Ukraine, Afghanistan and the failure of deterrence

Abstract

Russia’s 2014 seizure of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine highlighted the limitations of a ‘rules-based’ international order in protecting a state’s territorial integrity in the face of threats to international peace and security resulting from the actions of a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. With the capacity to veto any Security Council resolution authorising ‘enforcement action’ under Article 42 of the United Nations Charter, Russian leaders only had to fear the exercise under Article 51 of Ukraine’s inherent right of individual or collective self-defence. But Ukraine was in no position to drive Russian forces from Crimea unless supported by a great power such as the United States, and as Lawrence Freedman put it, ‘President Obama made it clear that he saw no circumstances in which the United States would use armed force in connection with this crisis’ (Freedman 2019, 106). The focus of the international response would instead be on extended deterrence of future Russian aggression. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 (Birnbaum et al. 2022), it became abundantly clear that Russia had not been successfully deterred from invading its western neighbour. Debate thereafter tended to focus on two points: the extent to which moves to admit Ukraine to NATO membership, anticipated by US President George W. Bush at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, might or might not have inflamed Russian elite opinion; and the importance of building a coalition of Western states to support the Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, an exercise for which US President Biden on the whole received high marks. Somewhat lost in these discussions was any serious analysis of the deterrence failure that the invasion of Ukraine exposed. Yet an exploration of what deterrence means in the 21st century, and how it came to fail in the Ukrainian case, remains distinctly pertinent when one looks at other potential flashpoints such as the Middle East and East Asia. For this reason, it is worth unpacking some key elements of the idea of deterrence, and looking at what contributed to its failing in the case of Ukraine.