When I was in NATO’s headquarters in Kabul, a belief emerged that negotiations with the Taliban would inevitably produce a lasting peace deal. That deal never emerged. The Taliban knew they had the momentum. They had completely undermined the state apparatus in rural Afghanistan. Negotiations just served as a tool for their final victory. We were negotiating from a position of weakness.
As we enter into negotiations to end the Russo-Ukraine War, we need to negotiate from a position of strength. With the appropriate support, Ukraine still has the opportunity to achieve a decisive victory. For too long, Ukraine’s supporters have provided enough for Ukraine to survive but not enough for it to win. As General Douglas MacArthur declared, “War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory.”
Unless Vladimir Putin faces defeat, he will not be pressed into a reasonable peace. Any deal he would accept would serve only as a means for the eventual subjugation of Ukraine. He already violated the Minsk I and II agreements. Just as the Taliban used negotiations to secure their final victory, when Putin decides Russia’s grinding offensive has culminated, he can seek a ceasefire to solidify his lines, obtain sanctions relief, rebuild his forces, and then fabricate an excuse to launch a sequel to his special military operation. To achieve a lasting peace that puts to an end Russia’s attempts at imperial conquest, Putin needs to see that continuing the conflict with Ukraine will exhaust Russia and risk the collapse of his regime.
How Theodore Roosevelt Negotiated an End to Russian Expansion
Over a century ago, an American president successfully negotiated the end of centuries of Russian expansion in Asia. In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt orchestrated the Portsmouth Peace Conference to conclude the Russo-Japanese War.
Russia’s empire building in Asia concerned Roosevelt. In 1900, Russia had seized control of Manchuria. In 1904, at the outbreak of the war, he worried that “Russia’s course over the past three years has made it evident that if she wins she will organize northern China against us.” After Japan’s initial success at the Battle of Mukden in March 1904, Roosevelt wrote that he was “thoroughly . . . pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.”
At the onset of the war, Roosevelt had sought to mediate a deal. However, Japan declined his efforts and stated that they would regard “any attempt at mediation as unfriendly because . . . Russia is simply striving for delay and intends to take advantage of every delay to perfect her preparations.” Even after repeated setbacks and facing economic collapse, Russian military leaders wanted an opportunity to press on for victory and did not desire a lasting peace. The American ambassador to Russia reported that the tsar would not consider any peace discussions until Russia’s Baltic Fleet engaged the Japanese. He informed Roosevelt that the Russians were bluffing about their strength and were concerned with their domestic crises.
But then in May 1905, at the Battle of Tsushima, Japan annihilated the Russian Baltic Fleet. A few days later, the Japanese ambassador to the United States sent Roosevelt an overture to mediate peace. While Russia still had much more manpower and industrial capacity than Japan, it now recognized that acquiescing to Japan’s terms was preferable to exasperating its internal issues with greater mobilization. Meeting in Portsmouth, the negotiators only required the month of August to agree to a peace deal. Even though Japan did not obtain all its demands, it put a halt to Russia’s conquest of Asia.
Ukraine is Not Yet Lost
It may seem that the prospects of Ukraine achieving a decisive victory like Tsushima are remote. During the last year, Russia has made slow, relentless advances, but the terrain it has seized is strategically useless. Its progress has come at enormous costs that outstrip its capability to sustain its forces. Russian casualties have climbed to over 1,500 a day, which Russia’s strained military recruitment cannot sustain. Russia is starting to exhaust its stockpile of Soviet equipment. Putin continues this unsustainable push to present a picture of inevitable victory to scare the West into forcing Ukraine to accept a ceasefire before his economy collapses. He has created a mirage of military and economic strength to increase his negotiating position.
Much like the tsar’s bluff a century ago, Putin has crafted an elaborate facade of economic resiliency. Obscuring military spending by means such as state-mandated loans from private banks to defense contractors, which may represent a majority of Russian defense spending, he has distorted the Russian economy and risks a cascading credit crisis. Putin’s precarious facade could collapse at any moment.
As his offensive races against economic collapse to produce a parallel phantasm of military success, Russia’s army will eventually outstrip its sustainment capabilities and culminate. At that moment, Ukraine will have a fleeting opportunity for a decisive counterattack. Ukraine needs to be ready to seize that opportunity. To see how Ukraine could capitalize on Russia’s culmination, we can look to the Hundred Days Offensive during World War I.
The 1918 Spring Offensive: How to Exploit Culmination
In 1918, Germany and its allies faced economic exhaustion, while the battered British and French armies would eventually be reinforced by millions of fresh Americans. But, after Russia’s surrender, Germany had a window of advantage as it moved fifty divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front. On March 21, 1918, Germany opened fire with 4,000 artillery pieces on Britain’s southern front. Using infiltration tactics, it penetrated twelve miles on the first day and inflicted forty thousand casualties. Within a week, it had pushed forty miles, an incomprehensible distance on the Western Front, where advances were normally measured in yards.
“We were beaten,” British Field Marshall Douglas Haig reportedly said at the time, “and it would be better to make peace on any terms we could.” The Germans continued to advance, and by July, the French feared Germany would seize Paris and the British planned contingencies to retreat to the channel ports.
However, Germany had bled through its temporary numerical superiority, the Allies had gathered forces for a counterattack, and French General Ferdinand Foch had learned how to defeat the German tactics. On July 15, at Reims, the Germans culminated as they failed to break French lines. With their logistics overextended and far from the prepared defenses of the Hindenburg line, the Germans were vulnerable. With the forces he had harbored for just such an opportunity, Foch immediately launched a counterattack before the Germans could solidify their position. For the next one hundred days, the Allies relentlessly pushed the Germans until their army collapsed, and they sued for peace.
Foch identified an opportunity for victory and seized it. The Allies had planned an offensive in 1919, but he did not wait. Waiting would have allowed Germany to reestablish its defenses and mobilize a fresh class of conscripts.
The Opportunity for Victory will be Fleeting
Just as the Allies did in 1918, when Russia culminates and before it can reestablish the defensive lines it built in 2023, Ukraine needs to be ready to counterattack, break through weakly held Russian lines, and achieve a decisive victory by exploiting their penetration deep into Russia’s rear areas.
Ukraine was unable to break through Russia’s prepared defense in the 2023 counteroffensive. It is hard to find examples of armies penetrating enemy defenses when the enemy has sufficient density of troops and time to emplace minefields and dig multiple lines of entrenchments. However, in the Kharkiv and Kursk Offensives, when Russia had not established a defense in depth, Ukraine demonstrated how it could conduct campaigns using maneuver warfare. Russia will present Ukraine with a fleeting opportunity for such a counterattack when its offensive culminates. Like the Germans in 1918, far from the Hindenburg Line, the Russians will be vulnerably strung out in hasty defenses and not ensconced in the multiple layers of the Surovikin Line.
Ukraine needs to be ready to conduct a counterattack at a much larger scale than in Kharkiv or Kursk to decisively defeat Russia and force a peace deal on its terms. Fortunately, Ukrainian forces have the right mindset for such an attack. I have seen Ukrainian staffs studying modernized Soviet doctrine descended from Deep Battle, which revolved around achieving deep, rapid penetrations of enemy lines to prevent them from reestablishing an effective defense. The concepts are there. Ukraine just needs help realizing its full potential.
How to Support Victory
First, Ukraine needs equipment for such a counterattack. Recently, the West became too distracted by debates about high-end capabilities for Ukraine such as the F-16 or whether to allow strikes on Russian territory with ATACMS. There is no silver bullet technology to win this war. Ukraine needs mass. It has done phenomenal work to increase drone production. It has been addressing its manpower deficiencies. But to sustain a breakthrough, it needs artillery, infantry fighting vehicles, and tanks.
As the Germans spectacularly demonstrated against France in 1940, after infantry achieve an initial breakthrough, tanks maintain the momentum of an advance to exploit a breakthrough and achieve a decisive victory. In its unwillingness to provide tanks to Ukraine, the United States reveals its lack of commitment to Ukraine ending the war. Even though the United States has 3,700 Abrams tanks in storage, it has only provided thirty-one to Ukraine. In fact, Russia has been the lead contributor of tanks to Ukraine. The United States only announced it would provide Abrams to Ukraine on January 25, 2023, eleven months into the war. Of course, it would be months until Ukrainian forces received and trained on the Abrams, which provided ample time for Russia to prepare to defeat those few tanks. The United States has provided a more significant three hundred Bradley Fighting Vehicles from its stockpile of six thousand, but those three hundred would not even fully outfit three brigades. While many of those vehicles need maintenance, that should not be an obstacle. After all, Russia has been sending museum pieces into battle.
On a promising note, the United States increased artillery round production so that Ukraine is approaching parity with Russia, which will be essential for achieving a breakthrough. To prevent Russian operational reserves from counterattacking to seal a breakthrough, the United States should increase donations of Remote Anti-Armor Mine System rounds to allow Ukraine to create minefields deep behind Russian lines to fix reserves in place. Ukraine is already using drones to remotely emplace minefields in Russian rear areas, which have restricted Russian forces’ movement.
Advising for Victory
In addition to providing capabilities to allow Ukraine to win, the United States also needs to assist Ukraine with appropriate advising. The United States has already trained almost twenty thousand Ukrainians under the umbrella of the Security Assistance Group–Ukraine (SAG-U), while the European Union Military Assistance Mission has trained sixty thousand. While these efforts have assisted Ukraine in mobilizing additional recruits, training soldiers on new equipment, and teaching staff the NATO planning process, they have largely been uncoordinated. NATO is in the process of taking over SAG-U, which should standardize advising efforts.
I observed a Ukrainian brigade that had members whose members had separately learned Ukrainian, German, Canadian, and American planning processes. They admitted that they would revert to Ukrainian methods when they returned to the front, because that is what the rest of the army used, and it was more suited for rapid decisions for their smaller staffs.
Compared to other armies that I have advised, the Ukrainian staffs I observed proved committed and quick learners. After a couple of weeks of instruction, they understood the US Army’s Military Decision-Making Process as well as American staff officers. The Ukrainians just needed to understand the logic of a planning technique.
Unfortunately, these advising efforts have not prepared Ukraine to win. The US Army trains Ukrainian brigades on scenarios that do not replicate the problem set they will face. NATO’s new advising mission needs to align its training with a theory of victory. It should prepare Ukrainian forces to conduct a decisive counterattack.
Future advising efforts need to better understand Ukraine’s existing processes and techniques. Ukraine has a robust system for collecting battlefield lessons and publishing them, but few of the American soldiers training the Ukrainians were familiar with these products. This problem mostly stems from the United States using an ad hoc approach to its advising efforts.
One of the consistent critiques of our recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan was the constant turnover of troops, which precluded the development of deep expertise. The problem is exasperated with our efforts with Ukraine. SAG-U is largely filled with borrowed military manpower, which only serves SAG-U for a few months. Meanwhile, most units that conduct training for the Ukrainians conduct it as an additional duty. With no time to fully assess Ukrainian units and optimize training for the context that Ukrainian units will face, the training mostly regresses to teaching American techniques.
In reaction to its shortfalls in advising during its recent wars, the US Army established six brigades of specially trained advisors. Inexplicably, these advisors have done little work with Ukrainian forces, either inside or outside the country. If the United States desires to end this war, it needs to get serious about its advising effort and prioritize its advising experts to assist Ukraine by better assessing its requirements, understanding its theory of victory, and tailoring US security force assistance to help Ukraine achieve that victory. With Ukraine mobilizing additional brigades, now is the ideal time to prepare those brigades to conduct a counterattack just as Russia culminates.
Unfortunately, those brigades have so far performed poorly. The French-trained 155th Mechanized Brigade experienced “systemic shortcomings” according to Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces. Even though it was supposed to be a model brigade equipped with the latest weaponry, it reportedly had 1,700 soldiers desert before reaching the front. When it engaged Russian forces, it suffered heavy casualties. The brigade has been broken apart and Ukraine has launched investigations. Effectively placed advisors could have mitigated such a debacle. Advisors assess partners, provide an understanding of their shortcomings, and ensure problems are solved before a disaster. They provide the connective tissue so that security force assistance programs do not fail.
Establishing Divisions and Corps
In addition to assisting in training brigades, advisors should help Ukraine in establishing division and corps headquarters. In February 2025, the Ukrainian Army announced the formation of up to twenty corps headquarters to provide a more effective command structure for its brigades. As soon as Russia invaded, Ukraine was in survival mode, and it has remained so for the three years since, raising a multitude of expedient units without a unified command structure. The transition to a corps system is an important step forward.
Currently, Ukrainian brigades are the primary tactical echelon. They are subordinate to operational-tactical groups and operational-strategic groups, which are regional commands with makeshift structures and no organic units. They can have over a dozen brigades assigned to them—far too many units to effectively control. The shortfalls of the operational groups mean that the Ukrainian General Staff often micromanages fights instead of focusing on strategic planning to win the war.
Division headquarters will be essential to setting conditions for a breakthrough, coordinating between brigades to maintain an attack’s momentum and managing the deep fight to disrupt Russian attempts to organize counterattacks or new defensive lines. Ukraine must prioritize building cohesion within its divisions with dedicated brigades. Divisions need to build shared mental models of how they fight to act with the tempo necessary to conduct maneuver warfare. Ukraine has been too quick to break apart brigades to meet emergencies, which shatters cohesion and shared understanding between staffs and commanders. This is yet another consequence of the survival mode that has characterized key aspects of Ukraine’s war effort. Divisions should be flexibly organized under regionally aligned corps to react to battlefield circumstances. As the German Army organized its corps in World War I, Ukrainian corps should focus on sustaining the fight and consolidating logistics elements far from the vulnerable front.
To assist Ukraine in establishing divisions and corps, the US Army will need advisors who can tailor their approach to Ukraine’s needs and not force on them the US Army’s onerous battle rhythm and targeting process, which is optimized to win Warfighter simulations, not wars. The advisors will need to support Ukraine in establishing adaptable systems to facilitate the transition from the defense, to breakthrough, and finally to exploitation.
For example, Ukraine has decentralized its artillery architecture to provide responsiveness in the defense. To achieve a breakthrough, it will need to briefly concentrate its artillery under division control to suppress Russian troops along the depth of its defenses, and then it will have to return artillery to decentralized control to provide responsive fires to its battalions as they rapidly exploit gaps in the Russian defense and overrun enemy positions before Russian forces can reestablish a defense. This transition between centralization and decentralization of artillery was a major innovation of Germany during World War I and enabled its forces to maintain momentum during the Spring Offensive. For Ukraine, maintaining the tempo of its counterattack will be paramount.
Timing is Everything for Victory
Time is the ultimate currency in war. Now is the time to quietly and quickly build the capabilities that Ukraine needs for a decisive counterattack to end this war.
During the Korean War, in May 1951, General James Van Fleet led the US 8th Army to a crushing victory over the Chinese in Korea. The Chinese had launched a massive offensive to capture Seoul. Van Fleet’s 8th Army broke the Chinese at the outskirts of Seoul. Before the Chinese could withdraw to defensive positions, Van Fleet launched a counterattack, which left the Chinese in chaos, with over one hundred thousand casualties, a third of their forces. He saw an opportunity to continue his counterattack deep into North Korea and annihilate Chinese forces in Korea. However, Washington, worrying about escalation and placing hope in negotiations, which China agreed to that June, denied Van Fleet’s request. The United States lost an opportunity to negotiate from a position of strength.
When negotiations did not produce a ceasefire, Washington allowed a limited attack, but Van Fleet recognized that China had exploited this delay to reorganize its forces and establish a defense in depth. He protested that during the thirty days of dithering, the situation on the ground had completely changed. In hoping for negotiations, the United States let victory slip from its grasp. The war dragged on for two more bloody years, with tens of thousands more American casualties, and resulted in a peninsula that is still divided.
The leader of the armistice negotiations, Admiral Turner Joy, wrote, “I feel certain the casualties the United Nations Command endured during the two long years of negotiations far exceed any that might have been expected from an offensive in the summer of 1951. The lesson is: Do not stop fighting until hostilities have ended, not if you want an armistice with the Communists on acceptable terms within a reasonable period of time.”
Korea demonstrated that even if we are talking, we should not stop fighting. Like Roosevelt with the Portsmouth Peace Conference, we have an opportunity to end Russian imperialism, but only if we remember that there is no substitute for victory.
Major Robert G. Rose, US Army, is a LTG (Ret) James M. Dubik Writing Fellow. He commands Alpine Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Security Forces Assistance Brigade. He holds an undergraduate degree from the United States Military Academy and graduate degrees from Harvard University and, as a Gates Scholar, from Cambridge University.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: armyinform.com.ua
