On the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, few predicted the success with which Ukrainian forces have been able to defend against the Russian onslaught. Ukrainian forces beat back the Russian Army north of Kyiv. They have challenged Russian domination of the air and sea. More recently, at Kherson and Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces liberated hundreds of miles of territory in rapid offensives. Yet the war appears far from over, and much is still undecided.
On October 6th, 2022, Professor Timothy Colton and Professor Serhii Plokhii sat down with Davis Center Executive Director Alexandra Vacroux at an event, “The War in Ukraine: Eight Months On,” co-sponsored by the Davis Center and HURI, to examine the impact of Russia’s invasion on geopolitics and domestic politics in Ukraine.
Colton and Plokhii, leading experts on Russian politics and Cold War history, respectively, began by recalling the first days of the full-scale invasion. Plokhii remarked that it had been “agreed on, both in Moscow and Washington, that Kyiv would not last for more than three to six days.” Instead, Russian forces were defeated north of Kyiv, and Ukrainians remained confident in their country’s victory. Colton recalled that before the invasion, he “certainly thought that something was coming” but thought it would be “something much more selective” than a full offensive along the entire frontier.
The conversation then turned to the objectives of Putin’s invasion. Colton noted that during the first stages of the 2022 invasion and into the month of May, Ukraine and Russia had begun to make progress in bilateral negotiations that would have secured Ukrainian neutrality in exchange for security guarantees, but then “something went wrong” and the dynamic of the war changed in May. Plokhii didn’t perceive a large shift in May, arguing that the “demands for Ukrainian neutrality … [were] a smokescreen, there was no real interest in negotiating these particular issues … It wasn’t about NATO.” Instead, for Plokhii, Russia’s goal since the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 was to assure Ukraine’s inclusion in the Eurasian Economic Union, preventing any movement toward the West, and ultimately “establishing Russian control over the post-Soviet space, which would be incomplete without Ukraine, the second largest post-Soviet Republic.” Any possibility the Russians had of achieving these objectives through negotiation evaporated “once Ukrainians started to see that they were actually able to fight back [against] the Russian aggression on the battlefield.” Colton agreed, though he clarified that concerns about neutrality were linked to “other matters, including Putin’s personal obsession with establishing that Ukraine is not a real country.” He added, “[If] the goal was to subordinate, to draw Ukraine back into the Russian orbit … then I have difficulty seeing how launching a war … was going to accomplish that.”
For Plokhii, many of Russia’s initial objectives were based on the idea that the invasion “would be a repetition of Crimea.” Vacroux, turning to Colton, asked how the Russian military, which some considered the second most powerful in the world, had turned out to be the “second-most powerful in Ukraine.” Colton explained that “it was pretty clear by two or three years ago that some of the talk of military reform, especially on the hardware side, was out of sync with reality.”
Plokhii also credited Zelensky’s leadership and experience as an actor, stating that his decision to stay in Kyiv acted as an “amplifier” for popular belief in victory. Critically, Zelensky allowed “the military to fight the war,” and did not seek to personally direct Ukraine’s defensive efforts. Colton called attention to Zelensky’s ability to appeal to foreign backers. Vacroux, at this point, asked if Zelensky is “going to be the person who... can tackle some of the deep institutional issues'' in Ukraine. Plokhii explained how Zelensky had made a point of “going after the oligarchs,” and whatever it meant for the struggle against corruption, “the president, as an office, would emerge actually ... much stronger out of this ... war than it was before.”
Since 2014, Plokhii explained, trust in state institutions has risen dramatically and the threat posed by the war has also led to a much more unified electorate. Colton added, however, that “there is a certain kind of unity that's for one purpose … fighting an aggressor, an invader … but then when you get normal politics, people start to think of their interests in different terms.”
Audience members raised questions about how the war would end. Colton explained that a total victory for Ukraine, in the sense that Russia not only no longer occupies Ukrainian territory, but ceases to be a threat to Ukraine, is unlikely. Instead, Colton predicted that both sides would settle into a “protracted war … [which] could be a very long drawn out thing.” Plokhii argued that much still depended on how the combatants defined their ever-shifting victory conditions. With regards to the total liberation of territory seized by Russia since 2014, Plokhii stated that “anything is possible … Moscow ... potentially soon could have issues much more important than Crimea.” Now, Plokhii argued, Putin was attempting to use “nuclear blackmail,” and if the collective West caved to it, he warned, “the balance of terror and fear” would be broken and “nuclear weapons will not perform anymore the stabilizing role … that they performed during the Cold War.”
The war so far has been characterized by Russian miscalculations: a belief that the Ukrainians would not fight, that foreign aid would be insufficient to turn the tide, that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would support the invasion. Plokhii concluded that Putin had become “a hostage of the imperial thinking of the late 19th and beginning of the 20th century, of the existence of one Russian nation, and really the whole military operation was based on this misreading of history.”