Reuters

Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was launched not only to subjugate a democratic neighbour through military aggression but to destabilize the existing international order. Six months later, the reality both on the ground and in global perception is quite different. Veteran diplomat Jeremy Kinsman, who served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, lays out the terms for a negotiated peace. 

Jeremy Kinsman

August 24, 2022

A searingly precise half-year elapsed between the day Vladimir Putin fatefully launched his illegal war of naked conquest on Ukraine, whose very existence as a country Moscow contests, and Ukrainian Independence Day, on August 24th. For Ukrainians, February 24 will always “live in infamy,” as Franklin Roosevelt described December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The world has watched Ukrainians suffer the atrocities, deprivations and displacements of Russia’s assault, as the country of 44 million fights its brutish neighbour of 144 million to a draw.

The invasion has turned out badly for Russia. It has devastated but united Ukraine, re-energized NATO’s collective security solidarity and deepened global economic woes.

As neither side is likely to win an all-out victory, there is no end in sight, especially since no signs have yet emerged of a mutually acceptable negotiated settlement. Logic and history nonetheless predict that mutual recognition of the costs of stalemate will encourage a ceasefire and then a likely-protracted negotiation. But the two sides are not there yet, each apparently believing its situation on the ground could improve. Ukraine is mounting a counter-offensive in the South, to retake Kherson and protect access to the Black Sea. But longer wars increase in violence and the risk of escalation rises.

Minimum Ukrainian requirements from negotiation would re-set demarcation lines back at least to those that applied before February 24 to deny any Russian territorial conquest, along with viable security and sovereignty guarantees. President Zelensky’s recent vow to re-take Crimea is politically necessary but militarily unrealistic.

The international community should mirror Ukraine’s bottom-line requirements and hold together with tough-minded diplomacy to prevent hard-won international norms against aggression from being thrown under the bus of renewed 1930s-style fascist aggression.

We must expect that after hostilities cease, the West will remain in adversarial relations with Russia for as long as Vladimir Putin is President. Putin’s regime thrives on enmity with the US, and pretends isolation is a badge of patriotic honour, though it will argue for the alleviation of isolating sanctions. Outrageous evidence of war crimes will need a route to justice, but it is by no means clear what that will be without full support of the International Criminal Court. Yet, urgent transnational challenges also insist that the international community, including Russia, be able to function as cooperatively as possible, which requires productive diplomatic contact.

Only Putin can decide how Russia comes to terms with such competing conditions. He seems convinced that Western democracies are so perilously fragile and fractious that Western unity, resolve, and deterrent and punitive sanctions will bend under pressure of the long game of attrition and intractability, even though Russia’s economic challenges will likely deepen its growing and costly isolation.

His extremely competitive nature, built-in ambitions and resentments, confidence in his police-state control, and apparent belief that only he is tough enough to prevail, are traits that drive him. Our goal must be to encourage Putin’s acceptance of the clear evidence that he is wrong. Putin is not irrational. We know how he adjusted objectives once he saw that he had erred in his estimates of success of the initial all-country invasion.

The international community should mirror Ukraine’s bottom-line requirements and hold together with tough-minded diplomacy to prevent hard-won international norms from being thrown under the bus of renewed 1930s-style fascist aggression.

Putin needs to understand that the world is not prepared to see February 24th go down in history as another infamous date when violent calamity upturned everything, like 9/11, searing collective memories for a lifetime as remembered thresholds between an unknowing “before”, and a punishing, rueful, “after.”

The Christian Bible depicts calamity as swift, borne on the horsemen of the apocalypse; conquest, war, famine, and ultimately death. The First World War was the great calamity whose armistice anniversary of November 11 became dedicated to resolve that it remain “the war to end all wars.”

The rise of competitive militarized nationalism in the 1930s blew such hopes away. Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 launched an even deadlier world conflict that took about 80 million lives, including those of the unthinkable Holocaust. It traumatized Polish memory, just as the fall of France on June 25, 1940 permanently scarred its psyche.

Victors mark the days that turned the tide — the “longest day,” D-Day, June 6, 1944, and for Russians, the conquest of Berlin, May 7, 1945. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, effectively ended the war, introducing the nuclear age, and chastening forever the human contemplation of conflict.

At the war’s end, then-sovereign nations committed the world to make certain 1918’s pledge of “never again.” US Secretary of State Dean Acheson titled his literate narrative of the construction of a new world order to outlaw aggression, Present at the Creation.

Does Putin think the world will now acquiesce to his reversion to the old, barbaric ways? Of course, over these decades, war still stalked the Earth, as wars of independence from colonialism, as proxies of Cold War rivalry, notably in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and as insurgencies, civil wars, and ethno-tribal or sectarian collisions. Generally, they ended in exhausted, negotiated truce.

Determined to end Europe’s history of murderous wars, Europeans aligned within a union meant to dull competitive nationalism with transformative pooling of national sovereignties and collective economic prosperity. The remarkably non-violent parallel transformation from communism, and then break-up of the Soviet Union, seemed at first to reinforce the positive European trend. But the revival of old majoritarian identities and hostilities, and initially overlooked loose ends of the Soviet break-up — including ethnic dislocation and economic degradation — deepened the sense for Russians of growing isolation, victimhood, and vulnerability, that welcomed Putin’s strong hand.

Putin needs to understand that the world is not prepared to see February 24th go down in history as another infamous date when violent calamity upturned everything, like 9/11, searing collective memories for a lifetime as remembered thresholds between an unknowing ‘before’, and a punishing, rueful, ‘after’.

Through all this, the world generally held to the need to protect the injunction against outright invasion of one country by another.

When Iraq invaded oil-rich Kuwait in 1990, the post-Cold War consensus at the time enabled a global coalition under UN/US command to affirm the unacceptability of a war of aggressive choice against a smaller neighbour, though the question lingered as to whether a nuclear power would be so easily overcome.

The invasion of Iraq by the US (with UK collusion) in March, 2003, was a disastrous war of choice that seemed to flow from an exceptionalist conceit expressed in George H.W. Bush’s State of the Union address of 1992, that “A world once divided into two armed camps……now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America.”

In Russia, that assumption of unipolarity ignited multiple grievances that Putin addressed in leading his country’s climb back from its ruinous and ultimately humiliating descent into chaos at the end of the Cold War. He chose — as would Donald Trump — to prioritize nationalism over internationalism.

Assertively championing the ascent elsewhere of often illiberal nationalism, Putin became increasingly vexed by independent Ukraine’s growing orientation to the EU and NATO as partners of choice. Russia processed Ukraine’s embrace of Europe and democracy as a threat fomented by Western interests. The invasion on February 24 was a consequence.

Few commentators and analysts believed Russia would launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine. Despite his increasing hostility to the West, Putin was considered fairly pragmatic, reasonably cautious, and certainly rational enough to avoid incurring punitive reprisals and international pushback.

The invasion and destructive war that converted battlegrounds into crime scenes now defines Putin as a throwback renegade.

Putin has morphed from being an international disrupter to an outlaw, indeed armed with thermonuclear weapons, the autocratic ruler of a society still traumatized by its convulsive and essentially unsuccessful and violent history. He mobilizes passive Russians through self-serving lies and half-baked historical fantasies that explosively validate the dictum that the “The first casualty when war comes is Truth,” a dictum from and for the ages, and never truer than in this age of disinformation.

In the communications war, Ukraine’s plight, its heroic defence of its sovereignty, its charismatic leader, and the broader stakes of defence of the rules-based security order together feed the narrative of one of the most effective military assistance and fundraising campaigns in history, providing an arsenal via aid that this year will exceed Ukraine’s defence budget several times over. Recent billion-dollar upgrades include advanced rockets and missiles intended to stanch Russian ambition and lead to negotiation.

Zelensky himself has acknowledged the war “will only end through diplomacy” while “each negotiation reflects the facts on the ground.” Despite growing pressures on Western economies, there must be no sign of relenting.

At the same time, in parallel with our immediate preoccupations with persevering to save Ukraine and the prohibition on aggression, we need to reboot confidence in the rules-based system more generally, especially for the most economically vulnerable countries already reeling from the costs of climate change, COVID, and other near-calamities.

February 24th will always be remembered as the day a Ukrainian nightmare began. It will be remembered, too, as the day the nation’s spirit rose to save it. We must enable it to be memorialized also as the date when the world successfully pushed back to save the pledge, once and for all, of “Never Again.”

Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canadian Ambassador to Russia from 1992-96, as well as Ambassador to the EU and Italy, and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.