CSIS experts: 5 conditions for Ukrainian victory

Eliot Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer and Associate Director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, and former US State Department Advisor under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (2007) identifies five key conditions for Ukraine’s victory in 2023 -2009).
FIRST CONDITION: supply of long-range missile systems. The first steps have already been taken: after the exceptionally successful combat use of the M142 HIMARS and M270 MLRS installations with a standard rocket range of less than 100 kilometers, the GLSDB (Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb) ammunition with a range of 150 kilometers begin to deliver to Ukraine. But it’s not enough. All of Russia’s tactics in recent months are based on the advantage in the range of destruction.
In the presence of similar weapons, “Ukraine will be able to begin to dismantle the Russian logistical infrastructure on which the group’s supplies depend,” said Eliot Cohen. – The supply of the Russian army is based on transport by rail and sorting at major railway junctions. Strikes against them will isolate Crimea and neutralize the Russian armed forces,” which means forcing them to retreat without bloody frontal attacks.
“Long-range strike systems are essential for ending war,” concludes the expert.
Noting the first condition, Cohen rebuts the skeptics’ argument about fear of “escalation” and “provoking Putin”: “The escalation argument is ridiculous, because it was the Russians who led the escalation constant hostilities. What else can they do that they haven’t done yet? The expert asks a rhetorical question. – Will attacks on Ukrainian power plants begin? Attacks on peaceful towns? Anything has happened before. The only kind of escalation that would make sense would be nuclear weapons. But there’s a whole bunch of very, very good reasons why the Russians won’t. So we’re holding back,” Cohen concludes.
CONDITION TWO: The West is rapidly accumulating military production, especially munitions. We ran into this problem almost immediately. In the United States, the production of FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank systems had to be restarted, and then the question arose of the urgent release of NASAMS missile defense / air defense systems, which, according to initial estimates, could take up to at two years. Western artillery deliveries require the supply of shells: never since the Second World War has humanity spent such a volume on ammunition: up to several tens of thousands of charges per day.
It turned out that the West is not sufficiently prepared for a war of such magnitude. For an urgent increase in production, Eliot Cohen suggests using legislative tools. First of all, the Defense Production Act of 1950 (The Defense Production Act), which was passed because of the Korean War and which “will now allow us to get rid of many bureaucratic obstacles and do what we have to do: conclude several one-year contracts with the industry so that it invests in people and infrastructure, ”explains the expert.
It must be said that American presidents quite often use the Defense Production Act as an effective tool, and not only in times of war. So on May 18, 2022, President Joe Biden enforced it in response to the baby food shortage, forcing manufacturers to prioritize filling orders for infant formula ingredients.
The Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture have been given permission to use Department of Defense planes to import formulas from overseas. On June 6 of the same year, Biden used the “Defense Production Act” to accelerate the national production of green energy. technologies, responding to the rising cost of energy sources caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Only the last two US presidents – Biden and Trump – have already applied this law 11 times, and there is nothing, according to Cohen, to prevent using it again.
CONDITION THREE: Eliot Cohen considers essential “a concerted effort to explain to the American people why the Ukrainian war is indeed at the center of our interests”. The Russian hybrid strategy is based on the desire to “survive the West”. Wait for war weariness, the next elections in the United States or Europe and, consequently, a decrease in support for Ukraine. Russian propaganda and intelligence agencies strive to divide Western society, to provoke any form of disagreement with support for Ukraine under any pretext, “be it America first or something else “.
So maintaining strong bipartisan support for Ukraine and standing up to a minority within the Republican Party that opposes it is a key factor in winning the war. A Congress delegation is currently in Ukraine. Thirty senators are attending the Munich Security Conference – from both sides.”
“Fortunately, life is often full of second chances,” adds Cohen sarcastically. “And Ukraine is a great second chance after the withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan: for the administration, for the United States … Therefore, you can not lose there either: even a limited war in which Russia would receive territory. ”Thus, Cohen calls discussion of “peace” negotiations under the Kremlin’s terms (with exit from the occupied territories behind Russia) “empty realism,” “a kind of false stubbornness, which sometimes takes different forms, but always ends up by the same thing: we supposedly have to reach some kind of agreement and freeze the conflict where it is.
Emily Harding, Deputy Director of CSIS, former analyst for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and CIA analyst, adds: By thinking of peace in exchange for territory, “we signal our own weakness at a time when we should show our strength. and our determination. So it’s a bad strategy.”
Cohen points out that the Kremlin appears to be mentally prepared for defeat. Because Russian propaganda has already put in place security mechanisms:
“Their propaganda lays the groundwork for why they can’t win. For example, they are not at war with Ukraine, but with the West… Sometimes they try to twist it in a really weird way: for example, one of the propagandists who appears on Russian television says that “we have actually succeeded in demilitarizing Ukraine: they have lost all the Soviet-era military equipment and therefore have to resort to the West.
CONDITION FOUR: Developing the theme of hybrid Russian ideological operations, Cohen points out that “Ukrainian territories controlled by Russia since 2014 have been forcibly indoctrinated and Russified. These are separate war crimes within the meaning of the Geneva Conventions. It is an act of monstrous cruelty.”
And they are also risks to post-war stability and a sustainable real world. Therefore, the new “Marshall Plan”, the successful socio-economic recovery of Ukraine – the most important thing in the fight against Kremlin propaganda.
FIFTH CONDITION, which is directed towards the future. War criminals must be punished:
“This is not just a war of aggression. This is a war that involves extraordinary crimes against humanity of a kind and on a scale that we have truly not seen since World War II. “It’s not just one bad guy. Unfortunately, it’s a systemic phenomenon. Entire units come in to rob, rape, kill civilians. It’s very broad.”
“You can’t just forgive Russia for all its sins and go back to business as usual, buying Russian energy, as if nothing had happened,” adds Michael Vickers, former undersecretary of defense. for intelligence and officer of the Paramilitary Operations Division. of the Central Intelligence Agency of the US Department of Defense (former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and CIA Operations Officer). “Europe is moving away from all of this right now. The stakes are high as the success of the invasion could have a cascading effect on our allies in Asia.
“We have a lot to do to prepare. [к соперничеству] with China, but our best short-term strategy for that is to defeat the Russians in Ukraine,” Eliot Cohen adds aphorically.
Cohen compares current support for Ukraine to Lend-Lease during World War II. Just as the West now supports Ukraine, it then supported the peoples of the USSR, including the same Ukrainians who “wage a war for their survival, fought an invader who really wanted to exterminate and enslave them.
Ukrainians feel the same today. And with completely different feelings, Russian soldiers will fight in Ukraine: they are waging a war of conquest,” says Cohen.
Just as the USSR could not have defended itself against the fascist threat without “massive support from the West, so Ukraine needs the support of the West” against the invasion of Putin, says the expert.
Seth Jones, senior vice president of CSIS, former US special operations command officer and adviser to the commander of US special operations forces in Afghanistan, recalls that in a year of war in Ukraine, Russia has suffered more casualties irreparable in manpower than “for all combined wars and operations after World War II, including Chechnya, Afghanistan, proxy operations in Korea and Vietnam, other countries, invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
But there is an important point to which Seth Jones draws attention:
“Now it’s a completely different army, it has far fewer opportunities. Also, Russia for the first time faced a mass exodus of people trying to avoid being drafted into the army; and the only reason we don’t see massive protests is that Putin still maintains tight control over the security services.”
Michael Vickers draws attention to another political aspect: “The problem is that Putin’s objectives have not changed during the year. As unrealistic as they are, they remain so: he wants to take over all of Ukraine and thinks he will survive, will survive us. We have to show him that not only will he not be able to achieve this, but that he will lose even more. Crimea will be critical in the near future, and it will be an important decision for the White House: to support the Ukrainian offensive to retake Crimea.
Yes, Russia can be defeated, but we must remember that if Russia is considered the winner even in a limited situation and keeps the occupied territory, it will be a defeat for the West. Not only the unprecedented losses of equipment and manpower, but also the loss of territories – this is what will really hit Putin’s authority, ”concludes Michael Vickers.