Wars seldom end in military victory so complete that losers simply accept the victors’ terms. The war in Ukraine is unlikely to end that way. Fighting will cease only if some agreement, formal or informal, is reached between the warring parties.

Most speculation about an agreement has focused on strategic, political and territorial issues. What territory, if any, would Ukraine renounce? Would this satisfy Russia? If a separate Ukraine survives, how independent would its government be? Assuming Ukraine could not join NATO or have NATO forces on its territory, what security guarantees would the West offer to ensure Russia doesn’t invade again? When and how would economic sanctions be lifted?

These obstacles to a settlement are daunting enough, but there are other intractable issues—war crimes, reparations and repatriation—that will compel Ukraine and its allies to contemplate difficult compromises.

Russia is committing appalling war crimes in Ukraine and there’s consequently much enthusiasm to pursue Russian criminality by legal means. With ample proof of killing of civilians, Russian forces can probably be shown to have attacked non-military targets deliberately or recklessly on a large scale. Counterclaims by Russia that the killing of civilians was staged or committed by Ukrainians themselves, or that Ukrainian forces were using schools, hospitals and so on for military purposes, simply do not stand up.

Wider allegations have also been mooted, including massive breaches of human rights, genocide and conducting a war of aggression. Yet there are enormous problems with all such charges. Determining or establishing an appropriate forum to hear charges is one, while getting the accused to court is another (though trials may take place in absentia).

A major problem is to determine those against whom charges should be levelled. Russian President Vladimir Putin himself is not immune, as the prosecution of another head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia demonstrates. Putin, however, though clearly responsible for setting in train the ‘special military operation’ and its foreseeable consequences, is likely to prove more elusive. The generals and members of the officer corps who directed operations are also open to charges, as are the low-ranking soldiers who actually fired the guns, shells and missiles. Wherever the line is drawn, many of the guilty will escape and this will be obvious to all.

A further dilemma is that the more vigorous the campaign to pursue war crimes charges, the more Russia’s willingness to negotiate will diminish. Russia vehemently denies that it has committed such crimes and will not readily accept that its leaders and its armed forces could face charges at the end of hostilities. However strongly Ukraine and its allies believe war crimes charges are justified, such a stance makes a settlement more problematic. The price of reaching peace may be granting immunity from prosecution for war crimes to a government and military that are as guilty as any in history.

The issue of reparations for the enormous damage Russia has inflicted on life and property in Ukraine has received little attention—so far. Ukraine could justifiably demand recompense for the losses it has suffered. As the innocent victim of aggression it will have the sympathy of many, but it’s hard to imagine that an impoverished Russia would be willing or even able to pay up. On the contrary, it is likely to continue to blame NATO and Ukraine for the war.

At most, Russian assets confiscated by Western and other countries could be diverted to Ukraine or reparations in kind such as gas or oil could be demanded. Private prosecutions might also be launched, though they’d have little chance of success. In the end, however, it is wealthy Western nations that will likely be called upon to foot the bill.

Repatriation issues could also prove thorny. Russia is reported to have moved some 400,000 Ukrainian civilians, including 80,000 children, into its territory. It’s possible Russia will claim they do not wish to return or will use them as bargaining chips in any settlement. The same could apply to Ukrainian citizens living in Russian-occupied territory.

A few small-scale exchanges of prisoners of war have apparently taken place. But problems could arise if captured Russian soldiers don’t wish to be returned to Russia. Would Ukraine be willing to return unwilling Russians if this was a key Russian demand in a settlement? At the same time, Russia may assert that captured Ukrainian soldiers, particularly Russian speakers, do not want to return home. Again, hard choices would have to be made.

War is easily begun, but its settlement creates legal and ethical dilemmas that have to be resolved, compromised or ignored once the shooting stops. Ukraine and its supporters will face distasteful and costly choices. Or the war may drag on indefinitely.

Mariupol is Russia’s theory of victory for its invasion of Ukraine. This strategy aims to break Ukrainian resistance by turning Ukraine’s cities into charnel houses through artillery bombardment and forcing the survivors into submission through a campaign of terror.

It could work. While Russia’s troops lack the ability to decisively defeat the Ukrainian army in the field, weight of numbers may enable them to get close enough to key Ukrainian cities to repeat the Mariupol strategy on a larger scale. Ukraine cannot defend its civilians against overwhelming artillery bombardment.

The West can prevent a Russian victory through atrocity by imposing a red line of its own: a campaign of atrocities will result in direct Western intervention sufficient to ensure that Russia loses. Since Russia has no other path to victory, this red line will—if respected or enforced—force the war into a stalemate and a negotiated peace.

To be respected or enforced, this red line needs to be credible. It will be credible only if it can be enforced and as long as enforcing it when called upon to do so is sensible from a risk–return perspective.

Russia’s principal military advantage lies in its artillery, and Russian forces suffer from poor logistical support. Consequently, a Western aerial campaign that degrades Russia’s artillery and logistics would ensure that Russia cannot win. This aerial campaign wouldn’t require maintaining air supremacy over all of Ukraine all of the time (unlike a no-fly zone). It would simply require getting Western planes close enough to Russian targets to launch their strikes (which rely heavily on stand-off precision-guided munitions).

To prevent this campaign from succeeding, Russia would need to establish a no-fly zone of its own. Based upon the performance of the Russian air force and air defence network to date, trying that will get them slaughtered.

So, this ‘no atrocities’ red line could be enforced. But enforcing it would obviously involve war with Russia (to acknowledge the giant bear in the room). That being the case, would enforcing it ever actually make sense?

The principal argument against any direct Western intervention in Ukraine is that it will create the risk of a nuclear war. And since running that risk can’t possibly make sense, no Western red line in Ukraine will be credible.

If you find that argument persuasive, then I have really bad news for you. The US (along with the UK and France) doesn’t run a ‘zero risk of nuclear war’ policy. The simple fact that the US, UK and France maintain a policy of nuclear deterrence means that we are at risk of a nuclear war with Russia right now. Plausible estimates suggest that the cumulative probability of nuclear war over the next 75 years exceeds 50%.

Short of unilateral nuclear disarmament by the West, then, a ‘no risk of nuclear war’ option is just not on the table.

Instead, the West must decide whether an option is sensible by considering both its immediate effects and its marginal impact on the cumulative long-run probability of nuclear war relative to alternatives.

A ‘no atrocities’ red line will save Ukraine and could well induce Russia to honestly enter into negotiations to end the war. Of course, if Russia pursues an atrocity strategy and the West does intervene, the immediate risk of nuclear war would undoubtedly increase. That said, Matthew Kroenig’s examination of the outcomes of 52 nuclear crises (some of which involved direct conventional clashes) in his book The logic of American nuclear strategy suggests that both sides in these crises behave rationally. And destroying the world to prevent a negotiated settlement to the Ukraine war is not a very rational choice.

However, any immediate increase in the risk of nuclear war that this red line will create must be weighed against the long-run impact on the risk of nuclear war that allowing Russia to triumph would create.

In this world, Russia will know that nuclear blackmail enabled it to win a brutal war against a country in which the West invested enormous amounts of diplomatic and political capital. The lesson that Russia and other hostile regimes will draw is that nuclear blackmail is a carte blanche to pursue revisionist policies. A Russian victory will inevitably lead to both nuclear proliferation and brutal conquests backed by threats of nuclear war made by regimes that believe that the West will always fold in the face of such threats. The cumulative long-run risk of nuclear war in this world is far higher than in the world where the West stops Russia now.

So, while there is no risk-free option for dealing with an expansionist and tyrannical nuclear power, imposing a ‘no atrocities’ red line for Ukraine offers the best prospect of both preventing a second Holodomor and minimising the long-run risk of nuclear war.

The West should declare a ‘no atrocities’ red line now.

The West is waging a hot economic war against Russia. That Rubicon has been crossed. The West is fighting this war by arming Ukraine and imposing an economic blockade that explicitly aims to eliminate Vladimir Putin’s regime by destroying the Russian economy (and it will be destroyed). As part of this devastating economic offensive, the West has seized around US$400 billion—more than 20% of Russia’s 2021 GDP—from the Russian state by freezing Russian central bank reserves.

War is the continuation of politics by other means, and we are well into other means now.

Yet this war is destined to end in a terrible defeat for the West unless it changes its strategy. The reason is simple: you can’t wage an economic war against a hostile, nuclear-armed opponent if you accept whatever nuclear red lines your opponent chooses to proclaim.

If Ukraine does fall and Russia responds to the economic war with actions backed by nuclear threats, the West is either going to have to either call Russia’s bluff or choose defeat—with all of the terrible consequences that that would entail. So, if the West is willing to call Russia’s nuclear bluff in the unavoidable confrontation to come, then it only makes sense to do it now and intervene militarily to save Ukraine from a second Holodomor.

The economic blockade that the West is imposing upon Russia through sanctions will cripple the Russian economy. Paul Krugman writes that ‘Russia appears to be headed for a Depression-level slump’, and J.P. Morgan predicts a crash in line with that of the 1998 debt crisis. The enormous overall hit to the Russian economy that sanctions will bring about will manifest itself in myriad painful ways. For example, a fascinating Twitter thread suggests that the sanctions regime will largely eliminate Russian civil aviation. The devastating consequences of the West’s economic war on Russia will affect everyone in that country for decades to come.

Yet, as crippling as these sanctions are for the overall Russian economy, they won’t prevent Russia from completing the conquest of Ukraine (though they do have a useful role to play). At that point, Putin will be victorious—on his own terms. He will know that the West watched his forces slaughter Ukrainians because of his threat to go nuclear. He will know that the West has seized US$400 billion of his money and that the sanctions regime was intended to remove him from power. He will know that the sanctions regime will force Russia to rely upon China, in which case his legacy will be to turn Russia into China’s Belarus.

Putin will have to react. And that reaction will have to take the form of a direct confrontation with the West because he will have no other options left. When that confrontation comes, the West will have to either appease Putin by ending the economic war and recognising the Russian conquest of Ukraine or call Putin’s bluff.

The advantage of choosing defeat is that the West will reduce the risk of an immediate confrontation with Russia. However, choosing defeat will also create enormous adverse consequences and will not enable the West to escape from an eventual confrontation with Russia anyway, and on worse terms.

Choosing defeat means that Russia will have successfully waged a brutal war against a country in which the West invested enormous amounts of diplomatic and political capital. The lesson that other hostile regimes will draw is that the West won’t directly interfere in such conquests in the face of a threat to use nuclear weapons. This defeat will therefore encourage both nuclear proliferation and brutal conquests, the combination of which will lead to a far more hostile world for the West and Western ideas.

Choosing defeat will leave Putin triumphant. He will have conquered Ukraine and prevailed over the full diplomatic, political and economic might of the West. Putin has vast ambitions, aiming to do nothing less than ‘relitigate the end of the Cold War, revise the current Euro-Atlantic security system and recreate a sphere of influence in the states of the former Warsaw Pact’. Winning the war in Ukraine while humiliating the West isn’t going to temper them. Putin’s Russia is not going to stop with Ukraine.

Choosing defeat will in fact do little more than set up the next confrontation. In that next confrontation, Russia will once again threaten to go nuclear if the West crosses its proclaimed nuclear red lines.

And what are those red lines? First, Russia cannot lose a war and second, an enemy cannot threaten Russia’s prosperity (I guess that ‘no Russian figure skater shall be subjected to a drug test’ will come later).

These are fabulous red lines if your opponents believe them, because it grants you enormous power over their ability to act. But these red lines are not credible. The US has nuclear weapons precisely to ensure that it isn’t subject to this sort of nuclear coercion. As the 2018 nuclear posture review put it, ‘Potential adversaries must recognize that … any nuclear escalation will fail to achieve their objectives, and will instead result in unacceptable consequences for them.’

Russia is going to attempt to win the war in Ukraine by repeating the tactics it used on the Chechen capital of Grozny in the 1990s. It will attempt to force the Ukrainian population into submission after the war by waging a campaign of murder and terror. The West can prevent this horror by directly intervening in the war with sufficient military force to ensure that Russia’s invasion fails. Russia is planning to get away with this horror anyway by cowing the vastly more powerful West into submission with nuclear threats.

Granting Putin victory in Ukraine will not lead to peace in our time; instead, it will ensure that Putin will confront the West again. At some point, the West is going to call Putin’s nuclear bluff. Let us call that bluff now and save Ukraine.

The way cyber actions have played out in the Russian invasion of Ukraine hasn’t followed the anticipated script. The attacks on Ukrainian government agencies and banks in early and mid-February were not unexpected, given Russian rhetoric. But the ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’ that some had anticipated hasn’t occurred.

Russia may well have drawn different conclusions to others from its experience in Georgia in 2008 and its 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Both were notable for their use of cyber—attacking infrastructure and government agencies, destabilising decision-making and sowing confusion regarding purpose, responsibility and the on-the-ground situation. The integration of cyber, political and psychological activities with conventional operations, progressively escalating effort from influence operations to full kinetic warfare, became known as hybrid warfare or the Gerasimov doctrine, after the Russian chief of the general staff.

Practice proved less smooth than theory. Russia’s effort in Georgia arguably was more successful than the more ambitious activity in 2014 in the more advanced Ukraine. Georgian government decision-making was disrupted, the Russians confused the issue and effectively defanged an international response, and Ossetian secessionists, with some support, proved good enough against the Georgian military.

In Ukraine in 2014, Vladimir Putin was progressively forced to show his hand and commit conventional forces as cyber, disinformation and his ‘little green men’ proved of limited value. Still, Putin succeeded in annexing Crimea and supporting limited secessionist effort in Donbas—enough to encourage his invasion this year.

Since then, cyber has proved useful to Moscow in other ways. Russia continued to improve its cyber capabilities, extending into active disinformation operations in the West, including the 2016 US and 2017 French presidential elections (and possibly the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK). In 2017, the Russian group Sandworm launched the NotPetya malware. Though the targets were Ukrainian companies and the country’s government, NotPetya spread quickly, demonstrating the indiscriminate damage such tactics can cause.

Later Russian activity was both better targeted and more sophisticated and may reflect caution over possible consequences to its own systems and interests resulting from malware spreading unchecked in the wild. And as the 2019 SolarWinds attack showed, attacks ‘deep in the stack’ and supply chain can offer considerable breadth and scope for exploitation, including for intelligence purposes.

The limited cyber activity in the current Russian invasion of Ukraine may be a recognition of its constraints in warfare. In the heat of conventional battle, the use of cyber will be highly tactical—classic signals intelligence—aimed at disrupting enemy digital systems. Because of the dependence of all modern states on digital systems for their military capabilities, protagonists won’t want to suffer blowback from malware loose in the wild.

Still, we would expect continued efforts to place malware, prepare the ground for a Russian takeover and shape the information environment outside the immediate sphere of operations. There is, after all, the broader information war to prosecute.

In hindsight, Putin has been set on this course for some time. However, the unanticipated use of US and UK intelligence to expose Russian mustering and intent shouldn’t be underestimated in terms of garnering global support. And the Ukrainians—government, community and supporters—have used social media to great effect.

These factors have cast doubt on Russia’s superiority in maskirovka, the use of disinformation, intimidation and deception, which has been employed since the country’s tsarist days and was refined during Soviet repression. The Russian government’s previous actions in Georgia and Ukraine, as well as cyber operations during the 2016 US presidential campaign, all echo those of the Soviet Union. Antecedents to Putin’s ‘little green men’ can be found in Stalin’s tactics in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s.

A central focus of maskirovka is domestic audiences and bolstering internal legitimacy—typical of repressive regimes everywhere. Putin’s crackdown on internal dissent—arresting protesters, silencing the few remaining independent broadcasters, pressuring tech platforms, possibly with more to come—is likely to harden as the Russian campaign in Ukraine regroups. We should expect use of ‘fellow travellers’ outside Russia, of which there remain many, including in the Trump wing of the Republican Party, and of nations from which it can call in favours or leverage concessions. And we should expect use of cyber to block, intimidate and disrupt dissenters and simply to sow confusion.

It’s early days in this conflict. Russian pressure on Ukraine will increase, even as its military resorts to tried and true tactics of destruction. In the meantime, there are some conclusions that may be drawn for Australia.

First, cyber is a classic ‘grey zone’ tool: it is ambiguous and potentially valuable for intelligence, developing influence, seeding uncertainty and shaping the information environment for the first few days of a conflict. We should be as sceptical of reliance on cyber for substantive outcomes as we are of claims of a cyber Pearl Harbor.

Second, nation-states don’t have a monopoly over the use of cyber. Some hacktivist and criminal groups are taking sides in the current conflict. Others—including nation-states—will seek to exploit both the distraction of agencies and the disruption of conflict. Cyber defence is getting harder and commercial companies and researchers often take point. All this activity is muddying the information environment, making signalling harder and increasing the prospect of miscalculation.

Third, the role of technology companies is increasingly important. Governments no longer have such assets under their direct control and yet are critically dependent on them. It’s not simply content. The withdrawal of major tech companies will give Russia increased impetus to develop sovereign capability. We can expect China and other authoritarian states to increase their control over tech companies, and even Western governments will give pause to consider their dependence.

Fourth, the importance of communities outside formal institutions. As Peter Singer has noted, the Ukrainians have provided something of masterclass in strategic communications and activities, from formally applying for EU membership to videos of grandmothers offering sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers. Normal government approaches aren’t well suited to the irreverence and spontaneity of a fast-moving social media environment.

Fifth, Australia’s formal institutions need to show coordination, imagination, active engagement and transparency—much as the UK and US governments demonstrated with the release of intelligence analysis. In a competition with closed, authoritarian states, transparency, adherence to democratic values and support of human rights and liberties offer the best counter.

Despite the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, we should not forget that the main game remains China; the one clear beneficiary of the invasion is the Chinese Communist Party. We should take care to understand the nature of cyber and information warfare in this conflict, not least to better prepare ourselves for increased pressure in the grey zone.

It’s still early days in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but so far nuclear issues have enjoyed a much higher profile than might have been expected. A strategic missile exercise formed part of the lead-up to the invasion. And when first launching the military operation last Thursday, Putin warned darkly that any country that stood in Russia’s way would suffer ‘consequences that you have never encountered in your history’.

Since then, we’ve had statements that allege the invasion was motivated in part by a concern that Ukraine was a proliferation threat. We’ve had a Russian spokesman say that the reason Chernobyl was seized so early in the campaign was to deny Ukraine the option of making a ‘dirty’ bomb. And we’ve had voters in Belarus—in a disputed referendum—renounce the anti-nuclear clause in its constitution, opening up the possible deployment of Russian nuclear weapons there.

Perhaps most worryingly, on Sunday Putin instructed his defence minister and chief of the general staff to raise the alert level of Russian deterrence forces by putting them on a ‘special regime of combat duty’. It’s not clear what he meant. US defence officials observed that this was not a term of operational art with which they were familiar and stated that they had seen no subsequent ‘muscle movement’ in the status of the Russian nuclear arsenal.

The Russian ministry of defence confirmed on Monday that its nuclear missile forces and the Northern and Pacific fleets had been placed on ‘enhanced’ combat duty. Some reports spoke of Russia boosting staff at its nuclear sites—which might mean that all leave has been cancelled.

All of this has made for a hectic time in the world of nuclear strategists. Nuclear signalling is woven through the invasion of Ukraine in a way we haven’t seen since the days of the Cuban missile crisis. Naturally, it has fed a wave of speculation on social media about the potential crossing of the nuclear threshold, either deliberately or inadvertently.

In early June 2020, Russia published an official outline of the principles underpinning Russian nuclear deterrence. (The online English translation seems currently inaccessible, perhaps as a result of the attack by the group called Anonymous against Russian governmental internet sites, but a quick summary can be found here.) The document lists four instances in which Russia might resort to use of nuclear weapons:

• in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies
• in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy
• when there is reliable data on a launch of ballistic missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies
• in the event of an attack by an adversary against critical governmental or military sites of the Russian Federation, disruption of which would undermine nuclear forces’ response options.

Some of Putin’s comments suggest an effort to make out a case under the second of those provisions. That’s a stretch. The transfer to Ukraine of lethal conventional military equipment from NATO members and other countries, at a time when a daunting array of sanctions are hitting the regime and its supporters, certainly isn’t seen in Washington, European capitals, or Canberra, as ‘aggression’ jeopardising the ‘very existence’ of the Russian state. True, some commentators do see those actions as jeopardising the future of Putin’s regime, but most see them simply as incentives for Moscow to change course in relation to its intended subjugation of Ukraine.

Still, Putin’s behaviour has been more than a little odd lately—including his apparent fascination with long-distance seating arrangements. Driven by a long list of perceived grievances, a burning ambition to recreate Greater Russia, and wounded pride, Putin might well see his own role in more sweeping historical terms.

That means, of course, that escalation is still more likely than de-escalation. Might that escalation involve nuclear weapons? Yes. But, from the Cold War days, Western intelligence probably still has available to it a good-sized list of warning indicators for imminent nuclear use. I don’t think we’re close to that.

And remember that Putin has a range of other, more likely, options. Those include a more vigorous prosecution of his current strategy—the toppling of the current government in Kiev, the installation of a more compliant regime in its place, and the gradual incorporation of Ukraine back under Moscow’s control. Easier said than done, certainly, but Moscow has form in that regard. He might also choose to strike—with conventional weapons—at the supply lines through which military equipment is finding its way into Ukraine. Or he might have in mind a more distant target set, again without necessarily resorting to nuclear weapons.

Strategic deterrence today doesn’t turn merely upon the old division of weapons into the conventional and the nuclear. Conflict has become multi-domain. Long-range precision-strike conventional weapons, options in the cyber realm, and space and counterspace weaponry are all possibilities.

In short, nuclear weapons have so far played a larger role in the crisis than expected—but there are still many paths forward.