How has Ukraine changed my mind?

By Daniel W. Drezner, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University

Social scientists are taught in graduate school that we need to rigorously test our theories and hypotheses. The attempt to falsify is at the core of what we are supposed to do. What we are taught and what we actually do, however, is not entirely in alignment. Social scientists, like everyone else, possess only slightly evolved monkey brains. We are prone to confirmation bias just like everyone else. In a murky, complex information environment, we will often grasp at the pieces of data that confirm our priors and ignore the more discordant bits of information. The system of scientific research still works because of the powerful incentives to falsify the other person’s hypotheses, but you get my point.

As my profession wrestles with who has been right and who has been wrong about the causes of war in Ukraine, Harvard political scientist Joshua Kertzer asks an important question: “What has the war in Ukraine changed your mind about?”

This is an excellent exercise. Last year, I pooh-poohed the possibility that Ukraine would trigger a great-power war. While that still has not happened, I must concede that I underplayed the possibility. So what other expectations of mine have proved to be off?

First, a caveat: given that the war is less than two weeks old, all answers are provisional. This is particularly true because our sources of information are partial at best and skewed at worst. Still, given what we know now, I think there are three aspects of international politics that I need to reevaluate.

The first is that I overestimated Russian power and strategy. In the run-up to the war, I read article after article explaining how Vladimir Putin had modernized and rebuilt the Russian military. Russian successes in Georgia, Crimea, the Donbas region and Syria certainly suggested a trendline of Russian competency in how to use force.

In retrospect, this was like projecting 1990s U.S. military victories onto the likelihood of success in occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. Russia may well still succeed in pulverizing Kyiv and Kharkiv, but with each passing day, it seems a bit more difficult to envisage. What has become increasingly clear is that Russia’s strategy for victory was predicated on a lightning-fast way followed by a decapitation of the Ukrainian leadership. Eleven days later, the cracks are showing in Russia’s military: out-of-date rations, poor fuel logistics and a perplexing inability to establish air supremacy.

Lawrence Freedman’s latest assessment of the situation on the ground perfectly captures the precarious nature of Russia’s position:Russia has now committed well over 90 percent of the massive force that was gathered around Ukraine before 24 February, and is still unable to take its early objectives, let alone work out, should they be taken, how they might be occupied and then governed. This suggests there is not much spare capacity for the western parts of the country, which is where Ukrainian forces, commanded from Lviv, could regroup with supplies coming in from Poland, Slovakia and possibly Hungary, if Kyiv were to fall.But the maps don’t show the full extent of the quandary faced by the Russians. To repeat a point made in my previous post, presence is not the same as control. As we saw yesterday in extraordinary videos from Kherson and Melitopol, in which unarmed civilians were demonstrating against the Russians, these towns are not truly in Russian hands. The populations remain resolutely Ukrainian in their loyalties, providing evidence not only of their indignation about the Russian occupation but warning how the lack of effective control could have deadly consequences for Russian units if this turned into an insurgency.

Russia might not lose this war, but it is becoming less clear by the day how it wins.

This leads me to my second rethink: the role of leadership in world politics. There has been a renaissance of scholarship in individual leadership over the past decade, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine should turbocharge this research program. It starts with whether anyone other than Putin would have chosen to invade all of Ukraine. (One Russian report suggests no.)

More important, however, is Volodymyr Zelensky’s effect on other countries as the war has proceeded. Despite publicly downplaying the threat for weeks prior to the invasion, his emotional appeals appear to have had a galvanizing effect on European leaders in particular. I cannot remember interpreters getting emotional in the past. The stark contrast between Zelensky’s cogent, social-media-friendly speeches and Putin’s super-weird optics in his televised interactions has also made it that much more difficult for Russia to win the information war.

Finally, my third rethink is that I have underestimated contagion effects in international relations. Most international relations scholars, myself included, are skeptical about the idea that international diplomacy mirrors social media in how actors can be ostracized so quickly. It is difficult to deny, however, that this phenomenon has been on display in the global response to Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

This has been most apparent in two ways. The first has been how many countries have responded to Russia’s bellicosity. This is most apparent in Europe, where E.U. members have fallen in lockstep behind Germany. Even leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the Czech Republic’s Milos Zerman, who had in the past been chummy with Putin, have changed their tune in the last week. Beyond that, however, other countries are taking unprecedented actions against Russia. When Switzerland is announcing sanctions and Japan is announcing that it will accept refugees, you know there has been a sea change in world politics.

The second has been the breadth of the economic sanctions that have been put in place against Russia — not by states, but by other actors on the global stage. Suddenly FIFA and the IOC are staking out political positions. Private-sector firms are going beyond the official sanctions. Boeing and Airbus will no longer sell or service Russian planes. Maersk, MSC and CMA CGM are suspending nonessential deliveries to Russia. Visa and Mastercard will no longer process any cross-border Russian credit card payments. Oil companies are apologizing for selling Russian oil even though they understandably believe that this is what Western governments want.

Putin has declared that sanctions are the equivalent of a declaration of war, but in truth governments are only partially responsible for what has happened. As Dmitri Alperovitch correctly noted, “it is the unilateral decisions of Western companies to pull out of Russia or break their contracts with Russian companies (when the sanctions are not requiring them to do so) that is driving Russian economy into a very deep economic hole.”

It is true that some of these moves are performative more than anything else, and sometimes go too far. The more companies that take these actions, however, the greater the pressure on other companies to act likewise.

As the war proceeds, maybe my opinions will shift again. Russia could learn from its strategic mistakes. Zelensky could still falter. Maybe there is a reverse contagion effect if Ukraine collapses. But for now, these are the issues where my expectations remain in flux.

This piece was re-published from The Washington Post.