The Strategic Logic Against a Ukraine Ceasefire
A measured, relentless advance applies political pressure. The more destruction looms, the more intense the pressure.
Delegations from the United States and Ukraine convened at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last Tuesday to lay the groundwork for a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war, in hopes of setting the prelude to an eventual peace settlement. The Ukrainian side reportedly agreed to U.S. entreaties—what alternative does it have?—but one should be skeptical that Russian leader Vladimir Putin will consent to a ceasefire.
Nor should he, according to the classics of strategy and military history.
That is not to say Putin will refuse to make peace, ever. All wars end. But to wring the most concessions possible out of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Putin should direct the Russian Army to keep up the slow grind on the battlefield. And the army should continue its offensive until the moment the belligerents ink a final peace deal. This is Martial Diplomacy 101. When you command the military initiative, you keep the heat on until the foe capitulates, can no longer resist, or no longer cares to bear the cost of further warfare.
Today in eastern Ukraine, Moscow commands the military initiative.
To bring about a ceasefire, Ukraine and its Western backers would have to put Putin in a plight so hopeless that a ceasefire constituted his least painful option. Indeed, that option might be possible next year, or the year after, if the war of attrition comes to exact an unbearable toll on the Russian economy while sapping its manpower and its armaments stockpiles. Recent expert reporting indicates that the unsparing differential equation of attritional warfare has turned hostile to the Kremlin, and it is now expending soldiers and warmaking matériel faster than it can replace them. Its long-term trendlines are negative.
But attrition is slow-acting, and its effects are ambiguous. The same is true of economic sanctions, another weapon of choice for Ukraine and its backers. As interests and passions run hot, the Russian Army is holding ground it already possesses, and it is taking more. Accordingly, Putin shows few signs of yielding to the grim statistics. Look no further than the Napoleonic Wars and World War II. Now, as then, the Russian way of war tolerates frightful losses in return for martial gain.
Putin’s Message to Ukraine: Things Won’t Get Better
Military sage Carl von Clausewitz would nod knowingly at Putin’s intransigence. Clausewitz, who fought against Napoleon as part of the imperial Russian Army, teaches that “if the enemy is to be coerced you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of that situation must not of course be merely transient. . . . Otherwise the enemy would not give in but would wait for things to improve.”
Transient pressure only allows the foe to stall or prevaricate at the negotiating table, regroup on the battlefield, and, as it bolsters its military position, enhance its bargaining leverage. Why would the stronger combatant want to allow that?
To keep the military and thus diplomatic pressure on, Clausewitz advises the combatant holding the upper hand never to break contact with hostile forces. Once friendly forces knock the enemy off balance, the Prussian scribe counsels, “he must not be given time to recover. Blow after blow must be aimed in the same direction.”
In other words, the victor hammers away unceasingly—“with all his strength and not just against a fraction of the enemy’s.” He puts the vanquished in an impossible position, prompting them to make concessions before they lose everything.
If the Ukrainian armed forces have the wherewithal to flip the script on Russia, putting Putin in an untenable military position, they haven’t displayed it lately. There is no question they have fought with valor, while their ability to innovate with drones and other novel technologies is nothing short of a marvel. We have much to learn from them. But they remain the lesser contender, by far, by most indices of armed might. They have not managed to parley their niche advantages into a counteroffensive that applies pressure unremitting enough to induce the Kremlin to come to terms.
Given these realities, it is far from clear that Putin has come to view peacemaking—let alone a ceasefire preceding peacemaking—as his least bad option.
Advancing Armies Shouldn’t Stop Advancing
Had he lived to see it, Clausewitz might relate the story of the Korean War as a cautionary tale for commanders tempted to defy his wisdom. Certainly Bernard Brodie, the dean of twentieth-century American strategists, would do so.
The facts of the Korean case are straightforward, at least for our purposes here. In mid-1950, the communist North Korean army crashed across the 38th parallel into South Korea. The communists drove the South Korean army all the way to an enclave around the city of Pusan, at the peninsula’s southeastern tip, while President Harry Truman hurriedly mustered an intervention force under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council.
That September, an amphibious force commanded by General Douglas MacArthur made a surprise landing at Inchon, sweeping around the Korean west coast and deep into the enemy’s backfield. Cutting off the North Korean army in the South allowed allied forces to break out of the “Pusan Perimeter,” and the combined U.S./U.N. army harried the defeated foe back across the frontier between the two Koreas. Whereupon MacArthur prevailed on the Truman administration for permission to invade the North in a bid to reunify the country.
MacArthur’s lunge toward the Yalu River, which forms the border between North Korea and China, succeeded all too well. Major powers simply do not like rival great powers abutting their territory. On the heels of victory in the Chinese Civil War, Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong authorized an army of “people’s volunteers” to cross the Yalu and intercede in North Korea. Emboldened by surprise and numbers, the Chinese host chased MacArthur’s army all the way back into South Korea. The Truman administration replaced MacArthur after he publicly feuded with the president over Korea strategy.
MacArthur’s successor, General Matthew Ridgway, stiffened the fighting front, stymied the Chinese People’s Volunteers, and resumed the northward advance. But then he stopped. Why?
Ridgeway’s pause came at the behest of Washington, D.C. The Truman administration had reverted to its original war aim of restoring South Korea. Consequently, the war of movement gave way to a stagnant war along frontlines approximating the 38th parallel. It also gave way to two years of Chinese and North Korean antics that prolonged the negotiating process—in hopes of bogging America down in a theater of secondary importance while scoring propaganda points in Asia and the larger Cold War. That process only produced an armistice, not a formal peace treaty, and the uneasy settlement reached in 1953 persists to this day.
Was it a mistake to call off the advance? General Ridgway thought so. In his memoirs, he lamented the decision to stop “that proud Army in its tracks at the first sign that the Reds might be ready to sue for peace.” That’s a sentiment Clausewitz would applaud. And here’s how Brodie puts it in his masterwork War and Politics: “The reason for continuing the extraordinarily successful enterprise that the U.N. offensive had become had nothing to do with the acquisition of more real estate. Its purpose should have been to continue maximum pressure on the disintegrating Chinese armies as a means of getting them not only to request but actually to conclude an armistice.”
A measured, relentless advance applies political pressure. The more destruction looms, the more intense the pressure.
Why Not Go On Fighting?
One imagines Vladimir Putin knows his Korean War history. After all, his icon Joseph Stalin approved the North Korean invasion while furnishing the communist combatants with material support. Historians disagree about whether Stalin’s death in 1953 constituted the decisive factor in halting the fighting—the new U.S. president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been rattling the atomic saber—but there is little doubt that it played an important part in the endgame. Had Stalin lived, he might well have kept egging on North Korean and Chinese emissaries to make mischief at the negotiating table.
Why not play the troublemaker if you can?
In a case of role reversal, Putin is playing the role of Eisenhower, a chief executive determined to ratchet up the military effort to bring about a diplomatic denouement. Barring an unlikely reversal of fortune in Ukraine, the Russian president will fight on while negotiating. Therein lies the best deal from the Kremlin’s standpoint.
It’s doubtful Clausewitz and Brodie would endorse Putin’s purposes. But they would have to salute his blood-and-iron approach to ending a war.
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.
Image: Shutterstock / Madina Nurmanova.