Russian President Vladimir Putin is still setting his sights on conquering “most of Ukraine,” the United States’s top intelligence official said on Wednesday.
At a Department of Commerce conference on Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines assessed Russia’s goals in Ukraine over four months into the war and said the U.S. intelligence community believes “an extended period” of fighting is still to come. Putin’s pre-invasion goal of seizing the whole of Ukraine remains unchanged, according to Haines. However, she said there appears to be a “disconnect” between the Russian leader’s objectives and his military’s capacity.
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“In short, the picture remains pretty grim, and Russia’s attitude toward the West is hardening,” Haines said.
“We think [Putin] has effectively the same political goals that he had previously, which is to say that he wants to take most of Ukraine,” Haines added, noting that spy agencies “perceive a disconnect between Putin’s near-term military objectives in this area and his military’s capacity, a kind of mismatch between his ambitions and what the military is able to accomplish.”
The Russian military attempted to decapitate the Ukrainian government when troops invaded on Feb. 24, but after suffering heavy losses and only making limited progress, the Kremlin pulled its forces out of the Kyiv region in early April, shifting the front lines of the war to Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
For now, Haines said she believes Putin’s priority is gaining territory in the Donbas region and crushing Ukrainian resistance.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told leaders at the Group of Seven summit this week that he wants the war to be over by the end of the year, but according to Haines, that scenario isn’t the most likely despite the billions of dollars worth of military equipment being supplied by Western nations.
The intelligence chief said the most likely scenario to play out is a slow, grinding conflict in which Russia makes “incremental gains, with no breakthrough.”
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Haines added that the toll the Russian military has taken in Ukraine will take years to recover from, with Russia “unlikely to be able to conduct multiple simultaneous operations” as it rebuilds its military.
“During this period, we anticipate that they’re going to be more reliant on asymmetric tools that they have, such as cyberattacks, efforts to control energy, even nuclear weapons, in order to try to manage and project power and influence globally,” Haines said.
