Bringing Russia Back in From the Cold

For Ukraine or all the talk that Vladimir Putin has “changed” over the last several years and that his decision to launch a major military operation in Ukraine must have resulted from illness, COVID‑19‑ enforced isolation, or whatever else have you, the Russian president has been remarkably consistent throughout his career as his country’s chief executive in his insistence that the post‑Cold War settlement needed to be revised. Putin’s belief that the European and global security environments that emerged under American leadership after the implosion of the Soviet Union do not take into account Russia’s position as one of the world’s great powers, and thus must be changed to ensure the overall stability and even legitimacy of a nascent international order. 

Two statements he made during the October 2014 session of the Valdai Discussion Club remain representative of his strategic thinking: First, “the Cold War ended, but it did not end with the signing of a peace treaty with clear and transparent agreements on respecting existing rules or creating new rules and standards. This created the impression that the so‑called ‘victors’ in the Cold War had decided to pressure events and reshape the world to suit their own needs and interests.” Second, “Russia does not need any kind of special, exclusive place in the world […] While respecting the interests of others, we simply want for our own interests to be taken into account and for our position to be respected.” 

The Western calculation seems to be that however much suffering Ukraine sustains, Russia will suffer more and the West will suffer minimally. How, exactly, is this good for Ukraine?

Those two statements need to be put alongside two others he made in April and May 2005, respectively. First, “we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the [twentieth] century.” Second, “People in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain. We do not regret this, we simply state the fact and know that we need to look ahead, not backwards. We will not allow the past to drag us down and stop us from moving ahead. We understand where we should move. But we must act based on a clear understanding of what happened.” 

Such and similar utterances do not amount to expressions of nostalgia or represent prolegomena to inevitable aggression, as has been claimed by a growing chorus of voices in the West; rather, they illustrate Putin’s analytic assessment that a world order in which America sits alone at the “head of the table” (in the words of U.S. President Joe Biden) and determines who else can take a seat and where, is inherently unstable and hence unsustainable; and that giving all due consideration to Russian interests and concerns is a necessary step in devising, at the very least, an agreed seating chart, common rules of dining etiquette, and a menu that addresses everyone’s dietary preferences.  

All this gives the current conflict over Ukraine a much greater degree of salience. The present crisis is not a mere border dispute or territorial claim that can be adjusted by a simple compromise; it is connected to, and even inseparable from, a larger strategic vision that has at its heart a revision of the post‑Cold War era order—at least as it applies to European and Eurasian geography— that was, from the Kremlin’s point of view, deliberately conceived and consciously executed without its meaningful input and assent. Moreover, to the extent that Putin’s long tenure in Russia has shaped Russian strategy and allowed Putin to shape the ranks of the Russian political, security, and economic elites, one could argue Putin has pressed his cognitive imprint about Russia’s role in the world on the Russian national security system. Thus, his departure would not necessarily lead to any substantive change, barring a fundamental “root and branch” restructuring of the Russian governing elite. 

Together with other senior members of the Russian government, Putin adheres to a clinically realist worldview in which powers either push out into the rest of the world or run the risk of other powers pushing in.

Given the circumstances, this seems quite unlikely: it is hard to forecast a realistic scenario in which post‑Putin Russia would be led by anyone who could garner the support of the country’s most relevant domestic stakeholders and cement his legitimacy through a victory at the polls and demonstrate the wherewithal to strategically reorient Russia’s foreign policy posture in a direction that would become compatible with what amounts to an “end of history” worldview that one of us (Krnjević) argued in the Winter 2021‑2022 edition of Baku Dialogues is the core belief animating the Biden Administration’s foreign policy. 

Together with other senior members of the Russian government, Putin adheres to a clinically realist worldview in which powers either push out into the rest of the world or run the risk of other powers pushing in. For the Russian elite, the principal threat is the United States, the country that Putin identified in his February 2007 Munich Security Conference speech with the assessment that it “has overstepped its national borders in every way.” The Russian elite does not believe in any altruistic liberal internationalist vision of world affairs (i.e., the latest version of the aforementione d “end of history” hypothesis), where major powers work to secure the welfare of all within a framework in which democracy is the sole legitimate form of government; therefore, they hear repeated U.S. and European pronouncements about defending a “rulesbased liberal international order” as code for retaining and enhancing Western hegemony. As Putin made clear in the same 2007 speech, appeals to respect the “rules” of the liberal international order are, in his view, “designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries.

Russia’s position as a great power is defined, in part, by being able to maintain an independent Eurasian pole of power. Thus, Putin wants to ensure that what is arguably the most powerful military alliance in history does not yet again expand its borders in such a way that these further come up directly against his country or reliable allied states like Belarus.

Putin believes that Russia has no choice but to remain as one of the agenda‑setting powers of the world. His view of “sovereign democracy” is that a Russia that lacks the wherewithal to defend itself from outside pressure will find itself forced to adopt Western standards (or, an outcome expressly much more quietly in Moscow, a very junior partnership with China). Instead, as he also expressly noted in his Munich speech, Russia wants to join with a coalition of rising powers of the global South and East in order to “strengthen multipolarity” and compel the United States to accept a “reasonable balance between the interests of all participants in the international dialogue.”

In turn, Russia’s position as a great power is defined, in part, by being able to maintain an independent Eurasian pole of power—more or less coterminous with the old Soviet Union. Thus, Putin wants to ensure that what is arguably the most powerful military alliance in history does not yet again expand its borders in such a way that these further come up directly against his country or reliable allied states like Belarus. In other words, he wants to cement a buffer zone between the Russian Federation and NATO by preventing additional states that were formally part of the Soviet Union (and now border its successor state as independent countries) from joining the opposing camp. In a world in which Russia’s ability to project power would be greater, this would mean preventing these bordering states that are not NATO members from pursuing foreign policies that are incongruent with Russian national interests. In today’s world, however, this means taking steps to prevent such states from entering into processes whose end point is membership in the Atlantic Alliance or the hosting of Western military on its soil. It also means, quite reasonably, that the West cannot ignore or oppose Moscow’s concerns while expecting the Kremlin to accommodate Western priorities.

This is where Ukraine comes in. Since the breakup of the USSR, Russia has sought to ensure Ukraine does not leave its geopolitical orbit. Ukraine is thus integral to maintaining a much‑diminished Russian sphere of influence. 

Indeed, the Kremlin’s aforementioned strategic imperative is actually nothing new: it has been a constant of Russia’s foreign policy for centuries, becoming actualized in the Westphalian era of interstate relations as early as 1667 (the Treaty of Andrusovo, which affected “left bank” Ukraine), then 1764‑1783 (various treaties with the Cossack Hetmanate, the Ottoman Empire, and others affecting the southern areas of Ukraine and, separately, Crimea), and then in 1772‑1795 (the Partitions of Poland, which affected “right bank” Ukraine). In fact, the only time between the above dates and 1991 when all but the westernmost area of present‑day Ukraine did not belong in peacetime to a state governed out of St. Petersburg or Moscow was in the immediate aftermath of the shortlived Brest‑Litovsk Treaty signed by the Bolsheviks and the German Empire in March 1918. 

To put this in comparative perspective, in the modern period of interstate relations, which began with the coming into force of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, Russia and Ukraine were part of the same state for longer than Belgium or Germany or any of the countries that have joined NATO since the end of the Cold War have been independent, sovereign states; or than Geneva has been a part of  Switzerland and Rome a part of Italy; than Lorraine or Nice have belonged to France and Okinawa to Japan; and longer than the territories making up the Louisiana Purchase, the Texas Annexation, the Mexican Cession, the Oregon Country, and the Alaska Purchase have belonged to the United States of America.

To this can be added that linguistic, cultural, and religious similarities between Russians and Ukrainians were much closer to each other than were the examples enumerated above at the time of the respective political amalgamations (and in some cases, still are today). 

Thus, the matter of proximate if not exactly indistinguishable identity is hardly one of fantasy. In fact, the Kremlin’s official narrative, as expressed by Putin, is not simply dismissible: there is something to the Russian president’s July 2021 claim that Russians and Ukrainians, since “the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty,” have been “one people—a single whole,” and that “Russia and Ukraine […] are parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space.” Indeed, it takes quite a bit of misremembering of the past to dismiss out of hand that for centuries, if not a millennium or more, Russians and Ukrainians have been siblings and perhaps even conjoined twins. This does not imply they should continue to live under a common roof, but, from Moscow’s conception, it does suggest that the relationship between the two can never be analogous to a marriage (in the sense that it can simply be dissolved through divorce). Of course, it also does not imply that the relationship was one of equals. 

This has much to do with the fact that the Russian historiographical narrative, and hence its identity, is distinctly civilizational. In fact, Russia today is unique amongst the major powers for remaining comfortable with what amounts to an imperial legacy. Moreover, today’s Russian Federation is one of the world’s most ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and religiously diverse states—and this fact is largely not due to the influx of immigrants from the developing world or poorer parts of the European geography (in contradistinction to, say, the United States and the European Union).

Indeed, Putin and his inner circle have come to accept many of the broad outlines of the role Russia ought to play in the world as formulated by émigré White Russian thinkers especially grouped around the so‑called “Eurasinist” movement. This perspective argues that the Russian Empire, by gathering up the lands between the Vistula and the Pacific, had created a distinct Eurasian civilization that joined to its ethnic Russian/Orthodox core a variety of different ethnic and religious groups to form a Slavic/Turkic synthesis that, although having a number of points of commonality with European culture, represented a distinct Eurasian civilization that had points of interchange with the Islamic and Asian worlds. This civilization gave purpose to the Russian state and provided for the creation of a common cultural, political, and economic space across the Eurasian landmass.

The émigré Eurasianists reluctantly accepted the reality of Soviet power as the only force capable of holding this Eurasian entity together after the collapse and disintegration of the Russian Empire. Yet they always viewed the Marxist‑Leninist ideological project as a distraction; a diversion of resources to pursue chimerical visions of uniting the world’s proletariat and support revolutionary movements far from Russia’s core interests that only ended up draining Russian resources and energy. In the 1970s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his famed “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” reiterated these criticisms and called for Moscow to pull back its focus to the Eurasian and Slavic worlds, and, anticipating Putin’s own Arctic strategy by 30 years, advised a concentrated effort to unlock and exploit the riches of the Far North as the basis for regenerating the capabilities of the Russian state. 

To the extent Soviet leaders carried out these missions, Putin sees them as worthy antecedents. However, in the February 2022 speech in which he recognized the independence of the secessionist “peoples’ republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk, he alluded to what the World Bank’s former lead economist Branko Milanović refers to as the “century of betrayals”—a revolutionary Bolshevik elite that rejected the Eurasian focus of a united Russian state in favor of creating separate national republics for the Soviet Union, introducing the possibility of breaking apart the united area of the Eurasian space, and the betrayal of the Soviet elites who focused on feathering their own nests and personal fiefdoms at the expense of holding together the Eurasian enterprise of the Soviet Union. One can easily imagine the present occupant of the Kremlin as a latter‑day Tsar Ivan IV similarly roaming about Red Square, furious at how the nobles are plundering the treasury, refusing to defend the Motherland, and wanting for reasons of personal gain to give the state over to be torn apart by foreigners (in Putin’s case, the third betrayal is that of the United States; more on that below).

This perspective has been consistent, but over the course of his career as prime minister and president, Putin has changed his tactics and approaches in pursuit of these aims. In his first years, he hoped that a post‑9/11 partnership with the United States and cooperation with the European Union and its member states to create a wider European space from Lisbon to Vladivostok would lead to Western recognition of Russian pre‑eminence in what he understood to be the Eurasia region—essentially a division where the Euro‑Atlantic world would voluntarily cease its eastward enlargement at the Vistula and Baltic littoral. 

When it became clear that, in its pursuit of engagement with Russia, the West was not prepared to accede to any Russian sphere of influence (while insisting on what amounts to a right to expand its own all the way to Russian borders), Putin’s approach became more controversial as he began to signal his readiness to use force to derail the West’s Euro‑Atlantic enlargement project—as reflected in his 2007 Munich speech and  his 2008 tête‑à‑tête with George W. Bush in Bucharest. This culminated in the 2008 Russian incursion into Georgia.From Putin’s perspective, the U.S. had been more than happy to utilize Russia’s influence in Eurasia in order to prosecute the post‑9/11 war on terror, while continuing to oppose Russian economic and political interests in its “near abroad.” The apparent U.S. effort to torpedo a 2003 Russian‑proposed settlement for the Moldova‑Transdnistria conflict (it would have created a decentralized state that would have given the pro‑Russian separatists an effectual veto over Moldova’s conduct of foreign affairs, thus guaranteeing Chișinău’s perpetual neutrality) was viewed in Moscow as a signal that Washington would continue to push the enlargement of the two chief Euro‑Atlantic institutions (i.e., NATO and the EU) into the Eurasian space with an eye to containing and isolating Russia while allowing Western military and economic power to come right up to the borders of the Russian heartland. Since 2003, NATO has admitted 11 new member states and the EU has admitted 11 new member states (not all are the same)—virtually all former members of communist Yugoslavia, the Warsaw Pact, or the Soviet Union itself. 

From Putin’s perspective, the U.S. had been more than happy to utilize Russia’s influence in Eurasia in order to prosecute the post‑9/11 war on terror, while continuing to oppose Russian economic and political interests in its “near abroad.” The apparent U.S. effort to torpedo a 2003 Russian‑proposed settlement for the Moldova‑Transdnistria conflict (it would have created a decentralized state that would have given the pro‑Russian separatists an effectual veto over Moldova’s conduct of foreign affairs, thus guaranteeing Chișinău’s perpetual neutrality) was viewed in Moscow as a signal that Washington would continue to push the enlargement of the two chief Euro‑Atlantic institutions (i.e., NATO and the EU) into the Eurasian space with an eye to containing and isolating Russia while allowing Western military and economic power to come right up to the borders of the Russian heartland. Since 2003, NATO has admitted 11 new member states and the EU has admitted 11 new member states (not all are the same)—virtually all former members of communist Yugoslavia, the Warsaw Pact, or the Soviet Union itself.  

The shock in the West at the 2008 Georgia incursion, which demonstrated how clearly the Russian establishment viewed the existential threat of further Western enlargement towards its borders, led to a pause and an effort to “reset” the West’s relations with Russia. Yet, the efforts of both U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy foundered on the rejection of the 2010 proposals made by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for rethinking security architecture in Europe, decreased in likelihood due to the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, and ended with the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” in Ukraine, with the forced ouster of its president, Viktor Yanukovych— who, it should be noted, had been immediately recognized by the West as having been legitimately elected—only hours after Russia had been explicitly assured that the European Union negotiators in Kyiv had settled on an orderly transition of power. Since that time,  Russia has embarked on a dual approach: using “sharp power” tools to try to impact politics in Western societies while also hoping that dependence on Russian energy and resources by European economies would produce sympathetic business and political leaders.

Ukraine’s strategic real estate (particularly Crimea) in ‘friendly’ hands allowed Russia a safe and secure pathway to project power into the heart of Europe and the greater Middle East; in ‘unfriendly’ hands, it would have not only pushed back Russian power, but also exposed critical vulnerabilities of the Russian heartland. 

Key to all of Putin’s plans has been to ensure a friendly and pliable Ukrainian government—or, at the very least (since 2014), a militarily neutral one. Ukraine’s economy, resource base, and population are critical for the success of any Russian‑led Eurasian Union, which is the manifestation of Russia’s ability to create that independent “Eurasian pole of power” that counterbalances a China‑led Asian sphere with the Euro‑Atlantic world. Ukraine’s strategic real estate (particularly Crimea) in ‘friendly’ hands allowed Russia a safe and secure pathway to project power into the heart of Europe and the greater Middle East; in ‘unfriendly’ hands, it would have not only pushed back Russian power, but also exposed critical vulnerabilities of the Russian heartland. 

Ukraine also serves an important role in validating Putin’s belief in a pan‑Russian/Orthodox civilization that is distinct from (although related to) European/Western culture. Indeed, Putin has consistently articulated this view—most notably in the aforementioned July 2021 essay on the essential unity between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. Moreover, there is a long tradition in Russian intellectual history of assigning blame to the pronounced emphasis on cultural, linguistic, and in some cases religious differences between Russians, on the one hand, and Belarussians and Ukrainians, on the other, as arising from efforts by outsiders to divide the ‘common Russian’ people and attempt to peel away these ‘western Russian people’ from their Russian brothers and sisters to the east. If Russian nineteenth‑century writers identified the Polish‑Lithuania Commonwealth as the instigator of these efforts to “divide” the Russian people, then their twenty‑first‑century continuators see the hand of Brussels and Washington. 

Since 2014, Ukraine’s political elite has rejected acceptance of the country’s position as a keystone state connecting the Eurasian and European worlds, which would require some accommodation of Russian security, economic, and political concerns. This approach contrasted with the efforts taken by other post‑Soviet states like Azerbaijan.

Faced with the “loss” of Ukraine in 2014, Putin took several intermediate steps: assuming direct control of the Crimean Peninsula—so vital for Russia’s ability to project power across the entire Caspian‑Black SeaEastern Mediterranean zone—in the context of a hastily‑organized referendum on “reunifying Crimea with Russia,” whose result (97 percent in favor) was not recognized by the West, while backing two separatist entities in southeastern Ukraine (also not recognized by the West) as a way to preclude Ukraine from taking steps to join key Euro‑Atlantic institutions, starting with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. At the same time, Russia started a series of new geo‑economic projects to more closely bind Europe’s economies to Russia’s resource base.

Ukraine’s political elite, in turn, rejected acceptance of the country’s position as a keystone state connecting the Eurasian and European worlds, which would require some accommodation of Russian security, economic, and political concerns. This approach contrasted with the efforts taken by other post‑Soviet states like Azerbaijan, which recognized both Putin’s determination to recreate a Eurasian pole of power and the limits of the Western powers to fully resist that trend. The tack was first taken by Azerbaijan in the context of negotiating the complex terms of the landmark 1994 Contract of the Century. Today it consists in the deepening of a genuine foreign policy posture of neutrality or even non‑alignment, which both accepts that Russia had some legitimate concerns and demands in the post‑Soviet space, but also refuses to accept any imposition from Moscow in terms of how Azerbaijan should structure its relations with Turkey, the United States, the EU, NATO, and so on (beyond a few basic red lines like full membership in any organization in which Russia is also not a member). 

Azerbaijan succeeded in large part because its leadership was able to leverage the limited support it received from its Western partners to negotiate Russian respect for its keystone status. A forthright relationship between the two leaders has also been an important factor. Azerbaijan’s successful pursuit of a foreign policy of “strategic hedging” was defined by one of us (Gvosdev) in the Fall 2020 edition of Baku Dialogues as not having to choose between good relations with any of the major power centers of Eurasia, building on Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 statement that Azerbaijan had the potential to become a strategic pivot of Eurasia. The enduring prudence of Baku’s foreign policy is illustrated by the fact that Azerbaijan has emerged as a trusted mediator and interlocutor capable of bringing together partners, rivals, and competitors in what may be called the Silk Road region—and beyond. As a result, every major global and regional actor now has an interest in supporting Azerbaijan’s foreign policy posture, because their own prosperity and security are best served by this arrangement. Rather than relying on great power competition and a zero‑sum approach, Azerbaijan’s focus has been on complementarity, not rivalry, within the framework of a regional transport and energy hub in which all major power centers, including Russia, participate and benefit. This has only become more obvious in the wake of the adoption of the November 2020 tripartite statement that ended the Second Karabakh War, which paves the way for the political and economic normalization of relations in one of the most complex regions of the world. 

In contrast, two successive presidential administrations of Ukraine—those of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy— have resisted emulating some version of Azerbaijan’s foreign policy posture and the evident benefits it has accrued from its position as a keystone state. Instead, they seemed to wholeheartedly embrace the pursuit of a foreign policy originating in many ways in another statement made by Brzezinski in 1997: without Ukraine, he wrote, “Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” But the heads of state of Ukraine mentioned above seemed to overlook the inconvenient fact that Brzezinski did not conceive of Ukraine as anything other than an object or “square” on the “grand chessboard” of Eurasia: his primary motivation was preventing Moscow from placing one of its own pieces on that square, not to suggest a path for Ukraine to transform itself from an object of geopolitical contention into a subject or a keystone state of a nascent international order. 

Thus, neither Poroshenko nor Zelenskyy countenanced adopting constitutional changes that would have prevented Ukraine from continuing towards full integration along the Euro‑Atlantic path as a price for regaining control over the secessionist portions of the Donbass. Instead, Ukraine pushed back against projects such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would allow Moscow to effectually end the use of Ukraine as a strategic transit state for Russian energy headed for European markets. Finally, the successful establishment of an Orthodox Church of Ukraine independent of the Moscow Patriarchate—which was largely a politically‑driven measure supported wholeheartedly by Poroshenko—was a powerful rebuke to the claims of a single Russian/Orthodox civilizational space. Ukraine’s halting but real reform efforts, especially in the military sphere, and closer cooperation with NATO states, also raised the possibility that at some indeterminate point in the future, the balance of forces might shift in Ukraine’s favor, not only regarding the Donetsk and Lugansk entities, but perhaps even Crimea itself.

The Kremlin worked throughout 2021 to get American and European assent to a series of propositions: the permanent neutral status of Ukraine (models include Austria and Finland); acceptance of Nord Stream 2 in return for Russian promises not to cease all energy transit through Ukraine; an end to military cooperation between Ukraine and NATO members; implementation of the Minsk Agreements that, in providing for the reintegration of Donetsk and Lugansk into Ukraine, would effectually give Russia the ability, through those entities, to veto aspects of Ukrainian foreign and domestic policy to which it objected. 

One very recent key turning point for Russia seems to have been the adoption of the “U.S.‑Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership,” signed by U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Ukraine’s foreign minister during the latter’s visit to Washington in November 2021. This document reiterated that the “strategic partnership existing between our two nations is critical for the security of Ukraine and Europe as a whole.” It also underscored a joint “commitment to Ukraine’s implementation of the deep and comprehensive reforms necessary for full integration into European and Euro‑Atlantic institutions” on the basis of the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit Declaration, which had stated explicitly that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” The Charter was evidently not interpreted favorably in Moscow: what the Biden Administration undoubtedly viewed as signal of resolve was perceived by the Kremlin as a sign of intransigence. 

One very recent key turning point for Russia seems to have been the adoption of the “U.S.‑Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership,” signed by U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Ukraine’s foreign minister during the latter’s visit to Washington in November 2021.

Still, Moscow did not abandon its policy of seeking an accommodation with the West (albeit on its own terms)—not only regarding the conflict over Ukraine, but broader questions as well. A little over a month after the U.S.‑ Ukraine Charter was signed, Russia provided written security and arms control proposals to the United States and NATO (the conflict over Ukraine was an integral part but hardly the sole object of these drafts). More than a month after that—so in late January 2022—Washington and Brussels provided counterproposals that fell far short of what the Kremlin had hoped to achieve. In a final set of conversations with FrenchPresident Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that took place soon thereafter, it became clear to Moscow that Paris and Berlin could not override Washington’s objections—thereby confirming the Kremlin’s longstanding view that the European members of NATO (and, by extension, the European Union itself) play little more than Robin to America’s Batman on matters of strategic significance as defined by the United States. 

In launching his “special military operation” deep into Ukraine, Putin has gambled that he can achieve most of his post2014 objectives through a military campaign whilst enduring the impact of Western sanctions.

In launching his “special military operation” deep into Ukraine, Putin has gambled that he can achieve most of his post2014 objectives through a military campaign whilst enduring the impact of Western sanctions.

In launching his “special military operation” deep into Ukraine, Putin has gambled that he can achieve most of his post‑2014 objectives through a military campaign whilst enduring the impact of Western sanctions. Indeed, as he told the Valdai Group back in 2014, “Russia is a self‑sufficient country. We will work within the foreign economic environment that has taken shape, develop domestic production and technology and act more decisively to carry out transformation. Pressure from outside, as has been the case on past occasions, will only consolidate our society, keep us alert, and make us concentrate on our main development goals.

Putin’s assertions about his country’s essential self‑sufficiency, as well as the expectation that Russia, as a provider of critical commodities required by the global economy, starting with energy and fuel, can weather the Western storm, sets the stage for testing how long prolonged economic sanctions against Russia can succeed, or whether the damage they inflict on Russia will cause Putin to change course. The apparent lack of enthusiasm on the part of many inhabitants of Eastern and Southern Ukraine— supposedly bastions of pro‑Russian sentiment—to welcome their “liberation” in 2022, in contradistinction to the case in Crimea in 2014, has also called into question how much Putin’s thesis about the essential unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples applies to the contemporary situation.  

In starting a major military operation in Ukraine, which has demonstrated real weaknesses in both the Russian military and its economy, the Kremlin risks doing more to erode its great power status than any outside Western policy. Russia’s sources of influence in the West are receding as European economies seek to decouple from the Russian natural resource base. To push back against Western economic and political power and influence, Putin, like the canonized Russian prince Alexander Nevsky in the thirteenth century, may have to accept temporary subordination to an Asian superpower in order to preserve Russia’s distinctiveness from Europe. 

A window of opportunity remains ajar, if not exactly wide open, for the West’s leaders to reach out to the Kremlin in order to prevent Russia from taking irreversible steps in the direction of a China so conceived.

This would obviously not be good for Russia. But it is also hard to understand how such an outcome would help the West counter China, a state whose “stated ambitions and assertive behavior present systemic challenges to the rules‑based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security”—in the words of a recent NATO summit document. This and similar statements make it clear that the West has determined that China is its foremost strategic competitor: when the CIA established a new dedicated China Mission Center in October 2021, Director Bill Burns even described its “increasingly adversarial, predatory leadership” as the “most important geopolitical threat we face in the twenty‑first century.” A window of opportunity remains ajar, if not exactly wide open, for the West’s leaders to reach out to the Kremlin in order to prevent Russia from taking irreversible steps in the direction of a China so conceived. Doing so is in the strategic interest of the West (and also Russia), and it will require the West to decisively urge Kyiv to strike a deal with Moscow— something U.S. and European leaders have been loath to do since the conflict over Ukraine entered into its present and decisive phase in the wake of the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity.” 

The obvious basis of a viable settlement to the conflict over Ukraine are the two Minsk Agreements—especially those provisions that, as alluded to above, would require Kyiv, at the very least, to engage in a painful process of constitutional reform granting self‑government to the Donbass in exchange for reintegrating this breakaway region into the country’s constitutional order.

Why is this so important? Because in this provision may lie the key to ending the conflict over Ukraine. The deal Putin wanted to make from 2014 onwards was and largely remains based on his interpretation of its meaning: constitutional reform that would ensure a status for the Donbass that can be described as “more than autonomy, less than independence” within a sovereign Ukraine whose territorial integrity (minus Crimea) could be guaranteed in some fashion by both the West and Russia. Such guarantees would also likely involve requisite pledges to respect Ukraine’s neutrality and binding commitments not to deploy troops or establish military bases on its territory. Depending on how political, economic, and battlefield realities play out in the time ahead, other considerations may also enter into the settlement picture. There are indications that Zelenskyy is at last facing up to such a possibility. Consider the following passage from his candid 25 March 2022 interview with The Economist: “Victory is being able to save as many lives  as possible. Yes, to save as many lives as possible, because without this nothing would make sense. Our land is important, yes, but ultimately it's just territory. […] To save everyone, defend all interests while protecting people, and not giving up territory is probably an impossible task.

We are of course aware of the various objections to this unsentimental way of thinking. But sentimentalism is precisely what produced innumerable missed opportunities, naive misjudgments, unforced errors, and the present morass in which no actor can objectively claim to be “winning.”

We are of course aware of the various objections to this unsentimental way of thinking. But sentimentalism is precisely what produced innumerable missed opportunities, naive misjudgments, unforced errors, and the present morass in which no actor can objectively claim to be “winning.”

Consider that since the onset of Russia’s “special military operation,” not a few new hints of support have been made to Ukraine by the West—many of which, as of the time of completing the writing of this essay (i.e., on 27 March 2022), have not been fulfilled. These include fast‑tracking Kyiv’s EU and NATO membership processes, the handover or sale of MiGs belonging to NATO member states, the establishment of a NATO‑enforced no‑fly zone over Ukraine, and even the direct involvement of NATO ground troops in the conflict. 

On the other hand, the West has provided just enough support to keep Ukraine in the fight, which is another way of saying the West has taken active measures to assure Russia cannot achieve its goals on the battlefield without incurring the potential for military breakdown and economic ruin at home as well as reputational collapse abroad. The Western calculation seems to be that however much suffering Ukraine sustains, Russia will suffer more and the West will suffer minimally. This expectation, however, has neither stopped the destruction of significant parts of Ukraine’s civilian and military infrastructure nor the Russian military’s advance. What it has done is increased the hardship of Ukraine’s population, produced millions of IDPs and refugees, and brought the global economy into a perilous position.

How, exactly, is this good for Ukraine?

The question of how to resolve the conflict over Ukraine is thus both a deeply geopolitical and ethical one. If the West truly wants the fighting to end quickly, it can either enter directly into an armed conflict with Russia—risking nuclear war—or it can bring its full influence to bear on Kyiv to negotiate a peace whose terms will look a lot like what ought to have been agreed before 24 February 2022. 

All this is a little too reminiscent of a critical event in the tragic history of Bosnia: in virtually all important aspects, the November 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war closely resembled the March 1992 Lisbon Agreement that was signed by all relevant actors a few weeks prior to its commencement before being rejected by one of them: Alija Izetbegović, the representative of the Bosnian Muslims. This rejection, which led inexorably to more than three years of civil war, took place within hours of his tête‑à‑tête meeting with the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman.

In between Lisbon and Dayton, 100,000 people lost their lives, something like half of Bosnia’s inhabitants were internally displaced or became refugees, jihad came back to the “heart of Europe” after a century’s absence, who knows how many billions of dollars were spent on weapons that caused between €50 and €200 billions of wartime damage (no one knows for sure), and its social fabric and demographic picture was irredeemably wrecked (its present population is what it was in the early 1960s, and trending further downwards).  

Regardless of who started that war and why, for Bosnia the result of protracted war was devastating: by every tangible and intangible measurement, the country remains worse off nearly three decades after war’s end than it was prior to its commencement—and this despite untold billions spent by the West in propping up the country since the U.S.‑backed peace was finally signed.

No one should wish a similar fate onto Ukraine, which is why finding a compromise settlement based on earlier proposals through negotiations devoid of sentiment should be completed successfully as soon as possible. Foresworn should be the temptation to look to another example from the Balkan civil wars—namely Kosovo—as somehow a more positive precedent from which to analogize what the West could hope to accomplish in the Ukrainian theatre. The truth is, Kosovo is hardly a place anyone can claim with a straight face has produced the hoped‑for return on investment, even by the low standards of contemporary expectations for the Balkans. The Kosovo scenario also does not apply to Ukraine for a much more important reason: the 1999 NATO “humanitarian intervention,” which was led by the United States at the peak of the unipolar moment, was fought against a small, isolated, and non‑nuclear state that had been under economic sanctions for much of the decade. Even then, it took 78 days of sustained bombing on a country roughly the size of Iceland or Kentucky to produce the intended tactical result—and still today, the underlying conflict remains unresolved. Again, not a model to emulate—if, that is, the desired end‑result in the context of the conflict over Ukraine is to produce conditions for restoring economic growth and political stability in Eastern Europe. 

As Walter Russell Mead recently wrote, “the world is a difficult place. Geopolitics rules, and if you get power politics wrong, the rest doesn’t matter.” And that almost certainly means ending the conflict over Ukraine as soon as possible along the lines we have outlined above—this is in the strategic interest of all actors. What also does matter, in present circumstances, is for Ukraine to avoid becoming the Bosnia (or Kosovo) of Eastern Europe and for Russia to avoid the risk of becoming China’s Belarus. Avoiding both is in the West’s interest, for it would then be able to concentrate on trying to strengthen its position against the Asian superpower Biden has argued desires “to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world.” This is also in Ukraine’s interest, for by wholeheartedly embracing the opportunity to become one of the world’s most important keystone states, Kyiv could ensure its long‑term viability as a sovereign and independent state. Finally, this is in Russia’s interest, as well, for the Kremlin could build a credible narrative that its immediate objectives were met and none of its red lines were crossed—in Ukraine and, frankly, elsewhere.

Two decades ago, we served together as editors at The National Interest. During this period, one of us (Gvosdev) wrote an article entitled “The Sources of Russian Conduct” that concluded with the following statement: “The word ‘appeasement’ easily drips from the lips of those who dislike this analysis. […] The belief that the United States can try to pressure Russia to abandon the pursuit of what it considers to be its legitimate interests without having truly to invest much time or effort is naive at best and counterproductive at worst.” Although circumstances involving the West and Russia have certainly changed for the worse in the intervening 18 years, our contention is that the guidance they contained is even more pertinent today than it was in the spring of 2004. 

For better or worse, Ukraine will never be as important to the West as it is to Russia—and this would be true even if Ukraine was the only item on their respective strategic agendas.

Our reasoning is straightforward: for better or worse, Ukraine will never be as important to the West as it is to Russia—and this would be true even if Ukraine was the only item on their respective strategic agendas. But this last is very far from being the case today—certainly for the United States, whose leadership of the West has again been reaffirmed thanks to the conflict over Ukraine. To maintain and perhaps even strengthen that leadership against China—a country that Biden defines as being in “competition [with the United States] to win the twenty‑first century”—America stands to benefit greatly from bringing Russia back in from the cold.