Adrian Karatnycky
Foreign Policy, July 11, 2023
“Obama’s Russia policy, including his embrace of the doctrine of Kremlin escalation dominance, has continued to shape U.S. policy during the Trump and Biden administrations.”
In an interview with Times Radio in May, Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s MI6, observed that “the policy that [U.S. President Barack] Obama followed in 2014, when there was this initial Russian invasion … the way that this was handled, with the benefit of hindsight, was probably a mistake.” Dearlove was right, but he missed a salient point: The decisions made in the Obama years aren’t just something to observe through the rearview mirror. Obama’s policies continue to exercise a major influence on the course of the Russia-Ukraine war and have resulted in the unnecessary loss of tens of thousands of civilian and military lives.
Today, Ukraine is in the early stages of what its leaders say is a major counteroffensive to recapture the roughly 20 percent of its territory occupied by Russia. The task of reconquest is far from simple. Not only has Russia’s military spent many months creating strong lines of defense and digging in, but Ukraine is also handicapped by the slow and belated provision of military aid. It still lacks significant air power and long-range missiles, two categories of weapons that would make reconquest less costly.
Ukraine has already endured an eight-year hybrid war that took 14,000 lives before Russia’s massive invasion in 2022 took even more—with tens of thousands and perhaps as many as several hundred thousand people killed on both sides. Russia at one point held as much as 27 percent of Ukrainian territory before its forces collapsed on several fronts. Yet Ukraine still lacks a wide array of necessary weapons to reclaim what Russia still occupies.
In truth, all these predicaments trace back to Obama’s Russia policy. Indeed, it can be argued that Obama’s approach to Russia and Ukraine continues to influence the situation fundamentally and detrimentally on the ground and in the U.S.-led allied response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s all-out war. … [To read the full article, click here]
