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A war with no end in sight.
1,331 days have passed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, and a resolution to the conflict seems as distant now as it did then. The war has spanned Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, and neither has managed a breakthrough despite their sustained efforts.
In Tangle, we’ve dedicated scores of editions to this topic since 2022, covering everything from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motivations to Ukraine’s defensive (and now, offensive) strategy to the Biden administration’s military aid disbursements to the Trump administration’s evolving posture toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. We’ve also spoken to experts — like the former U.S. ambassador to Russia — who have shed light on the conflict’s origins and the plausible paths to peace.
All the while, little has changed on the ground. The two sides remain locked in a stalemate, though Ukraine is now attacking deeper into Russia thanks to advanced drone capabilities, while Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian cities with its own drones and missiles. President Trump has had little success bringing President Putin to the negotiating table and has pivoted from friendly diplomatic overtures to increasingly hostile threats. Just this week, Trump spoke with Putin and said they will meet again — this time in Hungary — in the coming weeks, though Trump also floated the possibility of the United States sending Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.
After years of writing about a seemingly intractable conflict, it can start to feel hopeless. So today, we’re doing something a little different and sharing two unique perspectives from leading experts on the war.
In late September, Senior Editor Will Kaback spoke with two experts on Russia, Ukraine, and the war.
First was Richard Sakwa, a professor emeritus of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury and an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Sakwa has studied and written extensively on Russia and Vladimir Putin, including in his book Frontline Ukraine about the origins of the current war.
Then, Will spoke with Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Applebaum has also written several books on Russia and Ukraine and reported on the rise of autocracy and authoritarianism around the world.
Both interviews focus on a couple of central questions: What is the outlook for the war, and what role should the U.S. play in an eventual resolution? Within those questions, the interviewees also discussed the origins of the conflict, the animating issues for each side, and the differences between Biden and Trump’s approaches. As you’ll see, Richard and Anne have fundamentally different views on these topics, and we hope each of their arguments challenges your preconceptions (as they did ours).
The interviews were conducted individually, but we’re sharing Richard’s and Anne’s responses to a common set of questions below. If you’re interested in reading each interview in full, we’ve posted them as articles on Tangle’s website here and here. Furthermore, you can listen to the full interviews on the Tangle podcast, which will be posted later this afternoon.
Note: We’ve synthesized the question we asked each interviewee at the start of the sections below and lightly edited the responses for cohesiveness and clarity. To read the exact questions and full responses, you can read the transcripts on the Tangle website.
The war’s origins.
Tangle: What do you see as the roots of the Ukraine war?
Richard Sakwa: There are two dominant visions of what it’s all about, certainly in the West.
The first one is that the war and the conflict in Ukraine is all about Russian imperial expansion, that basically Putin is attempting to reestablish a Soviet Union, or some sort of empire, that Putin is the Hitler of our days, and so on. You then have this endless discussion that you cannot have negotiations because that will be appeasement. So we’re back to 1938 and Munich. The second one, which is tied to it, is that it’s a diversionary war — that basically, Russia has got so many internal complications and difficulties that it lashes out and tries to externalize.
I think that neither of these versions are credible. Internally, the Putin regime is remarkably stabilized. We’ve seen now nearly four years of war, and the regime is still enjoying huge popularity — amazing, incredible even — that it’s well into 80% popular support. Of course, in wartime it’s difficult to get accurate opinion polls, but I think all the evidence suggests that.
So, if those don’t really hold, what are the causes of the war? I would say they’re fourfold, and all four elements make this such a deeply intractable and almost solutionless conflict. The first one is the internal Ukrainian conflict: I’ve argued for many, many years that what we really did need to see within Ukraine is a pluralistic, multi-confessional, multicultural, multilingual settlement, possibly including federalism. It is quite clear that even when the Donbas rebellion began after the Maidan coup — or call it revolution — of February 2014, they weren’t calling for independence initially. It was for what the Russians say — it’s difficult to translate — samostoyatel’nost’, which could be autonomy, it could be something more than that. But certainly the basic view is that it was for autonomy. So internally, it was the failure to reflect Ukraine’s multicultural — well, complex — internal, demographic, cultural, religious framework and give it constitutional form.
The second element is the endless tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Now, this goes back indeed, a thousand years of entwined history, both of antagonism and cooperation. Ukraine was one of the major republics in the Soviet Union. And after 1991, you had this very difficult relationship. Ukrainian nationalism became exceptionally prickly, insecure, and that domestic insecurity was then projected outward in a particularly prickly relationship, an antagonistic one with Russia, seen as the colonial power, and therefore you needed to decolonize, and so on.
The third level is the pan-European one. If you remember, Gorbachev during his perestroika in the late 1980s called for a pan-European home, common European home, and we failed to do that.
That takes us to the fourth level, the U.S.–Russian relationship. I’ve also argued for a long time that after 1945, a political West took shape. You could call it the Euro-Atlantic alliance system. I think it’s more: It was political; it was cultural; it was all sorts of levels. After the end of the Cold War in 1989–91, the United States insisted on maintaining its hegemony, its dominance, and that precluded allowing Europe to become more autonomous and, indeed, to allow Germany and Russia to come together with France and the other countries. That couldn’t be allowed. We saw that in the Balkans, and we saw that over Ukraine. And so these four levels are like a Rubik’s cube — they all interact with each other — and to solve the war all four faces have to line up, which is going to be jolly difficult.
Anne Applebaum: Russia is a colonial power. It thinks of itself as the colonial power in the region of Eastern Europe. It has a memory of its empire being larger. Putin himself has said, “Anywhere where there has ever been a Russian soldier could be Russia again.” And so that includes the Baltic States, it includes Poland, it includes Berlin, and it includes eastern Germany, where he remembers in his lifetime that he was a Soviet apparatchik. He was in the KGB in eastern Germany. So Putin has a number of goals with this war, but one of them is to reestablish the Russian Empire.
They think of themselves as a colonial power that deserves to subjugate other countries and other nationalities. They think Ukraine is theirs because it was part of Russian empires in the past. Formally, the main reason, legitimation for the war — the reason why they say they’re fighting the war when they talk to other Russians — is that Ukraine is not a real country. It needs to be made part of Russia again.
Putin is trying to separate the U.S. and Europe. He’s trying to do a separate deal with Trump. He’s trying to break up NATO. He’s trying to put pressure on NATO that will somehow intimidate or scare the Europeans.
When they talk about this war, they talk about it as a war against NATO. They already tell the public that the reason why they haven’t defeated Ukraine is that it’s really a war against NATO, even though of course it’s not — it isn’t a war against NATO. They’re building the propaganda, the kind of psychological justification for it now. That is true. But it’s hard for me to see that they would be in a position to fight some kind of large-scale conflict against lots of armies right at this second.
European/NATO actions.
Tangle: How would you characterize NATO’s role in the conflict?
Anne Applebaum: European contributions to Ukraine — financial contributions plus military contributions — are two or three times larger than the U.S. So this myth that the Ukrainians have only been kept alive by America is wrong, and that’s an important thing to remember. There are a few pieces of technology that only the U.S. has that everybody needs, but the bulk of the financing for the Ukrainian economy, and now for the Ukrainian defense industry, is coming from Europe. Of course in the first year of the war, I think Europeans were disoriented. Nobody could quite believe it was happening. It took a while for people to take it seriously.
Most European countries are having internal conflicts over how much they should be involved or not involved. That gets less true the farther east you go. At least, the Baltic countries, Scandinavia, and Poland don’t have that same kind of division; but you get it in Germany, you get it in France, and more so elsewhere. It took time for some of these countries to build the political backing to really help out in the war and for the reality of the war to sink in and for people to understand it. So yeah, I think they were also too slow, but I wouldn’t underrate what they’ve done so far.
Richard Sakwa: NATO is a dysfunctional organization internally and catastrophic for Europe and global politics internationally. Absolutely catastrophic. It keeps boasting with its 32 members, the most successful military organization in history. It basically exists to sustain its own existence, and therefore to do that it has to foster and generate conflict. So you could say it’s the most disastrous military alliance in history. It should have gone after 1989 and the end of the first Cold War.
When we get to the 254th European Union package of sanctions, and Russia is still fighting on, our brilliant leaders might finally understand that it’s a losing proposition. A sign of madness is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome. Or they believe they can finally destroy Russia.
Russia’s nuclear weaponry.
Tangle: Are you concerned about Russia’s potential to use nuclear weapons?
