Prospects for Peace

Tunku Varadarajan has an interview of noted historian of Russia Stephen Kotkin at the Wall Street Journal that’s worthy of attention. Here’s the meat of his remarks:

Speaking by Zoom from his Hoover office, he’s keen to establish that we need to grasp three truths in the “big picture” of the war in Ukraine.

The first is a “paradox that people don’t usually put together”: Although much-smaller Ukraine may be “losing a war of attrition,” Mr. Putin “made an enormous strategic blunder and is damaging Russia severely for the long term.” He has lost his country’s old sphere of influence: “All his neighbors hate him and are afraid of him.” Even Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator in fraternal neighbor Belarus, is “looking for some distance, to get out of the stranglehold of Russia.” Mr. Putin has also “lost his civilian economy.”

Second, Ukraine is “an asset, not a liability—but we don’t seem to be able to appreciate how it’s an asset, and why.” He means that “Ukraine has an army”—a serious one, unlike, say, Germany. “We’ve been able to send a lot of our weapons and test them in battlefield conditions because of Ukrainian bravery and ingenuity.” As a result, “we’ve been able to see what a 21st-century land war looks like, and we’ve been able to change our defense industrial investments at home as a result.” He adds that military aid to Ukraine is “actually going to the American defense industry.”

Third, Mr. Trump is “correct” to seek an end to the war: “I applaud his forced imposition of a negotiation process.” But the president “lacks follow-through and patience. He lacks consistency. This is a hard problem. He promised to solve it in 24 hours,” but it’s “been going on since 1783,” when Catherine the Great annexed the Khanate of Crimea. Even so, “Trump’s instincts are correct. Ukraine, more than Russia, needs this war to end. And he’s groping towards that solution.”

Dr. Kotkin admonishes us to abandon any notions of Ukraine winning the war and focus instead on Ukraine’s “winning the peace”.

“We’re all talking about how Ukraine needs to get Crimea back, because Russia took it by force in a violation of international law.” Mr. Kotkin says with the laugh of an unsentimental realist. “Crimea is going back to Ukraine the day after Texas goes back to Mexico.”

but

So how could Ukraine win the peace? Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is out of the question, if only because the U.S. opposes it. The alternative is “joining the West through accession to the European Union,” Mr. Kotkin says. “They’ll need massive domestic reforms to be able to join. But it’s a great process for bringing countries into constitutional rule-of-law, open-society, and market-economy institutions.”

The other marker of a Ukrainian win is “some type of security, which some people call ‘security guarantees’, but which looks more like the ‘steel porcupine’ approach.” This is a phrase Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, introduced in March. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen defines it as fortifying Ukraine to make it “undigestible for potential invaders.”

That is an additional strategy to add to the two I’ve already covered here and one I see as more achievable. There are also some proposals for additional economic sanctions:

There are other things Mr. Trump could do. These include a removal of Russia’s Gazprombank from the Swift international banking system, to which it still has tenuous access, greenlighting the confiscation of $300 billion worth of Russian deposits in European banks, getting India to “buckle” and stop buying of Russian oil, and, most audacious, “cutting a deal with Xi Jinping behind Putin’s back to reduce China’s support for Russia in a bargain between the U.S. and China. It’s thinkable.”