Negotiate with Whom?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 14, 2023

 

The Americans who are increasingly discomfited with U.S. support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia in its war of territorial conquest — most of whom are self-identified Republicans — fancy themselves the only realists in the room.

 

They maintain (and have maintained with static determination in contrast to the dynamism of Ukraine’s battlefields over the last 20 months) that Ukraine’s defeat is preordained. Kyiv will have to sacrifice its territory and surrender civilians to Russia’s oppressive, brutal, and inhumane rule. It’s a matter of time before Kyiv surrenders. The stubborn refusal Ukrainians have displayed in their resistance to their own subjugation is a product of the West’s moral failures. This war will end in a negotiated settlement with Moscow, even if only temporarily. Cutting Kyiv off entirely and hastening Ukraine’s recognition that it is vanquished is the only humane course of action.

 

For the sake of argument, let’s take this capitulatory timidity masquerading as hard-nosed pragmatism at face value. With whom are the Ukrainians supposed to negotiate the terms of their captivity?

 

The autocrat in the Kremlin doesn’t seem predisposed to play along. He has never budged off the maximalist goals he stated explicitly from the outset of his second invasion of Ukraine. At the time, Vladimir Putin insisted that Ukraine was a legal fiction — an undesirable byproduct of Soviet idealism and post-Soviet expediency. Russia’s war is a continuation of the campaigns the Tsars waged against the Ottoman Turks in the 16th century, Putin insisted. No amount of opprobrium from the international community, no battlefield setbacks will dissuade him from the course on which he has embarked.

 

If Putin’s thinking has evolved since the winter of 2022, he hasn’t indicated as much. In his annual marathon press conference on Thursday, Putin restated his objective in this war: the total “de-Nazification” and “demilitarization” of Ukraine — all of it. He clings to that objective despite the devastation meted out to Russian forces by the Western-backed Ukrainian resistance. U.S. intelligence estimates that nearly 90 percent of the forces Moscow initially committed to this war have been taken out of action. Indeed, Moscow is suffering some of the heaviest losses of the war right now. Still, the Kremlin is committed to the goal of dismantling the Ukrainian state.

 

Putin has every reason to believe that his campaign will still be successful because the West’s Ukraine skeptics are busy making their skepticism into a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Ukraine produces almost nothing today, everything is coming from the West, but the free stuff is going to run out someday, and it seems it already is,” Putin gloated. The reference to the sluggish pace at which European weapons and ordnance have recently flowed to Ukraine and paralysis in Congress amid negotiations over a new package of aid for Kyiv is unmistakable.

 

Putin doesn’t feel the need to negotiate. Why should he when Ukraine’s Western sponsors are getting weak in the knees? Putin’s curious absence from the narratives retailed by Volodymyr Zelensky’s critics is illustrative of a chauvinistic reading of geopolitics that used to be exclusive to the left. It is a worldview that assumes, through its action or inaction, that Washington is the author of events abroad. As this narrow perspective relates to Ukraine, it is one that presupposes the war would end tomorrow if Washington applied sufficient muscle to Zelensky and sweetened the pot for Putin. That is solipsism. It presupposes Ukrainians have been manipulated into fighting for their own survival, and it assumes that Putin isn’t the irrational, revanchist despot he shows himself to be to anyone willing to listen.

 

Apparently, Ukraine’s critics can compartmentalize all this, if only to preserve the comforting fiction that America is the master not only of its fate but everyone else’s. All the world’s actors, malign or otherwise, are stripped of agency in a narrative that maintains the U.S. is the globe’s preeminent puppet master. The U.S. needs merely to withdraw its imprimatur, and the war would end, they tell themselves, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. The most charitable explanation for this fatuous outlook is that it is fueled by naïveté. Every other explanation for it is much less kind.