(Washington Insider Magazine)-While the entire world watches Ukraine and Russia bitterly fight over tracts of land as though they were observing the first world war, there are many different voices who simply do not agree with the international communities current means of rebuking Russia for their entirely unwarranted invasion. Many of these voices and groups have not sought to downplay what Russia has done, but simply seek to make the point – as I have previously pointed out myself – known that sanctions, if or when they do “work,” are not efficient means for stopping already-started conflicts that their threat was unable to quell in the first instance; there are others, however, who do not take this particular stance on the current global circumstance.
Some of these particular individuals and groups, but certainly not all of them of course, come from, seemingly, many of the most extreme sub-sections of the abstract and very nuanced political spectrum; from left to right, they are present and allies in this intellectual endeavor. Yet as a robust opponent of the sanction regime dating back many years myself, and as someone who thoroughly desires greater international cooperation and mutual diplomatic efforts, I empathize with some of their reasons and objections – although, to be sure, definitely not all of them.
And that is because many of those groups, politicians, analysts, reporters, think tanks, and the like, say that the world’s objections to Russian belligerence is unwise and/or entirely unreasonable – not because they believe another option for helping Ukraine or holding Russia to account is more reasonable, but because they often do not speak as though they believe Russia has done anything wrong whatsoever, and certainly not in comparison to nations like the United States or the United Kingdom.
They discuss – in many cases, hamhandedly – that the foreign policies and actions of the United States and many of its greatest allies are, to varying degrees, hypocritical (as though this is a secret that no one else is aware of); this cry of hypocrisy creates the appearance that, far from actually being upset with those atrocities that the US and its allies have committed, they would simply like Russia to be allowed to commit similar acts without anyone getting particularly frustrated.
They chat regarding Ukraine’s domestic and international trajectory, oftentimes claiming it to be a Russian national security threat, that Russia and Ukraine have a history that they alone should decide, and that, therefore, the Bear has historical and domestic claims and necessities to consider when dealing with Ukraine; they also often utilize the fact that Ukraine is clearly a still-developing eastern European democracy and certainly has many issues to deal with going forward.
These individuals do not talk about all of Russia’s obvious and glaring domestic and international issues, however – which also includes neo-Nazis. And, when reading or appraising their thoughts, they move seemingly immediately towards a plan of appeasing Russia’s desires as though that Bear will not seek any more of what it wishes if given just a bit more of what it demands without any pushback; they seem unaware that, were having neo-Nazis or their equivalents in your country internationally enough to legally warrant a full-scale military invasion, few if any nations would be free of the terror of external invasion currently.
Those that are not all-out rooting for Russia to dominate Ukraine – believing it to be a den of neo-Nazis, as opposed to a nation which, like many nations across the world, has neo-Nazis existing in it – have, from nations like Hungary and Italy, to names like Henry Kissinger to Noam Chomsky, suggested that Ukraine, its people, and the entire world for that matter, would be best off cutting a deal with Russia to cede territory that Russia wants for either satellite nations buffering them and the rest of Ukraine and the western nations of Europe, or else to incorporate into the greater Russian polity.
While the latter seems the current course that Russia is looking to take as it sorts out its disasterously mismanaged and poorly trained military, Ukraine seems incredibly unlikely at this point – just as its achieving real progress in retaking land from Russia – to look to give up any land in any sort of treaty that cedes Russia anything acquired since 2014.
There was a point in time not too long ago where one could ask their reader to suppose that Russia really believed itself to be making strides and significant progress since the opening dreadful months of the special operation into Ukraine; why then, one might then ask, would it even choose to settle for something along the lines of a negotiated settlement anyway? If Russian President Vladimir Putin’s initial aims were to march the troops into Ukraine, simply to empower the pro-Russian population and that nation’s military to overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, if he had previously said that negotiations would become more difficult with time, and felt that the tides of the conflict were turning, why would he not seek to re-expand his war aims, and to even take all of Ukraine? Perhaps Moldova too, at some stage either during or after.
These were and still remain questions worth asking, and questions that many of those hollowly suggesting simple outs for the Ukrainian people and state that involve giving up parts of their nation to an invading country – either under the pretense that they deserve it or not – do not seem able, or willing, to consider when speaking or writing regarding the subject. Things are today, however, much different in this conflict than they were just two months ago.
The entire circumstance remains simple enough to outline given the proper appraisal, however, and while that appraisal has changed somewhat, so too have the logical and practical conditions of any hypothetical Russian-Ukrainian settlement.
Both Russia and Ukraine have a delicate dance moving forward, but one at this point has more of the momentum than the other; in the days and weeks immediately after the Russian-Ukrainian Grain Deal was signed, I believed that the war could at that stage of it – far from ending quickly as I had once believed and hoped – stretch on indefinitely as each side dug in for a real protracted and gritty conflict. This still appears to be the course we are headed upon, with neither national government willing to stop in their efforts.
However, given the continuing success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive against the Russians, further news coming out of that nation concerning their economy and civil unrest associated with the recently announced partial mobilzation, it would seem that, while Russia would like to continue the conflict until their desired outcome is reached, the people that comprise that society are growing ever more tired of fighting in Ukraine.
Russia understands that its moves thus far have not been so smooth, and have resulted in many of the otherwise unnecessary innovations that they themselves allegedly began the war citing, alongside the neo-Nazis and all that. The recent failures, stumbles and incidents only magnify the present and future state of the nation should it continue on the path that Vladimir Putin has long set it upon. Yet it has also created interest from potentially vulnerable nations in joining both the European Union (EU) and the previously superfluous-looking North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Sweden and Finland have found joining the former union more desirable, whereas the likelihood of Ukraine and Moldova joining the latter appears more likely than ever before sometime in the future too. Russia has brought to life many of the fears that it credited with having begun the conflict in the first place. While these processes are all actively occurring, Ukraine – whatever size it ultimately ends up being – certainly wishes for them to occur faster still.
How then, does Russia wish to respond to all of those prospects? They have stated previously that they would have to “rebalance” moves from nations like Sweden and Finland with moves of their own; how far would those moves go into Eastern Europe, and are they today even remotely possible? They currently have their alliances within and without the CSTO – although those appear to hold less weight given the demonstrated incompetence of the Russian military against Ukraine – and so moving west into Europe seems the only reasonable direction left to “secure” themselves. India is not really with Russia in this fight, and China is likely watching Russia atrophy as it purchases cheap oil from its dying carcass – of which it will later vassalize once this conflict has ceased and Russia has shrunken in stature and ability.
But, returning to the conflict and its diplomacy, should Russia and Ukraine for some reason cut a deal in the near future – of which includes land cessions from Ukraine to Russia – then each side would essentially be freezing, with that bilateral deal, the new borders of eastern Europe for some time. Russia is currently in the process of annexing the land that has been collected since 2014 across Ukraine, in the hopes of securing for itself leverage in any future negotiations as well as a further pretense to use violent military force under the guise of defending the nation itself.
For, while Russia at one time would’ve allowed for – even promoted – the creation of hyper-local, Russuphilic national puppet states should that land not be absorbed by the likes of that nation or perhaps even Belarus as well, the situation for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his administration has grown far more dire. These swaths of land might not be under pro-Russian control for much longer, and so declaring them a part of Russia now feels for them the smartest way forward. While Ukraine may have, at some juncture, had to think and consider what type of treaty could be reasonable to accept, their President and his nation truly believe now as much as ever before that they can win and take back land first acquired by Russia in 2014.
Giving into Russia any concessions of land realistically loses that land for Ukraine and those Ukrainians who live there – with borders that have, numerous times, been settled upon – for the foreseeable future; decades maybe, longer. As the history of Russia and nations like Poland and Lithuania shows, with those three Partitions of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania from the 18th century the most glaring examples – although Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg and Królewiec, is as well – giving cultural or territorial claim to the Russians essentially means that that area is remaining Russian once the Russians have acquired it.
Hence, Ukraine, no matter how the conflict goes from this point onward, would wish to end the conflict with as much territory as they began it with in 2014. While Russia has been able to survive the sanction yolk currently enthralling it thus far, just over eight months have passed at the time this piece was finally finished. Russia is using Soviet-era surface-to-air missiles (SAM) units to bombard ground targets; they are shooting down their best planes, and continue to face unrest from within the military and across the society; they are also relying ever-more heavily upon their current allies even as those allies pull back and away from the flailing and failing nation-state.
Sanctions are, to be clear, devastating Russia – simply not in the ways that have so far lead to this conflict ending in any sort of timely manner; they are making life less bearable for millions of Russians in cities, towns, and the massive, endlessly sprawling countryside, affecting people, many industries – including armaments and various military industries, on top of common commodities and luxuries – and the society both presently and moving forward.
The sanctions yolk will be responsible for numerous unintended and not always positive circumstances, which could include unrest to a degree that eventually dislodges the current regime from power; that has long appeared a pipe dream, but truly feels more likely than ever before given reports coming out of and pertaining to Russia. To put it another way, the poison that sanctions use to disable their targets simply takes too long to be efficient in stopping conflicts of this nature in the short term, should it have previously failed in preventing them from starting in the first place.
When I began this piece some time ago, I asked these questions at this point in the essay, and expounded as I am wont to in essays such as this:
Does Ukraine, which continues to get assistance from countries across the world with humanitarian aid, weapons, technology, and the like, believe that it can turn the tide sufficiently enough to win back large swaths of Ukraine from Russia, or even to push it back further entirely? It is, in many ways, as much of a gamble as Russia takes should they ever reject Ukrainian-backed discussions of that nature; Vladimir Putin warned that negotiations would become harder with time, but that only does suppose that the Russia military becomes more imposing with time too.
If they continue only to have access to the remnants of their old, stored weaponry of 40 years ago, then Ukraine does have a real shot going forward to recover what they have thus far lost in this see-saw conflict. If that is the case, however, Russia will not be looking to take Moldova, no matter how small it is, because it will continue to have its hands full in even taking and holding towns, cities, and still greater swaths of land. Part of what makes coming to an intellectual place where both parties feel comfortable to agree to anything so difficult is that the momentum of victories in battle often inspires the feeling that more can be had; why would the winning side want to sue for peace when they could still better their hand? Russia to have more of Ukraine than they had before this conflict began, and Ukraine to have as much or more of their own nation as they had either in 2014 or at the beginning of this violent chapter of their conflict with Russia.
All of this minutia goes into the decisions emanating from all sides of this conflict, and so, again, for those pundits who are not fanatical Russophiles, consistently excusing the behaviour of despots and dictators because the rest of the world is also full of unfortunate people and awful policies, they should consider all of that before they simply suggest that a nation give internationally recognized land away – with people who largely identify with and as Ukrainians, supporting a Ukrainian state. The world needs not singular, one-sided criticism, but equal criticism that allows for us to critique all nations honestly, whether it be the US, the UK, Russia, Ukraine, China, or any other polity; that is the only way to further the human experiment in all of its facets.
To date, Russia looks less likely to possess at the end of this conflict the territory that it had in May of this year than it did at the time I first wrote those words; Moldova appears safe, if for no other reason then that Russia is highly ineffective despite its massive size and investment in fighting. Ukraine does have a real chance to size the day and push Russia out of its land, while sending the political career of Russian President Putin to the very same grave he has sent so many young Russians and Ukrainians during this horrid war. Multilateral, international machinations against wrongdoing can change the course of events and history in ways that singular, unilateral defiance simple cannot inspire.
In the final analysis, whatever is ultimately decided by this conflict vis-a-vis land, territory, borders, domestic and international leadership, as well as everything else that seems to accompany this war, will likely last and remain as it is settled upon for some decades to come. While it, at some point not too long ago, might have seemed a terrifying prospect for one side over the other, it feels safe to say that the roles have now switched. For both sides, however – the invading Russians and their allies, and the dug-in Ukrainians and their allies – losing is even less of an option than it ever has been before. For Russia, because they are now losing what they had put so much effort and human lives in to obtaining, and for Ukraine, because they have exceeded the expectations of the global community and their adversary so greatly that there actually is a real chance of pushing the Bear back East so that Ukraine can actually focus and work to better itself and fix some of its own flaws and issues.
