Piercing the Fog of War: Sean McMeekin on Russia and Ukraine

Digital Editor of The Dartmouth Review Lintaro P. Donovan (TDR) virtually interviewed Sean McMeekin (SM) on October 26, 2022. Mr. McMeekin serves as Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, where his scholarship focuses on Russian and Eurasian studies. He is the author of The Russian Revolution: A New History (2017) and Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II (2021), which reassesses Stalin as the “animating force” of the global conflict. He has also written for the Claremont Review of Books, including a Summer 2022 essay entitled “Portrait of Power” that sought to demystify Vladimir Putin in the context of the War in Ukraine.

TDR: Much of the talk about the War in Ukraine has revolved around the subject of nuclear war. Is Vladimir Putin using nuclear weapons a possibility in this conflict?

SM: Anything is possible at this stage. But there might be a greater likelihood of the United States using tactical nuclear weapons than the Russians. This is simply my reading of the nature of the two arsenals in the strategic doctrine of both sides. Russia has a much stricter first-use doctrine that is more draconian, involving an existential threat to the Russian state, which would require a massive retaliatory response. Whereas the US has actually been far looser in recent years in discussing the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. Most of this dates back to the War on Terror—that is, the US withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and restructuring its nuclear arsenal. Hence, the US may actually be likelier than Russia to deploy tactical nuclear weapons, though not necessarily in Ukraine. I don’t think Russia actually has a transparent doctrine related to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, but I think the threshold is actually higher for Russia than for the US.

TDR: According to a September 29 Levada Analytical Center poll, Putin currently enjoys an approval rating of 77%, far higher than that of any Western political leader. Why has Putin become more popular since the start of the war? Is a palace coup, as some analysts have predicted, possible?

SM: I have followed some of those trends with Putin’s approval ratings. Obviously, you have to take them, to some extent, with a grain of salt. One doesn’t know how accurate the approval ratings are. However, the trendlines do tend to suggest something real. My understanding is that, in the early days after launching the invasion in February of 2022, Putin’s approval rating remained actually stuck in the fifties, but it shot thereafter up into the eighties by late March, about a month or so after the war began.

That happened in large part because of the reaction in the West. The draconian sanctions applied on Russia and this vitriolic, almost hysterical anti-Russian campaign in the Western media—the firing of Russian composers and cultural figures, assaults on Russian restaurants, bans on Russian products and Russian food, all of that kind of thing—have created this bunker mentality of “us against them,” almost as if Putin’s prophecy about the West being in existential war against Russia is true.

There was a natural rallying around the throne, so to speak. There was also a sorting effect. A lot of the Russians who opposed the war, of whom there obviously were many, left the country. A lot of them fled by way of Finland, Georgia, and some other neighboring countries, and some went to Turkey.

Many of them ended up here in the United States. I know a good many of them personally, and the Russians whom I tend to know over here are quite anti-war. However, I don’t think they are necessarily representative of Russian public opinion because of the sorting effect, the natural rallying-around-the-throne effect, and the escalation on the Western side beginning with the sanctions and possibly extending to whatever exactly happened with the Nord Stream pipeline.

No one’s going to fess and own up to the crime, but many Russians simply assume that the Americans or their proxies were involved in the sabotage. At times, there’s even been open boasting about NATO communications helping Ukraine sink the Moskva and the Black Sea and also even target and kill Russian generals. There’s been heated rhetoric about toppling the regime. “Putin must go,” as Biden said in a speech in Poland. All of this has had the effect of reinforcing Russians’ convictions that they are in an existential war for their survival. A rallying around the throne is a predictable effect of this.

On the subject of a palace coup against Putin, that will depend on how the war goes, if Russia is forced to retreat and if—though I personally don’t expect this to happen—Russian control of Crimea comes into question. If there is a threat to Putin, it’s going to come from losing the war, certainly not from winning the war. That is to say, if the Russian position really does become precarious and fragile, then you could possibly see some type of palace coup, but so long as Russia maintains a vigorous presence and is able to defend its positions in Eastern Ukraine, I don’t think Putin is in any danger.

TDR: Do you think those who oppose the war in Russia could stage some sort of uprising? 

SM: I’m not quite sure how the mechanism is supposed to work, but there is an idea that some pro-Western, anti-Putin, anti-reactionary government might come to power and make rapprochement with the West. I suppose that, as a historian who currently has no access to the Russian archives, I have some sympathy for this desire, this wish.

But for some utterly different form of Russian government to come to power and to reopen the country, reopen the archives, make rapprochement with the West, I—as a realist—think this is kind of a fantasy. If there is going to be any threat to Putin’s government, it is more likely to come from hardline elements. If there is any possibility of the use of so-called tactical nuclear weapons, it would probably come in the case that Crimea is threatened and Putin thought his own political position was becoming untenable. The pressure would be becoming more from the right than from Putin’s liberal critics.

TDR: What was Putin’s calculus in launching the “special military operation” in February 2022? 

SM: Back in February of 2022? Well, it’s difficult to say. There’s been a lot of debate, for example, about the thrust towards Kiev, or Kyiv, as I suppose we’re all supposed to pronounce it now. Were the Russians genuinely hoping for a palace coup inside the Ukrainian capital so that a friendlier government would come to power, utterly flummoxed and embarrassed by the Russian invasion, or was this a feint designed to pin down Ukrainian forces in and around Kiev so that they could not reinforce the Donbass—I personally don’t have a strong view on the subject one way or another.

Everyone expects that there was some grand design. I’m sure there were certain objectives that Putin and his advisors probably had. I do think that the war did not turn out as well as they hoped. That’s quite clear in the early stages. It took them a while to recover their footing, but the Russians did, however, make methodical gains along the Donbass down effectively to Crimea, creating a kind of land bridge, which is obviously now under threat as the Ukrainians are counterattacking.

The Russians were probably hoping and expecting to, at the very least, reach the boundaries of the “autonomous” provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk. Capturing Mariupol and establishing a land bridge to Crimea, securing its water supplies and strategic lines of communication, was probably a minimum objective of the Russians.

Just because of the nature of escalation, I assume that the Russians, if they are able to turn the tide and resume the offensive after the ground freezes, will have greater objectives. Now perhaps, some of the objectives are simply to destroy Ukraine’s ability to continue to fight and to pose any type of military threat to the eastern Ukrainian provinces that Russia now sees as its own. Even if the rest of the world is not going to recognize the Russian annexations, the Russians certainly view them as provinces now.

They’ve annexed them formally. Holding onto those provinces has become an existential problem for Russian security. I don’t know if there was some grand design that a friendly government would be installed in Kiev, but I think that the Russians might have been willing to negotiate a deal with the Zelensky government for a while in the spring [of 2022]. I’m not sure that’s true anymore. I think now their objective is to cause such damage to Ukraine’s government that effectively Zelensky will have to be toppled and replaced by a friendlier statesman.

TDR: According to a Mediazona report, Russia has had 7,822 soldiers killed in action since the start of hostilities. What makes Russia willing to sacrifice so much men and materiel in this conflict?

SM: Ukraine is simply far more important to Russia than it is to the United States and to the West. For some reason, it has become important for the US and the West—in view of all the materiel, money, and even, to some extent, the talk of US Special Forces on the ground and troops training in Poland for possible deployment to Ukraine. But for Russia, Ukraine is a huge part of its history. Ukrainians would obviously dispute Russia’s interpretation of the history of Kievan Rus’ or the protection agreements signed with the various Cossack hosts of Ukraine, but—to Russians—Ukraine is simply part of their history and their heritage. The Crimea, for example, has been Russian territory dating back to the 1780s. A lot of Russian blood was shed there. A whole war was fought over Crimea in the 1850s.

Russians have viewed the Black Sea as a hugely important part of their security and their access to warm-water markets. It was over these kinds of problems, questions, and interests that Russia went to war on numerous occasions in the modern era, including the First World War, for example.

Some of Stalin’s main objectives at the end of the Second World War dealt with access to the straits and territories abutting the Black Sea. These are hugely important strategic issues and, in Putin’s view, amount to existential questions for Russia—that is, not necessarily controlling all of what is now the territory of Ukraine but having, at worst, a neutralized and, at best, a friendly government there.

Access to the Black Sea and control over some of Russia’s old naval ports, such as Sevastopol, are hugely important questions. The Russians may not succeed, but they clearly view these as critical security questions and even, to some extent, existential ones for Russia’s survival as a great power.

Russia without Ukraine is no longer a great power. I had an advisor called Norman Stone who had a great line about this. He said: “With Ukraine, Russia is the United States: a superpower; without Ukraine, it is Canada: mostly snow.”

TDR: If the US were to somehow intervene in the conflict, what would that look like?

SM: The US has already intervened. The US has maybe not declared war and has maybe not put regular troops on the ground, but I do believe the Biden Administration has owned up to the fact that there are US Special Forces on the ground. I also believe that the Administration has actually cited the findings dating back to the early Trump years that Russia had intervened in the 2016 presidential election as justification for this intervention. Hence the US is already on the ground in Ukraine in some sense but not in the full-on, officially recognized sense of an armed conflict that has been declared by Congress.

On the other hand, the US has not had a war declared by Congress since 1941 but has definitely been involved in numerous wars over the decades. The US is heavily on the ground in Poland. The US has deployed numerous troops, and we have a lot of logistical operations going on and are getting weapons into Ukraine via Poland. The US is openly arming Ukraine, to the tune of more than $50 billion in funds appropriated by Congress. Thus, the US is already involved in the conflict. Certainly, the US could escalate further. But so far the official line has been that, since Ukraine is not a member of NATO, the US is either not obliged or not necessarily going to intervene.

The US obviously does not want to go directly to war with Russia, but the Russian leadership certainly sees the US as already being involved. NATO is involved in Ukraine on the ground, whether it’s through special forces, mercenaries, logistics trainers, equipment, and all kinds of missiles—from the Javelins to the Stingers to the HIMARS. My personal hope is that the US does not escalate further and that the US tries to communicate regularly and negotiate with the Russians to ensure that certain lines aren’t crossed. I assume some of this is already happening behind the scenes. There are contacts of some level between the Russian and the US military command. I certainly hope that the US and the Russians can work out some type of agreement according to which there are lines that cannot be crossed.

TDR: What would be the best-case outcome of the war in terms of American security? The worst-case? 

SM: I disagree with the Biden Administration and most of Congress about this, but I think the US interest would actually be to wind the war down as quickly as possible, not least because of the economic devastation it continues to wreak across Europe and throughout the world economy. Everyone is talking about the possibility of Germany and other countries in Europe facing a major fuel crisis this winter, and it is already causing financial and economic havoc across the European economy. The US has been mostly insulated up until this point, but, in the end, the US economy is going to suffer too. 

The best outcome would be some type of admittedly unpleasant compromise. Some version of the Minsk Accords perhaps, relating to, if not de jure recognition, de facto recognition of Russia’s claims in Ukraine. The US could exercise considerable influence on Zelensky. Zelensky would be in a very difficult position if forced to accept some type of unpleasant status-quo arrangements. 

The worst-case scenario from the US perspective is some type of nuclear exchange with Russia. That would be the ultimate worst-case scenario. Short of that, if the war continues on even for another year, US and NATO stocks of weapons will be degraded quite significantly. It’s more difficult for us and for NATO to replace those stocks than for Russia simply because our procurement is so much more expensive and corrupt. This is actually a potential disaster for the US and for our security. With any war like this that goes on, the US might think that it is in its interest to continue to bleed Russia, but that is not ultimately in the US interest. The US should be trying to bring an end to this war as quickly as possible.

TDR: If you were in charge of our foreign policy, what would you be doing regarding Ukraine right now?

SM: Ukraine has become so dependent on the influx of funds and war materiel from the West that it would be very difficult to cut off the supply immediately. But I do think that it should be cut off. It should be made clear to Ukrainian leadership that there are certain limits to what the West is willing to do in order to fuel this war. The West must ask Zelensky quite clearly what a possible negotiating position might be to start bringing some type of resolution to this war. With Russia calling up reserves and escalating the war, this is not a bad time to get the parties to the negotiating table and to work out some type of unpleasant compromise.

It will not be easy. It’s never easy when you have the irreconcilable demands of two warring parties like this. Unfortunately, the US has effectively forfeited its position as a neutral broker. I’m not even sure that, in the event someone like me were by some miracle put in charge of US foreign policy, the Russians would perceive us as a neutral broker. I think they would see us as an advocate for Ukraine. In the end, some third party would have to negotiate, perhaps with the US at the table and involved in the negotiations.