By Steven Myers, Newsweek, 2/24/23

Since Russia began its invasion, the U.S. has contributed to an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, rallying popular opinion at home and throughout the West with the narrative that Russia’s motives and intentions are groundless, evil, and even genocidal.

This has made honest conversation about the history, motives, and inevitable geopolitical and economic consequences of the conflict impossible. Rather than directly intervene as the U.S. has historically done, the U.S. chose to pour fuel on the fire in the form of more funding, weapons, equipment, and technical support, without which Ukraine would have been forced to negotiate, perhaps even averting the war. Many brilliant, well-informed diplomats and scholars rang alarm bells about the U.S. diplomatic hubris, but to no avail.

Today, after a year of war, the consequences predicted by so many experts are now coming home to roost. The strategic, industrial, economic, political, and military situation in Ukraine—and in Europe—is deteriorating significantly. Even without Nord Stream, Russia remains the third-largest supplier of gas for the European continent. Germany, like the rest of Europe, had to pay 10 times the market price to bolster their reserves. But it’s not nearly enough.

Europeans have chosen to remove natural gas from their industries, leading to a huge number of industrial closures, including in Germany. Those manufacturing closures have occurred with all the attendant layoffs. Auto manufacturing alone is down by more than 25 percent. The German electorate is becoming increasingly skeptical about the West’s approach to the war. And that was before recent reporting of what many of us had been saying since September; that the Biden administration was responsible for the Nord Stream sabotage.

If he knew about it, Olaf Scholz, the chancellor of Germany, may be guilty of colluding with President Joe Biden in committing what even the U.S. defines as a major act of terrorism. A major German national strategic asset owned in joint venture with Russia was destroyed, seriously damaging both Germany’s economy and that of the EU, impacting tens of millions of jobs, putting many lives at risk, and on and on. A deep recession appears inevitable. The revelation should bring dire consequences for the German government at the very least. Only those who believe the ends justify the means and are willing put all moral considerations aside can defend this shocking action.

In Ukraine, the situation is desperate. Ukrainian tactical victories over the last year, however laudable, came at a terrible price. An estimated 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the war began. Ukraine is experiencing ongoing destruction of its infrastructure as winter progresses. A third of the Ukrainian population has been displaced already.

After the attack on the Kerch Bridge and their subsequent withdrawal from Kherson, Russia began launching missile and drone strikes against high-value Ukrainian infrastructure targets, including thermal power plants, electrical transmission lines, and large transformers. A third of the electric power grid is down. Much of the damage will be impossible to repair anytime soon. Unable to maintain their cities, the Ukrainians are running out of fuel, particularly diesel, as well as water and food.

Zelensky may have grand plans for a spring offensive, but it will likely come too late. Ukraine’s U.S.- and U.K.-supplied artillery shells, for example, are running low, while Russia is in full-throttle shell production mode, with an artillery advantage of three to one. Endless swarms of rockets and Iranian drones are continuing to systematically take down everything the country needs for people to live there. Satellite imagery tells the true story of the cost of this war. At night, Ukraine is as dark as the Black Sea.

In December, Biden finally seemed to encourage Zelensky to think about negotiations. Zelensky instead demanded preconditions for negotiations which he knew Putin would never accept. What we’ve seen over the last couple of months is faux escalation with deals for Challenger tanks from the British, along with negotiations to send Patriot batteries, M1 Abrams tanks, and F16s from the U.S. These are unlikely to ever arrive. The U.S. is not going to put weapon systems into Ukraine that can only be operated by U.S. personnel, would be immediately attacked upon delivery, or might fall into the hands of the Russians.

The coming year of conflict promises to be vastly more devastating to Ukraine than what we’ve seen so far. Russia is not going to listen to dubious offers to negotiate based on demands that ignore the issues that caused the war in the first place. The only way out is a mediated settlement. Mediation offers a very different approach to achieving a long-term durable resolution than is possible with negotiations. It provides a more structured, comprehensive path to resolving the conflict because the process is led by an objective, neutral third party.

The only country capable of mediating this conflict that would be potentially acceptable to all the belligerents is Israel. Israel understands protracted conflict better than any other nation in the world and they are tough negotiators. They won’t give up and walk away. They’ll keep at it. With the newly elected Netanyahu coalition in power, the timing couldn’t be better for Israel to take this on. Most importantly, they’ll want to do it.

Some outcomes of the mediation may be obvious. But there are many complicated issues on the table that must be articulated, legitimized, and resolved. Mediation can do that. The process will take many months. But, perhaps its most important outcome will be the start of a healing process so essential for the many, many people on both sides of the conflict victimized by this cruel and needless war. Morality is at the core of what makes peace possible. Ukraine and Russia are neighbors and will always be, and they share a great deal. It is time to put an end to this tragedy.

Link here.

It’s good to see someone explain to an English speaking audience (in this case the readers of The Guardian) how Putin’s views about the west evolved from wanting to be a part of it – and when that wasn’t possible, wanting to simply do business and have its most basic interests respected – and when that wasn’t possible, having to acknowledge that the hardliners were right that the west wasn’t interested in reasonable relations with Russia. Emphasis in the article is mine. – Natylie

By Anatol Lieven, The Guardian, 2/24/23

Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine and try to capture Kyiv in February 2022, and not years earlier? Moscow has always wanted to dominate Ukraine, and Putin has given the reasons for this in his speeches and writings. Why then did he not try to take all or most of the country after the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, rather than only annexing Crimea, and giving limited, semi-covert help to separatists in the Donbas?

On Friday’s one-year anniversary of Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, it is worth thinking about precisely how we got to this point – and where things might be going.

Indeed, Russian hardliners spent years criticising their leader for not invading sooner. In 2014, the Ukrainian army was hopelessly weak; in Viktor Yanukovych, the Russians had a pro-Russian, democratically elected Ukrainian president; and incidents like the killing of pro-Russian demonstrators in Odesa provided a good pretext for action.

The reason for Putin’s past restraint lies in what was a core part of Russian strategy dating back to the 1990s: trying to wedge more distance between Europe and the United States, and ultimately to create a new security order in Europe with Russia as a full partner and respected power. It was always clear that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine would destroy any hope of rapprochement with the western Europeans, driving them for the foreseeable future into the arms of the US. Simultaneously, such a move would leave Russia diplomatically isolated and dangerously dependent on China.

This Russian strategy was correctly seen as an attempt to split the west, and cement a Russian sphere of influence in the states of the former Soviet Union. However, having a European security order with Russia at the table would also have removed the risk of a Russian attack on Nato, the EU, and most likely, Ukraine; and allowed Moscow to exert a looser influence over its neighbours – closer perhaps to the present approach of the US to Central America – rather than gripping them tightly. It was an approach that had roots in Mikhail Gorbachev’s idea – welcomed in the west at the time – of a “common European home”.

At one time, Putin subscribed to this idea. He wrote in 2012 that: “Russia is an inseparable, organic part of Greater Europe, of the wider European civilisation. Our citizens feel themselves to be Europeans.” This vision has now been abandoned in favour of the concept of Russia as a separate “Eurasian civilisation”.

Between 1999, when Putin came to power, and 2020, when Biden was elected president of the US, this Russian strategy experienced severe disappointments, but also enough encouraging signs from Paris and Berlin to keep it alive.

The most systematic Russian attempt to negotiate a new European security order came with the interim presidency of Dmitry Medvedev from 2008 to 2012. With Putin’s approval, he proposed a European security treaty that would have frozen Nato enlargement, effectively ensured the neutrality of Ukraine and other states, and institutionalised consultation on equal terms between Russia and leading western countries. But western states barely even pretended to take these proposals seriously.

In 2014, it appears to have been Chancellor Angela Merkel’s warnings of “massive damage” to Russia and German-Russian relations that persuaded Putin to call a halt to the advance of the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. In return, Germany refused to arm Ukraine, and with France, brokered the Minsk 2 agreement, whereby the Donbas would return to Ukraine as an autonomous territory.

In 2016, Russian hopes of a split between western Europe and the United States were revived by the election of Donald Trump – not because of any specific policy, rather because of the strong hostility that he provoked in Europe. But Biden’s election brought the US administration and west European establishments back together again. These years also saw Ukraine refuse to guarantee autonomy for the Donbas, and western failure to put any pressure on Kyiv to do so.

This was accompanied by other developments that made Putin decide to bring matters concerning Ukraine to a head. These included the US-Ukrainian Strategic Partnership of November 2021, which held out the prospect of Ukraine becoming a heavily armed US ally in all but name, while continuing to threaten to retake the Donbas by force.

In recent months, the German and French leaders in 2015, Merkel and François Hollande, have declared that the Minsk 2 agreement on Donbas autonomy was only a manoeuvre on their part to allow the Ukrainians the time to build up their armed forces. This is what Russian hardliners always believed, and by 2022, Putin himself seems to have come to the same conclusion.

Nonetheless, almost until the eve of invasion, Putin continued unsuccessfully to press the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in particular to support a treaty of neutrality for Ukraine and negotiate directly with the separatist leaders in the Donbas. We cannot, of course, say for sure if this would have led Putin to call off the invasion; but since it would have opened up a deep split between Paris and Washington, such a move by Macron might well have revived in Putin’s mind the old and deeply held Russian strategy of trying to divide the west and forge agreement with France and Germany.

Putin now seems to agree fully with Russian hardline nationalists that no western government can be trusted, and that the west as a whole is implacably hostile to Russia. He remains, however, vulnerable to attack from those same hardliners, both because of the deep incompetence with which the invasion was conducted, and because their charge that he was previously naive about the hopes of rapprochement with Europe appears to have been completely vindicated.

It is from this side, not the Russian liberals, that the greatest threat to his rule now comes; and of course this makes it even more difficult for Putin to seek any peace that does not have some appearance, at least, of Russian victory.

Meanwhile, the Russian invasion and its accompanying atrocities have destroyed whatever genuine sympathy for Russia existed in the French and German establishments. A peaceful and consensual security order in Europe looks very far away. But while Putin and his criminal invasion of Ukraine are chiefly responsible for this, we should also recognise that western and central Europeans also did far too little to try to keep Gorbachev’s dream of a common European home alive.

Link here.

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 2/21/23

It’s been almost a year since Russia invaded Ukraine, and many of the original rationales for the attack put forward by the Kremlin, such as “de-Nazification,” are no longer even mentioned.

Instead, the key appeal Russian President Vladimir Putin offered Tuesday in his first state of the nation address in almost two years was that, since Russians are fighting against the united West and not just Ukraine, they must consolidate behind the war effort for the sake of national survival. “The goal of the West is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, to end us once and for all,” he said. “We will respond accordingly, because we are talking about the existence of our country.”

And, in a demonstrative final break with the post-Cold War arms control regime – which has been tenuous for years – Mr. Putin announced that Russia will suspend its participation in New START, the last of the nuclear arms treaties that limited arsenals and provided channels for verification and crisis management.

It’s hard to gauge the effectiveness of Mr. Putin’s case for uncompromising struggle with the Russian public. As Russia faces receding horizons for victory, the so-called existential threat has become the core of the Kremlin’s case for staying the course, even if it requires a painful new mobilization of manpower and more economic burdens for an indefinite period.

But while Mr. Putin’s framing may be persuading the Russian public that the war is one of defense against NATO rather than of offense against Ukraine, it seems less likely that he is stirring their enthusiasm for the conflict. While support for the war remains high, there appears to be increasing desire among Russians, whether they favor the war or not, that it be resolved with peace talks soon. And while the possibility of defeat is not being entertained, the civic mood seems to be resignation rather than resolution.

“I don’t see consolidation of mass support for the war,” says Boris Kagarlitsky, a Moscow-based veteran left-winger and anti-war activist, who contributes to Russian Dissent, an English-language portal for critical Russian voices, “but there is no groundswell of support for the opposition either.”

“People have returned to a state of detachment”

Russian state-funded pollsters stopped asking explicit questions about war support after some surveys late last year found a softening in public backing, and a sharp rise in a desire for peace talks. The data is thin and, in any case, sociologists warn that wartime polls are inherently unreliable, especially in the current Russian atmosphere where anti-war sentiments or expressions deemed defeatist could result in jail time.

But the sketchy data available indicates that personal support for Mr. Putin remains high, and at least a reduced majority of Russians think the war effort must continue until some kind of victory. Interviews with a few Kremlin-skeptical political experts who remain inside Russia suggest that early hopes of a public anti-war groundswell have been thoroughly dashed and, although most average Russians seem deeply unwilling to talk with a foreign journalist, those who do express ambivalence about the war at best.

“Russian society is multi-layered, and the views we find can be quite contradictory,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who, despite his outspoken anti-war opinions, remains in Moscow. “Some want peace, but support Putin. Some don’t want Putin, but back the war. The middle part of society is composed of conformists, most of whom are passive but some are active.

“I have noticed that those active supporters of the war are becoming more aggressive. It’s actually new and unexpected to see so many people who not only feel the war must be continued, but that it must be prosecuted to total victory,” says Mr. Kolesnikov. “I would not have believed that there could be so much dormant instinct for totalitarianism in our society, which Putin is now awakening.”

Mr. Putin’s contention that Russia is defending itself against the concerted forces of the West does appear to get considerable traction among Russians.

“Judging by what I see around me, and sociological data, I see that the idea that ‘it’s us against NATO’ does seem to work,” says Mr. Kolesnikov. “It helps people see this not as a war against little Ukraine, but as a defensive struggle against a really big enemy.”

The only organization still asking Russians flatly whether they support the “special military operation” is the independent Levada Center, and its latest report in January found that 75% of respondents supported the war to some degree, while 21% said they were opposed to some extent. The numbers who believe the war will end in Russian victory declined slightly between April and January from 73% to 71%, while those who think the war will last more than another year more than doubled, from 21% to 43%.

But secret polls allegedly commissioned by the Kremlin last fall, and cited by The Moscow Times and Meduza, found that the number of people who believed that starting the war was the right thing to do was declining precipitously, from over 70% to under 60% by last November, while those who thought the war was not going according to plan had reached a high point of 42%, and just 22% thought it was basically on track.

“By now people who support the operation say that too much has already been invested in it to think of stopping,” says Denis Volkov, head of Levada. “But both supporters and opponents say they wish it would end as soon as possible with peace talks.” After the chaos and shock brought on by the partial mobilization last fall, things have settled down. “Some people left the country, others realized they weren’t subject to mobilization. By early 2023, people have returned to a state of detachment, thinking that none of this depends on them.”

“They will carry on”

Marina Volkova, a working Muscovite, expresses the fairly typical view that “Russia has no way out but to continue this to the bitter end. I think it will win. But I am so surprised that there aren’t more efforts to bring peace, make the sides sit down and find a solution. I have many friends with sons and grandsons on the front line, and I feel for them. I really wish it were over.”

Pensioner Yevgenia Vasilyeva says the war is a horror that has kept her awake every night for a year. “I don’t know whether it will end in victory or defeat, but it should end. I dream of peace and normal relations with Ukraine.”

The prospect of Russian defeat is seldom discussed, even though some like Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser and Putin supporter, insist that most Russians believe the war has become an existential struggle for survival.

“Of course rational people have to consider the possibility of defeat,” he says. “But we know that it would mean that Russia would disappear as a united country. The disaster would be much worse than after the collapse of the USSR. That’s why, if Russia loses during the upcoming spring fighting, there will be mass mobilization and the entire society will be put onto a war footing. …

“Every Russian schoolchild knows that the West has tried to destroy Russia in each century for a long time. Now it’s happening under the leadership of the U.S. But it’s the same thing, they are trying to break up Russia, and people are realizing that it’s an existential battle. Russia is just beginning to gear up for the fight.”

But critics note that the discussion of the possibility of defeat is a deeply unpopular idea, and could court legal consequences.

“Admitting defeat would be a political disaster for the authorities, so they will carry on no matter how much worse things get,” says Mr. Kagarlitsky, the anti-war activist. “Apathy and despair seem to be the order of the day [among the public]. This is a very atomized society. People are mostly concerned about themselves and their families.”