The trouble started in 2014. A US supported coup took out the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, with his eastern base, and replaced him with a West leaning president who was handpicked by the US. Victoria Nuland, who is now Acting Deputy Secretary of State and who was then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, can be heard on an intercepted phone call selecting Arseniy Yatsenyuk as America’s choice to replace Yanukovych. He did.
The new government changed Ukraine. For the first time, the government had been changed by western Ukraine and its monist vision of the country crushing the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine and the pluralist vision it had hoped for. The pluralist dream died, and the ethnic Russians of the Donbas would suffer attacks on their language, their culture, their rights, their property and their lives.
After the coup, the first election brought Pyotr Poroshenko to power. Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, says that Poroshenko would transform into the “prime sponsor . . . of Ukrainian nationalism.” Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at Kent, says that Poroshenko’s government represented “a monist vision of Ukraine statehood that denied the pluralist alternative demanded by the Donbas. . ..”
By May 2014, the people of the Donbas had rebelled against the coup government and had approved referendums declaring some form of autonomy. Civil war followed.
The solution with the greatest signs of life was the Minsk Accords, which were brokered by France and Germany, agreed to by Ukraine and Russia, and accepted by the US and UN in 2014 and 2015. The Minsk Accords would peacefully return the Donbas to Ukraine in exchange for autonomy.
Recent corrections to the historical record have revealed the Minsk Accords to have been a deception. Recent statements by each of Putin’s partners in negotiating the Accords, Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande, have unmasked the Minsk Accords as a deceptive soporific designed to lull Russia into a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful settlement while actually buying Ukraine the time it needed to build up an armed forces capable of achieving a military solution.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a host of Ukrainian officials have added their signatures to that testimony. Petro says that “From the outset, Ukraine’s strategy was to prevent the implementation of Minsk-2.” Former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, Petro reports, says that “Ukraine’s sole objective in signing Minsk-2 was to rebuild the Ukrainian army and strengthen the international coalition against Russia.” He then adds, reinforcing the deception, that “That was understood from the very first day.” According to Petro, “[t]he Minsk-II Process . . . was explicitly rejected by senior Ukrainian government officials at the end of 2021.”
Former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock has said that “The war [in Ukraine] might have been prevented – probably would have been prevented – if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO.” Since Ukraine, Germany, France and the US – who failed to pressure Ukraine to implement the Accords nor to provide Zelensky the support he needed were he to implement them—were not willing to abide by the Minks Accords, that raises the crucial question, Was Putin? Had his negotiating partners been sincere, would the Minsk Accords have been implemented and the current war possibly avoided?
In his important biography of Putin, Philip Short says he was: “For Moscow, progress needed to come through implementation of the Minsk accords.”
In a recent article on the reasons for the failure of Ukraine to implement the Minsk Accords, sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko gives several reasons why Putin was serious about implementing the accords, including, that “It would most likely have stalled Ukraine’s Western integration by partially restoring the electoral base of the pro-neutrality ‘Eastern’ parties” and “the transformations implied by the Minsk Accords would have prevented Putin’s feared ‘anti-Russia’ from developing in Ukraine, leaving open the possibility of Ukraine and Russia evolving peacefully as two separate states . . ..”
Prior to the war, Putin had consistently resisted annexing the Donbas. In 2014, when the Donetsk and Lugansk regions held referendums on autonomy, Putin asked them to delay them. When they went ahead with them anyway and voted for autonomy, Putin did not recognize the results. Sakwa says that Putin “repeatedly reject[ed] requests to accept the territory as part of Russia.”
Dmitry Trenin, professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, points out that when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin was acting “on a mandate from the Russian parliament to use military force ‘in Ukraine’ not just in Crimea.” But Putin resisted pressure from Russian nationalists to annex the Donbas and instead remained committed the Minsk Accord’s plan to keep the Donbas a part of Ukraine.
Putin, at the time, “believed that we would manage to come to terms, and Lugansk and Donetsk would be able to reunify with Ukraine somehow under the agreements – the Minsk agreements.” Russian hardliners have criticized Putin for that restraint and blamed it for the current crisis. They have criticized him for stopping at Crimea and not annexing the Donbas as well. They have chastised him for trusting Germany and France’s promise to ensure the implementation of the Minsk Accords.
But Putin’s commitment to the Minsk Accords did not seem to waver until the revelations by Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko proved his hardline critics right. Following their revelations, Putin told the nation that “For years, Western elites hypocritically assured us of their peaceful intentions, including to help resolve the serious conflict in Donbass.” He then went on to charge that “[t]he West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it.”
Right up until the war, Putin remained committed to the Minsk Accords. Geoffrey Roberts, in an article called “Now or Never: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine,” in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, quotes Putin as saying that he is “convinced” there is “still . . . no alternative.” In August, 2021, in response to a question from the press following talks with Merkel, Putin said “we have no other tool to achieve peace, and I believe they should be treated very carefully and with respect.” Roberts says that, in a November 13 interview, Putin “reiterated Russia’s commitment to the implementation of the Minsk agreements, saying there was no other mechanism to resolve the Donbass problem.”
At the same time Putin complained to Merkel that “Ukraine has adopted a number of laws and regulations that essentially contradict the Minsk agreements. It is as if the leadership of that country has decided to give up on achieving a peaceful settlement.” Putin was referring to laws that prohibited the use of Russian language and culture from official use and education and the shutting down of all ethnic Russian television and media outlets.
Putin continued to speak with the French and German brokers of the Minsk Accords in the days right before the war. Roberts reports that Putin spoke with Macron on February 12 and complained of the West’s failure to prompt Kiev to implement the agreements. The next day he told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that he believed a solution within the Minsk agreements was still possible but that Germany and France had to pressure Ukraine. But, though the key players in the Minsk negotiations continued to meet in the days right before the war, “it was clear,” Sakwa says, “that Ukraine was in no mood to fulfill the Minsk-2 agreement.”
Though perhaps no one else was – not Ukraine, not the US, not Germany or France – Putin seems to have been serious about the Minks Accords. Since their implementation may have prevented the war, the implications are significant. Although it does not absolve Putin from the decision to launch the war, it does suggest, along with the December 2021 proposal on mutual security guarantees Putin sent to the US and NATO, that he was trying to prevent it.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on US foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets.
If you want to hear a different perspective on the war in Ukraine, talk to Samuel Charap. A fine-featured Russia analyst with, at forty-three, a head of gray hair, Charap works at the RAND Corporation, a think tank that has been doing research for the U.S. military, among other clients, since the nineteen-forties. In the self-abnegating architectural spirit of many Washington institutions, it rents several floors of an office tower attached to a mall in Arlington, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon. The mall has a Macy’s and a Bath and Body Works, which are not places that Charap likes to go.
Charap, who grew up in Manhattan, became interested in Russian literature in high school, and then became interested in Russian foreign policy in college, at Amherst. He got a Ph.D. in political science at Oxford and spent time researching his dissertation in both Moscow and Kyiv. In 2009, he started working at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in D.C. Russia had just fought a short, nasty war with Georgia, but the incoming Obama Administration was hoping to “reset” relations and find common ground. Charap supported this effort and wrote papers trying to think through a progressive foreign policy for the U.S. in the post-Soviet region. But tensions with Russia continued to increase. In the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine, in 2014, Charap wrote a book, with the Harvard political scientist Timothy Colton, called “Everyone Loses,” about the background to the war. In it, Charap and Colton argue that the U.S., Europe, and Russia had combined to produce a “negative sum” outcome in Ukraine. Russia was the aggressor, to be sure, but by asking that Ukraine choose either Russia or the West, the U.S. and Europe had helped stoke the flames of conflict. In the end, everyone lost.
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I first met Charap in the summer of 2017, not long after the book came out, and in the midst of a maelstrom of anger at Russia for its interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Robert Mueller had been appointed as special counsel for the Justice Department, Donald Trump had labelled the investigation a hoax, and Congress was in the process of passing a bipartisan sanctions bill against Russia. Charap was as angry as anyone else about the interference, but he thought the sanctions proposed in the bill were a mistake. “The idea of sticks in international relations is not just for beating other countries,” he told me at the time. “It’s for achieving a better outcome.” He used the example of the long-standing Iran sanctions, which had finally compelled Iran to come to the negotiating table and vastly limit its nuclear program. The sanctions on Russia, he went on, were not like that. “Sanctions are only effective at changing another country’s behavior if they can be rolled back,” he said. “And, because of the measures in this current bill, it’s going to be nearly impossible for any President to relieve them.”
In the following years, as Russia became more and more of a neuralgic subject in American politics, Charap continued to travel to Russia, engage with Russian counterparts, and look for ways to lower the temperature of the relationship. Going to Valdai—the annual conference where Vladimir Putin pretends to be a wise tsar interested in discoursing with professors on international politics—had become somewhat controversial. But, before the war began, Charap went to the conference whenever he could, and several times even asked Putin a question. “It’s my job to understand these people, and I was given firsthand access to them,” he said. “How can you understand a country if you don’t go and talk to the people involved in the decision-making?”
In the fall of 2021, Charap, along with much of the expert community in D.C., became worried that Russia was planning an invasion of Ukraine. In a piece in Politico that November, he urged the Biden Administration to work with Kyiv to make at least some nominal concessions, to see if the crisis could be defused. Two months later, as the crisis deepened, he wrote another piece, for the Financial Times. In this one, he argued that NATO should announce publicly that Ukraine was not seriously being considered for membership. “Nato cannot and should not accept being told what to do by Russia,” Charap wrote. “But Moscow’s inflammatory rhetoric should not distract from the fact that Nato is not prepared to offer Ukraine membership. If doing so could avert a war, why not find some way to say out loud what any Nato official would say behind closed doors[?]”
When I spoke to Charap around this time, he was freaking out. The disposition of Russian forces, their activities, the fact that blood supplies were being sent to the Russian encampments: none of this was the behavior of an army conducting an exercise. Even more worrisome was the tenor of Russian diplomatic communications. Their demands—not only that Ukraine promise to never join NATO but also that NATO pull its troops back to their 1997 locations—were simply unrealistic. “They’re asking the world’s most powerful military alliance to strip naked and run laps,” he said. “But the gun they’re holding is to Ukraine’s head.” Charap estimated that if an invasion was going to happen, it would happen in late February.
In late January of 2022, he co-authored an editorial for Foreign Policy in which he argued that sending anti-tank Javelin missiles and anti-aircraft Stinger missiles to Ukraine would neither deter Russia from invading nor meaningfully affect the military situation if Russia did invade. He once again urged that diplomacy be given a chance.
And then the war began. It turned out that Charap and his co-author were right about Western weapons and deterrence—the Russian Army went in despite the Javelins and Stingers that had been sent to Ukraine by NATO countries—but wrong about their military utility. The Russian Army used low-flying helicopters, vulnerable to Stinger fire, and sent armored vehicles, in a juicy column, straight down a main road toward Kyiv, where they were destroyed. Subsequent studies have pointed to Russian carelessness, timely U.S. intelligence, and, above all, Ukrainian mobility and courage as the prime factors in the debacle of the war’s first weeks for Russia. But the weapons helped.
Nonetheless, for Charap, there was more that the U.S. might have tried to prevent the fighting. In recent months, as the fighting has gone on and on, he has become the most active voice in the U.S. foreign-policy community calling for some form of negotiation to end or freeze the conflict. In response, he has been called a Kremlin mouthpiece, a Russian “shill,” and a traitor. Critics say he has not changed his opinions in fifteen years despite changing circumstances. But he has continued writing and arguing. “This is a five-alarm fire,” he said. “Am I supposed to walk past the house? Because, as bad as it’s been, it could get much, much worse.”
So far, the most active phase of negotiations to end the war took place in its first two months. During that time, there were numerous meetings between Russian and Ukrainian officials, most notably throughout March, in Turkey. At least one rumored proposal coming out of those talks had Ukraine agreeing to not seek NATO membership in exchange for Russia abandoning all the territory it had seized after February 23, 2022. Accounts differ about what happened next. It was not clear that the ever-shifting Russian delegations had Putin’s support, nor was it clear that Western countries were willing to provide the sort of security guarantees Ukraine sought in place of NATO membership. Soon these questions became moot. On March 31st, Russian troops withdrew from Bucha; Ukrainian soldiers who entered the city discovered mass graves and learned that residents had been tortured and randomly shot. Volodomyr Zelensky called what happened there “war crimes” and “genocide.” An early April visit to Kyiv from Boris Johnson, then the British Prime Minister, seems to have stiffened Zelensky’s resolve. After that, there were still occasional attempts at negotiation and mediation, but it was clear that both sides wanted to see what they could get by continuing the war.
In the spring and summer of 2022, Russia re-engaged in the Ukrainian east, trying to make progress in the Donbas region; it managed to level and capture the large port city of Mariupol, connecting the Russian mainland, through occupied Ukrainian territory, to Crimea. In the fall, Ukraine mounted a counter-offensive, which succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Ukrainian forces overran demoralized Russian troops in the Kharkiv region; they also laid siege to the city of Kherson, forcing a Russian retreat. In the winter, Russia was back on the offensive, occupying, after tens of thousands of casualties, the small city of Bakhmut, in the Donbas. Early this summer, it was Ukraine’s turn for another counter-offensive. This one was bolstered by much-publicized Western equipment and training, but so far it has not yielded anything like the successes of last fall.
At some point, this counter-offensive will end. The question will then become whether either of the sides is ready for negotiations. Russia has been saying for months that it wants negotiations, but it is not clear that it is ready to make any concessions. Most significantly, Russia has not backed off its demand for recognition of the territories it “fake-annexed” in September, 2022, in the words of Olga Oliker, of the International Crisis Group. Ukraine has said that it needs to continue fighting so it can expel the occupying forces and make sure that Russia never threatens Ukraine again.
The argument in the U.S. has split into two profoundly opposed camps. On the one side are people—not very many, at least publicly—like Charap, who argue that there might be a way to end the war sooner rather than later by freezing the conflict in place, and working to secure and rebuild the large part of Ukraine that is not under Russian occupation. On the other side are those who believe that this is no solution and the war must be fought until Putin is soundly defeated and humiliated. As the defense intellectual Eliot A. Cohen put it, in May, in The Atlantic:
“Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.”
The arguments seem to be based, ultimately, on three kinds of disagreement. One is about the timing and meaning of negotiations. In a Foreign Policy piece last fall, Charap’s RAND colleagues Raphael Cohen (Eliot’s son, as it happens) and Gian Gentile argued that any push by the U.S. for negotiations would send “a series of signals, none of them good.” As Raphael Cohen put it to me recently: “You’re basically telling the Russians, ‘Just wait us out.’ You’re sending a message to the Ukrainians and to the rest of our allies: the United States will put up a good fight for a little while, but in the end will walk away. And you’re telling the American public that we’re not really committed to seeing this through to the end.” Cohen added that he would feel differently if the Ukrainians no longer wanted to fight or, better yet, the Russians admitted defeat: “The bad guys have a choice in this, too. You have to get the Russians to a place where they view that they can’t win. Then we have something to talk about.”
Charap thinks this is a misunderstanding of what negotiations are and what they signal. “Diplomacy is not the opposite of coercion,” he said. “It’s a tool for achieving the same objectives as you would using coercive means. Many negotiations to end wars have taken place at the same time as the war’s most fierce fighting.” He pointed to the Korean armistice of 1953; neither side acknowledged the other’s claims, but they agreed to stop fighting to negotiate a peace deal. That peace deal never came, but, seventy years later, they are still not fighting. That armistice required more than five hundred negotiation sessions. In other words, it would be better to start talking.
Another disagreement centers on the possibility of a decisive Ukrainian battlefield victory. Charap believes that neither side has the resources to knock the other out of the fight entirely. Other analysts have also voiced this opinion, most notably General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in a controversial comment last November compared the situation with the stalemate that prevailed toward the end of the First World War and suggested that it may be time to seek a negotiated solution. But the other side of this debate has been more vocal. They see a highly motivated Ukrainian Army, supported by a highly motivated populace. They point to the relative cheapness, to the U.S., of a war that pins down one of its major adversaries. And they believe that, given enough time, and enough Western weapons and training, Ukraine could take back a fair amount, if not all, of its territory; sever the land bridge to Crimea; and get close enough to Crimea to deter any future Russian military operations.
The final disagreement concerns Putin’s intentions. The “fight to the end” camp believes that, if Putin is not decisively defeated, he will continue attacking Ukraine. And some believe that if not stopped in Ukraine, as he was not stopped in Chechnya, Georgia, or Syria, he will keep going—to Moldova, the Baltics, Poland. They believe that European security is at stake.
Charap, of course, disagrees. He believes that it is possible to make a ceasefire “sticky”—by including inducements and punishments, mostly through sanctions, and by monitoring the situation closely. As for the view that Putin is bent, Hitler-like, on unceasing expansion, Charap is cautiously skeptical: “We have to admit that this is a more unpredictable actor than we thought. So while I’m not prepared to accept the Hitler narrative about how far his ambitions extend beyond Ukraine, I don’t think that we can rule it out.” But ambition is one thing; capability is another. Even if Putin wanted to keep going, Charap said, “he doesn’t have the means to do it—as this war has amply shown.”
To Charap, “The strategic defeat of Russia has already taken place.” It took place in the first months of the war, when Russian aggression and Ukrainian resistance helped galvanize a united European response. “Their international reputation, their international economic position, these ties with Europe that had been constructed over decades—literally, physically constructed—were rendered useless overnight,” Charap said. The failure to take Kyiv was the decisive blow. “Their regional clout, the flight of talent—the strategic consequences have been huge, by any measure.” And, from a U.S. perspective, Charap argues, any gains during the past sixteen months have been marginal. “A weakened Russia is good,” he said. “But a totally isolated, rogue Russia, a North Korea Russia—not so much.” A year ago, Russia was not deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure; now it regularly bombs Ukraine’s energy grid and port facilities. With every day, the chances of an accident or an incident that brings NATO directly into the conflict increase. Charap is asking just how much that risk is worth.
“It’s not necessarily that I think Ukraine needs to make concessions,” he said. “It’s that I don’t see the alternative to that eventually happening.”
Earlier this year, Charap presented his position on the war at a security conference in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. During a hostile question-and-answer session, Edward Lucas, a former Economist editor, accused Charap of “Westsplaining,” and James Sherr, of the famed international think tank Chatham House, asked how he could be so sure Ukraine wouldn’t win the war outright. But the toughest question came from the Ukrainian activist Olena Halushka. “You are speaking a lot about the cost of fighting, the line of fighting here and there,” she said, in a strong but clear accent. “But what is your analytical perspective on the cost of occupation? Because if you take a look at what is happening, at all of the de-occupied territories, the patterns there are very similar. There are big mass graves, torture chambers, filtration camps, mass deportations—including the deportations of kids.” When Halushka concluded her remarks and sat down, the audience applauded.
Charap answered the other questions he’d been asked, but avoided responding directly to this one. When prodded by Halushka and the moderator, he said, “I don’t know exactly how to answer that question, except to say that of course I recognize there are horrible war crimes being committed under areas under Russian occupation. And it’s ultimately for the Ukrainian government to decide which is worse—the casualties that could occur as a result of the continued fighting,” or the brutality of the continued Russian occupation of Ukrainian land. Charap seemed uncharacteristically flustered. “I mean, I don’t know quite more what more to say to answer the question,” he said again.
It was the question—the tragic question—of how to think of the people who would be left behind if the line of contact were to freeze somewhere close to its current position. If the fighting went on, Ukrainian soldiers would die; if the fighting ceased, Ukrainian citizens would be trapped under a vicious and despotic regime.
I recently spoke with the Kyiv-based journalist Leonid Shvets, whom I have found, over the years, to have a knack for pithily formulating the views of the Ukrainian mainstream. He told me that conversations in which Americans came up with scenarios for Ukraine to surrender drove him up a wall. “Why don’t you surrender to the Chinese?” he said. “Give them Florida. You have lots of states, what’s one state less?” Florida, of course, was a complicated example. “Or, if you’re so eager to make a deal with the Russians, why don’t you give them some of your land? Give them Alaska.” He thought that anything short of total defeat for Putin would just mean that the war would start up again. “We went through this already in 2014,” he said.
“Here’s the problem,” he continued. “If we freeze the situation where it now is, not along Ukraine’s internationally recognized border but along whatever line the front happens to be at, then we acknowledge that internationally recognized borders are just a kind of fiction, which you can ignore. That’s a very bad lesson. And, second, if we put the borders in this new place, then we’re in a situation where this new border is worth even less than the internationally recognized border. Maybe a new military operation will move it even further, move it over here, or move it over there. So at that point it is just totally without meaning.”
Shvets acknowledged that people in Ukraine were exhausted after a year and a half of war. “No question, every day the war goes on is, for us, specific people who are lost, and specific houses that are destroyed. Absolutely. But we are not yet ready for defeat.” He went on: “There may come a point where we need to negotiate. But from where we are right now, that point is not visible to me.”
There are dissenting voices within Ukraine, but they are seldom heard from in public. One former official, who asked that we disguise his identity, told me, “The dialogue is not just toxic. If you are not jumping up and down with the mainstream, then you are an enemy.” The former official was not an enemy, but he did blame the Zelensky administration for its lighthearted and irresponsible attitude toward the Russian troop buildup in 2021. The former official was getting his family out of the country and making preparations for what he believed was an imminent attack. Meanwhile, Zelensky was telling people to remain calm and citing Ukraine’s sovereign rights. This, the former official said, was a grave miscalculation. “When there’s a crazy person next to you with a Kalashnikov, you don’t start talking to him about the U.N. Charter!”
The former official believes that the Istanbul talks were the best chance at a more or less stable peace. “Back then Bakhmut was a beautiful city,” he said. “Mariupol was under Ukrainian control.” But now “there is no win-win solution any longer,” he said. “Someone will have to lose.” He hoped it would be Russia. But he feared it could be Ukraine. I asked him when public opinion might begin to turn. “When every single person knows someone who has been killed or wounded,” he replied. The country was getting there.
For Charap, the Ukrainian position on when to stop fighting is decisive, but it’s an evasion of responsibility to pretend that the U.S. can’t have an opinion on the matter. “You have to do this with the Ukrainians,” he said. “You can’t do it to the Ukrainians. But to suggest that we have no ability to influence them in any way is disingenuous. Like, we feel it’s O.K. to advise them about everything under the sun, but not war termination?”
Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown who served on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, goes further. “Fighting for every last inch of Ukrainian territory,” he told me, is “morally justified. It’s legally justified. But I’m not sure that it makes a lot of strategic sense from Ukraine’s perspective, or from our perspective, or from the perspective of the people in the Global South who are suffering food and energy shortages.” He said that the U.S. Administration needs to let the Ukrainian counter-offensive play out. But at the end of this year, or maybe early in 2024, it will have to talk with Zelensky about negotiations. “I wouldn’t say, ‘You do this or we’re going to turn off the spigot.’ But you sit down and you have a searching conversation about where the war is going and what’s in the best interest of Ukraine, and you see what comes out of that discussion.”
Of course, in the wake of everything the world has witnessed since February of 2022, this is easier said than done.
The debate in the U.S. over Russia and Ukraine has become one of the most vicious foreign-policy disputes in years. “It has come to resemble the debate over Iran policy that we were having in the twenty-tens,” Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center and a longtime critic of U.S. hawkishness toward Russia, told me. “It became less a debate about actual policy than a debate where people were very quick to call names, sling dirt, accuse people of being in league with foreign interests.” In the pages of Foreign Affairs, the arguments are polite, but in the wilds of Twitter, things get ugly.
Ashford said, “There’s a lot of emotion. This is a major war. Thousands and thousands of people have died. It’s barbaric, and people get very emotionally involved with their positions.” Emotional intensity is also, she added, a useful tactic for the hawks. “It can be quite an effective way to shut down discussions over negotiations—to argue that it’s a betrayal of Ukraine, that it’s going to get people killed, that it’s what Russia wants. ”
Rajan Menon, the director of the grand-strategy program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy, is a longtime analyst of Russian affairs. He’s visited Ukraine several times since the war began and written extensively on possible solutions to the conflict. He thinks Charap’s prescriptions for an armistice are premature—that there is not yet enough will on either side to stop the fighting—but he is dismayed by the rhetorical atmosphere in the U.S. “There are people who are looking with a good-faith effort to try to see if there’s a way out of this box,” he told me. “And for their trouble they’ve basically been lambasted as appeasers or sympathetic to Putin and so on. This has got to stop.”
Charap is clearly bothered by some of the vitriol that’s been directed at him, but he chalks up the intensity of the debate to the barbarity of the Russian military. “I need to keep doing my job,” he said, which is to think and analyze and propose.
In just the last few weeks, as the Ukrainian counter-offensive continued to make agonizingly slow progress, the conversation moved closer to Charap than it has in months. In mid-August, a Washington Post article revealed that U.S. intelligence assessed that Ukraine would not be able to reach the key city of Melitopol during this offensive, and Politico quoted a U.S. official wondering whether Milley had been right, back in November, when he suggested that it may be time to seek a diplomatic solution. Congressional support, which aside from the Trumpian right had been fairly unstinting, has begun to waver. “Is this more a stalemate?” the Republican congressman Andy Harris, a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus and a co-chair of the congressional Ukraine Caucus, asked constituents at a town-hall meeting in mid-August. “Should we be realistic about it? I think we probably should.”
Some have pushed back on this analysis. The counter-offensive is not yet over, and there is a possibility that it will yet surprise everyone. “It’s been a miracle,” Olga Oliker, of the International Crisis Group, said of the successful Ukrainian resistance. “Maybe there’ll be another miracle.” The White House, at least publicly, has been of the same view. “We do not assess that the conflict is a stalemate,” the national-security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters last week.
Charap isn’t ready to call time on the Ukrainian counter-offensive, either. But he continues to worry that the Administration is being too cautious about starting work on a diplomatic solution. “Most people now recognize that Plan A isn’t working,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re prepared to discuss Plan B.” What would a Plan B look like? “It would be a diplomatic strategy,” he said. “It would be thinking about the choreography of how you engage.” It would be the “searching conversation” with Ukraine, and similar conversations with NATO allies. It would be trying to get Putin to appoint a representative who has authority to negotiate, and appointing such a representative on the U.S. side, with Ukrainian support.“This is the kind of pre-negotiation interaction that will be necessary to lay the groundwork,” Charap said, “and then you actually devote resources inside the government to thinking through the practicalities and getting the right pieces in place.”
He admits that such an initiative could fail: “The only way you really can know is if we actually try and it doesn’t work. You haven’t lost anything if you do that.” In Charap’s view, the risks of not trying are higher than the risks of trying. Every day, on the front lines of the biggest war in Europe since 1945, young men and women lose their lives. Many more will, before this is over. That’s one thing about which everyone is certain.
If the Ukraine war ended tomorrow, the United States still would need to send hundreds of billions in aid to that country. The bill includes continuation of military assistance, budget support for the Ukrainian government and reconstruction assistance.
President Biden has just asked for another US$24 billion to support Ukraine, primarily for military equipment but also budget support ($7.3 billion). While Congress is increasingly skeptical about another huge chunk of money to fund an endless conflict, this is peanuts compared with what will be asked after the war ends.
The World Bank has done a revised estimate on reconstruction needs, based on data from the first year of the war (February 2022 to February 2023). The Bank says that Ukraine needs $411 billion for reconstruction over a ten-year period.
That estimate will need to be significantly increased to account for February to August 2023 and beyond. It would make sense to think that even if the war stopped tomorrow, reconstruction aid would come to $600 billion or more, or more than half a trillion dollars.
For purposes of comparison, the war in Iraq featured a reconstruction program of $60 billion. The US also spent $90 billion over twelve years to support Afghanistan (although the war continued in that country.)
There is no doubt that most of the US assistance to Afghanistan was probably stolen or went over to the Taliban. On top of that, billions’ worth of US war-fighting equipment was left in place and is now used by the Taliban.
In the case of Iraq, most of the aid was wasted thanks to bad management, corruption and poor planning.
The US and its allies will need to cough up $60 billion annually to support Ukraine, and expect that a lot of it will be stolen. It will have to keep the funding up for 10 years.
Consider that Germany has committed to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” at $5 billion annually. But the German government in power is likely to be replaced soon, and that pledge is about as worthless as the Weimar mark.
Likewise, the UK economy is very dodgy, and finding serious money in future will prove a real challenge. The bottom line is that most of the money will have to come from Uncle Sam.
It may be that some Washington insiders are thinking that the best thing is to prolong the war as long as possible, because if the fighting continues the US just needs to provide military assistance and budget support for the government, but not reconstruction assistance.
In effect, that is the Biden administration policy. By continuing the war the Biden government thinks it can convince Congress to keep paying and they can keep Ukraine “alive” by forking over arms and money to pay salaries and for needed supplies.
But will Congress be willing to keep spending for an endless war? It is likely Congress will want to know where the money is going, how it is used, and how the US government accounts for its spending.
Most Americans oppose more aid to Ukraine. We are entering an election period with the first Republican presidential debates coming soon. Ukraine is sure to be an issue and some candidates, like Robert Kennedy Jr, who identifies for the time being as a Democrat, already are speaking out against supporting the war.
This could mean Biden will have a huge problem trying to get a skittish Congress, including his fellow Democrats, to sign up for more spending on a losing proposition.
It has long been understood that Ukraine is a corrupt country. Ukrainian politicians, including Zelensky, have offshored some of their wealth (Zelensky has a villa in Tuscany on the seashore in Forte dei Marmi which he bought before he entered politics and now rents to Russian clients at 12,000 euros a month).
President Biden’s son Hunter is embroiled in an investigation of payments and other activities centered partly on Ukraine’s Burisma energy holding company and in part on transactions in China. A Republican-dominated committee in the House of Representatives has sought to tie the president to the matters under investigation.
When the “big” reconstruction money starts flowing, assuming that happens, political and military officials in Ukraine will enthusiastically help the United States line their pockets.
Ukraine’s corruption was highly visible this month as President Zelensky fired all the military recruiters in the country because they were selling recruitment passes to young men seeking to avoid the war.
Ukraine will end up being the most costly operation ever carried out by the United States. The US Marshall Plan for European reconstruction after World War II cost the United States $13.3 billion. That amount, in 2023 dollars, would be $173 billion, roughly a third of what reconstruction would cost for Ukraine.
There will be a strong lobbying effort by some US companies that anticipate getting rich providing support to Ukraine (these in addition to the usual suspects in defense industries).
We have seen them before in the Iraq reconstruction exercise. This lobbying will provide bait to Democrats and Republicans who otherwise might walk away from the war. But will it be enough to go against the will of American voters?
Americans can rightly ask: What are we getting for these huge outlays that will seriously burden US taxpayers? The US policy on Ukraine is a disaster from many angles, but for sure one of them is the huge dollar cost in supporting this endless misadventure.
Seymour Hersh just dropped a new article at Substack. You can find it here, but it’s behind a paywall, so I will summarize the main points below.
The main assertion of the article is that a US intelligence source of Hersh’s has stated that Putin was behind Prigozhin’s death and the reason was that Prigozhin was potentially provoking NATO and that was too reckless and unacceptable for Moscow:
“Prigozhin was provoking NATO and he had to go,” the US intelligence official said. “The last thing Putin wanted to do was to give NATO further cause to shelve its growing doubts about the endless financing of [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelensky.”
So, the official said, “Putin did it.” Prigozhin had become too dangerous.
The intelligence source also reveals that the plane that blew up with Prigozhin and some of his closet associates onboard was suddenly and inexplicably pulled in for service the day before the doomed flight.
It was then, the intelligence official said, that bombs with delayed fuses bombs were placed in the wheelbase. The bombs were set to explode after the wheels were retracted.
The explanation for how the plane was downed sounds plausible. However, the source does not provide any evidence that it was Putin who actually ordered or approved it. The source provides a potential motive but motive alone doesn’t prove anything. Prigozhin had made many enemies who also had motives. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I still harbor some skepticism that Putin would do such a thing right in the middle of the BRICS summit, taking attention away from the constructive strides Russia and the rest of the BRICS countries are making toward a multipolar world. Why put a black mark on your own best PR?
I welcome readers’ thoughts in the comments.
Some additional interesting nuggets from the Hersh article include the claim by Hersh’s source (presumably from the CIA) that the US/UK media reporting on the progress of the war has been terribly inaccurate and is far too credulous of what Kiev says:
“The goal of Russia’s first line of defense was not to stop the Ukrainian offense,” the official told me, “but to slow it down so if there was a Ukrainian advance, Russian commanders could bring in reserves to fortify the line. There is no evidence that Ukrainian forces have gotten past the first line. The American press is doing anything but honest reporting on the failure thus far of the offense.
“What happened to the use of cluster bombs by Ukraine? Weren’t they supposed to open the door? And Zelensky is now claiming Ukraine had hypersonic bombs. He’s been bullshitting us like this as he always does. Where are the engineers and scientists manufacturing them? In a bunker somewhere? Or in Kiev? He’s pretending—stalling as long as he can?
The source suggests that military intelligence provides similarly poor information that is being used by the White House but that more accurate intelligence exists but is somehow prevented from reaching decision makers in the executive branch:
“Here is the key issue,” the official told me. “This kind of reporting from the military intelligence community is going to the White House. There are other views,” he said, obviously referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, that do not reach the Oval Office. “What is going to happen? Will we be supporting Ukraine as long as it takes? It’s not like we are fighting the Führer in Germany or the Emperor of Japan. The other day former vice president [Mike] Pence said that if we don’t defend Zelensky in Ukraine, Russia will come after Poland next. Is that the White House’s policy?”
The source also told Hersh that the new Defense Minister of Ukraine, Rustem Umyerov, is even more corrupt that the one who just left (Oleksiy Reznikov), but interestingly Umyerov was not on CIA director William Burns’ list of corrupt officials provided to Kiev during a visit in January.
The last interesting comment by the intelligence source was that Putin is focused on running a war that he sees as critical to his nation’s security and doesn’t care what the American public thinks of him.
