Aftermath of overnight bombarment of Kyiv, December 29th, 2022/Kyiv Post

Lisa Van Dusen

December 29^th, 2022

If you Google “Russia Ukraine war diplomacy” the search results read like weekly entries in the diary of a 16-year-old girl who can’t decide whether to go to prom with the quarterback: Diplomacy will fail, diplomacy is the only way, diplomacy will never happen, diplomacy is premature, diplomacy is renewed, diplomacy is eschewed, diplomacy is urged by both sides, but only in theory.

At this writing, Russia has rejected Kyiv’s proposal for a peace summit within two months by — in the manner of a sophomore passing a note to Britney in civics class, to prolong the allegory — calling it a “diplomacy 404” per the standard dead web page error message.

The latest New York Times headline, Hard-Line Positions by Russia and Ukraine Dim Hope for Peace Talks, repeats a theme generated at regular intervals over several months — the dance of no-diplomacy, with the impasse couched in the language of moral equivalence. “As the battle for Ukraine turns into a bloody, mile-by-mile fight in numbing cold, Ukrainian and Russian officials have insisted that they are willing to discuss making peace,” writes the Times’ Shashank Bengali. “But with a drumbeat of statements in recent days making clear that each side’s demands are flatly unacceptable to the other, there appears to be little hope for serious negotiations in the near future.”

Those demands include the non-starter on Kyiv’s part of Russia only attending the peace summit if it faces a war crimes tribunal first and the deal-breaker on Moscow’s part of Kyiv surrendering the four oblasts of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia that Putin has claimed if not conquered. In other words, a confirmation that the symmetry of Newton’s third law of narrative motion has yet to be skewed by an external force, whether public opinion — which is overwhelmingly on the side of the invadee in this fight, a fact reinforced by Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent trip to Washington — third-party military intervention, decisive battlefield defeat or act of God, leaving both parties fixed in their positions and the immediate power to end the conflict still in the hands of Vladimir Putin as the criminal aggressor.

It would be not only a cliché but a lie to say that truth was the first casualty of Vladimir Putin’s illegal war on Ukraine. Truth died in this dynamic long before February 24^th 2022. It was already dead when Putin, for weeks in late 2021, indulged in a sort of catfish diplomacy by going through the motions of entertaining the possibility of any alternative outcome beyond invasion. Its demise was evident in the parade of ludicrous casus belli ventured to rationalize a military adventure whose only truly plausible rationale was the one admitted by an uncharacteristically unguarded Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in April, when he said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “meant to put an end” to US-led global domination.

And so, the endgame that was was impossible to achieve in Putin’s anticipated timeline of two days — an assessment shared by the US intelligence community — has devolved into a war of attrition.

The word attrition comes from the Latin atterere, meaning “to rub against”, denoting the “grinding down” of an opponent’s forces in attrition warfare. The key elements of wars of attrition are 1) time, 2) strategic patience, and, 3) incremental narrative reversal, including through the gradual depletion of an opponent’s arsenal — in Clausewitzian terms, “the exhaustion of the adversary”. Russia’s victory over Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812 was a war of attrition, as was the Western Front Battle of Verdun in 1916. The question now is, “Is this Russia’s war of attrition to win or Ukraine’s?”

Can the Lavrovian world order clash, defeat and triumph that could not be achieved by baiting NATO and the United States into an air or ground war in Europe 10 months ago be produced through a combination of commodified time, inflation, military depletion/re-armament and trade disruption? The substantive answer to that question is not as important as we approach the one-year anniversary of Putin’s invasion as is the absolute certainty that, from the zero-sum worldview of the party of the first part, it’s worth a shot.

As with all tyrants, Vladimir Putin’s relationship to power is characterized by a narcissistic myopia of the sort that makes grown men behave like three-year-olds with deadlier toys. Diplomacy is a grown-up skill, not the kind you can fake for a photo-op in lieu of mastering.

Which makes diplomacy the element in this narrative most notable for its absence. Hence the trademark, cynical, New-Authoritarians irony of the “diplomacy 404” joke. Vladimir Putin, as the junior geopolitical partner to China in a global assault on democracy whose major headway was made in the first two decades of this century using cyberwarfare, narrative warfare, hybrid warfare, mass propaganda and other forms of non-kinetic organized larceny, espouses a contempt for diplomacy not seen since the relentless anti-diplomatic disingenuousness of the last lunatic whose world domination designs terrorized humanity.

This week, Policy magazine went live with our first issue of 2023, the magazine’s 10^th anniversary year. We chose diplomacy for the theme of the issue, whose cover is The Diplomats, with an image of Canada’s United Nations ambassador, Bob Rae, at the rostrum of UN General Assembly Hall. The theme is a tribute to the current and former diplomats who’ve provided us with such brilliant insight and analysis for the past decade. Also, at a time when challengers to democracy consistently manifest contempt for diplomacy, we wanted to spotlight the art and public service of dialogue and negotiation as the civilized alternative to force and brutality for resolving conflict.

Our new issue went live hours after Lavrov issued an ultimatum to Ukraine to submit to Moscow’s demands — including surrendering Ukrainian territory that Russia now controls — or the Russian army “will decide the fate of Ukraine”. It was a brutalist move made no less thuggish by Putin’s declaration less than a week earlier that the war can only be resolved diplomatically which, given the source, could only be read as misdirection. The juxtaposition of a medieval threat issued by a man who still fancies himself a diplomat and the thousands of words written by real ones in Policy actually doing their jobs was jarring.

Aside from all of the other contrasts of our ongoing clash between the rules-based global order and the aspiring totalitarian surveillance-state one — between freedom and Orwellian subjugation, between truth and industrialized scammery as the means to political ends — there is a clash between humanity and interests bent on disenfranchising it for the purposes of power consolidation. Which makes diplomacy — as an expression of humanity based on the accountability of democratic governments to their citizens, including for their conduct in international affairs — as much of a target as other key components of democracy. That much was clear when the last American president gutted the State Department and scapegoated individual diplomats in his bullying effort against Ukraine.

This war will not end through performative, puck-icing negotiations presided over by autocrats or de facto autocrats who’ve traded the interests of their own citizens for power. And it will not end through truth-trolling Kabuki designed to create a diversion with a series of viral sideshows. As with all tyrants, Vladimir Putin’s relationship to power is characterized by a narcissistic myopia of the sort that makes grown men behave like three-year-olds with deadlier toys. Diplomacy is a grown-up skill, not the kind you can fake for a photo-op in lieu of mastering.

In the world that Putin comes from — not St. Petersburg, the other one — covert tactics are deployed and operational games are played precisely to avoid reasonable processes such as the dialogue, explanation, justification and negotiation required in diplomacy. A man whose personal irritants consistently end up poisoned, shot or defenestrated has no respect for dialogue, negotiation or even the Marquess of Queensberry rules of global leadership.

That much is clear from the fresh bombardment of Ukrainian cities launched overnight — including 120 strikes on civilian infrastructure — between the writing of the beginning of this piece and the end of this sentence.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.