Where is Russia ‘right’?

By Hal Brands

The war in Ukraine is not just a conflict between Moscow and Kiev, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said recently. It is a “proxy war” in which the world’s most powerful military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), uses Ukraine as a siege ram against the Russian state.

Lavrov is one of the most credible spokesmen for President Vladimir Putin’s baseless propaganda, but in this case he is not wrong. Russia is the target of one of the most ruthlessly effective “proxy wars” in modern history. And the less American officials say about this issue, the better.

By representatives

Proxy wars have for centuries been tools of great power rivalry because they allow one side to bleed on the other without direct conflict between the two. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union bled the United States by supporting communist “proxies” in Korea and Vietnam.

The United States retaliated against Afghanistan and Nicaragua during the 1980s by supporting anti-communist insurgents who killed Soviet soldiers or destabilized Moscow’s “client” regimes. “America was inclined to do to the Soviets what they did to us,” said Richard Pipes, a member of the US 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 loyal local partner – a proxy willing to kill and die – and then load him with the weapons, money and intelligence support he needs to deal a devastating blow to a vulnerable adversary. . This is exactly what Washington and its allies in Russia are doing today.

Loyalty

The Ukrainian forces, first and foremost, are committed to the struggle they are waging. They proved willing, in many cases, to fight even the last soldier. They have proved far more effective than the US intelligence community expected when the Russian invasion began.

Putin’s ill-conceived attack has put Russia in a dire 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 United States and European countries to crush Russian units. Although the figures are approximate and inaccurate, it appears that Moscow has suffered more than 10,000 uniformed deaths and lost at least 3,500 vehicles in this war.

Western governments have handed over the money needed to keep the Ukrainian government afloat and the information Kyiv uses to thwart Russia’s plans for attacks – even reportedly to target Russian generals. U.S. officials have denied the allegations in a statement issued Friday stating “Similar, baseless allegations concerning Ukraine’s foreign policy have been made more than once.

Reward

For NATO, the reward is the fact that it has damaged some of the most important parts of the Russian army – its ground and motor forces, its airborne units, its special operations forces – so badly that it may take years to recover. . America’s goal is to “weaken” Russia, admitted US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The only way to deal with an unscrupulous regime is to reduce its ability to harm those around it.

Let’s not expect Moscow’s position to improve any time soon. Its attack on eastern Ukraine is proceeding at a lethargic pace. Ukraine is better equipped as the war continues, while Russia has severely depleted its weapons stockpile and has limited itself to dropping already weakened units on the battlefield. Putin hoped to crush the Ukrainian state. He may eventually, instead, open huge cracks in his own army.

Beware of rhetoric

This would be a blow to the democratic part of the world, but it would take some rhetorical discipline to get there. One reason the public knows so much about Western support for Ukraine is because the US government is leaking “crazy” material, revealing sensitive information about the role played by US intelligence in targeting Russian top officials and sinking of the flagship of the Moscow fleet on the Black Sea. This not-so-smart compass 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 conducting “victory rounds”. In the 1950s, for example, the United States and the Soviet Union both concealed the fact that Soviet pilots were flying combat missions over North Korea in an attempt to keep their limited confrontation secret and within limits.

So far, the United States and its allies have been very effective in putting pressure on Putin’s Russia. They helped Ukraine kill huge numbers of Russian troops – more than Moscow lost at the end of a decade in Afghanistan – while at the same time preventing Putin from hitting NATO or retaliating militarily against those who “torture” him. way.

There is no real reason to destabilize 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 unbelievable resistance from Ukraine, the United States and its allies have pushed Putin to the wrong side of a brutal proxy war. Now Washington just has to shut up about it.