„Rosja nie ma już możliwości eskalacji konfliktu poza bronią jądrową i nie chce jej używać bardziej niż my”

It is now over a 1000 days since Vladimir Putin’s bold gambit to take Ukraine in specified weeks unravelled into a protracted and bloody war. As both sides dig in, the stakes for Ukraine, Russia and the West proceed to grow. As the conflict grinds on, both sides find themselves locked in a brutal war of attrition, with no decisive breakthroughs on the horizon. In a wide-ranging conversation with RFE/RL’s Vazha Tavberidze, Colonel (Ret.) Liam Collins, the founding manager of the Modern War Institute at West Point and a erstwhile defence advisor to Ukraine (2016-18), examines the battlefield dynamics; evaluates the effectiveness of western aid; and reflects on the lessons learned – and unlearned – over the course of the war. From the tactical realities on the ground to the broader geopolitical implications, his insights paint a sobering image of this grinding, unforgiving conflict.

VAZHA TAVBERIDZE: A 1000 days since Putin assumed he could take Ukraine in a substance of weeks, if not days – where do we stand today? What chapter of this saga are we surviving through now?

LIAM COLLINS: We’re kind of where we were at after about 3 weeks – after 3 weeks, it was clear Russia was truly going to conflict and not be able to accomplish its goals. You could already tell that this would be an extended conflict. I said at the time it’s going to last many years, and that’s kind of where we’re at – at a standstill, a deficiency of crucial ability from Russia to take territory or Ukraine to liberate it.

With reports coming in that Russia is advancing at a faster pace than any time for the last year and half, is it inactive actual that Moscow lacks a crucial ability to seize more territory?

Without a doubt, they’re doing it at a faster pace. But if you look at how long it would take them to scope Kyiv, at this pace, it would take decades. That’s not a viable way to taking the capital and taking over the nation, and it’s improbable that they’re going to be able to do it right just through the force of arms. It’s going to be exhaustion on 1 side or the other. But yeah, they’ve had any success of late. But keep in mind, that’s erstwhile we were artificially restricting Ukraine. This has never happened in the past of war, where a nation is being supported but with so many restrictions on the weapons that are provided to them. I think we’ve seen that erstwhile they have gone into Russian territory or pursued deeper strikes, it forces Russia to reposition its forces.

Let’s look at the situation on the front, if the current trends continue, what can each side realistically hope to accomplish by the fresh Year?

You’re not going to see Ukraine liberating any crucial territory. They’re truly just trying to hold their lines, reconstitute their forces, get resupplied. Russia will be continuing to just throw their soldiers away, they don’t care about Russian citizens, and let them to be slaughtered to make truly insignificant gains on the front line. We’re talking, you know, tens of metres, possibly hundreds of metres, at the cost of hundreds of their own citizens for truly small tactical purpose. So that’s what I would anticipate to be seeing. We might see the Russian lines decision in any places and proceed to grow on the front, but by and large, they’re going to be beautiful stagnant, another than a fewer places where they’re truly pushing and getting their people slaughtered.

That’s precisely what I wanted to ask – do you anticipate any fresh conquests from Russia, specified as fresh cities, fresh towns, fresh strategically crucial outposts?

No. I mean, we’re in mid-November, only a fewer more weeks left before the winter sets in. I think the large chaotic card in all of this will be, what is president Trump going to push for and pursue? What’s the US policy going to be? Because, Ukraine has fought highly effectively. However, you can have all the resolve in the planet but if you don’t have the means to fight, then you’re going to struggle. And that’s kind of the large question, what will US support proceed to be after fresh Year, and then if the US decides they’re going to cut down importantly or halt entirely, will another western nations step up to fill that void? Ukraine absolutely needs to be resupplied. As long as they’re resupplied, they can proceed the fight and truly proceed where it’s at. Now, they aren’t going to have the ability to liberate large swathes of territory. It’s truly Ukraine just playing a war of exhaustion, just continuing to push Russia, to make it costly until Moscow decides it’s not worth fighting this war. But again, that’s not months away. That’s years away.

Would you expect, for example, Russia to liberate the Kursk region by, you know, the fresh Year?

It’s not impossible that they will, but I don’t think so.

Speaking of making it besides costly for Russia to proceed waging this war – is there anything that could happen on the battlefield to get that message through to the Kremlin? Should there be any kind of hitherto unseen casualty ratio? How many dead Russians per period would be adequate for that?

We’ve seen the attacks into Russia, and those truly jar Moscow, any of these deeper strikes, and the more the Ukrainians are allowed to conduct these strikes deep into Russia, then the political elite will possibly start paying the cost of this war, as opposed to the soldiers dying. That calculus is beginning up the front so that Ukraine is free to strike anywhere, alternatively of just on their territory. Otherwise, as long as you have massive economies like China and then have war fighting capabilities from the North Koreans supporting them, it makes it truly hard to make the Russians feel that cost.

It’s inactive rather fascinating that the death ratio does not seem to be deterring Russia in any way, form or form. As a combat veteran yourself, is there any threshold where if the casualties scope that threshold, then Moscow might have second thoughts about it? Or no substance how advanced it goes will they inactive keep on sending the men in?

There evidently is simply a certain level where if it’s reached eventually, they won’t be able to fight, due to the fact that they won’t have people to fight with. But if you look at Ukraine, could you realistically always get to that threshold? That’s the question. And I’m not rather certain you could get to that threshold, to be honest. Initially, at the start of the war, I thought they most likely could have exceeded that threshold. But as I always tell people, never underestimate Russia’s ability to absorb pain. Part of it is besides that we care about our citizens and Russia truly doesn’t.

Ratio-wise, what would that threshold look like? How many dead Russians?

If you were to ask me before the war, I might even have said, well, if Russia was losing 200,000 men, that would be it, but they lost as many in the first month. That’s more than a decades-long war in Afghanistan. And truly what brought about the end of the war in Afghanistan? It was an extremely, highly unpopular war in the 1980s. Russian mothers didn’t like their kids coming home in body bags.

But they don’t seem to head it as much now, with 10 times more body bags coming home. Why?

Part of it is that Putin’s got a tighter grip on the country, so you have little of that public dissent. But part of it is that Ukraine is fundamentally different for Russians. To Russia’s mind, like, this is part of their psyche, it’s part of Russia. On the another hand, Afghanistan was something they never truly cared about that much.

Right. You mentioned in the beginning how Ukraine needs to be resupplied, how resolve alone won’t be enough, if they don’t have adequate equipment, right? But then again, you can have all the equipment, but you request people to usage it. How large is Ukraine’s manpower problem that we keep proceeding about?

They request both equipment and manpower. Without a doubt. They request soldiers. 1 thing is they could lower their draft age – if you look at the NATO countries, their draft age is much lower.

But most western nations are not sending their people to war. And in Ukraine’s case, it’s deliberate. They’re sending older people to defend the demographic pool, so to say.

I realize that, but if they are fighting for their survival, historically, that is not an different age group to tap into, to fight wars. Another thing that would aid is simply a greater number of western trainers. They should besides not be dispersed throughout Europe but based in Ukraine. If the Russians have North Koreans fighting there, why can’t the western nations have a more crucial training presence in Ukraine appropriate to train the Ukrainians? There truly is no reason why this isn’t more seriously considered.

The large news of this week is the Biden administration greenlighting the usage of ATACMS for deep strikes into Russia. Before we go on discussing what impact it will have, let me ask you why has this come now and not a long time ago, erstwhile arguably it could have saved thousands of lives?

The US has deterred itself from action. We think, well, if we do this, Russia will escalate. It took Russia 11 months to, you know, seize the tactically insignificant city of Bakhmut, throwing everything they had at it. So there’s nothing Russia could have always done to escalate. And so we should have opened up the floodgates, given the Ukrainians quite a few equipment, alternatively of going about it at an incremental pace and putting restrictions on them. Again, if you look at the past of war, this has never, always been done. I think the reason we see it now has to do with the administration changing, and we’re just trying to give them something to see if it can aid at all. You know, the change happens in mid-January and that’s why we’re seeing it now.

So what might the possible Russian consequence be then, given Putin’s earlier remarks that it would be tantamount to NATO entering the war?

There’s nothing they can do. Russia beautiful much has everything out there. Okay, apart from atomic weapons. Russia’s not going to usage atomic weapons. They want to usage them as much as we want to usage them. Nobody wants those to be used. So truly look at what they can do – they’re reliant on the Iranians for drones, they’re reliant on the North Koreans for troops. There’s nowhere they can truly go to escalate. And if they did escalate, Putin’s besides not stupid, he’s thinking, well, what will the US do in return? Will they start actually sending western troops in Ukraine? I think we besides forget that just due to the fact that they might escalate, they might not be thinking, hey, what’s our consequence going to be? We have a much greater ability to escalate, while Russia beautiful much has nothing left but atomic weapons, which you’re not going to use. We have a crucial and much greater ability to escalate than Russia does.

What’s next? Do you do anticipate Britain and France’s Storm Shadows and French Scalps to follow suit? And what about Germany’s Taurus missiles?

I would anticipate to see those restrictions be lifted. We’ve seen this incremental increase throughout the war, and so I would anticipate that as shortly as 1 kind of beginning appears you will see the others follow. I’d be amazed if it didn’t happen.

Does this greenlight come with a time limit, given that a fresh US president is set to take office in 2 months?

I think this provides a bit of unpredictability, which is frequently a good bargaining chip, right? What is Trump going to want to do? He’s a kind of deal maker, and he wants to effort to seal a deal, he’s promised to end this within days of taking office. That’s unlikely, right? If it’s days in political time, it truly means weeks or months, right? But no uncertainty he’s going to want to effort to broker this on terms favourable to him. But the large question is whether he will end up frustrated due to the fact that both sides might not want to do it. And maybe, like Putin, this could alienate or anger him. He might then decide that he’s going to actually increase aid to the Ukrainians, or that he simply doesn’t like what Zelenskyy is doing. He might say that he won’t give any more aid if his deal isn’t accepted, or effort to force Russia to the table through increased support. So I think there’s quite a few uncertainty with that. surely nothing’s going to happen within days or weeks.

Suppose there’s a deal, and Ukraine comes out the clear loser, what kind of far-reaching geopolitical consequences do you see that having?

What we’ve kind of seen play out here is what individual called the “Axis of Upheaval”. You have North Korea, China and Iran all aligning together. If you just halt supporting Ukraine, you effectively have handed this group a triumph and you’re weakening your position in the world. If the US just walks away, we’re in a dangerous situation. I mean, we haven’t seen scenarios like that since before planet War Two. If you just want to walk distant from another democratic nation, as we did back then… I would have liked to believe we learned that lesson in the past, but possibly we haven’t. But what happens erstwhile you just kind of set a precedent that emboldens them more? Then possibly China will be going after Taiwan again in the short term, because, evidently China has been looking at this for a long time. They might be asking themselves any questions: was this costly for Russia? Yes, but let’s say they get a good swathe of Ukrainian territory now out of it. That’s a decent bargain, as far as the Kremlin is concerned. That would be a comparative bargain at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives they don’t care about and the billions of dollars that they don’t truly head spending. If they can look at it and say, all we gotta do is wait, absorb any minimal sanctions for a comparatively tiny number of years, but in the long term, we will own Taiwan, then it’s worth it, right? From 2022 to 2025 is not that long of a time, right? That’s 3 years. You know, it’s quite a few lost lives, but in terms of Russia’s point of view, that’s worth the calculus and China would feel the same way. If you told Beijing, hey, you’ll have the planet against you, but in 3 years, you’ll have Taiwan, and people will just kind of be sick and tired of it. You can have it. They would go for it in a heartbeat, I am sure.

Liam Collins is executive manager of the Madison Policy Forum and a fellow at the fresh America Foundation. He was the founding manager of the Modern War Institute at West Point and served as a defence advisor to Ukraine from 2016 to 2018. He is simply a retired peculiar Forces colonel with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and South America. He is co-author of the book Understanding Urban Warfare.

Vazha Tavberidze is simply a Georgian writer and staff author with RFE/RL’s Georgian Service. His writing has been published in various Georgian and global media outlets, including The Times, the Spectator, the Daily Beast and New east Europe.

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