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Right now, the signal-to-noise ratio is heavily tilted in favor of noise. But there are a few things that are certain. About 5 hours ago, the commander of Wagner, Denis Prigozhin, claimed that the RUMOD had ordered a missile strike on Wagner fighters. He followed this up with what can only be interpreted as a threat of violence again the MOD. This was followed up by a number of statements by both Prigozhin and other Wagner telegrams backing up his message. Given these threats' public and unambiguous nature, this is very unlikely to be a false flag or 5D chess. Comments like this are at the heart of a state's monopoly on violence. Such an attack can only be responded to by the Russian government as an existential threat. By all indications, this is exactly what has happened. Major generals have come out to publicly condemn Prigozhin, and a warrant has been issued for his arrest. That's the summary of what we know for sure.

As far as on-the-ground information, there is very little to go on at the moment. Apparently columns of vehicles have been spotted in a city near the Russia-Ukraine border, but it is still unclear what units they belong to. Rosgvardia(Russian internal security forces) have clearly been deployed in force and are making themselves known in Moscow and Rostov. Obviously, Ukraine is watching this with great interest, and there have already been reports of advances in the Bakhmut area that could possibly be connected to this. In addition, the US government is clearly taking this seriously, with Biden having reportedly been briefed on the matter.

Submission Statement

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced many countries to reevaluate their security postures, and Japan is no exception. In fact, the Ukraine War is exceptionally relevant to Japan's security situation, given that the island nation may soon find itself indirectly or directly supporting a different democracy under threat by an authoritarian power. Given that context, this article provides a valuable starting point for some of the lessons that Japan can take away from the current conflict. In particular, the emphasis on logistics, stockpiles, and sustainment is a key element that has received renewed focus during this war and will arguably be even more important in a war over Taiwan.

Jeffrey W. Hornung is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Japanese leaders have already begun internalizing key lessons from Ukraine. As shown in a triad of strategic documents released last December, Tokyo is ramping up spending on munition stocks, maintenance, and base hardening and readiness, as well as making new investments across all domains. But despite this, Japanese officials are silent on whether they are preparing for a short conflict or a long one. This matters because, as the Ukrainian war demonstrates, a protracted struggle could require different plans from the ones Japan is possibly making.

Any conflict involving China and the United States is unlikely to be a short one. For Japan to participate effectively in any East China Sea conflict — even in its own defense — Japanese forces should take six key lessons from the current fight in Ukraine: prepare for a protracted conflict; ensure an adequate logistics posture; be ready for active combat; assist the broader fight; use unmanned capabilities; and sustain the will to fight. Addressing these issues can help Japan — and the alliance — become better prepared to rapidly respond in support of U.S. operational timelines.

A senior American intelligence official tells me for both Ukraine and U.S. intelligence, it’s a “watch and see if they destroy themselves sort of situation.” They said it was going to be a long night of watching how this develops. Said Wagner is mobilizing—headed towards Moscow.

Submission Statement An excellent look into the feasibility of a Dnipro crossing, starting from first principles and satellite images of the terrain. In my opinion, this is the definitive assessment of the prospects of a Ukrainian offensive across the Dnipro, at least in the short term. Special attention should be paid to the second- and third-to-last paragraph--while a crossing would undoubtedly be difficult, it does come with some excellent tactical benefits, not least the element of surprise.

Riley McCabe is a program coordinator and research assistant with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Alexander Palmer is a research associate with the Transnational Threats Project at CSIS. Joseph S. Bermudez Jr. is senior fellow for imagery analysis with the iDeas Lab and Korea Chair at CSIS.

Another key constraint on a Ukrainian offensive across the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast is the logistics operations that would have to follow to support a large and sustained offensive. Forces can only fight if they are supplied, and Ukraine would have to regularly cross the river to deliver ammunition, fuel, vehicle parts, and reinforcements to its units on the far bank. Without such supply lines, any forces committed would risk being isolated in a Russian counterattack or be unable to exploit the success of an initial assault.

The width of the Dnipro River and lack of existing bridges means that Ukrainian logistics and follow-on forces would need to establish new bridging, rely on ferries, or a combination of both. During its 2022 withdrawal from the city of Kherson, Russia used ferries to move troops and equipment across the river, as shown below. Ukraine presumably refrained from targeting Russia’s ferry operation because it wanted the Russians out of the city. Today, however, Russia would attempt to strike the vulnerable dock and loading areas if Ukraine were to fail to first push back enemy indirect fires. Any bridging operation across the river would need to account for the same threat of indirect fires.

By delaying a potential offensive in Kherson Oblast, the dam’s breach increases pressure on ongoing offensive operations elsewhere along the front. Russia is already reportedly redeploying units from the south to reinforce defensive positions further north. These redeployments will increase the number of Russian troops available to defend against Ukrainian attacks and may free operational reserves to contain Ukrainian breakthroughs or conduct counterattacks.

Even still, a Ukrainian offensive across the Dnipro River remains possible in the coming months. Common knowledge of an operation’s difficulty can work in the attacker’s favor by generating operational surprise. The landing at Inchon in 1950 during the Korean War was initially dismissed by both UN and North Korean forces as too difficult, but the amphibious assault by UN forces against underdefended enemy positions took and created the conditions the near-total collapse of the In Min Gun within a month.

A successful crossing of the Dnipro River near Kherson is extremely unlikely to have such a dramatic strategic effect, but it could catch Russian forces off guard and allow Ukraine to bypass the defensive systems Russia has constructed further north and strike important groundlines of communication leading from Crimea.

For now, however, a Ukrainian offensive in Kherson Oblast is extremely unlikely to be viable for at least several weeks because the reconnaissance and planning that determines the success of any major river-crossing operation will need to begin again. In the meantime, Russia will continue to capitalize on the defensive advantages it gained from the breach.

As opposed to conventional munitions, which have a single warhead, cluster munitions operate by dispensing a number of smaller warheads over an area. They are particularly useful against soft and mobile targets, especially those dispersed over a wider area or entrenched in a specific location. However, cluster munitions are banned by most countries due to the risk of unexploded ordinance. In the case of DPICMs, the form of munition most often discussed to be sent to Ukraine, this rate hovers around 2-5%. It’s important to note that Ukraine, Russia, and the US are not signatories to the treaty which banned cluster munitions, and all three possess at least some stockpiles of such munitions. In addition, both Ukraine and Russia have been reported as using cluster munitions during the war. However, Russia’s use of cluster munitions has been significantly greater and appears to have indiscriminately targeted civilian population centers on many occasions. Ukrainian usage has likely been limited by their smaller stockpiles of such weaponry, but the country has used cluster weapons in populated areas in the past, though not with the lack of tactical benefit and disregard for civilian life displayed by the Russians. Ukraine has also been receiving DPICM munitions from Turkey, likely with informal consent from the Biden administration. While I haven’t seen any footage of their use, its likely they have already been deployed somewhere along the front. Neither side has given any indication that they are limiting use based on ethical concerns with tactical munitions.

When discussing DPICM munition aid, it is important to balance the human cost of cluster munitions against the damage that could be caused by a prolonged conflict. Sending DPICMs will unquestionably result in civilians being harmed, now and in the future. It's unpleasant, but it's the truth. However, it is also true that civilians are dying now, to a Russian army that has shown a reckless disregard for human life and is engaging in terror bombing of cities it has no chance of taking. Just because cluster munitions have harm associated with them, does not mean that sending them would not decrease the overall harm of the conflict overall. Furthermore, restrictions on the use of such munitions would go a long way toward minimizing civilian harm while retaining most of their combat effectiveness. DPICMs would be massively useful in clearing trenches, for instance, but such usage has far less risk to civilians than attacking a city.

Submission Statement The outcomes of wars are determined in part by the capacity of factions to maintain and replace capabilities as they degrade. While Western stockpiles are large, they are not infinite, and excessive depletion could endanger other allies. Both the existing progress and political commitments reported in this article are positive signs for the sustainment, and therefore future success, of the Ukrainian war effort.

The U.S. has sharply increased production of a key artillery shell, helping to alleviate a global shortage of the ammunition that threatened to squeeze Ukrainian forces as they battle Russia, the U.S. Army’s acquisition chief said.

Doug Bush, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisitions, logistics and technology, said in an interview that the U.S. is currently producing around 24,000 155-millimeter howitzer shells each month, up from around 14,000 a month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. wants to hit monthly output of between 70,000 and 80,000 shells a month by early in the 2025 fiscal year, he said.

“We are on a very rapid path to get to really high numbers,” Bush said. The U.S. has drawn down some of its own stockpiles of the ammunition to supply Ukraine. Bush said those stockpiles are more robust than many people believe, and that they will return to prewar levels quickly.

Submission Statement

Regardless of one's position on Sweden and Finland's decision to join NATO, the military value of doing so has been so broadly accepted that it nearly goes without saying. This article pushes back against that assumption, claiming that, given the preexisting connections between Sweden, Finland, and NATO, accession is actually more of a choice of identity and culture than defensive bolstering. From this perspective, the debate about the move's impact on collective defense is missing the forest for the trees. The choice to give up their nonaligned policies and incorporate NATO membership into their identities as states will likely be the deepest and most durable impact of accession.

Katherine Elgin, Ph.D. is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, where she focuses on great power relations, U.S. and allied defense strategy, and grand strategy.

Alexander Lanoszka is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Waterloo. He studies alliance politics, theories of war, and European security.

Rationalist understandings of military alliances argue that a formal treaty underpinning the security relationship is crucial for deepening and rendering more efficient defense cooperation between countries. However, Sweden’s and Finland’s cooperation with NATO prior to 2022, when the two countries announced their intentions to formally join the alliance, was far more substantial than what rationalist explanations would expect. Traditional approaches to military alliances overlook the importance of ontological, or identity-based, considerations that come with being a formal member of an alliance. Accordingly, not only is signing a treaty functionally important, it is also significant in terms of what it implies for national identity in terms of security policy. For Sweden and Finland, this suggests that the greatest change with NATO membership will be with regard to identity and strategic culture.

Submission Statement

The taboo against nuclear use is perhaps the most widely adopted norm in human history. Russia is no exception to this, and despite the strategic debacle unfolding in Ukraine, the Russian nuclear arsenal has shown few signs of activation. By contrast, Russia has leaned heavily on nuclear signaling, where the use of nuclear weapons is heavily implied through state and quasi-state channels to achieve policy goals.

One such signaling effort has unfolded over the past week, taking the form of a cascade of articles surrounding the idea of a limited nuclear strike against Ukraine. Remarkably, these articles touch tangentially if at all on using nuclear weapons to generate battlefield effects. Instead, nuclear usage here is framed as a signal intended to coerce Western powers into giving Russia political concessions. In this sense, the discourse can be seen as an outgrowth of continuing messaging by the Kremlin attempting to reframe its war in Ukraine as an existential struggle of East vs. West.

An interesting aspect of these articles is that they are(for the most part) not explicitly state-sanctioned. They are being published by websites that are not explicitly connected with Russian government sources, and by intellectuals that are not traditionally considered government mouthpieces. Nearly simultaneously, Russia has moved nuclear weapons to Belarus, and Putin announced that the Sarmat nuclear weapon was nearly complete. The likely intent is to communicate a whole-of-society debate on the nuclear bomb, intending to indicate to the West a larger conversation is being had around nuclear weapons, and therefore potentially a larger consensus could be reached regarding their use. Putin's saber-rattling is easy to dismiss as empty threats, but a half dozen experts must at least be considered as an indication of broader trends in Russian intellectual spheres.

While Twitter links are ordinarily not sufficiently credible for this forum, the thread linked above is an aggregation of other, more mainstream sources. Given the novel nature of active nuclear signaling by a major power, the number of articles that were connected to the signaling effort, and the qualifications of the Twitter user herself, I felt the thread was the best to link to.

Submission Statement

While the focus of the article is on one/a few cases of RCA use in the Ukraine War, the article also serves as an excellent overview of the reasons that chemical weapons have largely fallen out of favor since World War I. While there have been a few isolated reports of Russian/Ukrainian use of tear gas/RCA, larger-scale deployment of these weapons remains unlikely, given their serious drawbacks and the stigma surrounding the use of such weapons.

Lennie Phillips OBE Senior Research Fellow, Chemical Weapons Proliferation and Nuclear Policy

Professor David Crouch Senior Associate Fellow - Specialist in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) remediation processes

Submission Statement The Navy's personnel issues are a known and even notorious problem for the service. Failures to attract and retain competent and motivated individuals have direct and indirect consequences for force readiness. The article and the report embedded within detail the scope of the problem and valuable first steps towards addressing those issues.

Sam LaGrone is the editor of USNI News. He has covered legislation, acquisition and operations for the Sea Services since 2009 and spent time underway with the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and the Canadian Navy.

Anyone familiar with surface warfare knows that frustrations about time away from home, too many JOs and a punishing amount of administrative paperwork are as common as mustard on a hotdog.

In 2021, the Government Accountability Office studied Navy career trends and found since 2004 SWOs had the shortest average careers of the major warfare communities in the Navy and surface warfare had a harder time generating department heads for ships.

“U.S. Navy officials stated that SWO retention to the department head milestone is low and requires them to commission nearly double the number of SWOs every year than needed, to ensure they have enough department heads eight years later,” reads the report.

The surface navy has polled its force every two years since 1999 and reached similar conclusions. Now, SWO leadership is trying to make better use of its data to make the community more appealing.

“There’s inherently a lot of friction on the ship,” Capt. Andy Koy, director of SURFOR commander’s action group at Naval Surface Warfare and former destroyer commander, told USNI News in an interview. “How can we reduce some of that?”

For example, having a ship full of ensigns competing for time on the bridge discourages SWOs from staying for the long haul, the community has found.

“Having a lower number of ensigns aboard, or the wardrooms that have a lower density [of officers] tend to have a greater feeling of connected value among junior officers. There’s definitely something to that,” Koy said.

Since the 2017 fatal collisions in the Western Pacific, the Navy has poured billions into training SWO ensigns that also makes better use of their time underway, USNI News reported from an underway aboard USS Halsey (DDG-97).

SURFOR has been on a drive to tie the thousands of data inputs the command gets from each ship to an overall dashboard for the health of the force. In parallel with the survey, analysis over time shows that the surface ship with the lowest density of officers tend to produce more department heads overall.

“We are bringing in 20 percent fewer officers next year – largely in response to this knowing that the ships with the lowest density of officers produce the highest percentage of department heads,” Cmdr. Bill Golden, deputy for the commander’s action group, told USNI News.

To keep the SWO pool healthy, the Navy is also targeting junior grade lieutenant SWOs with two to four years in the service, since the study found they are the most likely to leave.

“Many officers are likely making the decision to either stay in the Navy or remain a SWO as a LTJG. LTJGs are serving as either 1st or 2nd tour division officers on ships, and their satisfaction is most influenced by administrative burdens, equitable workload and work performance recognition,” reads the report.

In terms of complaints, the survey found that “most JOs are dissatisfied with administrative requirements, workload distribution, and working hours during shipyard availabilities.”

There were also specific reasons that women tended to leave the surface fleet.

“Junior officers were asked which reasons contribute the most to their desire to separate from the Navy. While men and women had similar trends, women expressed a stronger overall desire to separate from the service, with the ability to start a family as the leading reason why they plan to leave the Navy,” reads the survey.

Some JOs said they were reluctant to take the training to be a Weapons Tactic Instructor – a specialized training in a specific warfare area like mine warfare or air and missile defense – due to complications to train as a WTI and also attend graduate school.

An overwhelming number of junior officers wanted specialized career paths that would slot them as ship drivers, engineers or weapons system specialists.

In line with the findings, SURFOR will hold a junior officer symposium later this summer to gather more input on correcting some of the problems identified.

One innovation in use now is increased automation for tedious tasks like reporting a casualty on a ship.

“You have to go from a piece of equipment being broken to that report leaving the ship,” Golden said. “We have ships doing that – are doing that in a not-quite-automated fashion. It’s not quite chatGPT. But there, they’re much smoother about getting that from the O1 who’s writing it, who’s through to the O6 to have it released and saving time and allowing [SWOs] to focus on… how to teach their sailors about warfighting and how to get better ship handling.”

The structure of the anonymous survey reinforced one positive for Koy and Golden.

“There was no one looking over their shoulder. They were able to take this survey on their own and they said, ‘Leading sailors and working with the people I am charged to lead is what I find the most valuable’,” Golden said. “I think that is fundamental to what it means to be a SWO. On the first day you step on a ship, you might not know… what a CASREP even is, but you can help create a team and build that connection from your lowest-ranking sailor throughout that division and make it a place that people look forward to going to work.”

Submission Statement India's love-hate relationship with the "First World" can be traced all the way back to its founding. Many of the country's revolutionary leaders were open to or outright supporters of socialism. As a nation, India itself attempted to chart a path separate from either of the Cold War powers and their spheres of influence. The same skepticism of Western motives and attitudes which drove that neutrality remains a powerful force within India. The situation now is less amenable to such neutrality, however. China's revanchist ambitions are growing increasingly overt and violent as the nation displays both the will and the ability to seize Indian territory by force. Russia is inarguably declining on the world stage, leaving only the West as a credible security partner. That leaves India in a bit of a pickle, being forced to pick between its historical Western skepticism and a global environment that is making the West an extremely attractive security partner.

Okay, with all that context out of the way, this article is an excellent summary of India's increasing strategic alignment with the West. The situation is not as cut and dry as the article claims it to be, however. Western nations' attitudes toward freedom of expression and democratic values are likely to remain a stumbling block for India, where the dominant political party, BJP, has increasingly been stoking the flames of Hindu nationalism and undermining its democratic norms and institutions. To be sure, such concerns haven't prevented Western alliances in the past or present(see: Turkey). But Western pressure over India's authoritarian streaks is likely to continue inducing friction over the long term. The tension between domestic and international priorities is fascinating and a space to watch.

SUMIT GANGULY is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University Bloomington and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Institute of Politics at the University of Heidelberg.

DINSHA MISTREE is a Research Fellow in the Program on Strengthening U.S.-India Relations at the Hoover Institution.

Article text in the comments.

In the middle of August 1952, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai traveled nearly 4,000 miles to Moscow to meet with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Zhou was acting as an emissary for the leader of China, Mao Zedong. The two Communist powers were allies at the time, but it was not a partnership of equals: the Soviet Union was a superpower, and China depended on it for economic assistance and military equipment. Two years earlier, Mao and Stalin had embarked on a joint venture of sorts, giving their blessing to the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung when he invaded South Korea. Their hopes had been high; even though the United States immediately rushed to South Korea’s aid, Stalin telegrammed Kim in the wake of the invasion to tell him that he had “no doubt that in the soonest time the interventionists will be driven out of Korea with ignominy.”

Things had not gone according to plan. In the fall of 1950, as troops led by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur advanced through North Korea, China directly intervened. By the middle of 1951, a bloody stalemate had set in along the 38th parallel, the line that had delineated North from South Korea before the invasion. Negotiations between the opposing sides began in July of that year. Their purpose was to reach an armistice and set the stage for discussions about Korea’s future. The talks had deadlocked, however, over the details of exchanging prisoners of war.

When Zhou traveled to Moscow in the summer of 1952, the situation was looking grim for the Communists. Airstrikes had destroyed the North’s industrial facilities and heavily damaged every city. Food was short. In February, Kim told Mao that he had “no desire to continue the war.” Around five months later, Kim pleaded with Stalin to bring about “the soonest conclusion of an armistice.” But Stalin did nothing. Like Stalin, Mao was determined to stand fast in the face of U.S. demands, and he was less worried than Kim was about the battlefield. Like Kim, however, Mao knew that his country was suffering.

Over the course of the Cold War, Zhou would earn a reputation as a cool diplomat. Yet arriving in Moscow as the bearer of bad news, he could not have been at ease. His task was to sound out Stalin’s openness to a truce. Stalin had been behind the war, and it seemed reasonable to assume that talk of shutting it down would displease him.

The meeting took place on August 20. Stalin wanted to know if the Chinese and North Koreans could increase the military pressure on the United States. Zhou expressed confidence that “both sides are about equal in strength” but noted that a Chinese “general offensive would be difficult to carry out.” In other words, there were no good military options for coercing the United States. To exude confidence, Zhou reassured Stalin that “Mao believes that the continuation of the war is advantageous to us, since it [distracts] America from preparing for a new world war."

“Mao Zedong is right,” Stalin affirmed, according to Russian archival documents. “This war is getting on America’s nerves. The North Koreans have lost nothing, except for casualties. . . . [The] Americans understand that this war is not advantageous and they will have to end it. . . . Endurance and patience [are] needed here.” Zhou praised “the truth of comrade Stalin’s observations.” Then he tried again. The North Koreans are “wavering somewhat,” he said. “They are in a slightly unsteady state. Among certain elements of the Korean leadership one can detect a state of panic, even.” This seemed to annoy Stalin, who replied that he had been “already informed of these feelings.” Zhou backed off.

A month later, Zhou broached again with Stalin the possibility of accepting a cease-fire and putting off contentious details regarding prisoner exchanges. Stalin dismissed the idea as “one of [several] possible scenarios, but America is not likely to agree to it.” It was clear that Stalin wanted the Chinese and North Koreans to press on and forgo compromise. Zhou was left with little choice but to assent to Stalin’s counsel, which he praised as “valuable instructions.”The fighting would rage for another ten months before the two sides would agree to an armistice, albeit on terms that were slightly worse for China and the Soviet Union than those that Zhou and Stalin had discussed. During that time, tens of thousands died, and tens of thousands more were wounded. Ultimately, 36,574 Americans were killed in the war and 103,284 were wounded. China lost an estimated one million people, and four million Koreans perished—ten percent of the peninsula’s population.

The armistice ended that bloodshed, establishing a demilitarized zone and mechanisms to supervise compliance and mediate violations. But the Korean War did not officially conclude. The major political issues could not be settled, and skirmishes, raids, artillery shelling, and occasional battles broke out. They never escalated to full-blown war, however. The armistice held—and 70 years later, it still holds.

Today, the Korean Peninsula remains a site of high geopolitical tension. North Korea is governed by a dictator who brutally represses his citizens and regularly threatens his neighbors with nuclear weapons. But the carnage of the Korean War is now a distant memory, and the peace produced by the armistice allowed South Korea to develop a robust economy and, eventually, a stable liberal democracy. For all its flaws, the armistice was a success.

The war ravaging Ukraine today bears more than a passing resemblance to the Korean War. And for anyone wondering about how it might end, the durability of the Korean armistice—and the high human cost of the delay in reaching it—deserves close study. The parallels are clear. In Ukraine, as in Korea seven decades ago, a static battlefront and intractable political differences call for a cease-fire that would pause the violence while putting off thorny political issues for another day. The Korean armistice “enabled South Korea to flourish under American security guarantees and protection,” the historian Stephen Kotkin has pointed out. “If a similar armistice allowed Ukraine—or even just 80 percent of the country—to flourish in a similar way,” he argues, “that would be a victory in the war.”The negotiations that produced the Korean armistice were long and difficult and took place alongside heavy fighting, before the war’s costs were clear enough to persuade either side to compromise. The same would likely be true today. The Korean experience also suggests that the obstinacy of Russian President Vladimir Putin—who, like Stalin, seems averse to compromise of any kind—could be especially obstructive. On top of that, domestic politics in the United States and the gap between Washington’s and Kyiv’s legitimate but distinct interests could trip up a cease-fire.

At the moment, debate in Washington often focuses on the question of when would be the right time to start pushing Ukraine to negotiate, and the consensus answer has generally been, “Not yet.” The Korean War shows that, in a military stalemate, it can take a very long time for both sides to clearly see that the costs of continuing to fight are outweighing the benefits. And by the time they do, a great deal of death and destruction can occur without producing any meaningful advantages.

If the United States, NATO, and other supporters of Ukraine do decide to work toward a cease-fire, the end of the Korean War offers three practical lessons. First, they must be willing to fight and talk simultaneously, using battlefield pressure to enforce demands at the negotiating table. Second, they should include the United Nations in any negotiations, since neutral arbiters are an asset. Finally, they should condition future security assistance and postconflict support for Ukraine on Kyiv’s willingness to make some concessions.

A complete victory for Ukraine and the West and a total defeat for the other side would be a welcome end to the Ukraine war, just as it would have been in Korea. And as in Korea, the risk of escalation confounds such an outcome. Kyiv, Washington, and their partners in opposing Moscow’s aggression should understand that an armistice that both Ukraine and Russia can accept—even if it fails to settle all the important questions—would still be a win.

Submission Statement

CARTER MALKASIAN is Chair of the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and author of The Korean War, 1950–1953. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Special Assistant for Strategy to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As General Mark Milley has stated, this war will end, one way or another, at the negotiating table. I found this article fascinating not necessarily for its parallels to Ukraine, but for its insights into decision-making in authoritarian nations, especially in the context of operational/strategic setbacks.