A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.”
From almost the opening days of the Russia-Ukraine War, a running theme among Western analysts has been that the Russian military has badly underperformed and the Ukrainian Armed Forces constantly exceeded expectations.
Few seem to have noticed, however, that the pendulum on the battlefield has shifted.
Shift for Russia in Ukraine
Recent evidence indicates the Russian side has made tactical and operational improvements that are having an impact on the ground in Ukraine.
Washington policymakers need to update their understanding of the current trajectory of the war to ensure the U.S. is not caught off guard by battlefield events – and that our interests don’t suffer as a result.
There has been no shortage of legitimate evidence to support the contention that throughout 2022 the Russian side performed much worse than most expected and that Ukraine performed better than anticipated. Russia’s initial battle plan was flawed at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.
Moscow allocated an invasion force that was too small for the task, dispersed across four axes of advance (ensuring that none would be strong enough to succeed on its own), and was not equipped with supplies to sustain a long war.
Ukraine was more prepared for an invasion than many originally believed and took impressive action quickly to stem the Russian advance, blunting each axis, and imposing serious casualties on the invaders.
In contrast to Russian blunders, Zelensky’s troops initially performed well at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels such that Russia was forced into a major withdrawal of the bulk of its armored forces from Kyiv and Kharkiv barely a month into the war.
Russian Deployments
It was a logical and rational strategic decision for Russia to redeploy its forces to strengthen the Donbas front in April 2022. But even then, ample evidence began to pile up that tactically, there were still grave weaknesses in the Russian forces, such as the infamous May 2022 crossing of the Seversky-Donetsk river, which saw an entire battalion wiped out. All the news wasn’t bad for Russia, however, as through the month of July Putin’s forces captured a number of key cities.
After repositioning its forces, Russia Captured Mariupol, Lyman, Popasna, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk. But exposing Russia’s ongoing operational weaknesses, Ukrainian forces launched two offensives, one of which caught Russia completely by surprise, resulting in the recapture of Lyman. The first was in the Kherson province, which started off badly for Ukraine. But while all Moscow’s attention was on Kherson, Ukraine unleashed a major drive north near Kharkiv.
Back and Forth Continues
Russian leaders had been asleep at the wheel, focusing all of their attention on Kherson and literally ignoring Kharkiv, trying to secure their northern flank with a paltry number of minimally trained national guardsmen. Ukraine exploited this mistake and drove Russian troops back over 100km to the Svatavo-Kremenna line. While still reeling from this blow, Russia faced a dilemma in Kherson city: fight a bloody defensive battle in the city or surrender it without a fight.
Russia chose the latter. By October, Russian leaders were being ridiculed in the West as having been seriously wounded by Ukraine’s twin offensives, and talk of a Ukrainian victory picked up steam, with former U.S. Army general Ben Hodges claiming Ukraine could win the war “by the end of the year” 2022.
As of November 2022, it was fair to say the Russian general staff had been outperformed by the Ukrainian general staff. Many pundits in the West concluded that Russian troops and leaders were deeply flawed and incapable of improving, believing that Russia would remain incapable tactically for the duration of the war.
What many of these analysts failed to recognize, however, is that Russia has vastly more capacity to make war, both in terms of material and personnel, and therefore has the capacity to absorb enormous losses and still remain viable. Further, Russian history is replete with examples of starting out poorly in wars, suffering large casualties, and then recovering to turn the tide. Ukraine, on the other hand, has significantly fewer resources or troops and therefore has less room for error.
Timeframe
Over the now 15 months of war, Ukraine has fought and lost four major urban battles against Russia, suffering progressively worse levels of casualties in each: Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Soledar, and most recently Bakhmut.
When Russia was faced with city battles – Kyiv, Kharkiv City, and Kherson City – they chose to abandon each while establishing more defensible defensive positions elsewhere. Ukraine, on the other hand, chose to fight for their major cities. The results are telling.
By withdrawing from Kyiv and Kharkiv in the first month of war and from Kherson City last fall, Russia was able to relocate its force into more defensible positions, preserving its personnel from the crucible of a grueling defensive fight in urban terrain. Ukraine, on the other hand, chose to contest major cities and has now lost staggering numbers of troops – but they also lost the city itself in the end. The decision of the Ukrainian general staff to defend Bakhmut until the end may have grave implications for the rest of the war.
As far back as December, it was clear that Ukraine would not be able to keep Bakhmut. Once Russian troops advanced around the flanks of the city and took all the roads supporting the garrison under fire control, the chances of holding the city fell to almost zero. What Ukraine could and should have done is follow the Russian example at Kherson and withdraw to the next prepared defensive position in the vicinity of Kramatorsk or Slavyansk.
From those locations, the Ukrainians would again have had all the advantages: they would have had elaborately dug fighting positions, unrestricted fields of fire to attack oncoming Russian troops, and unhindered resupply routes to the rear. It would have been far more expensive for Russia to try and take those positions than it was to fight from point-blank range against the Ukrainians in Bakhmut, especially when the Russians could and did inflict severe blows on a daily basis to resupply the defenders.
As a result, Ukraine has lost literally tens of thousands of killed and wounded, along with enormous quantities of equipment and ammunition, in those four city fights. Based on a likely fire superiority of 10-to-1 on the Russian side, Ukraine no doubt suffered considerably more casualties in those fights than the Russians. But even if the cost were equal, Russia has millions more men from whom to draw more fighters and a major domestic industrial capacity to produce all the ammunition they may require.
Put simply, Ukraine doesn’t have the personnel or industrial capacity to replace their lost men and equipment in comparison to the Russians. Moreover, Russia has been learning from its many tactical mistakes and evidence suggests they are improving tactically while simultaneously expanding their industrial capacity. Even bigger than the dearth of ammunition and equipment for Ukraine, however, is the number of trained and experienced personnel they’ve lost. Many of those skilled troops and leaders simply cannot be replaced in the span of mere months.
Ukraine is now faced with a world-class dilemma: should they use their last offensive capacity in a last gasp of hoping they inflict a grave wound on the Russians defending in the occupied territories or preserve them in case Russia launches a summer offensive of their own? There are serious risks with either course of action. I assess there is currently no likely path for Ukraine to achieve a military victory. Continuing to fight in that hope may perversely result in them losing even more territory.
Supporting Ukraine
The United States must take these realities into consideration in the coming weeks and months. Washington has already provided Ukraine the lion’s share of all military and financial aide including many of our most sophisticated armor, artillery, rockets, and missiles. Biden has even authorized the release of F-16 jets. The United States cannot – nor should it – commit to sending an equal amount of support for the next year of war, should it continue that long. Europe must be willing to make greater contributions to any future deliveries to Ukraine.
Only Kyiv can decide whether to keep fighting or seek the best-negotiated deal it can get. But the United States is obligated to ensure the security of our country and people above the desires of Kyiv.
In addition to burden-shifting physical support primarily to European states, it means the U.S. must avoid the trap of agreeing to any type of security guarantee for Ukraine. History is too filled with examples of hasty agreements to end fighting that unwittingly lay the foundation for future conflicts. America must not put its own future safety at risk by agreeing to any form of security guarantee.
The trend of war is shifting toward Moscow, regardless of how upset that may make many in the West. It is the observable reality. What Washington must do is avoid the temptation to “double-down” on supporting a losing proposition and do whatever we need to bring this conflict to a rapid conclusion, preserving our future security to the maximum extent. Ignoring these realities could set up Ukraine for even greater losses – and could put our own security at unacceptable future risk.
Note: Emphasis by bolding below is mine. – Natylie
Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
The dominant international story last year was Ukraine. For several decades after the Second World War, the belief in the transformative potential of the new order in diminishing the role of force in shaping great power relations—and world affairs more generally—seemed to have been validated.
The last great power war was in Korea in the 1950s. There has been a long-term shift from the power end of the spectrum towards the normative end as the pivot on which history turns, with a steady reduction in societal, national and international violence based on the ‘better angels’ of human nature as argued by Steven Pinker.
This was accompanied by a geographical shift from Europe to Asia and the Pacific as the new cockpit of world affairs. Bucking these twin trends, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marked the return of Europe to the centre of world affairs, and the return to Europe of geopolitics, territorial disputes and large-scale force and ground wars not experienced since 1945.
Here we look back on the crisis in a longer-term and broader reflective analysis of four intertwined threads: the core issues at dispute, the conflict parties, the possible different endings to the war, and the principal lessons to be drawn from the conflict. It concludes with the question: Where to next?
Post-Cold War European Order
The issues involved in the Ukraine conflict can be broken into structural and proximate. The big-picture structural issue is the post-Cold War order in Europe and the place of a shrunken and much-diminished Russia in the European security order and architecture. History did not end with the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War in 1990–91.
Nor was the power status of post-Soviet Russia settled. Great powers rise and fall on the tide of history but we lack the analytical tools to be able to map power transitions with any degree of confidence while they are actually occurring.
The process of transition is not always peaceful and linear, but often jagged with points of friction. As the old and new powers cross each other on the way down and up, they create potential zones of tension that may lead to armed conflict through different pathways. A declining power may fail to recognise or refuse to accept its fading economic dominance, military might and diplomatic clout; persist in expecting and demanding respect due to its former status; and try to make the rising power pay for the perceived lack of respect.
Conversely, the rising but not-yet-fully-risen power may exaggerate the scale and pace of its declining rival’s fall or its own ascent, miscalculate the point of transition and provoke a premature confrontation.
Thus, wars may result from misperceived slights by the fading power or miscalculation of relative strengths by the falling-rising pair of powers. Either way, particularly as the march of history does not respect the prevailing political correctness of the day, economic dynamism and military might remain basic arbiters of the destiny of nations and determine the very definition of who is a great power and who are the also-ran and never-will-be great-power countries.
As noted in a previous article in Global Outlook, Russian leaders from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin believed that Russia had consented to the peaceful terms of the ending of the Cold War on two core understandings: NATO would not expand its borders eastwards and Russia would be incorporated into an inclusive pan-European security architecture.
Instead, waves of NATO enlargement took it to the very doorstep of Russia in an exclusionary post-Cold War order that in due course provoked a strong reaction from Moscow. Or, to put it more provocatively, the problem with NATO’s expansion was not that it expanded eastwards, but that it did not expand far enough east. It stopped at Russia’s borders instead of bringing Russia inside the tent of a fundamentally transformed NATO.
The end result is that the rupture of the Cold War European security order caused by the collapse of Soviet power is a long way from being repaired. For context, it’s worth recalling that the problem of growing German power that had perturbed the existing European balance of power order in the first third of the twentieth century was ‘solved’ by two world wars followed by the division of Germany on either side of the Iron Curtain. During the ‘Long Peace’ of the Cold War, in the North Atlantic theatre the rigid military, political and economic division under US and Soviet imperial umbrellas ran along the spine of Europe.
By contrast the great power competition in the Pacific, which was primarily maritime unlike the chiefly continental contest in Europe, was not settled by the Second World War. Instead, the US, Russia, China and Japan are still jostling in the crowded strategic space. The ongoing Pacific power contest is also more complex, where all four have to readjust to:
The fall from great power status of Japan after World War II;
The fall from great power status of Russia after the Cold War;
The return of China to the historical norm of great power status and its continued rapid rise on all dimensions of power; and
First the absolute dominance and then the relative waning of the US and the regional order constructed around its primacy.
Initially, while Russia was militarily ascendant, many analysts rightly worried about China copying Russia’s Ukraine template. With Russia now militarily on the defensive, it might be time to start worrying about the US exporting the template of provoking a military conflict as a means of diplomatically isolating and militarily weakening the only potential strategic rival in the Pacific.
Rubbing Russia’s Nose in the Dirt of its Historic Defeat
The proximate causes of the war are the place of Ukraine between East and West, NATO’s eastward expansion, President Vladimir Putin’s lament of Soviet collapse as a catastrophe and Russian revanchism, and his desire to exploit the debacle of US withdrawal from Afghanistan and perceptions of President Joe Biden as a cognitively challenged weakling. It took two world wars to make the transition from the UK to the US as the global hegemon, with the Soviet Union as a pretend peer power to contest US hegemony after 1945. The end of the Cold War set in motion the implosion of the Soviet Union with accompanying impoverishment and collapse of Russian power.
Russia’s unchecked continued decline and loss of power, influence, economic weight, diplomatic heft and status has provided cover to the West’s neglect of satisfactory arrangements for Russia’s place in Europe.
Instead, Russia’s nose was rubbed repeatedly in the dirt of its historic defeat with the ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, the contemptuous dismissal of its interests and concerns in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Syria and, most consequentially, around its Western borders as NATO inched ever closer. Sweden and Finland joining NATO—not a cause but a direct consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—will only intensify Russian perceptions of growing strategic encirclement by a hostile military alliance.
Gareth Evans recalls that, shortly after leaving office, former president Bill Clinton said, as the top dog in the world, the US faced a fundamental choice. It could make every effort to stay top dog. Or it could use its unchallengeable dominance to create a world in which it was comfortable living when no longer top dog. The same argument was expressed less crisply in a speech at Yale University in 2003: “We should be trying to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour that we would like to live in when we’re no longer the military, political, economic superpower in the world.”
Unfortunately, the US—including Clinton’s own administration in the Balkans—failed to heed the wisdom of this analysis, and the rest is living history in which we are still trapped. It is a truth, albeit not one universally acknowledged, that behaviour by others inconsistent with social norms and professed values is condemned as immoral and hypocritical, but similar discrepancies in our own conduct are rationalised as understandable prioritisation in the face of multiple goals.
In 1999, sickened by Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s record of brutality in the Balkans and evasions and deceit in dealings with the Europeans and the UN, the US decided on ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo. Following the Serb rejection of an ultimatum not crafted for acceptance, NATO began bombing Serb military facilities throughout Kosovo and Yugoslavia on 24 March 1999. Belgrade bitterly denounced NATO strikes as illegal aggression. Its traditional ally Russia strongly opposed NATO’s war against Yugoslavia while China was deeply wounded by the ‘accidental’ NATO bombing of its embassy in Belgrade.
The UN was essentially sidelined and the demonstration of Russian impotence as Serbia surrendered on 9 June 1999 was an international public humiliation that scarred that generation of Russian leaders.
Fifteen years later the Kosovo ‘precedent’ was hurled at US and European criticism of Russia’s actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine by President Putin in March and October 2014, and echoed by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who in 1999 was Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1994–2004). The brittleness of international institutional checks on the exercise of American power to attack a sovereign UN member state in violation of international and UN Charter law was brutally demonstrated again in Iraq in 2003. It’s still not clear to this analyst that NATO countries fully grasp the long-term damage these precedents caused to the UN-centric normative architecture of global governance.
In Libya in 2011, all five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) objected strongly to the shift from the politically neutral posture of civilian protection to the partial goal of assisting the rebels and pursuing regime change. The price of NATO excesses in Libya was paid by Syrians as China and Russia resumed the double veto of several draft resolutions.
China and Russia remained adamantly opposed to authorisation of any international action without host state consent and to any resolution that could set in train a sequence of events leading to Security Council Resolution 1973-type authorisation for outside military operations in Syria. As well as a civil war, the Syrian crisis was also about relations with Iran, Russia, and China. With Russian economic interests in Libya ignored in the post-Gaddafi years, Syria was the last remaining Russian sphere of interest and influence in the Arab world that intersected also with the Sunni-Shia divide in the region.
The strategic and economic imperatives behind Russia’s Syria policy included Russian arms sales to Syria, the reopening of a Russian naval supply base at Tartus, fears of a loss of international credibility if an ally was abandoned under pressure from abroad and a sense of frustration and humiliation at how Resolution 1973 was abused to effect regime change in Libya.
In addition, Moscow’s opposition also reflected a rejection of armed domestic confrontation backed by international enablers and a conflict of political approaches, with Russia and China holding that the Security Council is not in the business of imposing the parameters of an internal political settlement on member states and dictating to them who stays in power and who must go.
The bitter dispute over NATO enlargement to include an expanding number of former Warsaw Pact countries is best understood in the context of the structural factors at play after the Cold War ended. To the leading Western powers, NATO enlargement was a natural adjustment to the realities of the post-Cold War balance of power and the historical antipathy among eastern Europeans towards Russia. To a Russia that does not see itself as a defeated and exhausted great power, it was a threat to core security interests that had to be confronted and checked. The only question was when and where. The prospect of Ukraine joining NATO answered the last question.
To a disinterested observer outside the NATO–Russia conflict, it’s striking how most Western analysts refuse to concede the direct parallels between Russia’s hostility to potential NATO missiles based in Ukraine and the US willingness to risk nuclear war in 1962 because of the threat of Soviet missiles in nearby Cuba.
More recently, the British columnist Peter Hitchens, who was witness to the collapse of the Soviet empire as a foreign correspondent based in Moscow, sketches an analogy with a hypothetical scenario involving Canada. Imagine the province of Quebec has seceded from Canada, its elected government is overthrown in a coup in which Chinese diplomats are actively involved and a pro-Beijing regime is installed instead, English-speaking Quebecois are subjected to increasingly repressive discrimination, and Quebec’s growing commercial relations with China are followed by a military alliance that results in Chinese missiles being sited in Montreal.
The US would no more shrug this off as a matter for China and Quebec as two sovereign states than Russia could accept what was happening in Ukraine.
Conflict Parties
The second question is who are the conflict parties. The immediate parties are Russia and Ukraine, with neighbouring eastern European states involved to varying degrees in funnelling arms (Poland) and as staging posts (Belarus). But the main conflict parties are Russia and the US-led West.
In a very real sense, Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War. This explains the ambivalence of most non-Western countries. They are no less offended by Russia’s war of aggression. But they also have considerable sympathy for the argument that NATO was insensitively provocative in expanding to Russia’s very borders.
A study published on 20 October from Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy provides details on the extent to which the West has become isolated from opinion in the rest of the world on perceptions of China and Russia. The 38-page study spanned 137 countries representing 97 per cent of the world’s population. In Western democracies, 75 and 87 percent of people hold negative views of China and Russia, respectively. But among the 6.3 billion people who live outside the West, positive views dominate: 70 per cent towards China and 66 per cent towards Russia. On Russia, positive perceptions range from 62 to 68 to 75 per cent in Southeast Asia, Francophone Africa and South Asia, respectively (p. 2). How can a democratic government in India not reflect such perceptions?
That said, the survey also shows that the number of countries with more favourable views of the US greatly exceeds those with favourable views of Russia and China. Just 15 countries hold a favourable view of Russia and China which is at least a 15 percentage points higher than their view of the US, compared to 64 countries (including India, Australia, Japan, South Korea—but not New Zealand) that hold the same minimum margin of favourable views of the US (pp. 8–9).
Given its history and geopolitics, the place of Kyiv in Russia’s cultural and national identity, and the strategic importance of Crimea for Russia’s security, neither a Russia with a ruler other than Putin, nor indeed a democratic Putin and Russia, would have reacted differently to the challenge to core interests posed by Ukrainian developments in 2014. Nor would a US with Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon in the White House, instead of a wimpish Barack Obama (as caricatured by American forever wars hawks), have confronted a heavily nuclear-armed Russia’s move to retake Crimea (‘gifted’ to Ukraine voluntarily by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954). Yet, in December 2021, NATO brusquely rejected Russia’s call for the 2008 declaration on NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine to be rescinded. “NATO’s relationship with Ukraine is going to be decided by the 30 NATO allies and Ukraine, no one else,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.
A great power does not retreat forever. Russia is a traditional European great power that was comprehensively defeated in the Cold War. The West has treated it as if it had been militarily defeated and conquered. Instead, it reacted like a wounded great power when NATO expanded its borders to the limits of Russia’s territory, betraying Moscow’s understandings on the terms of its acquiescence to Cold War defeat.
Even so, the 2014 crisis did not portend a new Cold War. There was no prospect of Russia reemerging as a global military challenger to the US any time soon, nor posing an ideological challenge to democracy, nor resurrecting the command model of socialist economics to counter the dominant market principles.
In terms of classical realism and balance-of-power politics, Ukraine’s actions were dangerously provocative to its great power neighbour and Russia’s reactions were entirely predictable in its core sphere of influence. Yet, American impotence neither reflected its true power nor was it an authentic test of US credibility or will to act when its vital interests are under threat.
That said, no one can credibly claim that Russia did not warn the West to cease and desist. At the NATO–Russia Council in Bucharest in April 2008, an angry Putin was reported to have warned President George W. Bush that were Ukraine to join NATO, Russia would encourage the separation of eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
Speaking at the Valdai Club in Sochi on 24 October 2014, Putin delivered an extraordinarily tough diatribe against Washington. In his initial 40-minute address and then in the Q&A that lasted for over an hour, Putin insisted that US policies, not Russia, had torn apart the existing rules of global order and brought chaos and instability by violating international law and ignoring international institutions when inconvenient.
The Ukraine crisis was the result of ‘a coup d’état carried out with the support’ of Western powers. They were also short-sighted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, such that Americans ‘are constantly fighting the consequences of their own policies, throw all their effort into addressing the risks they themselves have created, and pay an ever-greater price.’
Moreover, ‘unilateral diktat and imposing one’s own models’ leads to conflict escalation and the growing spread of chaos with the authority vacuum quickly filled by neo-fascists and Islamic radicals. The “period of unipolar domination has convincingly demonstrated that having only one power centre does not make global processes more manageable.” Rejecting charges of wanting to recreate a Russian empire, Putin insisted: “While respecting the interests of others, we simply want for our own interests to be taken into account and for our position to be respected.”
Possible Outcomes
The third question is the likely trajectories of the conflict in the new year and beyond. In his influential book, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (1977), Hedley Bull argued that war has traditionally performed certain functions in international relations as the arbiter of the creation, survival, and elimination of actors in the system, especially the major powers; of the ebb and flow of political frontiers; and of the rise and decline of regimes. If Russia should ultimately prevail in its key war aims in Ukraine and reassert its great power status, NATO as well as Ukraine will be the big losers. If Russia is defeated and permanently weakened, Ukraine and eastern and northern Europeans will rejoice, Ukraine will recover and prosper with substantial Western assistance, and NATO will emerge as unchallengeable in the North Atlantic.
The exact course, costs, and battlefield ebbs and flows of the war are impossible to work out for independent observers. As always, all conflict parties are deeply involved in propaganda, highlighting their own successes and exaggerating enemy setbacks, casualties and alleged atrocities while reversing the equation in the other direction. It seems reasonably safe to infer that Moscow badly miscalculated its initial ability to shock and intimidate Kyiv into submission with a surprise blitzkrieg, did achieve significant military successes in eastern and southern Ukraine in the early period, but has suffered substantial reverses in recent months as Ukraine has regrouped with more lethal and substantial Western military assistance and training.
Yet, it is hard to say with any confidence if one side is clearly winning or if the war has entered an attrition phase. Retired British Lt.-Gen. Jonathon Riley notes that Russia committed under ten percent of its available combat troops to Ukraine, indicating firstly, that its war aims were always limited and secondly that it retains the ability to regroup and go on the offensive against selected targets. John Mearsheimer is almost certainly right to say that had Putin’s goal been to invade, conquer, occupy and incorporate all of Ukraine into a greater Russia, the initial force would have had to be closer to 1.5 million than 190,000.
If Russia fails to get its preferred outcome of a neutral Ukraine, it might instead aim for a dysfunctional rump state with a wrecked economy and infrastructure. Putin’s political aim might also be to break Europe’s political resolve and fracture the North Atlantic community’s cohesion and unity with ‘rising prices, energy shortages, lost jobs and the social impact of trying to absorb’ up to 10 million Ukrainian refugees, as Gideon Rachman put it in the Financial Times on 28 March 2022.
Even so, the asymmetrical equation remains. As the undoubted aggressor with pretensions to great power status, Russia will lose by not winning while Ukraine as the weaker object of aggression will win by not losing.
There’s unlikely to be any settlement before a mutually hurting stalemate is reached—the point where each side believes that the cost of continuing with conflict will exceed the pain of a negotiated compromise that meets bottom lines without satisfying all war aims.
Russia has imposed heavier costs on Europe by weaponising its dominance of energy supplies than it has suffered from sanctions. Moreover, after the experience of Western sanctions in 2014 when Crimea was annexed, Russia had already built its own parallel payments systems to work around the global Visa and Mastercard credit card dominance.
With aroused nationalism on both sides—fuelled in Ukraine by naked Russian aggression and in Russia by the conviction that the West’s real goal is not to protect Ukraine but to destroy Russia as a functioning country—and Ukraine winning battles but defeat of Russia still a long way off, a slow and gradual escalation is still the more likely short- and medium-term trajectory.
Indeed, as winter set in this had already started happening, with intensified Russian attacks on critical Ukrainian infrastructure and strikes by Ukraine ever deeper into Russia proper. And this is where the probability of a nuclear endgame is non-trivial and why ‘realists’ like Mearsheimer still fear that the various conflict parties are trapped in a game of nuclear Russian roulette.
The US has managed to bleed Russia heavily by arming Ukraine without putting its troops into battle on land, sea or air. But the scale and speed of Ukraine’s military successes in turn means that Kyiv is less amenable to US pressure to compromise on its absolutist war aims of pushing Russia out of every corner of Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders.
Ukraine has surprised friends and foes alike by the success of its resistance. Putin has exposed the hollowness of Russia’s image as a formidable military power. Portrayals of Russia as a threat to Europe more broadly will be laughed out of court after this. The Ukraine war has highlighted flaws and shortcomings in Russian arms, technological sophistication, doctrine, training, logistics, and integration of land, air and sea capabilities; that is, in its combat worthiness on the battlefield.
But NATO military stocks have also been seriously depleted and the weaponisation of trade, finance and energy has, on balance thus far, proven costlier to Western peoples than to Russians. One of the perennial puzzles of sanctions as a tool of coercive diplomacy is how the morally righteous countries ignore the fundamental reality that every economic transaction has a buyer as well as a seller and criminalising the transaction for political reasons inflicts pain on buyers as well, including innocent third parties outside the conflict parties.
Counteracting persistent Western criticisms that India had somehow compromised on moral principles in sourcing oil imports from Russia, India’s Petroleum Minister (and former Permanent Representative to the UN) Hardeep Singh Puri made two key arguments in a CNN interview on 31 October. First, he pointed out that Europe’s purchase of Russian energy in one afternoon equated to India’s energy imports from Russia in three months. In other words: Physician, heal thyself first.
Second, he insisted that India’s primary moral duty is to its own consumers. That is, where for high-income populations in the West rising energy prices impose an inconvenience, amidst widespread poverty in India they can have life and death consequences.
All that said, the risk is if the West pursues outright defeat and humiliation of Russia, Putin might yet resort to the use of nuclear weapons that will end in catastrophe for everyone. All sides have been extremely careful thus far to avoid any direct Russia–NATO clash. But will NATO be seduced by the temptation of regime change in Moscow, or by Ukraine’s call for this, into rejecting opportunities for an end to the conflict before costs begin to exceed gains?
Even short of that, it is hard to see Russia giving up Crimea: it is too important from a purely strategic point of view. For the present, though, both the timing of when to commence serious negotiations as well as the terms of a settlement that is minimally acceptable to all the main conflict parties will depend on the course of the war. Typically, negotiated ceasefires and peace agreements are preceded by intensified fighting as all sides seek to create facts on the ground to strengthen their bargaining positions when talks begin around the conference table.
The Lessons to be Drawn So Far
What lessons can be drawn from the war so far already? Among the most important is the limited utility of nuclear weapons as tools of coercion and blackmail. Russia has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal (5,889 warheads compared to 5,244 held by the US), Ukraine has none.
Despite this, and contrary to everyone’s expectations, Ukraine refused to be cowed by Putin’s nuclear-tipped bellicose rhetoric and fought back with great skill and grim determination. In recent months it has gained the battlefield momentum. Nor has the nuclear reality prevented the West from supplying Ukraine with extremely lethal and highly effective armaments.
To date, political, economic and reputational costs to Russia of serial threats exceed initial battlefield gains. A good example of reputational damage is the UN General Assembly Resolution of 12 October, passed with a 143-5 majority (with 35 abstentions), demanding that Russia reverse course on ‘attempted illegal annexation’ and urging countries not to recognise this. This was the biggest anti-Russian vote in the UN last year and captured widespread anger at the attempt to change international borders through the use of military force.
Items up for negotiation whenever talks begin will include: NATO enlargement; Ukraine’s sovereignty and security; Crimea; and the status of the Donbas region (eastern Ukraine) dominated by ethnic Russians. Both Ukraine and Russia have justifiable interests and grievances tied up in all four issues. Russia’s overriding goal most likely remains the recreation of Ukraine as a firmer geopolitical buffer state between NATO and Russia. But the incorporation of eastern Ukraine (east of the Dnieper River) into greater Russia means that any future war with NATO will be fought on Ukrainian territory and not Russian.
Absent a decisive defeat of a heavily nuclear-armed Russia, this goalpost will not shift. This is not a matter of ‘face’ but of hard strategic logic. The changing contours of the Ukraine war have likely concentrated President Putin’s mind on the leadership costs of failure. The threat to his hold on power and possibly to his freedom and life is greater from nationalist hardliners than from liberal Russians.
Recent Russian military reverses confirm that greater numbers are of little consequence against technological superiority, training, leadership, and morale. In addition, the year has also demonstrated the limited utility of war itself in modern conditions and reconfirmed the extreme unpredictability of the course of conflict and the outcome of war. The demonstration of the poor performance of Russian arms on the battlefield will almost certainly cost Moscow dear in falling arms exports. The worry is that Ukraine might have become a profitable testing ground for Western weapons manufacturers.
Given Washington’s well-known addiction to regime change stretching back several decades—from the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953 to the pro-Russian Yanukovych administration in Ukraine in 2014—why would Putin trust any assurances of peaceful intent behind NATO troops and missiles based inside Ukraine?
Even though the quid pro quo was deliberately buried at the time, the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis was made possible because the US agreed to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from NATO ally Turkey. This long-standing belief among many analysts including the present author was confirmed on 28 October 2022 with the release of 12 documents at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
Where to Next?
On 6 November, The Wall Street Journal reported that US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan had been in periodic contact with top Russian officials to keep channels of communications open and to reduce the risks of escalation and a wider Russia–NATO conflict. Sullivan then flew to Kyiv to assess Ukraine’s readiness to explore a diplomatic solution. This was followed by a meeting in Turkey on 14 November between CIA Director William Burns, himself a former US ambassador to Russia, and Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency.
The White House said they discussed the use of nuclear weapons. Ukraine was briefed in advance of the meeting. Two days later, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned that full Ukrainian victory over Russia remained unlikely because Moscow still retained significant combat power. This helps to explain why the US had called on Russia and Ukraine, right after Russia’s retreat from Kherson under Ukrainian assault, to enter into peace negotiations.
On 10 November, General Milley gave an estimate of about 100,000 Russian and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded in the war, with another 40,000 civilian deaths. But if both sides have come to the conclusion that the other cannot be defeated on the battlefield, then demanding de facto surrender as the condition for a peace agreement makes no sense.
Instead, they need to find opportunities and sites for diplomatic overtures. If negotiations are the most sensible and perhaps the only way to bring the war to a close, then is it not better to begin talks sooner rather than later and limit the military and civilian casualties? Despite the unassailable logic of this argument, there’s been little indication that the conflict parties have been seriously exploring off-ramps.
Just as prudent nations under wise leaders prepare for war while at peace, so too they must prepare for peace even in the midst of armed conflict. Battles won and lost—hard military facts on the ground—will determine the cartographic maps that delineate Russia and Ukraine’s new borders, perhaps with some tweaking in post-ceasefire negotiations to take into account demographic and other factors.
That will still leave open other big questions to be addressed: the nature and political orientation of the regime in Kyiv; the status of Crimea; the place of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine; Ukraine’s relations with Russia, NATO and the EU; the identity of guarantors and nature of guarantees, if any, for Ukraine; the timing of exit from sanctions for Russia.
The most sobering thought of all is this: For genuine and lasting peace in Europe instead of another armed truce pending a fresh flare-up of hostilities, either Russia must be decisively defeated on the battlefield and finished as a great power for the foreseeable future, or else Europe and the US must experience once again the horrors of war on their own soil.
According to a report from the Congressional Research Service on 8 March 2022, between 1798 and February 2022, the US has deployed force overseas a total of nearly 500 times, with more than half of these occurring after the end of the Cold War.
The brutal reality that very few Western commentators and analysts are prepared to voice is that no other country comes even remotely close to the United States for the number of military bases and troops stationed overseas and the frequency and intensity of its engagement in foreign military conflicts, so much so that Richard Cullen suggests the Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of Attack as a cost-free means to elevating the intimidation level; the readiness with which it weaponises trade, finance, and the role of the dollar as the international currency; and its history of regime change by means fair and foul.
Many countries in the rest of the world now also perceive the willingness of Western powers to weaponise the dominance of international finance and governance structures as a potential threat to their own sovereignty and security.
Interest in the transition to a multipolar currency system by developing countries and emerging markets has been spurred by the addictive weaponisation of the dollar to pursue US foreign policy objectives. It is in their long-term interest to reduce exposure to egregious US monetary policy through efforts to de-dollarise trade, sign bilateral currency swap agreements, and diversify investments into alternative currencies.
Sachchidanand Shukla, chief economist with the Mahindra & Mahindra group, wrote in The Indian Express in March: ‘The “de-dollarisation”by several central banks is imminent, driven by the desire to insulate them from geopolitical risks, where the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency can be used as an offensive weapon.’
However, while there will be renewed interest in the de-dollarisation of global trade and finance, the practicality of the efforts is yet to be determined. In the long term, we may experience a new world of currency disorder regardless of the military and political outcomes of the Ukraine war. The impressive Western unity therefore stands in stark contrast to the sharp divide from the rest.
Originally published as Toda Policy BriefNo. 147 (January 2023)
Pro-Ukrainian Russian fighters at a press conference after completing their Belgorod Oblast raid. Photo courtesy the Ukrainian Independent Information Agency (UNIAN)/Wikimedia Commons.
The war between Russia and Ukraine escalated further this week when two armed groups crossed from Ukraine into the Russian province of Belgorod and briefly occupied a village before being driven out by Russian troops. According to the Russian government, 70 “terrorists” were killed in the process.
What makes this episode unusual is not the fact that it took place on Russian soil but that the “Ukrainians” in question appear in fact to have been Russians, albeit Russians fighting on the side of Ukraine. They were members of two groups, the Freedom of Russia Legion (FRL) and the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), the latter of whom had undertaken a smaller, but somewhat similar, incursion into the Bryansk region of Russia in March of this year. The CBC reported the story as “Freedom Fighters Seize Small Part of Russia.” As so often, though, the reality is rather more complex than this headline suggests.
Little is known about the FRL, other than that it was founded by former Russian Parliamentary Deputy Ilya Ponomarenko. The organization’s Telegram channel has stated that its aim is “the preservation of a one and indivisible Russia within its 1991 borders,” a slogan clearly echoing that of the anti-Bolshevik White army of General Denikin in the Russian Civil War, “Russia, One and Indivisible.” One Legion member interviewed by CNN declared himself a “devoted member” of the Russian Orthodox Church and stated that “he misses the Tsarist era which predated the Soviet Union.” All this suggests a somewhat conservative and nationalist disposition.
The Russian Volunteer Corps is much more radical. Its leader, Denis Kapustin (who nowadays goes by the alias Denis Nikitin), is a one-time football hooligan whom the Guardian newspaper describes as “a Russian neo-Nazi who claims he once kept a framed photograph of Joseph Goebbels in his bedroom.” According to the Financial Times, Kapustin/Nikitin also goes by the nom-de-guerre “Rex” in honour of “his white nationalist clothing brand White Rex,” and is “a former mixed martial arts fighter with ties to neo-Nazis and white nationalists across the Western world.” In 2019, his far-right activities earned him a 10-year ban from the European Schengen zone. Since then he has lived in Ukraine.
The RVC is overtly ethno-nationalistic. The Russian language has two words for “Russians”—“russkie’ and ‘rossiyane.’ “Russkie” are ethnic Russians. “Rossiyane” are citizens of the Russian Federation, of any ethnicity. In a statement of its aims, the RVC declared: “We are ‘russkie’—we are not ‘rossiyane,’” and argued that the Russian Federation should be a “Russian [russkoe] national state” consisting of “predominantly ethnic Russian regions.”
The involvement of the RVC raises the interesting question of why far-right Russian ethno-nationalists would be fighting on behalf of Ukraine against their own country. According to the narrative commonly peddled by the Western media, Putin and the state he leads are “ultra-nationalist,” even “fascist.” Yet it seems that real Russian fascists don’t like him.
An explanation can be found in a speech Putin made last week in which he discussed the “State National Policy Strategy.” In this he commented that a growing majority of Russians identified first and foremost as citizens (in other words, as Rossiyane) and only secondly as members of this or that ethnic group (such as Russkie). This, said Putin, was a thoroughly good thing. He remarked that:
From generation to generation, our forbears worked together for the good of our common and vast Motherland and multiplied the spiritual heritage of a single state with the diversity of their languages and traditions, and formed its unparalleled multiethnic and multi-religious culture. Our state was built around values of multiethnic harmony. This is the bedrock foundation underlying our consolidation. … Our adversaries, that I mentioned earlier, people with neo-colonial mindsets—halfwits, in fact—are unable to realize that diversity makes us stronger.
Putin has said this sort of thing many times in the past. His government has been quite intolerant of Russian nationalism, fearing that it might incite ethnic conflict and so destabilize the country. In the 2010s, many Russian nationalists fell foul of laws outlawing extremist speech and were arrested. As a result, they tended to view Putin decidedly negatively. Following the invasion of Ukraine, some changed their minds and decided that Putin was after all on their side. Others like Nikitin, however, seized the opportunity to take up arms against him. For them, a smaller but ethnically more Russian state is preferable to a larger but more diverse one. Imperialistic projects, such as the Russian attack on Ukraine, are consequently viewed as undesirable.
While this may explain why members of the Russian far-right are willing to fight for Ukraine, it doesn’t explain why the Ukrainian state views them as desirable allies. They are, after all, not particularly interested in Ukraine itself. The reason may be purely pragmatic and cynical, based on the principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Contrary to Russian claims, the Ukrainian state is far from being fascist. Nevertheless, since the 2014 Maidan revolution, it has been more than willing to tolerate the far-right for the practical reason that it provides a strongly motivated source of military manpower. Likewise, the Russian militias help to fill the ranks.
The Russians also serve a political purpose. The Ukrainian government regularly says that it is fighting a purely defensive war, and is not interested in invading Russia. But launching attacks on Russian territory helps to divert Russian resources from other fronts and can be seen as demonstrating to the Russian people that Moscow is incapable of defending them. The Ukrainian authorities have rather implausibly claimed that the FRL and RVC are unconnected to them, and have described the attack on Belgorod province as an uprising of the Russian people within Russia. The Russian militias constitute a mechanism through which Kyiv can carry out such actions while denying that it is.
Kyiv’s previous dalliances with the far-right have produced short term practical military benefits, but have arguably been politically counterproductive in that they have helped to alienate part of the Ukrainian population while giving Moscow an opportunity to portray Ukraine as fascist. The same dynamic may now repeat itself. On the one hand, the attacks on Belgorod provide some tactical advantages to Ukraine. On the other hand, they enable the Russian authorities to paint Ukraine as a “terrorist state” and strengthen Moscow’s propaganda narrative that Kyiv is in league with neo-Nazis. Rather than weakening support in Russia for the war, these attacks may therefore have the opposite effect.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.
Monday May 15th marks 68 years since the signing of one of the least heralded but most important agreements of the 40-year Cold War.
The State Treaty for the Re-Establishment of an Independent and Democratic Austria, otherwise known as the Austrian State Treaty, was signed by representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, France and Great Britain in Vienna on May 15, 1955.
The Treaty ended Austria’s 17 years of foreign occupation (first, by the Nazis from 1938-1945, and then, the Big Four from 1945-1955) and set the stage for its independence and neutral status.
In his message to the U.S. Senate requesting ratification of the treaty, President Dwight D. Eisenhower noted that “The Austrian State Treaty represents the culmination of an effort by the Western Powers extending over a period of more than eight years to bring about Soviet agreement to grant Austria its freedom.”
It should be noted that those eight years were among the most fraught of the first Cold War. Yet, only a handful of years after Stalin’s brutal consolidation of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe; the Soviet Union’s detonation of a hydrogen bomb; the Korean War; and only a year before the brutal Soviet crackdown in Budapest, Austria’s occupying powers were able to come to a peaceful modus vivendi over the status of Austria, setting the stage for Austria’s successful postwar transformation.
In the years preceding the Treaty’s signing, one of the principal obstacles that needed to be overcome (along with the issue of Soviet compensation) was the issue of Austrian neutrality. In a bid to win Soviet approval of the Treaty, the Austrian foreign minister sent a message to Moscow via neutral India, that Austria would refrain from joining any military bloc — East or West. Eisenhower initially objected, worrying that the West Germans would follow suit and scuttle American plans for its rearmament and incorporation into NATO. This issue, however, was put to bed in October 1954 with the signing of the Protocol to the North Atlantic Treaty on the Accession of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The Treaty and the accompanying declaration of neutrality was unquestionably good for Austria. As the late historian of Europe Tony Judt pointed out 40 years after the Treaty’s signing, Austria’s Cold War was marked by a “remarkable political continuity.” Upon declaring itself “permanently neutral” Austria transformed into “a stable and prosperous country at the center of Europe.”
Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in February 2022, nuclear experts Thomas Shea and Kateryna Pavlova observed that the Treaty “has proved remarkably successful. Today, Vienna hosts well-respected international organizations like the United Nations and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The city was deemed the “most livable” for 10 years running on a survey that compared world cities on political, social and economic climate, medical care, education, and infrastructure conditions.”
Puzzlingly, Washington and its hawkish allies in Europe have again and again rejected the eminently sensible idea of neutrality in favor of a dogmatic insistence on NATO membership for Ukraine. Though interestingly, according to the journalist Ben Aris, negotiators representing Ukraine in a round of diplomacy conducted in April 2022 were willing to concede to Moscow’s demand to keep out of NATO in exchange for “bi-lateral security agreements with all its Western partners —something the Russian delegates accepted.”
And whatever one thinks of the motives, leadership and domestic political arrangements of Russia, Austria’s revitalization in the decades following the signing of the Treaty suggests there was (and is) a good deal of merit to the idea of Ukrainian neutrality. As The Quincy Institute’s own Anatol Lieven has observed:
“A declaration of neutrality has generally been treated, both in the West and in Ukraine itself, as a colossal and dangerous sacrifice by Ukraine. But modern European history does not altogether bear this out. Being drawn into great-power rivalry may not be such a wonderful thing as the U.S. foreign and security establishment — safely isolated from any resulting horrors — tends to imagine. And if sufficient guarantees are in place, neutrality can be a great boon for a nation.”
As the war in Ukraine drags on into its second year with little end in sight, the Biden administration and its Western partners could do worse than familiarize themselves with this too often overlooked success story from the first Cold War.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin travelled to Beijing for a Sino-Russian business forum to boost rapidly developing economic ties on May 24.
The Sino-Russian business forum is a “good platform to strengthen co-operation between Russia and China,” Prime Minister of China Li Qiang told the forum participants during the plenary session.
“China is ready to further expansion of economic and trade exchanges with Russia and co-operation development, both in terms of quality and quantity. This forum provides a good platform to business communities of the two countries to strengthen exchanges and co-operation,” the Chinese prime minister said, cited by the China Central Television.
Mishustin arrived with a large delegation that included a number of Russian tycoons subject to Western sanctions, including from the key fertiliser, steel and mining sectors. Russian exports of oil, gas and raw materials to China have soared since sanctions were imposed over a year ago.
Amongst the delegation were vice-premiers Dmitry Grigorenko, Dmitry Chernyshenko and Denis Manturov, several ministers, including the head of the Ministry of Transport, Vitaly Savelyev, and the head of the Ministry of Agriculture, Dmitry Patrushev. Amongst the businessmen were the owners or heads of the largest enterprises: Alexei Mordashov (Severstal), Andrey Guryev (Phosagro), German Gref (Sberbank), Andrey Kostin (VTB), Igor Shuvalov (VEB) and others.
However, in a sign of the lopsided nature of Russia’s relations with China and the threat of sanctions, the Chinese delegation was thin. There were no top government officials and no big-hitting Chinese businessmen in the corresponding Chinese delegation.
“The Chinese are warmly welcomed, but they are very afraid of sanctions. Even those big businessmen who wanted and were ready to speak publicly were not allowed to the meeting by the official authorities – they do not want to take even the smallest risk. No offence – their position is clear,” one of the forum participants told Vedomosti.
Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, who was part of the delegation, said Russian energy supplies to China would increase by 40% year on year in 2023, Russian state media reported. China has begun to import record amounts of Russian crude oil since Europe imposed restrictions on the import of Russian oil.
The Russian prime minister is scheduled to hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his counterpart Li to discuss boosting trade and economic ties, with special attention on industry, energy, transport industry and agriculture.
“Amid today’s global economic recovery we are facing numerous challenges, as uncertainty and instability are mounting. China is committed to high-quality development and top-level openness. We are ready to strengthen our mutually beneficial co-operation with all countries, including Russia,” Li said.
Beijing and Moscow have been drawn together by rising tensions in recent years as both countries have come under increasing pressure from the US. Those tensions erupted into war 15 months ago when Russia marched into Ukraine. Since then China has given Moscow limited support as Beijing tries to avoid bringing down sanctions on itself, but broadly backs President Vladimir Putin’s call for a “multi-polar” world. The relationship went to a new level after Xi went Moscow in March to show solidarity with Putin. Some analysts took that meeting as an act of open defiance by Beijing and an explicit challenge to the US’ claim to be the global leader.
The unintended consequence of the extreme sanctions regime imposed by the West on Russia has been to unsettle the Global South, which is now being drawn into the BRICS bloc led by China and Russia. A key element of that is to de-dollarise international trade, with the yuan as the leading contender to replace the dollar.
Sino-Russian trade soaring
Russia has become China’s seventh partner in terms of trade turnover in the first quarter of 2023, according to Mishustin.
“China has been Russia’s biggest trade partner for 13 consecutive years, with the scale of mutual investment surging,” Li added.
Speaking at a plenary meeting of the Russian-Chinese business forum in Shanghai, Mishustin highlighted the significant growth in bilateral trade between the two countries.
“China has been Russia’s main trading partner for more than ten years. And in the first three months of this year, our positions in a similar Chinese list have also changed – they have risen from tenth to seventh place,” Mishustin said.
The volume of mutual trade between Russia and China has been steadily increasing, with a growth rate of about a third annually in 2021-2022.
In 2022, the trade turnover reached approximately $190bn, and the momentum has continued into 2023. Mishustin reported that the turnover in the first quarter of 2023 had risen by almost a quarter, reaching $52bn.
Work is also underway to expand mutual access to agricultural markets. “Last year, agricultural trade increased 42% to $7bn. In the first quarter of this year, exports to the Chinese market grew by another 91% (from last year) to $2.4bn,” the Economics Ministry said ahead of Mishustin’s trip to China.
“I am sure that this year we will fulfil the task set by the heads of state, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Xi Jinping, to bring mutual trade to $200bn,” Mishustin stressed.
China’s foreign trade turnover in 2022 amounted to $6.31 trillion, with the United States as its main partner with a trade volume of $759bn. Following the US, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are China’s other major trading partners, with turnovers exceeding $300bn with each country.
However, the improvement of logistics infrastructure remains a key challenge that Russia and China need to address. Chinese Premier Li Qiang emphasised the importance of enhancing logistics infrastructure during the plenary meeting.
Mishustin also noted this problem. “Russia and China share a long land border. And its infrastructure needs to be improved,” the prime minister said. To do this, according to him, it will be necessary to increase the capacity of transport arteries, modernise checkpoints, expand air traffic and unlock the potential of the Northern Sea Route as the shortest route from Asia to Europe.
As Russia and China aim to strengthen their economic partnership and overcome logistical challenges, further investments in infrastructure and collaborative efforts will be crucial to sustain and enhance the bilateral trade between the two nations.
The Russian Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Commerce of China signed a memorandum on deepening co-operation in the services trade sphere, the press service of the Russian ministry said the same day, Tass reports.
As a result of negotiations between Russia and China, five documents were signed in the field of trade, medicine, sports and intellectual property, according to a Russian government statement.
The memorandum on deepening investment co-operation in the sphere of trade in services was signed by the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China.
Russia’s agricultural organ Rosselkhoznadzor and the Main Customs Administration secured the agreements with protocols on phytosanitary requirements for grain and plant materials exported from Russia for the medical region of China.
The prime ministers of Russia and China will hold another meeting at the end of this year to compare notes and “synchronise their watches,” Mishustin said during a meeting with Chinese President Xi.
“We have agreed to activate the logistical work and mechanisms for holding regular meetings of the heads of government of Russia and China. It encompasses five intergovernmental commissions at the deputy prime ministerial level and more than 80 sector-specific working groups. We will compare notes at the next regular meeting of prime ministers, which will take place at the end of this year,” Mishustin said as reported by Tass.
Separately, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang said that more and more voices are calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine, during a meeting with his Dutch counterpart a day earlier.
“At present, more and more peaceful and rational voices speaking in favour of a ceasefire and an end to hostilities [in Ukraine] can be heard,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry quoted Qin as saying.
