Russia and Ukraine: deal or no deal?

The choicest clichés are timeless.  In 1939, Winston Churchill said that he could not “forecast the action of Russia” (by which he meant the Soviet Union). It was a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. The old warrior was right then and he is right now.

The Wagner uprising hasn’t shed much light on the Russian enigma. Was it a coup manqué? Was Russia really on the verge of civil conflict? Was Yevgeny Prigozhin, hot dog salesman turned mercenary overlord, bluffing to get more attention? How much tacit support did he have in the armed forces?

Nothing I’ve read so far seems entirely convincing. Not even the juicy but improbable conspiracy theory that it was a put-up job by Vladimir Putin to flush out traitors. It’s possible. We just don’t know. We’re back to good old Kremlinology.

There is one thing most Russia-watchers do agree on however: Putin’s authority, after 23 years in power, has been badly shaken. The carefully constructed narrative that there is no viable alternative to Putin the Tsar to hold Russia together – better the devil you know — has been shredded.

Russia, three decades after the collapse of Communism, remains an inherently and dangerously unstable nuclear power. And that in turn must have a profound bearing on the West’s posture towards Russia in general and its existential war against Ukraine in particular.

The Prigozhin gambit coincides with two sharply differing views on how Europe and the US should shape their strategies towards the war, now in its second bloody year.

The first – most often espoused in the US and France – is that this war is unwinnable by either side. It is therefore in the West’s interest to start thinking about what an end might look like.

This approach, favoured by (among others) the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, posits that it doesn’t matter how long the war goes or how well either side does. Russia and Ukraine are doomed to be enemies forever, so we might as well start thinking about what an end to hostilities might look like.

This thesis is powerfully argued by Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, the US public policy think-tank, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. His argument goes something like this: battlefield gains by Ukraine will not necessarily bring about an end to the war; in any case the front line will not (ever) influence the unsettled territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia. Wherever the front line ends up, Ukraine and Russia will continue to pose a threat to each other.

A forever war at Europe’s frontier will be bad for everyone, including the US: a drain on the resources of Ukraine’s supporters as well as a threat to the stability of Europe and in particular to the Baltic nations that might be next in Putin’s sights.

Chapin’s answer is not a peace but an armistice, a cessation of hostilities in place, wherever that may be; a frozen war.  His model is the armistice that paused the Korean war, signed by North and South Korea in 1953.

The two Koreas are still, technically, at war. But nearly 70 years on there has not been another serious outbreak of hostilities. South Korea has emerged from the devastation of the 1950s as an economic powerhouse and a thriving democracy under the protection of the US.

With its airspace closed, its ports subject to blockade, its cities under fire, millions of Ukrainians abroad and foreign investment at a standstill, Ukraine could never achieve economic take-off. An endgame premised on an armistice would leave Ukraine without some of its territory, but able to recover and rebuild with the help of the West. Or so this theory goes.

A starkly alternative theory comes out this week by a think-tank on this side of the Atlantic – Chatham House. Its starting point is, that time and again, Russia has proved itself over decades to be a rogue state. Appeasing it will only feed its atavistic and imperial compulsions. There is, in other words (at least for now) no reasoning with the Kremlin.

The authors argue – equally powerfully – that the only way to deal with this perma-threat is to help Ukraine inflict a clear and unambiguous defeat on Russia.

It agrees with the RAND report in one respect: a ceasefire or an armistice will leave Putin convinced that his unprovoked grab of Ukrainian territory was justified, a success and the correct choice. Wherever the armistice line is will be a jumping point for the next push to obliterate Ukraine.

The authors make two other important points. The first is that the line pushed in Europe, mainly by French President Emmanuel Macron, that “we must not humiliate Russia “ signals in advance to Putin that he can cut a deal, knowing that he will be able to keep at least some of his gains.

The second is that the West is caught in a circular argument: by planning, in effect, for a partial defeat for Ukraine (because Russia is deemed unbeatable) you deliver fewer weapons. By delivering fewer and less sophisticated attack weapons, such as fighter aircraft, you make that partial defeat more likely.

The Chatham House report calls for all restrictions on arms transfers to Ukraine to be lifted. Allowing Ukraine a free hand, it says, is “essential for our safety”.

These two opposing views mirror, to a certain extent, the difference between America’s historic instinct to keep out of faraway foreign wars and Europe’s historic need to defend its borders against proximate threats.

It seems that, without an internal transformation of Russia (and we saw how the ultra-nationalist Prigozhin was treated as a hero in Rostov-on-Don) the country remains a clear and present threat to Europe. If Putin falls there’s no knowing who might succeed him.

Pragmatism in the face of aggression seems reasonable until it begins to look like appeasement. There is no easy way out of this war. The Russian army and the political leadership are guilty of atrocious war crimes. Should those go unpunished? What message does that send to other autocrats?

Ultimately how the war is prosecuted must be up to Ukraine. It deserves our unstinting support. It’s the right thing to do. It’s also frankly the only thing, at least until Russia becomes a functioning state that can be relied on not to go haywire every few years.

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