Ukraine Endgame
Eventually wars end.
Maybe it ends with Ukraine overrun. Maybe Russia withdraws in defeat. Maybe both sides need to experience frustration and hopelessness before a settlement can happen. Maybe a leader needs to die, be killed, or be deposed. Eventually something happens.
Guest Post author Jeffrey Laurenti is an expert on foreign policy. He is a college classmate, a political scientist, a former senior analyst with a boutique foreign policy think tank. He lives in New Jersey, where he has been active in Democratic politics.
Jeffrey told me he thinks Putin misplayed his hand on Ukraine for the past decade. He undermined Ukraine president Viktor Yankovych, "a pro-Russian stooge," by making him abandon a hard-negotiated economic accord with the E.U. Then he shaved off the Russian-speaking eastern provinces that had guaranteed a pro-Russian vote of between 45% and 52% in Ukrainian national elections. And then he went to war without evident reason or urgency. Taking them out of the Ukrainian electorate guaranteed a West-leaning majority of at least 65%.
Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti
Russians ushered in the new year with yet another fireworks display over Ukraine, knocking out electrical power in Kyiv and other cities. Ukrainians celebrated their more focused strike on a building in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied east where hundreds of newly mobilized Russian conscripts were housed.
The two sides in Mr. Putin’s war did not grant each other even a holiday’s reprieve in their grinding struggle, where the lines of control appear to have budged scarcely an inch since winter set in. It is less the front lines than the home front where the war is now being fought: Russia seeks to demoralize Ukrainians with winter hardship and to sap their will to resist, while Ukraine presses to exhaust Russia’s military capabilities and trigger a collapse of its demoralized soldiery.At the moment this looks like a classic war of attrition, where relentless death and destruction aren’t translating into territorial gains on either side; the question is, will one side crack first?
We may devoutly hope – I certainly do – that Russia’s war machine cracks first and quickly, that Vladimir Putin suddenly discovers he wants to spend more time with his family, and that a replacement leadership in Moscow disengages from the war, dismantles the ultranationalist security state built around Mr. Putin’s old KGB cohort, offers the Russian citizenry a second chance at democracy, and recognizes Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. That is certainly a possible outcome, assuming the entire Western world continues to serve as the arsenal for unflagging Ukrainian national spirit, and the one we should hope to see.
But sometimes wars of attrition go on and on and on, with neither side suddenly crumbling. They can end in compromises among exhausted combatants. Perhaps this spring Kyiv may gauge the Ukrainian public’s enthusiasm for continuing the war till every last Russian combatant is expelled from Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory.
It may be that those last Russian combatants are only withdrawn in the context of a settlement in which an international peacekeeping force, presumably organized through the United Nations, provisionally replaces them in the eastern Ukrainian territories still occupied by Russia when a ceasefire is put in place.
The future political status of those territories might then be determined by a U.N.-administered referendum in each of the contested territories vacated by Russian security and paramilitary forces in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea. The risk that the ethnic Russian populations in those territories might sway the electoral result toward Moscow would be a bitter pill for Ukrainian nationalists – but those populations’ sour experience of the Putin regime’s empty promises might also make reunion with a now Western-aligned Ukraine an attractive option.
Presumably no settlement would impede the International Criminal Court from proceeding at its lumbering pace to prosecute war crimes in this conflict, including the crime of aggression.