You don’t need to be an expert on Ukraine and Russia to know that there are four ways in which Vladimir Putin’s war can end – assuming that it doesn’t go nuclear.
The first is with a Ukrainian win, and a return to the status quo of 2014. The second is with a Russian victory, and its conquest of the whole of Ukraine. The third is with a negotiated peace – most a product of military exhausation and outside pressure on both countries for a settlement. This seems the most likely of the three, and is consistent with a drawn-out struggle.
The fourth is a coup and the fall of Putin (which would also be a likely consquence of the first). There has been much talk about about it and no sign of it. Until now.
It’s impossible to know the outcome of the deal between Russia’s leader and Yevgeny Prigozhin, or the degree of support that the latter has among Russia’s balkanished security apparatus. But the Government seems to be bracing itself for Putin’s fall, as does America’s, and it isn’t hard to see why.
For Putin gambled, first, on a quick win in Ukraine and when that didn’t happen, second, on preparing for a long war and hoping that something would turn up – most likely, Donald Trump.
The consequences have been strategically disastrous for Russia. Ukraine has fought heroically and hasn’t folded – thus giving the lie to Putin’s paranoid ideology, buoyed by twisted Christianity, which assumed it isn’t a nation at all, and would collapse at a whiff of gunpowder. Finland has joined NATO and Sweden is applying – the opposite of what fear provoked by the Ukraine adventure was meant to achieve.
A war intended to restore Russia’s virility instead threatens to leave it a Chinese dependency. That’s the sum of the political effect of Putin’s war.
Russia’s economy hasn’t collapsed and it isn’t isolated – so for example, the western powers have failed to get India into their camp. But sanctions have made Russia weaker and the war left it lonelier. It was bad for Putin for his cause to be backed in the UN General Assembly by only Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali and Syria.
Whatever happens next, the war and this insurrection will surely leave Russia weaker as a player abroad – after years in which Putin looked like a winner everywhere he left his mark, from Chechyna within Russia to civil war-torn Syria.
That has implications in north Africa and the Middle East especially. But a weakening of Russian power abroad would have less impact here in Britian than a collapse of Russian authority at home – or the replacement of Putin himself, since his successor would be less likely to be a western-type liberal than another mafia autocrat, or else a strongman general, or a succession of both types.
Since the war begin, the focus of western politicians and media has been on Ukraine, and little wonder. Britain has taken some 160,000 Ukrainian refugees. Boris Johnson drummed up support for Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
We tend still to see security through the lens of World War Two, and Putin fulfills the classic stereotype of a fanatical tyrant seeking to swallow a smaller neighbour. The strength of Britain’s support for Ukraine may make us an outlier but the principle doesn’t. Ukraine’s quest to join the EU and NATO is now in a better place.
There may not exactly be a Marshall Plan for Ukraine in the event of the war ending, but there will surely be a variant of one. Indeed, our focus on the country may be so intense, unsurprisingly, as to fix our gaze on Ukraine to the exclusion of Russia. This would be a mistake.
It may not be possible for the West to find a solution to the problem of Russia, but seeking to do so should be a strategic aim of British foreign, security and defence policy – given the presence of our armed forces in Eastern Europe and Russia’s capacity to cause havoc in our European backyard.
What is that problem? One way of putting it would be: vast size, declining population, a weak economy (at least in terms of purchasing power parity), big armed forces (the sixth largest in terms of absolute numbers), nuclear weapons, imperial stretch, endemic corruption and mafia government.
Russia has given us some of the greatest European literature ever written and yet never been a western liberal democracy. That end can’t be forced on it from outside, but helping to create conditions whereby it might be possible has fascinated me since the start of this stage of Putin’s war.
We must keep showing Russia that it has a way out, even if Putin himself is too mired in blood to take it. That wouldn’t be consistent, in the event of a coup and the collapse of his invasion, with seeking to sow Russia with salt or impose reparations on it.
Admittedly, the counter-tendency presents a kind of foreign policy moral hazard. Liberalise your country, and western money and support will follow. Invade a neighbour, and the same will follow – if the local strongman is removed and his replacement is more amenable.
But the prospect of a collapsing country bristling with nuclear weapons is disturbing, to understate the matter vastly, and the avoidance of horror during the Cold War was as much a matter of luck as deterrence – at least, if the near miss of the Cuban missile crisis and the 1983 false alarm were anything to go by.
The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed the new republics a certain distance between themselves and the new Russian Federation. There is academic talk of this development continuing further, with Russia itself breaking up, and falling back on the original territory from which Ivan IV Vasilyevich and other tsars created it.
There is doubtless a contrarian argument which holds that this would be a good development. But it is very hard to see how this would be so in an fragile country in which nuclear weapons could go astray,together with the capacity to deliver them. One source I spoke to last week sees Russia drifting further into China’s orbit.
In this version of events, power in the country drifts east from Moscow and Europe to the east and Asia, and local bosses who feel the gravitational pull of Chinese power. I can’t help wondering about the opposite: a reverse of the Nixon-to-China visit of the early 1970s.
In this alternative story, a re-elected Trump flies to Moscow to seek to pull Russia back into the western orbit, as he boasts of his “great relationship” with Putin’s successor, whoever that might be. I’m not sure that Britain especially, where we still tend to think of America as a guarantor of our security, would be ready for such a volte-face.
Perhaps the least bad solution would be for the United States to be Ukraine’s guarantor and China Russia’s, and for both powers to work for disarmament and detente in eastern Europe. That doesn’t look likely. In the meantime, don’t forget that some on the right as well as the left here in Britain talked up Putin as a winner.
Nigel Farage once named him as the world leader he most admires: “as an operator, but not as a human being, I would say Putin,” he said. Today, the latter looks as fragile as Ozymadias. A previous generation was told in the 1930s that dictatorship was stronger than democracy, if not better. It didn’t fall for it then and we shouldn’t do so now.