Matthew Blackburn on why Western deep-strike pressure on Russia is unlikely to force a ceasefire
Glenn Diesen interviews political analyst Matthew Blackburn about Western strategy toward Russia.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Matthew Blackburn, a political analyst who publishes in The National Interest and Responsible Statecraft, about the Western strategy of deep strikes into Russian territory as a means of pressuring Moscow toward a ceasefire. Blackburn argues that this strategy rests on a fundamental miscalculation: while rising costs do erode the support of Russia's instrumental, depoliticized majority, that majority lacks the leadership or motivation to translate discontent into political pressure on Putin. He contends that the Europeans are not offering a feasible peace — only a vague ceasefire that ignores the underlying political conflict — and that the standard Western framing of the war as purely autocracy versus democracy prevents any serious analysis of Russian security motivations. Blackburn also argues that Putin's February 2022 operation was a limited war aimed at forcing a diplomatic settlement, not a full-scale invasion, and that misrepresenting its nature has made genuine peace discourse nearly impossible.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The origins and logic of the deep-strike strategy
Glenn Diesen: Today we're joined by Matthew Blackburn, a political analyst who focuses on Russia and the post-Soviet space and who publishes frequently in The National Interest and Responsible Statecraft. It's great to see you again. What I wanted to discuss was one of the articles you wrote published in Responsible Statecraft about the strategy of deep strikes within Russia. The West seems to have a plan to bring the war to Russia, as they keep saying, with deep strikes. This includes targeting commercial targets to hurt the economy, but also to make Russian civil society feel the war. The overall purpose being that Russians should put pressure on the Kremlin to end the war. From my perspective, it does seem like a risky strategy, and there is surprisingly little discussion around it and the assumptions it is based on. A lot of the success depends on what Russia's interests are, and also what Russia's threat perceptions are. What are the domestic political pressures? Putin will balance many things here — many constituencies — and I think a lot of this analysis tends to be lost by simply portraying Putin as a dictator who rules single-handedly, without having to take all of these considerations into play. To start at the beginning, could you outline this strategy of the West with these strikes into the Russian rear — how it's done, what it's supposed to achieve, but also what's missing from this plan or this analysis?
Matthew Blackburn: I think we should start by acknowledging that in all likelihood the plan emerges from Ukraine, not from any European capital or even Washington D.C. It's a response to the failure of the land war — the offensive of 2023. The so-called victory plan is taken to Washington in the months prior to the presidential elections in 2024, and Biden does not agree to it, does not greenlight it. The plan is: Ukraine will give its minerals, Ukraine will get a security guarantee, and they will also get the possibility to launch deep strikes into Russia. Biden didn't want to do it. Trump was made aware of it when he was a presidential candidate in 2024. The plan was potentially supported by the Europeans at that stage — I'm not entirely clear — but it's definitely emerging from Kyiv.
The idea, according to this plan, is that Russia and Putin have fought this war with a nervousness about public opinion, with a concern about political stability and macroeconomic stability. And that if you raise the ante, so to speak, then Russia might fold — if we consider it like a game of poker. In the beginning, of course, this campaign doesn't start straight away. When Trump comes to power in January 2025, it's been very incrementally brought in, as if it's sort of reluctantly, hopefully going to be approved of by Trump — or was it secretly approved of by Trump earlier? We don't know. Trying to understand who is the author of the strategy is not transparent. But by all accounts, Zelensky pushes it, and there's some agency on the Ukrainian side. Zelensky very much has this view of Russia's autocracy — that it's personalized, it's all based on Putin, it's extremely corrupt. He has firsthand knowledge of Russia. He spent a lot of time there as an actor and a comedian, a lot of time in Moscow. He has lots of friends in Moscow and knows people with proximity to the power system in Russia. And he's not completely wrong to say that there are some elements of personalism and corruption in the Putin system. Of course there are.
But to present Putin as a dictator who can suddenly be pressured and will just change his position, and then all of Russia falls into line behind him — that certainly is a simplification. Like any successful politician, especially one who is also a kind of modern-day autocrat, there has to be a successful balancing of interest groups that have different desires and that attempt to influence state policy. Putin has to balance his own very clear ideas of sovereignty and Russia's security, the need for stability, with the demands of elites and also public opinion. That's something he has been able to do — while occasionally resorting to certain repressive and manipulative techniques, but also taking actions which win some support among elites and the population.
Russian public opinion and the limits of pressure
The general idea that you can increase the pain on the Russian population and create pressure on the government is not completely without foundation. If you look at polling data — as we do in this article — and you look at how polling has changed over the course of the war as costs have increased, you do find that those respondents who view the war in more instrumental terms — as a means of achieving a concrete goal, where you spend resources and take some costs but the benefit is that Russia's geopolitical status improves — many Russians don't have a moral or ideological framing of the war. They hear it all the time on the news, but they don't necessarily buy into the civilizationalism, or the Satanist West, or these more esoteric imperial nationalist framings of the war. Those who have that more instrumental framing are also happy to see this war outsourced to the military professionals and to be insulated from the costs. As long as that's the case, they can turn their back on the war and go on with their everyday lives.
Whereas the more moralistic and ideological supporters of the war tend to be activists, volunteers, donating money, actively reading Telegram channels, thinking about the war, becoming thinking and active patriots. And in the process, some of them become critical patriots — they start to ask why Putin wages the war in this way, why it looks dysfunctional, why more resources are needed. So you have a kind of patriotic hawkish constituency, which is a minority of Russians, and then a more disengaged, depoliticized, instrumental majority who do support Putin's war idea. They believe Russia cannot lose. They have a loyalty to their country. But those are the ones who, as costs go up, want to see the war end. Whereas the moralized minority take the opposite view — they want to see the war escalated and fought to a successful conclusion.
Where Western policymakers who support Ukraine's victory plan — or the diminished version of it in 2026 — go wrong is worth underlining. The new victory plan, in contrast to 2024, is now about freezing the lines of contact and having a ceasefire. It's a much more limited idea of victory. But nonetheless, this idea that you increase the costs is based on some truth in relation to public opinion. Where it becomes a miscalculation, in my view, is the assumption that if you disgruntled the instrumental majority, they will then become a factor that will pressure Putin into some kind of climb-down — where he finally says, "Okay, ceasefire. You've got me." That passive, depoliticized, instrumental majority may be disgruntled, but they won't do anything. Because in wartime Russia, as in many other countries at war, there's a lack of leaders who will step in to try and capitalize on that sentiment.
One political party in Russia — perhaps the only one — whose leader, Yavlinsky of the Yabloko party, a marginal liberal party that's been around since the Yeltsin times, getting less than 1% of the vote if I remember correctly, is still a legal party. Yavlinsky has been one of the main people talking about the need to end the war because the costs are too high and there's no need to keep going. There's a suggestion that people in the Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance agree — the so-called economic bloc around Putin who believe the war's costs have spiraled out of control and the economy is going to overheat. There's a good instrumental logic to ending this war. But Yabloko's members have been arrested, and I don't think they're going to be in a position to make a vocal pitch to the Russian population in the forthcoming Duma elections. And I certainly don't think the people in the Ministry of Finance or in the Central Bank are all of a sudden going to start talking loudly about peace and making politicized comments about that.
There are many people inside Putin's top appointments who you might describe as technocrats — actually Western-educated technocrats in many cases — who never use any of this hyper-patriotic ideological discourse and just get on with their work in the government. Like the Prime Minister Mishustin, or even the mayor of Moscow, Sobyanin. But they are silent. They will not lead some kind of pro-peace vocal campaign, and the ones who could have led that have largely left Russia in 2022 — those people who were more willing to take a risk and get out in the street and carry some kind of placard.
Why bombing campaigns historically fail to break the will to fight
So I think that's the major miscalculation: that you can increase the costs and this will force Putin's hand. As many commentators, or anyone with basic knowledge of military history, would know, previous historical attempts to use heavy bombing campaigns to break the opponent's will to fight have failed. Many people would look at Germany and Japan as failures in World War II, but we can also look at North Vietnam and North Korea. They were heavily bombed, with very high civilian casualties, and their will didn't bend — far from it. In many ways it was strengthened, driving them to fight to the end and make no compromise. In North Korea's case, they did compromise when China and the USSR forced their hand, whereas North Vietnam did not really compromise — they got what they wanted at the end of their struggle.
Those are a few of the points I would make about why this whole discourse on how Ukraine is going to be able to pressure Russia into a ceasefire just doesn't look very realistic. And of course, the other side of the coin is what's going on in Ukraine right now, which is always missed in these comments. They never want to do a straightforward comparison. But you have to do a straightforward comparison because in a war of attrition, it's like two boxers going past round ten. But the difference between boxing and a war of attrition is there's no bell. It just goes for as long as it takes for one of the boxers to fall down. This is where we have to look at both boxers and see what condition they're in to have an understanding of who is going to give in to the pressure first.
The problem of one-sided analysis and what peace actually means
Glenn Diesen: This is one of the things that worries me as well. We don't really have a clear objective analysis of the damages on both sides, and it's built into the language. If one argues that the Ukrainians are taking higher casualties — and you can point to any numbers, like with the drones or artillery — then immediately it would be dismissed because it would be seen as pro-Russian, as undermining belief in the war and public support for the funding. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have a way of building narratives which insulate themselves from facts.
The possibility of growing dissent within Russia — I mentioned Grigory Yavlinsky. I met him at the Vatican last year and I'm familiar with his views. But I often ask: we have these slogans — bring the Russians to the negotiation table, they have to accept peace — but what does the end of the war actually mean? What does peace mean? Because, as you said, the EU tends to define this as a ceasefire. But when you ask the EU what will bring a sustained peace, they say NATO membership for Ukraine, NATO peacekeepers in Ukraine, all the territories including Crimea coming back under Ukrainian control — which would then be de facto under NATO influence. And also reparations. The EU wants money because it loaned a lot of money to Ukraine and needs to dip into the Russian funds it froze.
It just seems that even if there is a ceasefire, it would be a temporary pause. For Russia, this could be seen as deeply problematic because of their threat perceptions. What many people don't like to discuss in the West is that the Russians see this as an existential threat — not Ukraine alone, but the fear that NATO is using Ukraine as an instrument. I tend to see it the same way, but the only thing that really matters is what the Russians perceive, because if they see it as an existential threat, irrespective of what anyone in the EU thinks, this is what they will act upon.
So I'm wondering how much space there is for Russia to accept peace along the EU format. The Europeans keep saying we have to bring them to the negotiation table, but technically the Russians were there with the US. The Americans put a deal on the table apparently in Anchorage, which the Russians said they'd go with, and then seemingly the Americans walked it back. So how much pressure is actually required depends on what goal we want to achieve, because peace becomes a very ambiguous term. And once we unpack it, we see that it might mean essentially what is an existential threat for the Russians.
Matthew Blackburn: I think you're right that the Europeans are not offering a feasible end to this war. What they're essentially offering is: "Let's just call it a draw, ceasefire, forget about the whole thing, we'll look after Ukraine, you just keep your bits of territory and we're not going to recognize them." It's very unclear what kind of peace that is or what it resembles. I think it's a non-starter because this whole thing begins with a political conflict. There's a political conflict at the core of it. To pretend there's no political conflict at the core of it is to misrepresent the very nature of the conflict, and it is consistently misrepresented.
It's very difficult to talk about Russia's motivations in the current atmosphere. There are a couple of points that are repeatedly made about what Russia thinks is a threat by Western commentators. I think it's worth flagging them and raising some questions about them.
The first is that Putin merges the idea of regime survival with national security — that he perceives Ukraine's democracy as a threat to him personally, his cronies, and his regime, and so he has to crush democracy in Ukraine. There's maybe some truth to that to the extent that when things start to sour between Russia and the West, Russian security circles and the political establishment highlight color revolutions as part of a toolkit the West uses to destabilize Russia and change the governments of neighboring states in order to weaken Russia geopolitically and ultimately undermine its sovereignty. They call that hybrid war — the Gerasimov Doctrine. But that's not quite the same as a fear of democracy spreading into Russia. There are plenty of autocratic regimes that have sustained for decades without any need to have a war with a democratic neighbor — take Mexico, South Korea, Singapore. They don't need to have a war to sustain themselves.
Another way to rebut this is the idea of a diversionary war — that Putin has to fight this war to keep the population distracted from the corruption and incompetence of his governance. But there is no media campaign in 2021 to prepare the Russian population for a big mobilization and a big war. There is no need, because Putin's ratings had already restored themselves to quite good levels by the middle of 2021. So that's one misconception — to call this autocracy versus democracy the fundamental nature of the conflict. It's a very dangerous way to portray the conflict because it basically means it can't be solved until the autocracy is destroyed or the democracy is destroyed. And that's the way a lot of people see it.
Russian threat perception: sovereignty, hybrid war, and the post-Soviet space
Here's another way of framing the Russian motivation, which I think is also misleading, although again it has a hint of truth to it: that Putin wants to dominate his post-Soviet neighbors and remove their sovereignty — Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine are the cases usually given. There is some degree of truth to that in the sense that Russian national security, as perceived in the Kremlin, demands there be some level of leverage in these countries so that Russia feels its voice is heard and those countries do not become openly hostile to Russia or close their borders and become part of NATO. That is a fairly conventional security concern of any major country. But to misconstrue the desire for leverage as a desire for complete domination and annexation — that's not what recent history shows us.
In the case of Georgia, Russia used the tool of separatism to destabilize the Georgian government under Saakashvili in South Ossetia and Abkhazia — a mechanism to say, "We can create many problems for you if you want to try and join NATO." And it worked in the Georgian case. But that didn't then translate into Russia dominating Georgia. I don't believe that the Georgian Dream government is dominated by Moscow, although there are some rather ideologized liberals who make that claim. I think Georgia has a relationship with many different neighbors and is pursuing its own path to a large extent.
And then if you look at Ukraine — obviously Russia made a major transgression of international law by annexing Crimea, and that created a serious escalation of what was a domestic political crisis into a geopolitical crisis. But the Kremlin said it was doing that because the West was supporting a coup d'état. Russia was doing the same thing as in Georgia — weaponizing a separatist movement to curb Western expansion of influence into that neighboring state. And it was also successful insofar as Ukraine could not join NATO. The Minsk II process was set up. But was Minsk II a tool of Russian domination? That's often claimed by Ukrainian nationalists. But by all accounts, if it had been implemented, those regions would have gone back into Ukraine and there may never have been this war in the state it is now.
To acknowledge that the Russians perceive Western hybrid warfare as a threat to their fundamental security is almost impossible today, and it was pretty hard to get that point across between 2014 and 2022. Now, how can we replace that with a more accurate assessment of the Russian threat perception? I think we have to take more seriously this idea of hybrid war and the fear of color revolution, and link it to a central concept that has been flowing through Russian political discourse since Putin came to power — sovereignty. Many people will dismiss the discourse on sovereignty as a cover for Russian imperialism, but the quest for status Russia has been on, and its idea of national security, has been formed by its history — its huge size, its porous long borders, the fact that it has constantly been invaded and requires buffer zones or a belief that certain areas around its territory are safe or neutral. That is an observable fact of Russian history if you're a security studies scholar. It's not contestable.
If you want to understand Putin's mentality about what sovereignty means to him, I think you have to look at what's going on in the Middle East. He was a keen observer of developments there. For Putin, what's happening in the Middle East is that the West has completely negated the concept of state sovereignty — empowering Israel, going against any country that's pursued its own independent sovereign agenda: Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria. They've used all kinds of means to undermine them — economic blockade, overthrowing the government, full-scale invasion, killing the leader, as with Gaddafi. And on the other hand, they have supported pro-Western governments as client states: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states. In this sense, the Middle East is dominated by America, and there is no sovereign center of power. What Putin wants to do is stop that from happening in the post-Soviet space. That's my reading of his vision — not my opinion of what should be done, but my reading as best as I can understand his writings and speeches over the last decades.
When we look at Ukraine and the first phase of this conflict in 2014, it does have the features of hybrid war preceding it — if we say that hybrid war includes interfering in the domestic politics of a country and trying to get your preferred actors into power by hook or by crook. The Russians observe that, and that's why they annexed Crimea. The annexation of Crimea is their answer to what they perceive as Western hybrid activities in Ukraine.
To acknowledge that the Russians perceive Western hybrid warfare as a threat to their fundamental security is almost impossible today. And what would it mean to create some kind of peace where Russia felt it was no longer expanding its energies in a hybrid war competition with the West in Ukraine and Georgia and the countries bordering it? I think we're very far away from any European leader talking in a way that would acknowledge any blame or role that the West has played in creating the conditions for this war. Is there anybody in power in Europe today who has made any statement indicating any deviation from that black-and-white narrative of pure Russian aggression, pure Russian imperialism, a pure desire of an autocrat to extinguish the democratic state and absorb territory?
And if that version, just for the sake of argument, is correct, we need to have a World War III with Russia. We have to actually destroy the Putin regime. Because we can't have peace. But that's not where the European leaders are going. Where they're going is neither war nor peace — which of course was a quote of Trotsky, who thought you could have neither war nor peace after the October Revolution with the Germans. That was a failed strategy, and Lenin signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. But the point is: is it really a feasible strategy, neither peace nor war? Is it not more likely that we're just going to sit on the edge of spiraling into a final exchange of blows between the European states and Russia? We just sit on the edge of that spiral and ask, when is it finally going to happen? Is it only after the spiral that we're going to take the question of war and peace seriously again and maybe reconsider our commitment to some of these very one-sided views of the Russian threat perception?
Spheres of interest, the Istanbul talks, and the impossibility of honest discourse
Glenn Diesen: I think this black-and-white framing is at the heart of the problem in finding a settlement, because even recognizing basic Russian security interests along its borders would be impossible to discuss across the political West. As you said, the first thing someone would say is, "Well, then you're advocating for Russian dominance." But back in 2008, when NATO first made this commitment to expand to Georgia and Ukraine, from the Kremlin you got this concept — I think it was Dmitry Medvedev who first pushed it — that Russia didn't want spheres of influence but spheres of interest. He made a clear conceptual distinction: a sphere of influence suggests domination or exclusive influence, which is what we usually assume the Russians want. But he was arguing, "We don't need this anymore. What we need is a sphere of interest" — meaning we don't demand exclusive influence, but when other great powers operate on our borders, you can't do this without taking our interests into consideration.
This was very quickly dismissed, especially by the Europeans but also the Americans, who made the point that this suggests the limited sovereignty of neighbors, and neighbors should be allowed to do whatever they want. But that sounds lovely and is also absurd, because that's never been the case. I would argue that the Americans have a sphere of interest in Mexico — they don't demand exclusive influence in Mexico, that would be absurd, but we can't pretend Mexico has the freedom to set up Chinese military bases and Russian rockets. So when other great powers operate on the borders of the United States, they do have to take American security concerns into consideration. Once one can discuss the shades of gray instead of everything being black and white, then you can possibly have some sensible discussion.
You said the same with Georgia. Georgia today essentially recognizes the sphere of interest — they're arguing, "We have to recognize reality as it is, and if we try to join NATO now, the Russians would never accept it and they essentially have veto power, whether through institutions or through military force." And I often see the EU respond, "Well, I guess now it's Putin's thugs who are ruling Georgia." But you've been to Georgia as well — this is simply not true. Many of them have aspirations to join the EU and ideally could have joined NATO, but they have to respect reality as it is.
That little gray zone of recognizing it's not either this or that is virtually impossible to discuss in Europe now, which makes it so hard. And that's why everything is either democracy or autocracy. I thought it was also the same with Russian objectives. When they went in, the main two narratives we got in 2022 were "unprovoked" — which suggests they have no security concerns, only territorial acquisition — and "full-scale war," which they still repeat in every sentence. But I find this fascinating, because from what I remember in 2022 when the Russians went in, they didn't go with full-scale war. They dropped less bombs in the first month than America did on the first day of Iraq. Many analysts linked to the US government assessed this as well — they don't want to spoil the possibility for diplomacy by using excessive force. Why would they want diplomacy? Well, Zelensky told us on the first day of the Russian invasion that Putin had already contacted him and wanted to negotiate Ukraine's neutrality in return for Russia pulling out — which was the foundation of Istanbul.
We're not allowed to discuss this, which makes analysis very difficult. I tried to make the point that the Russians didn't actually want territory — that's a means to an end. What they wanted was neutrality. And then once you recognize their security concerns, there's always this sleight of hand where they say, "Well, then you're justifying it" or "you're providing legitimacy." How is it possible to have proper discourse around this in order to do what we usually do when we want to find peace — the first thing you should do is put yourself in the shoes of the other guy? But what do you do if this is treated as treasonous? Because if we do want to pressure Russia into a deal, surely we must figure out what kind of deal would be possible for the Russians.
Matthew Blackburn: Well, as an academic, my job is to try and get the clearest possible interpretation and then hear why it's wrong. Of course, that was made impossible in February 2022. It was a different time, but today it's a bit easier to have discussions and some kind of academic discourse. And to try and step aside from all the hyperbole — Russia's action in February 2022 is an act of military aggression. There's no bones about it. But what we can say is that Putin brought Clausewitz back to Europe in 2022 — war as an extension of diplomacy by other means, which we Europeans thought had ended. And when the Russians said, "You are doing hybrid war on us," that was just called propaganda. Most European people thought, "We're not waging a hybrid war against Russia." So Putin says, "Well, we're sick of hybrid war. Let's have conventional war and see how this goes." What Putin is doing is saying it's legitimate for sovereign states to fight limited war for limited geopolitical aims. That was a completely normal part of European life in the Westphalian system.
And I think that comes back to what you said earlier about why Medvedev's idea of zones of interest was ignored, why we never seem to have any grasp of what the Kremlin is asking for — because of a fundamental mismatch in how political concepts are understood. Take sovereignty and democracy. Even before the 2008 Georgian crisis, we had Vladislav Surkov come up with the concept of sovereign democracy, and by doing that he was summarizing what was becoming the Russian position. First on sovereignty — a traditional view of sovereignty as undivided in the Hobbesian sense, the Westphalian idea of sovereignty as something that all states must prioritize and preserve. Then they also came up with an idea of democracy which tied into Carl Schmitt's idea of a majoritarian democracy, or even Max Weber's idea of a leader democracy — separating the idea of liberalism and democracy. So you can have democracy without liberalism. That was quite a popular view in many non-Western countries but was widely rejected in Western analytical circles.
In the West at the same time, the idea of sovereignty was reconfigured: we don't need it, we pool sovereignty to a higher cause in supranational organizations which give us the greater good of our global civilization. And the idea of democracy was really reconfigured after 1989 to be a checklist — a recipe — defined by liberal democratization NGOs. You just had to follow the cooking instructions and you'd get it, and if you didn't follow the cooking instructions, then you were evil.
The nature of the February 2022 operation and the failure to articulate limited war aims
So when we come back to the idea that Putin said it's a limited war with the idea of achieving a diplomatic end by other means — because diplomacy was burned out and impossible — I think we have to acknowledge where Putin maybe took a wrong step or a big risk. Because one of the reasons the Clausewitzian approach to war became discredited was that in the age of nationalism, you couldn't have a limited war without it becoming a major or total war, a people's war. The German high command acknowledged that after 1870 — after the war with France, which was very successful, they saw that it could have sparked off into a people's war. And then in the 20th century we have nuclear weapons, which puts a stop to all this. You can't have a Clausewitzian approach to war when you have nuclear weapons. So you have proxy wars, and the proxy wars in the Cold War — as you've discussed at length with John Mearsheimer — were contained to places considered safe to have a competition. Vietnam, Angola, Korea were considered small enough that it wouldn't boil over into World War III. There's no evidence that the US ever considered opening up a proxy war somewhere in Finland or Austria or in the European theater, because they understood the Soviet Union was ready to go to war about that.
So for Putin to take this action in February 2022 is not the same as the proxy wars of the Cold War. He very quickly starts using nuclear rhetoric to back his action, and he has a belief that he has escalation dominance and a strong belief that the West is not committed to Ukraine the way Russia is, and therefore they will eventually give in and recognize Russian concerns. He believes he can stick within these basic parameters.
Now, he was wrong in the first case in February 2022. One of the things that I think is mysterious about Putin's approach in February 2022 is that instead of articulating a specific limited objective, he said "demilitarization and denazification," which could mean any number of things. Why is it that he can't just articulate a Clausewitzian version of war? Because it's illegitimate. It has been illegitimate for as long as he has been president. He's always had to rely on other things — identity, status, emotional language — to justify what's going on, why Russia has to step up against the West in the post-Soviet space. So he has to wrap it up in all this language of culture and national history and identity and all this stuff about Ukraine being fascist, which — I don't think a serious analyst is going to say that Ukraine is a fascist state in 2022 under Zelensky. It's not a serious argument if you know what fascism really is in a historical sense.
So my understanding of what causes some of the problems with understanding what Russia is doing — what it is attempting to achieve — is their own mistakes in presenting their war aims, their own communication failures, their own poor information strategy. And we don't seem to be willing to understand it in terms of limited war. As you said earlier, it was called a full-scale invasion. It's not a full-scale invasion. I've made this point several times to various colleagues and not many of them like the argument because it sounds like I'm saying I like the Russian invasion because it's not full-scale. I'm not saying I like it — I'm just trying to be accurate about the scale and scope. It could be a full-scale invasion if they mobilized a million men and started producing all the required tanks and the huge preponderance of force required to break through at parts of the front with a three-to-one advantage on certain sectors and do something like a blitzkrieg. But to call February 2022 a blitzkrieg is just military illiteracy.
In a book on deterrence — I think John Mearsheimer back in '82 wrote a book based on his PhD thesis — he outlined three main ways that countries initiate conflict as an aggressor. One is blitzkrieg: a very specific form of war involving very specific preparation, and it's the minority of wars. That is not what February 2022 was. There was no massing of forces of that nature, like when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the USSR, or when America invaded Iraq. The second way is a limited short-term war intended to catch the opponent by surprise, put facts on the ground, and force them to a settlement. That's what happened in February 2022. The third main means of conflict is a war of attrition — you don't try to pierce through the lines and have a quick clean rapid victory, you go for a slow overwhelming of each position one at a time. That was the North against the South in the American Civil War, that was the First World War. And that's what it developed into.
When we have the presentation of the war and what motivated the Russians, that was completely lost, and it was very hard to get anyone on TV in the UK — where I paid attention to the media — who would be able to articulate that point: we have a chance to negotiate this out and replace it with something that the Russians and the Ukrainians and the Americans and the Europeans can all sign. That would be a more accurate way of understanding what was going on in 2022.
How Russia is likely to respond to escalating pressure
Glenn Diesen: I think that's common in wars on all sides — during wars, the doves go quiet and the hawks become very loud because suddenly being aggressive is the patriotic thing to do. If you argue that this was a limited war — they didn't go in with 100,000 men in 2022 to occupy a whole country of 35 to 40 million people — none of this makes any sense. But again, all evidence suggests they wanted to impose a peace organized around neutrality, which is consistent with the sphere of interest idea. But if everything is dismissed or accepted based on whether it's seen as legitimizing or delegitimizing, you can't advance this argument.
As you said, it's important to recognize that it wasn't meant to be a war — it was meant to be what the Russians call a special military operation. That's not only a propagandistic concept; it's also supposed to denote that it's limited by nature. This is important to assess their intentions, and once you acknowledge their intentions and motivations, then we would have a clear view of what would be required in an actual peace agreement.
The same with the rules of proxy war. I thought it was interesting what you said — this idea that you fight in a narrow space with clearly established rules. One of the things which surprised me over the past four and a half years is how the rules of proxy war have changed. Four and a half years ago most European countries were arguing, "Well, we don't supply weapons to countries at war because that makes us a participant." If you make that point today, it's almost treasonous. But that was a common position only four and a half years ago. So you see how things are changing, and now the proxy is essentially going away.
I just had a last question on this. If the main point is to pull Russia to the negotiation table by escalating or intensifying attacks in its rear, how will Russia respond? It has two options as I see it. It can either bow to pressure — which is very difficult if there's no acceptable peace on the table besides what is essentially capitulation in a war for its existence — or the alternative is escalation. And I get the impression from Russia now that many are worried that all the restraint by Moscow is interpreted as weakness in the West, and as a consequence Russia's deterrence has started to slip as the rules of proxy war have changed. How do you see this moving? From recent events alone, we see Kyiv is burning, the Russians are targeting it in a much more brutal way than they did in the past, they're putting naval blockades in place — all things which they could have done in the past but didn't. So it looks like they're not striking NATO yet, but there are some voices arguing very strongly for this. How do you see this calculation going as part of this strategy? If you strike deep into Russia, will this bring the Russians to the table or will it force them to escalate?
Matthew Blackburn: I think it's worth acknowledging that it's a legitimate strategy for Ukraine to go for deep strikes and try this, because of the unexpected centrality of drones to contemporary warfare — which was not understood in February 2022. They are able to hold the lines much longer than anyone expected and are now able to cause this pain. And if you're the Europeans and the Ukrainians, this might be the best hand they can play. It shows a united front. It shows that they're not weak, they're not giving up, they're not ready to capitulate — which you don't want to show if you're going into negotiations. So this is a legitimate approach. It could be a legitimate way to go into negotiations if it's combined with two other things.
Firstly, real diplomacy — meaning putting people in a room and talking back and forth, and getting the ideologues and the big mouths out of the room. You can't have certain figures in the room any more than you can have Maria Zakharova in the room. You need to bring someone from the Russian side who's considered by the Europeans to be fair-minded and interested in peace, and the same thing has to come from the Europeans. They need to come up with a swap that basically involves mutual concessions. Russia has to give something up, and what they want most of all is neutrality — no NATO forces, a security architecture. So that's one thing they need to do, and they can do that while fighting, while doing deep strikes. That's how the Korean War ended. It's called fight and talk. I'm not excited by that, and I'm not having leaps of joy when I see things getting blown up in Russia and Ukraine — quite the contrary. However, that's one thing.
The other thing is to balance deterrence with reassurance. Deterrence is everywhere in the Western discourse, in the European discourse about Russia. The further east you go — the Baltics, Poland, the Nordic countries — it is very noisy in that regard about deterrence. But reassurance is very important. Reassurance is what needs to happen through back channels — the European states come together and send certain signals to reassure Russia that we're not going to do this, we don't want to be doing this, and we don't want you to do it. The back channels where they would have conversations about controlling emergency situations and avoiding crises, hotlines. At the moment it's not even clear to me who from the European side would do the reassurance and with what authority they would do that. Trump can do it. The Americans can do it — they can do it tomorrow. I think they have reassured Russia on several occasions and it's worked. Putin doesn't feel that America is ready to step up and do something that would cause a huge escalation.
So those things — back-channel reassurance, plus diplomacy, plus pressure — that could be okay. But I fear that those two things are not happening and all we have is ramp up the pressure and let's see how much heat Putin can take before he gets out of the kitchen.
The EU's refusal to talk and what a genuine peace process would require
Glenn Diesen: The fight and talk is a good point. This is a strange thing at the moment, especially with the Americans talking since Trump took over — not necessarily going anywhere, but at least talking. For the EU, this idea that we're not going to talk to the Russians at all, but we have to put an end to the war, and the only way this can be done is an unconditional ceasefire — we won't talk. The idea that you can't have diplomacy before you end the war, that talking to the other side is now a condition for first ending the war — it's kind of strange. You would hope that even if the EU isn't ready to end the war, if the Russians aren't ready to end the war, or the Ukrainians, at least you would want your people sent to the capital of your opponent to work out some common understanding, so that once an opportunity for peace emerges you do have some basic framework. It just seems very strange not to have anything at all. But as I said, a strange war indeed.