Russia cannot win, but Ukraine looks set to lose

The return of realpolitik. The west has cast Russia's war as an existential threat but not quite so existential as to demand Nato intervention

In Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, we are witnessing a familiar collision between high ideals and realpolitik, between the world as we would like it to be and the world as it is. The west frames Ukraine’s brave resistance as a shared struggle to uphold the founding principles of a civilised international order. It then adds a codicil. Ukrainians must fight the war alone. 

So far, such contradictions have been largely lost to the anger and emotion stirred by  Putin’s barbarism. Vaulting rhetoric has half-obscured the ifs and buts in the small print of the west’s “unflinching” support for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. But the terms of any eventual peace will bring the collision sharply into focus. The fine intentions about democracy, sovereignty and inviolable borders set down in the 1992 Paris Charter will soon do battle with the brutal pragmatism exemplified by the Yalta pact some half-a-century earlier.  

This is a war that Putin cannot win. That much is clear. The Russian army may yet manage to occupy what remains of Ukraine’s cities, though that prospect now looks far less certain than only a week ago. If the Kremlin has learned anything, however, from the failings of its army and the indomitable courage of Ukrainians, it is surely that it can never pacify the country. By seeking to deny Ukraine’s nationhood, Putin has rendered it immutable. 

Yet measured against what we are told is at stake, it is almost as difficult to see how defeat for Russia becomes victory for Ukraine. Even putting aside the killing of so many of its citizens and the criminal destruction of its towns and cities, the difficulty lies in imagining an outcome that properly restores Ukraine’s freedoms - above all, the right to make its own choices, more especially if one of them includes full membership of Europe’s democratic community of nations.

The post cold-war global order set down in Paris, when Mikhail Gorbachev joined the Soviet Union’s former enemies in signing up to freedom, democracy, and inviolable borders, has for some time owed more to hope that experience. For some - Germany comes most obviously to mind - it had been a self-serving illusion. Western leaders should have woken up when Putin went to war against Georgia and a few years later annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. 

Liberal democracies might also have been jolted out of their complacency by the open scorn for “western” values shown by China’s leader-for-life Xi Jinping. Beijing seems embarrassed by the mess Putin had made - Xi likes to back winners -  but it shares Moscow’s core goal. Xi, like Putin, believes in spheres of influence. The great powers should draw the maps. For Putin’s Greater Russia, read Chinese hegemony in the western Pacific. The world of Yalta. 

Now, as shock at Putin’s reckless brutality has coalesced with the extraordinary courage of Ukrainians, the rhetoric of western leaders has taken flight. At issue, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the Bundestag, is whether “power is allowed to prevail over the law …… whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the 19th century”. For Joe Biden, “the free world is coming together” to defeat aggression.

Up to a point, Biden was right. The severity of sanctions, Scholz’s abrupt abandonment of German pacifism, the flow of modern weaponry into Ukraine and the heartening assistance for refugees testify to a remarkable cohesion. Russia is isolated, culturally and politically as well as economically. When the United Nations general assembly voted to condemn the invasion, Putin won the backing of Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea. Some 141 nations lined up against him. 35 abstentions were scant consolation.  

Nato has rediscovered its purpose and, reversing half a century of Ostpolitik, Germany’s Social Democrats have admitted that the country can longer run a foreign policy relying at once on American security and Russian gas. The ever repeated refrain is that Putin simply cannot be allowed to redivide the continent into exclusive spheres of influence.

And yet. Values and idealism are set against interests. If Putin’s war represents an existential challenge to the global order, it is apparently not quite so existential as to demand Nato intervenes directly. How many times has Biden repeated that American forces will not fight in Ukraine? A no-fly zone has been likewise ruled out lest it draw Nato aircraft into direct conflict with the Russians. Nor do Europeans want to fight.

Putin, western leaders have told us countless times, is threatening the fundamental principle that nations are free to set their own foreign policies and choose their own alliances. Yet in Ukraine’s case, that right has already been tightly circumscribed. Yes, Kyiv must retain the right to apply to join Nato, but Washington and its European allies are also content to assure the Kremlin that the door will remain firmly closed.

European diplomats will tell you that the terms of any peace must lie in the hands of the Ukrainian people and their president Volodymyr Zelensky. But they know well that any such decision will be conditioned not just by Ukraine’s calculations about its very survival in the face of Putin’s onslaught but also on an assessment of how far and for how long the west will give its support. 

Were Kyiv to accept neutrality, would the EU throw open its doors to Ukrainian membership? Would the US maintain sanctions until Moscow has fully met its side of any bargain? If Ukraine does concede part of its territory, it would be because the west has left it no other option. In such circumstances, would Nato offer real security guarantees for what remains. At what point, would the west itself be ready to fight for the legal order it now declares to be under mortal threat? 

These are uncomfortable questions. And watching the killing and destruction, there is an understandable temptation to condemn the western leaders for self-serving hypocrisy. They should send in Nato forces or keep their counsel. After all, Putin went ahead only because he knew that, in Biden’s expression, the US was not prepared to start world war three in Ukraine. 

And it is certainly true that there has been too much appeasement of Putin - too much we-mustn’t-do-this-or-that for fear or provoking him. But it is more than a leap to conclude that the horror and indignation felt across western societies at this latest aggression amounts to a popular mandate for all-out war with Russia.

Foreign policy realism is distasteful. It can also be, as remains the case with the west’s present relationships with regimes such as that in Saudi Arabia, corrupting. But, in a world where democratic norms are challenged by authoritarian leaders armed with nuclear weapons, a measure of realpolitik is inevitable. We learned that during the Cold War. Or should the west have risked a thermonuclear conflict with the Soviet Union to save Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968?

Another lesson from the Cold War, however, is that democratic nations must be clear in their intent.  Ukraine is paying the price for western complacency. Strong as the response has been by previous standards, the west must now demonstrate real resolve to hold its ground. Pressurising Zelensky into a deal in order to return to something resembling business as usual would be a truly heinous crime.

Putin will not change. Moscow’s elites must understand that as long as he remains in power, Russia will be decoupled from much of the rest of the world. Above all liberal democracies must draw their own red lines and demonstrate the will and resources to defend them, in the last resort with military force.  Too late, though, for Ukraine.