Jullian Waller
The Russian political leadership badly misjudged the domestic political environment in Ukraine in February 2022. In contradistinction to its apt and aggressive reading of the ground-level Ukrainian political ecosystem in 2014, Russian intelligence failures in 2022 turned an attempted regime-change operation into a grinding regional war of attrition, with its political objectives forcibly downgraded and its military and economy both substantially degraded by the conflict.[1] Expectations that a sizeable portion of the country’s population were in favor of political decapitation in Kyiv; that a large number of state, military, and security officers were ready to defect or aid in Russian efforts; and that local politicians would be waiting in the wings with sufficient clout, legitimacy, and personal skill to lead post-occupation efforts proved to be wrong on all counts.
Western researchers, regional observers, and local analysts have largely pinned the blame on two primary faults on the Russian side: 1) the operational failure of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) to collect and properly digest accurate information about the state of the Ukrainian political system and the political-cultural disposition of the population; and 2) the unnaturally constrained information ecosystem and decision-making features of a personalist autocratic political regime in which there are strong disincentives to correcting misaligned and self-harming views at the top of the political system.[2] U.S. and other partner aid to Ukraine, as well as the country’s own preparations, have been noted as important elements to Ukraine’s successful resistance, as well.[3]
These lessons are instructive but of limited use to policymakers and political-military analysts in the United States and among its Western allies. While the prospect of intelligence failures will surely remain a perennial problem for all military-security bureaucratic apparatuses, the Russian case highlights a uniquely siloed internal information environment dominated by a single intelligence branch which does not map well onto the variegated, distributed, and bureaucratically-complex U.S. intelligence community.[4] The U.S. political regime is even more removed, although still ultimately relying on personal decision-making at the presidential level to green-light major military operations. Yet beneath that final decision-point is a vastly different incentive structure determined by domestic audience costs to a responsive electorate, a plural media environment, and an oligarchic matrix of economic, political, and international stakeholders that constraint individual executive initiative. All together, this precludes hyper-personalized and privatized decision-making.[5]
Instead, analysts should turn to a less-acknowledged contributor to Russia’s act of catastrophic political misjudgment which does bear directly on American decision-making processes—the danger of assumptions about a country’s domestic political dynamics under highly dynamic ideological change worldwide. The key error in Russian analysis of the Ukrainian polity was a belief that the political conditions of 2014 still held in 2022, and moreover that the same political geography and split elite orientation towards Russia remained as it had been a decade before. Put bluntly, in 2014, large segments of the Ukrainian population were substantively pro-Russian and mobilizable for political purposes. Many influential political and military-security elites at both the national and regional levels were actively interested in geopolitical rapprochement, and pro-Western Ukrainian nationalism was considerably weaker across society. Over the span of less than ten years, each of these assumptive elements were no longer true.[6]
Faulty assumptions about the ideological realities on the ground, at both the popular- and elite-level, are not unique to the Russian case, but can be widely applied to current geopolitical concerns that attract the attention of U.S. policymakers…
Faulty assumptions about the ideological realities on the ground, at both the popular- and elite-level, are not unique to the Russian case, but can be widely applied to current geopolitical concerns that attract the attention of U.S. policymakers, especially those which are hypothesized to potentially require future American military operations. Two cases stand out as areas where careful reassessments and hard, ideologically unpalatable nuances are needed: first, kinetic American involvement in a defense of Taiwan against military aggression by the People’s Republic of China, and second, potential ground intervention in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Less severe cases of potential political misjudgment, and more relevant to the interests of U.S. partners in Europe, include political interventions in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia and NATO membership candidates such as Georgia and Moldova, as well as assumptions about ally interest in countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
Political misjudgment across these varied problem-sets has the potential to mirror the Russian failure in Ukraine. The global shift away from the ideological expectations of the post-Cold War U.S.-backed liberal order, widely noted in the area-studies and social scientific communities, has led to greater doubts about inherent popular and elite support for Western norms in countries that may be targeted for crisis operations.[7] As late as the mid-2010s, policymakers could assume considerable support for democracy-promotion, political liberalization, and integration with U.S.-led international economic institutions. This provided a standard case for assumptions about the outcome of protest movements that constituted the Color Revolutions of the 2000s in Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Eurasia as well as the Arab Spring in the early 2010s.[8]
Yet this approach can no longer be assumed but must be demonstrated through careful and regular analytic reassessments. Taiwan hosts a considerable pro-PRC interest group at the elite level, which is also expressed in internal party politics.[9] The Iranian regime, while delegitimizing itself through repressions against conational protesters, continues to find recourse in strong religious traditionalism, influencing all levels of society. Any post-theocratic regime successor would easily muster anti-Western nationalism in the population and among moderate clerical and business elites.[10] Ideologically pro-Western views (i.e., those beyond simple geopolitical calculations) among Eastern European and Eurasian elites likely peaked in the 2010s, a function of a halting integration strategy by the EU and NATO, as well as local expressions of discontent with the increasingly left-progressive normative commitments by international institutions, Western-funded NGO complexes, and policymakers in both Brussels and Washington.[11] And civil society in the Arab world remains dominated by Western-skeptical religious and nationalist ideologies, juxtaposed against the liberal pro-Western elites in several countries that have supported renewed authoritarian rule in the wake of the 2010’s revolutionary chaos.[12]
The case of Russia’s failure in Ukraine to properly prepare, or even understand, the political groundwork for a major regime-change operation is thus instructive for Western policymakers. While the details and the extreme nature of the decision are quite different, the macro-level assumptions of a compliant, pro-operation constituency able and willing to support intervention remains relevant and applicable. U.S. and coalition experiences with shifting and antagonistic domestic political realities in Iraq and Afghanistan only further underlines the key insight that grave political misjudgment is not something that only happens to adversaries.[13]
The Case of Political Misjudgment in the Russo-Ukrainian War
Euromaidan protesters rally in Kyiv. (Nessa Gnatoush/Wikimedia)
The Russian failure to properly understand the domestic political situation in Ukraine is first and foremost a problem of intelligence-gathering and misapplied sociopolitical assumptions. The regime’s subsequent decision-making processes, given these inputs, followed to tremendously ill effect. As described in detail in both journalistic accounts and post hoc research observations, Russian military and political leadership assumed an operating environment akin to the one they found in 2014 at the end of the Euromaidan protests.[14] The FSB was the primary information corridor informing Kremlin discussions, but continued to propose solutions using the local elites whose star had fallen significantly since the annexation of Crimea, while the evaporation of a pro-Russian position in Ukrainian politics was never forthrightly acknowledged.[15]
The protest period and successful regime-change from a pro-Russian to a pro-Western government in 2013-2014 has often been (rightly) framed as a success of the Western democracy-promotion model interacting with genuine, grassroots domestic political support. But it can also be described as a successful use of pro-Russian assets at the elite- and popular-level to achieve modified Russian geopolitical goals, included the annexation of Crimea without significant armed struggle and the development of a major anti-government insurgency in the Donbas, which was supported, supplied, and partially led by Russian security forces.[16] Furthermore, Russian decision-makers took advantage of a unique period of state and regime weakness, through which an aggressive roll of the dice had an unusually decisive impact.[17]
Russian aims in 2014 were achieved with the help of considerable local support. This included political elites in Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea, who quickly pivoted from passive support for the pro-Russian Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych to a fully separatist position and ultimate integration into the Russian government’s ruling party, United Russia.[18] It also relied on broad, longstanding support in the Crimean population for a pro-Russian political orientation, as well as the rapid radicalization of pro-Russian opinion in Donbas and southeastern Ukrainian populations which led to significant political mobilization and then active support for insurgency by many Ukrainian citizens.[19] Although Russia saw the Ukrainian state removed from its geopolitical orbit after the 2014 events, key elites and sympathetic anti-Maidan segments of the southeastern Ukrainian public meant that separatist action was acquiesced to by many, if not outright supported by all.[20]
The political situation in non-occupied Ukraine in 2022 was decisively different, although the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Russian intelligence and political analysts utterly failed to update their prior assumptions over the intervening years. By this time, the Ukrainian population found itself in an eight-year trench war with Russian-backed forces in the Donbas for which hundreds of thousands were called up over the period. Ukraine also experienced the loss of considerable territory to Russian aggrandizement, and had seen multiple elections in which forthright, pro-Western politicians had won huge parliamentary majorities and presidential victories. Pro-Russian sentiment was largely delegitimized by association with the conflict and had evolved into a pro-peace faction supported by far smaller segments of the Ukrainian population.[21] The most outspokenly pro-Russian parts of the electorate had been physically detached from Ukrainian politics due to annexation and occupation, changing the fundamental political geography of the polity. This should have been evident to analysts based on very simple, publicly-accessible data points such as the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections.[22] Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government had pushed forward, alongside civil society, with a sharp Ukrainianization policy and supported a sustained civic-nationalist ideological project that integrated the population into a symbolic repertoire of state sovereignty and national identity distinct from Soviet-era and pro-Russian identity legacies.[23]
Ukraine in 2022 was not without political turmoil, and counterfactual analysis of the elite situation just prior to the war (that is, sans intervention) suggests that the Zelensky administration was facing serious internal political challenges.[24] The most bullish case for Russian hopes at this point was that political fragmentation could have led to renewed openings for a pro-peace faction to gain in clout over time. Yet Russia embarked on an armed political decapitation strategy instead, assuming that discredited and marginal pro-Russian politicians such as the oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, the former, exiled president Viktor Yanukovych, or even the Ukrainian MP Yuri Boyko and his Opposition Platform party, might be able to act as a quisling government-in-waiting.[25] This simply did not reflect the political opportunity structure at the time, nor the nationalizing, anti-Russian sentiment that was now widespread among the population.
Viktor Medvedchuk, Viktor Yanukovych, and Yuri Boyko (Wikimedia and Encyclopedia Britannica)
Russian efforts to force a regime-change failed for many reasons, as ongoing research has suggested, ranging from bad strategic design and poor operational/logistical planning to force-structure misalignment with military goals, bad operational execution, and insufficiently prepared ground troop psychology. But it also suffered from a fundamental issue of political misjudgment—a fantasy portrayal of what cadres of Ukrainian elites were available to pursue Russian goals and what constituted the actual sentiment and political orientation of the wider population. This experience holds extrapolatable lessons far beyond the case itself.
Political Misjudgment Applied
Ultimately, U.S. and allied policymakers can take several useful lessons from the disastrous Russian political misjudgment in Ukraine. First, they must recognize that the problem of inferring the political orientation of local elites and populations cannot be based on prior experiences without significant attention paid towards updating priors. FSB analysts and Russian governmental elites continued to believe that the facts on the ground fit the 2014 problem-set, despite tremendous, and post hoc quite obvious, changes.
Second, policymakers must be prepared to accept that local actors may not see events in the same ideological lens that decision-makers in Washington do—and that alignment on said issues can change significantly over time. While Vladimir Putin became increasingly obsessed with the idea of a triune East Slavic people divided by arbitrary, Soviet-era borders, Ukrainians had increasingly solidified towards a separate, sovereign conception of nationhood reinforced by experience in an antagonistic war with Russian-backed separatists and undergirded by an extensive, state-directed nationalization program.
Finally, decision-makers must spend time and effort in ensuring that their information flows from intelligence and area-analysts are as removed from just-so stories of easy local compliance and assumptions of popular, welcoming sentiment as possible. FSB reports that did suggest problems in the Ukrainian domestic political sphere are reported to have been packaged through several layers of rewrites and systematic re-framings to ensure that positive news was conveyed readily, while detrimental information was easily dismissible at the top. Given the extreme outcomes of a major kinetic operation gone awry due to political misjudgment, alongside significant military incompetence, policymakers would be wise to keep these meta-lessons ever present in mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment