Reality Bites

Is there an off-ramp in Ukraine, or has Putin turned it into a highway to hell with no stop signs and no speed limit?

Sadly, it’s time to accept a harsh reality: There is no promising path to a peaceful end to the war that Vladimir Putin started by invading Ukraine.

Each side, but especially Putin’s, already has gone too far and paid too dearly to reach a deal acceptable to the other. If the Russian leader has shown any interest in negotiations, he is merely trying to buy time for his forces to regroup, remove Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and replace him with a puppet, reduce the country to rubble, or all of the above.

That doesn’t mean efforts to reach a settlement should be abandoned, of course, and Zelensky has wisely kept hope alive. But the U.S. and its NATO and other allies need to be clearheaded about Putin’s willingness to abandon his crusade to resurrect the Russian Empire.

Any conclusion, especially one that unpleasant, must be tested, so the one above was circulated verbatim Monday night to more than three dozen current and former U.S. and other diplomats, military and intelligence officers, graduate students, academic experts and others with Russia experience and expertise that in a few cases dates back nearly 50 years.

Most, including all of those now serving in governments or working in businesses or with clients that have even suspended interests in Russia, requested anonymity to avoid the appearance of promoting more vigorous intervention or abandoning hope.

With a few noteworthy exceptions, the overwhelming consensus was that, as one former senior U.S. official put it, there is no conceivable Venn Diagram in which Russian and Ukrainian interests overlap, and as each day passes, the carnage mounts and both sides’ negotiating positions continue to harden.

If anything, Putin is in a worse place to make any concessions now than he was three weeks ago because the shortcomings of his military and intelligence services have been exposed, and any peace agreement presupposes that he can live with the reality of a military defeat — by the Ukrainians, no less. In reality, argued one expert, Putin “regards any negotiation as an exercise in weakness”.

A veteran negotiator asked if Putin could accept a Zelensky government remaining in place and whether Ukrainians would accept a Moscow-installed stooge. His answer: “No, and really no.”

Nor does the prospect of relief from the economic sanctions imposed on Russia offer much incentive for Putin to compromise, argued a former senior economic official in a Democratic administration, because any relief would come step-by-step and only in response to Russian concessions.

In other words, the consensus was that there is no space for meaningful negotiations, only for the kind of temporary ceasefire that Putin’s Russia has used in the past to regroup, refit and rearm its forces for another offensive or continued siege warfare, which is what the Institute for the Study of War predicted on March 22.

A real ceasefire will be possible, said another respondent, only when Putin has been defeated in battle; in bankruptcy; and in support from his generals, his intelligence services and his oligarchs.

Others took a darker view, arguing that Putin would need to be defeated within the Kremlin walls, perhaps in some manner borrowed from the board game Clue.

One current senior U.S. official privately conceded that the Biden administration’s public “give peace a chance” position is “a necessary triumph of hope over expertise”, but said that pessimism prevails in private, as evident in public warnings that the conflict could escalate in cyberspace or in the use of chemical or smaller tactical nuclear weapons, which Russian military doctrine includes.

America’s military misadventures from Vietnam to Iraq have made today’s reality hard to accept, and the Russians have tried to exploit those memories, for example in an opinion piece Tuesday in RT, a government mouthpiece, comparing the invasion of Ukraine to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and media support for Zelensky to the widespread — but not universal — media cheerleading for a U.S. attack based on false premises.

(That conveniently ignores the fact that if the Bush administration had treated criticism of its bogus case for invading Iraq the way Putin’s regime increasingly treats criticism of its “special military operation” in Ukraine, you would not be reading this because its author and some of his former colleagues at Knight Ridder would be nowhere to be found.)

There’s no comparison between Ukraine and Iraq, or for that matter Vietnam, al Qaeda or ISIS. Vladimir Putin is not Saddam Hussein, nor is he Osama bin Laden or Ho Chi Minh. None of them posed a grave threat to the U.S., much less to world peace, and the threats they did pose often were exaggerated.

Though it’s unfashionable to say it, Putin is more akin to Hitler and Stalin. He’s not dangerous because he believes Russians are a master race entitled to lebensraum, but because he thinks no one has ever considered them equals. Like Stalin, he’s a totalitarian, but without any Marxist-Leninist ideology to export or impose. If anything, his oligarchy resembles the czars’ courts more than the lines of communist luminaries who once graced Lenin’s tomb.

Putin is dangerous because, standing John F. Kennedy on his head, he appears to be willing — for his countrymen, at least — to “pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe”, not to secure the survival and success of liberty, but to stamp it out in Ukraine, and likely in other regions of the former Russian Empire.

That’s not to say that all who read here should abandon hope. Respondents ranging from a young graduate student of Russia to two former U.S. intelligence officers and two of their European counterparts said they think de-escalation and eventual compromise is possible.

Two expressed hope that both sides will recognize that the longer the war persists, the more they’ll recognize that their countries are being destroyed physically, economically, militarily or all of the above.

“A negotiated settlement offers both sides a net of sorts, if they want it,” offered one respondent, Russian-speaking former CIA operations officer Douglas London. He said he doesn’t think either side has gone too far, “crazy as that sounds given how Putin is leveling cities and targeting civilians”.

The more optimistic visions of a potential off-ramp were based partly on Putin’s toning down of his demands for complete Ukrainian capitulation; the fact that Zelensky has continued to focus his criticism on Putin, not Russia writ large; and the possibility that the Ukrainian leader might agree that Ukraine will never join NATO and recognize the Donbas and Crimea as parts of Russia.

Jeffrey Trimble at Ohio State University, a veteran journalist in Moscow and later a U.S. official in Eastern Europe, however, cited an old Russian saying that in a normal country, if your neighbor gets a cow, you want one, too. But in Russia, if your neighbor gets a cow, you hope it will get sick and die.

Traditional Russian resentments aside, it’s never prudent to plan for the best outcome, and in the case of Ukraine, preparing for the worst while praying it never comes now falls into two broad categories:

• How can the U.S. and other nations continue to resupply the Ukrainians with food, weapons, real-time intelligence, training and perhaps covert action while minimizing the chances of a confrontation with Russia? If the war settles into a stalemate — all quiet on the Ukrainian front — the Institute for the Study of War argued in its March 22 report, that effort would have to expand dramatically in order to keep Ukraine “alive as a country”.

• How best to deter possible escalation on three other fronts — nuclear, chemical or cyber — while continuing to support Ukraine? While Putin may not pose an existential threat, the Russia leader might gamble that the West will blink before he does.

All the possibilities, however, require one thing in common: a clear-headed look at reality.