There is a problem with talk about providing an “off ramp” to Russian president Vladimir Putin as the war in Ukraine gets bogged down in murderous annihilation.
Clearly he believes either that he can pretend to negotiate with the Ukrainian government while all the while trying to annihilate it or else he believes that he can annex large chunks of Ukraine in some internationally brokered peace agreement which will also include an end to sanctions, thus rewarding his cruel war of aggression. Either way that amounts to a win-win situation for the Kremlin.
Neither scenario is acceptable. Before the war, perhaps it was possible for Kyiv to contemplate letting go of Crimea and the Russian dominated areas in the Donbas region in return for a western guarantee of freedom for the rest of Ukraine and access to the European Union economy as a partner state – like the European Economic Area members.
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But that was then; now is now. Unless the Russian Federation suffers severe and lasting consequences for its criminal war, Putin will remain in office and follow a strategy of reculer pour mieux sauter [to draw back in order to make a better jump].
Doubtless all of this intelligence is leaked to indicate to Putin that his security apparatus is dangerously exposed
It seems to me that Nato was correct not to attempt to use its members’ military forces in support of the Ukrainians, if only because that would have seemed precipitate and risked embroiling Nato in an all-out war with Russia which could so easily escalate into nuclear war.
But watching Ukraine slowly succumb to destruction at the hands of the Russian military is simply not sustainable at this point. It would destroy the credibility of the western democracies and enslave a nation of 44 million Europeans in a revived USSR. It would expose the Georgians and the Moldovans to a similar fate.
Western intelligence has correctly predicted Putin’s war plans thus far. Now the same sources reveal that Russia is seeking Chinese support in the form of military drone technology and hardware. Doubtless all of this intelligence is leaked to indicate to Putin that his security apparatus is dangerously exposed and to warn the Chinese that they will be held accountable if they assist Putin’s prosecution of his vicious war. Nobody should be under any mistake but that President Xi was aware in advance of the Kremlin’s plans and tacitly approved of them. Russia and China have over the course of the last 18 months secretly agreed a regime of mutual political support.
Timidity in the name of diplomacy presupposes that the other party is playing by remotely the same rules
The West has been slow to call out this new entente between Moscow and Beijing for what it is. And the West has sent all the wrong messages to Putin – especially under the Trump presidency – a period in which Trump described the EU as an opponent of America, deprecated Nato as a financial rip-off of the US, treated the Ukrainian democracy as a pawn in his campaign against Biden, and chose to openly discredit his own intelligence agencies’ confirmation of Putin’s interference in the US electoral process. He accepted Putin’s word on the matter – for whatever reason.
It wasn’t just the limp response to the Kremlin poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Alexei Navalny. Putin tried to kill a previous Ukrainian premier, Viktor Yushchenko, during an election. All this elicited a timid squeak from the West in retrospect. When Putin’s glove puppet in Minsk used jet fighters to hijack an Irish plane in order to kidnap and imprison a political opponent, there were no real consequences for Moscow or Belarus. A ban on civil aviation to either country could have made a point effectively.
Timidity in the name of diplomacy presupposes that the other party is playing by remotely the same rules. Where that is not the case, the result is Munich 1938, a point at which those in Germany’s army who were willing to depose Hitler rather than go to war the following year were let down by the naivety of his opponents.
There are alternatives to doing nothing or attempting a no-fly zone for all of Ukraine. One of them is to massively ramp up military assistance to the Zelenskiy government and to make it very clear that any interference with western assistance of Kyiv, the democratic government of a sovereign member state of the United Nations, will not be tolerated. Instead of a single no-fly zone, protected air corridors to the Ukrainian government territory could be instituted. Violation should carry the threat of immediate and effective air response against the violators. Such a ramp up at this stage is far better than naive diplomatic efforts to tempt Putin with “off ramps” of his own choosing.
Pure diplomacy had its chance and it failed. Hoping that Kyiv pulls off a miracle is wrong and unsustainable.