Russia’s potentially huge miscalculation in this war is that it decided it could do better than Zelensky in Ukraine.
Our editorial on the shuttle-diplomacy happening on the Ukraine issue dwells more on our lack of leverage over Putin, which is difficult to solve given the limited material and moral commitment of the West.
But Putin’s own stated war aims are also in serious tension and work against each other and a resolution of the conflict. The fundamental aim of Putin’s war is Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment, whether it is a frontier for the Western world order in Western institutions like the EU and NATO, or whether it remains more integrated in Russia’s economic, cultural, and political sphere. There are some hard power implications for Russia in this, including the position of its Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol. After the failures of its coercive diplomacy in 2014 and 2022, Russia resorted in each case to a strategy of compellence.
In Putin’s somewhat hysterical language, the Western alignment of Ukraine is its “Nazification.” He attributes this to all of Ukraine because of the presence of neo-Nazi elements in the Azov Battalion and other nationalist paramilitaries who played a small but crucial role in the 2014 Maidan revolution, and who (often acting on their own apart from the elected national government) carried on irregular fighting and pogroms in Eastern Ukraine after 2014.
In 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and 2022’s Russian legislation for the annexation of Ukraine’s Easternmost oblasts, Russia sought to achieve 1) the long term security of its naval base; and 2) the integration of Ukraine’s most Russian-identifying peoples and regions with the Russian Federation, securing their language and religious rights, and inflicting pain on Kyiv for their violation.
These territorial acquisitions, and the bloody means by which they’ve been effected, subtract millions of Ukrainians who supported neutralist, or pro-Russian political parties from Ukraine’s emerging democracy. The radicalization of many formally neutralist Ukrainians into the nationalist cause by Russia’s military campaign and its atrocities also makes the math problem of a pro-Russian Ukraine almost impossible. Even if, in defeat, a prostrate Kyiv accepts as part of a war-ending treaty a constitutional commitment to neutrality, there will be little incentive among native politicians to honor or protect that commitment, save servile fear of renewed Russian aggression. Putin’s only attempt to square this circle has been to launch a completely unconvincing propaganda campaign to persuade Ukrainians that, eventually, a weakened Western Ukraine, will be invaded and annexed by Poland. While there is some anti-Polish feeling among radical Ukrainian nationalists, this has not worked at all.
Russia’s potentially huge miscalculation in this war is that it decided it could do better than Zelensky in Ukraine. Was Putin’s war worth it if he only takes territory, but by doing so ensures that Ukraine will, by sheer demographic momentum alone, drift ever more away from him and toward the West?