To Truly Pressure Putin, Target Russia’s Partners

Russia’s war on Ukraine is being fueled by a range of international partners. To change the Kremlin’s calculus, the West needs to target them.

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Sometimes, it is said, in order to make a problem smaller, you need to make it bigger first. So it is with the Ukraine war, which is now fast approaching its grim fourth anniversary.

When it was unveiled earlier this month, the Trump administration’s 28-point draft peace plan for ending the nearly four-year old conflict came in for no shortage of condemnation for its generous (to Russia) terms. Even those provisions, however, haven’t convinced the Kremlin to sign onto the proposal. White House envoy Steve Witkoff is now headed to Moscow in coming days in an effort to break the impasse.

As he does, he would do well to remember something that hasn’t been captured in Administration proposals to date. Namely, that the conflict is now a truly international affair – and taking aim at the external sources of support for Russia’s war might just be the most effective way to change its calculus.

China is one such contributor. As part of the “no limits” partnership that has evolved between the two countries in recent years, China has become a source of critical wartime assistance for Moscow. According to U.S. officials, it has supplied the Kremlin with drone and missile technology, as well as battlefield intelligence and machine tools used for the manufacturing of ordinance. At the same time, Chinese companies have engaged in extensive gray market trade with Russia, selling it everything from restricted chips to critical mineralsneeded for high-tech electronics and precision-guided weaponry. All of this has been backstopped by surging trade and expanding oil purchases which have helped keep the Russian economy afloat despite Western sanctions. In this way, Western officials say, the PRC has turned into a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war of aggression.

Iran is assisting Russia’s war of choice as well. Over the past three years, the Islamic Republic has provided Russia with thousands of advanced drones, which the Kremlin has subsequently used to target Ukrainian cities, infrastructure and civilian populations. It has also provided training and support in the form of deployments of personnel from its clerical army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to help train Russia’s military on those systems. And Tehran has helped Moscow set up indigenous production of those drones, as well as counseling Moscow how best to evade Western sanctions.

North Korea, too, is complicit in the Kremlin’s aggression. The DPRK has become a key supplier of ammunition for Russia’s military – previously accounting for as much as half of all ammo being used by Kremlin forces, according to Ukrainian intelligence estimates. It has also provided Russia with ballistic missiles that have subsequently been in strikes on Ukrainian targets. Most conspicuously, as part of an existing mutual defense treaty between the two countries, North Korea has deployed some 14,000 soldiers to Russia to augment the Kremlin’s forces, both in Russia’s border regions and on the front lines.

Other nations are providing critical inputs as well. Turkey, for instance, has emerged as a significant supplier of nitrocellulose, a key ingredient in the production of small arms ammunition, artillery and rocket fuel. Meanwhile, Central Asian states like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have become notable transit and re-export hubs that have helped Russia maintain access to key Western technologies in spite of U.S. and European restrictions.

All this presents U.S. policymakers with some hard choices. Over the past three-and-a-half years of conflict, Washington and European capitals have been quick to impose sanctions and penalties on Russia itself for its war of choice against Ukraine. When it comes to the countries providing critical inputs to that war effort, however, they have been slower to act because of worries over market turbulence and assorted other factors.

What is clear, though, is that such pressure works when it is actually applied. Recent U.S. sanctions, for instance, forced Indian and Chinese refiners to suspend their imports of Russian oil so as to maintain their access to the U.S. market. That step provides a clear template for Washington and its allies to follow – provided they are prepared to force Russia’s trading partners to choose whether doing business with them outweighs the benefits of engagement with Moscow. So far, at least, they haven’t been.