If the outcome of peace talks rewards Russia’s aggression, Putin and his kind will set their sights on other targets.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s planned blitzkrieg to capture Kyiv in two or three days has now lasted three years. As leaders in the United States and Europe begin to talk peace, the costs, consequences and lessons of Putin’s war are coming into focus.
Costs Topping the list of the war’s costs are the human losses, which are horrific.
The United Nations estimates at least 12,300 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in Putin’s war, though Ukraine’s agency charged with investigating war crimes places estimates 100,000 civilians killed. Putin’s war has displaced more than 10 million Ukrainians. Russia has abducted 260,000 Ukrainian children. And Russia has forcibly transported thousands of Ukrainian adults into “filtration centers” inside Russia. All told, investigators are sifting through evidence of 58,000 war crimes committed by Russian troops.
Western intelligence agencies report that 80,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in the war. Those same agencies estimate 200,000 Russian troops killed, with another 400,000 seriously wounded. Russian infantrymen fighting in Ukraine grimly joke, “A hundred men eat breakfast, seven men eat dinner.”
Then there are the material losses, which are massive.
In 36 months of fighting, Ukraine has lost 1,062 tanks, 435 armored fighting vehicles, 1,205 infantry fighting vehicles, 409 mine-resistant vehicles, hundreds of artillery pieces, 103 fixed-wing aircraft and 50 helicopters.
Russia has lost a staggering 3,740 tanks, 1,899 armored fighting vehicles, 5,459 infantry fighting vehicles, 615 armored personnel carriers, 3,835 transport vehicles, more than 1,200 artillery pieces, 455 rocket-launch systems, 136 fixed-wing aircraft, 151 helicopters and 28 warships.
Russian missiles and drones have hit virtually every corner of Ukraine -- scarring Kyiv and Kharkiv, turning Mariupol into rubble, flattening historical sites in Odessa, bombing dams in Ukraine’s south and destroying 1,200 cultural sites. International observers estimate that Ukraine’s reconstruction will cost more than $486 billion. (For perspective, Ukraine’s entire pre-war GDP was $199 billion.)
Ukrainian drones and missiles have stuck at least 15 Russian refineries, torching gas and oil reserves, refining capacity, storage facilities and a healthy portion of Putin’s kleptocratic wealth.
The payoff for all that killing and destruction: Putin’s henchmen control about 18% of Ukrainian territory today. They held more than 25% in 2022.
Ukraine, interestingly, holds 470 square miles of Russian territory.
Consequences Putin claimed before his invasion that Ukraine was “not a real country,” that Ukraine was “entirely created by Russia,” that Ukraine was a mere extension of Greater Russia.
The irony is threefold.
First, Putin’s war on Ukraine and attempt to erase Ukraine galvanized the Ukrainian people, lit the fuse of Ukrainian nationalism and laid bare the very premise of Putin’s war of war crimes: If Ukraine wasn’t a viable, unified nation-state three years ago, it undeniably is today.
Second, while Putin thought his war on Ukraine would expose a feeble and failed state in Kyiv, it actually exposed the weakness of his own regime: There are countless reports of desertions and fratricide within the Russian military. In Russia’s Southern Military District alone, 18,000 military personnel have deserted. In 2023, Putin had to put down a military mutiny. Plus, rebel Russian soldiers are fighting alongside Ukrainian troops as part of the Free Russia Legion. Their goal is “to liberate our home -- Russia -- in order to destroy the Putin regime and establish a new free country in Russia.”
Third, support for Russia among Russians is tenuous: When Putin ordered 300,000 reserve military personnel back into service, 200,000 Russians fled to Kazakhstan, 70,000 fled to Georgia, 66,000 fled to European Union countries. All told, a million Russians have fled their homeland since the start of Putin’s war.
The ironies and unintended consequences don’t end there.
One of Putin’s motivations for invading Ukraine was to prevent the further expansion of NATO. Yet the NATO alliance is larger and more united today than it was before Putin launched this war.
Soon after Putin’s lunge at Kiev, longtime neutrals Sweden and Finland sought NATO membership. After they were brought into NATO, they quickly joined their fellow allies in working to restore NATO’s deterrent capabilities.
Indeed, it could be said that rather than scaring NATO to death, Putin’s attempt to crush Ukraine scared NATO back to life. For years, the alliance had been drifting. But with Putin trying to rebuild the Russian Empire, there’s broader support -- and clearer need -- for NATO than at any time since the coldest days of the Cold War.
The United States has expanded its presence in Europe by thousands of troops since February 2022, with a permanent U.S. Army garrison now based in Poland and U.S. Air Force refueling operations shifting from Germany to Poland.
Britain is deploying 20,000 troops to defend NATO’s northern flank. Poland is investing 5% of GDP in defense. France is making historic increases in defense spending. Germany is spearheading a NATO battlegroup in Lithuania, has nearly doubled defense spending since 2022 and is leading efforts to construct a continentwide missile-defense system. Finland, with a massive reserve force of 870,000 troops, is standing up a new NATO land command.
NATO’s European members are leading battlegroups in Estonia, Lithuania and Romania, defending the skies of Eastern Europe, and protecting the Baltic Sea. Indeed, with Sweden and Finland now in the NATO fold, the alliance has turned the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake.
Moreover, the alliance is returning to its primary mission of deterring war by preparing for war:
· Twenty-three alliance members now meet NATO’s standard of investing at least 2% of GDP in defense -- up from just eight before Putin’s war on Ukraine.
· Germany, the Netherlands and Poland are carving out military corridors to rapidly move troops and equipment from their ports to NATO’s eastern flank.
· An airbase in Romania is set to become NATO’s largest in Europe. A refurbished Soviet-era airbase in Albania was opened last year.
· The United States and Germany are deploying Tomahawk land-attack missiles and hypersonic missiles on German territory.
· The United States has increased artillery-shell production from 14,000 per month before Putin’s war to 70,000 per month this year -- and 85,000 per month by 2028. Germany has quadrupled tank-shell production to 240,000 rounds per year. Sweden is quadrupling production of anti-tank weapons. Europe’s largest munitions supplier produced 600,000 shells in 2024, up from 150,000 in 2022.
Another consequence of Putin’s war relates to nuclear weapons.
In 1994, Ukraine surrendered its entire nuclear arsenal in exchange for Russia’s commitment to “refrain from the threat or use of force” and respect Ukraine’s “sovereignty” and “existing borders.” The free world’s failure to back up those words after Putin’s 2014 attack on Ukraine not only set the stage for 2022; it crippled the cause of nonproliferation. Ukraine serves as an object lesson of the deterrent power of nuclear weapons -- and the danger of not having them.
Allies like South Korea, adversaries like Iran and war-scarred nations like Ukraine are pondering that lesson. Indeed, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine recently declared, “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection or we should have some sort of alliance.”
That’s not a bluff: Arms-control experts note that Ukraine has long possessed weapons-grade plutonium at existing nuclear-power facilities.
Lessons A lesson the free world continues to learn and relearn -- because it continues to forget -- is that appeasement only whets an aggressor state’s appetite.
Putin invaded and seized parts of Georgia in 2008. The free world responded with toothless sanctions, stern communiques, and a return to business as usual.
Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and chunks of eastern Ukraine in 2014. The free world responded with more toothless sanctions, Russia’s expulsion from the G-8 (an organization in which it never belonged), more stern communiques, and what Washington euphemistically called “non-lethal aid.” As then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko observed at the time, “One cannot win a war with blankets.”
Doubtless, Putin expected that when he returned to finish off Ukraine in 2022, he could do so at little to no cost. That proved to be a massive miscalculation. But Putin’s miscalculation was a function of more than a decade of miscalculations -- and appeasement amnesia -- in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin.
It’s good that the warring sides are engaging in peace talks. However, if the outcome of those talks rewards aggression, then the free world will have succumbed to appeasement amnesia yet again -- and Putin and his kind will set their sights on other targets.
A second lesson: What happens in Europe doesn’t stay in Europe.
The world is still struggling to make up for the loss of Ukrainian goods, grain, resources and commodities: Pre-war Ukraine accounted for 10% of global wheat supply and 15% of global corn supply, with countries such the Philippines, Egypt, Morocco, Thailand, Indonesia Tunisia especially reliant on Ukrainian grain. In addition, pre-war Ukraine was the world’s sixth-largest producer of iron ore, 13th largest steel producer and 21st largest nitrogen-fertilizer producer.
The world is still trying to measure the effects of how Putin’s war has deepened cooperation between Iran and Russia, North Korea and Russia, and China and Russia. This cooperation enfolds new security treaties, widening weapons trade, combat-troop deployments, and resource, commodities and financial arrangements.
Thanks to Putin’s war, for the first time in 70 years, North Korean military units have engaged in combat operations. Thanks to Putin’s war, Iran saw the effects of drone-swarm attacks (attacks that relied on Iranian-made drones) and then applied those lessons in attacks on Israel. Thanks to Putin’s war, China has learned what works and what doesn’t when trying to subdue a democratic neighbor -- and has caught a glimpse of the West’s pressure points.
A third lesson: NATO’s security guarantee matters.
Given that Putin has attacked Ukraine and Georgia but kept his hands off Poland and the Baltics -- territories he claims as part of Russia’s sphere of influence -- it’s clear that he respects NATO’s all-for-one security guarantee.
That’s a good thing, and that leads us to a fourth lesson.
NATO still serves U.S. interests. If Americans think it’s expensive to deter Moscow and Beijing, protect U.S. interests, and promote U.S. prosperity today -- with our transatlantic and transpacific alliances intact -- wait until those alliances are gone.
There’s a reason Putin has attacked Georgia and Ukraine but not Poland and the Balts. There’s a reason Xi is circling Taiwan but not Japan. There’s a reason the Kim dynasty has blustered about unifying Korea by force but hasn’t tried to do so for 72 years.
That reason is the U.S.-led alliance system. Our alliances serve as outer rings of our security, fuel and sustain our prosperity, and promote our interests -- the most important of which is deterring great-power war.
We can hope Putin’s patrons and partners have learned other lessons in Ukraine. Among them: carefully planned three-day blitzkriegs can turn into bloody quagmires, wars of aggression do not pay, the free world will defend its own, and the costs of aggression far outweigh any benefits.
Since defending the national interest cannot rely on hope, however, we must invest in restoring America’s deterrent military strength. As Zelensky observes, “Freedom must be armed better than tyranny.” When it’s not, the result is Ukraine 2022, Korea 1950, Pearl Harbor 1941, Czechoslovakia 1938. To ensure that Taiwan, the Philippines and the Baltics aren’t added to that list, America and its free world allies need to continue building up the common defense and standing up to aggressor states.
Alan W. Dowd is an award-winning writer with experience in opinion journalism, public-policy research and communications consultancy. Any opinions expressed in this article are strictly his own.
- Landing Zone