The Sword Is Mightier...
...than the pen. In Ukraine anyway.
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As always, thanks to those who tirelessly supply translation in other languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here. Hubert Mulkens has volunteered to make another translation into French, and we’ll be working on that. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:
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I was going to write about something quite different this week, but I noticed in comments on my last post, and in other discussions on the Internet, that people are starting to talk about two related practical issues to do with what follows the “end” of the Ukraine war. One is how Russia might ensure the security of its new western border, and the other is whether it would be feasible (assuming it’s acceptable) for some kind of multinational force to deploy along a buffer or demilitarised zone between Russia and Ukraine. The two are obviously linked, and the second is to some extent a subsidiary case of the first.
Both of these issues raise very profound questions, which I haven’t seen addressed properly elsewhere, so it falls to me to do what I can. As always, I’ll try to stay out of detailed military issues, where I’m not really competent to speak, but believe me, there’s plenty to say elsewhere. And as always, I want to start with some very basic but important principles, and work on from there.
The common feature of these two questions, obviously, is the use of the military, so let’s begin by recalling what that is. The military is an institution with the capability to use, or threaten to use, organised force in support of political (or “policy”) objectives. This capability gives governments extra options, but also needs to be used with care if it is to be effective. So the first question about the use of military forces after some putative settlement in Ukraine is, What is the higher strategic purpose such forces are intended to serve? Put concretely, you can’t talk about the feasibility of the Russians being able to control the western frontier, nor of the insertion of some hypothetical “peacekeeping” force, without being very clear about their higher strategic purposes, and whether there are ways in which they would actually be able fulfil them.
That’s why all responsible use of military force begins from strategic level decisions and works downwards, and we’ll do that a moment. Otherwise, as has happened with monotonous regularity in the past, a force of some kind will be deployed because it can be, and because “something” needs to be “done,"and then some kind of jury-rigged strategic rationale will be tacked on afterwards. I’ll give some examples of that as well. Whenever you read of military action to “show determination” or “send a message” or “stabilise the situation,” you can be sure that nobody can actually explain the strategic purpose of the mission, or even how the military will contribute to it. It’s practically certain that military missions of this kind will achieve nothing concrete.
Either of these options would need to begin from a strategic political end-state, which is to say, What is the situation you are trying to produce on the ground, and how will you know that you have reached it? This is why objectives like “showing determination” are meaningless, because you have no idea what concrete effects you are trying to produce, and no way of measuring them anyway. These end-states are for the political leadership to define, and this is where the problems start. In the case of the Russians, there is at least a single point of decision, so they might be able to define their end-state in terms like “a Ukraine no longer capable of posing a threat to Russia and without the presence of foreign forces.” Now, certain words need to be defined, in particular “threat,” and there would have to be some pragmatic judgement about what level of foreign contacts Ukraine would be permitted. Again, we’ll deal with these points in a minute, and meanwhile we’ll leave the Russians to work out their own end-state and come back to them later.
Meanwhile, a useful comparative national example is Northern Ireland during the thirty-year Emergency, where after a rough start, the British end-state was defined as a Province still part of the UK, where the Republicans had given up the armed struggle. This involved hanging on until the IRA eventually gave up, but also trying to reform the domestic political process so as to undermine support for those who wanted a united Ireland, and avoiding a civil war between Protestants and Catholics that such a possibility would have provoked. In turn, this involved a whole series of judgements about how to employ the military, the police and the justice system, among other things.
The real problem arises when a group of countries try to define an end-state, often in ignorance of the situation on the ground, and paying more attention to their own desires than to the wishes of the locals. The classic case of this is Bosnia from 1992-95, an example I will refer to several times It is doubtful if there really ever was an agreed political end-state among the large number of competing external actors, but the nearest approach to it would probably have been “a unitary Bosnia with some kind of political system that everyone, especially the West, can live with.” The problem, of course, is that the majority of the population did not want to live in a unitary Bosnia, and that there was no possible political system, no matter how complex and ingenious, that would actually resolve the irreconcilable political tensions in the country. (The nearest solution, the 1993 Vance-Owen Peace Plan, was sabotaged by the Clinton administration under pressure from NGOs and the media: something to bear in mind as we progress.) The chaotic and dysfunctional political system in place in Bosnia since 1995 reflects the attempts of the West to foist an end-state they could be happy with on people who didn’t want it. But then no-one has yet found a better solution, either.
At least in the case of Bosnia there was a (very) rough consensus about the political end-state, even if it was unrealistic. In the case of Ukraine, what would this consensus even theoretically be? And whose consensus would it be anyway? The Russians would have to be fully on board, the Ukrainians could probably be managed, but what political structure would take responsibility? Clearly not NATO, unless the concept is a deployment on Ukrainian territory against Russian wishes: good luck with that. Maybe the UN? Well, that means giving China a voice in the definition of the end-state, as well as various Asian and African states on the Security Council. And of course international organisations, led by the EU, would be rushing in with their own plans and political initiatives, generally disconnected from each other.
That may be enough to stop such an idea before it starts. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Russians agree to such a force, and that it’s placed under the aegis of an international organisation other than NATO, or, just possibly, under some kind of ad hoc coalition. (I explain why this is difficult later.) Well, what is it going to do? There are three basic possibilities.
The first is monitoring and verification, which of course presupposes something to monitor and verify. There was, in fact such a monitoring group under the OSCE in Ukraine between 2014 and 2022. There is an ad hoc group in Southern Lebanon now, working with the UN Force in the South of the country. Such missions, which don’t have to be very large, are essentially for record-keeping. They keep a log of ceasefire violations, and report them usually to some kind of coordinating committee, and that’s about it. From time to time they produce reports. It’s just about feasible to imagine some kind of Joint Commission involving Russia, some Ukrainian entity, and some international body, perhaps the OSCE again. The Russians would veto any involvement by NATO or EU countries and, whereas once the Swiss or the Swedes might have played a role (as they do in the Korean DMZ) that’s unlikely to be possible now.
The actual value of such a deployment would be close to zero, and if the situation deteriorated the personnel would have to be withdrawn for their own safety. Its only real use would be providing raw material for the propaganda of the different sides.
The second would be a classic UN or African Union-style deployment, on a much larger scale and with a much larger mandate, designed to provide security in a defined area. These days, UN forces tend to get given all kinds of other jobs: demobilisation and disarmament of combatants, training, formation of new national armies, gender reform and many others. But let’s assume for the sake of what follows that their mandate is limited to providing security along a demarcation line which we will define: perhaps ten or twenty kilometres either side. Organising, deploying, supporting and commanding such a force would have massive problems attached, and I’ll go through some of the worst of them in a moment.
The third would be an actual interposition force, designed to keep the “warring parties” apart from each other. (This seems to be what Mr Zelensky, in his typically confused fashion, was hinting at, at Davos yesterday.)I don’t think there is a single example of such a force having been deployed successfully anywhere, and the option remains purely theoretical. Technically, the force could be a “tripwire” one, designed to raise the political costs of violation of an agreement but, as we’ll see in a moment, occupation of terrain by an international (or for that matter Russian) force doesn’t mean much in the case of Ukraine. It’s also in this context that, in the last few days, British and other politicians have evoked the idea of the deployment of small national forces to Ukraine. But that implies a dangerous confusion between a deployment into a permissive environment and a deployment actually directed against Russia in some way.
None of these three options can be discussed without some idea of the size of the terrain , and thus the task, that we are talking about. Nobody knows what the Russians would regard as an acceptable demarcation line, but for the sake of argument let’s assume it runs from Odessa to Kharkov, through Dnipro, and follows roughly the line of the main transport axes, since that would facilitate communication. That’s around 700 kilometres, or roughly twice the distance between Washington and New York. If the forces were separated by as little as 5km either side of the demarcation line, which would not be very much, that would give an area of 7000 sq km, or approaching the size of the Tokyo./Yokohama conurbation, except far more strung-out. Obviously, the area to be monitored or patrolled increases rapidly as the width of separation increases. So let’s look at the three possibilities.
The OSCE Mission in Ukraine from 2014-22 consisted of about 1500 unarmed civilian monitors, covering a much smaller area, where the two sides were directly confronting each other, and where it was straightforward to establish relations with the combatants. Something similar might be possible here, on a purely symbolic level, but it’s questionable even if the Russians would accept the OSCE as an overarching structure. In any event, they would no doubt veto monitors from any NATO or EU state (the majority of the OSCE) so we’d be down to countries like Andorra, Liechtenstein and the Holy See. Ukraine for its part would veto states such as Belarus. Whether it would be possible to find perhaps 2-3000 acceptable, experienced monitors (often retired military) is an interesting question. It can be assumed in any event that all of the major players would exploit such a mission mercilessly for political ends.
So what about the second option: a UN-style deployment? I say UN-style, because an actual deployment under the UN would require, as a minimum, detailed agreement between Russia and the western P3 in the Security Council. But let us take some UN operations as a model. In terms of demarcation, the obvious example is the UNIFIL force in South Lebanon. Its area of responsibility is just over 1000 sq km, between the Litani River and the Blue Line bordering Israel. It currently has just over 10,000 troops from 50 countries. Now clearly, there isn’t a strict mathematical ratio to apply, but it’s obvious that even patrolling and observing a line 700 km long would require a massively larger, well-organised force, divided into sectors with subsidiary headquarters. In fact, most UN missions are larger than this anyway. UNPROFOR in Bosnia, with some additional troops in Croatia, was about 25-30,000 strong at different times, and even UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone had a maximum strength of 17,000. (Bosnia is about 50,000 sq km, Sierra Leone about 70,000, but in neither case were the troops deployed throughout the territory.)
But that’s just numbers. Where would the troops, even for a bare-bones deployment 10,000 strong, actually come from? There are three sorts of limitations. The first is political: the Russians would not accept any troops from the Global West, and would be unreceptive to ideas that the Force should be deployed over the border in Ukrainian territory. They would no doubt announce that they could not “guarantee the safety” of any troops in such a Force, and arrange a few “incidents” after which nations would start to withdraw their personnel. Indeed, with the Ukrainians holding out for impossible things as usual, there is a good chance the Force would never deploy.
The second is capability based. The Global West has the majority of the world’s capable militaries, with the capability to deploy overseas and take part in coalition operations. Barring some kind of weird Russian-Ukrainian joint force, the Russians are excluded, the Chinese (with very little experience of foreign deployments) would not be enthusiastic, and the Indians, although with some experience of peacekeeping operations, would not be capable of playing a major role. Deploying at scale outside the country for sustained periods is something that very few states can actually do, and fielding the type of robust, mechanised all-weather forces that would be needed is increasingly uncommon these days. (The story of the Egyptian UNPRFOR contingent that turned up in Sarajevo in the dead of winter with only their personal weapons and summer uniforms has become proverbial.) And of course that assumes that public opinion in the Global South would actually support such deployments, especially as the casualties started to mount.
The third is financial and logistic. UN deployments are attractive to many countries because the UN pays all of the costs (including personnel) and countries such as Ghana and Pakistan make a tidy profit from their deployments. NATO members pay their own costs. But in the absence of a UN budget, deployments into Ukraine would be beyond the financial (and for that matter logistic) capabilities of the vast majority of nations in the world. UNPROFOR was deployed into Bosnia partly through the port of Split in Croatia, and Lebanon has a large port in Beirut. Look at a map and tell me how the South Koreans, for example—one of the more prosperous and technically competent states outside the Global West—could bring their heavy equipment to, say, Dnipro, and imagine how much it would cost.
But assume that you could somehow solve these problems. Well, there are others. The most serious is troop rotation. You can’t keep military units in the field for more than six months before their effectiveness starts to fall off sharply. The French rule is four months, the British rotated some of their troops in Northern Ireland every three months at one point. So no sooner will the troops have arrived, than it will be time to think of bringing them back and replacing them. A rough rule of thumb is that deploying a unit overseas for six months will take it out of the line for about a year, when you consider training, deployment, operations, recovery and leave. After that, the unit may then require retraining before it resumes its previous role. (The British had some 30,000 troops tied up in this cycle at the height of the Northern Ireland Emergency.) Since you can’t keep sending the same units on operations, for every one you send on a six month tour, you need probably a minimum of three in reserve.
And finally, what about command? You can’t just send units off on operations and tell them to do whatever seems sensible. An operation of this kind requires command at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. To be exercised properly that command requires pre-existing doctrine, and in turn that requires political direction if it is to be effective. Any force of this kind would need a proper command structure: typically a tactical HQ in the field, to handle day-to-day operational and management issues, an operational level HQ outside the country to deal with the politico-military level and allow the people on their ground to do their job, and a strategic HQ where the high-level political and military guidance would come from. In NATO operations in Bosnia after 1995, and in Afghanistan, there was a command structure already in place, even if it wasn’t particularly effective. During UNPROFOR, the Force had a theatre-level command, and the operational and strategic levels were in theory provided from New York. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations (now just “Peace” Operations, interestingly) could not really “command” anything, and the Security Council, with its changing membership and constant political infighting, could never really define a strategy. Moreover, national contingents all came with their own national doctrines, and some had been involved in similar operations before, whilst others had not.
Structurally, there would be a need for a Force Commander, probably several Sector Commanders given the size of the task, and the organisation of a balanced Force, which doesn’t just happen, but requires a lot of prior work. The Force that is deployed has to be suited to the mission, and a complex process known as Force Generation is needed to ensure that it is properly structured and capable of working together. In addition, a Framework Nation often takes responsibility for around two thirds of the HQ staff, to ensure that everyone can communicate with each other. Given that the force is multinational and the operation will be highly sensitive, it’s not clear how many, if any, of the nations outside the Global West have the experience and most of all the enthusiasm to take on such a task.
Above all, the Force needs a clear mission, articulated at the strategic level. UNPROFOR, probably the closest analogue to the putative force we are discussing here, is a good example of how not to do it. In effect, it was decided to send a UN Force for political reasons, before thinking about what the force was supposed to do. Media and NGO pressure to “stop the violence” would have required a mission with a well-armed and aggressive force of perhaps 100,000 troops with heavy equipment, and a similar number to replace them, according to analyses done at the time. Such a force did not remotely exist. Moreover, a number of nations pointed out that it was ridiculous to send a peacekeeping force anyway, when no peace existed. Indeed, it proved effectively impossible to define a military mission that made sense. Ultimately, confronted with the overwhelming need to “do something,” it was decided to define the mission as protecting humanitarian aid convoys. However, the Security Council (where only the British and French were regular troop contributors) meddled endlessly with the mandate, piling more responsibilities on the Force and leaving the commanders with often confusing and paradoxical instructions.
At least in that case there was an organisation with mechanisms of discussion and coordination. But the kind of ad hoc force we are discussing, if it could ever be constituted, would have none of that. And it is not clear how a strategic purpose could be agreed, how the missions could be defined, how the Force would be commanded, or what doctrine it would use. A particular problem that worries specialists a lot is what is known as Rules of Engagement, or RoE.
In a zone of armed conflict a military force is governed by the laws of war. If the armed conflict no longer exists then each contingent is subject to the laws of its own country regarding the use of force. Often these are different, and there have been situations in multinational forces where a senior commander gives orders that would be illegal for a junior officer from another country to implement.
That isn’t there worst, though. RoE are additional to, not instead of, these legal provisions. Most countries sending troops on multinational operations do so for wider political reasons, to gain experience, to impress other nations, as part of regional competition, and for many other purposes. Few of these purposes involve risking the lives of their own troops. So whilst nations such as France and the UK expected their troops to defend themselves when attacked, many of the other national contingents of UNPROFOR had RoE that required the troops to withdraw if they came under fire, to avoid casualties. (As it happens, some non-western nations, like the Bangladeshis, the Ethiopians and the Nepalese have been among the toughest and most determined troops on different multinational operations.) Thus, any conceivable ad hoc force would consist of contingents sent by different countries for different reasons, with different expectations of the mission and different RoE. Not a recipe for success.
Perhaps this is beating the subject to death. But the truth is that even in a permissive political and military environment, any multinational force except under the aegis of the UN or NATO simply would not function, even if it could by some miracle be assembled. (And I’ve left out a lot of important detail.) It follows from this that some kind of “interposition” force, intended to actually stop violations of whatever accord is reached, is a hopeless fantasy, and there is little point in discussing it. The most that might be practically possible would be some kind of monitoring force, reporting to a joint committee of some kind. But even that would be desperately difficult and probably ineffective. And whilst I’ve mentioned NATO in tones of less disapproval, we need to be clear that NATO could not, in practice, generate, deploy and command such a force either: it does not have the necessary troops, political support or common strategic vision.
I should mention as a coda that if, as I have shown at some length, any idea of direct military intervention against Russia is equally fantastic, then it would still be technically possible to insert token European contingents into Ukraine, with some idea of “deterring” the Russians from occupying certain areas or certain cities. This has been discussed for months now, and nothing has happened (as indeed I predicted) but it remains a theoretical possibility. Still, a small enough force would probably be left alone by the Russians, who would simply cut off its supply routes and allow it to become ineffective.
So as I have suggested before (and most recently last week) written agreements monitored by some hypothetical international presence are not going to work. What will “work,” in the sense of bringing about actual lasting results, is a Russian victory that creates facts on the ground against which there is no appeal, and a state of compliance by Ukraine and the West that is in their own best interests. Nonetheless, this control has to be exercised in some way. What about the possibility of “demilitarised areas” of “cordons sanitaries,” or even of areas of Ukraine under Russian occupation? We left the Russians mulling this over some paragraphs back. Can we set out some possibilities?
As will be clear, I think, the problem is essentially political rather than military, and it’s a classic error to attempt to use military means to solve political problems. It’s hard to imagine that the Russians would actually seek to occupy the whole of Ukraine, thus acquiring a new and sensitive border with NATO, and there is no point in occupying only part of it, unless they plan to incorporate that part into Russia itself. It’s also important to define what we mean by “occupation” and why one would do it.
Historically, part or all of a country might be occupied at the end of a war as a visible symbol of victory and to physically prevent that country from continuing the war. This occupation lasted until the end of peace negotiations, after which troops would normally leave. In certain cases (as in the Rhineland after 1918) troops would stay on to demilitarise the region. The German occupations of the Second World War were different: they were mostly strategic, intended to provide access to food and raw materials, and obstruct landings by the Allies.
Like every military operation, therefore, occupation has to have a purpose. Because these purposes are different, types of occupation are different as well. The simplest is a permissive occupation by consent, where serious resistance is not expected. In December 1995, the NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) deployed into Bosnia with a strength of some 60,000, falling to about half that number when the name was changed to the Stabilisation Force a year later. Bosnia is a tiny country, less than a tenth the size of Ukraine, and largely hilly and mountainous: the towns and cities are in the valleys.
Compare that with the German occupation of France between 1940 and 1944, a country very roughly the size of Ukraine. Here, the Germans were a conquering army, but they did not occupy the entire country, and some of the roughly 100,000 personnel stationed there were from the Navy and the Air Force. The so-called Free Zone, based in Vichy, was in the hands of Pétain’s French State, which did not welcome the German occupation, but thought that France’s best interests were served by going along with a situation that could not be altered militarily, and collaborating with a power fighting International Communism. The activities of the Resistance, associated in their minds with the Communists, were thus a major irritant and a danger to national security. This meant that Vichy took the lead in the fight against the Resistance, which for its part, and conscious of its weakness, rarely attempted to fight the occupiers directly. By contrast, over 300,000 German forces were stationed in Norway, where the collaborationist Quisling government was weak but resistance forces were active.
Then there are occupation forces engaged in actual conflict. At the height of the war in Algeria, the French had half a million troops in the country. In Northern Ireland, the British had up to 20,000 troops at the height of the Emergency, as well as the entire local Police force and locally-raised military forces. Moreover, in Algeria, hundreds of thousands of locals fought, less on the side of the French than against the FLN. In Northern Ireland the majority of the population supported links with Britain (some violently so) and among Catholics only a small minority actively supported the IRA, which itself numbered only hundreds of combatants at any one time.
Examples could be multiplied, obviously, but a few things are relatively clear. The first is the primacy of the political situation. If an occupation is accepted, albeit grudgingly, then not only are the numbers different, but the configuration of the force is different as well. A Russian force in Ukraine might simply be there to intimidate, and to remind people where the power lies. But it might also be there, theoretically, to police the Ukrainian frontier with NATO countries (around 3000 km in length.) It might have the support of local forces, or such forces might have been disbanded. All depends on the political situation at the end of the fighting, and thus to talk of “the occupation” of Ukraine in the abstract doesn’t mean very much.
The second is that for virtually any level of actual conflict, the requirement for occupation forces is massively disproportionate to the number of forces resisting them. This is logical, since forces resisting the occupation will always have the initiative, and can easily merge into the local population. They are seldom handicapped by the need to wear uniform or obey the laws of war. But again, the number of insurgents is necessarily finite, and breaking up networks, or physically eliminating them (as the French did in Algeria) can destroy resistance if the occupying power is prepared to be ruthless enough.
The third is that outside support and logistics are often key. The FLN’s armed wing, the ALN, benefitted both from practical support and training from other Arab countries, and from safe havens in Tunisia and Morocco, where in fact the majority of the ALN was based. By contrast, the ANC’s military wing, umKhonto weSizwe (MK) never had a secure rear base of any kind, and was always desperately short of serious weaponry. Construction of the kind of fortified lines the French used in Algeria, or interdiction of the supply of weapons by sea, as practiced by the British and Irish governments during the Emergency, are not really relevant to Ukraine. On the other hand, there’s a big difference for the West between verbal support for Ukraine and sending weapons during the current war, and actively making an enemy of a victorious Russia by supporting guerrilla or terrorist forces across the border in a hopeless struggle, so in practice frontiers might not be that important anyway.
The fourth is that successful occupations have to find and leverage local support. In Afghanistan, the Soviet occupiers managed to create a proto-urban middle class, and a significant fraction of the population preferred the Soviet-backed government to the Islamist rebels. In occupied France, traditionalists and anti-communists, but also many simple “patriots” were prepared to serve the Vichy State, and thus indirectly the Germans, rather than engage in the hopeless struggle of the Resistance. Nations are virtually never united against occupiers, and some local actors can always see an interest in working with them. In Ukraine, a plausible Russian objective would be to make any residual resistance a Ukrainian problem as far as possible, putting it into the hands of a government that realised that its best interests would be served by not antagonising Moscow.
The final one perhaps is that occupation forces have to be prepared to tolerate a certain level of residual violence, so long as that does not threaten the overall political objective. There will always be the discontented, and in a country like Ukraine they will always have access to weapons, but heavy-handed attempts by an occupier to crush the last vestiges of resistance often backfire horribly.
But these considerations are rapidly being overtaken by advances in technology that make physical “occupation” increasingly dubious as an idea. Even as late as Afghanistan, forces resisting occupation had to come physically close to their targets and be lucky in the placing of bombs or the use of suicide bombers. We are only at the beginning of the changes in warfare that drones and associated technologies will bring, but it’s already clear that total physical control of an area is no longer feasible. It scarcely matters, therefore, how many soldiers the Russians might deploy in a conquered Ukraine. Likewise, the increased availability of weapons which are both long-range and extremely accurate means that “cordons sanitaries” and the like are increasingly pointless, or at least would have to be so ginormous as to include most of Europe.
For these reasons, and the many reasons of practicality discussed earlier, we can pretty much rule out the options of observers (watching drone attacks from a distance) or a monitoring force (watching missiles fly overhead) except in some attenuated and purely symbolic role. Likewise, it’s not obvious that the Russians would want to, even if somehow they could, physically occupy large areas on Ukraine. We are left, once more, with a political solution imposed by military force. Ukraine and the West have to be hammered until they accept de facto Russian control over Ukraine, and a government in Kiev that decides it is prudent, and in the national interest, to cultivate Moscow and ensure no hostile acts from the territory it controls. As usual, the paperwork will follow after.