Ukraine's army has recently recaptured a lot of territory from Russia. They also have analysts asking a question, not for the first time, what happens if Russian President Vladimir Putin feels cornered? NPR's Michele Kelemen reports. Listen below for Steven C. Házy Lecturer's, Rose Gottemoeller's comments on the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia.

Read the transcript here

So many wonderful things have been said of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev in recent days that I am loath simply to repeat them. Instead, I have reached back for my own memories, those that brought home to me his unique place in Russian history. Of course, you would expect that I would sing kudos for his role, together with Ronald Reagan, in halting the nuclear arms race in the 1980s. Their 1986 meeting at Reykjavik was a breakthrough that led within a few years to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), and within a few years more to the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

What I recollect from Reykjavik, however, was my astonishment at news reports on the first day that Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev and American President Reagan were considering abolishing ballistic missiles and the nuclear weapons that went on them. At the time a young analyst at RAND, I knew the debates that had been raging in our own system about undertaking reductions in nuclear weapons, never mind abolishing them. “Richard Perle,” I thought, “must be furious over this.”

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With an ugly war of attrition in Ukraine threatening to drag on for months, some fear possible escalation and suggest Washington should start talking to Moscow about a cease-fire and ending the war, or offer proposals to foster diplomatic opportunities.

Ending the fighting may well require talks, but the decision to negotiate should lie with Kyiv.

The Russian army launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on three fronts on February 24. However, by the end of March, it had to abandon its goal of capturing the Ukrainian capital and withdrew from much of northern Ukraine. The Kremlin said its forces would then focus on Donbas, consisting of Ukraine’s easternmost oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk.

By mid-July, Russian soldiers had occupied most of Luhansk. That represented a symbolic victory, but in reality three months of grinding fighting gained little new territory. The Russian army, which has seen roughly 15,000 to 25,000 soldiers killed in action and lost much equipment, appears exhausted.

The Ukrainian military has also taken heavy losses but has been bolstered by flows of new arms from the West. Among other things, Russian war crimes have provoked sharp anger among Ukrainians and strengthened their resolve to resist.

Now hardly seems a propitious time for negotiations.

To begin with, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin show no sign of readiness to talk seriously. Russian officials articulated their war aims for Ukraine early on: denazification (of a government headed by a Jewish president), demilitarization, neutrality, recognition of occupied Crimea as Russian territory, and recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent so-called “people’s republics.”

In early July, Russian National Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev restated basically the same goals. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on July 20 said that Russia had broadened its military aims and would seek to seize territory beyond Donbas. He later added that Moscow sought to end the “unacceptable regime” in Kyiv.

The Kremlin’s goals remain unchanged — Ukraine’s almost total capitulation — despite the fact that Russia’s performance on the battlefield has fallen well short of expectations and could deteriorate as the Ukrainians take military actions such as systematically destroying Russian ammunition dumps. Do those who urge talks see space for any compromise that would not leave Ukraine in a substantially worse position than before the most recent invasion began in February?

Even a cease-fire presents peril for the Ukrainian side. It would leave Russian troops occupying large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine, with no guarantee they would leave. The Ukrainians have learned from bitter experience. Cease-fires agreed in September 2014 and February 2015, supposedly to end the fighting in Donbas, left Russian and Russian proxy forces in control of territory that they never relinquished and did not fully stop the shooting. Moreover, the Russian military might use a cease-fire to regroup, rearm, and launch new attacks on Ukraine.

This is not to say that a cease-fire or negotiation should be ruled out. But, given the risks inherent in either course for Ukraine, the decision to engage in talks on a cease-fire or broader negotiations should be left to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government.

If Ukraine’s leadership were now to conclude that it should seek a settlement, Moscow’s unyielding negotiating demands would require that Kyiv consider concessions. They would be painful for the Ukrainian side and would almost certainly encounter stiff public opposition: A July poll showed that 84% of Ukrainians opposed any territorial concessions. That included 77% in Ukraine’s east and 82% in the south, the two areas where most fighting now occurs.

Any negotiation thus would be fraught with risk for Zelenskyy and his team. Only they can decide when — or if — it is time to talk. Battlefield developments and future military realities may affect the calculation in Kyiv. If Ukraine’s leaders choose to begin negotiations, the West should not hinder them, but the West also should not press them to negotiate before they see a net benefit in doing so. Western officials should be leery of opening any channel to Moscow that the Russians would seek to turn into a negotiation over the heads of the Ukrainians.

To be clear, this war has an aggressor, and it has a victim. Those who advocate that Washington talk to Moscow fear that, if the war continues, Russia might consider launching attacks on targets in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states. One should not wholly exclude that possibility, but the Russian military has its hands full with Ukraine. It likely does not want to take on NATO directly as well.

The United States and NATO certainly have a major interest in avoiding direct military conflict with Russia. However, in order to minimize that risk, is it right to ask the Ukrainian government to make concessions to the aggressor, concessions that could reduce the size and economic viability of the Ukrainian state, that would provoke a sharp domestic backlash in the country, and that might not end the Russian threat to Ukraine?

One last point to weigh. If the West pressed Kyiv to accept such an outcome, what lesson would Putin draw should his stated desire to “return” Russia’s historic lands extend beyond Ukraine?

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Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin had a number of reasons for invading Ukraine in February and starting the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II.  Putin sought to portray the pre-invasion crisis that Moscow created with Ukraine as a NATO-Russia dispute, but that framing does not stand up to serious scrutiny.

Putin tried hard.  In late 2021, he complained of NATO’s “rising” military threat on Russia’s western borders and demanded legal guarantees for Russia, as if the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and largest army in Europe needed such guarantees.  Moscow proposed draft agreements with NATO and the United States that would have ruled out further NATO enlargement and required the Alliance to withdraw all military forces and infrastructure from members that had joined after 1997.

Washington and NATO offered to engage on other elements of the draft agreements regarding arms control and risk reduction measures, which could have made a genuine contribution to Europe’s security, including Russia.  However, U.S. and NATO officials would not foreswear further enlargement.  That became another grievance—along with false claims of neo-Nazis in Kyiv, genocide in Donbas and a Ukrainian pursuit of nuclear arms—that Putin cited in his February 24 explanation of his unjustifiable decision to launch a new invasion of Ukraine.

Some Western analysts continue to accept Putin’s argument that lays blame on NATO.  The history does not support that argument.

In July 1997, NATO invited Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to begin accession negotiations—but only after first laying the basis for a cooperative relationship with Russia.  In May 1997, NATO and Russia concluded the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security, which set up a permanent body for consultation and coordination.

Among other things, the Founding Act reiterated that NATO had “no intention, no plan and no reason” to place nuclear weapons on the territory of new member states.  The Act also noted that NATO saw no need for the “permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” on the territory of new members.  These statements reflected the Alliance’s effort to make enlargement for Moscow as non-threatening as possible in military terms.

From 1997 to early 2014, NATO deployed virtually no combat forces on the territory of its new members.  That changed following Russia’s use of military force to seize Crimea and its involvement in the conflict in Donbas in eastern Ukraine in March and April 2014.  Even then, NATO moved to deploy, on a rotating basis, multinational battlegroups numbering 1,000-1,600 troops in each of the three Baltic states and Poland—no more than tripwire forces.

As for advancing the Alliance to Russia’s borders, five current NATO members border on Russia or the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad (this does not include Finland, which requested membership only in May 2022).  Of the five current members, the last to join the Alliance, the three Baltic states, did so in 2004.  That was 18 years ago.  Putin did not raise a fuss then.

In fact, in May 2002, Putin met NATO leaders in Rome and agreed to a joint declaration on deepening and giving a new quality to NATO-Russia relations.  In his address at that NATO-Russia summit, Putin expressed no concern about NATO enlargement, even though the Alliance planned a second summit later that year, and the Russian president had to know that NATO then would invite additional countries, quite probably including the Baltic states, to join.

Putin has in recent years played up grievances against NATO enlargement in ways that he did not when NATO was enlarging in Russia’s neighborhood.  The four countries that joined the Alliance after 2004 are all in the Balkans, quite distant from Russia’s borders.  The Russian president reacted calmly to this year’s Finnish and Swedish decisions to apply to join—even though Finland’s addition will more than double the length of Russia’s borders with NATO.

As for Moscow’s concerns about Ukraine entering NATO, Russian diplomats and spies surely understood there is little enthusiasm within the Alliance for putting Ukraine on a membership track.  With Russian troops occupying parts of Ukraine (even before the February attack), membership would invariably raise the question of allies going to war against Russia.

Ironically, Russia had a neutral Ukraine in 2013.  A 2010 Ukrainian law enshrined non-bloc status for the country, and then-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych showed no desire to join NATO.  He was interested in concluding an association agreement with the European Union, but he came under massive pressure from Moscow not to do so in late 2013.  He succumbed to that pressure, and the announcement that Kyiv would not sign the completed association agreement triggered protests that same evening that began the Maidan Revolution.

Putin’s decision to launch a new attack on Ukraine appears to have several motivations.  One is geopolitical, the Kremlin’s desire to have a Russian sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space and its fear that Ukraine was invariably moving away from Moscow.  This is a broader question than Ukraine’s relationship with NATO.  But nothing has done more than Russian policy and actions since 2014 to push Ukraine away from Russia and toward the West.

Russian domestic politics looks like a second key factor.  For the Kremlin, a democratic, Western-oriented, economically successful Ukraine poses a nightmare, because that Ukraine would cause Russians to question why they cannot have the same political voice and democratic rights that Ukrainians do.  For the Kremlin, regime preservation is job number one.

The third factor is Putin himself.  Reading his July 2021 essay on Ukraine or his February 24 speech on Russia’s recognition of the so-called “people’s republics” in Donbas makes clear that Putin does not accept the legitimacy of a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state.  He regards most of Ukraine as part of historical Russia.

On June 9, the Russian president voiced the quiet part aloud, implicitly comparing himself to Peter the Great on “returning” historic Russian lands to Moscow’s control.  Putin said, “Apparently, it is also our lot to return [what is Russia’s] and reinforce [the country].”  He said not one word about NATO or NATO enlargement.

Case closed. 

The Russian nuclear saber-rattling that has accompanied the invasion of Ukraine represents a level of nuclear risk unprecedented since the end of the Cold War. One wonders how global nuclear politics will adapt to these changing circumstances. The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war poses major challenges for several core international institutions and issues, from the upcoming Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference to President Biden’s proposed arms control efforts with Russia and China. Read more at thebulletin.org

Just days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dmitri Medvedev, the former president and prime minister of Russia, took to social media to post a chilling message. He raged against Western sanctions on his country and suggested darkly that Russia could rip up some of its most important agreements with the West. He mentioned the New START treaty, the nuclear arms reduction agreement signed with the United States over a decade ago, but the threat was broader still: the sundering of all diplomatic ties with Western countries. “It’s time to hang huge padlocks on the embassies,” he wrote.

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A vast array of critical new technologies rely on rare earth metals, a group of elements that are difficult to mine because they are so well dispersed in the earth and often contain radioactive elements such as thorium and uranium.

Over the last 20 years, demand for these elements in the U.S. has increased while domestic supply and production have fallen off. And globally, the supply chain is tightly controlled by just a few countries.

To explore the significant challenges created by this imbalanced supply chain, Gorakh Pawar, a visiting scholar at CISAC, and CISAC Co-Director Rod Ewing edited “Rare Earth Elements in Material Science,” a special theme issue of the MRS Bulletin, a journal of the Materials Research Society.

“With China's rapid rise and the reemergence of Russia as a major power, the global stage is set for multipolar competition to secure the critical materials supply chains and control the rare earth elements (REE) derived high-end products and relevant technologies,” Ewing and Pawar write in the introduction to the issue.

The issue includes six articles that delve into the material science aspects of the rare earth elements supply chain. Researchers from Australia, Germany, Korea and the US contributed articles on mineralogy, separation and extraction, mining economics and the environmental impact of rare earth element mining.

“REE recycling is no longer just a choice, but it has become necessary in a world where resources are constrained,” Pawar and Ewing write.

The MRS Bulletin includes recommendations that the US and other countries can follow to reduce dependence on China for rare earth elements.

The March issue of the MRS Bulletin can be found here.