Three Years of War in Ukraine

Introduction

Lindsay: I’m Lindsay Shingler, and you’re listening to Talking Policy.

Three years have passed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has brought devastation to Eastern Europe, and economic and political fallout around the world. 

A year ago on Talking Policy, we brought together a group of experts, to reflect on the origins and trajectory of the conflict and to mark its second anniversary. 

In this special episode, Jesse Driscoll, an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, returns as guest host to lead a conversation to mark the third anniversary of this horrible conflict, and to explore what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, and what might happen next. This interview was recorded on February 3, 2025.

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Jesse: Hi, I’m Jesse Driscoll and I’ll be your guest host for today’s episode of Talking Policy. We’re marking three years of war in Ukraine. I’m joined by Paul D’Anieri, professor of political science and public policy at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War. I’m also joined by Jess Peake, assistant director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and the director of the International Comparative Law Program at the UCLA School of Law. Also, a recent Pulitzer Prize nominee for her article, “War Crimes by Any Name” for the Los Angeles Lawyer. 

Together, we’ll discuss what’s kept this war going, how its global impacts continue to evolve, and what might bring this deadly conflict to an end. 

So, let’s start off at 30,000 feet, and let’s start with you, Paul. Where are we now in the conflict, and how is this different from where you thought we’d be when we spoke a year ago?

Paul: Yeah, I don’t think we’re in too much of a different place than we would have expected a year ago in that it continues to be a war of attrition, a war that is driving a bargaining process that’s, of course, not a formal bargaining process, but both sides trying to position themselves for what are anticipated to be peace talks in the future.

Russia is taking territory slowly, but surely, and Ukraine is suffering casualties and losing territory. Russia is also suffering casualties. And so there’s kind of this contest right now, as there has been since the war started, about how much territory can you get and what is it going to cost you?

Jesse: Jess, anything you want to add to that?

Jess: Yeah, so I guess when we spoke a year ago, I think I was talking about the different strands of legal strategy that Ukraine was waging against Russia in various international fora, and there was a lot of hope for what was going to come out of that.

And unfortunately, the cases have not quite gone the way that many observers had hoped that they would. So a year ago, Ukraine had a couple of cases before the International Court of Justice, and unfortunately, in both of those, the judgments from the court were not what Ukraine had been hoping for.

The first was a case that had been filed against Russia by Ukraine under the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. And basically, in that case, Ukraine had claimed that Russian support for separatist groups in Eastern Ukraine had violated the treaties, and the illegal occupation of Crimea was violating Russia’s obligations under these international legal instruments. And unfortunately, the court rejected the majority of those claims, which was a big blow to the legal strategy that the Ukrainians had mounted under those channels. 

The second case was filed by Ukraine under the Genocide Convention shortly after Russia’s full scale invasion in February of 2022. That filing, at the time, was thought to be a clever move as Russia had alleged that Ukraine was committing genocide against Russian ethnic minorities in eastern Ukraine. And Ukraine very cleverly sort of twisted that around to bring that case before the court, but the court didn’t like the arguments that Ukraine had made there, and basically found that it doesn’t have jurisdiction to determine the legality of Russia’s use of force under the genocide convention. 

It will move forward on some other grounds, and it will hear the merits on whether or not Ukraine is responsible for committing genocide, which was Russia’s original allegation. But that, of course, is not addressing the use of force legality question that I think Ukraine had tried to mount under that case, particularly. 

On the sort of individual accountability side, we haven’t really got any further than we were when we spoke last year. The International Criminal Court has a couple of live arrest warrants against Putin and Lvova-Belova, who is the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President. Both of those arrest warrants allege war crimes of unlawful deportation and transfer of children, particularly from Eastern Ukraine into Russian territory. But the ICC requires physical jurisdiction over those people in order for those cases to move forward, so without, you know, Putin sending himself to the Hague or some other state transferring Putin to the Hague, if he is in their territory, there’s not really a way that that’s going to move forward yet either. 

I think we spoke a little bit last year too about the special tribunal for aggression that a number of states were trying to get behind. That’s kind of in the same position too. There’s still a lot of talk, there’s not a lot of movement. 

There has been a bright spot from the European Court of Human Rights that issued a judgment about the first case that Ukraine brought against Russia, which concerns the repression of Ukrainians and activists in Crimea since 2014. That was a very strong victory for Ukraine. The court found multiple human rights violations. But overall, the legal strategy is a little bit stuck, I would say. The ICJ didn’t do what Ukraine had hoped it would do. The ICC can’t move forward. The special tribunal for aggression is mired up in domestic politics of other states, I think.

And so, you know, the question of when and how will accountability be found for the war crimes committed in Ukraine is still a very open question.

Jesse: Yeah, I think that the metaphor of being stuck also applies to the battlefield situation. I mean, in political science, we tend to say that for there to be a lasting conflict resolution, you need one of three conditions to hold:

There either needs to be a kind of a mutually-hurting stalemate and acknowledgement that that’s where you are. There needs to be a situation where both sides can at least see distance that both of them can get to in terms of where both of them wants to end up. So you can begin talking about a bargaining space, even if both sides aren’t exhausted. Or, one side just needs to decisively defeat the other and really impose its will on the other.

None of those three things have [been] obtained in the last year, despite really enormous costs paid on both sides. And we tend to focus on the Ukrainian side because that’s where the tragedy is, something that we feel ownership of. But Russians have lost a lot of people. You know, the manpower estimates, and you never really know what to do with these numbers, but it seems like to keep their manpower sustainment, 30,000 bodies per month is what gets thrown around a lot. Any other military in the world would have culminated by now, but they haven’t, so, you know, that’s kind of grim.

I guess I’d say a couple of other things in terms of where we are compared to where I thought we would be last year. One of which I think just, it deserves a little bit of a ray of optimism because it’s easy to get down to dark places in these conversations.

Conditional on the hiatus of American support, which hadn’t happened when we spoke last year, but happened in the interim, I’m actually relatively pleased at how well Ukraine has done. Because if you told me a year ago that there would have been the kind of politically-driven hiatus of support, you know, from the U.S. side, I would have actually feared much worse battlefield outcomes than we’ve actually obtained. 

Other surprises, without getting too down into the weeds: I didn’t expect the Kursk pocket to happen, and I did not expect there to be Ukrainians squatting on Russian territory. I did not expect Korean troops to be involved in the war, couldn’t have predicted that. There was a conversation about long-range precision strike that was brewing last year, but I didn’t expect that when the long range precision strike would arrive, it would be after the Ukrainian assaults, so the timing of that would have been puzzling to me, if you told me. I would have hoped it would have come earlier if it came at all. But we have provided some ATACMS missiles, also some new sanctions that I think will hurt a lot in the waning hours of the Biden administration, things we didn’t want to do before because they might have had disruptive effects on oil prices or changed elections or something.

But I think that kind of hits us on the major updates…

Jess: I would just maybe add to that the—

Jesse: Oh, there was an election in this country too! That would be a major update, we should throw that in. Sorry, Jess…

Jess: Yeah, no, that’s a very important update too. I was just going to mention the so-called Ukraine facility, you know, this 50 billion commitment from the EU over four years, just to provide Ukraine with that regular financial support to underscore like all of the necessary expenses of the administrative state that they’ve been struggling so much with. And so I think that also has contributed massively to Ukraine being able to sort of advance their involvement in this conflict because it’s provided—or will provide, over the next four years, this additional financial support.

Jesse: To bring it back to Paul, let’s dig in on the North Korea angle.

I mean, this is, I think it’s safe to say, one facet that was genuinely unexpected as a development over the last year that was just not on anybody’s radar. So how do we interpret that? 

Paul: Well, I am of two minds about how to interpret that. I mean, it’s fairly shocking that it happened, although it’s just long ago enough now that I sort of have, like, built it into my understanding of the conflict.

It’s fairly shocking that it happened. As you said, nobody saw this coming. But I think there’s a question about what it means, and at least the people I’ve talked to who know more than I do don’t agree on this. 

One interpretation is: it means the Russians are really running up against it in terms of conscripting more soldiers at the prices they’re willing to pay to go and do this dirty work. And there’s another interpretation that says, no, it’s, it’s not about that at all. And as you pointed out, there are not too many signs of the Russian offensive culminating. I do have this question, okay, now that the North Koreans seem to have really taken it on the chin in Kursk, how long can Russia keep up this attrition of its soldiers? These guys have to be trained, they have to be equipped, they have to be recruited and motivated. So I think that’s one of the huge questions for the next year. 

And as far as what does it mean? On the bigger picture about what this conflict means for the world, the dynamics between China, North Korea, Russia are really shifting in ways that I’m not sure I’m expert enough to comment on, other than to recognize that it’s happening and we need to think about it.

Jess: Yeah, I would agree with Paul. I mean, I definitely didn’t see that coming and I think, you know, as of late fall, I think there was something like 12,000 North Korean soldiers in Russia, and estimates I’ve seen put it that maybe at least a third of those, so 4,000 of those, have already been killed in, what is that, two months, three months?

And then I’ve seen reporting in the past couple of days, too, suggesting that those North Korean troops have really pulled back from the front line after those heavy losses. So I think it’s a question of like, what is going on internally? How are they regrouping and thinking about this strategically? I mean, from my perspective, I think it actually shows desperation of Putin that he requested these North Korean troops to come in. I think it clearly underscores that the heavy civilian casualty losses of the Russian people are really beginning to take a toll on society, and that he’s really struggling with that recruitment. And so I actually do think it maybe underscores a weakness at this point.

Jesse: Yeah. So just to give the glass half empty to counter your glass half full, just so that our listeners out there can hear it.

The counterpoint I think is strong, which is that if the Ukrainians had an ally that was willing to send them 12,000 boots on the ground, the Ukrainians would be very grateful to have those boots on the ground. So, you know, it might actually be signaling something about Ukrainian isolation.

And in a strange way, I mean, we think that 12,000 soldiers sounds like a lot, and to a European army it actually does. But North Koreans have well more than 12,000 where that came from, and so we’re not really sure what the pipeline is going to look like. Now, they haven’t gone from Kursk engagements into Ukraine yet, and I think that might be part of a calculation by Russian leadership that once there are World War III type, coalition versus coalitions of armies in Ukraine, that might be something that they don’t want, but as long as it can be cast kind of as a police action, maybe there’s more troops where that came from.

I think the other thing worth saying, I tend to think that the North Korean angle has much more of a psyops dimension to it than oftentimes gets appreciated. Americans have enjoyed compartmentalizing the Ukraine conflict as kind of a European problem or a EUCOM [U.S. European Command] problem, and you can’t do that when all of a sudden you’re thinking about every Korea kinetic contingency wrapped up in the Ukraine war, and it may well be that at some point in the Trump administration, there will be, kinetic things on the Korean peninsula on the table. And we will then have to wonder about Russia in outer space. What technologies were transferred to North Korea in exchange for these troops? What promises were made? We know what the North Koreans say about the security assurance that was signed, but, like, what do the Russians actually interpret their obligations to be? And all of this is kind of a horizontal escalation of the conflict. 

In America, we tend to think that it’s all about us, and it feels that way right now. But for Ukrainians of course, you know, aid from the West and aid from the United States matters, but nothing magically changed on their battlefield just because things changed in American politics. The fundamentals of a war of attrition, the way Paul described it, have been clear for months, maybe years. So, Ukrainians are watching American politics carefully, obviously, but let’s talk a little bit about Ukrainian domestic politics. What has changed in Ukrainian domestic politics over the course of the last year?

Paul: I think a couple of things have changed that are significant. One is the popularity of President Zelenskyy is slowly heading back down towards where it was before the war started. And I think Zelenskyy is at this point much more popular in the West than he is in Ukraine right now. And it’s not that he’s done anything in particular. It’s that, and this is the second big point, the Ukrainian people are increasingly tired of this war. Many of them individually are traumatized, they’re exhausted in many different ways.

And so the tolerance among the Ukrainian people for a settlement in which Ukraine does not immediately regain its 2014 borders has gone up significantly. More and more Ukrainians are getting to the position where they would say, “We’ll give up the territory—or we’ll give up some territory—if we get real security guarantees.” Now, whether that deal is going to be available to them, I’m fairly skeptical about, but that’s the big change, I would say, in Ukrainian domestic politics.

The last thing I would say is, and this isn’t a change, but rather the continuation of something, which is, after an initial rushing of mostly young men off to fight this war in the early stages, Ukraine has struggled to mobilize more forces. So that’s an issue as well, and of course, the Russians are watching this very carefully. 

And I just want to tie that back to the fact that we’ve had an election in the United States. Morale is important in war. Expectations are really important in war, right? Nobody wants to be the last person to die for a losing cause. And so one of the important things about the U.S. election is it’s raised this question about what the United States is going to do now. And to the extent that the Ukrainians are confident that the United States and the West will continue to support them, it will be easier for them to recruit, mobilize, motivate, and keep on the lines their forces. To the extent that they’re going to lose that support, it becomes much harder to do those things. And that is one of the major imports, I think, of our U.S. election. It’s increased uncertainty on all sides about what’s actually going to happen with U.S. policy.

Jess: Yeah, I completely agree, Paul. The U.S. election obviously affects so many around the world. But this situation particularly is one where I think, you know, the Ukrainians are probably looking at what is going on here in the U.S. and thinking, “what on earth does this mean for us?” And nobody knows the answer to that question, right? I saw that President Zelenskyy, I think he was talking to the Associated Press, basically tried to frame it as though NATO membership would be a chance for Donald Trump to score a geopolitical victory over Russia and would be sort of the cheapest way to guarantee the security of Ukraine. And I mean, I assume what he means by that is if Trump can pull off some kind of ceasefire peace agreement that includes NATO membership for Ukraine, then it will be a signal that the United States decides who is in NATO or not, rather than Russia sort of pulling those strings, as it were.

I think that is a framing that is really the only framing to advance, but then the question is, is Trump going to get on board with that, given that we know that Trump is extremely skeptical of NATO, has threatened to withdraw the U.S. from NATO anyway, has all of these issues with the way various states are committing funds to NATO. And I think also Trump said at some point that Biden’s support of Ukraine joining NATO is actually what provoked Russia’s full scale invasion, so I see what Zelenskyy is doing, but I don’t know how persuasive it will be to Trump, given his skepticism.

Jesse: Yeah, I think that’s a huge understatement, Jess. I think we know exactly what Trump thinks, or at least the people around Trump think about it. I understand why Zelenskyy’s saying what he’s saying, because I don’t quite know what else Zelenskyy would say. But my feeling is that if four years from now, the United States actually has the same number of troops in Europe and is still in NATO, that will be kind of a win.

And there’s a real chance that for the next two years, we’re going to spend a lot of time toying with the idea that that won’t be an outcome, in order to try to induce Europeans to spend more on their own national defense, stand up what could be a European peacekeeping force in Europe without America holding its hand. And the way that the Trump administration tactically is going to try to make that happen is threatening to blow up the post-World War II European security architecture. And so I don’t know how you can keep those two conversations going without the cognitive dissonance just overwhelming you.

And I could be wrong about that. I really could, but if you look at what it would take for Americans to be the backbone of security force in Ukraine, the idea that we would put more troops into Europe in order to secure Ukraine, is I think just a non-starter. But I did want to just push back on the optimism embedded in your answer, because I think Ukrainians are on “hopium” when it comes to the NATO conversation at this point.

Paul: This has been true of Ukrainian politics as long as I have been studying them, right? And, and so by that I mean since the early 1990s, since independence. Their security strategy has always depended on a hope that the Russians would leave them alone and just get used to the idea of an independent Ukraine, which in the 90s seemed to be happening—actually, I think, in the 90s, was happening. And this was idealism. It was this idea that, well, of course, the Americans and the Europeans understand that Ukraine is trying to be democratic, understand the dangers of Russia, they will never let this happen. And I can tell you, I had a lot of conversations with people over many, many years saying, don’t bet all your money on the righteousness of the Europeans or the Americans. But for very many reasons about Ukrainian domestic politics, it was always easier to do that than to face some of the issues. The spending it would have taken to get prepared, the reform of the military it would have taken, and frankly, their sense of their own security dilemma, which is that if they started building up their military, the Russians would invade sooner rather than later.

And so Russia had always kind of effectively deterred Ukraine from solving its own problems. So there’s been a lot of parts of this over a long time. The real solution has always been a robust NATO European policy towards Ukraine, but it’s never been on the table. And Jess, I think you’re absolutely right that, given the skepticism in the Trump administration about internationalism in general versus isolationism—and especially about NATO—holding the U.S. Commitment to NATO together over the next four years will be an accomplishment. Getting Ukraine an Article 5 guarantee seems increasingly unlikely, and I think there are a lot of people in Europe who would be happy to see the United States take the so-called fall for that, because I think there’s a lot of folks in Europe, especially the further you get away from Russia, who really aren’t sure that they want to make that commitment. So I think in that respect, I think the war gets harder to solve, because the one thing that would sell domestically in Ukraine to say, “Yep, you’re giving up Crimea and Eastern Ukraine,” I think is increasingly not on the table.

Jesse: Okay, let’s talk about possible settlements and security guarantees. The way I would put it is that there’s a bit of a Goldilocks problem. If the security guarantees are too weak, Ukraine can look down the game tree and see that it’s just going to be a period of rearmament. And if we’re going to lose the third war, no one will care if we won the second war or got to a temporary ceasefire in the second war. They think this is the second war, by the way, because they think the first war was the one that started in 2014. And so, if they view this as just a pause, why not just keep fighting? So that’s what you get with a weak security guarantee, is you get Ukrainians who would prefer to keep Russians in the trenches, rather than rearm and reconstitute, and there’s a logic to that.

On the other hand, if they’re too strong, Russia just won’t agree to them. And, you know, as you put it, Paul, probably the U.S. wouldn’t either. So, with those constraints in mind, how do you think the new Trump team should try to get the parties to the table?

Paul: I think there are two parts of that. I’m not sure the Russians feel like they’re in a hurting stalemate right now, because they can see that line on the map inching forward. I think it’s important to recognize the Russians are slowly and steadily taking ground in Eastern Ukraine.

It’s equally the case, however, that you have to zoom in pretty far on that map to see those gains. In other words, what I’m saying is in terms of the territory of Ukraine, it’s a few miles here and a few miles there. And if you think about sustaining that cost all the way to someplace that really matters, there’s a lot more Russians to be killed. They can’t win the war the way they’re winning it now, if we mean by win, like really take over Ukraine. They’ve got to be hoping, rather that at some point the Ukrainian army collapses, or for negotiated solution.

So I think the first part of the Trump policy, and this is the challenge for the Trump administration, given its broader political outlook, is to bolster the Ukrainians against the Russians, to say to the Russians, “We’re willing to support peace, but we’re also willing to support the Ukrainians.” Which means giving them the weapons they need to raise the cost higher than you want to pay. And then the flip side has got to be producing a peace agreement that the Russians see as politically something they can call victory, and something that, whatever their notion is of security, they feel like protects them going forward. 

And that’s where people like me, I think we stumble a little bit in understanding this, because it’s very hard for me to understand how a NATO security guarantee for Ukraine, or even NATO troops in Ukraine, is any meaningful threat to Russia, as long as Russia is not intending to invade the rest of Ukraine. I accept that they may not see it that way, in Moscow. The problem is all the other security guarantees don’t work. 

Jesse: Yeah. For me the language of armed neutrality is the way to get there because you can load so much into “armed”, that an indigenous Ukrainian deterrent may actually be much more credible than even an Article 5 deterrent. I think one of the problems with this particular conflict is that if you take the Russians seriously, if you take seriously what they say they need to feel secure, for one thing it would require Ukraine to sign a document that has a bunch of premises in it that most Ukrainians find offensive and not true, right? And that might just be the cost of doing the dirty deal, but beyond that, I’m not sure whether it sets a good precedent or a bad precedent to negotiate a deal that accepts a whole bunch of false premises about Russian security. And I think that’s really the fundamental issue here, and it’s the precedent that is set by—like, I’m fine having a peace treaty. As an American, you know, I’m fine with all kinds of things that aren’t fine to my Ukrainian friends, right? But I can imagine a peace treaty, which says, listen, okay, Crimea is part of Russia and Ukraine agrees to do 15 things that it was never going to do anyway. Okay, we reaffirm that we will not build nuclear weapons, you know, like a whole bunch of things like that are part of a peace treaty.

But the argument against that, that I take seriously, is that that might get the precedent wrong for aggressors in other parts of the world who find that they can back their way into a peace treaty that ends up back-validating a whole bunch of disinformation on the way in. And that’s a hard one for me, because there’s no two ways about it. The Russians lied about a lot of things, and will continue to lie about a lot of things if it serves their purpose. Acting as if their people are under threat of genocide, that’s not something to be played around with. But I know that that is something that will be demanded as part of a treaty, because that’s the way you get regime change in Kyiv.

Paul: I think you’re absolutely right. Russia is 11 time zones across. It’s the biggest country in the world. The idea that it needs to seize more territory in order to be secure is, on the face of it, it’s ludicrous. And what it means is there will never be peace between any two countries in the world, right? If a country that’s 11 times zones across can’t be secure in the territory that it has.

Jesse: Alright, well, this has been a great conversation, and we could keep doing this for another hour—and my hunch is that a year from now we’ll be back to do it for another hour.

Last question for either of you: If you were going to be optimistic about the best case scenario for the conflict one year from now, if we meet back up again in a year, where would you hope that we are, and why?

Jess: I’m going to again come at this from the sort of lawyer accountability perspective. I think a best case scenario is, a year from now, we have a special tribunal for aggression established for Ukraine, and we see some efforts at accountability moving forward to hold the most senior leaders, so Putin and others, responsible or accountable for the mass war crimes and crimes against humanity and human rights violations that have been held on the ground.

Now, does that lead to an end to a conflict? Probably not, but I think it’s a very powerful signal, to Putin and others in his position, that these types of activities cannot proceed with impunity. And I think it’s just such an important piece of the puzzle of how something like this may be brought to a close eventually.

Paul: My optimistic scenario would be the Russian offensives in eastern Ukraine, and in Kursk Oblast, culminate. Putin looks out there at the potentials for force regeneration, and things don’t look very good. Trump has done just enough along the lines of some things he said over the past week or so to make Putin think, “Oh, he’s not going to be quite the pushover we think he is,” to get Putin to the point where he says, “Okay, maybe it’s time to declare victory and negotiate a deal.” My optimistic view of the deal—and my Ukrainian friends will be appalled to hear me say this—is the territory is probably going to remain more or less where the troops are now, except that Ukraine would have to evacuate Kursk Oblast. Ukraine does not get a short or automatic path towards NATO membership, and maybe even gets that taken off the table, but EU membership is left on the table and lots of folks in Western Europe say all the right things to Ukraine about how they’re going to help them secure their territory in the future. That’s, I think, the best we’re likely to do. 

But I agree with you. You know, there’s a lot of people talking like this war is going to end in the next six to twelve months. A lot of Americans. I’m no more optimistic about that than you seem to be, Jesse, when you say that we’ll do this again next year, this time.

Jesse: As we said last year, in the long-term, a great deal about how this conflict is ultimately going to be resolved depends on Russia, and Russia changing somehow, and the truth is, only Russians can change Russia. In the short-term, when it comes to external security guarantees for Ukraine and some sort of ceasefire, the devil’s going to be in the details: Who’s obligated to do what under what circumstances, what does the planning for contingencies mean, and who’s going to actually foot the bill? A wide coalition of liberal and realist communities with equities in Ukraine will continue watching the details closely.

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Credits

Lindsay: This has been a special episode of Talking Policy. Special thanks to our guest host, Jesse Driscoll.

Talking Policy is a production of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. This episode was produced and edited by Tyler Ellison.

To ensure you never miss an episode, subscribe to Talking Policy wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about IGCC, visit ucigcc.org.

Jesse Driscoll is an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and co-author of Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022. Paul D’Anieri is a professor of political science and public policy at UC Riverside and the author of Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War. Jess Peake is the director of the International Comparative Law Program at the UCLA School of Law and also a recent Pulitzer Prize nominee for her article “War Crimes by Any Name” for Los Angeles Lawyer.