Washington needs an endgame in Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a moment of clarity for the United States and its allies. An urgent mission was before them: to assist Ukraine as it countered Russian aggression and to punish Moscow for its transgressions. While the Western response was clear from the start, the objective—the endgame of this war—has been nebulous.
This ambiguity has been more a feature than a bug of U.S. policy. As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan put it in June 2022, “We have in fact refrained from laying out what we see as an endgame. . . . We have been focused on what we can do today, tomorrow, next week to strengthen the Ukrainians’ hand to the maximum extent possible, first on the battlefield and then ultimately at the negotiating table.” This approach made sense in the initial months of the conflict. The trajectory of the war was far from clear at that point. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was still talking about his readiness to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and the West had yet to supply Kyiv with sophisticated ground-based rocket systems, let alone tanks and long-range missiles as it does today. Plus, it will always be difficult for the United States to speak about its view on the objective of a war that its forces are not fighting. The Ukrainians are the ones dying for their country, so they ultimately get to decide when to stop—regardless of what Washington might want.
But it is now time that the United States develop a vision for how the war ends. Fifteen months of fighting has made clear that neither side has the capacity—even with external help—to achieve a decisive military victory over the other. Regardless of how much territory Ukrainian forces can liberate, Russia will maintain the capability to pose a permanent threat to Ukraine. The Ukrainian military will also have the capacity to hold at risk any areas of the country occupied by Russian forces—and to impose costs on military and civilian targets within Russia itself.
These factors could lead to a devastating, years-long conflict that does not produce a definitive outcome. The United States and its allies thus face a choice about their future strategy. They could begin to try to steer the war toward a negotiated end in the coming months. Or they could do so years from now. If they decide to wait, the fundamentals of the conflict will likely be the same, but the costs of the war—human, financial, and otherwise—will have multiplied. An effective strategy for what has become the most consequential international crisis in at least a generation therefore requires the United States and its allies to shift their focus and start facilitating an endgame.WHAT WINNING DOESN’T LOOK LIKE
As of the end of May, the Ukrainian military was on the verge of conducting a significant counteroffensive. After Kyiv’s successes in two earlier operations in the fall of 2022, and given the generally unpredictable nature of this conflict, it is certainly possible that the counteroffensive will produce meaningful gains.
Western policymakers’ attention is primarily devoted to delivering the military hardware, intelligence, and training necessary to make that happen. With so much seemingly in flux on the battlefield, some might argue that now is not the time for the West to start discussions on the endgame. After all, the task of giving the Ukrainians a chance at a successful offensive campaign is already straining the resources of Western governments. But even if it goes well, a counteroffensive will not produce a militarily decisive outcome. Indeed, even major movement of the frontline will not necessarily end the conflict.
More broadly, interstate wars generally do not end when one side’s forces are pushed beyond a certain point on the map. In other words, territorial conquest—or reconquest—is not in itself a form of war termination. The same will likely be true in Ukraine: even if Kyiv were successful beyond all expectations and forced Russian troops to retreat across the international border, Moscow would not necessarily stop fighting. But few in the West expect that outcome at any point, let alone in the near term. Instead, the optimistic expectation for the coming months is that the Ukrainians will make some gains in the south, perhaps retaking parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, or push back the Russian assault in the east.
Those potential gains would be important, and they are certainly desirable. Fewer Ukrainians would be subjected to the unspeakable horrors of Russian occupation. Kyiv might retake control of major economic assets, such as the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe. And Russia would have suffered another blow to its military capabilities and global prestige, further raising the costs of what has been a strategic catastrophe for Moscow.
The hope in Western capitals is that Kyiv’s gains on the battlefield will then force Putin to the negotiating table. And it is possible that another tactical setback would diminish Moscow’s optimism about continued fighting. But just as losing territorial control does not equate to losing a war, neither does it necessarily induce political concessions. Putin could announce another round of mobilization, intensify his bombing campaign on Ukraine’s cities, or merely hold the line, convinced that time will work for him and against Ukraine. He might well continue fighting even if he thinks he will lose. Other states have chosen to keep fighting despite recognizing the inevitability of defeat: think, for example, of Germany in World War I. In short, gains on the battlefield will not in themselves necessarily bring about an end to the war.MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE?
After over a year of fighting, the likely direction of this war is coming into focus. The location of the frontline is an important piece of that puzzle, but it is far from the most important one. Instead, the key aspects of this conflict are twofold: the persistent threat that both sides will pose to each other, and the unsettled dispute over the areas of Ukraine that Russia has claimed to annex. These are likely to remain fixed for many years to come.
Ukraine has built an impressive fighting force with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid, extensive training, and intelligence support from the West. The Ukrainian armed forces will be able to hold at risk any areas under Russian occupation. Further, Kyiv will maintain the capability to strike Russia itself, as it has demonstrated consistently over the past year.
Of course, the Russian military will also have the capacity to threaten Ukrainian security. Although its armed forces have suffered significant casualties and equipment losses that will take years to recover from, they are still formidable. And as they demonstrate daily, even in their current sorry state, they can cause significant death and destruction for Ukrainian military forces and civilians alike. The campaign to destroy Ukraine’s power grid might have fizzled, but Moscow will maintain the ability to hit Ukraine’s cities at any time using airpower, land-based assets, and sea-launched weapons.
Ukrainians firing toward Russian troops in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, May 2023 Viacheslav Ratynskyi / Reuters
In other words, no matter where the frontline is, Russia and Ukraine will have the capabilities to pose a permanent threat to each other. But the evidence of the past year suggests that neither has or will have the capacity to achieve a decisive victory—assuming, of course, that Russia does not resort to weapons of mass destruction (and even that might not secure victory). In early 2022, when its forces were in far better shape, Russia could not take control of Kyiv or oust the democratically elected Ukrainian government. At this stage, the Russian military even appears unable to take all the areas of Ukraine that Moscow claims as its own. Last November, the Ukrainians forced the Russians to retreat to the east bank of the Dnieper River in the Kherson region. Today, the Russian military is in no state to push back across the river to seize the rest of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Its attempt in January to push north on the plains of the Donetsk region near Vuhledar—a far less taxing offensive than a river crossing—ended in a bloodbath for the Russians.
The Ukrainian military, meanwhile, has defied expectations and may well continue to do so. But there are significant impediments to achieving further progress on the ground. Russian forces are heavily dug in on the most likely axis of advance in the south. Open-source satellite images show they have created multilayered physical defenses—new trenches, antivehicle barriers, obstacles and revetments for equipment and materiel—across the frontline that will prove challenging to breach. The mobilization Putin announced last fall has ameliorated the manpower problems that had earlier allowed Ukraine to advance in the Kharkiv region, where Russia’s thinly defended lines were vulnerable to a surprise attack.
