Dispatch from Ukraine
These are my initial impressions from this trip. More to come.
Being in Kyiv is a bit of an optical illusion. The hipster youth, well-stocked stores, abundance of fancy cars plying the street, trendy cafes pulsating with merriment, and packed restaurants can obscure the reality that this is a country at war. But the misapprehension lasts only till the next Russian missile barrage strips away the patina of normalcy.
And after the recent embarrassment Putin suffered as a result of the brazen attack against Belgorod province, everyone in Kyiv senses that the retaliation is just a matter of time. (As it happens, no sooner did I finish this particular sentence than the air-raid sirens started wailing, a sound by now familiar to me because of previous visits to post-invasion Ukraine.)
I still see no chance of a negotiated settlement to this war anytime soon. Neither side believes it needs to compromise, albeit for different reasons.
Putin thinks Russia’s bigger battalions and willingness to wage a long war will ensure its victory because the West’s commitment to Ukraine will eventually fade. For their part, Ukraine remains confident and motivated because of the military successes it has had since last fall, the massive supplies of western arms it has received, and the unflagging morale of its civilians and soldiers. The Russian army’s lackluster performance has also helped keep Ukrainians’ spirits high, as has the deep animosity toward Russia.
Ironically, if Putin truly believes that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, his war has made the latter more determined than ever to separate themselves from Russia and to align with the West. It will not take long for any visitor to see the strength of this sentiment among Ukrainians, regardless of their ethnicity and linguistic preferences.
In this sense, Putin’s war has already proven a failure. The more firepower he uses, the deeper Ukrainians’ animosity toward Russia (the government in Moscow, and even the Russian people at large) becomes. It is a misconception to believe this view lacks appeal in eastern and southern Ukraine. The war has made the standard western Ukraine (anti-Russian) vs southern Ukraine (Russophone) interpretation, common in the West, increasingly threadbare. Understandably so—no part of Ukraine has been hit harder by this war than the east and south.
Given the (by now undeniable) incompetence of the Russian military, I expect that the Ukrainians’ counteroffensive, which in my view has already begun, will have a measure of success—but nowhere near what’s required to wring big concessions from Putin. No one I have talked to so far disputes this assessment. Indeed, some warned of the danger of pumping up Western expectations about the counteroffensive lest Ukraine’s failure to meet them sows doubts about its military prospects and boosts the influence of those in the West who advocate diplomatic solutions that could require painful concessions on Ukraine’s part.
A year hence, I could very well be visiting a Ukraine that remains trapped in war. Well before that, however, I expect Kyiv will feel increasing pressure (even if not public) to seek a settlement; and some of my Ukrainian interlocutors agreed with this assessment, albeit unhappily.
As for Russia, I am skeptical Putin can blithely assume that time favors him and that he can ride out any reverses (the loss of Kharkiv and right-bank Kherson last summer; the recent drone strike on the Kremlin; and now the humiliation of a cross-border attack, backed by armor, that reportedly extended 10 kms into Belgorod province, catching Moscow by surprise) without denuding his political capital at home. He owns this war: it was his idea, and its trajectory and his fate are therefore inseparable. Blaming the battlefield failures on others won’t work for a man who has excelled at depicting himself as the indispensable strong leader who enabled Russia to stand tall again after the disastrous 1990s and to whom Russians can confidently entrust their security and their future more generally.
Some of the well-informed, smart Ukrainians whom I have come to respect want Ukraine to prevail, of course, and believe that Russia waged an unprovoked war of aggression and therefore must not be permitted to reap any benefits. They nevertheless worry that time may favor Putin, that NATO membership could prove beyond Ukraine’s reach, and that Western unity will begin to fray as this war drags on. Short of entry into NATO, they would like to obtain a Western security guarantee, but when pressed, concede that no country will send its soldiers to fight and die to defend Ukraine unless the United States is among the guarantors. A purely European security commitment, even in the event that were forthcoming (the chances of it are slim to none) doesn’t evoke any faith.
Ukrainians in this group also understand that an American guarantee of the sort they seek and deem essential (something similar to the NATO treaty’s Article V) may not materialize, especially with a U.S. presidential election looming. That leaves the option of a long-term Western commitment to arm and train Ukraine’s defense forces. They do not believe that a promise along those lines will suffice after what their country has experienced since February 24 and are convinced that Russia will remain a serious threat. Still, they admit that this may be the deal Ukraine ends up with.
Others—call them the second group—with whom I have had discussions are unhappy over the pace and quantity of Western arms deliveries. They fear that the result could be a counteroffensive that is not dramatic enough to sustain Western unity and that the West will therefore begin to conclude that Ukraine’s conceptions of victory (even one that involves regaining the territories lost in this war, but those that Russia took in 2014) cannot be realized.
Ukrainians in this group contend that Ukraine has been put in the position of having to demonstrate continual successes to ensure continued Western military support—but without having been given what it needs to be able to do that. Laments about the delay in making a decision on the supply of F-16 jets or the refusal to provide Ukraine the ATACMS enter the conversation at this point. So do expressions of unhappiness about Western apprehensions about the risks involved in pushing Putin too far, which they consider to be overwrought on the grounds that Putin’s threats of escalation are empty and meant solely to rattle the West. Oddly, then, Putin in this narrative is portrayed as dangerous and unpredictable, but also as prudent.
Those Ukrainians inclined to this line of thinking insist that NATO must declare at the upcoming summit in Vilnius that it will act on Ukraine’s membership and admit Kyiv to its ranks even without a Membership Action Plan, just as the alliance did for Finland and Sweden. When queried about the circumstances that could make such an outcome, or even a security guarantee of some sort, infeasible, they warn that communicating weakness to Putin will endanger not merely Ukraine but, in time, Europe as well. They seem unwilling to reckon with the possibility of disappointment when it comes to NATO membership or security guarantees. It’s easy to criticize this view and to appeal to realism in response, but anyone who has seen up close the destruction this war has visited on Ukraine can nevertheless appreciate the underlying sentiment.
In short, the deeply-held conviction that Ukraine is fighting for its survival and has lost vast amounts of blood and treasure in consequence, leads Ukrainians in this camp to (understandably) counter suggestions that NATO membership or a security guarantee may not materialize with indignation, appeals to justice, warnings about the folly of appeasement, and reminders of the lessons of history. Attempts to explore alternative ways of safeguarding Ukraine’s security do not, therefore, get very far, and formulas for armed neutrality tend to be dismissed as naive.
My sketch of these two perspectives does not, of course, capture all the particulars and nuances of war-related discussions in Ukraine; but it does depict what I see as the dominant variants.
Despite their differences, Ukrainians in both camps do not expect this war to end soon. Both are also well aware of the colossal tasks of post-war reconstruction and the hundreds of billions of dollars it will take to finance it. Both groups insist that at least some portion of Russia’s frozen assets must be allocated to help underwrite Ukraine’s reconstruction, even as they recognize the legal complexities involved in making that happen. Both worry that the longer this war continues, the more likely that some proportion of the most talented Ukrainians who are now refugees in Europe may not return—not because they have ceased to love their country but because, with the passage of time, they have put down professional and personal roots and begun new lives.
My interlocutors tended to disagree on one major point. Some opined that ideas about diplomatic settlements that leave Russia holding large chunks of Ukrainian land couldn’t be sold on the home front and would indeed produce a huge public backlash, one that the Zelensky government would be hard pressed to manage, or perhaps even survive.
Others ventured that some sort of compromise that falls short of Kyiv’s publicly-stated terms for ending the war could ultimately prove acceptable to Ukrainians because of the enormous suffering and destruction they have witnessed, and even experienced, for well over a year now. The belief that open-ended war would merely sacrifice more lives has, in this view, become somewhat stronger in Ukraine by now. Yet I was also cautioned that Ukrainians’ willingness to settle for peace through compromise would require adept political communication by Zelensky and would also depend on the nature and extent of Western security commitments to Ukraine, and the likelihood of Kyiv entering the EU without a prolonged delay created by a pile of preconditions.
I have not been in Ukraine long enough yet to venture an opinion on which of these two views of Ukrainian public opinion is more accurate.
RAJAN MENON is Director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities, Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor Emeritus of International Relations at City College of New York, and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.