Shifting goals, unclear timelines, and a flimsy pretext: The US-Israeli campaign against Iran at times bears curious parallels to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The comparison is far from exact. In 2022, Putin sent a massive army across Ukraine’s borders in an unprovoked invasion of a democratic state, a campaign that quickly resulted in heavy losses. So far, the United States has largely limited its involvement to airstrikes against Iran’s authoritarian regime.
However, the echoes are difficult to ignore.
In both wars, the campaign objectives have been formulated differently at different times, while the legal justification, academics say, is non-existent.
Early U.S. statements framed the strikes as a response to an effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Officials have also emphasized the degradation of Iran’s missile capabilities and the weakening of the military infrastructure that supports its regional proxy network. But the goals have become increasingly maximalist.
Donald Trump has said Iran’s leadership should be replaced, openly raising the prospect of regime change, and more recently called for Tehran’s “unconditional surrender.”
In Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has also repeatedly changed its stated goals.
When Putin launched the invasion in February 2022, he said the goal was the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine, language widely interpreted as a push for regime change in kyiv. As the war dragged on, the Kremlin increasingly portrayed the conflict as one about protecting Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine and securing control over the territories Moscow later annexed.
The similarities also seep into the language.
Both sides have portrayed their actions as defensive, citing what experts say are, at best, dubious claims that they were acting to prevent an imminent threat.
Last week, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the United States “did not start this war, but under President Trump, we are ending it.”
Throughout his own war, Putin used strikingly similar language. “We did not start the so-called war in Ukraine,” he said in February 2022. “We are trying to end it.”
Neither leader expected to be drawn into a protracted conflict. Putin appeared to believe that the full-scale war in Ukraine would last just a few weeks and could repeat the rapid seizure of Crimea in 2014.
Meanwhile, Trump entered the confrontation buoyed by the apparent success of the U.S. operation earlier this year that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Tellingly, some U.S. officials and the Kremlin avoided describing their actions as acts of war, suggesting they hoped the conflict would be brief.
Four years after his invasion, Putin still avoids the term “war,” insisting on calling the invasion a “special military operation,” language enforced at home through strict censorship laws that have sent his critics to jail.
Some in Washington have also been reluctant to use the word. Asked last week whether the US actions amounted to war, House Speaker Mike Johnson responded: “I think it’s a limited operation.”
The New Yorker was quick to joke and published an image from Tolstoy’s classic War and Peace, where “War” was replaced by “Limited Combat Operation.” The same jokes were made in Russia four years ago.
And then there was the reaction of the political and media elites. Much of the Russian establishment, initially horrified by the invasion of Ukraine, eventually rallied behind the war, arguing that Putin should finish what he had started.
Some figures in the Russian exile peace movement were quick to point out parallels in the reaction to the latest conflict, pointing out how American commentators who had harshly criticized the Russian invasion were struggling to maintain the same clarity when their own country went to war.
“Once our presidents make the decision to go to war, even when I disagree with the decision and the process – as is the case with our current war with Iran – I still want our military to win,” wrote Michael McFaul in X, a former US ambassador to Moscow during the Obama administration and a frequent critic of Trump.
The question now is whether the United States will be able to avoid the obstacles that ensnared Russia in Ukraine and whether more parallels will emerge.
According to media reports, Trump has recently raised the possibility of sending elite troops to Iran to secure the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
In the early days of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia deployed elite airborne forces to seize a key airport near kyiv, a risky operation that ended with heavy losses.
Commenting on the US-Israel campaign, Danny Citrinowicz, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, warned on Friday that “when strategic objectives become overly ambitious or unrealistic, even a successful military campaign can gradually turn into a war of attrition.”
“To avoid that outcome, it is essential to define clear and realistic objectives, which can be measured and which provide a clear point at which the campaign can end,” he added in a post on X.
Vladimir Frolov, a retired Russian diplomat, responded dryly: “Sounds familiar.”
