sell that to Congress. He really controls the Republican Party thoroughly at this point, and if so, if that’s the course that he charts, then I think the Congress and his supporters would come along.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

But I guess on some level, the most important signal is not any particular capability or step, but just signaling that the United States is there for the long haul.

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

Yeah, I agree.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Mike, I’m curious for your view on how an increase in U.S. pressure or the decision to send new capabilities or put other kinds of pressure on Putin might affect things on the battlefield, but also to address what I think is the criticism that is implied in that theory—that there were things that the Biden administration could have done and did not, whether that’s specific weapons they could have given and did not, or only did after weeks of prevarication or delay, or some of the restrictions they put on how Ukrainians could use those weapons. There’s a theory out there that that would’ve materially changed the course of the war, and that if Trump takes those off, that will somehow reverse momentum. So as you look at those two pieces, both backward-looking and forward-looking, what do you make of that?

MICHAEL KOFMAN

So first, I know there’s this theory and this discourse out there, but I’m deeply skeptical of a monocausal theory of this war that places all the burden and causality for outcomes on the Biden administration in the United States. This has been first and foremost Ukraine’s war, and many of the key decisions made in this war were, if not made by Ukraine, they were certainly made jointly. I think a lot of the criticisms of how the Biden administration handled security assistance to Ukraine are very fair. And it’s difficult to engage in the counterfactuals of what could have been, but I struggle to identify specific weapons that would’ve made such a dramatic difference in the dynamic in the course of this war. For some folks that might be a bit surprising to hear. I think the challenge with that particularly early on is folks tend not to be appreciative of how much time it took to set up the security assistance pipeline and training, maintenance, what have you, over the course of 2022, and that a lot of this simply just wasn’t possible early on in the war—the reality of what it takes to make these things happen.

I think at this juncture in the war, the Trump administration has some options, but they’ve inherited a fairly weak hand. First, they don’t have much in the way of funding. Second, Ukraine’s principal problem at this point in the war is not a deficit of ammunition or equipment, although you can never have too much in a conflict such as this. The leading problem Ukraine has is manpower, and this is not a problem the United States can solve. And it’s become very evident that while the Russian advantage in artillery fires and in drones has been dramatically reduced over the course of 2024, such that in many areas Ukraine has almost no show in parity, the Russian rate of advance only increased along similar timelines. So increasingly, we can begin to isolate that the leading challenges in Ukraine have to do with force management, force quality, and mobilization.

That said, I think sustaining assistance for Ukraine will prove to be very important, and there are still some capabilities that the United States has not provided that were discussed in 2024. I’m simply unsure how they can be decisive. And the reason I say that is because most capabilities have their greatest impact when they’re first introduced at scale, and they need to be in support of an operation that takes advantage of their presence on the battlefield. Being in a large-scale conventional war and just adding the latest missile to that war isn’t going to change much of anything. It’s going to help, but it’s going to help by a matter of degree, right? It’s not going to change the dynamic. What you need is usually an offensive operation or a defensive operation or something concerted that you are doing.

So I do think that if Ukraine is able to stabilize the frontline in the coming months, then some additional strike capabilities could really increase the cost that Ukraine inflicts on Russia. It could also allow Ukraine to pursue certain limited aims like halting a Russian critical infrastructure strike campaign for example. And it can be part of an approach this year to try to rebalance the scales or at least the relevant balance of leverage in the war. But it’s important to get folks off of the notion that we’ve seen throughout the war, that whatever next capability might be available, whether it’s Western tanks, whether it’s attack missiles, whether it’s F16s, that that’s going to be the game changer. And unfortunately, these capabilities don’t compensate for problems with the fundamentals.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to jump into the recent piece. I read it again this week and was struck both by how persuasive it is at the level of framing argument but also how full of just really sharp and well-substantiated analysis it is, paragraph by paragraph. So there’s a lot in it we will not get to today, and people should go read it. But one piece of the framing argument that I want to draw you out on is the degree to which Putin has adjusted ideologically, politically, and economically, to a wartime footing to fighting this war.

Starting with the last one of those, Andrea, the ability of the Russian economy to withstand pressure has been surprising to a lot of observers. This is at a moment when the two of you estimate that when you include unofficial expenditures, about eight percent of GDP is going to military spending. How has the Russian economy changed to withstand economic pressure in the sanctions regime? And why is it that it surprised us? I mean, if you’d gone back a few years and listed everything that the United States and its partners would’ve been doing to put pressure on the economy and just how much Russia would be spending on the war, you would’ve, I think, suspected more of a collapse than we’ve seen.

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s fair to say that the impact of the sanctions and the export controls—I mean, they are unprecedented, the freezing of central bank assets and other things. It’s been really a mighty effort by the part of the United States and Europe to try to raise the cost for Putin of sustaining this war. But I think everyone would generally agree that the impact has been less than people had hoped for, and part of that is because they have been able to adapt to those sanctions and export controls over time. A large part of the resilience of the Russian economy has been the high defense spending—that the government is pumping this money into the economy. And that has had both benefits in terms of keeping economic growth much higher than most people anticipated. Despite all of the pressure that the West has levied, the Russian economy up until this point has continued to grow. So there has been a lot of dislocation, but on the whole there’s been quite a lot of resilience.

And the other key factor is certainly the support from external actors—China first and foremost, but also the Indias and other countries of the world, some of which chose not to implement sanctions in the first place, but others such as China that are actively helping Russia to circumvent the sanctions and export controls. So there’s been a lot of different modes and methods of adaptation, and as Mike has said, it has created economic challenges. We know inflation is incredibly high, the ruble is very weak, there are labor shortages. So it’s not as if there haven’t been costs. It has raised the cost for Russia of prosecuting the war. But it just hasn’t yet had the effects that I think that many in the West had hoped.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you see space for the Trump administration in this search for leverage, or the search for escalation, to really ramp up the economic pressure? I mean, they talk about maximum pressure in all kinds of contexts—is there a maximum pressure course here that might put strains on the Russian economy that would make a difference?

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

I think a lot of that would have to do with the oil and the energy sector. So you have President Trump asking Saudi Arabia and other countries to significantly up their production of oil to drive down the price. That would be a major thing. The United States and Europe have tried to put the oil price cap to try to reduce the amount of revenue that Russia can access as a result of selling its oil and gas. It’s had modest effects, and you hear the Europeans now talking about reducing the oil price cap. So that would further reduce the revenues that Russia is able to generate. But really if we did see a precipitous decline in the price, that would significantly curtail the amount of oil revenue that is basically allowing Russia to continue to prosecute this war, pumping the billions of dollars into its wartime coffers. So that’s one. And then I think if they want to get serious about the enforcement of sanctions and using secondary sanctions, that’s another key way I think that they could ratchet up the pressure.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Mike, do you see constraints potentially coming into effect on Russia’s ability to sustain the war effort when it comes to both men and materiel? There’s obviously all this focus on the outside help that Andrea referred to, but in the more purely military sphere, when you look at the missiles and drones and other things coming from Iran, and then of course the 10,000, or whatever it is, North Korean troops that have gotten lots of focus, is all of that essential to keeping the war effort going? Are there constraints that might start to bite if we do in fact manage to sustain Ukraine?

MICHAEL KOFMAN

Yeah, Russia does face materiel and manpower constraints. On the materiel side, the challenge they have is that they mostly fuel this war by pulling equipment out of storage, which they inherited from the Soviet Union. So this is essentially the last war of the Soviet Union—Russia is spending through its Soviet legacy. And I think, particularly, Russia is going to have challenges in the second half of this year if it keeps going this way. But it doesn’t mean that Russia is going to run out of equipment. It means that the way they fight is going to be focused on reducing losses of mechanized equipment, and it means that they are going to struggle to sustain momentum on the battlefield even in times when they do have breakthroughs to a tactical level.

On manpower, so they had issues last year, then it looked like recruitment went up, but it went up because they started offering payouts at five to six times what they were in previous years of the war. The challenge Russia has with manpower is, even though Russia has plenty of people, plenty of men, Russia has almost no unemployment. It is a very, very tight labor market. It has very significant shortages of skilled labor. And so the Russian state, along with the rest of the Russian economy, is competing for what manpower is available. And at a certain point, it’s just not going to be worth it to go to this war, or the state will not be able to offer the payments you would need to further attract people because they’ve already been recruiting people at a rate of around 30,000 men per month almost for the past two years. And in a country that has these sorts of labor shortages, these challenges in terms of manpower and demographics, it’s just a lot of the resources that Russia has are not necessarily available. And they clearly don’t want to go to another partial mobilization either because, first and foremost, not because of political effects, but because of how economically damaging and destabilizing that will be given the position they’re already in.

So manpower will be a constraint as well. And what that suggests to us is that if Ukraine can address its issues, it does have a shot at exhausting the Russian offensive potential at some point this year. I just don’t know that they’re able to do these things. But nonetheless, Russia faces, I think, very strong headwinds in the second part of 2025. And so the Russian position overall is actually weaker than I think it appears, and certainly their hand is weaker relative to their maximalist aims and demands. Ultimately, their combat performance and the material constraints that they face in 2025 are going to create challenges for them in any negotiation.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Andrea, to focus on the political piece of that and what it means for Putin, the two of you write in the new piece that his increased reliance on repression has generated risk to the stability of his regime. You have a new book co-authored with Erica Frantz on personalist autocracies, and in a piece that you and Erica wrote shortly after the start of the war, you noted that these kinds of regimes look extremely stable right up until the point they aren’t.

There have obviously been lots of moments in the war when people were predicting the imminent downfall of Putin, especially when [former Wagner paramilitary company leader Yevgeny] Prigozhin was on his way to Moscow and it looked like he was going to get there. But as you look at Putin now, and you look at all the false dawns that we’ve seen in the last few years, do you see signs that his grip on power might be weaker than we think, or are there things that you’re looking out for that would suggest that he’s starting to see real political threats?

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

Well, just like Mike likes to avoid making forecasts about exactly which way the military or the situation is going to go, so too what I like to avoid making any forecasts about the longevity of any dictator, especially one as personalized as Putin. But that caveat aside, I think at this moment there don’t seem to be as many visible threats to his hold on power, and I think in large part it is because the repression has been so successful, and because he was able to weather the Prigozhin incident to basically then blow his plane out of the sky and demonstrate to traitors or others what happens to those who oppose him, along with the repression against everyday Russians. I think just the space for speaking out has become so nonexistent that it’s difficult to imagine in this moment anything genuinely threatening his hold on power.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And to maybe ask the question in a slightly different way that will not ask you to make predictions, you’ve studied lots of regimes like this, you’ve studied Putin very, very carefully. What are the things that you are looking out for as indicators that might be changing? What would we see if there were real threats to him?

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

I think at the end of the day, it really would be a confluence of factors. And I think it would be naive to think that any one factor could bring down a regime that’s so entrenched as the Putin regime is. But a bad economy creates conditions that might be more conducive should another exogenous shock happen. Also looking for signs from the elite about any sorts of discontent or dissatisfaction over the future trajectory.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens as negotiations, if they do begin, if there are disagreements about what Russia should accept, what it should not accept. So I think a lot of it would be signs from the economy and then elite support for Putin and whether or not you begin to see any vocal opposition to that. But again, I think at this point in time, it’s really difficult for me to imagine that. The caveat is always, these regimes are stable until they’re not.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When you imagine how quickly we went from all assuming that Bashar al-Assad in Syria was coming back into the good graces of polite international society, or regional society at least, to falling very precipitously, it’s a reminder of that. Let’s go to the negotiations question. Mike, I mean, you spend a lot of time in Ukraine, including with Ukrainian officers and troops and other decision makers and voices in politics and society. Do you see an openness to new kinds of thinking about negotiations and accepting that not all of Ukrainian territory is going to be back in Ukrainian hands in the near term, or is there still resolve to keep fighting no matter what—which is still the public message much of the time but I think it would be very different from what you hear in private.

MICHAEL KOFMAN

I think the challenge depends on who you ask, of course. There’s an openness to negotiation, and society, increasingly in 2024, had become tired and exhausted from the war. Those things are true. But there’s not an openness to making major concessions to Russia, and that’s the problem. And so what you often run into is that folks want to end the war, but they’re not willing to end the war at any cost. And they certainly are not willing to end the war at a cost that then raises the fundamental question of what was the point of fighting and sacrificing people for three years if you’re ultimately going to concede to Russia or make concessions such that the war ends with Russia being able to impose its will and substantially limit Ukraine’s sovereignty. And that’s where the crux of the matter I think lies.

Conversely, I think folks are willing to keep fighting, but it’s clear to everyone that there’s not been a great theory of success that they can identify—neither in the West or in the United States, or to be very frank in Ukraine over the past year. If it’s out there, it’s a well-kept secret. So I think that’s the challenge we’re at right now.

The military maintains morale and has the spirit to fight. Of course, it’s been diminishing over the course of 2024, but a lot of that has to do with exhaustion, with lack of rotation, with lack of replacements, with certain force management choices such as creating new brigades instead of sending replacements to existing brigades and these sort of decisions. Morale on the battlefield is very localized. I think people sometimes don’t appreciate that. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a general morale where Russians are at a six and Ukrainians are at an eight. It really depends on what part of the front you are, what the fight looks like there, the leadership, the degree of support, and what have you.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You mentioned the theory of success in Ukraine. I’m curious to hear from both of you, does Putin have a theory of success at this point? Mike, we can start with you.

MICHAEL KOFMAN

So my sense of it is that the Russian approach right now is to use a combination of pressure at the front, attacks against Ukrainian and critical infrastructure, to increasingly make the situation unsustainable in Ukraine, and then hope that they can convert this to decisive leverage at the negotiating table maybe in the latter half of 2025.

They’re also, from my point of view, stalling for time, meaning folks often confuse a Russian willingness to talk with a willingness to negotiate, and they’re not the same. If we look at the opening Russian position, which is actually not to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war but to reiterate demands regarding European security and aspects of the ultimatums they issued back in December 2021, from my point of view, it is a stalling tactic. It is to begin to discuss the unnegotiable rather than the war itself and to see if they can buy time. Why? Because for now, continuing the war to them is a better alternative than negotiations. They have to actually be compelled to negotiate ultimately.

Now, I think they also have goals that fundamentally are beyond their military means. From my point of view, yes, Russia has minimalist territorial aims—capturing the Donbas, what have you, and those may be achievable in 2025. But their goal of either destroying Ukraine’s viability as a state or imposing their will such that they dramatically limit Ukraine’s sovereignty—it’s very difficult to see them having the military means to attain that. And throughout the war, from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, Russia’s had a rather visible ends-means mismatch in terms of the military power available to achieve those goals. So I think the theory of success for them is somewhat elusive as well. But they at least are advantaged right now on time. The war is not sustainable for Russia, if you look at material constraints, if you look at economic factors. But currently it is more sustainable for them than it is for Ukraine, and I think unfortunately, everyone looking at the trajectory of the war knows that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Andrea, do you have a different view or would you put the theory of success in different terms?

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

I guess just focusing on the political theory of success, to put it very simply, I mean it really is about Ukraine’s capitulation. I think it’s about, as Mike said, impinging on Ukraine’s sovereignty, to make Ukraine a neutral state, to limit its ability to defend itself and protect itself in the future. I do think that a theory of victory would be regime change to try to install a leader who will be far more compliant. If they can’t do it on the battlefield, then I think they’ll look for political means to do it, to get rid of [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and put in a leader who will be far more compliant to Russia’s objectives. I mean, in many ways I don’t think that Russia’s goals have changed very much since the outset of this war.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

To go back to the essay, I mean the first part of the argument is about how much Putin and Russia have adapted to wartime reality, but the other piece is what this means beyond Ukraine, especially if there is an end to the war there. And what you write is pretty forceful and unsettling on this point. Let me read a long quote here because I think it captures it really well. You write, “Putin is now more committed than ever to the war with Ukraine and his broader confrontation with the West. Although the conflict is first and foremost an imperial pursuit to end Ukraine’s independence, Putin’s ultimate objectives are to relitigate the post–Cold War order in Europe, weaken the United States, and usher in a new international system that affords Russia the status and influence Putin believes it deserves.” So there’s a lot in that.

I mean, Andrea, on some level it seems like we’re already seeing elements of this confrontation, not just in Ukraine, but everything that Russia is doing with sabotage and hybrid warfare operations, everything from fires in warehouses and these DHL packages that were blowing up in planes, cutting undersea lines and all of that. How do you see that evolving and what is the intention behind that? Is that just Russian intelligence services going a little bit feral, or is this part of a nascent strategy that is going to grow from here?

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

I mean, I think it’s part of a strategy whereby we might not see ourselves at war with Russia, but Russia sees itself as being at war with us. And so for the time being, so long as the war in Ukraine continues, they’re having to rely on these unconventional tactics—the sabotage, cable cutting, assassinations, exploding warehouses, and arson and other things. I mean, those types of attacks and indirect actions in Europe are on a categorically different level now than they were before the war. But there’s also the way that [Russia is] directly supporting other U.S. adversaries, which I think it’s part and parcel of the same thing. So they’re giving more direct military aid and assistance to the North Koreans. So in exchange for what they give, they’re having to give away increasingly sophisticated military technology.

So there’s the indirect stuff, that unconventional war, while at the same time I think they’re enhancing military capabilities to spread the United States thin in other parts of the globe. So those things are all happening, and it is part of this much broader confrontation that Putin sees himself as engaged in. He views the United States as in decline. He wants to accelerate that decline, and so he’ll do it through sabotage and other things, but also by emboldening his like-minded partners who are equally as committed to weakening the United States as he is.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And I should say you wrote a piece with Richard Fontaine last year, called “The Axis of Upheaval,” on that grouping—I think that term is becoming one of the most widely used ones, and I think best captures what is common to the intentions of those four actors. But I want to draw you out a bit as you look at the Putin side of this. When he looks at European security architecture, when he looks at these questions of global order, what is he trying to get at other than just causing trouble for the United States and its European allies?

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

I mean, I think at the end of the day, it’s about undermining U.S. power and influence. We saw all of the demands that Putin made at the beginning of the war about rolling back NATO and our presence in parts of Europe and other things. So I think ultimately it’s about pushing the United States out of Europe. I mean, ultimately, Putin believes in spheres of influence, and he would like the United States out of Europe, and that’s a goal and mission that he shares with Xi Jinping who sees a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific, and Iran in the Middle East. So all of these countries, I think, are committed to diminishing U.S. power and reestablishing these spheres of influence. I mean, I think it’s really as simple as that—I mean, they have this vision of multi-polarity where Russia is one of many poles, but it is free to do as it chooses within what it sees as its own sphere.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And this is, of course, at a moment when Trump still occasionally talks about withdrawing from NATO, which would be very much in line with that vision. But to go back to a line of the piece, the two of you write that the Kremlin—if there is a settlement in the war in Ukraine, just or not, “the Kremlin will look to pocket any concessions from the Trump administration for ending the current war, such as sanctions relief, to strengthen its hand for the next one.”

Mike, as you look at Russian planning and strategy here, where do you imagine we might see that? Are there other military targets? Is it a place like Transnistria, the Russia-aligned breakaway region in Moldova? Is it the Baltics and testing NATO resolve under Trump? Where are you concerned as you look at that next stage, if there is one?

MICHAEL KOFMAN

I mean, my main concern is that there is going to be a third Russia-Ukraine war. This war is a continuation war of what began in 2014. And I think the challenge a lot of folks have looking at the prospect of a settlement this year is that a ceasefire is not likely to be durable. It’s likely to be more of a piece of paper with the word ceasefire on it because, as long as Putin is in charge of Russia, his objectives are not likely to aim, and there isn’t much to prevent Russia from undergoing a brief rearmament period. And then restarting war with Ukraine, this time without the political assumptions, this time without the massive planning mistakes that they made in 2022, which were principally causal of the failure of that invasion in the first 30 days, having taken a lot of the lessons, having substantially expanded the Russian armed forces over the last two years.

And that’s what concerns Ukrainians. That if they make an agreement and there are no security guarantees—and at this point they look very unlikely, certainly none that involve the United States in some way, shape or form. And the Ukrainian position is that security guarantees that don’t involve the United States are not worth that much to them. I think they know, and Russians certainly know, that once the war has ended, Ukraine will have to demobilize some significant percentage of the army. There will be elections, there will be all sorts of civil political challenges, which Russia can anticipate. And that’s what concerns, I think, many in Ukraine the most. Whereas Russia is not going to face these challenges, not necessarily, although we can’t predict what the state of the Russian economy will be a year from now, I don’t think that’s very fair. But nonetheless, the situation for Russia is less uncertain.

It’s not just a conversation on how do we end the war. And just ending the war for the sake of saying you ended it isn’t going to achieve war termination for you or any kind of lasting durable peace. You also have to have a plan for, how are you going to win the peace and how are you going to deter Russia? And lastly, one of the key arguments the piece makes is, look, Russian reconstitution—from the standpoint of the Russian military being able to pose a threat to Ukraine or to members of NATO and being able to conduct large scale combat operations is not a question of if, it is a question of when. That much is clear now; we are only debating the timelines. And the timelines we are debating at this juncture are not very long. Whether you think it’s seven years or ten years or something like that—ten years is often a minimum defense planning timeline. For folks involved in defense analysis and defense planning, ten years is going to be around the corner. You need to make decisions now to be properly positioned for a threat and to hedge against the uncertainty that that threat poses ten years from now.

And so there’s always the challenge of both conveying that, no, it’s not necessarily tomorrow, but this is an urgent challenge, and leaders have to make trade-offs and decisions now because if they don’t—we’ve seen the history of the last 20 years—the price they will pay later for not making those decisions now will be infinitely higher. This is what it’s conveying, and it’s conveying it based on, I think, the experience we’ve had over the last two decades in European security. And past administrations coming in consecutively all saying that they want to focus on China, Indo-Pacific, park their relationship, maybe compartmentalize it, what have you, and that only leads to a much higher cost of having to deal with Russia and Russian revanchism.

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

Yeah, but I think the one thing I would add actually is, I mean, I certainly agree with Mike about the prospects of another Ukraine war, but I also, even though it’s still a low probability and a bit more distant prospect—you can’t dismiss the prospects that Putin would try to challenge NATO directly. And the scenario that I think is the most likely pathway to a direct military conflict between Russia and NATO, which we describe in the piece, is one where the United States might be engaged in the Indo-Pacific, and therefore Putin could judge that NATO—but really read: the United States—would lack the political will and perhaps some of the resources to come to NATO’s defense, and that Europe on its own could not deter or defeat Russia at the end of the day.

And so it’s that opportunism that I worry a lot about. As Mike said, it’s not a matter of if but when Russia reconstitutes its military. Its aims are enduring. We know what Putin is trying to accomplish, and so he will be on the lookout for opportunities. He already has the economy on a wartime footing. He will rebuild the military, and so he will be poised to seize on opportunities as he sees them.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Mike, let me quickly press you on one dimension of this, and that’s the nuclear question that’s obviously been a factor in the war so far and feeds into that critique you hear of the Biden administration, that it was overly jumpy when Putin would resort to nuclear saber-rattling. But this will, I think, become a question of urgency and a broader question in this existential struggle, as you put it, between Putin and the West. How do you see Russian nuclear doctrine playing into these dynamics, especially at a time when China is rapidly expanding its own nuclear arsenal?

MICHAEL KOFMAN

So the conversation on risk of nuclear escalation and Russian coercive threats throughout the war is a really interesting one. I think that early on, Russia was very successful in deterring the United States with uncertainty, and folks can debate whether we were overly deterred by these threats, particularly in the beginning of the war. But that being said, I do think that the deterring effect began to fray fairly quickly, and that the United States and European countries effectively salami sliced Russia over the course of the war, such that if you were to be able to ask the Russians and say, “Did you want to end up at this point of the war in year three with U.S. attack and [Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems] being fired directly into Russia, with U.S. funding having gone to Ukraine to help enable the expansion of a drone strike program that now is also conducting strikes in Russia, with what happened to the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, the degree to which you have had such extensive Western material support, intelligence support, what have you, for the Ukrainian war effort?” Certainly Russians had hoped to deter all this.

And actually it’s a story of what nuclear weapons don’t get you. That said, different parties react differently to nuclear threats, at the end of the day, in these forms of escalations. So even most recently, when you have Russians use this new [Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile], to the United States that might have not been unexpected or particularly impressive, but it’s clear that the Russian goal is to try to convey to Europeans that they’re facing something like another European missile crisis and to try to influence German decision-making and other parties that had had greater effect. So we sometimes have an overly Washington, D.C. focused understanding of the case. I think it’s much more effective on certain European governments and their decision-making than maybe our own.

So ultimately, I think you can argue that yes, Russia was successful early on in deterring greater U.S. involvement and assistance at the beginning of the war, and that might have played a role. But looking at the overall timeline, I don’t see it as a success story for Russian saber-rattling and what have you. And lastly, there really weren’t fears of that nature past the October 2022 crisis, and even then, a lot of what I’ve read in public press, I’ve been skeptical of because I still have never seen reporting that there were discrete signs of any Russian preparations to employ nuclear weapons—the kind of overt signaling that you would see. Meaning the worst nuclear crisis of this war wasn’t really that bad, that’s what I’m trying to convey. We’re not exactly 1983 Able Archer.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Andrea, let me close with a question to you that I’m somewhat sheepish about asking given, if I go back to your 2021 piece the two of you wrote on the myth of the Russian decline, you go back and catalog all of these false hopes of stabilizing or repairing the Russian relationship over past administrations. But when you imagine an indefinite freeze or indefinite tensions between Russia and the West, given the sheer size of Russia, the size of its nuclear arsenal—that’s not a feature that we would wish to have in the international system indefinitely. So I’m interested if there’s any course you can imagine, again, looking over a decade or so that would change its trajectory and get us back to a true reset. Obviously, reset is a loaded word. You caution in your work with Erica that even Putin’s death would not necessarily change this trajectory. So is there anything, I’m trying to look for a little optimism here, is there anything you can offer?

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

I don’t feel optimistic really at all. I think there are very few reasons for optimism in this case because, as you said, Putin is committed to the course. That’s why we called the piece “The Point of No Return.” He’s committed to the course. And I do think that even with a new Russian leader, a lot of these contours of Russian foreign policy are deeply entrenched and will outlive Putin. And so I think really the best that you can hope for is that we get our own house in order. As Mike was saying, we can invest in resisting Russia now or pay a far greater cost later.

There are lots of foreseeable things that we can do that actually make the Russia challenge far more manageable down the line. So it’s about making this a manageable problem. It’s not going away, so how do we manage it? And we can make these investments in European security. Our allies in particular can do more to spend for their own defense to take on a greater share of the burden. And if we do a lot of these easily foreseeable things, if we just have the political will to do it, then I do think the Russia challenge is a far more manageable one.

The other silver lining, I guess, is on the arms control front. And you do have now a President Trump and President Putin talking about what arms control might look like. Trump is talking about more of a trilateral agreement. But as we all know, the New START agreement, the last pillar of this arms control regime, expires basically one year from now, and so the clock is ticking. And so how do we ensure that we can make the problem more manageable by making the investments while also looking to put some of these guardrails on the relationship that have existed in the past?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, I think that’s what counts for optimism in January 2025, so we’ll leave it there. Andrea and Mike, thank you so much for the series of fantastic pieces you’ve done for Foreign Affairs, and thanks for joining me today.

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR

Thanks for having us.

MICHAEL KOFMAN

My pleasure. Thanks a lot for having us.