“There’s nowhere left for Russia to escalate beyond nuclear weapons, and they don’t want to use them any more than we do”

US Marine Corps soldiers. Photo: Michele Ursi / Shutterstock

It is now over a thousand days since Vladimir Putin’s bold gambit to take Ukraine in mere weeks unravelled into a protracted and bloody war. As both sides dig in, the stakes for Ukraine, Russia and the West continue to grow. As the conflict grinds on, both sides find themselves locked in a brutal war of attrition, with no decisive breakthroughs on the horizon. In a wide-ranging conversation with RFE/RL’s Vazha Tavberidze, Colonel (Ret.) Liam Collins, the founding director of the Modern War Institute at West Point and a former defence advisor to Ukraine (2016-18), examines the battlefield dynamics; evaluates the effectiveness of western aid; and reflects on the lessons learned – and unlearned – over the course of the war. From the tactical realities on the ground to the broader geopolitical implications, his insights paint a sobering picture of this grinding, unforgiving conflict.

VAZHA TAVBERIDZE: A thousand days since Putin assumed he could take Ukraine in a matter of weeks, if not days – where do we stand today? What chapter of this saga are we living through now?

LIAM COLLINS: We’re kind of where we were at after about three weeks – after three weeks, it was clear Russia was really going to struggle and not be able to accomplish its goals. You could already tell that this would be an extended conflict. I said at the time it’s going to last many years, and that’s kind of where we’re at – at a standstill, a lack of significant ability from Russia to take territory or Ukraine to liberate it.

With reports coming in that Russia is advancing at a faster pace than any time for the last year and half, is it still true that Moscow lacks a significant ability to seize more territory?

Without a doubt, they’re doing it at a faster pace. But if you look at how long it would take them to reach Kyiv, at this pace, it would take decades. That’s not a viable path to taking the capital and taking over the nation, and it’s unlikely that they’re going to be able to do it right just through the force of arms. It’s going to be exhaustion on one side or the other. But yeah, they’ve had some success of late. But keep in mind, that’s when we were artificially restricting Ukraine. This has never happened in the history of war, where a nation is being supported but with so many restrictions on the weapons that are provided to them. I think we’ve seen that when they have gone into Russian territory or pursued deeper strikes, it forces Russia to reposition its forces.

Let’s look at the situation on the front, if the current trends continue, what can each side realistically hope to accomplish by the New Year?

You’re not going to see Ukraine liberating any significant territory. They’re really just trying to hold their lines, reconstitute their forces, get resupplied. Russia will be continuing to just throw their soldiers away, they don’t care about Russian citizens, and allow them to be slaughtered to make really insignificant gains on the front line. We’re talking, you know, tens of metres, maybe hundreds of metres, at the cost of hundreds of their own citizens for really little tactical purpose. So that’s what I would expect to be seeing. We might see the Russian lines move in some places and continue to expand on the front, but by and large, they’re going to be pretty stagnant, other than a few places where they’re really pushing and getting their people slaughtered.

That’s exactly what I wanted to ask – do you expect any new conquests from Russia, such as new cities, new towns, new strategically important outposts?

No. I mean, we’re in mid-November, only a few more weeks left before the winter sets in. I think the big wild card in all of this will be, what is President Trump going to push for and pursue? What’s the US policy going to be? Because, Ukraine has fought extremely effectively. However, you can have all the resolve in the world but if you don’t have the means to fight, then you’re going to struggle. And that’s kind of the big question, what will US support continue to be after New Year, and then if the US decides they’re going to cut down significantly or stop entirely, will other western nations step up to fill that void? Ukraine absolutely needs to be resupplied. As long as they’re resupplied, they can continue the fight and really continue where it’s at. Now, they aren’t going to have the ability to liberate large swathes of territory. It’s really Ukraine just playing a war of exhaustion, just continuing to push Russia, to make it costly until Moscow decides it’s not worth fighting this war. But again, that’s not months away. That’s years away.

Would you expect, for example, Russia to liberate the Kursk region by, you know, the New Year?

It’s not impossible that they will, but I don’t think so.

Speaking of making it too costly for Russia to continue waging this war – is there anything that could happen on the battlefield to get that message through to the Kremlin? Should there be some sort of hitherto unseen casualty ratio? How many dead Russians per month would be enough for that?

We’ve seen the attacks into Russia, and those really jar Moscow, some of these deeper strikes, and the more the Ukrainians are allowed to conduct these strikes deep into Russia, then the political elite will potentially start paying the cost of this war, as opposed to the soldiers dying. That calculus is opening up the front so that Ukraine is free to strike anywhere, instead of just on their territory. Otherwise, as long as you have massive economies like China and then have war fighting capabilities from the North Koreans supporting them, it makes it really hard to make the Russians feel that cost.

It’s still quite fascinating that the death ratio does not seem to be deterring Russia in any way, shape or form. As a combat veteran yourself, is there any threshold where if the casualties reach that threshold, then Moscow might have second thoughts about it? Or no matter how high it goes will they still keep on sending the men in?

There obviously is a certain level where if it’s reached eventually, they won’t be able to fight, because they won’t have people to fight with. But if you look at Ukraine, could you realistically ever get to that threshold? That’s the question. And I’m not quite sure you could get to that threshold, to be honest. Initially, at the start of the war, I thought they probably could have exceeded that threshold. But as I always tell people, never underestimate Russia’s ability to absorb pain. Part of it is also that we care about our citizens and Russia really doesn’t.

US Army Col. (ret) Liam Collins. Photo: United States Military Academy West Point

Ratio-wise, what would that threshold look like? How many dead Russians?

If you were to ask me before the war, I might even have said, well, if Russia was losing 200,000 men, that would be it, but they lost as many in the first month. That’s more than a decades-long war in Afghanistan. And really what brought about the end of the war in Afghanistan? It was an extremely, extremely unpopular war in the 1980s. Russian mothers didn’t like their kids coming home in body bags.

But they don’t seem to mind it as much now, with ten times more body bags coming home. Why?

Part of it is that Putin’s got a tighter grip on the country, so you have less of that public dissent. But part of it is that Ukraine is fundamentally different for Russians. To Russia’s mind, like, this is part of their psyche, it’s part of Russia. On the other hand, Afghanistan was something they never really cared about that much.

Right. You mentioned in the beginning how Ukraine needs to be resupplied, how resolve alone won’t be enough, if they don’t have enough equipment, right? But then again, you can have all the equipment, but you need people to use it. How big is Ukraine’s manpower problem that we keep hearing about?

They need both equipment and manpower. Without a doubt. They need soldiers. One thing is they could lower their draft age – if you look at the NATO countries, their draft age is much lower.

But most western nations are not sending their people to war. And in Ukraine’s case, it’s deliberate. They’re sending older people to protect the demographic pool, so to say.

I understand that, but if they are fighting for their survival, historically, that is not an unusual age group to tap into, to fight wars. Another thing that would help is a greater number of western trainers. They should also not be dispersed throughout Europe but based in Ukraine. If the Russians have North Koreans fighting there, why can’t the western nations have a more significant training presence in Ukraine proper to train the Ukrainians? There really is no reason why this isn’t more seriously considered.

The big news of this week is the Biden administration greenlighting the use of ATACMS for deep strikes into Russia. Before we go on discussing what impact it will have, let me ask you why has this come now and not a long time ago, when arguably it could have saved thousands of lives?

The US has deterred itself from action. We think, well, if we do this, Russia will escalate. It took Russia 11 months to, you know, seize the tactically insignificant city of Bakhmut, throwing everything they had at it. So there’s nothing Russia could have ever done to escalate. And so we should have opened up the floodgates, given the Ukrainians a lot of equipment, instead of going about it at an incremental pace and putting restrictions on them. Again, if you look at the history of war, this has never, ever been done. I think the reason we see it now has to do with the administration changing, and we’re just trying to give them something to see if it can help at all. You know, the change happens in mid-January and that’s why we’re seeing it now.

So what might the potential Russian response be then, given Putin’s earlier remarks that it would be tantamount to NATO entering the war?

There’s nothing they can do. Russia pretty much has everything out there. Okay, apart from nuclear weapons. Russia’s not going to use nuclear weapons. They want to use them as much as we want to use them. Nobody wants those to be used. So really look at what they can do – they’re reliant on the Iranians for drones, they’re reliant on the North Koreans for troops. There’s nowhere they can really go to escalate. And if they did escalate, Putin’s also not stupid, he’s thinking, well, what will the US do in return? Will they start actually sending western troops in Ukraine? I think we also forget that just because they might escalate, they might not be thinking, hey, what’s our response going to be? We have a much greater ability to escalate, while Russia pretty much has nothing left but nuclear weapons, which you’re not going to use. We have a significant and much greater ability to escalate than Russia does.

What’s next? Do you do expect Britain and France’s Storm Shadows and French Scalps to follow suit? And what about Germany’s Taurus missiles?

I would expect to see those restrictions be lifted. We’ve seen this incremental increase throughout the war, and so I would expect that as soon as one kind of opening appears you will see the others follow. I’d be surprised if it didn’t happen.

Does this greenlight come with a time limit, given that a new US president is set to take office in two months?

I think this provides a bit of unpredictability, which is often a good bargaining chip, right? What is Trump going to want to do? He’s a kind of deal maker, and he wants to try to seal a deal, he’s promised to end this within days of taking office. That’s unlikely, right? If it’s days in political time, it really means weeks or months, right? But no doubt he’s going to want to try to broker this on terms favourable to him. But the big question is whether he will end up frustrated because both sides might not want to do it. And maybe, like Putin, this could alienate or anger him. He might then decide that he’s going to actually increase aid to the Ukrainians, or that he simply doesn’t like what Zelenskyy is doing. He might say that he won’t give any more aid if his deal isn’t accepted, or try to force Russia to the table through increased support. So I think there’s a lot of uncertainty with that. Certainly nothing’s going to happen within days or weeks.

Suppose there’s a deal, and Ukraine comes out the clear loser, what kind of far-reaching geopolitical consequences do you see that having?

What we’ve kind of seen play out here is what somebody called the “Axis of Upheaval”. You have North Korea, China and Iran all aligning together. If you just stop supporting Ukraine, you effectively have handed this group a victory and you’re weakening your position in the world. If the US just walks away, we’re in a dangerous situation. I mean, we haven’t seen scenarios like that since before World War Two. If you just want to walk away from another democratic nation, as we did back then… I would have liked to believe we learned that lesson in the past, but maybe we haven’t. But what happens when you just kind of set a precedent that emboldens them more? Then maybe China will be going after Taiwan again in the short term, because, obviously China has been looking at this for a long time. They might be asking themselves some questions: was this costly for Russia? Yes, but let’s say they get a good swathe of Ukrainian territory now out of it. That’s a decent bargain, as far as the Kremlin is concerned. That would be a relative bargain at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives they don’t care about and the billions of dollars that they don’t really mind spending. If they can look at it and say, all we have to do is wait, absorb some minimal sanctions for a relatively small number of years, but in the long term, we will own Taiwan, then it’s worth it, right? From 2022 to 2025 is not that long of a time, right? That’s three years. You know, it’s a lot of lost lives, but in terms of Russia’s point of view, that’s worth the calculus and China would feel the same way. If you told Beijing, hey, you’ll have the world against you, but in three years, you’ll have Taiwan, and people will just kind of be sick and tired of it. You can have it. They would go for it in a heartbeat, I am sure.

Liam Collins is executive director of the Madison Policy Forum and a fellow at the New America Foundation. He was the founding director of the Modern War Institute at West Point and served as a defence advisor to Ukraine from 2016 to 2018. He is a retired Special Forces colonel with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and South America. He is co-author of the book Understanding Urban Warfare.

Vazha Tavberidze is a Georgian journalist and staff writer with RFE/RL’s Georgian Service. His writing has been published in various Georgian and international media outlets, including The Times, the Spectator, the Daily Beast and New Eastern Europe.

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NATO, Russia, Russian invasion of Ukraine, security, Ukraine