One month after Russian president Vladimir Putin asserted that Ukraine should be liberated from the historical mistake of its independence, the Russian defence ministry has announced that Russia’s war aims were limited to the Donbas region, and were nearing completion.
This climbdown is undoubtedly laying the groundwork for selling the operation as a success to the Russian public despite an abysmal military combat performance. But that does not mean a rapid end to the war.
Having failed in its initial attempts to seize several Ukrainian cities, and with its logistics in disarray, Russia has been forced to focus on one target at a time. Mariupol is the current main effort.
Once that port city falls, Kharkiv is likely to be the next target, followed by an attempt to push north along the Dnieper River to cut off Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. If the Russians can hold Kherson, this would pave the way for a Russia-initiated ceasefire, with a link created between the Donbas and Crimea, and Russian propaganda claiming to have averted a fictional Ukrainian genocide against ethnic Russians in the Donbas.
Even these more limited aims promise fierce fighting. Kharkiv – close to the Russian border – has already been subjected to heavy bombardment, whose intensity is likely to increase, and Ukraine has few options for preventing it.
On the other hand, the fight northwards along the Dnieper will probably be met with stiff resistance, with continuing western arms supplies leading to heavy attrition among Russian armour. The outcome of this fighting is far from inevitable.
It would be a serious error to expect the war to end at this point, however, even if local ceasefires and expanded negotiations suggest diplomacy may prevail. This is for three reasons.
First, Putin’s view of Kyiv – as rightfully Russian territory – will not have changed. Just as the Russian military continually sought to destabilise Ukraine and kill its soldiers for the eight years between the annexation of Crimea and this year’s campaign, negotiations will not halt Russian aggression but merely shift its intensity and emphasis.
Second, precisely because Russia is setting itself up to annex more Ukrainian territory so it cab claim victory at home, western sanctions are not going away. They will persist. The result is that Putin is rapidly losing all levers of influence in the west other than the application or threat of force. In this context, any lull in the fighting is likely to see the Russians seek to correct defects in their campaign plan, to regroup and to threaten a future campaign against Kyiv.
The third reason why Russia’s new declared aims do not suggest an imminent end to hostilities is that, precisely because of the expectations of the first two points, Ukraine will not wish to see a ceasefire allow Russia to dig in along a new “line of contact”. This will amount to it taking the country bite by bite. Ukraine will seek to strengthen Kharkiv and try to prevent its encirclement, spoiling the staging area for Russia’s second objective after Mariupol.
Ultimately, Kyiv will not feel secure until Putin is removed from power or the Russian army is broken, and to that end will seek to continue to kill Russian soldiers on Ukrainian soil, for as long as possible.
Moreover, a general collapse in Russian forces is anticipated to offer the best chance for Ukraine to retake what was lost in 2014 and 2015. Having pulled Russia’s hand into a mangle, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has no intention of letting Russia take it out. Even if he wanted to, the Ukrainian government could do little to stop insurgency by Ukrainians in the occupied territories.
For Ukraine’s international partners, these dynamics pose some difficult questions. Those seeking off-ramps may in fact be pressuring Ukraine to surrender longer-term advantages to Moscow. For Ukraine, Russia’s curtailed objectives offer the space for more maximalist ambitions. The question is whether the west shares them.
Dr Jack Watling is senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute
