Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy in Ukraine is increasingly clear for all to see: strategic patience.
This phrase is commonly associated with former President Barack Obama’s North Korea policy. It’s a fancy way of saying, “We plan on putting more pressure on the other side and sitting pretty until they blink.” As history demonstrates, it didn’t work on North Korea—if anything, the diplomatic isolation, in combination with U.S. economic sanctions, merely convinced Kim Jong-Un that prioritizing Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs was the right course of action.
Putin’s strategic patience policy is different for any number of reasons. To name the most obvious, the United States and North Korea weren’t in the middle of a shooting war when Washington invoked it. But the assumptions behind the approach are the same: Use time to your advantage and gradually increase the amount of coercion until your adversary either gives up or agrees to enter a diplomatic process on your terms.
This is precisely what Putin is doing in Ukraine today. On the military front, the Russian army is pressing multiple offensives along the front line, bombarding Kyiv with a torrent of attack drones and ballistic missiles and making it known to Washington and its European allies that any peace process will have to take into account Moscow’s maximalist terms.
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