This commentary is by Barbara Felitti of Huntington, who retired after 28 years of international development work, including 15 years with the Montpelier-based Institute for Sustainable Communities. She lived and worked in Ukraine from 2005 to 2008 on a USAID-funded democracy project following the Orange Revolution, and was based in Kyiv. From 1993 to 2005, she worked extensively on projects in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
The recent commentary about a “diplomatic off-ramp” in Ukraine is an example of an academic exercise devoid of historical context, leading to dangerously simplistic conclusions.
The commentary relies on several flawed “pillars.” Framing the conflict in “absolutist terms of good and evil” is one concern. Really? Putin chose to invade Ukraine and denies its very right to exist as an independent country. He is destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure and economy, while the military rapes, tortures and kills civilians. The International Criminal Court accuses Putin of war crimes for bringing Ukrainian children to Russia for adoption. The Russian government does not even deny the facts about the adoption program — they don’t see anything wrong with taking children from their parents to another country and giving them to another family. I see no moral equivalency here or difficulty sorting out “good” vs. “evil.”
Another “pillar” says the war cannot be decisive, referencing a NATO official’s March 2022 assessment — four weeks after the invasion started. We are now 13 months into the war. A more recent analysis by a former senior CIA intelligence officer with decades of Russia experience sees a deal that consolidates Russia’s gains as Putin’s best option to “mask weakness and intimidate his foes into blinking first.”
Statements that Putin “might” view accommodation by Ukraine or the West as a sign of weakness that encourages future imperialistic ambitions, and that diplomacy can be hard-edged by “insisting on verification,” are where the commentary is most divorced from historical realities.
Putin does see accommodation as weakness and a green light for his territorial ambitions. Some history:
- Russia deliberately creates “frozen conflicts” to weaken the sovereignty of former Soviet republics that are now independent countries.
- In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, where two regions (Ossetia and Abkhazia) are still under Russian occupation and control. As in Crimea, the global response was muted.
- Failure in 2014 to stop Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and occupation in eastern Ukraine emboldened Putin to invade in 2022.
- Since the 1990s, a frozen conflict exists in Moldova (which borders Ukraine) where the region of Transnistria is under Russian military occupation.
- Putin’s scorched earth policies were honed in 1999-2000 during fighting within Russia with the separatist republic of Chechnya. Putin ordered the complete destruction of Grozny, the republic’s capital city. A similar pattern of destruction is now being repeated in Ukrainian cities.
- Beginning in 2015, Russia’s support for the Syrian government included bombings that deliberately targeted hospitals, schools and markets, causing massive civilian deaths. Again, techniques all now being used in Ukraine.
“Diplomacy with verification” sounds good except that diplomacy has been tried and failed multiple times:
- Russia violated all agreements it signed related to Ukrainian sovereignty — the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, and both the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements.
- In the Budapest Memorandum, Russia, the U.S. and the United Kingdom recognized Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders (which included Crimea) in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. Violation of this agreement by Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea had no repercussions, in part because the U.S. insisted on changing provision of security “guarantees” (which would require military action if the agreement was violated) to security “assurances,” which proved meaningless.
- For the Minsk agreements, Russia signed both agreements but insisted it was not a party to the conflict in eastern Ukraine and therefore not subject to the conditions to remove military troops and equipment.
Based on this experience, Ukrainians rightly do not trust Putin to negotiate in good faith. Therefore it is essential that Ukraine’s conditions for negotiations are respected — not through “back channels,” but starting with Russia’s withdrawal from occupied areas of Ukraine. Diplomacy has a time and place, and it is up to Ukrainians to determine when that is.
Autocratic regimes around the world, particularly China, are watching. Is there a high cost for unprovoked aggression against a peaceful neighbor or an acceptable off-ramp? What is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow. Global security is at risk, and supporting Ukraine is very much in the security interests of the U.S.
And so it is disconcerting that the commentator’s call for diplomacy uses the right-wing dog whistle that money spent in Ukraine could be “better spent addressing the challenges facing people at home.” This “left-right” alliance against Ukraine is the biggest threat to a just and lasting peace.
A Ukrainian socialist, Alona Liasheva, states it clearly; “I know the left tends to look for a nefarious U.S. plot behind everything … (but) in the case of Ukraine, it’s far simpler than many on the left think. Ukraine was attacked by an imperialist army, and as a result we are in a struggle to defend our lives and our very right to exist as a sovereign nation. … This is not an abstract question for us.”
Here is an academic thought exercise: What would a diplomatic off-ramp for Hitler have looked like?
