The Endgame (Updated)

I wanted to draw your attention to a New Yorker interview by David Remnick of historian Stephen Kotkin. I recommend you read the whole thing but Dr. Kotkin makes some very interesting points:

1. Contrary to what you might have read, Ukraine is winning on Twitter but Russia is winning on the battlefield.
2. Ukrainian valor plus Russian atrocities equals Western unity and resolve.

Here’s his epitome of the war:

Let’s think of a house. Let’s say that you own a house and it has ten rooms. And let’s say that I barge in and take two of those rooms away, and I wreck those rooms. And, from those two rooms, I’m wrecking your other eight rooms and you’re trying to beat me back. You’re trying to evict me from the two rooms. You push out a little corner, you push out another corner, maybe. But I’m still there and I’m still wrecking. And the thing is, you need your house. That’s where you live. It’s your house and you don’t have another. Me, I’ve got another house, and my other house has a thousand rooms. And, so, if I wreck your house, are you winning or am I winning?

What he proposes to conclude the war is for Ukraine to recognize that it’s lost Crimea and the eastern part of the country and that Ukraine be admitted to the European Union.

Both Ukraine and Russia have been very open about their objectives in the war. Ukraine’s are to recover its lost territory including Crimea and to join the European Union and NATO. Russia’s are to “protect” i.e. annex or at the very least detach from Ukraine the parts of Ukraine with majority ethnic Russian populations. Russia will retain Crimea. Ukraine will not become a member of either NATO or the EU. There is no compromise there.

What are the U. S. objectives? I recognize that our support of Ukraine is being sold as support for the rules-based international order but that rings hollow—you can’t support such an order without following it yourself. They can’t very well sell our support as “making the world safe for kleptocracy”. I think our objective is for Russia to lose.

If Ukraine joins the EU even NATO while Russia retains Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, does Russia lose? Does it preserve the rules-based international order? I should also mention that I believe that if the war ends and Ukraine is admitted to the EU, it is overwhelmingly likely that many, many more Ukrainians will move to other EU countries. Ukraine will in essence be hollowed out.

The Ukrainians win from such an arrangement, the Russians don’t lose, but we definitely lose. I can’t see our supporting such a resolution.

Update

Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s formula for concluding the war from Newsweek:

The winning formula for Ukraine is simple: Supplies of weapons, economic sanctions against Russia, helping to strengthen Ukraine’s resilience, the de-Putinization of Russia, and the accession of Ukraine to the European Union and NATO. Only all the elements of this formula combined would guarantee permanent security for Europe and the whole world.

which is obviously predicated on the assumption that there is some level of support by the West of Ukraine which will result in a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield. I don’t believe the numbers actually support that.