From the Black Sea to its textbooks, Russia is expanding the battlefield

Russia is visibly escalating its war against Ukraine and Europe. Terminating the 2022 grain agreement with Ukraine that was mediated by Turkey and the United Nations, Russia has reiterated its intention to destroy Ukraine’s economy and statehood.  

Russia is mercilessly bombing Ukraine’s grain export economy and civilian infrastructure; it placed new mines in the Black Sea to threaten and interdict Ukrainian maritime exports. Washington has claimed that these mines intentionally create the basis for a false flag operation against Ukraine should civilian ships be sunk. It has declared that any ship in the Black Sea delivering or taking cargo to and from Ukraine will be attacked as a ship working on behalf of Ukraine, effectively deeming all efforts to pass the blockade as potential acts of war. 

Moscow also declared the Black Sea’s northern and northwestern waters to be dangerous places, then forcibly boarded a Turkish-registered commercial ship in the Black Sea. This was an unwarranted and illegal violation of the concept of freedom of navigation and possibly the Montreux Convention regulating wartime passage there. In addition, it began a live-fire drill in the Black Sea aimed at attacking and seizing ships. It is also creating an alternative plan to oust Ukraine from the global grain export business and is using an occupied Ukrainian port to export confiscated grain abroad. 

These actions go beyond efforts to strangle Ukraine’s economy; they threaten inflation in grain and food markets as well as global hunger. They reveal Putin’s objective to destroy Ukraine’s statehood and economy and to not agree to a negotiated settlement. Moscow is claiming exclusive Russian dominance over the Black Sea and implicitly brandishing the threat of nuclear strikes in service of its goals. 

All of these moves constitute an ongoing threat of escalating the war to have a free hand against Ukraine, given Putin’s belief that he can take such steps with impunity, as nobody beyond Ukraine’s army will retaliate forcefully.   

At the same time, Russia is escalating threats against Poland, including implied nuclear threats and increasing military probes with or without China against U.S. allies and Alaska. Putin actually termed Poland’s Western border a “gift from Stalin” for which Poland ought to show Russia gratitude.  

This is all part of a strategic pattern designed to force a Russian victory and intensify threats against NATO and its members. Accordingly, the bombing of Ukraine’s grain export infrastructure in proximity to Romania and shipboarding close to Bulgaria’s coastline represent signals of threat to those countries.  

Russia’s invasions of Ukraine in 2014 represented an attack on the very notion of an international order, as well as the global and European post-Cold War order. Indeed, these belligerent actions and threats represent Moscow’s policy, undeviating since the 1990s, to not accept or recognize the post-Cold War European order and the sovereignty or territorial integrity of the states that gained their freedom.

As former U.S. diplomat Jeffrey Feltman has written, “Russia dropped a barrel bomb on the fundamental principle of the international system: respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Thus, Putin’s attacks upon Ukraine are part of a multi-dimensional war against the West as a whole that also underscores the fragility of conventional deterrence in Europe, if not elsewhere.  

Putin’s nuclear threats likewise highlight the connection in Russian military thought and practice, between conventional and nuclear deterrence. Indeed, Moscow’s 2020 nuclear policy guidelines state that the main purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter conventional and/or nuclear attacks on Russia, its allies or its conventional capabilities. Nuclear weapons are mainly what deterred Western action against the invasions of Georgia and Crimea and other operations in Moscow’s self-proclaimed “sphere of influence.” They also empower Russia to act autonomously and coercively abroad.  

Lastly — although this merits higher standing as a defining attribute of this conflict and Russian strategy — there is strong evidence that this is a genocidal war. Therefore, its perpetrators must be defeated decisively and brought to justice to ensure any sort of order either in this region or globally.

The surge in aggression represents Putin’s efforts to impose an empire based on force and fiat throughout the former Soviet Union and beyond. Inside its borders, Russia’s new state-authorized history textbook openly states that “the Russian world cannot be contained by state borders.” This is part of a coordinated strategy of horizontal escalation to other issues and theaters that was activated because Putin perceives Western resolve and deterrence to be fragmenting.  

Whether or not he is wrong, the fact is there has been no NATO action whatsoever beyond its current weapons and financial commitments to undo or challenge any of these examples. And extensive experience tells us that where Moscow perceives a lack of resolve it escalates further. Such escalation conforms with Putin’s previous conduct of the war.

As The Economist observed, Putin’s modus operandi is escalation, not cutting his losses. Thus, the West must upgrade its policy to allow Ukraine to decisively win this war. Failure to achieve victory all but ensures further Russian threats to Europe but also to the idea of deterrence. And if those threats are not vital U.S. interests, what threats are?

Stephen Blank, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a former professor of Russian national security studies and national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College. Blank is an independent consultant focused on the geopolitics and geostrategy of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Eurasia.