In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the West now has no choice but to impose the toughest possible economic sanctions on Russia and to seek to unite as much of the world as possible in pressing Russia to end the attack. All scholars and analysts of Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union must add their voices to the unqualified condemnation of Russia’s action, and their support for massive economic retaliation.
Whatever may be the legitimacy of at least some Russian grievances about Western and Ukrainian policy, nothing can justify this flagrant violation by Russia of international laws and norms to which Russia itself has repeatedly appealed. And while Russia has had legitimate grounds to protest against Ukrainian discrimination against the linguistic and cultural rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine, nothing remotely justifies President Putin’s grotesque lies about Ukrainian “genocide” and “Nazism.” Putin’s speech justifying the invasion brings to mind Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s response to the Japanese statement that accompanied the attack on Pearl Harbor:
“In all my 50 years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions — on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them."
Especially sinister was Putin’s reference to the “denazification” of Ukraine and the punishment of Ukrainians guilty of “atrocities” against Russian citizens in Ukraine. This would seem to hint at potentially ferocious repression in areas of Ukraine controlled by Russian forces, or even at an attempt to destroy Ukrainian nationalism as such.
Once the immediate crisis has passed, there will be a time to consider the lessons of this disaster for the formulation of U.S. global strategy, and the errors of that strategy over the past generation. For the moment, we must all support the Biden administration in its effort to punish and isolate Russia for this flagrant breach of international law.
Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London.
A resident stands in an apartment that received a shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine February 24, 2022. REUTERS/Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy
Ukraine is already asking for more money to continue fighting into 2026, a sure sign that President Volodmyr Zelensky has no plans to end the war.
With the battlefield continuing to favor Russia, European leaders have their collective heads in the sand on who will pay. How long before President Trump walks away?
At the G7 Finance and Central Bank governors’ meeting in Banff on May 21, Ukraine’s Finance Minister Sergii Marchenko sought financial support for 2026, “including the provision of support to the Ukrainian army through its integration into the European security system,” according to reports.
I have said before that Ukraine cannot keep fighting into 2026 without a significant injection of European money. Even if the war were to stop tomorrow, Ukraine would still face a huge funding black hole. And that prolonging the war simply extends Ukraine’s indebtedness and delinquency, nudging it every closer towards the status of a failed state.
Making light of the price tag, German-based Kiel Institute has suggested extra EU support to Ukraine’s army would only need to cost an extra 0.2% of GDP or $43.3 billion per year. This assumes no additional U.S. funding under President Trump and is a figure practically identical to the $41.5 billion figure I forecast two months ago.
The Ukrainian side pointed out two assumptions that underpin their request — first, that funding Ukraine’s military supports macro-financial stability in that country. That is untrue. By far the leading cause of the increased financial distress of Ukraine is its vast and unsustainable prosecution of a war that it cannot win. As I have said before, ending the war would allow for immediate reductions to be made to military spending, which accounts for 65% of total government expenditure.
Second, that paying for Ukraine’s military is keeping Europe safer. It isn’t. The best route to European security would be to end the war tomorrow. The risk of escalation only grows for the longer the war continues and President Zelensky resorts to increasingly desperate tactics as the battlefield realities turn against him.
This latest request for money is a clear signal that Zelensky is not serious about U.S. demands for peace, and would prefer to continue the fight, drawing directly upon European funds. It has long been clear to me that Zelensky is evading peace because it would bring his presidency to a close, not to mention elevate risks to his personal safety.
He has therefore been piling on more pressure for Western leaders to impose more sanctions and other measures, which will only serve to prolong the war. Senator Lindsey Graham’s recent brain wave that the U.S. impose 500% secondary tariffs on countries that trade with Russia is a classic example. No doubt other countries, China in particular, would respond negatively to this, as it has already to the launch of Trump’s tariff war. It would kill President Trump’s efforts at engagement with Russia, by boxing him in to Beltway demands in an identical rerun of his first presidency, making him appear toothless in the eyes of Putin.
But these are not the real points. Having suffered over 20,000 sanctions already since 2014 yet maintaining a stable, growing economy, what makes people believe that Russia will back down to even more sanctions now?
The war continues to favor Russia on the battlefield. In recent days, in addition to expanding territory in the south of Donetsk, the Russian army has made major gains in the pocket around now-occupied Toretsk. Progress, as always, is slow and grinding as it has been since the start of 2024. Ukraine has undoubtedly mounted a formidable defence of its territory, for which its fighters deserve great credit.
But Russia has never fully mobilized the country for the fight in Ukraine, for various domestic political reasons. Putin also wants to maintain relations with developing country partners and a more devastating military offensive against Ukraine would make that harder.
Pumping more billions into Ukraine’s army will merely slow the speed of defeat. Even the Ukrainians now accept that they cannot reclaim lost territory by force. Ending the war would at least draw a line in the sand for future negotiations.
For their part, Europe simply can’t afford to pump another $40 billion per year into Ukraine’s army, at a time when member states are trying to boost their own militaries, revive their flagging economies and deal with an upsurge in nationalist political parties that want to end the war.
An April pledge for extra military donations in 2025 elicited just $2.5 billion per year from Germany, and reconfirmed the £6 billion from the UK already committed, without pledging new funds. Keir Starmer’s government is in the process of making an embarrassing U-turn on previously agreed cuts to winter fuel payments for pensioners.
I seriously doubt that British people would consider another big increase in funds for Ukraine’s war would be a sensible investment if peace was on the table. That this isn’t actively discussed in Britain, in a way that it is in the United States, is driven by the complete lockdown of debate in the UK and European mainstream media.
Right from the beginning, the war in Ukraine has been an attritional battle of who can sustain the fight for the longest period of time. A longer war will always favor Russia because the economic liability Europe faces will ratchet up to the point where it becomes politically unsustainable. We make the assumption that Russia’s aims in Ukraine are to prevent NATO expansion and to protect the rights of native Russian speakers in that country, and of course, on the surface, they are.
But on the current track, Putin gets the added benefit of watching the European Union project slowly implode, without the need to go all in on Ukraine.
President Trump for his part continues to walk a fine line that involves criticizing both Putin and Zelensky for the continuance of the war. In the face of intransigence on all sides, I wonder how long it will be before he washes his hands of the mess and walks away.
keep readingShow less
Top photo credit: The President-elect of United States of America Donald Trump at the Elysee Palace for an interview with Emmanuel Macron and the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, December 7, 2024. (Shutterstock/Frederic Legrand-COMEO)
If the Trump administration truly makes good on its threats to walk away from its efforts to settle the war in Ukraine, the situation is very likely to get worse for all parties to the conflict, including for the United States. Potentially far worse.
This would most obviously be true for Ukraine if President Donald Trump’s diplomatic disengagement were paired with a cutoff of military and intelligence assistance. Ukraine is highly dependent on American intelligence data and on the U.S.-provided Starlink satellite network to target and coordinate attacks on Russian forces.
Without this support, few of Ukraine’s precision-guided weapons would function effectively, and Ukrainian communications would be far more vulnerable to Russian jamming, disruption, and interception.
Kyiv could still elect to fight on under such difficult conditions, but its battlefield fortunes would greatly suffer. Coupled with Ukraine’s ongoing manpower challenges and with the dwindling number of U.S. Patriot air defense systems to protect against large-scale Russian missile attacks, the blow to Ukrainian morale might prove decisive. Trump is correct that the Biden administration deserves considerable blame for failing to prevent the war in the first place, but in the ensuing controversy over who lost Ukraine, many would be quick to point fingers at Trump.
In fact, absent a compromise settlement of the war, Trump has no clear way of avoiding that blame, justified or not. Doubling down on Biden’s sanctions strategy by toughening enforcement or imposing secondary sanctions on Russia’s trading partners stands little chance of forcing the Kremlin’s capitulation to American demands for an unconditional ceasefire, but it very likely would roil American relations with India, Turkey, and others while undoing recent hard-won progress in Trump’s trade negotiations with China.
Opting to sustain or even increase current levels of U.S. military and intelligence aid to Ukraine would delay defeat, but not prevent it. Many point to the slow pace of Russia’s advance along the front line as a sign that Ukraine can sustain a stalemate with sufficient Western political will. But gauging Ukraine’s fortunes by tracking Russia’s progress on the map is misleading. In a war of attrition, progress is measured not by battlefield breakthroughs, but by how many well-trained and well-equipped troops each side can put in the field.
By this metric, Ukraine is in big trouble. Russia’s defense industry is greatly outproducing U.S. and European military factories in such critical munitions as artillery shells, and it is assembling attack missiles at a faster rate than the West can produce air defense missiles. At least a million Ukrainians have been killed or wounded on the battlefield; many millions more have fled the fighting for Europe, Russia, and beyond.
Although Russia has also suffered great casualties, it has five times Ukraine’s current population and has employed sound approaches to training and replenishing its forces. These trends point not to a long-term stalemate, but to a World War I-style Ukrainian implosion sooner or later, probably during Trump’s term in office.
Contrary to popular perceptions, however, a Ukrainian collapse would not be entirely good news for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Granted, Russia would be in a commanding battlefield position that would allow it to occupy all four of the Ukrainian regions it has officially annexed but not entirely conquered. And Moscow could reasonably expect that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would not survive such a defeat politically, paving the way for regime change that Russia claims to want.
But that would very likely amount to a Pyrrhic victory.
Although Moscow can break Ukraine, it cannot fix it. Its territorial expanse is too vast and its war-stricken population too anti-Russian for military occupation beyond Ukraine’s east and south to be viable. Absent a compromise peace settlement, Ukraine’s societal repair and economic reconstruction would be difficult to imagine, as few refugees would return, and no one would invest hundreds of billions of dollars in projects that could be wiped out by Russian missile and bomb barrages in a matter of hours.
A physically and militarily broken Ukraine could very well become politically broken, too, leaving Putin with a failed neighbor, whose dysfunction would in turn radiate problems — such as crime, terrorism, ethnic unrest, and political extremism — that could pose threats to Russia itself.
For Putin, such an outcome would be preferable to a Ukraine that is a military ally of the United States and NATO, but failed peace efforts would still spell bad news for Russia’s efforts to address its broader security concerns with the West.
Absent new arms control and confidence-building measures — which will be almost impossible without a settlement in Ukraine — Europe’s rearmament would be constrained only by its own political will and industrial capacity, and such informal NATO sub-groupings as the Nordic-Baltic axis combine a high degree of military capacity with deeply held anti-Russian views. Even with a massive militarization of the Russian economy, using conventional forces to defend a border with NATO that has doubled in size since the Finns joined the alliance would be almost prohibitively costly for Moscow.
It would be only a short hop from that dilemma to new, more cost-effective deployments of Russian nuclear forces in the European theater, resurrecting the days of nuclear decapitation scenarios and hair-trigger warning times that ended when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the now defunct Treaty on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces in 1987.
Some in Washington might look indifferently at a re-nuclearized Europe that lacks the diplomatic safeguards that kept the Cold War cold but features a host of imaginable new East-West flashpoints in Belarus, Kaliningrad, Moldova, Georgia, and the Balkans. They might ask, why would this be America’s problem?
For starters, American fingers would still be holding the nuclear triggers on one side of that tense Russia-West divide. The United States is scheduled to deploy new intermediate-range missiles in Germany next year, and the political pressure to pair them with nuclear warheads will be enormous if Russia points new nuclear weapons at Europe. Trump officials have openly discussed drawing down US ground forces in Europe, but no one has suggested withdrawing America’s nuclear umbrella, because doing so would prompt Germany and other technically capable European states to develop their own nuclear weapons, which in turn would fuel proliferation in other regions and increase the odds these weapons would one day be used.
Moreover, this more volatile version of the Cold War in Europe would deepen Russian dependence on China, incentivize Russian mischief-making in the Middle East, and make Trump’s vision of stabilizing and counterbalancing relations among great and rising powers in an increasingly multipolar world considerably less attainable. Much of Washington is already opposed to Trump’s broader efforts to pursue détente with Russia; improved US-Russian relations will be well-nigh politically impossible absent a compromise settlement in Ukraine.
For obvious reasons, Trump does not want this. For less obvious ones, neither does Putin. And neither of them has a good way to avoid this mutually troubling future without a negotiated end to the war.
The path to that compromise will not begin with an unconditional ceasefire, however. Having been burned before by perceived American deception over NATO expansion and European double-dealing over the Minsk 2 accord in Ukraine, Putin will not agree to a ceasefire (which would ease military pressure on Ukraine and undermine Russian negotiating leverage) until he gets strong assurances that the United States is addressing his key security concerns.
Ukraine and Europe lack both the desire and the capability to bargain with Russia over these issues. Only Trump can deliver the kind of deal that can secure Ukraine, stabilize Europe, and still address Russia’s core concerns.
To test Russia’s interest in peace, Trump’s negotiators should press Moscow directly to agree to a settlement framework that codifies the key geopolitical compromise — Western assurance that Ukraine will not join NATO in return for Russia’s support for Ukraine’s EU membership — and establishes a roadmap for resolving the range of complicated issues required for a stable peace.
The sooner we begin the hard negotiations over these core issues, the better. They will not get easier to resolve if the Trump team steps away from the table.
keep readingShow less
Top image credit: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan holds a joint press conference with Syria interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Ankara on Febuary 4, 2025 (Turkish presidential press service via EYEPRESS and REUTERS)
Of all powers in the Middle East, none did as much as Iran to help President Bashar al-Assad weather the Syrian civil war.
When Assad’s regime fell in late 2024 to a coalition of rebel groups led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Tehran lost its closest Arab ally, constituting a major crisis and humiliating setback for Iran. The amount of blood and treasure that the Islamic Republic invested in shoring up Assad’s government meant that his overthrow was, as the senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Behrouz Esbati put it, a “very bad defeat” for Iran.
Now, approximately six months into the post-Assad era, Syria and Iran are cautiously re-engaging in limited ways that underscore a pragmatic approach by both Damascus and Tehran.
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is intent on strengthening diplomatic and strategic relations with the West, building on his recent fruitful engagements with the U.S. and France. In pursuit of this goal, he is likely to exercise considerable caution in his dealings with Tehran, mindful of the fact that Washington and most European capitals view Iran with deep suspicion and regard the Islamic Republic as a destabilizing force in the Middle East. As such, he will seek to avoid any actions or overtures toward Iran that could jeopardize his efforts to build trust and cooperation with Western powers.
As reported by the National, an Abu Dhabi-based media outlet, on May 20, Iranian officials have acknowledged being in “indirect” communication with Syria’s relatively new government, with Turkey and Qatar acting as intermediaries.
Nevertheless, Tehran has signaled that it is “not in a hurry” to reestablish full diplomatic relations.
Mohammad Sheibani, the Iranian Foreign Ministry's special envoy for Syrian affairs, explained that the Islamic Republic is “watching and waiting” to see how Syria’s situation plays out under Sharaa’s HTS-dominated government. According to the National, Tehran is seeking to find ways to possibly engage Syria’s current government and revive Iranian investments previously made in the Syrian economy.
The Iranian diplomat specified that “appropriate” conditions on political and security grounds would need to take hold prior to direct talks with Sharaa’s government. He voiced his concerns about instability in post-Assad Syria potentially fueling “growth of terrorism and ISIS” — identified by Sheibani as a threat not only to Syria but the entire Middle East. Stability in Syria, he argued, requires “the whole political spectrum” to participate in the country’s political process.
Batu Coşkun, a political analyst at the Sadeq Institute (an independent public policy think tank based in Tripoli, Libya), expects Iran to eventually formalize diplomatic relations with Syria’s post-Ba’ath government.
“Syria is being embraced in the Arab world and Western sanctions are easing,” he told RS. “It’s unthinkable that Iran would not formalize diplomatic ties, particularly as Tehran’s regional rivals, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have emerged as al-Sharaa’s primary interlocutors. Though at the current stage, Iran remains reliant on the current power brokers in Syria, namely Turkey and the Gulf.”
Balancing the US and Iran
The White House’s shifting stance toward post-Assad Syria is an important factor to consider when assessing Damascus’s perspective on engagement with Iran. At least for now, President Donald Trump’s administration is aligning Washington’s Syria foreign policy more closely with Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, as demonstrated by Trump’s recent face-to-face meeting with Sharaa in Riyadh in mid-May and his administration’s lifting of some U.S. sanctions on Syria.
With Sharaa seeking better ties with the U.S. and other Western powers, he will be careful to avoid moves toward Tehran that might undermine his efforts to establish a positive image of his government in the West’s eyes.
“Sharaa seems to be saying all the right things related to the U.S., and how Trump’s national security elite view the region. This can be tied to his comments related to normalizing ties with Israel, and positioning Syria as a country open for business with the West,” said Coşkun. “Likely, Sharaa will retain his distance [from] Tehran as the new Syria’s goal of cultivating strong ties to Western powers eclipses any need for an urgent rapprochement with Tehran.”
“Both Iran and Syria are testing each other’s boundaries and moving towards an informal, pragmatic relation at a time of radical uncertainty, mainly due to the U.S.’s unpredictable strategy in the region,” said Marina Calculli, assistant professor in International Relations at Leiden University, in an RS interview. “Overall, Tehran sees the Syrian government as subjugated to the influence of the United States, and therefore unable to establish its own foreign relations.”
Nonetheless, Sharaa will probably be careful to avoid making too much of an enemy out of Iran. Although Iran and the “Axis of Resistance” are weaker today as a result of the 2023-24 Israel-Hezbollah conflict and Assad’s fall last year, the Islamic Republic maintains substantial clout in Iraq and Lebanon — two countries on Syria’s borders with which Sharaa wants to establish positive relations.
“Iraq is especially important for trade, water and energy and these deals cannot happen without the green light by pro-Iran Iraqi political factions,” Calculli said. “[Sharaa] may think that in a long-term perspective it is unrealistic and unwise to antagonize Iran. It may also be unwise to do so in a short-term perspective, especially at a time in which Iran is trying to conclude a deal with the U.S.”
The Turkish and Qatari bridges
Turkey and Qatar’s desires for a certain “balance” in Syria largely motivate Ankara and Doha to serve as diplomatic bridges between Damascus and Tehran.
On one hand, Ankara and Doha want to prevent Syria from becoming “a zone of Iranian influence,” said Javad Heiran-Nia, the director of the Persian Gulf Studies Group at the Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies in Iran (a primarily self-funded NGO that receives a portion of its funding from the Iranian government). But he also explained that, on the other hand, Turkey and Qatar have interests in bringing Tehran to recognize the relatively new Syrian government “to ensure that Iran is not completely sidelined from Syria’s political landscape.”
Furthermore, as Heiran-Nia observed, Iran, Turkey, and the GCC members have some common cause in post-regime change Syria.
“The disintegration of Syria and the resurgence of terrorist groups in the country are shared concerns for Iran and regional states, including Turkey and Qatar. Aside from Israel, no country in the region benefits from Syria’s fragmentation. Thus, Israeli influence in Syria and the occupation of parts of it are also common concerns for Iran, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf Arab states,” he told RS.
Turkey and Qatar seem to be mostly in the same boat when it comes to questions about post-Assad Syria’s foreign policy. Turkey and Qatar were major winners from Syrian regime change, and as key conduits for other nations looking to reestablish ties with the Islamist rebels-turned-rulers in Damascus, Ankara and Doha have played pivotal roles in facilitating Syria’s reintegration into the international community.
These Turkish and Qatari efforts were instrumental in securing the latest round of sanctions relief. In contrast, the lack of any significant Iranian role in these developments reflects a broader shift in regional power dynamics, marking a relative decline in Tehran’s influence alongside the rising prominence of Ankara and Doha, which have vested interests in shaping Sharaa’s perception of regional actors, including Iran, and how Damascus engages with them.
Ultimately, the transformation in Syria’s foreign relations since the collapse of the Ba’ath regime almost six months ago is remarkable. The very states that once stood as Assad’s fiercest regional adversaries in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising — Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — now appear to be the closest partners of the “New Syria.” In a striking reversal, Iran, once Assad’s most steadfast regional ally, now finds itself reliant on these Sunni powers as intermediaries simply to maintain dialogue with Syria’s post-regime change leadership.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.