Retired U.S. Army Colonel Alexander Crowther is a former Supreme Allied Commander Europe special assistant and an expert on cybermilitary operations, advising government officials in Eastern Europe and Latin America.
A visiting research professor at Florida International University, Crowther is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he frequently publishes articles on the war in Ukraine and other regional and global topics.
In one of those articles last month, Crowther argued that a Ukrainian defeat would have serious implications for Europe, and that it was time to send EU forces to Ukraine. RFE/RL's Georgian Service asked him about that and other aspects of European and transatlantic support for Kyiv.
RFE/RL: How seriously should we be taking [French] President [Emmanuel] Macron's words about not ruling out the possibility of having to send military personnel to Ukraine? He apparently also felt the need to reaffirm that "each word I pronounce on this matter is weighed, thought through, and measured."
Alexander Crowther: I think it's being discussed in Europe, and I think we need to take it seriously. I think there are NATO allies who don't want anything to do with sending troops to Ukraine. I don't think the Spanish want to send the Blue Division (a Franco-era volunteer force) back to Ukraine. They didn't have a good time last time they did it.
On the other hand, maintenance, logistics, technical [stuff], like running air-defense systems -- you know, for every soldier or civilian that is sent there, that's a Ukrainian who can get shipped to the front, right? And so, it's a matter of the existential logic of combat.
Ukrainians are running out of soldiers, just like we did in 1944, when in Europe, we took cooks and handed them rifles and said, "You are now an infantryman." And so Ukraine is at the point where they're having to do that.
The Tavberidze Interviews
Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vazha Tavberidze of RFE/RL's Georgian Service has been interviewing diplomats, military experts, and academics who hold a wide spectrum of opinions about the war's course, causes, and effects. To read all of his interviews, click here.
If you remember the HIMARS (High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) that were damaged in combat, they had to fly them back to the United States for repairs. Most armored vehicles that are damaged, they drag them to Poland and they're repaired in Poland.
That all costs time and money and effort. Why can't you maintain them west of the Dnieper [River]? Honestly, if I was going to send anybody to Ukraine, I would make sure that they stayed west of the Dnieper River, because the Ukrainians do control everything west of the Dnieper River, and [I would] make it very clear to the Russians that we're not advancing east of the Dnieper River.
You can run air-defense systems [there]. An argument would be, "Oh, we'll shoot down Russian airplanes, and we'll be killing Russians, and that's bad, it's exculpatory." But the Russian airplanes aren't flying west of the Dnieper River. The Russian airplanes are flying in eastern Ukraine and lobbing munitions, right?
It's not doing close air support or anything like that. They're not going west of the Dnieper River because they'll get shot down. You saw the [Russian] A-50 [surveillance aircraft] that got shot down -- they shot down two of them. They're shooting down all sorts of Russian things.
If you could get Americans or Western Europeans, or whoever, running a very tight air-defense system to knock down all those missiles -- the Kinzals and all the Iskanders that are coming across the [Dnieper] River -- if you could do that, that would be very helpful, and it wouldn't threaten any Russian life.
You'd have to be really clear to Putin [and] say, "We're sending people to Ukraine, they're not going to be doing offensive combat against you.... Anything that crosses the Dnieper is dead."…. It's not a no-fly zone, it's air defense.
RFE/RL: You made these and other arguments in your piece for the Center for European Policy Analysis. I want to ask about the title, Time To Send EU Troops To Ukraine. It makes a rather important distinction: Instead of Western forces, as Macron claims, you settled for EU forces in particular, presumably to bolster EU strategic autonomy. Before we go on, let me ask you: What about U.S. forces?
Crowther: Sending U.S. forces to Ukraine? I would have no problem with recommending to the [U.S.] administration that we send logistics, maintenance, and technical people to western Ukraine, keeping them west of the Dnieper River. I don't advocate sending any combat forces at all, because as soon as you have NATO, EU, [or] American people killing Russians, then that's really escalatory. And so, you don't want it.
RFE/RL: You underline that point in the article. When you said the use of military forces would require "clear messaging to Putin" that this would not be escalatory, are we talking about the same Putin here? The man who has half of the world's geopolitics experts questioning whether he's rational or not, who's known to respond to everything asymmetrically?
Crowther: Putin is rational. Putin is a hard-power guy, and it's all about hard power. It's about money for him and money for the "siloviki" (a blanket term to describe the network of former and current state-security officers with personal ties to the Soviet-era KGB and its successor agencies) and the oligarchs who run the country on his behalf.
There's good tsars and there's bad tsars, right? And a good tsar, in Putin's worldview, leaves the Kremlin feet-first, right? He dies in the job. To him, Ivan the Terrible, so Ivan IV, and [Josef] Stalin are good tsars because they fought till the very end. Bad tsars quit. So that would be Nicolas II, that would be [the last Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev.
Putin doesn't want to go down in history as a bad tsar. He wants to go down in history as a good tsar. He's just going to stay in the Kremlin; he's dug into the Kremlin for the rest of his life. And so everything that he does is designed to extend his stay in the Kremlin.
RFE/RL: I understand your reasoning. What I don't understand is how the U.S. or European military personnel, acting defensively, get to be taking out his bombs -- the bombs he's lobbing at Ukraine. How does that translate into him being a good tsar in the eyes of the Kremlin? If he tolerates Westerners going there and saying, "Oh, we're on the defensive, we're not escalating. We'll just, you know, explode those bombs that you're launching at us in the air so that no Ukrainian is killed."
Crowther: The claim of self-defense is universal.
RFE/RL: Does it scream "good tsar" for you on Putin's terms, allowing that?
Crowther: I wrote a chapter in a book about Russian hybrid warfare. Putin has threatened to invade Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states. He threatened to invade Finland and Sweden if they agreed to join NATO. He threatened to invade Norway for hosting U.S. troops, Poland and Romania for hosting ballistic-missile-defense facilities, any European country hosting U.S. missiles, and has threatened or exercised the use of nuclear weapons on Denmark, Poland, the Baltic [states], the U.K., Sweden, Ukraine, the EU, NATO, and the United States. He has threatened to nuke all of those countries, [but] he hasn't done it once.
RFE/RL: You think he's bluffing? All the way?
Crowther: Nuclear weapons are the only thing keeping Vladimir Putin at the big-boys' table. This is the only thing that prevents him from being just a vassal of the Chinese. It's literally the only threat he has left. In January 2022, people talked about Russia having the second-best military in the world. Well, right now, it's been revealed that they're the second-best military in Ukraine, right?
He has no threats left. His basket is empty. He can't threaten, like he did with Georgia, a military intervention, because he's just got no military left. Honestly, it's really hard to threaten somebody with political warfare: "I'm going to do information operations in your country, irritate your people." That just doesn't [work] well, right? All he's got left is nukes to threaten with, and so he's very liberal with threatening the use of nuclear weapons. [But] I think if NATO forces hit Russian territory, he would use a nuclear device, absolutely.
RFE/RL: He was quite emphatically underlining in [his State of the Nation] address [on February 29] that there would be nuclear consequences if a move such as that Macron was hinting at occurred. Do you believe that's also another bluff on Putin's part?
Crowther: He threatened to nuke Sweden and Finland if they joined NATO.
RFE/RL: OK, so the biggest counterargument to [Macron's] idea that all those Western capitals have is that [deploying troops] would basically make them a party to the war. Would that not happen?
Crowther: This is the discussion about letting Ukraine into NATO, because this buys a piece of that war for NATO. If you read the rules about joining the European Union and NATO, it says they have to have good neighborly relations. So that is one of the things that's interpreted as a "finalized boundary."
The Russians didn't figure this out in time to keep, say, the Baltic states out, but they figured it out in time to keep Moldova, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia out. All you've got to do is occupy a square meter of your neighbor, and all of a sudden they are not eligible to join NATO or the European Union.
Now, NATO or the European Union can waive that requirement…. And that's what people are discussing now: not if Ukraine is going to join NATO, but when and under what circumstances they're going to join NATO.
I think the NATO summit [in Washington, D.C. on June 9-11] will hinge on that discussion: When and how -- under what circumstances -- does Ukraine join NATO? At one end of the spectrum [are] people who say Ukraine just isn't ready to join NATO…
RFE/RL: The consensus at the moment seems to be that [Ukraine joining NATO and the EU] will happen after the war, not during the war, exactly out of fear that that would make Europe and the West parties to the war. So how does that answer my initial question, that this seems to be the major fear for the West in that they do not want to be seen as party to the war?
Crowther: There are three groups. There's the "Ukraine isn't ready to join NATO" group. "They've got a war. They're corrupt. Are they really a democracy?" All that stuff. The counter to that, which I heard recently, was, "If they're not ready to join NATO, there are several NATO members that [also] aren't ready to join."
At the other end of the spectrum is [the] "They need to be in NATO right now" [group]. And then in the middle is that big group that you were talking about, which is -- like at the 2008 Bucharest summit -- "Yes, they'll be in NATO eventually, just like Georgia."
I think a lot of the [NATO] summit is going to be those three groups not necessarily fighting it out, but [getting] back to politics. It's convincing the other person to do what you want them to do. NATO, to have a successful summit, will have to figure out how to take those three different camps and create some sort of consensus.
RFE/RL: So far, their way of figuring it out has been kicking the can down the road. What changed?
Crowther: That's the middle-of-the-road group -- that big, amorphous group in the middle that says, "Yes, they're going to join eventually." I believe that a lot of people that are kicking the can down the road, during the first phase of the war they said, "Oh, the Ukrainians are going to lose. So, let's not talk about it." And then in the second phase of the war, it was, "Oh, the Ukrainians are going to win, we don't have to talk about it until they win." Now it's, "Oh my, there's a stalemate, nobody's going to win -- uh oh, I guess we have to [do something]." So, there's a lot of pressure to make some sort of decision on where this is going to go.
RFE/RL: And sending Western troops to Ukraine will have to wait at least until the summit?
Crowther: No, because that's the EU, not NATO…. That's why my article talks about the European Union and not NATO. Because NATO is kind of stuck right now until the summit. NATO already has a mission helping out Ukraine. The EU has a [military assistance] mission, the EUMAM.
[European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen has been very clear that she wants to support Ukraine, so this is a tremendous opportunity for the European Union to step up and do this stuff. If you look at who's responsible for security in Europe, writ large: You have internal, you have external, you have soft power, you have market power, and then you have information power.
NATO is responsible for external hard power for Europe. Internal hard power, external soft power, external information power, internal information power -- all of that belongs to the European Union, not to NATO. NATO is a one-trick pony, as we say.... It's vital. But we've got to remember that the European Union is responsible for all these other [aspects]. Security is bigger than just external hard power.
RFE/RL: Do you see an appetite for that in the EU? Because Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic -- pretty much all of the countries that have contributed more in terms of aid to Ukraine than France itself -- seem to be opposed to that kind of move.
Crowther: Are they opposed to it?
RFE/RL: Well, they definitely seem to be very vocal about it, when it comes to official statements.
Crowther: This is just like [the question around the NATO obligation to spend] 2 percent of GDP [on defense]. It's one of those things where we're -- I hate to bring it up -- "taking casualties." "Oh my, we can't do offensive operations in Afghanistan because someone might get hurt and then I'd have to explain it to the voters." But nobody talks to the voters about this. If you look at polling, there's actually support for stuff like this in Europe.
RFE/RL: For sending troops to Ukraine?
Crowther: For supporting Ukraine vigorously. I don't think pollsters are asking the question in Warsaw: Do you think you should go to Ukraine? They're not asking.
RFE/RL: I think they'll be asking that question very shortly: Would you support Western troops being sent to Ukraine? Do you really think there's appetite [for such a move]? Don't you think there's a distinction between supporting Ukraine vigorously when you are asked about that and saying, "Yeah, we're fine with sending Western troops to Ukraine"?
Crowther: I think that sending Western troops to Ukraine is a subset of supporting Ukraine vigorously.
RFE/RL: But does one imply necessarily the other when you are asking that question?
Crowther: I could name half a dozen countries right now that would be willing to send people to Ukraine.
RFE/RL: Be my guest, that's going to make a brilliant headline.
Crowther: I'm not going to do that in an interview. You know who they are. You could name some countries. What I don't want to do is to spoil things for the political leadership in these countries. I'm not going to put them on the spot -- that's not my job. I'm an analyst and an adviser.
RFE/RL: In a way is that not what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did when he said British soldiers are helping Ukrainians fire those Storm Shadow [long-range cruise] missiles?
Crowther: You should see the blowback that he's getting. I'm not going to put myself in the position that Scholz put himself in. I'm an adviser, and I advise the European Union to start thinking about putting some people forward -- not contingents from every European Union country.
As you know, somebody's got to pay for it, somebody's got to provide a headquarters for command-and-control or some intellectual framework. How about the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF)? (Ten northern European countries, led by the U.K., make up the JEF.) Maybe you can take the JEF and set up a headquarters across the Polish border from Lviv and put the JEF headquarters there and have them rotate JEF people through. The Joint Expeditionary Force is designed for under-Article 5 deployments into Eastern Europe, right? There's an option. There are options.
I'm not saying Ursula van der Leyen needs to create unanimity in the European Union, because there is no unanimity in the European Union -- just like there's no unanimity in NATO. But we need to start thinking about different approaches.
So you start with, "what's the problem?" The problem is that the Ukrainians are running out of people. How do you help the Ukrainians? I don't think the French are going to grab every Ukrainian in France and expel them and make them go home so they can fight. That's not an option, right?
What is politically doable? What is the art of the possible? One of the arts-of-the-possible is that the European Union starts to get involved and talks to their members about their role in security. They've always wanted a role in security. Well, hey, your opportunity is here.
RFE/RL: A reading between the lines that can be inferred from this incident between Scholz and Britain is that such a thing could be done but under the radar, without flags and fanfare, and that might be a much-preferred route for those who are hesitant. If that's the case, then basically Macron has not done very well by bringing it out into the open.
Crowther: If you're going to message Putin that "we've got people on the ground, but they're just doing defensive operations, they're not going to kill any Russians," then there has to be some level of political agreement in Europe to do that.
RFE/RL: Do you think there was a political agreement in Europe on some sort of readiness for that, and Macron then kind of voiced it? Or was it Macron basically saying things out loud that probably should not have been said?
Crowther: I believe that Macron is trying to catalyze a discussion; he's trying to initiate the discussion. Because honestly, if Ursula von der Leyen brought that up without a national leader doing it, she'd probably run into some problems, political friction within the European Union. So now what has happened is that a major European Union member has brought it up, which now allows everybody else to discuss it like Scholz was discussing it.
RFE/RL: You talked about logistics personnel operating in a defensive capability. One [way of doing that] would be shutting down the missiles that Russia is lobbing into Ukraine.
Crowther: That's an option. It's like a hand of cards: a bunch of different options, one of which would be to set up an air-defense system for west of the Dnieper River.
RFE/RL: What if some of those logistics personnel [are killed or injured by] Russian bombs or bullets? Would the party that suffered the casualties be obliged to respond, and, if so, would that cause a chain reaction among its allies?
Crowther: No, that's not [grounds for invoking] Article 5 or anything like that. If Country X in the European Union sends people to Ukraine and the Russians succeed in killing some of them, I don't see that as a casus belli. You can't say, "Oh, they've killed one of my citizens, now let's do an Article 5 and invade Russia." You can't do that. It would be with the understanding that you're accepting a significant amount of risk.
It depends on the country, it depends on how many people get killed, it depends on whether they're overtly there or not. There are Europeans and Americans getting killed in Africa, getting killed in Asia, and it's just not discussed.
"What is an acceptable risk?" is really the discussion that the European Union has to have. I can't tell them what acceptable risk is in Germany or France; only they can have that internal discussion. So as an adviser, I'm trying to get them to have that discussion. I'm trying to catalyze that discussion.
