Filenews 11 May 2022
Hal Brands
The war in Ukraine is not just a conflict between Moscow and Kiev, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently. It is a "proxy war" in which the most powerful military alliance in the world, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), uses Ukraine as a battering ram against the Russian state.
Lavrov is one of the most reliable mouthpieces for President Vladimir Putin's unsubstantiated propaganda, but in this case he is not wrong.
Russia is the target of one of the most mercilessly effective "proxy wars" in modern history. And the less American officials say about this issue, the better.
By proxy
Proxy wars have been tools of great power competition for centuries, because they allow one side to cause bleeding on the other without direct conflict between the two of them. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union bled the U.S. by supporting communist "proxies" in Korea and Vietnam.
The U.S. took revenge in Afghanistan and Nicaragua during the 1980s, supporting anti-communist rebels who killed Soviet soldiers or destabilized Moscow's "client" regimes. America was committed to doing "to the Soviets what they did to us," said Richard Pips, an official of the U.S. National Security Council. "At a very low cost ... we can make things very difficult for them."
The key to this strategy is to find a dedicated local partner – a proxy willing to kill and die – and then load them with the weapons, money, and information support needed to deal devastating blows to a vulnerable opponent. This is exactly what Washington and its allies in Russia are doing today.
Devotion
The Ukrainian forces before and above all are committed to the struggle they are giving. They proved willing, in many cases, to fight up to the last soldier. They have proven to be far more effective than the U.S. intelligence community expected when the Russian invasion began.
Putin's ill-conceived attack has put Russia in a terribly exposed position, and the Kiev government, like its supporters, has no intention of letting Moscow escape the trap.
Ukraine has used drones, anti-tank weapons and other tools provided by the US and European countries to crush Russian units. Although the figures are approximate and not accurate, it appears that Moscow has suffered over 10,000 deaths of its uniformed personnel and has lost at least 3,500 vehicles in this war.
Western governments have handed over the money they need to keep the Ukrainian government functioning and the information Kiev is using to spoil plans for Russia's attacks — even, reportedly, to target Russian generals. U.S. officials have denied, quite reasonably, that they are providing Ukraine with the explicit aim of the Ukrainians to kill Russian generals, but confirm that they provide Ukraine with a wide range of information that Kiev decides how to use.
Reward
For NATO, the reward is the fact that it has damaged some of the most important parts of the Russian army - its land and mechanised forces, its airborne units, its special operations forces - so badly that it can take years to recover. America's goal is to "weaken" Russia, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin admitted. The only way to deal with a ruthless regime is to reduce its ability to harm those around it.
Let no one expect Moscow's position to improve soon. Its attack on eastern Ukraine is progressing at a lethargic pace. Ukraine is better equipped as the war continues, while Russia has significantly exhausted its arms reserves and has limited itself to throwing already weakened units on the battlefields. Putin hoped to crush the Ukrainian state. He may eventually, instead, open up huge cracks in his own army.
Beware of rhetoric
That would be a powerful blow on the part of the democratic part of the world, but getting there will require some rhetorical discipline. One reason that public opinion knows so much about the West's support for Ukraine is because the U.S. government is leaking "like crazy" material, revealing sensitive information about the role U.S. intelligence agencies played in targeting Russian senior officers and sinking the flagship of the Moscow fleet into the Black Sea. This not particularly clever boast is bad news.
The way to wage a proxy war is to maintain a conspiracy of silence. The target state is more likely to refrain from retaliation if the other side can resist holding "rounds of victory." In the 1950s, for example, the U.S. and the Soviet Union both concealed the fact that Soviet pilots were flying on combat missions over North Korea in an effort to keep their limited confrontation hidden and within limits.
So far, the US and its allies have been very effective in putting pressure on Putin's Russia. They have helped Ukraine kill huge numbers of Russian soldiers - more than Moscow lost in the quagmire of an entire decade in Afghanistan - while at the same time preventing Putin from striking at NATO or reciprocating militarily against those who "torture" him in this way.
There is no real reason to destabilise this fragile balance with pointless provocations against a leader who on Monday claimed that NATO was planning a pre-emptive strike against Russia and compared the current conflict to World War II.
Thanks to Ukraine's incredible resistance, the US and its friends have cornered Putin on the wrong side of a brutal proxy war. Now Washington just has to shut up its mouth on the issue.
Source: BloombergOpinion
