Reacting to Russia's Ukraine Invasion

With the breakdown of U.S.-Russian talks, a Russian invasion of Ukraine appears increasingly probable. Russia's cyberattack against Ukrainian government agencies, its force buildup along the Russo-Ukrainian border, and the growing likelihood of a Russian operation in Belarus that creates another axis of advance against Ukraine demonstrates the Kremlin’s military aggressive intent. Moreover, U.S. intelligence has warned of Russian false-flag operations against pro-Russian separatists in Donbas and Transnistria, the Russian-supported breakaway part of Moldova. If these occur, Russia will have no choice but to invade. If they occur in Moldova and Eastern Ukraine, a much broader operation is likely.

Ryabkov's Venezuelan and Cuban threats are telling. They evoke a Cold War mentality, drawing a conscious parallel between the modern Russo-American balance and its 1960s antecedent. Russia, however, hopes to resurrect a more specific narrative, one of severe strategic imbalance between it and the U.S., that it must correct through treading the brink.   Indeed, this was Khrushchev's justification for his nuclear missile deployment to Cuba. In the early 1960s, before intercontinental ballistic missiles became the primary means of nuclear delivery, the Soviets and Americans relied on shorter-range missiles and strategic bombers to deliver nuclear weapons (the U.S.' first operational ICBM, the SM-65 Atlas, was deployed in 1959, while the Soviet R7 was launched in 1957). Soviet missiles in Cuba crystallized Mutually Assured Destruction by ensuring that the U.S. would suffer direct punishment in a NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation.

The situation today is radically different. Russia is not the U.S.' great power equal, but a post-imperial oligarchy led by a paranoid former intelligence officer. Neither the U.S. nor Russia intends to unleash their nuclear arsenals, nor does the U.S. have any interest in "rolling back" Russian control, invading Russia, or toppling Putin and the kleptocrats on whose shoulders his reign sits. Putin probes NATO both to ensure his domestic security and fulfill the Soviet Union's central strategic imperative, to become the only non-European participant in European security.

Yet Russia's actions must be considered in a broader context: a Eurasian context. Indeed, it is on this vast stage that Ukraine has any meaning, despite American sympathies for Ukraine’s Westernized population that has little desire to live under Russian kleptocracy or suffer the rule, albeit a slowly improving rule, of its own post-Soviet oligarchs. It is the Eurasian question that makes this a global crisis. China is America's nemesis in this grim dance – the CCP is poised to make a bid for world power, first by taking Taiwan, then shattering America's Pacific alliances, and finally by reordering Eurasian security arrangements in its economic and political favor. Such a shift would spell the end not only of the vaunted liberal international order but, more concretely, the end of the post-1945 American way of life, premised as it is upon international commercial stability and access to Eurasian markets.

Russian victory in Europe – that is, NATO's destruction and the complete reorganization of Eastern Europe's security arrangements – will do little to deflect China's capture of Russia into its geopolitical orbit. The Eurasian question also frames Russian actions since China would bend Russia to its will after defeating the United States. It has begun its preparatory work already, economically extending its reach into Russia's Central Asian political sphere and Russia's intended Eastern European targets and penetrating Russian markets with its telecommunications companies.

Thus, the U.S. must answer two questions. First, can Russia be given what it wants without jeopardizing NATO? Russia will no longer accept Ukrainian Finlandization, in which Ukraine de-affiliates from NATO and maintains mutual economic contact with the EU, U.S., and Russia, in return for Russian de-escalation. Russia either wishes to recover Ukraine as de facto political possession, as it hoped to do before Putin's miscalculation sparked the Euromaidan protests in 2013, or to conquer a corridor running at least from Donbas to Crimea via the port city of Mariupol, and perhaps even to Odesa or Transnistria. Neither eventuality is acceptable to NATO. Russian military access to Ukraine or conquest to Transnistria would allow it to pressure Romania directly and improve its operational and strategic agility against Poland or the Baltic states. Even a more limited Russian success that captured Mariupol would create a land corridor between Rostov-on-Don and the Crimean Peninsula, facilitating power-projection in the Black Sea and future anti-NATO pressure.

But neither the U.S. nor NATO's Western European members have expressed a desire to intervene militarily on Ukraine's behalf. Russia cannot be given what it wants. For example, a limited naval deployment, the dispatch of a Surface Action Group and a submarine squadron to the Black Sea, supported by an anti-submarine P-8 squadron and a fighter squadron in Romania, would disrupt Russia's invasion plans. A Russian operation against Mariupol, and likely against Odesa, would require an amphibious landing, which U.S. naval forces could disrupt. And American/allied control of the Black Sea would leave Russian forces within striking distance of U.S. warships, confronting Russia with a series of escalatory options that would broaden a Russo-Ukrainian conflict into a Russo-NATO conflict that Putin knows he cannot win.

Again, however, the question is Eurasian, not European. Given China's clear ambitions against Taiwan, its greatly-accelerated aerial probing against the island-republic, and its growing navy – now large enough to conduct an amphibious assault – the U.S. must consider the possibility that China will invade Taiwan concurrently with a Russian invasion of Ukraine if the U.S. commits to Ukraine’s defense and erodes its naval margin of superiority. Of course, a ground deployment would limit the damage to the U.S. Pacific forces. Still, Mr. Biden, his civilian advisors, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs have provided assurance that they have the spine for this more escalatory action.

This calculation generates a subsidiary question: what can the U.S. do to disrupt a Russian invasion without reducing American combat power in the Indo-Pacific? Sanctions are insufficient. Russia has endured punishing economic pressure before and will do so again. Moreover, the time delay between the high of Russian territorial gains and the low of a Russian economic crash is too great to deter an offensive.

While the Ukrainian Armed Forces are incapable of defeating a Russian offensive wholesale, they are fully capable of inflicting high casualties. Ukraine has constructed defensive lines around Donbas, complicating a Russian armored assault to the southwest. While still inferior to Russian strike capabilities, Ukrainian air defenses are much improved since 2014-2015, when Ukraine forced Russia to accept a bloody stalemate. The military's morale, and the country's, is high – Ukrainians have endured eight years of war yet have offered no indication of psychological exhaustion. And even in Eastern Ukraine, the location of Russian-speaking populations upon whose behalf Putin supposedly intervened in 2014, Ukraine's citizens are largely hostile to Russian rule.

War will not end with a Russian invasion. Putin will face an insurgency on a far greater scale than the U.S. encountered in Iraq. Not only is Ukraine larger than Iraq – its people also lack the sectarian divisions that directed insurgent attention away from U.S. forces and towards their religious adversaries. Russia's last combat operation of this scale came in 1979. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan helped destroy the Soviet Empire. Putin risks the same result in Ukraine. And as body bags pile up, the Kremlin will be unable to hide the damage, unlike during Russian operations in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine previously. 

Additionally, Ukraine’s climate, size, and urban geography in the east guarantee disruption, operational friction, and urban combat. Mariupol is 100,000 residents larger than Grozny – Russia's last experience with high-intensity urban combat, the Syrian adventure notwithstanding – in 1994, and Zaporizhzhia, the probable northernmost extent of Russia's advance, approximately 400,000 residents larger. Both Russian operations against Grozny were victorious but took months against an opponent far worse trained and equipped than the Ukrainian military.

Cyber and electronic means are the most proper. An American cyberattack against Russia's Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov-on-Don – naturally as deniable as possible – would disrupt Russian operational cohesion, while electronic spoofing and jamming would slow a Russian advance. The longer a Russian offensive takes, the more time Ukraine will have to solidify its lines of defense and mobilize reserves, and the greater the casualties Russia will endure. Ample opportunity, therefore, exists for American disruption short of a kinetic response.

Naturally, the possibility exists of Russo-NATO escalation. Russia's most likely target will be the Baltic states, not Romania and Bulgaria. A single axis of advance from the north against Estonia is possible, limiting Russian escalatory options. More likely is a two-pronged assault, one from the north against Estonia, the other from the south through Belarus. Russia may lack the capacity to conduct two simultaneous large-scale ground wars. However, although Russia has prepared for Belarus' annexation, NATO will still have warning of a Russian move through Lukashenko's fiefdom. And once again, Putin recognizes that a Russo-NATO confrontation will not end in his favor, given NATO's superiority in men and materiel over time.

America cannot stand by while Russia takes Ukraine. But action need not mean committing to kinetic combat. Nevertheless, the Biden administration must be watchful. War is a messy business. At times, the best option is to force the issue.

Seth Cropsey is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute and director of Hudson’s Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy.

Harry Halem is a research assistant at Hudson and holds a master's degree in political philosophy from the London School of Economics.