Realism about the Russo-Ukraine War
and why peace should not be the goal.
On February 24, 2022, the 8 year war between Russian and Ukraine went from simmer to boil. Yeah, it’s been going on for eight years.
Armchair diplomats, peace activists, and a trickle of politicians have begun advocating negotiating an end to a war that in the last two months has produced enough atrocities and war crimes that that even some Republicans have become “woke”. The wokeness on the Right is hardly surprising, there are about 900,000 ethnic Ukranian living in the U.S.
On the other side, armchair generals, militarists, and a sizable chunk of GOP politicians have been pushing for some level of escalation on the Unites States’s part. Whether the Right gets how brutal the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the world are is academic — militarism is sexy, tangible, and let’s a bunch of over-the-hill politicians, most of whom are chicken-hawks, look tough.
Some realism before everyone jumps into peacetalks or expanded war:
There is no negotiating with Putin in power - Russia has violated two treaties specifically with regard to Ukraine, i.e. the Minsk Protocols. Now, Putin has committed war crimes and seems to be headed to genocidal goals. Putin has been implicated in the assassinations of so many of his foes that Ukraine warned its negotiators to bring their own food and water to venues to discuss safe corridors to allow refugees to leave war zones.
The next “free election” in Russia is 2 years from now — March 2024.
Economic Sanctions should not be lifted before Russia has had free elections — The effectiveness of sanctions as a curb to Russia’s anti-democratic militarism, which is frighteningly close to Hitler’s lebensraum, won’t show their full effect for years. Putin and his oligarchy know this. Allowing Putin to negotiate a military pullback for a return to the status quo is pointless pragmatism and blind-faith idealism.
Putin and his oligarchy are maneuvering in Eastern Europe to retake its post-U.S.S.R. republics. Georgia was their first attempt in 2008. Ukraine appears to be a better planned reset of that long-term goal.
President Biden has been the savvy genius here in getting near universality in imposing sanctions on Russia — and he must hold this near whole world coalition together for at least the next 2 years.
A weakened NATO emboldened Putin not an expanded stronger NATO — It did not take long before the neo-conservatives started spoutinging their nonsense of how the West (specifically NATO) was the cause of the Russo-Ukraine war.
Blaming democratic autonomy and regional security is belied by this salient fact. Since the war began, four nations have joined NATO (Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, and North Macedonia). The Soviet Union consumed numerous ethnic nations to make itself — none of them were those four nation-states on the Balkan peninsula. Upon the fall of the U.S.S.R., many former Soviet republics became free, autonomous, and democratic states1; but nothing, since the rise of Russian militarism, can be tied to NATO expansion.
Putin was emboldened to be more aggressive by the election of Donald Trump and 4 years of distinctly anti-NATO sentiments during the Trump Administration. Putin, like Trump, has not been a fan of democracy or nation-state autonomy, and February 24, 2022 seemed like an opportunistic moment to lauch a full scale invasion.
Until the Russian oligarchy is disassembled, peace in Eastern Europe is not a realistic goal — fighting for democratic autonomy is. To that end, the United States and the coalition supporting Ukraine needs to remain in this 21st century version of Lend-Lease2 for at least the next 23 months.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09636410591002509?journalCode=fsst20
The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 was the precursor of the U.S. entry into World War II.