Sure A Not

Some two and a half times after&nbsp, Russia launched its” special military activity” against Ukraine there appears to be much thought given to how the conflict was realistically&nbsp, finish. Now, both parties claim that their purpose is “victory”.

For President Volodymyr Zelensky, this entails the return to Ukraine of all the lands occupied by Russia, including Crimea, and NATO account.

For President Vladimir Putin’s triumph, it means that Russia will continue to control the land it seized from its neighbor and that Ukraine will not only refrain from joining NATO but acknowledges that it is a part of Russia’s sphere of influence.

In other words, as of right now, each group demands that its adversary be a acquiescence without reservation. Given the current circumstances, these problems are never likely to be met, and if new story is a guide, they probably never will be.

The next big conflict, as it was known, saw Japan and Germany defeat one of the opposing forces in the end. All subsequent wars, from Korea to Vietnam to the Iran/Iraq conflict ended either with a negotiation, a compromise ( be it temporary ) or a return to the status quo ante.

And in the two instances where the attacking authority was initially successful, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan, it proved capable of consolidating its carry on its opponent.

So, one can honestly believe, irrespective of the standard pronouncements made by all the parties to the Ukraine fight, that the result will be some sort of “modus vivendi”, even if this may take the form of an eternal, protracted, low-intensity confrontation. But whatever the results, there are a number of experiences that cannot be ignored.

In terms of populations, Russia’s population is currently estimated at 144 million. The combined groups of Germany, Poland and France are 192 million, reaching 259 million if one adds Ukraine.

From an economic standpoint, Russia’s position is not much stronger. Currently, Russia has an average yearly per capita GDP of some US$ 15, 200, compared with$ 48, 700 for Germany,$ 39, 000 for France and$ 18, 500 for Poland.

Therefore, Putin took a position of relative failure in terms of population and economic clout when he began his Ukrainian project. These flaws were made even more clear by Russia’s achievement in the military world.

A Russian armoured row made a run for Kiev on February 27, 2022, with the intention of putting a pro-Russian government in place in the Russian capital. At best, it was a lightening strike that was supposed to last 48 hours. For Russia, it has proved rather an absolute disaster.

The Russian troops, which reportedly had been reformed and reorganized under Putin, proved capable of seizing the Russian capital, more galvanizing a opposition embodied figuratively instantaneously by Zelensky.

Putin’s actions against Ukraine, which occurred after Russia’s invasion of Crimea, had a damaging impact on the development of global ties as it had been intended since World War II.

Granted, it was not the first day that a nation-state without foreign support invaded another. In theory, there was little to differentiate between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the American invasion of Iraq.

Also, India’s conquest of Sikkim in April 1973 and the “referendum” that followed may have caused a splash, but it did no. Finally, Sikkim was useless and America’s invasion of Iraq was a show.

Ukraine, however, is in the heart of Europe. It is one of the world’s major grain producers and it shares a boundary with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. So, in geostrategic conditions, a Russian-dominated Ukraine has the potential of appearing as a menace to Western Europe. But to do so it has to be firmly in Russia’s hand. For Putin, the problem is not only to establish his identity on Ukraine but, once he has, to keep it in his grasp.

One may assume that the rest of Ukraine would not approve of being under Soviet rule, aside from the Donbass and Crimea, which are both inhabited by Russian listeners. Putin’s military might be insufficient to control an held Ukraine, but if background provides an example it does not enjoy in his favor.

When Germany occupied part of France in 1940, it took some 350, 000 European soldiers to retain some 25 million Frenchmen under control. That proportion considered the fact that French officials continued to be in charge of the nation for all manner of purposes at the local level.

So the postal service, trains, schools, road maintenance, the courts and the like endured as they always had and almost all of the 72, 500 Jews who were deported to the death camps were arrested not by the Germans but by the European authorities operating on behalf of the occupiers.

It would take at least one million, if not more, to impose Putin’s rule over an occupied Ukraine, keeping in mind the size of the French population in relation to the number of occupying Germans as a reference and assuming that the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian occupation would not be more committed than the French.

A hostile and occupied Ukraine would not, in the long run, pose a greater challenge to Putin’s vision of Russia than his current predicament, he might ask.

On paper, there were two ways of denying Putin’s ambition to impose his hegemony on Ukraine.

The first was to allow him to have his way while ensuring that his desire to recreate a Russian empire based on the Stalinist model would be thwarted by the burden it would impose on Russia from within.

However, this would not only have entailed a long-term strategy for which the West was ill-equipped. It also would have required, above all, that the Ukrainians throw in the towel. Although this might have happened about 20 years ago, a resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism made it possible for the nation to refuse to accept Russia as its oppressor in the 2020s.

The second way of denying Putin’s ambition—refusing to let him have his way—is what has emerged as the current situation. Today, there is a general consensus among Western countries that Putin’s geopolitical agenda must be constrained.

That raises two questions:

• Why?
• At what cost?

Putin’s Ukrainian initiative will be viewed as a direct threat to Western Europe if, in part, the Western public accepts the idea that if he is n’t stopped, it will encourage him to take similar initiatives against Poland or the Baltic states. In this perspective, Putin had to be stopped, and Ukraine was the place to do it.

Questions that were raised or left unanswered included whether he had the population to move farther west, whether the economy would support an open conflict, or whether the army would manage it.

If Ukraine had not resisted the Russian incursion, there would have been&nbsp, no scope for the West to intervene as it did. However, once it did, the nature of the conflict changed.

What started out as a conflict between Moscow and Moscow’s neighbor became a conflict between Washington-plus-allies and Russia. And while conflict’s political and economic dimensions are still restricted to the Russian-Ukrainian border region, they have expanded to include all countries.

The collateral damages have been colossal, even if the human cost of the conflict is estimated to be 400 000 casualties in addition to the estimated 3.7 million internally displaced and the 6.3 million refugees who have fled the country.

In economic terms, the combination of sanctions, embargoes and disruption is estimated to have cost a total of some$ 1.5 trillion, equivalent to 1 % of the global GDP. This includes, among other things, the price of petroleum, which in turn has impacted prices in the fertilizer and petrochemical industries, as well as the global supply of grain. From that perspective, the war in Ukraine is nothing less than a global economic disaster.

The disruptive impact of the conflict in Ukraine is difficult to understate if the international order is a matter of balance. Before Putin’s” special military operation”, NATO, which was conceived as an anti-Soviet alliance, has, over the years, drifted into a state of semi-irrelevance.

Literally overnight, Putin was able to persuade countries like Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, which was revived as a buffer against a potential Russian imperial expansion.

Washington’s stance on both Russia and China on a more global scale inevitably provided the two with a common ground when confronting a common enemy. However, Beijing’s interests do n’t align with China’s desire to see Russia overbearingly weakened, as this would strengthen Washington’s reputation globally.

Ultimately, Beijing’s Russia policy entails providing some support to Putin without provoking an excessive American reaction.

As for the West in general and more specifically for Washington, the future is, to say the least, uncertain. The temptation to use Ukraine to bring Putin to his knees is real, but it also poses a risk.

Russia is a major nuclear power, after all, and nothing could prevent it from losing control of its arsenal if it drifted into a state of semi-anarchy. The real question is therefore whether Putin can be attracted to without destroying the Russian state.

Much will depend on how long the Putin establishment can maintain the system that the West is currently imposing on it. Sanctions are undoubtedly having an impact, but one should not discount the fact that the Russian people’s level of social resilience is unmatched in the West in terms of hardship.

In terms of socioeconomics, Russian society is neither industrial nor entrepreneurial, and all it produces is energy, grain, and raw materials. In the end, Russia is much less receptive to outside forces than countries like China by merely hunkering down.

As of today, Putin’s” special military operation” has reinvigorated NATO, illustrated the shortcomings of the Russian armed forces and massively boosted Ukrainian nationalism. They have yet to demonstrate that they are even close to reining Putin in when it comes to their responses.

That makes the current situation a lose-lose proposition for all concerned.

Alexander Casella PhD has taught and worked as a journalist for Le Monde, The Times, The New York Times, Die Zeit, The Guardian and Swiss radio and TV, writing primarily on China and Vietnam. In 1973, he joined the UNHCR, serving, among other postings, as head of the East Asia Section and director for Asia and Oceania. The International Center for Migration Policy Development’s representative in Geneva then served him.

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