Filenews 23 May 2022
By Leonid Bershidsky
One of the most striking issues surrounding the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022 is the variety of results that both sides could declare as a victory - and the rarity of results that could lead to lasting peace.
What will determine the success of any declaration of "victory" is the target audience. What matters in the real world, however, is whether the result will create a balance of power and interests between the belligerent forces, so that further armed conflict makes no sense or even becomes impossible.
Objectives
The stated goals of both sides in the war are relatively ambitious, although Russia seemed to limit its own over time. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's victory vision includes the return of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk to Ukraine.
Russia aims to extend its control over Ukrainian territory to the entire Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east and to a part of the Ukrainian Black Sea coastline in the south, turning Ukraine into a country with no exit to the sea. The occupied territories may even be claimed as purely Russian territory and not as allied, unrecognized states.
This does not mean, however, that neither side has "victory" options somewhere in between, or that even if one of the sides achieves its maximum goal in the coming months, the violence will end in the long run.
For Ukraine, a Russian retreat to the lines of contact that existed before 24 February would be a clear victory, at least in the eyes of the rest of the world. Zelensky could even sell it internally - as a compromise that would save Ukrainian lives and restore the status quo to which the country was generally accustomed - even if an electorate that is outraged by Russian war crimes would probably accept it. More than 80% of Ukrainians are opposed to the recognition of any Russian conquests, including Crimea, and almost three quarters believe that Ukraine is capable of repelling the Russian attack. These percentages do not favour any kind of compromise.
And yet, even if Ukraine sees the war going worse on the ground and the Russian withdrawal to the positions of 24 February before 24 February becomes unrealistic, any outcome whereby Ukraine maintains access to the Black Sea and lifts the Russian blockade of the rest of its ports would still be something of a victory - at least on a moral level, similar to the one Finland won in the Winter War of 1939-1940 against the Soviet Union, despite losing 9% of its territory. Ukraine would thus continue to thwart Putin's ambitions for regime change and maintain its independence and national identity.
Victory and defeat
Ukraine could only be considered a loser if Putin had displaced Zelensky and installed a puppet government in the first weeks of the invasion. Since even the Kremlin has abandoned this dream, Ukraine, in a sense, has already won.
Russia, for its part, has already lost this war - its reputation as a military power has been undermined, its global image has been tarnished for decades by the barbarity of its soldiers during the invasion, its sense of security has been diminished by NATO's imminent expansion into Finland and Sweden. Its territorial gains in Ukraine - especially given the devastation it has caused to the occupied territories - cannot compensate for the loss of international companies that have left its territory and the frozen reserves of the Russian Central Bank.
Nevertheless, a declaration of victory is essentially possible for Russia any day given that it occupies more territory than on the day it invaded Ukraine - and especially since it occupies the coastline of the Azov Sea between Crimea and the Russian border.
This land ensures an uninterrupted supply of water and a route from mainland Russia to the occupied Ukrainian Crimea. Without this peninsula and without the Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson regions, Ukraine's territory would have shrunk by about 18% - even more so, both in absolute and relative terms, than Stalin managed to detach from Finland. Russia would add to its territories an area comparable in size to Colorado, Nevada or Bulgaria.
Pretences
Putin also has much more room to "pass" these relative gains as a victory to his domestic audience than Zelensky has in selling any unfinished triumph to his voters. Timothy Schneider, a professor at Yale and author of "Bloodlands," a book on the tragic history of Eastern Europe that is a frequent point of reference, highlighted this issue in a recent modular post on Twitter.
"If he is defeated in reality, Putin will simply declare victory on tv and the Russians will believe him or even pretend to believe him," Schneider wrote. In contrast, Zelensky "can't just change the subject. He must have the people of his nation with him in any important decision." From this point on, Snyder concludes that Putin cannot be found cornered in Ukraine, like the famous rat of the childhood memories of the President of Russia, and does not need any effort to save face, while Zelensky, on the contrary, needs help both to win the war and to convincingly explain to Ukrainians the post-war future of their country.
Snyder is right, at least in the short term. The war continues because Putin seems to believe he can earn more in exchange for everything Russia has already lost - and because Ukrainians believe they can defeat and drive him out so that he has less in the end than he had when he attacked their country earlier in the year.
If Putin can be convinced that further gains are impossible, and if the Ukrainian public can "buy" a partial Russian retreat, the fighting will end, at least for now. This is an objective that can best be achieved by more military aid to Ukraine - and by celebrating its victories on the battlefield, which give the Ukrainians much to be proud of, even if they fail to achieve a full, definitive victory.
The war of the future
In the long run, however, any outcome of the current war - even the best results desired by each of the two sides today - may well be as unbearable as the situation of 2014-2015, which has inevitably incubated the current conflict.
If Russia stops its offensive and consolidates its relatively modest gains, or if it retreats while maintaining its previous conquests in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, both sides will be tempted to resume hostilities at some point in the future.
Ukraine has overcome the trauma of the defeats it suffered by the Russian military in 2014 and 2015. Its troops have tasted success on the battlefield and are not in awe of their opponent: the recovery of lost territory is now in the realm of the possible. The head of the Ukrainian military intelligence services Kirilo Budanov has predicted that Ukraine will take back its territory by Christmas - and even if this prediction turns out to be very rosy, many in Ukraine will find it worth trying out later. This means that no Russian "victory" other than the collapse of the Ukrainian state can be definitive.
On the other hand, Putin - who will likely remain in power even if the "victory" he will end up proclaiming is of a moderate "stature" - may not be able to resist the urge to invade anew once the lessons of his current attack have been internalised and those responsible for today's failures are punished.
The risk of a new Russian attack will remain real even if Putin's failure is completed and he must withdraw from all annexed and occupied territories in the coming months. His position at the top of the Russian hierarchy will then be precarious: he will not be able to declare victory even for television, and Russia is not a country that politely treats the losers, nor that easily forgets defeats.
For those interested in what to expect from a particular kind of Putin successor, the Telegram account of Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, one of the key figures of the 2014 uprising in eastern Ukraine, presents a budding version of Dolchstoßlegende, according to which Putin's inadequately nationalist clique betrays Russian interests for selfish purposes.
Driver
Even if a weakened Russia emerges from the conflict - and even if it collapses, as some Ukrainian and Western intellectuals hope - the experience of inter-war Germany, or, more importantly, of post-Soviet Russia itself, should be a good 'guide'. Discontent can lead to both economic mobilization and rearmament. A Russia that would be forced to withdraw within its borders and lick its wounds would continue to pose an existential threat even to a Ukraine that would protect itself from joining the most important alliances of the Western world, the European Union and NATO.
There are not many options for lasting peace in Ukrainian "bloody soils", and those that exist today seem utopian. A quarter of a century after the conclusion of the Yugoslav wars, the former Yugoslavia is still not free from tensions, while an armed conflict involving its successor states is still possible, even though Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia are now NATO member countries.
The tension would disappear once and for all if Serbia, a candidate for accession to the European Union, eventually joined the EU along with other former Yugoslav states. In the same way, any long-term harmonious solution to the existential conflict between an imperialist Russia and a stubbornly independent Ukraine is only possible if both countries end up as part of a united Europe - a completely distant prospect in the present and a possibility that requires a degree of Russian atonement unthinkable not only under Putin, but also under almost every possible successor.
If an everlasting peace, however, is what the West is seeking, that - and not just a weakened Russia - must be its long-term goal.
Source: BloombergOpinion
