Correction and Amplification
The first paragraph of the piece below incorrectly suggested that the recent massing of Russian troops at the border with Ukraine was simply another attempt by Putin to put pressure on the government in Kyiv, to distract his own population from its economic and COVID-related woes, or both. This omits salient facts that led Putin to act as he has.
First, this is not the first time that Russia sent thousands of troops to the border. In April 2021, it felt compelled to do so based on signals from Kyiv that Ukraine was preparing an offensive against the separatists who control Donbas (the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk). Ukraine called off the offensive.
Second, Ukraine has again stepped up military activity — artillery and drone strikes — in Donbas, activity that has led the separatists there and the Kremlin to believe that there will be a Ukrainian offensive to retake the region. The US and NATO continue to support Ukraine’s government. In 2021 alone, the US has provided $275 million in military aid.
Third, through Defense Secretary Austin, it reiterated support for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO. It did so shortly after Under Secretary of State Nuland — the ultimate non-diplomat diplomat — had told Moscow that there would be no military offensive and greater autonomy for Donbas.
In early November, the Biden administration sent CIA Director Burns to Moscow, to discern the intentions of a Russian government likely confused by the contradictory signals sent by the West. It is reasonable to expect that Russian officials, including Putin, reaffirmed Russia’s concerns and, in particular, its objection to NATO membership for Ukraine.
All to say that 90,000 Russian troops are now again at the border with Ukraine in response to provocations from a Ukrainian government egged on by, and convinced of military and diplomatic support from, the US and NATO, with the intent of defeating Donbas separatists militarily and taking back the region. This is not a Putin distract-the-people exercise.
Nor is it clear why, with existential issues on its policy plate — climate change, a global infectious disease emergency, domestic insurrection — the Biden administration insists on a military confrontation with Russia, one it isn’t serious about unless it wants WWIII. Ukraine will always be more important to Russia than to the US.
With that additional background to the piece below, its recommendations are even more sensible. But they presuppose, erroneously, that the fate of the flesh-and-blood human beings in Ukraine and Donbas are of the slightest interest to the American foreign policy establishment.
Ukraine: Not Quiet on the Eastern Front
Russia has massed 100,000 troops at its border with Ukraine. The Russian government lamely denies it as “fake news”. this has triggered the usual tea-leaf reading in the West: Does Putin intend to invade Ukraine? Is he just rattling sabers to intimidate Ukraine? Is he doing it to force the EU and, by extension, the US to end the sanctions in place since Russia’s seizure of Crimea? Does he really see a national security threat in Ukraine? Or is it all of the above?
We don’t know, just as we don’t know if the education of Putin — beneficiary of present-day Russians’ enduring preference for czarism (this time with state thuggery free of royal pomp) — included Shakespeare. Considering the Lubyanka was his schoolhouse, we surmise not. But it might well have, given his Henry IV-inspired habit of keeping giddy Russian minds busy with foreign quarrels. Or maybe that’s just a value common to all rulers of restive populations asking uncomfortable questions to which leaders have unconvincing answers.
Regardless, Putin can count on his people’s long-standing attachment to Ukraine as their distraction of choice. When Russians tire of their own economic woes (in part the result of Western sanctions related to Russia’s annexation of Crimea), staggering COVID rates, and endemic corruption, they let Putin divert their gaze to the immediate western neighbor with whose people there are centuries of political, cultural, and human ties. For many Russians, the quarrel with Ukraine is not foreign at all, merely a family squabble.
What we do know is that, in early 2014, after Ukrainians had objected to their government’s choosing economic integration with Russia rather than the EU, and after the pro-Russian president, Yanukovich, had fled to Moscow, Russian fondness for Ukraine led Putin to seize the Crimean Peninsula, and to nurture violent pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (“Donbas”) — the 24,000 square miles of eastern Ukraine, population 6.2 million, of which roughly 40% is ethnic Russian — in their insurrection against their government.
About 14,000 people have died in the resulting war there. Despite the evidence, Russia denies its role, including with respect to the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, in supporting the separatists with troops and materiel. The EU, led by Merkel, predictably if not especially successfully, tried to contain the madness through multilateral negotiations and the resulting Minsk Protocols I and II. The stalemate continues, as Putin raises or lowers the temperature at will, content to absorb lectures from Merkel, two dull minds steeped in the old GDR.
Because reading a KGB agent’s thoughts is entertainment chiefly for Russia specialist, media focus in the US reflexively swivels to: What should the US do in response? How can we turn this into a Putin vs. Biden cage match? This leads to the US domestic political dimension and questions about Biden’s competence, measured by how forceful (or not) his response is. Guaranteed, Republican mouth-breathers will insist that, anything less than the threat of war with Russia confirms Democrats’ squeamishness when it comes Realpolitik.
Such threats contradict or, at a minimum, trigger serious brain freeze with respect to the Republican hymnbook on Russia, re-written by Trump in gratitude for Russian help getting to the White House in 2016. Ever averse to thought, not to mention consistency of it, Republicans will not bother to explain how Democrats, when it comes to Russia, can be both trigger-happy warmongers and national security pansies. They also won’t tell us how, exactly, the US military would prevent or meaningfully stymie a Russian military assault on Ukraine.
That’s because bellicosity is all they have. It’s all everyone has in light of two facts that rhetoric emanating from Washington or NATO officials cannot alter: Neither the US nor NATO will go to war with Russia over Ukraine even if Russia invades a part or even all of Ukraine, regardless who is in the White House; and Ukraine will always have the much larger Russia as a neighbor. Neither is news to Putin, who does not hesitate to exert leverage accordingly.
Right-wing US muddlheadedness, however, does not mean there is no debate to be had about what the US and its allies could and should do in response to unceasing efforts by Putin to undermine the sovereignty of Ukraine, a place he does not consider a country and whose people he refers to as “Malorussians” (Little Russians), hardly an endearment in Ukrainian eyes. He is “convinced that Kiev does not need Donbas” and that “foreign advisers” are deploying “NATO infrastructure” in Ukraine.
Putin’s lecture tells us that his policies and intentions regarding Ukraine are not intended only to distract miserable Russians, though they do help. For him, the imperative to retain Ukraine in Russia’s orbit reflects an article of cultural faith and traditional (if outdated) national security concerns. Both seem immutable, in which case the tired question — Should the West provide military support to Ukraine? — is proof of a depressing lack of imagination that does nothing to help people in Ukraine.
What would Western military assistance accomplish? Its advocates insist it would deter a Russian invasion. But if a reliable Ukraine (as Putin chooses to define it) is an existential issue for Russia, how much Western military assistance would it take, especially when Moscow sees every bit of hardware, however defensive, as an escalation and, therefore, justification for ratcheting up rather than down its own military activities in Donbas? Ukraine is far more important to Russia than it is to the US or Europe, even if Western leaders choose not to say so.
That truth leads to the more fundamental question: How useful — and morally defensible — is it for the West to induce in Ukrainians the illusion that it will protect them against Russia? They may want to ask survivors of Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968, useful sources of lived experience with the chasm between what Western politicians say and do. Ukrainians, like the Hungarians and Czechs before them, mistakenly believe these politicians to be talking to them rather than to their domestic constituents a safe distance from the mayhem.
Immutable geography, the imbalance of power, and the Russian sense of entitlement (and willingness to assert it by force) suggest that it would be far more useful for the West to propose that Ukraine make a commitment (i) not to join NATO or the EU; (ii) to adopt permanent neutrality along Swiss lines; and (iii) to hold a referendum in Donbas: stay with Ukraine or join Russia. Ukraine would reflexively reject these commitments. Nor is there a guarantee that they would cause Putin to desist from further efforts to undermine Ukraine.
But, distasteful as the recognition of reality often is, these proposals offer at least the chance of fewer useless Ukrainian deaths than does the West’s encouragement of trial by combat that Ukraine will never win and for which Western military support will be half-hearted at best. Besides, demographics alone make Donbas a perpetual threat to the stability of the rest of Ukraine. Better for the West to press Ukraine to acknowledge this and to be prepared to cede Donbas. Only then would it stand a chance of becoming a viable state.
As other neighbors can attest, living next to the colossus that is Russia is hardly easy no matter who sits in the Kremlin. When it comes to Ukraine, even a Russian leader less gangsterish or less nostalgic for empire than Putin will demand a Russian say on what is happening there, be it out of an emotional commitment to fellow Slavs or as a distraction to the Russians he rules. Meaningful resistance to those demands will need a thriving Ukraine. Only a Ukraine unflattened by the Russian military makes that possible. It’s past time for the West to educate the Ukrainian government accordingly.
