What is going to happen in Ukraine? What happens next? And what is at stake? Tom Wright is in a better position than most to assess the biggest questions that Europe faces today. Wright may well be the most influential Irishman that you’ve never heard of. An international relations scholar, he was plucked from the Brookings Institution, perhaps the most eminent of the Washington think tanks, to lead the team responsible for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.
The NSC advises the US president on foreign and security policy and military issues, co-ordinating the work of the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies as it feeds into the decision-making in the White House. Wright’s boss was national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who briefed Biden daily on security threats and related issues. “You get to do a bit of everything, sort of see the whole picture,” Wright says, but “about half my time” was spent on Russia and Ukraine. He left when Donald Trump became president in January, and spoke to The Irish Times in Washington this week.
The invasion of Ukraine, he recalls, was not a surprise to the White House. Their intelligence on Vladimir Putin’s intentions, he says, was “amazingly good ... from in or about October-November [2021] they had reason to think there would be an invasion in February. So even the timing was pretty accurate. But there was probably no way to deter it short of sending US troops to Ukraine.”
Short of that though, the administration had made clear that “there would be much tougher sanctions, the US would arm the Ukrainians, if the Russians defeated the Ukrainians pretty quickly like a lot of people thought, then the international community might arm an insurgency so Russia couldn’t hold it – so all of that was said and communicated”.
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It didn’t deter Putin. Or not sufficiently, anyway. “I think this was something that Putin was just committed to doing, because he thought it would be easy and he would be able to create facts on the ground at a relatively low cost.”
US and European support enabled Ukraine to survive the Russian onslaught. The country is still “today sovereign and independent”. Putin, he says, has about 18 per cent of Ukraine, “which is marginally more that he had at the beginning”.
“Everyone looks at Ukraine’s vulnerabilities. And they may have to give up land. But Russia also has vulnerabilities. They are losing 1,500 people a day in this war – which is just an astonishingly high number, just a crazy high number of casualties and they’re gaining small slivers of territory in the Donbas ... So that’s not particularly sustainable for them.”
At what point does it become unsustainable?
“At some point, Putin, if he wanted to continue the war, would have to order a mobilisation, which we know he doesn’t want to do, because he’s losing so many soldiers.”
For Ukraine, he says, giving up territory isn’t “the toughest problem ... I think the toughest problem is whether Ukraine can exist as a sovereign independent country ... Will Putin accept the right of Ukraine to exist as an independent sovereign country with the right to defend itself? Our view was he probably wouldn’t. At the moment, his aims are still pretty maximalist. He still wants to dominate Ukraine. He wants a neutered Ukraine, not just a neutral Ukraine. He wants real limits on its ability to defend itself, he wants to remove Zelenskiy and have a more pro-Russian leader there, a little like Belarus or Georgia, and that’s something that Ukraine can’t accept.”
On the question of whether the EU can replace the US, he says “Europe has given more to Ukraine already than the United States ... But the reality is they don’t have enough military equipment to get it there in the short to medium term. A lot of this will take years to develop the industry, to build it up ... They can do a lot but it will be tough for them to replace the US.”
Ukraine, he says is “not going to collapse, at least in the short term”. They remain well equipped and are “not in a desperate situation”. But they are in a fight for their lives. War against a bigger neighbour will do that.
One of Putin’s “core objectives” has been “to destroy the Nato architecture in Europe. Just before the war started in Ukraine, he issued a demand of the US that all Nato troops pull back to pre-97 borders, meaning all of eastern Europe”. Wright believes Putin is “almost certainly coming back to that in negotiations now”.
To achieve that aim, Putin may try to provoke crises in eastern Europe “to try to raise doubts about whether the US would go in, or he does something and Trump doesn’t go in. He could launch a limited attack somewhere ... If he emerges victorious in Ukraine I think he won’t stop, in the sense he will try to erode and overturn the security architecture in Europe. And that would be very worrying to the Baltics and to others.”
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Two things he regards as unwelcome developments. The Russians have got better at fighting and managing the war, and the Chinese have helped them rebuild their military. Combined with uncertainty over the US security guarantee, he says, “that would make anyone nervous about the next few years. I think the French and Germans are right to be worried.”
