The failure of Russian operations in Ukraine to achieve Russian President Vladimir Putin’s maximalist objectives thus far is not a permanent condition, and only continued Western support for Ukraine can ensure that Putin’s maximalist objectives remain unattainable.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated on December 20 that Putin has already failed to achieve his principal objective of “erasing [Ukraine] from the map and subsuming it into Russia.”
The Russian military has failed to force Ukraine to capitulate to Putin’s maximalist objectives to replace the Ukrainian government with one acceptable to the Kremlin under veiled calls for “denazification,” to destroy Ukraine’s ability to resist any future Kremlin demands under calls for “demilitarization,” and to prohibit Ukraine’s right to choose its own diplomatic and military partnerships under calls for Ukrainian “neutrality.”
The Kremlin has also pursued additional undefined objectives for territorial conquest in Ukraine that have resulted in the illegal annexation of parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson regions and the occupation of small parts of Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions, none of which represents either a departure from or the full accomplishment of Putin’s initial “principal” objectives.
Putin has recently re-emphasized that his maximalist objectives in Ukraine remain unchanged, and Putin and senior Kremlin officials have increasingly expressed expansionist rhetoric indicating that these objectives do not preclude further Russian territorial conquests in Ukraine.
Russian victory on Putin’s terms does not necessarily portend the full-scale annexation of Ukraine into Russia and the erasure of a Ukrainian state altogether, to be sure, but they certainly entail at least the destruction of the current Ukrainian state and its recreation into an entirely Russian-dominated entity, for which the full-scale Russian military occupation of Ukraine will very likely be required.
ISW has assessed that the collapse of Western aid would likely lead to the eventual collapse of Ukraine’s ability to hold off the Russian military and that the current positional war in Ukraine is not a stable stalemate because the current instable balance could readily be tipped in either direction by decisions made in the West.
Continued Western security assistance that empowers Ukrainian forces to repel ongoing and future Russian offensive efforts and to liberate more Ukrainian territory is the only course of action at this time that can make the Russian failure to achieve Putin’s maximalist objectives in Ukraine permanent.
