When President Trump returned to the Oval Office earlier this year, he confidently proclaimed that he could broker an immediate end to the Russia-Ukraine war. But the White House has gotten a better sense of the potential for meaningful compromise in the months since, and revised its expectations down — way down.
“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump told reporters in late May. The same day, he posted on Truth Social that Russia’s leader “has gone absolutely CRAZY.” Since then, although the administration has continued to press Moscow for some sort of compromise with Kyiv, more of its officials now seem to grasp that Russia has no real interest in de-escalation.
But why, precisely? After all, the Kremlin has already expended enormous blood and treasure in its efforts to dominate Ukraine, and is continuing to do so. Russian battlefield casualties are estimated to have hit 1 million, making its campaign against Ukraine more costly than all of the country’s post-World War II conflicts combined.
Still, the Kremlin has persisted in its war of aggression, for both ideological and practical reasons.
Ideologically, recent years have seen the revival of Russia’s dreams of Eurasian empire and concerted attempts by the Kremlin to revise its borders outward — and to do so at the expense of its nervous neighbors. Underpinning all of this is an expansionist ideology that sees both territorial gains and conflict with the West as inevitable. Or, as one-time Kremlin insider Vladislav Surkov put it earlier this year, “The Russian world has no borders.”
That helps explain Russia’s ongoing aggression toward Ukraine — and its objectives in the current truce talks. “The Istanbul talks are not for striking a compromise peace on someone else’s delusional terms but for ensuring our swift victory and the complete destruction of the neo-Nazi regime,” Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, recently proclaimed on Telegram, referring to the Ukrainian government.
The second reason for Russia’s militarism is economic. Growing evidence suggests that in the face of sustained international sanctions, the Kremlin has retooled the country’s economic sector, prioritizing military industries (while neglecting others) and making its armed forces the focal point of national development.
Signs of this shift are everywhere. One is a dramatic surge in military expenditures. Russia has raised its defense spending by a staggering 25 percent this year, and the country’s defense budget, at 13.5 trillion rubles ($145 billion), now accounts for more than 6 percent of total GDP.
Another is the allocation of billions in stimulus funds to boost Russia’s military-industrial complex. This support, carried out both officially and off-the-books, has led the country’s defense sector to thrive while other industries stagnate.
A third is a massive expansion in the rate of production of war materiel. European officials now estimate the country makes as much ammunition in three months as the entire NATO bloc does in a year. They project that Moscow will produce 1,500 tanks, 3,000 armored vehicles and 200 Iskander missiles in 2025.
All of this has helped make Russia’s war machine the engine of its national economy, and locked the state into a sustained campaign of militarism.
Increasingly, European officials see the writing on the wall. In a recent speech in London, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that Russia could be ready to attack a NATO treaty nation within five years, and that the bloc needed “a quantum leap” in collective defense as a response. “Danger will not disappear even when the war in Ukraine ends,” he said.
Those words are a grim acknowledgment of Russia’s revisionist ideology, which views Ukraine as simply the first in a series of inevitable conquests. It is also a sober recognition that, in a real sense, Putin now requires ongoing war in order to keep his regime afloat.
For the Trump administration, which is still seeking a swift end to the conflict, that is undoubtedly a bitter pill to swallow. But the drivers of Russian policy dictate that, even if it wanted to, the Kremlin is simply unable to climb down from its current foreign policy without risking ideological bankruptcy or economic upheaval, or both.
The corollary is that, unless Moscow is stopped in Ukraine, it will inevitably need to be stopped somewhere else — and at potentially far greater cost to the U.S. and its European partners.
Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.
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