Inevitable War or Necessary War?
Let’s Not Buy Into the Fear That Russian Narratives Export to the Leaders’ Souls
Poster in the streets of Kyiv, March 24, 2024. Photo: Nicolas Tenzer
The debate, hardly a new one, which is stirring and dividing the leaders of the democracies these weeks on the desirability or otherwise of strikes by Ukraine on military targets in Russia using Western weapons, is like the bush in front of the tree that hides the forest. It is only a tiny part not only of a more essential debate about what our war aims should be—a debate skirted by most political leaders—but above all of a primary question about what our involvement in the war means.
To put it bluntly, our policy blind spot in the face of Russia’s war against Ukraine is our—inevitable—involvement in the war and what it means.
On the one hand, we find the least interesting category: those—let’s call them “pacifists” for simplicity’s sake—who either demand peace at all costs, whatever concessions they have to accept, and play along, willingly or unwillingly, with Putin’s game of eternal wars. A variant can be found among those who are willing to fight “a little”, or rather to help the Ukrainians fight, but only to demonstrate a false commitment and try to avoid the reproach of defeatism, but who quickly imagine some form of agreement or supposed stabilization. Some of them will perhaps then easily head back to Moscow.
On the other hand, there are those who are prepared to go quite far in supporting Ukraine in terms of the quantity and type of weapons to be delivered, who recognize the scope of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which authorizes Kyiv to defend itself and the Allies to help it do so, but who imagine that, in the end, this will be enough. We can’t blame them for buying into Russia’s so-called red lines, but we can, perhaps without being able to completely decide, question the realism of their assessment of the situation. As much as they are right not to believe that giving massive aid to Ukraine will provoke a massive retaliatory reaction from Moscow, we may well wonder whether their idea that it will be enough to remain on the threshold of war on our side to be able to win holds water on a military level. In other words, will giving Ukraine massive assistance without intervening be enough for it to expel all Russian forces from its territory? Are they prepared to consider that this might not be the case? Can they imagine what that would mean?
On a third side also, there is a small number of people who believe, without necessarily talking too much about it, that there is a strong probability that aid to Ukraine without direct intervention will not be enough. I’ve already sketched out here the idea that you can’t win the war without, in one way or another, fighting it. And factually, it could be said that this war is too big for the Ukrainians, both in terms of its significance and scope, on the one hand, and the disproportion of the forces involved, on the other. Perhaps some American strategists have made the same analysis, while drawing the opposite conclusion: since the Ukrainians can’t win the war on their own, we shouldn’t intervene and try to stop it by striking a so-called balance—which we’ve often shown here is also unacceptable for Ukraine, in terms of international law and for the very credibility of the Alliance’s power. Some Ukrainians are also tempted to reject this hypothesis for another reason: they believe that Ukraine’s future will somehow be brighter if they succeed in showing the world that they alone can, with help, defeat the Russians. I’m not in a position to assert that this is possible, and I certainly fear the opposite. I also think that the cost of such an option will be even more insanely high for the Ukrainian people.
But to say today that winning the war will necessarily entail a commitment by allied forces, the level of which will have to be determined pragmatically, is to break an unspoken—and more seriously, an unthought. Emmanuel Macron’s hypothesis, presented with great restraint, of the possibility of sending in ground troops, had already aroused a certain amount of emotion, even though he was evoking a logical, potentially necessary step, without going into too much detail on the different scenarios it opened up. To speak of war today—even uttering the word—is to plunge into a more formidable abyss. But it’s better to think about it beforehand, not precisely to reject the hypothesis, but to look it in the face.
War of defense or war of attack: how relevant is the distinction?
We won’t go into the whole story of Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine here. Let’s just remember that, at the outset, Western aid was very measured. Some even introduced the distinction, of little military relevance, between defensive and offensive weapons. Kyiv, it was sometimes said, could use the former, but not the latter. The genocidal crimes of Bucha and Mariupol and the strength of the Ukrainian resistance soon led to the arrival of combat weapons, but we still had to wait for the heaviest weapons to be delivered—F-16 aircraft are only due to arrive shortly, and then only in very small numbers. Belgium has also just announced the supply of such aircraft, a welcome gesture indeed, but they are not due to arrive until... 2028! This echoes the phrase, often uttered by Western leaders, that the war will be long, whereas I wrote, back in 2022, that if the Allies had wanted to, they could have won the war that very year. Just think of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives that would have been saved! We would also have shut down Russia’s ability to rearm and switch to a war economy.
The Ukrainian counter-offensive of summer and autumn 2023 was unsuccessful mainly because not all the weapons had been delivered, either in terms of numbers or performance. Many rightly said that Ukraine was being asked to fight with its hands tied behind its back. Some even had the audacity to blame Kyiv for these failures, even though none of the NATO armies would have launched a counter-offensive under these conditions. Everyone also knows that an offensive, especially in such conditions, is considerably more costly in human lives than a defensive action. A successful counter-offensive would already have required Ukraine to have the means to strike deep into the enemy’s territory, using long-range missiles and fighter jets to cut off the enemy’s supply lines. As we know, this was not the case.
Today, Ukraine is in a defensive position and, as I have already pointed out, the new arms packages that are expected to arrive all too gradually will at best enable it to hold out, rather than launch a new offensive. Substantial new aid will be needed if Ukraine is to win back the country.
This is where the reality of the war—or, more accurately, the counter-war—that Ukraine must wage against Russia to counter its war comes into play. Not only, as some strategy textbooks teach us, is the best defense an attack, but Ukraine’s own goal, and ours, cannot be limited to defending the territory not occupied by the Russian invader. The only conceivable and necessary war for Ukraine and for us is a war to reconquer the territories now occupied, without exception. What’s more, we must do everything in our power to ensure that the criminals, both those who gave the orders and those who carried them out, are punished by international justice. It is the return of Ukrainian children deported to Russia, and the payment over time of all war damages. Finally, it means obtaining credible security guarantees for Ukraine within NATO and the European Union.
From this perspective—there can be no other—the Allies must necessarily move from defense to attack. This is the only condition of security, not only for Ukraine, but for all European countries—most democratic governments are finally beginning to perceive this, and even to formulate it in these terms. It is to these considerations that we must link the question of the involvement of Alliance countries in the war. Can we seriously believe that Ukraine alone will be able to push the enemy back from its borders? Even supposing that it can do so, admittedly with Western weapons and, increasingly, its own, which have proved their effectiveness, will this be enough to make Russia fall so that it will be obliged to give in on the other points (international justice, return of children, compensation for war damage)? Today, it is more than risky to think so. So, at what level of power and involvement will the commitment of Western countries be required? Will we be content with air strikes from a distance, with a few hundred or a thousand instructors and “war assistants” on the ground, or will we have to send tens of thousands of men to fight on the ground?
None of the Western political leaders can escape these questions and pretend to ignore them, even if everyone understands that none of them is detailing them publicly.
Playing with fear and tempering scenarios
Certainly, as soon as we raise the prospect not of a war that Ukrainians are waging day after day, with unprecedented courage, but the war in which we could be directly involved—literally what I had called Our War—an irrepressible fear tends to arise. Of course, everyone can and must understand this, even more so for the people of Europe, particularly in the West, who had been told that wars on their territory would come to an end. The hope that Europe would mean peace was not insane; it was, moreover, the most beautiful of projects that could be; but the anticipation was too confident and precipitate. In the end, a large proportion of Europe’s peoples are torn between a deep-seated fear of war and a sense of its unreality. They don’t want to see that war is already here; they refuse to consider that Russia’s war against Ukraine is the catastrophic prelude to a potentially wider operation, whatever its exact forms.
Putin has been playing on these fears for a long time. As I’ve already pointed out, this fear has mainly deterred Western governments for at least 22 years. This fear has undoubtedly subsided since February 24, 2022, and the latest decisions—admittedly still incomplete and limited—by most major Western governments to authorize Kyiv to attack certain bases in Russia with their weapons, is a first step in this ebb of fear. However, much of this fear still remains, and this helps to explain why most heads of state and government in democratic countries are still reluctant to talk about the exact nature of the Russian war and its possible extension. Many continue to stress that “we are not at war with Russia”, or prefer to use the term “conflict”—fortunately, they hardly ever use the expression “Ukrainian crisis” as they did in the beginning, as if to avoid mentioning the name of the aggressor.
It’s sometimes said that while everyone knows how war begins, no one knows how or when it will end. The frightening specter is always the transition from a limited war to a total war, of the kind the Ukrainians are experiencing today. Everyone seems to retain the historical memory of the First World War, which was supposed to last a few weeks or months and ended in the near-destruction of Europe and 20 million deaths over its four years, with almost as many civilians as soldiers killed. Here too, we can only echo this fear. For Ukrainians, the war combines elements of the First World War—trenches, ferocity of fighting in sometimes very close quarters—and the Second—deliberate massacre of civilians by Russian forces. It is this prospect that some European peoples, and even more so their leaders, fear. The scenario of a war that is both decisive in response to Russia’s total war and limited in scope and action on our side seems difficult to accept.
However, it is these scenarios that need to be considered, since neither the military characteristics of a war involving the Allies today, nor the methods of action to defeat Russia militarily, would follow the patterns of the two world wars—and there would be no question of sending Western forces to conquer Moscow. This argument, sometimes put forward by advocates of non-intervention or those who reject the term “defeating Russia”, is absurd and often in bad faith, as no one in their right mind has ever suggested such a scenario.
While no one can ever minimize the risks, the scenario of a war in which the Allies intervene directly to liberate Ukraine is one of limited intervention. Striking deep into the Russian system to push Moscow's army back is by no means a scenario for radical confrontation, still less the one—which seems to frighten some of Joe Biden’s advisors—of a war between NATO and Russia. It would probably not even be useful to fight on the entire front line, which stretches for almost 1,000 kilometers: it would be enough to send clear signals to the Kremlin that we are ready for it, and that the scenarios would be devastating for Russia. Already, the Russian army was unable not only to take Kyiv at the start of the war, but also failed to capitalize on the failure of the counter-offensive to advance. Even its gains in the Kharkiv region are extremely limited, amounting to no more than the capture of a few villages. In the face of NATO’s armies, even assuming only air and missile intervention, and without substantial ground troops, Russia is not in a position to make an impact.
It would then be tempted to resort to its old rhetorical tactic—the only one left to it, immediately brandished again after the recent announcement about strikes—of nuclear blackmail, which I have already mentioned why it was unwise to buy, while certainly keeping a close eye on developments. The greatest risk would be if Russia were to step up its use of threats against European countries, including terrorist attacks and the destruction of critical infrastructures (energy, water, telephony), but we have the means to counter this to a very large extent. Above all, we need to measure the consequences of a defeat in Russia itself, even if we are reduced to uncertain hypotheses. In any case, it’s not certain that Putin’s regime would be well equipped to continue its policy of control and aggression elsewhere (Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Africa, Syria in particular), or to win the loyalty of some of its allies (Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia) who would understand that rapprochement with the Russian regime has no future.
A firm resolution on the part of the Allies, going as far as a limited involvement in the war, would have consequences far beyond Ukraine, and would restore lost credibility. It is to be hoped that the signs given with the authorization of strikes on Russian territory, despite their limitation, are only a first step. It would also send propitious shockwaves through Western opinion and beyond.
The meaning of war and democratic resistance
Democratic opinion would be doubly stunned by such developments. It is also certain, as evidenced by the outbursts of a number of political parties, mainly extremist and pro-Russian, at Emmanuel Macron’s mention on February 26, 2024 of a possible dispatch of allied troops to Ukraine, that many would fear a kind of general mobilization of European youth. However, there has never been any question of this, and no country considers it to be effective. Combat skills cannot be learned in a few months; training them would take well over a year and, above all, if these new recruits had to be equipped, this would divert the armies from much-needed expenditure. Above all, as we have seen, a high-intensity war with ground troops is highly unlikely. In any case, it would be technically, socially and politically unmanageable in most democracies. So we would certainly have to face an information war unleashed by Russian relays in the West that would be more intense than ever. But it’s more important, upstream, to understand how this would be felt—intimate and deep understanding comes much later.
Firstly, these opinions would be gripped by a sense of unreality. Even if the vast majority of the population of democracies would not have to fight, and would not send their young people to the front, they would be living in a new time punctuated by war, which would invade most of the public discourse and, no doubt, the discussions of friends and family. The economy, now fully a war economy, would also take on a new face marked by constraint, urgency and obligation. Each and every one of us would be led—so exceptional certainly for many—to distinguish between the essential and the accessory in the information that would reach us. At the same time, for this same majority of people—for it is precisely Western populations that would be experiencing nothing comparable to what Ukrainians have been going through for over two years and three months—nothing would be profoundly changed other than the possibility, however improbable, of a possible tipping point. The temporality of life would be different precisely because it is conditioned by a possible change of era. For Ukrainians, there will certainly be what we are used to calling a pre-war and a post-war period—and no doubt this will even be the real beginning of the post-war period started in 1945. We should probably begin to understand that the possible defeat—let alone the hypothesis of victory—of Russia will be a major break in historical temporality, almost on the same level (I hesitate to write “almost”) as the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945. Yet no leader, at least in Western Europe, has ever described the stakes, let alone the present reality, in such terms.
Secondly, it is likely that, for the first time, the Russian threat, initially suppressed by the leaders of a large proportion of Western countries, will appear to be real and tangible. In itself, this perception can give rise to two apparently contradictory feelings. On the one hand, it should reinforce the conviction of a part of the Western population that a thorough, not partial or limited, victory is an imperative duty, and that direct participation in the war is therefore legitimate—increasing support for the governments in place. The mass graves left by Russia could perhaps seem closer and more contemporary to them. On the other hand, Russia’s status as an absolute threat would in no way be reassuring for a population that is certainly quick to buy into the fear-mongering and defeatism that propaganda would spread on a massive scale. Western societies will undoubtedly react differently, although it’s impossible to predict exactly how. In any case, it would be a major test of their resilience.
Finally, the populations of democratic countries would be obliged to have an intuition of the vital underlying stakes, namely first and foremost the struggle for law and freedom. It has become a commonplace to assert that, particularly in Western Europe, but often also in Eastern Europe, large sections of the population on both sides of the political spectrum have all but abandoned awareness of the threats, primarily internal, to freedom, law and rights. The very notion of the rule of law seems less clear to them in terms of the principles on which it is based. Freedom is not necessarily the value they put first, either in terms of priorities or threats. The revisionist powers have played on this erosion of consciousness, hammering home the point about the fragility of democracies both by amplifying the attack by their internal enemies and by emphasizing the inconsistency of their declarations. They were analyzed and countered too late by governments that often scorned the warnings. Worse still, these same governments, though formally committed to democratic values, have sometimes dealt them the final blow through their own inconsistencies and their playing with these principles in a vain attempt to appeal to certain bangs of the electorate, thereby reinforcing the legitimacy of positions that attack freedom and thus the parties that put them forward. They have rarely made freedom and the rule of law the center of their political discourse.
Faced with the intensity of the Russian threat, whose war combines aggression and crime on the one hand, and the absolute will to destroy all the rules forged by democracies following Nuremberg and the victory over the Nazis on the other, perhaps some populations will return to this primary struggle. In the final analysis, war always combines these internal and external dimensions, and is inseparable from a choice of values, the radical nature of which must be understood.