How Russia achieves their strategic goals?
Yurii Boiko
The Russian-Ukrainian war is still ongoing. Numerous attempts at peace negotiations have failed. Once again, we are reminded that conflicts do not end with phone calls, and personal diplomacy often yields no results.
Ukraine continues to fight — just as it did ten years ago, just as it did yesterday, and just as it will tomorrow. Some might conclude that nothing has changed since Trump’s inauguration on January 20. I’ll leave it to others to decide which side is doing more to achieve “peace.” It is still largely under a huge question mark as to how Russia manages to get what it wants through changes of leadership in the face of Western decision-makers.
Russia is a dictatorship. The Russian type of government has a lot of downsides to it, but one of the “perks” is the allowance of the creation of a carefully crafted foreign policy foundation, upon which structural and reactionary policies might be established. This is not an ideology, but a continuous foreign policy.
One of the ways Russia advances its interests is by threats. Leaders make threats on a daily basis as part of their strategy. Yet, not most leaders have the largest arsenal of nuclear weaponry at “ready”. Threatening using nukes is not an old story. Russia has been lightly threatening to use nuclear weapons since the mid-2000s. It started when President George W. Bush pursued a Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system aimed at intercepting long-range missiles from “rogue states”, particularly Iran and North Korea. The Russian leadership took this as a threat to “The Motherland.” In 2006, in several speeches, Putin emphasized the modernization of Russia’s nuclear forces. He stated that Russia was developing “new types of nuclear weapons” capable of penetrating any missile defense system (a reference to U.S. plans for missile defense in Eastern Europe):
We are not only conducting research and successful testing of new nuclear missile systems... I am sure that they will guarantee Russia’s security for decades to come.
Afterwards, putin went to Germany, where he made a speech, which is largely considered “anti-Western” at the Munich Security Conference. Afterwards, “new president of Russia” Dmitriy Medvedev escalated the conflict in Georgia, invading the country. As Russian influence on the world stage dried up, and world tension rose, the threats were becoming less subtle. Meanwhile, Russian state media started openly discussing the invasion of Ukraine and the Baltic states as part of the attack on Trans-Atlantic security. The dream of deterrence through economic cooperation failed in 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea and started a war in Donbass.
Russian leadership assumed different strategic goals throughout the conflict, beginning from resolving an imaginary humanitarian crisis in Donbas to the reversal of NATO’s eastward expansion. But it seems like Putin wants America to give up on its strategic deterrence through diplomacy and military might in Europe and sees the Ukraine war as a stepping stone in the broader strategy to undermine American power on the European continent.
As of the past half of a decade, we have been living in a world where if putin did not like what the opposing side was doing, He would threaten nuclear escalation. He upped the stakes in February 2022, as his nuclear forces moved to special combat readiness, amidst the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After that putin reiterated the Russian nuclear doctrine: “it is not a bluff” that he will use nuclear weaponry if Russian borders were to be invaded. Beforehand, the Russian leadership threatened to blow up, colloquially, everyone if old Soviet jets were transferred from the countries of Eastern Europe, and then the same with American artillery. Missiles, jets, and tanks, rusty and brand-new, with each delivery to Ukraine, various persons in Russian media and leadership structures proclaimed the ods of the destruction of old civilizational capitals in North America and Europe.
Coming from this, the War in Ukraine is a first-of-its-kind conflict, where leaders of the biggest security and treaty structure in the world made the escalation management their priority in handling the conflict. Not broad ideological terms, such as “fairness, democracy, or love, not humanitarian concerns, and not even victory. Because of this, the capabilities that Ukraine receives move up the destruction chain, whilst the Western leaders operate by looking at the escalation chain. They(Western leaders) are playing the metaphorical game of hot potato, whilst simultaneously trying to keep the potato as close to their hands as possible. In this, putin’s strategy is clear. He is trying to threaten the Western leaders that at any second, if they throw the ball hard enough, he will blow the hot potato with a shotgun, and it may or may not only blow up in the face of Western decision-makers. Or their offices as well.
This strategy has shifted as the new faces arrived in Washington. In the future, I would like to examine the rise of the neo-conservatives in the United States. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this article, it is important to state that Trump does not have a foreign policy, or at least a “concept of the plan” on what to do with Ukraine and Russia. The established conservative think tanks largely turned their backs on him after the first term, leaving “The Heritage Foundation” as the only viable outside opinion on the right. And they do now know how to deal with Ukraine. In the infamous Project 2025, the writers in the Heritage Foundation could not give Ukraine more than 3 sentences in the whole manifesto. That’s why Trump tried to end the war in Ukraine by political means—phone calls, pressure points, talks, and deals.
And with this Russian rhetoric and approach have changed. It is a political conflict now, one that can be resolved in the halls of the White House and on the stairs of Congress. It happened before, during the Qatar diplomatic crisis, when Trump’s approach to Qatar and the leaders of the Arab League can be argued to have been influenced by the financial and economic incentives, rather than a cohesive strategy. It was formulated in the Orb Meeting.
The Orb meeting, between Trump, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt
Leaders of Saudi Arabia, the USA, and Egypt met on the occasion of the opening of a new Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology. During this summit, Trump closely aligned himself with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, embracing their vision of combating extremism, particularly Iranian influence and Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is closely tied to the nation of Qatar, which was pursuing its strategic goals in the region. Just weeks later, in June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a blockade on Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism and being too close to Iran. Al Udeid Air Base is an American military base where a large number of American aircraft are located and used in various conflicts in the Middle East. This base is the largest American military base in the region. It is also located in Qatar. In June of 2017, POTUS endorsed a blockade of his own military base, amidst tensions with Iran. It was made over Twitter.
And as Trump endorsed the blockade,at the exact same time, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had asked the Arab League to ease their blockade on Qatar, advocating for a diplomatic solution. In response to the blockade and initial U.S. support for it, Qatar launched a major lobbying effort in Washington, hiring PR firms, law firms, and former officials to shift opinion. And they succeeded, over time. along with the Secretary of State and Defense Departments’ advocacy, helped shift the U.S. position to a more neutral stance. The conflict over alleged “ties to terrorists” between States and Qatar was resolved by 2018, and in 2019, Donald Trump hosted the Emir of Qatar at the White House, praising the country’s partnership.
Donald Trump and the Emir of Qatar. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani
Previously, Russians had to gain parity on the battlefield in order to put pressure on Ukraine and the West. Now, the lobbying efforts and the phone calls can simply put the United States out of the equation, and Russia might enjoy economic and military relief. We already see this in practice, where Putin seems to be living the hedgehog’s fortnight. Keith Kellogg advocated for Trump’s dual-track Russia policy — engagement at the leader level while maintaining sanctions, arming Ukraine, and strengthening NATO defenses. Ukraine is not getting any new relief since Trump took office. It has been 151 days. Russians escalate the war by starting new fighting in the Dnipro and Sumy regions of Ukraine. The missile and drone attacks are using larger salvos and are becoming deadlier and deadlier on a day-to-day basis. It seems like no matter how many times Trump gives putin “2 weeks” to make a decision, the war is not slowing down. The war did not finish in 24 hours, as the new leadership assumed its position in Washington.
Amidst the transition in the White House, the Russian strategy shifted. Now, the decision makers who wander the Kremlin’s vast hallways will not threaten to blow up your capital; rather, they will say that a move made by any hostile decision-maker is not helping the peace process, or it is not a correct political move. It feels less like an unhinged teenager with nuclear weaponry, Putin in the Biden era, and more like a lecture from an old and out-of-date geopolitics professor. Maybe it only reflects the struggle of Russo-American relations since the end of the Cold War and the current handling of the American leader by Moscow in recent history. President Biden was lecturing putin a lot, so putin behaved more unhinged in a political scene. President Trump is, well, Trump, so putin is lecturing him now.
It happened before. That’s why it is always interesting to see a struggle between a continuous dictatorship and changing decision-makers, who are hostile to that dictatorship. George W. Bush( 42nd) was more similar to Trump, whilst Biden’s foreign policy project was largely built on the foundation outlined by Obama. So, putin changed the rhetoric. More and more Bush Jr. spiraled out on democracy promotion in his second term, the closer, putin, moved to execute his plan to invade Georgia. Putin did not like Obama’s lecturing on humanitarian crises in Donbass and his invasion of Syria, so he became more and more unhinged in Donbass, starting one offensive after another, whilst breaking peace negotiations, ceasefires, and armistices established with the Ukrainian and European sides.
I don’t believe putin is irrational, as Boris Johnson characterized him, after the former started his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I also don’t think he is a grandmaster who uses his pieces and the board to carefully construct a well-thought-out combination. I think he is trapped in a war that he cannot end, but still wants to achieve victory. And I think he believes that they chose a working strategy that might lead to victory under certain circumstances. What are the circumstances under which he might achieve his strategic goals? I do not know, nor do you. But we may find hints by looking at what he is doing. The American support of the Ukrainian war effort is one of the biggest and most important parts of the Ukrainian effort to end a never-ending cycle of invasion, colonization, and genocide.