“Western logic in Ukraine would expect such a moment to lead to negotiations, but authoritarian logic demands escalation,” say GLOBSEC experts
At a time when Patriot missiles are in high demand due to the war in Iran, further north, Ukraine is urgently requesting advanced air defense systems. The reason is that Moscow is intensifying its attacks with barrages of ballistic missiles that are difficult to intercept. But why do some Western analysts foresee the worst?
Experts at GLOBSEC, a Slovak pro-Atlantic think tank, believe that the coming months will mark the most dangerous phase of the war, not the most likely path to peace.
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The reason, as they explain in their analysis in Foreign Policy, is that the Russian president sees no way out, but a dead end, due to the nearly 200 fierce attacks by Ukrainian drones on Russian oil refineries since the beginning of the year.
“Having failed to achieve any of his military or political objectives,” they argue, Putin “cannot enter into substantive negotiations without jeopardizing his regime”. That is why he will escalate the conflict, since, as they note, “authoritarian regimes are designed to absorb costs that would bring down any comparable Western government.”
According to them, there are three ways the Russian president will escalate the situation.
First, through ballistic missile strikes against Ukrainian cities known to be facing severe shortages of Patriot interceptor missiles.
Second, through strikes against infrastructure. Since the beginning of 2026, Moscow has carried out 250 attacks on Naftogaz infrastructure, a fact that suggests an ongoing campaign against Ukrainian natural gas production and energy infrastructure, rather than a series of isolated strikes.
The third tool, they continue, is hybrid warfare against Europeans. Recently, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, citing information from U.S. intelligence agencies, claimed that Russia could strike a NATO member state within the next few months.
The Contradiction
However, while GLOBSEC analysts argue that increased pressure from the West is making Russia more persistent and aggressive, they then urge the West to put even more pressure on the Kremlin so that it cannot simultaneously manage acute crises on multiple fronts.
“Putin will continue to escalate using the means at his disposal until the political cost of aggression ultimately exceeds the political cost of negotiation,” they say.
“Until a convergence of crises occurs, Ukraine must withstand the escalation dictated by Putin’s logic. Filling the current gap in air defense to intercept Russian missile attacks will give Ukraine and the West enough time to keep the economic and militaryfronts open long enough for a political reversal to take place.”
NATO, they believe, will succeed only if it “accepts the truth that, in personalist authoritarian regimes, pressure first hardens a regime and only later weakens it. The strategic challenge for the West is to create crises on multiple fronts for a sufficient period of time, so that the coalition keeping Putin in power comes to the conclusion that continuing the war poses a greater threat to its survival.”
The Opposing School of Thought
Finally, GLOBSEC analysts believe that Putin’s war “is governed neither by rational international relations theory nor by conventional military strategy, but by the political theory of authoritarianism and regime survival.”
Prominent, American analysts and diplomats have for decades framed a potential war by Russia within a rational cause-and-effect framework, citing NATO’s expansion.
According to former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter, who served under Clinton, the West had committed a strategic error at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when it declared that Ukraine (and Georgia) would become NATO members.” This may have seemed fairly harmless to Westerners, but not to Russia. “It would have been as if the West were accepting that Ukraine would become a Kremlin satrapy,” says Hunter.
“But instead of acknowledging its mistake, NATO, at the urging of the U.S., continued to ritually repeat the wording and will undoubtedly do so again at the Washington summit, out of loyalty to Ukrainian wishes,” he argued.
It is not a matter of “authoritarianism,” as the GLOBSEC experts say, since, as Hunter pointed out, “the geopolitical reality is this: Russia will not be destroyed; it remains a threatening presence no matter who is in power in the Kremlin, and at some point, the West will need to try to shape overall European security with Russia’s active participation.”
In the mid-1990s, however, the former U.S. ambassador to the USSR, Jack Matlock, had warned that if he were Russian, he would find it difficult to understand why the West was expanding to Russia’s borders through NATO. “It was nothing less than an attempt to exclude Russia from Eastern Europe.”
“You have to take into account the impact on the domestic politics of other countries,” he said, emphasizing that “the impact would be very negative in Moscow, on Russian politics, and would offer nothing to those who wanted democratic institutions.”
One of the world’s most distinguished political scientists, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, has written since the beginning of the war that the prevailing view in the West—that Putin is an irrational, aggressive leader—is mistaken
“The West, and especially the United States, is primarily responsible for the crisis that began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine but could even escalate into a nuclear war between Russia and NATO,” he argued.
Moreover, George Kennan himself —one of the five sages of American foreign policy—had predicted in 1997 that NATO’s expansion could reinforce the nationalist, anti-Western, and militaristic tendencies in Russian public opinion, that it would negatively affect the development of Russian democracy […] and that it would push Russian foreign policy in directions that would be anything but to our liking.”
Source: in.gr
