 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of naval sea power, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon. I'm Professor John Jackson and it's my pleasure to serve as emcee for today's event where our chat field is on travel and I'm pleased to welcome you all on her behalf. The series was originally conceived as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. It has been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, and colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and via Zoom virtually around the world. We will be offering 13 additional lectures between now and May of 2023 spaced about two weeks apart. An announcement detailing the dates, topics, and speakers of each lecture will be posted by our public affairs office. I want to alert you to a very special lecture that is not a part of our INS series, but is open to our Zoom audience. On Tuesday, 15 November 2022, NASA astronaut Captain Sonny Williams will provide a lecture about NASA and space exploration at 1830 to 200. Our public affairs office will provide a Zoom link a few days before the event, so stay tuned. Looking ahead on Tuesday, 8 November of 2022, Professor Jim Holmes will deliver his fascinating lecture called China plus Zombies. Okay, enough background and admin, let's proceed with the main event. Today's lecture, Conflict in Ukraine Lessons from the Current War, will examine the roots and conduct of the current war in Ukraine. It will assess the strategies of Russia and Ukraine and discuss possible scenarios for war termination. Our speaker will also look at lessons the international community might be drawing from this conflict. Professor Timothy D. Hoyt is a professor in the strategy and policy department here at the Naval War College. He also serves as the John Nicholas Brown chair of counterterrorism, and he is the academic director and senior mentor of the advanced strategy program. He has earned both MA degrees and a PhD from the Paul H. Knitzel School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. Without any further ado, let me remind you first that during the formal presentation, if you have questions in the Zoom audience, please feel free to post those using the chat function, and we'll get to as many questions in the auditorium and on Zoom at the end of the presentation. So, Dr. Hoyt over to you, sir. For the benefit of our audience, which I know is not all students, many there are spouses and family members and members of the foundation as well. What I'm going to try and do in this lecture today is use some of the tools that we teach in the strategy and policy department here at the War College. In the command and staff course, we teach a course called strategy and war, and in the war college course, we teach a class called strategy and policy. And what we're looking at is strategy, which is the use of the tools of national power to achieve national ends. In the command and staff course, we focus more on using strategy during war time. In the war college class, we also look at strategy in periods of war and peace. What I'm going to use here today, at least for the basis of this lecture, are frameworks that we use, the environment of strategy, examining externalities which affect the ability of a nation to not only determine its political ends and their feasibility, but also to make strategy that allows them to use the tools of national power to achieve those ends. Then we'll look at the process of strategy making, and I'll focus particularly on Russia. And I should say right up front, I am not a Russia expert. I was doing my PhD and finished my concentration in Soviet studies just in time for the wall to fall and the Soviet Union to collapse. So I moved on to other things. However, the process is going to have to be derived because Vladimir Putin has not written his autobiography yet. So what I'm going to do is look at what's happened and try and use the tools of our strategy course to determine what Russia was attempting to accomplish and where it might have gone wrong because as we know it has gone grievously wrong in this war. So with no further ado, one thing that we need to talk about a little bit is the origins of this conflict. Now we can take this all the way back to about the ninth century when Kiev was part of the Greater Rusa Empire. This is something that Putin has talked about repeatedly, but actually Ukraine or much of it was finally absorbed from the Ottoman Empire by the Russian Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. Ukraine was also, it had its own language, it had its own culture, it had its own version of the Orthodox faith. The Russians didn't really like that, and especially in the 19th century they tried to suppress it, and they tried to suppress the Ukrainian language. And in this they were relatively unsuccessful. What they did instead was foment Ukrainian nationalism. The Ukrainians wanted to feel of themselves as well as part of Russia, and we see this happening in empires all over Europe in the 19th century. Language becomes the foundation of a nationalist spirit and ideology, and that happens in Ukraine. In the early 20th century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed at the end of World War I, actually supported Ukrainian nationalism. And in 1917 and 1918, under the Treaty of Brest-Lotovsk, Ukraine became briefly independent. And then as a result of the Russian Civil War, the Russian Revolution in fact, Ukraine was reabsorbed into the Soviet Union, where it rested until 1991 in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since that time, Ukraine has been an independent state, but many Russians feel that it needs to be an integral part of Russia, that it is little Russia and is attached to greater Russia, Russia itself, and white Russia, fellow Russia. This is the perspective from which Vladimir Putin is deriving both his policy aims and his strategy. Since 2000 or so, when Putin became a major player, we've seen some major benchmarks. There have been elections in Ukraine, which have resulted either in very pro-Russian candidates, or increasingly recently, pro-European candidates, presidents who want to take Ukraine into greater Europe, and not so much remain a satellite of Russia itself. President Zelensky, who was elected with something like 73 percent of the vote in 2019 in a free and fair election, stood for greater integration, greater interaction with Europe. And this is one of the things that Vladimir Putin apparently is most concerned about. Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine to be Russia and part of Russia's sphere of influence, and Ukraine wants to be able to determine its own future and act autonomously. So the international dimension of strategy, what did the world look like as Vladimir Putin was beginning to plan this war? Well, there were some important trends that may have influenced his thinking. One was the perception of a decline of the liberal world order. This is a very important part of Putin's foreign policy, of his connection with the People's Republic of China and with other authoritarian governments. A second was the economic and political unrest in the democracies that was exacerbated by COVID. And we see that still rippling through European societies today. In June 2021, Putin wrote an op-ed where he laid out his vision of Ukraine's role in the world. And in that op-ed, he basically denied the existence of either a Ukrainian national ideology or of the Ukrainian language. He said Ukraine was part of Russia, period. And his objective was to make it come back in as a satellite of Mother Russia. As the crisis heightened in 2021, President Biden and European leaders began to meet regularly to figure out how they might prevent what they thought was going to be a war. The coalition gave warnings to Putin of the economic and political consequences of an invasion. And Putin in February met with Xi Jinping in order to make a friendship pact. It's not an alliance. They didn't use that word. But it appears that Putin was going to try and get at least an appearance of Chinese support on February 4th and 5th when he met them. The economic dimension of strategy is another important external feature that shapes decisions of leaders and states. Russia, although it is not an enormous economy, Russia's economy used to be about the size of Italy's. It's probably a bit smaller now. That's not an insignificant economy. It's in the top 20. But it's somewhere between 11 and 15 rather than one or two. However, Putin was trying to maximize his economic leverage over the international system. And he could do that in a couple of ways. Russian energy is incredibly important to the European market. And he was using that as a pressure point. Russia also sells a lot of food and they sell a lot of weapons. Those are the three things that Russia really exports, also some other raw materials. What Putin was trying to do was maximize the leverage he could get from those tools in the international system. And that included putting pressure on European states, especially Germany, which was becoming much more reliant on Russian energy over the past decade, then was probably healthy, as we have now found out. Russia also had been hit by sanctions in 2014. Those sanctions came about after Russia absorbed Crimea, which was technically part of Ukraine, but which Ukraine could not defend. It was a surprise attack. Those sanctions hit Russia very hard. And the promise of further sanctions was intended to deter Russia from making an armed attack. It was insufficient. But we do know that those sanctions as they are implemented and they're implemented sequentially. There are still more available to Western leaders if they want to implement them. They've been having an increasingly, I wouldn't say decisive, but an increasingly important effect on Russian industry and on the Russian economy. And that's particularly in high tech sectors. Russia can't get access to semiconductors anymore. And those are critical for building lots of high tech machinery and especially high tech weapons. They also can't get access to Western electronics and Western electronic systems were a big part of their military industry, some of the most modern systems. So economic pressure on Russia has now become increasingly oppressive and will continue to roll out for the foreseeable future. Finally, the global impact of war as we've seen has spiked energy prices. It has spiked food prices. Inflation is up almost everywhere. These are all economic effects that may play out over the course of the war. Those high inflation, for instance, is affecting American domestic politics. It recently affected domestic politics in the United Kingdom, leading to the resignation of a prime minister. So clearly the economic impact of war is an important thing to continue tracking. The institutional dimension, how do the various players carry out their business? What kinds of organizations do they have? How effective are they? Do they work together? Do they feud against one another? Well, in this case, we've seen some real misjudgments in both the West and Russia on Russia's military capability. And that's very interesting because a lot of people have been studying Russian military capability for a long time. They also saw that there were considerable flaws in Russia's intelligence capabilities. They made assumptions, which I'll detail a little bit later, they made assumptions about Ukrainian and about European behavior that turned out to be exactly wrong. We see that Ukraine, which people had not studied carefully in the world up to the war and generally had dismissed with the idea that while Ukraine's corrupt because it had been right after the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine actually, their institutions have been functioning very, very well. They have superb political leadership. Zelensky was underestimated by everyone and he turns out to be giving a masterclass in leadership in many respects. They've had determined military resistance and very effective military resistance, which is something that many Western analysts missed. They didn't study Ukraine carefully and they didn't think that Ukraine would be able to put up a conventional fight. Well, Ukraine is not only putting up a conventional fight, but it's winning. Last but not least, they're winning the information battle. And this came as a big surprise to a lot of people as well because Russia from 2016 to 2020, we made big assumptions about Russia's information operation capability, which included things about interference in elections, but also included their ability to dominate sort of the international airwaves. Ukraine is winning this information battle in many places. Russia remains secure domestically. It's not clear how well their message is carrying around the rest of the world. Ukraine's is doing pretty well. The UN was marginalized. It was marginalized because Russia has a vote in the UN Security Council and that vote means it has a veto as a permanent member. So Security Council resolutions were not an option. The General Assembly met, though, and 140 nations condemned Russia's invasion, suggesting again international opposition to wars of aggression. The West has done pretty well. And the interesting thing about this for all of the trends that I identified in that first slide about perhaps the downfall of the liberal Democratic order, democracies have actually performed pretty well as institutions. And Russia and other authoritarian states have not performed nearly as well. That's a little bit counterintuitive. We tend to think that authoritarian systems, because they have one leader and they're highly centralized, they can make things happen. Well, in fact, it turns out that messy democracies with bureaucracies and big organizations may be able to make things happen better in both war and peace than an authoritarian leader. The social and cultural dimensions of strategy are also important. As I identified earlier, this is a war between Russia and Ukraine and the Russians view Ukraine as part of them and the Ukrainians view themselves as separate, as other, as different, and as deserving of their own nation. That's based on language, it's based on culture, it's based on history. These social and cultural dimensions have played out in a number of different ways. We have seen Russian troops and leaders behave in ways that unfortunately are stereotypical. And they have reinforced the vision of Russians as being barbaric and uncaring. And that has certainly stirred up a lot of support for Ukraine in Eastern Europe, in the former nations of the Warsaw Pact. It stirred up support in Germany because Germany remembers a substantial portion of it being conquered and occupied by the Soviet military in 1945. It also creates an interesting misunderstanding of Ukrainian society and of the impact of Ukrainian diasporas, which are spread around not only Europe, but the United States. These are important players in building support for Ukraine early in the conflict. The Ukrainian diaspora leaps out in defense of their homeland or the land of their ancestry. And that's important. Key leaders in war and peace look different. And this is part of Zelensky's information operation. He almost never appears in a student tie any longer because he's trying to emphasize visually that his country is at war. And it is in a brutal war. The war that is being carried out today in Ukraine looks much more like the first or the second world war than it does like any war that's been fought in the last 30 years. The closest comparisons, even in the late Cold War, would be things like the Iran-Iraq war or the Vietnam 1972 offensive. In 1972, Vietnam lost 40,000 dead in a matter of a couple of months. These are tremendous battles of attrition involving tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of trained and heavily armed troops. Estimates are that the Russians were firing 10 to 20,000 artillery shells a day in the Donbas in recent offensives. So this is enormous and it's bloody. And Zelensky wants to emphasize that. He wants people to remember. He once looked like the other guys, but now his country is at war. Now, we then think about the process of strategy making. And here, again, I'll focus primarily on Russia, but we'll also talk about other states as well. What is Russia thinking? Will Russia's policy goal under Putin is to restore the greatness of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union? Take back as much as is feasible of the territory that the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union once used to control. Now, obviously, that brushes Russia right up against NATO. As NATO has enlarged the Baltics, Poland, these are states now that are up against the Russian border or very close to the Russian border. And that's a concern. But Putin wants Ukraine. The other wants Ukraine conquered or he wants it to become a puppet again, the way that it was to some extent from 2010 to 2014 when a pro-Russian government was in power or rather like the government currently of Belarusia, which doesn't have a lot of independence from Russia because Russia is right next to it and looming over it. The best way to do this, he decided with the national tools that were available to him was through a war. That was based on a couple of assumptions. The first was that the West wouldn't respond, as they did not in 2014. And in fact, in 2015, France and Germany actually sort of pushed Ukraine into taking the Minsk to agreement basically by sort of saying, well, well, we're good with this. So there was some evidence that Europe would not side with Ukraine. And again, with COVID and the weakness of Western democracies and economies that resulted, Putin was making a bit of a gamble here. But the gamble was the West won't respond. This would then be a way to reassert Russia as a great power. And as I'll talk about at the very end, we have some idea of what Putin really wants. And one of the key things again is this great power status. Now, the next thing is as you're thinking about, I know what my political objective is, it's to somehow reabsorb Ukraine. You then carry out intelligence, gather your intelligence, carry out assessments and make plans for how to do it. And hopefully you test those plans before you actually go to war if you're going to use military force. But in this case, it's unclear what the relationship is between the Russian intelligence community and Putin's own decision-making. Now, this happens a lot in authoritarian systems, especially the longer an authoritarian stays in power. It becomes very difficult to say no to a guy who can make you disappear. It becomes very difficult to give them bad news. And if you give them bad news, often you're trying to figure out if you can get away with it or not, which means you tend to err on the side of telling them what they want to hear. And in this case, some of the intelligence assumptions that were made about a speedy Ukrainian collapse were deeply, deeply flawed. But at the same time, they seem to have been closely held by military and political leadership. The Russians assume that the Ukrainian military won't fight any better than it did in 2014, when it fought fairly hard, but didn't do very well in bad circumstances, admittedly. What they weren't paying attention to was that Ukraine had been training with NATO since 2016 and that in the fighting in Donbas, which has been ongoing at a sort of a simmering level from 2014 to 2022, the Ukrainians had actually been performing better and better. They had been getting especially small-unit tactical training from NATO trainers, which meant that their non-commissioned officer corps and their lower-level officers were both more confident and more competent. And the Ukrainian military organizations changed so that they could allow lower-level commanders to make local decisions based on what the overall objective of the unit in combat would be. And this allows for much more innovation, it allows for much more creativity, and it means you can make decisions faster because you don't have to refer everything to the colonel or the general. This is something we've seen very definitely in the Ukrainian army's performance. They are creative, they are quick, and they seize advantage of opportunities, and it's because their military is now structured very differently than the Russian military. The West was accurate in its assessment about Russian intentions, even if by and large the public in the West, and I would include myself in this, didn't think that Russia was going to attack. The reason that President Biden started meeting European leaders in late October was because American intelligence had concluded that Russia was going to go to war. We don't know why exactly, but they had seen such positive signs that the President took a big political risk. And in November and in December and January, the US and Europe are leaning hard forward saying this war is going to happen, we know it's going to happen. They begin declassifying intelligence so that they can present it into the public and say these are things we know that Russia is doing. We're watching them very closely, and the intent was to use both the sort of shock to Russia that we knew what they were doing, and also the threat of political and economic sanctions to deter the attack. That effort failed. Putin was dead set on going to war, and he does around February 21st, or 24th, excuse me. Ukraine mobilized its reserves and it repositioned forces shortly before the Russian attack. That suggests they also had good intel, and that they knew that something was coming. It also suggests that they had their own defense plans, which were not really taken into consideration either by the Russians who basically assumed the Ukrainians would fold or by a lot of American analysts who felt like, well, the Ukrainian army will collapse. The question is, what will be the guerrilla war that happens afterwards? And can Russia, with a relatively small force, less than 200,000 troops, can it truly occupy a country the size of Texas with 44 million people? The answer to that question should have been no, it can't. If we've learned nothing else, it's very hard to occupy countries that don't want to be occupied. Putin watched what happened in Iraq. He watched what happened in Afghanistan. The Americans had just withdrawn from Afghanistan. Surely he might have learned those lessons, but evidently he didn't. The assumption was Ukraine would fall like a house of cards, and then something good would happen. And as a result, Putin went to war. And things immediately began to go wrong. China didn't support him. And in fact, in the UN General Assembly vote that I talked about earlier, China abstained. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in September, China said we actually have a lot of concerns about war. We're not sure that's the right thing to do. They haven't condemned Russia, but they certainly haven't been cooperative. They haven't shipped arms to the best of our knowledge at this point. So that alliance or that partnership that Putin tried to set up in early February collapsed by early March. We also thought, or at least certainly I did, that Putin had already achieved a bunch of the things that he probably wanted to achieve. With the threat of war in January, he was able to recognize the Donbass Republics, two of them, Donetsk and Luhansk, as Russian republics. And that allowed him to stake a claim in Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine. Nobody condemned him for it, really. There wasn't a lot of pushback on that, because we were more worried about focusing on the invasion. But that might, in theory, have been enough for Putin to say, okay, I got what I wanted. I can move back from crisis. The fact that he continued attacking suggests that he was very serious about this. The assumptions Ukraine wasn't unified, that the military was weak, that Zelensky was unpopular, that international support would not be forthcoming, and that victory was possible within a matter of days. Every one of these assumptions was wrong. Every single one. It's a colossal intelligence failure. Now, some of it may also have been that Russia did not deploy its forces as well as it might have. But they deployed their forces according to a series of calculations and assumptions. They thought they could get away with this, and they were deeply grievously wrong. So what are we learning about the militaries involved? One of the things is we looked at Russian military equipment. We said, oh, that's pretty good equipment. What will we do with that? And if we use that equipment, there's a whole series of sort of scenarios that then would play out. And the Russians didn't do any of those things, because the Russians don't really train or fight that way. They train and fight their own way. Their doctrine is available, for the most part. We've seen a bunch of exercises. We've watched them in combat in a number of places, right? Syria, yes. Donbas, yes. Georgia, few years before that. The Russian army hasn't necessarily looked like a real steamroller, but for some reason we thought it would be. And many of the reasons that it wasn't have to do more with software than with hardware. They have to do with military organization. They have to do with logistic preparations and the ability to carry out logistics further into a conflict than a few days. The assumption, again, was that the war would be over in less than a week. Then you don't necessarily need that much in the way of logistics. But if the war drags on, you've got to start getting stuff to your troops who have invaded, and you'd better be able to move it. They fail to utilize combined arms, effectively. Certainly not in the way that a Western force would. They had, interestingly, a lack of infantry and reserves. We tend to think of the Russian army as this enormous machine just stuffed with manpower. Well, it turns out the Russian army only had about 300,000 ground troops at the beginning of the war. They put somewhere between half and two thirds of those into Ukraine in the first few weeks. Then they started suffering losses. And they've continued to suffer losses. We'll talk about that a little bit in just a second. But it appears that Russia doesn't have the depth in its military to carry out some of the kinds of operations that its doctrine says that they should be carrying out. And as a result, the Russian military failed to perform it. Failed to perform its duty. The military tool did not achieve the political goal, which is a failure of strategy. Now, we now know, I put this website up just because it's really interesting. This is the media revolution. Oryx looks at photographs of destroyed Russian equipment in Ukrainian held territory. And first it identifies to make sure that it is Russian rather than Ukrainian because they often are using similar equipment. The Ukrainian army is based mostly on Russian equipment until fairly recently. And then they tag it. They geolocate it to make sure that they're not counting it multiple times. Well, they've identified 1400 Russian tanks lost. That's enormous. That's more tanks than are in most armies in the world. And about 500 or more of those have been captured and are now being used by the Ukrainian armed forces. So this is a massive loss. 7,500 vehicles doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that thousands of those vehicles are heavy trucks, which are what you need to move logistics. Ukrainians have deliberately been hitting Russian logistics. And they've been targeting it in trucks. They've been targeting it at railheads. They've been targeting it in depots. And as more Western equipment comes, especially the high Mars at 155 millimeter how it's gun how it serves. They have more range than Russian artillery. And they have been extremely successful at blowing up munitions depots, as well as hitting command and control nodes fairly deep in Russian territory. By doing that, they disrupt the ability of the Russians to continue fighting and they deprive it of supplies. That's important in a long war, because a big army that doesn't have supplies doesn't fight as well and sometimes has to retreat. The US estimates of Russian casualties as of August, 20,000 dead, 70 to 80,000 total casualties. 20,000 dead is more than the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan in 10 years. And the US military believes that they lost that many dead in six months, less than six months. This is a very, very destructive war. Now the Ukrainians have much higher estimates. I think with all due respect, we have to take those with a grain of salt and do as much as we can to figure out because it's very hard to identify who's been killed on some of these battlefields because the artillery that has been used has been so overwhelming, it's just difficult to recover bodies. But 20,000 dead alone is enormous. It's far more than America lost in a 20-year war on terror. Now, interaction and adaptation. The Russians launched the offensive and those blue areas were areas that they took. And then they also took this whole area of southern Ukraine and large chunks of eastern Ukraine. In the first few weeks, the Russians penetrated fairly deep into Ukrainian territory and they seized a lot of land. However, by April, they were beginning to realize they couldn't hold it, especially in the north in the attack against Kiev, the capital, which came, much of it came out of Belorussia on Allied. That attack stalled and it stalled because the Ukrainians fought really, really hard with a really creative defensive plan. They got the Russians stuck on roads by killing lead vehicles and then they flooded areas on either side of the road so vehicles couldn't leave the road. They used shoulder-fired anti-tank and anti-air weapons incredibly creatively to deny the Russians air support and to begin killing Russian resupply efforts. So the troops who were on the road began abandoning their vehicles and walking back to Belorussia because they had no food and they'd run out of gas for their vehicles. As a result, in April, those blue areas up in the north for the most part are abandoned by the Russians. And the Russians instead concentrated on what they can do well, which is, again, here in the Donbas region. They try and consolidate this stuff in the south and they try and keep pushing in the Donbas where they've been fighting since 2014. And that's a war that they fight in a very Russian way with extremely heavy and dense artillery fire. And then once virtually everything has been destroyed, they advance their front line a few hundred meters and then the next day they start again with massive artillery barrage. It's very, very lethal and it's high attrition. The Ukrainians dug in and they received some criticism for this and this is something that we actually have to study at some point in the future. The Ukrainians dug in and they held positions at high cost. Mariupol is one of them, if you remember those stories about the unit that fought in the factory for weeks, right? Positions in the Donbas, the Ukrainians took very heavy casualties from Russian fire. At one point Zelensky said they were losing 500 men a day. So they apparently felt that they needed to hold that ground and it will be interesting to see later in reports why that decision was made. We may be able to sort of guess at that when we look at what happens next, which is that in August and September Ukraine counterattacks. And it starts with a very clever act of deception, which is it sort of tells everybody that it's going to attack the south. It's going to attack the city of Kharsong, which is on the Dnieper River, and the Russians mass forces there in order to defend against it. And there are probing attacks. There have been probing attacks since August and gradual withering away of the Russian lines and gradual advances. But what they do is they draw the Russian forces to that area and then they attack up in the north and to the east. And if you look here, right, you can see all that light green and yellow area up on the north and to the east has been taken back by early August. This is a substantial success for the Ukrainian forces. They took back thousands of square kilometers and key railheads and they did it in very, very rapidly, especially the Eastern attack was a matter of a week. They forced the Russians back. They overran Russian positions. They captured hundreds of tanks and a lot of equipment and apparently captured enough artillery rounds to basically restock their ground forces that have Russian artillery for a significant period of time. But that's where we are now. And now we have to think about one of the key problems with wars, which is how do you end them? It's not easy. Once states go to war, what might have been a diplomatic negotiation becomes muddied and it becomes muddied because of the expense in blood and treasure. Ukraine has suffered horribly. Its cities have been bombed. It's people, millions of people have fled into either internal or international exile. Its economy has been shattered. Areas that produce a great deal of food and grain and crops are now occupied by the Russians. So Ukraine has been bloodied badly. Under what circumstances does Ukraine negotiate? What compromise might it make? That's very hard to know. And in addition, it doesn't look like Putin is willing to compromise at all. He continues to say in his statements that there is no Ukraine and that he will continue to fight and that Ukraine will lose. This makes ending the war really difficult. Usually you get a compromise when peace is a better alternative than continued fighting. But neither side appears to have reached that point. The West can play a role in this. We can influence it because we have imposed sanctions on Russia and we can either make them more intense or we can loosen them. And because we're providing vital military aid to Ukraine. But the question is under what circumstances do we want to exercise that leverage? Because it might be a really bad idea to appease Vladimir Putin. Now, some more termination scenarios. These are the ones that I would actually say are pretty unlikely. But I think it's important to at least get them out there. Russia wants to have a military revival. It is instituted conscription. Vladimir Putin said today that within two weeks they will have achieved their objectives from that conscription, which is roughly 300,000 men. And in fact, there are indications that some of the people who were conscripted as recently as two weeks ago are already dead on the battlefield in Ukraine. So they're going to get a lot of bodies and they're going to give them rifles and they're going to send them to the front. And Russians are going to continue dying because they're not going to be trained and they're not going to be incorporated into their units. I don't think the odds for a Russian military revival are very good at this point. Too much power has been spent and they don't have the training base to train all these people. They just don't have the facilities. So as a result, they're just going to be throwing raw bodies into the frontline. You have a Russian military collapse. People don't talk about this much. It has happened before. It's rare. But it certainly happened in 1917 after a government became increasingly unpopular and suffered dramatic losses in the long war. I don't think it's likely, but it's something that at least somebody should be thinking about. You could have Putin removed from power. I think that's unlikely. But if we know anything about authoritarian regimes, the guy who's in charge always looks like he's really in charge until all of a sudden he's not. Authoritarian regimes collapse very quickly sometimes. I don't know what the power base is that would replace Vladimir Putin, but that might provide an impetus for the end to the war. If this is Putin's war, a successor might choose to end it on some kind of terms. We have the possibility that Ukraine liberates its territory. That might happen. It would happen at very high cost, and it would require the West to support it strongly, maybe even more strongly than we already are. I'm not sure if that's going to happen or not. The Ukraine could collapse. The West could decide, oh, we don't want to back this war anymore. I don't think that's likely either. I think Vladimir Putin has lost any friendship that he had in most countries in Europe by trying to do a rehash of the Soviet invasion that they all feared during the Cold War. But it's possible. And finally, this idea of a Russian nuclear detonation, which has recently been bouncing around or a dirty bomb, which was an option that came up this weekend. I'm not sure Russia would do that because that's a very, very risky move. That said, it can't be dismissed. The question then becomes, well, what next? Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons against the Ukrainian army isn't going to win them the war. They don't have the right targets. The fighting is too spread out. They won't achieve decisive effect. Nuclear weapons on cities would be a whole different matter, but then it would be a whole different matter and how the world would respond to the country that broke the nuclear taboo and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, I think that's pretty unpredictable. So negotiation and compromise. This is the way that Klausowitz sort of says, wars end. My students would never forgive me if I didn't mention Klausowitz at least once. Klausowitz says, look, war is a negotiation with the addition of force. It's like buying a car and then you draw a gun on the car dealer. However, to negotiate, you have to have two sides that are willing to talk and two sides that are willing to compromise. And I'm not sure we're there. What could change it? Maybe things on the battlefield. If Ukraine continues to be very effective, if the Russians lose a lot more troops and begin to get much more restive at home and there's more opposition to the war, those could make a difference. Stale mate, if it goes on long enough, might eventually put the governments in a mood to end the war and buy some breathing space to allow themselves to recover. And again, what's the leverage that the West chooses to wield if we choose to wield it? I would argue the most likely outcome is that the fighting goes on. And I think an example might be the war of attrition, which happened after the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and Egypt primarily in the Suez and the Sinai. The fighting claimed 1,000 Israeli lives. It was low intensity, but it was long duration, and it could get very, very fierce. We've already seen this happen in the Donbass from 2014 to 2022. So it's possible that they won't reach an accommodation. They won't even declare a ceasefire, but that both sides might choose to stand down operations to some extent and then reignite them periodically for tactical or political reasons. That's a very unsatisfactory outcome, and it's hard to know how it'll play out on such a large front, but I think it is a quite possible outcome at the moment. The incentives for peace seem to me to be low. It will cause continued strain on Ukraine because Ukraine is under attack, and it will cause increasing strain on the Russian economy and industrial base, and especially the high-tech industrial base. Klausovitz says, in war, the results is rare for final. Even if you get a negotiated peace, the political stakes in this war haven't been resolved, and it's hard to know how they will be resolved. Russia committed itself to not invading Ukraine in 1993, 1994, in 1995, in 1997, in 2014, and in 2015, and then it invaded Ukraine. Getting some kind of verifiable assurance of a change of policy in Russia is something Ukraine would need, or else they would need a security guarantee. Something that somebody said, I'm going to defend you, Ukraine. Could you have a UN peacekeeping operation? Well, I was just talking to the Irish army about this, actually, a couple of weeks ago. It could happen, but it's going to be very, very difficult, and how you end the fighting so that you can assert a PKO is going to be very problematic. I would point out, though, that big contributors to UN PKOs, both India and Pakistan, abstained in the UN General Assembly vote. So they might be looked at by both sides as fairly neutral parties if you want to try and police some kind of a ceasefire line. And they both have big militaries, and they've been regularly involved in the UN PKOs and other places. So it's not implausible. I just think it would be very difficult. Overall, this has been an unprecedented strategic disaster for Russia. If you think about what Putin really wanted, restore Russian greatness, discredit democracy, divide the U.S. and Europe, divide Europe against itself, keep Ukraine out of European institutions, end NATO expansion, and absorb Ukraine into greater Russia, Putin was doing much better in peace at that. And by going to war, he has reversed all of the progress that he has made. And he has probably assured not only that NATO will enlarge, that's the term NATO prefers, and enlarge by bringing in two states that were neutral throughout the Cold War, Sweden and Finland. That is the result of Putin's war. But also, in addition, at some point, NATO may well bring Ukraine in. And that may happen a lot faster because of the Russian invasion than it was going to happen if Putin had not invaded. This is a disaster for Putin. And it's a testament to the amount of control that he has over his own society that more people in Russia aren't recognizing this and talking about it. Most of the people who are criticizing him in Russia, it appears, are the much harder line right-wing nationalists saying he should fight harder. We need more stuff. Let's take the gloves off. In fact, what he should be criticized for is that his strategy completely backfired. Russia will take years to recover, and this photo of the Russian cruiser Moskva I think is actually a really useful symbol of what Putin has done to his own country. And with that, I'll take any questions you might have. Yeah, I think you may have to turn them on. Besides pushing the button? Yes. Thank you. Yes, Suman Chen. Under what conditions do you see Ukraine being part of NATO? I think they applied for immediate NATO entry during the war. I think they initially applied for it several days after the attacks began, but then they pushed again I think in June or July. Getting into NATO requires a consensus vote. So I suspect it would be some time, and I suspect it would have to be in conditions where Ukraine and Russia are no longer at war. Because otherwise, if we accept Ukraine into NATO right now, then we have some obligation to defend them with our own forces. I think there were fairly long lag times for Ukrainian entry into both the EU and NATO before the war began. I imagine those are going to be accelerated, but they still will involve years, and they may involve a lot of different kinds of political and corruption tests, which are part of what it takes to get into the EU these days. On the other hand, I think sympathy for Ukraine is going to be very high, and there's going to be a real desire to put Ukraine back on its own feet with economic assistance and trade as soon as we can once the war is over. The big problem right now is ending the war. Sorry, a quick follow-up. Do you see Ukraine being part of the EU before it becomes part of NATO? That would make sense to me, but I confess I am not an EU scholar, and I know that getting into the EU is probably harder than I as an American would assume. I'd sign on the dotted line. I think it's going to be easier to get into an economic organization than it is to get all 28 soon to be 30 maybe more members of NATO to agree to let you in after you've just had a war with Russia. I think that's going to require a lot of finesse before Ukraine will be able to join because countries will be concerned that by bringing Ukraine into NATO, they may provoke another war. I know that sounds perverse, but Russia might choose to strike early, even if they're at peace. So I think that NATO is more delicate than the EU would be my guess. But again, I confess I am not an EU scholar. Are there questions here in the back, please? Hi, Nick Henderson, CNWS Strategic Operations Research Department. Thank you for your talk today. That was fantastic. Given that this is, as you were saying, likely going to be a war of attrition, do you think that there are any particular tools that we have or countries supporting Ukraine have to dissuade other nations from supporting Russia's logistics? That's a really good question. I think a lot of them will have to do with economics, to be honest. We could easily say it sounds at the moment, like Russia, again, I'm only working open source. So it sounds like Russia is getting some munitions from Belarus, Russia, perhaps. And there have been rumors that it approached or maybe receiving munitions from North Korea. Both those countries, I think, are already under our sanctions. The question will be, the big question is China. And I'm not sure how much leverage we'll have on that. But China has really good reasons to be restrained about giving Russia arms. So that may be less what we can do and more Chinese self-definition of national interest. But there are a lot of countries around, especially former republics in the Soviet Union that have stockpiles of Russian Euro weaponry and probably munitions. And I think they're a big part of our leverage is going to be, do you really see that going well? I mean, is this really going to be worth it? Because if you give them arms, we're probably going to have to put you under sanctions. And Russia's probably not going to win. So you're paying a high cost to back somebody who's not going to win. I think that's probably just looking at the diplomacy that the coalition, for lack of a better word, has carried out so far. I think that would probably be our main tack. I think lots of countries are going to be very cautious about giving arms back to Russia. The exception maybe if Russia can make food or energy deals, especially with some of the central Asian states, that might be, they might look at the United States and or the Western coalition to say, you're a long way away. We need food and oil. If we can get that from you, yes, we will give you artillery shells. But again, I think those are finite supplies. The big thing, we thought Russia had enormous stockpiles of equipment and weaponry. And it turns out a lot of those stockpiles haven't been reliable because they haven't been well kept up. Their domestic defense industry, we thought was very formidable. And it turns out that it's not as good as we thought it was. For instance, it looks like a jet aircraft crashed just the other day because the oxygen system failed at high altitude. And so as a result, the plane just flew till it ran out of gas and then crashed into a housing complex because the pilot passed out. That's really bad engineering. And this was a brand new aircraft off the line. So their ability to produce new stuff to replace their losses looks more penantious than we thought it would be. That's all good. Again, lack of chips is going to make production even harder. If the West is willing to back Ukraine in a war of attrition with equipment, probably selectively, I think they may do pretty well against the Russians. I think our assumptions about Russian pre-war or stockpile and ability to carry out a war of attrition is more limited than we thought. And now they've made bad military decisions. That mean they've lost a lot of their trained troops or the guys who could train their troops. And that means the overall quality of their ground forces is going to be deteriorating for some time. So I think attrition doesn't play in Russia's favor. I hope that answered your question. Gary, do we have a question from Zoom? Yes, we do. Thank you, Professor Hoyt, for that excellent lecture. The first question that came in through Zoom was, how do you see the economic effects on Europe impacting their follow-on support to Ukraine? That's a really great question. This is a test of European political will. And I'm not saying that in a nasty way. I'm saying it literally is a test. My sister lives in Germany. They're looking at energy prices skyrocketing. Europe is, it looks to me like the current leaders in Europe have basically said, we're going to suffer through a really bad winter, but we're going to detach ourselves from a lot of our reliance on Russian energy. That's a brave decision. It's one that may have political costs. You may see governments voted out or leaders voted out. Again, like what happened in the United Kingdom. That wasn't so much about Ukraine, but it was about economics. And the economics are affected by Ukraine, by the war in Ukraine. So it is in some ways a real test of European determination. The flip side is, if they make it through, and it looks as though support for Ukraine is not falling off in most countries, at least at the leadership level, then once the spring rolls around, they're going to be finding other sources of energy. Yeah, energy prices are going to be higher. There's going to be inflation, but they'll have found ways to ameliorate some of the really bad social impacts. And then they can continue to support Ukraine freely. What happens in the winter is a real question. And I'm sure Vladimir Putin is looking at the winter and saying, you know, the winter is my friend, and we'll see how it affects European determination. I am fairly hopeful that Europe will not back away. Some of the things we were worried about the new Italian government, which includes some parties that have been friendly to Putin, the new Italian government has said, no, we're going to support the Ukraine war for the time being. So I think it looks at the moment like that's fairly stable. It depends how bad the winter is. And it depends on how that affects politics in certain key countries, especially Germany. But I think at least for the moment, the policy that they're taking is one of self-sacrifice, and we will stand by Ukraine. And I think that's a noble stance. And the back and the far side in the middle. Do you still have a question? Yes, sir. Thank you, sir, for this great presentation and lecture. So I'm Commander Junior Great Talis Dzeri from Latvian Navy. So my question is, is the fear of nuclear war the only reason why Vest or we can say NATO also do not engage directly, militarily, in war in Ukraine, because if they would, I think that would be a question of weak or two in conventional war. So or there are any other reasons? What is your opinion? Well, great question. Certainly nuclear war has something to do with it, right? I mean, Putin sort of made nuclear threats very early. And that was deliberate. That said, I think a second reason, and I must emphasize here that I'm speaking only with my own opinion and not necessarily representing that of the U.S. Naval War College, the U.S. Navy, or any other organization, the U.S. government. But I would say I'm not sure that early in the conflict that NATO thought Ukraine could win this thing. I think they thought that there was at least many NATO intelligence bodies and leaders felt that Ukraine would collapse. And so as a result, we didn't want to commit to a losing cause, especially if it might then escalate to nuclear weapons. Now, once Ukraine proved that it could defend itself, the need for NATO to enter suddenly goes down. And I think at this point, it's more of a sort of a real polity calculation that if we enter the war, the risk of nukes goes up. If we don't enter the war and we support the Ukrainians who really want to fight this war, if we give them the things that they need, then that's just as good as our being in there, because they're winning, right? At least tactically on the battlefield, they're doing very well now. So I think this is probably a sort of a very high-level political calculation that if we get in, it could be worse, right? Because if NATO goes in, yes, there's the Polish Army, which is not to be sneered at by any stretch of the imagination. But NATO ground troops won't get in early. It'll be NATO air power, right? That would be the thing that would first begin to affect the battlefield. And if that starts to have decisive results on the Russians the way that it has in other environments, and I think it would be harder, but I think it's not impossible. The stakes for the Russians goes way up, and their nuclear calculus may change. We don't know what that calculus is, but I suspect NATO believes that if it gets involved, the risk factor goes up substantially. So yes, nuclear weapons have a lot to do with this, but I think also a lot has to do with the capabilities of Ukraine itself and its determination. And in those circumstances, we're going to provide aid and support and economic assistance and a whole bunch of other things so that the Ukrainians can fight their war, and we'll stay out as long as we can. I suspect. But again, here I have to say only my two cents. I don't speak for higher authority. Gary, one last question from Zoom. What could the West do in the Black Sea with a naval presence to further support Ukraine and encourage Russia to consider negotiations? Is this a good idea? The Black Sea has been a really interesting place, and I don't know. Well, first off, again, for the same reasons I just mentioned, NATO is being very careful about what it's doing. It's moving a big fleet into the Black Sea might escalate things quite quickly, which is not something that anybody wants. What's interesting in the Black Sea is that you now have this situation where both Russia and Ukraine are able to export goods. And this is partly because of global pressure about food. But it's also a really interesting and very kind of unique in modern war situation where the two combatants are cooperating in weird ways for some time. Energy was moving from Russia across the Ukrainian pipeline. I'm not sure if it still is or not. But now we also have Russia, which technically probably could patrol the Ukrainian coast because the Ukrainian Navy is not very large, and I think a lot of it is sunk at this point. But Russia has signed this deal to allow Ukrainian commercial shipping or commercial vessels carrying Ukrainian goods to traffic. It's just a very strange situation. I think it's a situation that at the moment the international system is comfortable with because food is getting out to places that otherwise might have been desperately hungry in the not too distant future. Rocking that boat with some kind of international naval presence might stop that traffic or force the US or the international organization to escort Ukrainian vessels, which then puts you in a war zone. It could get very tricky. So I think right now everybody's trying to keep the risk as low as possible. And as a result, I think we won't see that presence. That could change. Turkey's a NATO member, although the role that it has played has been a little more even-handed or trying to be even-handed to Russia. But I think for the moment, we probably aren't going to see that because a naval presence in the Black Sea might easily be converted in Russian mines into a blockade of Russia. And again, that would look very aggressive. Whether it happened or not is irrelevant. The potential for it to happen would be something that would change Russia's decision-making calculus. And I think, again, we're really being pretty risk averse at this point. I hope that answered your question. Tim, thank you. That was a brilliant presentation. We appreciate your time this afternoon. Thank you, John.