Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military is “about to run out of steam,” British intelligence officials believe, leaving the country’s faltering forces vulnerable to a counterattack.
“I think they’re about to run out of steam,” U.K. Secret Intelligence Service chief Richard Moore said Thursday at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado. “Our assessment is that the Russians will increasingly find it difficult to supply manpower and materiel over the next few weeks. They will have to pause in some way, and that will give the Ukrainians opportunities to strike back.”
That forecast could have important ramifications for the war in Ukraine due to Putin’s signals to Western leaders that he can afford to continue the war longer than the trans-Atlantic allies. Ukrainian officials, for their part, have labored to convince world leaders that the Kremlin propaganda is designed to trick them into handing Putin a victory that he can’t achieve if the West provides adequate support to Ukraine — making the next phase of the conflict a crucial one for all sides, in Moore’s telling.
“It’s important, I think, to the Ukrainians themselves, that they demonstrate their ability to strike back. … I also think, to be honest, it will be an important reminder to the rest of Europe that this is a winnable campaign by the Ukrainians,” Moore said. “Because we are about to go into a pretty tough winter … clearly in that atmosphere, with the sort of pressure on gas suppliers and all the rest, we’re in for a tough time.”
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The American political calendar could put additional pressure on U.S. support for Ukraine, according to a House Democrat who is pessimistic about Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) ability to retain the gavel this fall.
“I think it is highly likely that Republicans will take over the House of Representatives,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) said during a separate appearance at the Aspen forum. “I hope and I believe that support for Ukraine, support for NATO support for internationalism would continue. But I will say that presumably-Speaker Kevin McCarthy would have a real challenge on his hands within his conference. And if he has a good third or so of his Republican conference voting against legislation that he’s putting up, you can’t take for granted that that will happen. And that’s the political reality.”
Boyle acknowledged that some of the political pressure on Democrats stems from public distaste for the idea of providing aid to Ukraine in the midst of domestic economic troubles, such as inflation.
“I would very much caution anyone who assumes that this unity will last forever and that the support of the American people will last forever,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many constituents of mine — I come from a fairly Democratic district in Philadelphia. You’ll see memes from people who are fairly apolitical in my district, showing the price of gas or showing empty shelves, and then say, ‘Oh, great, but Congress has sent another X number of billion dollars to Ukraine.’”
That kind of “war fatigue” is apparent even within the Central European societies most threatened by the prospect of a Russian victory in Ukraine, as a senior official who appeared alongside Boyle acknowledged.
“People may think that to keep the stability and peace in the world would cost them only a penny or just a cent — without any expenses,” Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz told the forum. “So there is a lot to do in order to encourage people, our societies, to support this policy.”
The outcome of those debates and the war itself could have global consequences, according to Moore, who cautioned against a pennywise, pound foolish approach to the war. The British spy boss argued that Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping is studying the Western response to the conflict while evaluating his regime’s capacity to invade and subjugate Taiwan — a potential crisis that could present the United States with a choice between a bloody conflict with China or a strategic defeat brought about by the loss of Taiwan.
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“It is so essential that we tough it out on Ukraine and we keep going through this winter and we help the Ukrainians to win — or at least to negotiate from a position of significant strength,” Moore told CNN’s Jim Sciutto. “Xi Jinping is watching this like a hawk. And as you say, he’s got a very entrenched narrative of Western weakness. … He underestimates U.S. resolve and power. And that might lead him to miscalculate over the sort of issues that we’ve been talking about over the last couple of days, particularly over Taiwan.”
