Stephen Kotkin, the pre-eminent historian of Russia, on Moscow’s long record of overreach, Biden’s Ukraine failure, and prospects that Kyiv can ‘win the peace.’
By Tunku Varadarajan via Wall Street Journal
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
Excerpts
Few in the West have a deeper understanding of Mr. Putin than Mr. Kotkin, 66, a historian whose monumental biography of Joseph Stalin—one of Mr. Putin’s heroes—awaits its third and final volume. Mr. Kotkin is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a professor emeritus at Princeton.
His comments shouldn’t be taken as a show of admiration for Mr. Trump. At the Aug. 15 Alaska summit—which Mr. Kotkin disdainfully calls the president’s “surrender photo-op”—Mr. Putin “evidently told Trump that Russia is going to win anyway, so let’s just hand the territories taken over to Russia and save lives in the process.” But Mr. Trump “cannot surrender Ukraine,” he says. “The Ukrainians are not going to accede to that. And Mr. Trump cannot grant Putin a sphere of influence in his neighborhood because it’s been lost for good by Putin himself.”
Mr. Kotkin is similarly scornful of Monday’s White House summit with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, which he calls the “European rescue photo-op.” Europe’s leaders are “talking about providing security guarantees. Well, if they can do that, why are they flying to the White House to ask President Trump to make them do that? They were there to beg the president to help them deliver security. There was lots of theater, melodrama, and attention on President Trump, which, of course, is what he’s after. But I don’t know what, if anything, really happened in terms of Ukraine’s self-defense against Russia.”
Speaking by Zoom from his Hoover office, he’s keen to establish that we need to grasp three truths in the “big picture” of the war in Ukraine.
The first is a “paradox that people don’t usually put together”: Although much-smaller Ukraine may be “losing a war of attrition,” Mr. Putin “made an enormous strategic blunder and is damaging Russia severely for the long term.” He has lost his country’s old sphere of influence: “All his neighbors hate him and are afraid of him.” Even Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator in fraternal neighbor Belarus, is “looking for some distance, to get out of the stranglehold of Russia.” Mr. Putin has also “lost his civilian economy.”
Second, Ukraine is “an asset, not a liability—but we don’t seem to be able to appreciate how it’s an asset, and why.” He means that “Ukraine has an army”—a serious one, unlike, say, Germany. “We’ve been able to send a lot of our weapons and test them in battlefield conditions because of Ukrainian bravery and ingenuity.” As a result, “we’ve been able to see what a 21st-century land war looks like, and we’ve been able to change our defense industrial investments at home as a result.” He adds that military aid to Ukraine is “actually going to the American defense industry.”
Third, Mr. Trump is “correct” to seek an end to the war: “I applaud his forced imposition of a negotiation process.” But the president “lacks follow-through and patience. He lacks consistency. This is a hard problem. He promised to solve it in 24 hours,” but it’s “been going on since 1783,” when Catherine the Great annexed the Khanate of Crimea. Even so, “Trump’s instincts are correct. Ukraine, more than Russia, needs this war to end. And he’s groping towards that solution.”
Mr. Kotkin warns against facile obsessions with “winning.” We talk all the time, he says, about “who’s going to win the war. But what matters is winning the peace.” In Afghanistan, America won the war and lost the peace. In Vietnam, the other way around.
What does that mean for Ukraine? Russia is a “giant neighbor, armed with nuclear weapons, willing and able to build a war machine well beyond its GDP and ostensible means, and indifferent to the loss of its own lives.” Winning the peace isn’t easy against a foe like that: “That’s the conundrum we face, and have faced from the beginning. But we haven’t faced up to it,” he says, exasperated.
In the minds of most Ukrainians and many friends of Ukraine in high places, a win must include the return of Crimea, which Russia conquered in 2014. “We’re all talking about how Ukraine needs to get Crimea back, because Russia took it by force in a violation of international law.” Mr. Kotkin says with the laugh of an unsentimental realist. “Crimea is going back to Ukraine the day after Texas goes back to Mexico.”
Then he proposes a careful-what-you-wish-for exercise, inviting me to “fantasize” that Crimea is back with Ukraine. “Then Russia has two million ethnic Russians inside the Ukrainian state, and can mount a permanent insurgency and sabotage campaign with this gigantic population to recruit from.” There’s also the threat of external force. The return of Crimea to Ukraine would “incentivize Russia to attack again tomorrow, or 20 or 30 years from now. Regaining Crimea is terrible for Ukraine winning the peace in the long term.” The West needs to understand that “what makes sense to some people in terms of a violation of norms and the stability of the international order as a whole may not make sense for the Ukrainian cause they’re advocating for.”
So how could Ukraine win the peace? Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is out of the question, if only because the U.S. opposes it. The alternative is “joining the West through accession to the European Union,” Mr. Kotkin says. “They’ll need massive domestic reforms to be able to join. But it’s a great process for bringing countries into constitutional rule-of-law, open-society, and market-economy institutions.”
The other marker of a Ukrainian win is “some type of security, which some people call ‘security guarantees’, but which looks more like the ‘steel porcupine’ approach.” This is a phrase Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, introduced in March. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen defines it as fortifying Ukraine to make it “undigestible for potential invaders.” Mr. Kotkin says it would mean helping Ukraine set up a “strong defense establishment with weapons production at home and continued financing for that from its European partners. So you get both EU accession and a version of security where Ukraine is doing most of the heavy lifting.”
A win for Mr. Putin would have grave consequences for the West, Mr. Kotkin says. The Russian dictator is “looking for the surrender of Ukraine and the surrender of the United States.” He wants to subjugate Ukraine, to “destroy it as an independent, sovereign state. But more than that, he wants to destroy the Reagan-George H.W. Bush Cold War victory.”
Mr. Putin is at an advantage, Mr. Kotkin says, because he doesn’t need “the maximalist win”—a restoration of the Soviet empire or even the Soviet Union. “He wins by wrecking Ukraine, which is hurt by the continuation of the war.” He gains merely by keeping the war going: “Putin doesn’t need Ukraine. He’s already got Russia. But Ukraine needs Ukraine. They don’t have another state. And Putin’s saying, ‘If I can’t have Ukraine, well, then nobody can have Ukraine, especially the Ukrainians.’ ”
Thus Mr. Kotkin concludes “Trump is correct. Ending the war is Ukraine’s best hope. This is the only country they have, and it’s being devastated.”
Mr. Kotkin is critical of Mr. Biden’s Ukraine policy, though in a more measured way than Mr. Trump is. He says Mr. Biden “deserves credit for supporting Ukraine’s self-defense” and also for working closely with U.S. allies and partners. “But overall, the Biden strategy failed. Why? Because the argument was that we’re supporting Ukraine to put them in the best position to negotiate a more favorable settlement. But the problem was, there were never any negotiations.” The support, Mr. Kotkin laments, was “endless and pointless—there was no pathway for negotiations.”
Enter the 47th president: “He comes in. He forces the issue. Immediate negotiations!” Mr. Kotkin sums up Mr. Trump’s strategy as follows: “We’re not going to wait till Ukraine is, quote, in a better position for negotiations. We’re just going to impose an imperative that we have negotiations starting now.” This compelled Mr. Zelensky and the Ukrainians to become “more realistic about their war aims.”
The flaw in Mr. Trump’s approach “is that he didn’t put the same pressure on the other party,” Mr. Kotkin says. “He put all the pressure on the Ukrainians and, so far, next to no pressure on Putin and the Russian establishment to force the negotiations.” The result: “We’re kind of stuck. Even though Trump was correct to move away from the Biden strategy, he’s failed in part to execute a negotiation strategy where he’s built leverage with the Russian side.”
The bottom line, Mr. Kotkin says, is that there’s been insufficient pressure on Mr. Putin. “There’s been military pressure on a high level, thanks to the Ukrainians’ courage and ingenuity, but not on a scale that’s working.” Russia has a bigger army and support from China and North Korea, “which helps quite a bit.” Mr. Putin is also willing to sacrifice Russian lives: “Bleed and bleed and bleed, sending boys to their death on the battlefield in ways that most democratic countries—including a flawed democracy such as Ukraine—cannot do.” That leaves Ukraine in a war of attrition “where it counts lives and the other side doesn’t.”
Economic pressure has been severe, but oil revenue still flows to Mr. Putin, delivering a “massive cash flow that floats this war. So unless you cut off all oil revenues, your economic pressure is going to be insufficient.”
Most important, the West needs “very severe political pressure on Putin’s regime, and that comes in the form of alternatives to his rule.” Many prominent Russians “feel that Russia is on a self-defeating trajectory right now.” These are nationalists; “they are not democrats, they’re authoritarians. They don’t look like the kind of Russian opposition we might associate with in terms of values. They have no sympathy for Ukraine, but they have a lot of sympathy for Russia, and they feel that an end to the war would help Russia regain the civilian economy that it’s lost.” U.S. and European intelligence agencies are “recruiting them inside. We know who they are.”
These sentiments, Mr. Kotkin says, are widespread in the Russian establishment, and even in the armed forces, and became visible with the public comments of retired Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, who in February 2022 accused Mr. Putin of engaging in “a criminal policy of provoking war” and urged him to resign. “Obviously sitting officers of the armed forces and security services cannot voice such public sentiments,” Mr. Kotkin says. “The vast increase during the war in cases brought for alleged treason indirectly testifies to the existence of the sentiments, and the regime’s knowledge and fear of them.”
Mr. Kotkin believes Mr. Trump should make an offer to these patriotic Russians “in exchange for retrenchment, defined as an end to the aggression against Ukraine and a turn to focusing on developing Russia, its people and economy, for the future.” If Mr. Putin refuses a deal, “maybe President Trump can appeal to others inside Russia who would be willing to do it or urge Putin to do it. Maybe the start of a ‘political bank run,’ or the fear of it, could destabilize the regime enough to force retrenchment.” It’s a long shot, “but military and economic pressure without political pressure has not worked.”
There are other things Mr. Trump could do. These include a removal of Russia’s Gazprombank from the Swift international banking system, to which it still has tenuous access, greenlighting the confiscation of $300 billion worth of Russian deposits in European banks, getting India to “buckle” and stop buying of Russian oil, and, most audacious, “cutting a deal with Xi Jinping behind Putin’s back to reduce China’s support for Russia in a bargain between the U.S. and China. It’s thinkable.”
Of all the threats Mr. Putin faces, Mr. Kotkin says again, “none is bigger than President Trump. Putin may smirk. He may walk down that red carpet in a strut. He may joke for the camera with President Trump. But ultimately, Trump holds the cards. And if the president uses those cards, he could unsettle Putin’s smirk, his self-confidence, and his maximalist demands. Will this happen? I don’t know. But it’s there for the taking.”
Le rédacteur dit l’inverse du titre dans son texte. Il pourrait être Macronien.