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Painful Choices Lie in the Path to Peace in Ukraine by David Ignatius
Political crossfire Painful Choices Lie in the Path to Peace in Ukraine
by David Ignatius
In the agonizing final years of the Vietnam War, a strategist named Fred Iklé wrote a treatise titled “Every War Must End.” His basic theme was that “wars are easier to start than to stop” – a message that applies powerfully now to the conflict in Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine had been meeting for preliminary peace talks in Turkey last week, which has raised hopes for a settlement. Both sides have described the same basic terms for resolving the conflict: In exchange for a halt in the fighting, Ukraine would agree to a neutral military status that wouldn’t threaten Russia.
But this formula masks painful choices: Such a pact would grant Russian President Vladimir Putin at least partial victory. For many in Ukraine and the West, that is unacceptable. Putin launched an unprovoked, illegal invasion. His army committed atrocities against civilians. He shouldn’t be rewarded for such behavior.
The Biden administration’s view is that it’s up to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to decide whether to settle for neutrality or keep fighting for a better deal. “The Ukrainians will have to decide when the situation on the ground is ripe for a settlement,” argues Stephen Hadley, a former national security adviser to President George W. Bush who keeps close contact with the Biden team.
After fighting so valiantly, Ukrainians won’t want a settlement that leaves the country disarmed and vulnerable to a future attack. “This is viable to me in only one way – the kind of neutrality that Switzerland has – fully armed, with a citizen army,” Konstantin Gryshchenko, an influential former foreign minister of Ukraine, told me in an interview.
The Russian military has performed poorly so far, and some Ukrainians think more fighting will bring victory. But U.S. officials specializing in Russia are skeptical. Russia is a large country with the ability to resupply and reposition its forces; Ukraine is a relatively small one that’s short on the essentials for survival. The war is 40 days old; who can say what the battlefield situation might be in six months or a year?
Iklé offered a useful caution: “It often happens in wars that the weaker party makes no attempt to seek peace while its military strength can still influence the enemy but fights until it has lost all its power to bargain.” He called this “self-destructive perseverance.”
Iklé was similarly skeptical of punitive tactics such as Russia’s seeming determination to bomb its way to a desirable settlement. “Inflicting ‘punishment’ on the enemy nation is not only an ineffective strategy for ending a war, it may well have side effects that actually hasten the defeat of the side that relies on that strategy,” he wrote.
Often, wars don’t end with a peace treaty but a cease-fire that leaves forces in place along a “line of control.” Some analysts think Russia may be moving toward
such an outcome by consolidating its forces in a swath of southeastern Ukraine that could eventually stretch from Odessa to the Donbas region.
Such partition lines are messy but can be surprisingly durable. North and South Korea are still separated without a formal peace treaty. A disputed line of control separates India and Pakistan, and also India and China. Vietnam was similarly partitioned for decades.
Harvard’s Graham Allison argues that such a division could allow the Western-allied part of Ukraine to prosper. Before the Russian invasion, he contends, Ukraine was a failing state – one of the rare post-Soviet republics whose real gross domestic product per capita actually declined after 1991. A future Western Ukraine might become a version of South Korea, Allison says.
As Russia and Ukraine exchange peace proposals, the United States and its allies are subtly pressuring Russia through what has been their best tool – the release of declassified intelligence. The latest installment was a series of statements this week by U.S. and British officials arguing that Putin’s bloody invasion was marked by the Russian leader’s delusion and the incompetence of his advisers. “Putin’s advisers are afraid to tell him the truth,” but “the extent of these misjudgments must be crystal clear to the regime,” argued Jeremy Fleming, director of Britain’s code-breaking agency GCHQ, in a speech on Thursday.
That zinger was aimed directly at the Kremlin, and it could have several interesting consequences: Putin may further blame his military and intelligence chiefs for failing to warn him of the disaster ahead; the generals and spies may further resent their remote president who has waged what Fleming described as his “personal war”; and the Russian people may mistrust both Putin and his security chiefs.
The most hopeful development I saw in this week’s peace feelers was a statement by Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky that, although Moscow rejects Ukrainian membership of NATO, it “has no objection Ukraine’s aspirations to join the European Union.”
Maybe that is a building block for a real settlement. For a European Ukraine would represent a profound defeat for Putin’s dream of hegemony over Kyiv. That’s an essential requirement for a peace deal, along with stopping the killing.
