It’s Been 10 Months Since Russia Invaded Ukraine. What’s next?

It’s been 10 months since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the second phase of his invasion of Ukraine, aiming to dismantle its government and replace it with one of his liking while annexing large portions of Ukrainian territory. Instructively, Putin launched the first phase of his operations against Ukraine in 2014 when Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president.

With Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent address to a joint session of Congress and the Biden administration’s announcement of another $1.8 billion in military assistanceSome quarters have raised concerns about U.S. assistance, including the first ever provision of an air defense battery to protect Patriots.

To be clear, many of today’s critics were opposed to significant military assistance to Ukraine from the start. They warned that Russia might resort to nuclear weapons, that Russia would win anyway, that Russia’s core interests in Ukraine meant that they’d never give up the fight, that prior offers of potential Ukrainian accession to NATO meant that Russia had no choice but to preemptively invade, that Ukraine is corrupt with U.S. security aid somehow returning to America to line the pockets of corrupt politicians, that sending advanced weapons to Ukraine was escalatory and might widen the war, and that China is the main threat and any assistance to Ukraine is a zero-sum game that increases the risk in the Taiwan Strait.

Time has proven most of these concerns wrong or exaggerated. However, the final matter of deterring China is more complex than delivering weapons to Taiwan. This is because American credibility is closely tied to American deterrence. A Russian victory in Ukraine would encourage China, and not discourage it.

Drawing on a career as an Army intelligence officer and service as young Reagan-appointed foreign affairs staffer in the Pentagon, I’ll first lay out some facts and then discuss current events and possible outcomes.

How did we get to this point?

First, this war didn’t have to happen. It’s not a coincidence that both times Putin invaded Ukraine occurred when he perceived he was facing weak American administrations — Obama, and then Biden, fresh off the embarrassing debacle in Kabul. Were President Donald Trump reelected, Putin wouldn’t have rolled the iron dice.

Second, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman had a hand in Trump’s narrow defeat. Imagine the counterfactual in a world where a combat veteran U.S Army decided that Trump’s elected president had more authority for foreign policy than he had to do so on behalf of the amorphous nonelected. “U.S. national security interagency.” It was Vindman’s belief that the president was acting against the consensus opinion of the Executive Branch Trump himself led that caused Vindman to breach the classified contents of a phone call between Trump and Zelensky. This resulted in a partisan impeachment referendum in December 2019.

It’s worth noting, however, that during Cold War era, any Ukrainian-born national security personnel would find their advice and actions carefully scrutinized for conflicts of interests. It is.