Russia's War Aims in Ukraine

📖 The Scoop

"Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine is by far its largest and most consequential commitment of military forces abroad in recent decades. The stakes for Russia are extremely high. However, despite these stakes, the Kremlin has not provided a clear and consistent public narrative regarding its objectives, maintaining significant ambiguity and even adopting contradictory stances. In this report, the authors analyze Russia's official public narrative regarding its war aims in Ukraine in the first year of its full-scale invasion. They begin by investigating Russian strategic writings and pre-2022 Russian practice of objective-setting when using force abroad. The authors use this analysis to generate expectations about how Russia would have been expected to behave during the full-scale invasion. They then document the reality of Moscow's objective-setting in the first year of the Ukraine war through a qualitative analysis of Russian leaders' key speeches and a quantitative study of an original dataset of official statements on the war. The authors compare this reality with the expectations, noting significant divergences. Finally, they then provide implications of their findings for U.S. and allied policymakers."--

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