Artículo The Washinton Post, 15.10.2024 Robert Kagan, politólogo y columnista norteamericano
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All the talk about a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine? It’s designed mostly to appeal to Americans.
As the war in Ukraine continues to drag on with no obvious good end in sight for Ukrainians, folks who are not Ukrainian have begun talking about and yearning for a negotiated settlement. As National Security Council spokesman John Kirby recently put it, “a negotiated end is the most likely outcome here.” And we know what that means for Ukraine. As Czech President Petr Pavel, a longtime supporter of Kyiv, bluntly put it: Ukrainians “will have to be realistic” and understand that “the most probable outcome of the war will be that a part of Ukrainian territory will be under Russian occupation, temporarily.”
The irony of a Czech leader urging this course on Ukraine will not be lost on those with a sense of history — it was exactly the advice offered to Czech leaders in 1938 by the “realists” of the day. As George F. Kennan explained it just after the Munich conference, which ceded control of part of then-Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany, “Czechoslovakia is, after all, a central European state. Its fortunes must in the long run lie with — and not against — the dominant forces in this area.” But, he continued, the Munich settlement had at least “left the heart of the country physically intact … which would undoubtedly have been sacrificed if the solution had been the romantic one of hopeless resistance rather than the humiliating but truly heroic one of realism.”
As we now know, the “heart of the country” did not remain “physically intact.” Within months of the Munich agreement, the German army marched in and took the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Today, it is the Ukrainians who are being urged to abandon the romantic path of hopeless resistance and pursue the heroic path of realism. But if they do, what is to stop Russia from taking the rest of Ukraine whenever it is ready?
Advocates of a negotiated settlement with territorial concessions by Ukraine do not deny this danger and attempt to address it in various ways. All seem to assume the postwar Ukraine will have full access to American and NATO weaponry, training and other forms of military assistance, and substantial reconstruction aid. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, in what he calls, “A Trump Peace Plan for Ukraine,” would provide Ukraine $100 billions from a special NATO fund and an additional $500 billion worth of U.S. “lend-lease” loans to purchase weaponry (which, presumably, like the original lend-lease, would not have to be paid back for decades, if ever). Others call for “sustained military assistance in peacetime” to “help Kyiv create a credible deterrent.” Even Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) envisions some kind of guarantee of Ukraine’s security so that “the Russians don’t invade again.” He calls for a “heavily fortified” “demilitarized zone” between Russian and Ukrainian forces, which must mean one of two things: either establishing some kind of international peacekeeping force between the two armies or building a Ukrainian military sufficient on its own to repel a Russia attack.
The common assumption is that the Ukrainians are the biggest obstacle to such a settlement because they refuse to give up on the territory they have lost. That’s wrong. If the United States and NATO wanted to force Kyiv to accept it, they could. Brave and determined as the Ukrainians may be, they cannot continue fighting without U.S. and Western support and so must eventually accept the West’s dictation, just as the Czechs did in 1938.
But what about Vladimir Putin? Little thought seems to have been given as to whether the Russian president would accept the kind of peace settlement advocates of negotiations have proposed. Consider what such a settlement would look like from Moscow’s perspective: Before the war, Russia faced a relatively weak and politically divided Ukraine trying with only modest success to forge closer ties with a hesitant Europe and an ambivalent United States. At the end of 2021, Ukraine had a little over 200,000 active-duty soldiers, while Russia had more than 900,000.
Three years later, the war has transformed both Ukraine and the military balance in central and Eastern Europe. Today, Ukraine has more than 900,000 active-duty soldiers and hundreds of thousands of trained and battle-tested reserves. It has become, in fact, larger than the forces of Britain, Germany and Poland combined. And according to the proposals of Pompeo and others, it will remain so, aided by a continuous flow of billions of dollars of military aid. NATO this summer established a permanent center at Wiesbaden, Germany, staffed by 700 personnel to oversee the training and “long-term development” of the Ukrainian military, to increase interoperability between Ukrainian and NATO forces, and to manage the distribution and repair of the vast amounts of military equipment flowing to Ukraine now and in the future. Presumably, the U.S. and NATO allies plan to continue providing intelligence and targeting advice, as they have done increasingly over the course of the war.
This well-armed postwar Ukraine, moreover, is going to be an intensely hostile neighbor. Ukrainians won’t soon forget the death, destruction, murder and torture suffered at Russia’s hands during the war. There will be potent strains of revanchism as Ukrainians mourn their lost territory and yearn for its eventual return, especially given that, according to Pompeo, the United States and much of the international community will not officially recognize Russia’s conquests but, in Pavel’s words, will regard them as “temporary.” Indeed, according to one of the leading advocates of a negotiated peace, the goal of any settlement would be to ensure that the Ukrainian military has the capacity “to hold at risk any areas under Russian occupation” and even “to strike Russia itself.”
So, in return for the acquisition of Donbas, Crimea and some other strategically significant territories (much of which was beyond Kyiv’s control even before the war), Putin gets an angry, powerful, revanchist Ukraine, heavily armed and trained by the West and increasingly integrated in NATO, with or without formal membership.
Many Americans and Europeans would be content with this outcome — even if Ukrainians aren’t — and some even call it a “genuine strategic victory.” For Putin, however, it would be hard to mask the magnitude of the strategic failure. Not only will his war have created this monster on his borders, but it also will have brought Finland and Sweden into NATO. Russia will have to enhance its defenses across the full length of its western front, with special requirements on the border with Ukraine. After three years of war, more than 600,000 casualties, and widespread economic suffering, Putin will have succeeded only in tightening the circle of containment around Russia, brought hostile forces closer to Russia’s border and substantially increased even peacetime defense requirements. Putin wants to see himself as a 21st-century Peter the Great, but with that outcome he will look more like the 20th century’s Nicholas II, who took Russia into a war that fractured its army, dismembered its empire and, incidentally, led to the czar’s overthrow and murder and the end of the more than 300-year-old Romanov dynasty.
As is so often the case, U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine has been driven by what Americans don’t want. They don’t want to wind up at war with Russia; they don’t want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on a seemingly unwinnable war; but they also don’t want to bear the guilt and shame of letting Ukraine lose, with all the humanitarian horrors and strategic problems that entails. For all their pretense of “realism,” Pompeo and the other advocates of negotiated territorial concessions promise an outcome that conveniently solves the United States’ problems but no one else’s. The United States can impose its will on a desperately dependent Ukraine, but why must Putin go along? The advocates of peace talks with Russia simply assume that Putin will accept the outcome that best serves American needs.
That is not how negotiations work — or how these talks would go. It would be one thing if the United States, NATO and Ukraine were in a position effectively to dictate terms to Putin — as might have been the case had the Biden administration not failed to give Ukraine what it needed in the first months of the war, and as still might be the case if the administration gave the permissions and weaponry Ukraine needs right now. But it didn’t, and it isn’t. Unless Russia is demonstrably losing the war at the time when negotiations begin, these will be talks between equals and their outcome will reflect the actual state of the military situation. Therefore, the agreement will not be just. It will exact no price for Putin’s aggression. It will have to be equitable to all parties. Putin has needs, too, and chief among them will be avoiding precisely the postwar situation outlined above.
In that case, therefore, the key issues in any actual talks, in addition to drawing a new de facto Ukrainian border, will concern the size of the Ukrainian military and the nature of its relationship with the United States and NATO. The direct government-to-government military aid, the training and intelligence sharing throughout the war have been unneutral, which is to say, they have made the United States and the allies de facto belligerents. Putin will want strict limits on the aid provided to Ukraine by outside powers, particularly by the United States, assuming he is willing to tolerate such aid at all. He is also likely to demand that the size of the Ukrainian military be reduced to prewar peacetime levels, or nearly so, so they do not retain the capacity to “strike Russia itself.” Why would he demand less? Because he recognizes the injustice of his own actions?
There are two reasons Putin might acquiesce to the kind of agreement outlined by Pompeo and others. One is that he has no intention of abiding by it because he assumes that the United States and NATO will not, in fact, continue arming and protecting Ukraine, regardless of what the agreement allows. For Putin, that is not a bad bet: Given how hard it has been for the United States and other Western nations to authorize military aid reliably during wartime, it is certainly possible that Western publics will have limited enthusiasm for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Ukraine’s defense in peacetime.
But there would be risks for Putin, too. When the war stops, the reckoning in Russia begins. A war that cost so much and gained so little, and which left Russia objectively worse off strategically, is not likely to redound to the political health of its author. Even if Putin does not face serious postwar discontents, he could find it harder to demand sacrifices and impose his iron discipline on a postwar Russia than he did on a wartime Russia fighting what he characterized as an existential armed struggle with the West. Putin might decide it is safer to stay on the current course — and continue the war — unless that course leads to the collapse of his military.
That is the only other reason Putin would accept such a deal — if he believed that his army was about to crack. He might have feared that at the beginning of the war, but he doesn’t fear that today, and there is little reason to believe he will fear it six months or even a year from now. We could get lucky, but few expect the current aid program to turn the tide that substantially — which is why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was just in Washington pleading for more weaponry and fewer restrictions on its use. In short, Putin has good reason to believe that Ukraine and its Western supporters are more likely to crack before his army does. The Biden administration’s very public fear and reluctance to give Ukraine more long-range weapons without constraints, combined with Donald Trump’s evident desire to be rid of Ukraine altogether, can only strengthen Putin’s perception that it is the West, not Russia, which is short of breath.
Whoever wins the coming presidential election, therefore, is likely to face an intransigent Putin sticking to his current demands, which amount to the end of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Putin has not budged, for instance, in demanding Ukraine’s “denazification,” by which he means a change of government in Kyiv, as well as insisting on control of territory Russian forces have not even conquered yet. Advocates of talks suggest this is just an opening gambit and that he will be compelled to compromise. But compelled by what?
The Biden administration promises only more of what it has already been doing, which obviously has not been enough. Historians might conclude that the Biden administration lost this war in the first year or 18 months, as it continually refused to give Ukraine weapons that might have made a difference when Russian forces were in disarray. Absent a substantial change of course soon, there might be no salvaging Ukraine’s chances, and no prospect for getting any kind of deal with Putin short of Ukraine’s effective surrender.
Trump’s supporters think the mere return of their man to the presidency will be sufficient to frighten Putin into giving up his interests in Ukraine. This is what passes for “realism” in Republican foreign policy circles these days. But the opposite is closer to reality. Consider what it would take for Pompeo’s plan to have any chance of working. Putin would have to believe that Trump was prepared not only to continue but also to double down on a policy that Trump and his supporters have opposed for more than two years. According to Pompeo, the first move of a second Trump administration will be to escalate both the quantity and quality of military and economic support. Trump would thus have to spend the first months in office pressing Congress to approve significant spending on a new weapons package.
In theory, Trump might have the stomach to ignore Putin’s threats of escalation that have so far frightened the Biden administration, except that Trump looks just as frightened — he, too, warns of World War III. Nor does it seem likely that Trump wants to spend his first year back in office getting more deeply involved in Ukraine and provoking a crisis with Russia — all for the purpose of getting out. Putin is likely to call Trump’s bluff, therefore, at which point Trump will indeed be left with the choice of ramping up American involvement in the war or backing down and accepting a truly “neutral” and therefore indefensible Ukraine. Which course do you think Trump will take?
The present course, in short, is unlikely to lead to a stable settlement, and certainly not the kind of peace agreement that advocates of talks assure us is possible. This is not one of those “win-win” situations. Unless something dramatic changes, this is a war that, like most wars, will be won or lost on the battlefield. We are not going to be rescued by a peace deal. Americans need to decide soon whether they are prepared to let Ukraine lose.
