Ukraine: Where Are We Now, and What's At Stake?

The following conversation has been edited for clarity.  Robert Hamilton: After a delay of many months, US assistance to Ukraine is flowing again. However, Russian forces are making gains in Northeastern Ukraine, around Ukraine's second largest city Kharkiv, and there are persistent rumors of a larger Russian offensive to come. What is the situation on the ground now, where is the war likely to head, and what does it all mean for the United States?  To discuss these questions I'm joined today on Chain Reaction by retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges. General Hodges is the former Commanding General of US Army Europe from 2014 to 2017. He currently serves as NATO’s senior mentor for logistics. He is also a distinguished fellow with GLOBSEC and serves on the international advisory board of the New Strategy Center in Romania and the Warsaw Security Forum in Poland.  General Ben Hodges, thank you for joining me today on Chain Reaction.  Lieutenant General (retired) Ben Hodges:  Bob, thank you very much for the privilege. RH:  We're talking about Ukraine today and there's a lot of Ukraine news but one of the most recent pieces of Ukraine news is the fact that the United States and many of Ukraine's Western partners have begun lifting restrictions, allowing them to use their weapons to strike inside of Russia. What do you think will be the effect of this decision and why did it take so long? BH:  Well, of course it's welcome. I'm glad that the US administration and other governments have made it clear that Ukraine can do what makes perfect military sense and there's no legal or moral reason to have restricted Ukraine from using weapons to defend their citizens, and to destroy Russian capabilities even inside Russia. The problem is that there was even a policy to begin with that was so restrictive. Unfortunately, it reflects the fact that our administration, the German government, and several other governments have not yet fully committed to helping Ukraine win.  The priority from the administration seems to be escalation management; that's more important than anything else. And that's why you end up with bad policy decisions or policies that just don't make any sense, and they're not connected to an end state. If you have a clearly defined end state, which I think should be to help Ukraine defeat Russia because it's in our strategic interest. Then we would be providing them everything they need to defeat Russia and we would not have these kinds of restrictions. Now, to be fair and to answer the second part of your question: The reason it took so long is because the White House does prioritize escalation management. And they have an excessive fear, I think it's excessive fear, that Russia might actually use a nuclear weapon if an American-provided ATACMS three hundred kilometer range weapon was to destroy a target three hundred kilometers inside of Russia regardless of the type target. I think this fear is excessive and it has caused us to be incremental and drip, drip, drip in our decision making and in the provision of aid to Ukraine. RH: You mentioned  the end state. And both of us as retired military officers understand strategy as the relationship among ends, ways, and means with an assessment of risk. And you talked about the risk of escalation that the White House has been so fixated on. I think we need our end state to be a Ukrainian victory and sometimes we say that, but then sometimes we say we should put Ukraine in the best position for negotiation. So what do you think our actual end state for Ukraine is? BH: I think they don't know or they're not willing to say it. Because if you say here's our objective—which, by the way, for our civilian leaders is usually the hardest part, which is to clearly define the end state—then you have to have to commit to it. You have to put resources into it and you have to understand and accept the risk, and you have to explain it to the population and to the Congress: that's hard. We didn't have it for 20 years in Afghanistan through multiple administrations. So as I look at what the administration has done and not done, said and not said, I think that they hope that this thing finally just sort of comes to where neither side can knock out the other, and they agree to some sort of settlement and then they can move on to something else. So that's why they are focused on trying to manage Russia's reactions, which I think is naive. Yes, it can be that you can't manage Russia; They only respect strength. You can deter them or you can defeat them, but you can't manage them. Somehow the administration thinks they can do that now. I do want to be clear. The administration has done a superb job on keeping 50 nations focused on helping Ukraine. They have delivered a lot but you know that the same could have been done last year. I believe if we had committed to helping Ukraine win, the administration's end state I think really is something that just kind of settles into, I don't want to say, but frozen conflict. Where Ukraine sort of finally gives in to some sort of negotiated settlement. The problem of course is that's exactly what the Kremlin hopes. Their book on living up to agreements is a very short book. They just don't do it unless they're absolutely forced to do it, and I think they're pretty confident that we won't force them to live up to any agreement because we haven't done it in the past thirty, forty years. RH: Y ou mentioned deterring Russia and that sort of piqued my interest because I remember you and I were at a conference a couple weeks ago in Bucharest, and you made the point that this is what deterrence failure looks like. So let's unpack that a little bit. Why did we fail to deter Russia in late 2021 early 2022? And then looking forward, this war will end at some point. How can Russia be deterred from rearming, re-equipping, and re-attacking Ukraine at some point in the future? BH:  Thanks for that and that was a very good conference, I enjoyed being there with you in Bucharest. I think our failed deterrence really began back in 2008 when we did not do anything meaningful after Russia invaded Georgia. You still have the Republic of Georgia and you still have Russian troops occupying twenty percent of Georgia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, places with which you're very familiar. The Russians saw that we didn't have the will to do anything about it. And that's not just the United States, that's the collective West.   You'll remember President Obama used the dreaded red line phrase, telling the Russians that if they helped the Assad regime use chemical weapons against the Syrian people, that would be a red line. And of course they immediately did it, and we did nothing. That's we the US, Germany, UK, or France. Then in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine using their proxies in Donbas, and the seizure of Crimea, the US did nothing. Germany and France began this so-called Minsk process but that was a joke.