The horrifying truth is that the war isn’t going Nato’s way
Sanctions have now failed as a deterrent not once but twice. Their threat did not deter Putin from invading Ukraine and their implementation has not halted the Russians in their tracks. As a result, the war is expanding, not being contained, and Putin is likely to achieve his aims in Ukraine before Russia feels the full economic effects.
The failure of sanctions to prevent or contain the war has turned them into something else – an instrument of economic war, at least in Putin’s eyes. By casting what Nato and the EU are doing as a belligerent action rather than a financial penalty, he has retained escalation dominance. Russia has linked what the Western powers have wanted to keep separate. Nato and the EU are deterred from other forms of action. The West has greater military capability than Russia, but it is understandably fearful of invoking it.
Paradoxically, however, Nato thinks it has had a good war. Member states have congratulated themselves on how well they have rallied. Germany’s increased defence spending promises to make actual its latent hegemony of Europe. Both the alliance and the EU have been strengthened as multilateral institutions. So far, however, none of this helps Ukraine or holds back Russia. Nato, as it did in Afghanistan, can sometimes forget that it is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Putin may have expected a quick and easy victory which he has not gained, but that does not mean his strategy has failed – or not yet. Because he is using war as an instrument of Russian policy, when Nato is not, he still holds the cards. Nor does he see the war as “a war of choice”, however crazy we may regard his decision to embark on it.
The Russian president regards Ukraine not as an independent sovereign state but as an integral part of the Russian empire. Ukraine’s entirely justified rejection of that assumption makes this an existential struggle for both sides. Putin is now fighting for his political survival, just as much as Zelensky and the Ukrainians are fighting for their lives.
As the war lengthens it will pose fresh challenges. A long war will give sanctions more time to take effect, but don’t expect them to divide the Russian president from his people any time soon. Economic warfare rarely prevails in isolation. It failed to divide the German people from their leaders until the very end of the First World War, and it failed entirely to do so in the Second World War. Rather, common adversity can rally a nation, while deaths in combat – at least for the immediate future – are more likely to represent sunk costs than a reason to stop.
The effects of economic warfare are also visited on those who employ it. War shattered the globalised economic system in 1914 and it was only finally put back together again after 1990. We are dismantling it once more. The longer the war in Ukraine, the more the unity of Nato and the EU will be strained. Other domestic effects will follow as refugees once again stoke migration across Europe.
The further that Russia advances into Ukraine, the more it threatens the flanks of the country’s Nato neighbours. Nato’s unity will be affected by the relative proximity of its members to the conflict and its consequences. The US rejection of Poland’s offer of MIG fighters is a portent of strains to come.
The popular demand is that Putin be stopped, not that Nato members march in lockstep. That, presumably, is Nato’s strategy too, but it is not delivering – and time is not on its side.