Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo / AP
A counterfactual view of the conflict in Ukraine.
The West is toying with the idea of letting Vladimir Putin have Ukraine. Newly committed Western aid to the country dropped nearly 90 per cent from a year earlier, even before the US and EU failed this month to approve more funds, calculates the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Voters, egged on by the pro-Putinist far right, are getting bored with Ukraine’s war. The West, after an 18-month hiatus, is resuming its 15-year appeasement of Putin’s aggression. “If Russia wins” is an increasingly plausible scenario. Here’s what that might look like:
1. Russia exacts terrible victor’s justice on Ukrainians. This isn’t speculation. It’s precisely what the Russians have already done in Ukraine: mass executions, castrations, rapes, torture and abductions of children. Remember Russia’s pre-invasion lists of Ukrainian public figures to be “removed”.
Guerrilla attacks by Ukrainian partisans would trigger more Russian reprisals. Millions more Ukrainians would flee west, this time permanently. Remember that the arrival of 1.3 million refugees in 2015 turbocharged Europe’s far right.
2. A free state might survive in western Ukraine, writes former British diplomat Peter Ricketts. It might even join the EU. Putin doesn’t seem very bothered about the region. But it could expect repeated Russian attacks, no matter what “treaties” were signed.
Russia constantly violated the post-2014 Minsk Agreements, too. A rolling Russian advance would take territory when it could.
3. Putin would control close to a quarter of the world’s wheat exports. He has already been upgrading from gas as a weapon to food as a weapon.
4. Putin’s success would encourage countries interested in invading a neighbour: China, Venezuela, Azerbaijan and, indeed, Russia.
Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Every time the Russians think that they have ‘won’ in a conflict under Putin — Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014, Syria 2015 — they learn something about us...become overconfident in their abilities and in a few years they try bigger and bolder operations.”
The likely creation of a Ukrainian army in exile running sorties from European countries would further incentivise Russian attacks on those places.
Putin has already built a war economy. His army has updated its methods by decades in less than two years. His population has shown it will tolerate even a big war. Why not keep taking bites out of neighbouring states? Putin’s cheerleader Viktor Orbán ought to reflect that Hungary borders Ukraine.
5. A discredited Nato would face its biggest test. Nato and the EU are possibly the strongest remaining multinational alliances in a nationalistic world. Putin seeks to prove they won’t hold.
If he attacked the Baltics, Nato would probably send troops. But for how long?
Once a few hundred western soldiers came back dead, far-right parties would demand “peace”, meaning unenforceable peace treaties with Putin. Western countries could retreat, saying they had met their obligation under the Nato treaty’s Article 5 to fight for an ally. Nobody would want to escalate to nuclear war.
Article 5 isn’t sacrosanct. Other international agreements — from the UN’s Convention against Torture to the EU’s rules on budget deficits — are routinely breached with impunity.
Russia’s army in Ukraine, Hamas and Israel’s army in Gaza have all recently violated international law on camera.
In any case, two pillars of the so-called “international community” — the British government and a prospective Trump Administration — seem to be done with international treaties. Donald Trump has said (according to his former national security adviser John Bolton), “I don’t give a shit about Nato”, and, as president, often threatened to leave it.
Americans and western Europeans feel immune: Putin isn’t coming for them. No wonder some eastern European officials have begun musing about attacking Russia first, instead of just sitting around waiting for it to attack them.
A more likely scenario: many European countries spend fortunes on defence, reintroduce conscription and invest in nukes, while also letting Putin bully them.
Ditching Ukraine would be a choice. There is an alternative. Russia has a low-tech economy about the size of Canada’s.
The Europeans could help Ukraine withstand Putin even if Trump pulled out. We’d have to build up our arms industries fast, but the effort required of us would be tiny compared with Russia’s.
We’d also need to replace American aid to Ukraine — €71.4bn in the war’s first 21 months, according to the Kiel Institute, or €40.8bn on an annualised basis. That’s €70 a year per European citizen of Nato. We could find that if we wanted.
Written by: Simon Kuper
© Financial Times
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