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But it boosts the strength of the professional armed forces, which is often relatively small. There may have been no lightning breakthroughs in 2023, but Ukraine can point to some gains this year. Kyiv has reclaimed more than half of the land Russia had captured since the start of the war in February 2022 and grabbed headlines by liberating villages and towns in the south and east. Meanwhile, Putin can look to the post-Soviet space for an example of how to play the long game, said David Rivera assistant professor of government at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York.

Around 80% of the male population complete some form of military service. Refusal can mean a jail sentence, though there is the option of civilian service out of uniform too. In Sweden and Norway, conscription is partial - not everyone gets drafted.

Putin ousted

As for humanitarian or war crime trials, these seem unlikely to affect more than a few low to medium-level scapegoats—or even take place—as long as Putin is in power. Ukraine might at least be able to repatriate some of its citizens and children who have been taken into Russia and are being forced to become Russian citizens. Put bluntly, a workable Western grand strategy means that the political leaders in the United States and its NATO partners need to make good on their political statements and efforts. They must create and actually implement an effective overall plan for arming, training, and supplying Ukraine, as well as strengthening NATO. The war in Ukraine has exposed the fact that Russia’s conventional forces have serious limits, but it has done an equally good job of exposing NATO’s lack of war reserves, standardization and interoperability, modernization, and readiness. Germany alone remains a critical power vacuum, but most of the nations in NATO have major problems in war fighting and forward deployment capability and uncertain plans for modernization.

The worry is that even this is overly optimistic, although it is the strategy that western leader appears to be selling to their publics. “There is a real problem here in that we may be over-encouraged by Ukraine’s early successes in counterattacking last year,” said James Nixey, a Russia expert at the Chatham House thinktank. "There is always a risk of nuclear escalation but I do think both sides are being cautious," Partlett says.

European states also face even more challenges in dealing with the costs of the war than the United States, and at least as much popular and domestic political resistance to aiding Ukraine and rebuilding the real-world security structure of NATO. They also face a potential return to many of the tensions of the Cold War in terms of a Putin-led and hostile Russia, regardless of the outcome of the fighting. The United States and its partners could then publicly endorse specific peace proposals when this seems timely or make them a subject of international review and debate without formally agreeing on a given set. If the fighting drags on, as it well may do, making peace negotiations a major priority might help convince Russia that peace is possible, and that Russia might receive more benefits than letting the war continue.

Why Putin won’t back down

The recent arms donations — Kyiv still wants fighter aircraft and long-range tactical missiles — are predicated on the assumption they’ll force Moscow to end its invasion and begin negotiations because military costs are too high. That objective has coexisted with an expectation that Putin’s government will probably never stop fighting, as losing the war could spell the end to his political power. So far, western countries have shown strong unity in wanting to help Ukraine force out Russia. But if Joe Biden is defeated in the US presidential election in 2024 by Donald Trump or another isolationist candidate, it could pose serious questions for Ukraine’s war effort.

He wanted to take (what were claimed to be) the former Russian parts back into Russia and turn the rest into a friendly buffer state. From this perspective Russia remains a long way from a sustainable victory. But Ukraine's air defenses were surprisingly effective, shooting down many Russian fighter jets and helicopters in the first couple months of the war. It was once reluctant but now provides Ukraine with Stinger and IRIS-T low-altitude anti-air missiles, HIMARS rocket artillery, and Patriot high-altitude air defenses. The United States and Germany have said they will supply infantry fighting vehicles. Since the counteroffensive was launched in June, only a handful of villages have been recaptured.

It is also a clear example that for all the talk of an integrated strategy and a rules-based order, the United States at present only has a limited integrated strategy even for dealing with Europe. Anything that approaches a rules-based order is limited to some developed countries. Putting clearly defined options on the table for improving U.S./European relations with Russia might lead to more Russian willingness to accommodate Ukraine in at least some aspects of territory and economic relations. More generally, Putin will not last forever, and presenting such options moves the focus away from a relatively narrow focus on the war to a focus on its outcome.

• For example, the tactic of repurposing dishwasher electronics for weapons, mocked in the West as a sign of desperation, probably means “somebody thought about that from the beginning,” he said.









• Such an outcome would end the current fighting without reducing the tensions that led to the Russian invasion in the first place without restoring any broader level of stability between Russia and Europe and the United States.









• The alternative would be a ceasefire along some line based on the progress of the fighting to date, where both sides would agree to stop fighting but remain deployed.









• The war theorist Branislav Slantchev, one of Goemans’s former students and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, told me that in August he’d been asked to participate in a Zoom symposium on war termination convened by a U.S. intelligence agency.

They believed the wars that they had studied could shed light on the current conflict. https://diigo.com/0vz5u4 , one of Goemans’s former students and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, told me that in August he’d been asked to participate in a Zoom symposium on war termination convened by a U.S. intelligence agency. More recent theoretical literature had acknowledged the two-sidedness of war, Goemans writes, but here, too, important aspects had been missed. War theory imported from economics the concept of “bargaining,” and wars were thought to begin when the bargaining process—over a piece of territory, usually—broke down.

• Ukrainian officials believe an emboldened Russia is preparing for another offensive as early as today, having begun the preliminary phase earlier this month.









• While the West could warn Kyiv that it would stop supplies of weapons or financial support if Ukraine were to insist on defying the US or Europe, “this kind of threat is not credible”, Slantchev told Al Jazeera.









• There have been a number of proposals in circulation, from China’s last February and those later from the BRICS countries.









• But the head of the British Army Gen Sir Patrick Sanders is not alone in issuing a national call to prepare for a major conflict on European soil.









• Compared with this time last year, Vladimir Putin is stronger, politically more than militarily.

“Those who are against the war have left, and those who remain are adapting,” Meister said. In the course of the past year, Putin’s domestic propaganda strategy has morphed from a message of “fight the Nazis” in Ukraine to “fight the West” there, said Stefan Meister, a Russia and Eastern Europe expert at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations. “The narrative is the great struggle of the Cold War,” he said, a framing that has helped to attract new recruits. But the sizable swaths of terrain Ukraine wants to liberate will take time, and to even build the necessary forces will take six months, Donahoe estimated. The challenge now is training and equipping an armored force big enough and sophisticated enough to envelop Russia’s fighting force.

• NATO does not want a full-scale war in Europe, and Russian President Vladimir Putin knows he would lose a conflict with a 30-member military alliance led by the Americans.









• At a minimum, even the most courageous and unified people will need the kind of U.S. and allied grand strategy that provides clear guarantees that the necessary military and civil aid will keep coming.









• However, it is hard to imagine Russia striking very far west, given the painfully slow advance around Bakhmut and the catastrophic attempt to capture Vuhledar.









• The United States could, however, with its partners, create an international group of experts to examine peace options, which could become part of the grand strategy for ending the war.

According to this approach, wars will end when the problem that caused the war is resolved by fighting on the battlefield. How long the fighting will last and the form it takes depends on the extent and type of the problem. In a matter of days, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has escalated to one of the biggest military conflicts in Europe since the second world war. The fog of war can obscure our view of who is winning, who is losing, and how long all of this will last.

European countries have largely outsourced much of their military capacity and thinking on strategy and security to the States through NATO. Hungary has signalled it is ready to compromise on EU funding for Ukraine - after Brussels reportedly prepared to sabotage its economy if it did not comply. Meanwhile, Moscow has claimed its forces have taken control of the village of Tabaivka in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region.