Russia has for years adopted the same bellicose stance that triggered 70 years of Cold War during the reign of the Soviet Union, yet the West has failed to respond strongly enough the Kremlin.
That was the bleak assessment given by three prominent U.S. defense and security experts at a talk in Kyiv on Dec. 11 as part of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation Public Lectures series. The 75-minute program was moderated by Stephen Sackur, the host of the BBC HARDTalk program.
Former U. S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, retired U. S. General Wesley Clark, and retired U. S. Gen. Jack Keane warned that Russia’s war on Ukraine shows that Russia President Vladimir Putin has wider military and geopolitical ambitions.
“The post-Cold War era that we knew since 1991 is essentially over,” said Keane, who is chairman of the board of the Institute of the Study of War in Washington D. C. “We have returned to big power competition again in the world.”
While the confrontation is on a smaller scale than when the Soviet Union existed, “Russia clearly is dangerous, very capable, and has significant geopolitical ambitions that are on a collision course with the international order, as we had for more than 70 years,” Keane said.
Russia, by using proxy military forces and information warfare, was able to initially paralyze the Western response over the attempted annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas.
“This is the frontline of new-generation warfare,” Keane said.
New warfare
With Russia’s war in the Donbas in its fourth year with at least 10,200 people killed, including 2,700 Ukrainian soldiers, the U.S. experts were cautiously optimistic that Ukraine could hold its own.
While Ukraine since Russia’s 2014 invasion has strengthened its military, the defense forces remain far from NATO standards and defense spending remains shrouded in secrecy, with strict civilian control yet to be established, they said.
In such a military situation, maintaining a steadfast and savvy defense is the best possible option, added Clark, who commanded NATO troops in Europe from 1997 to 2000.
“First of all, Ukraine must continue to defend its front, and hold its lines,” he said. “It must do so as strategically as possible, and with as much concentration of manpower as possible… Hold the defense stable, and don’t lose troops.”
Ukraine cannot settle for deployment of United Nations peacekeepers only along the war front, a move that would allow Russia to continue supplying its proxy forces with manpower and military hardware across the Ukrainian-Russian border.
“That would be a frozen conflict,” Clark said. “That is what Putin wants.”
Stop corruption
Ukraine still needs a “crackdown on corruption” to shore up the country’s defenses, Clark said.
“What NATO wants to see in Ukraine is civilian control over the military, an end to war profiteering, and increasing capability as Ukrainian forces modernize, with NATO offering standards, procedures, and equipment.”
Such steps would eventually bring Ukraine closer to full membership of the alliance, Clark said.
However, the retired NATO commander added, corruption can be found “in every country in the world”, including the United States; therefore, demanding elimination of corruption in Ukraine means setting “unrealistic standards in the middle of the war.” However, one key difference that Sackur noted is that rule of law is entrenched in the United States — meaning people get tried and convicted for corruption. In Ukraine, nobody does.
Also in contrast with the United States, with its ingrained public control over defense spending, in Ukraine roughly 95 percent of defense spending is classified as secret, stamping out high-profile corruption in military procurement is hardly possible. In America, the reverse is true — 95 percent of the budget is public.
The answer to that is transparency and accountability to the public, said Carter, the U.S. secretary of defense from 2015 to 2017 during U. S. President Barack Obama’s administration.
“It’s your money, first of all,” Carter said of public defense spending. “I spent $600 billion (annually) of U.S. taxpayers’ money…but I was always mindful, and I always told people that worked for me, that this was not our money. This is the taxpayers’ money; they deserve to know what it’s being used for.”
Keane also criticized excessive secrecy in Ukraine’s defense budgeting.
US support
Ukraine continues to enjoy strong US support, the experts said, including from the U. S. Congress, which has authorized $350 million in military aid — including the supply of lethal weapons in the legislation signed by U. S. President Donald J. Trump on Dec. 12.
However, Keane doesn’t expect Trump to make a decision on whether to provide Ukrainian forces with lethal weapons until he talks it over with Putin. “Until that takes place, I don’t think we’ll have a decision out of the White House about lethal assistance,” he said. Such assistance was blocked by Obama.
Asked by debate moderator Sackur whether the previous U.S. administration could have done more to help defend Ukraine, Carter was unequivocal.
“The answer is yes,” Carter said. “We could have. And I would like us to see do more now — no question about it. There are hosts of areas, in terms of weapons system and kinds of systems like air defense, intelligence and so forth. There’s a whole reform agenda for the Ukrainian military that it’s necessary for us to continue strengthening. I think that the United States can do more, should do more.”
“I cannot speak for the U.S. government now, but I believe there is wide support in the United States for this, and no support really at all for the idea that this conflict is frozen.”
Besides, many months after the war in Donbas broke out, massive high-profile corruption in Ukraine was deemed by many the main reason why the Obama administration was consistently reluctant to supply weapons to the country.
However, according to Keane, failure to support Ukraine more strongly is Obama’s fault.
“Putin got inside Obama’s head,” Kramer told the Kyiv Post after the forum. “He was paralyzed by the fear about worst consequences. Putin called Obama and told him: ‘If you provide assistance to the Ukrainian military, I am going to consider that as escalation, and you’re going to force me to take some action.’ And Obama chose not to do anything.”
Weakness was a pattern of Obama’s global policy for all eight years of his presidency, and this omission eventually led to dire failures particularly in Ukraine and Syria, Keane said.
In Syria, “it doesn’t mean that we would have changed it all, and it would not have gotten into the hell that it became. But by doing nothing, we almost guaranteed it would happen, and possibly we could have had a better outcome.”
