This Is the War’s Decisive Moment

[David Morris]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/ukraine-russia-war-consequences/629541/


The United States and its allies can tip the balance between a costly
success and a calamity.        By Eliot A. Cohen
<https://www.theatlantic.com/author/eliot-a-cohen/>


About the author: Eliot A. Cohen
<https://www.theatlantic.com/author/eliot-a-cohen/> is a contributing
writer at The Atlantic, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School
of Advanced International Studies, and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy
at CSIS. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Counselor of the Department of
State. He is the author most recently of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft
Power and the Necessity of Military Force
<https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780465044726>.


The relatively brief but bloody war in Ukraine is entering its fourth
phase. In the first, Russia tried to depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government
and sweep the country into its embrace in a three-day campaign; in the
second, it attempted to conquer Ukraine—or at least its eastern half,
including the capital, Kyiv—with armored assaults; in the third, defeated
in the north, Russia withdrew its battered forces, massing instead in the
southeastern and southern areas for the conquest of those parts of Ukraine.
Now the fourth, and possibly decisive, phase is about to begin.


If Ukraine succeeds in preserving its freedom and territorial integrity, a
diminished Russia will be contained; if it fails, the chances of war
between NATO and Russia go up, as does the prospect of Russian intervention
in other areas on its western and southern peripheries.

[•••]

Russia’s sheer brutality and utterly unwarranted aggression, compounded by
lies at once sinister and ludicrous, have endangered what remains of the
global order and the norms of interstate conduct. If such behavior leads to
humiliation on the battlefield and economic chaos at home, those norms may
be rebuilt to some degree; if Vladimir Putin’s government gets away with
it, restoring them will take a generation or longer.

[•••]

In most intense conflicts of this kind, armies engage in a kind of
competitive collapse, victory going to the side that can hold out longer.
The Ukrainians have kept their own losses and exhaustion well-guarded
secrets, as they should, but outgunned as they are, and seeing their
civilians slaughtered and tortured, they have to feel the strain. As
fighting shifts to open areas where guerrilla tactics and handheld
anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles will no longer be as effective, they
face daunting, if not impossible, odds. They are as motivated as soldiers
can be, and creative tacticians too. But they are not supermen, and they
desperately need all that the arsenals of the West can provide them.