The war raging in Ukraine opens a new phase in the post-Cold War era of global affairs. For the past two decades international relations have been highly inflected by the events of September 11, 2001 and the US response to those attacks. Moving forward from the current moment the outcome of the war in Ukraine will have a similar shaping impact.
The moral stakes in Ukraine are enormously high, but it is of course always advisable to take as practical and dispassionate a view of such conflicts as possible. We are well advised not to focus on what ideally should happen but rather on what is certain or at least most likely to happen in concrete terms. If we do so, however, we find that the moral and practical dimensions of the Ukraine war are inextricably intertwined. The dangers of thinking or acting too cynically are as grave as the potential pitfalls of moral idealism.
To understand why this is so, one only has to begin by asking a deceptively simple-seeming question: “Why did Vladimir Putin invade the Ukraine?” All of the reasons that Putin himself have given are utter nonsense. The idea that Ukraine is organically a part of “Mother Russia” was long ago shown to be ridiculous, in the strife following Putin’s machinations in Crimea and the Donbas region. The canard of “de-Nazification” is deliberately laughable. It broadcasts the contempt of a man who insists that anyone who opposes him does not even deserve to be spoken to seriously.
The true logic of Putin’s invasion is ultimately inseparable from the logic of his obscenely cleptocratic regime. Russia is territorially the largest nation on earth, covering more than 6.6 million square miles richly endowed with natural resources. Its 144 million people are among the best-educated in the world. Yet its economy is smaller than that of Italy, and its GDP per capita ranks fifty-seventh in the world, well behind nations such as Greece (51) or the Bahamas (45). Russia’s rate of economic growth is shockingly slow when compared with other formerly communist nations possessed of similar assets.
All of these conditions reflect the reality that Putin has turned what should be one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth into the turf of a primitive criminal syndicate of which he is head. He and his cronies are a literal network of vampires who keep order by sucking the lifeblood of Russian society nearly dry. This network extends beyond Russia’s borders into the satellite nations of the former USSR. The sheer improbability of such a monstrosity in the 21st century was made manifest by the “Revolution of Dignity” that swept Ukraine in 2014. The grotesque insult of being made part of a thieves’ banquet for Putin’s cronies was infuriating enough to galvanize Ukrainians and set them on a path to both democratic independence and a collision with Putin’s murderous machine.
Only if we remain clear about how ludicrously retrograde Putin’s regime really is can we understand the degree of desperation expressed in February’s invasion. In explaining why this war happened many observers either give too much credence to Putin’s deliberate absurdities or focus myopically on the wrong side of the “risk-reward” calculation upon which the war was predicated. It is true that Putin was emboldened by overtures of friendship from Xi Jinping and by the success his “active measures” campaigns had achieved in sowing discord throughout Europe and America. He was also obviously ignorant of just how degraded his military had been by the corrosive graft of his cleptocratic regime.
But though these facts help explain why Putin sorely underestimated the risks of invasion, they do not account for the urgent goals that he gambled so much to achieve. By February it had become clear that the resistance to vampiric Putinism had spread from Ukraine into Belarus, Kazakhstan, and beyond. Robust popular protests against the cleptocratic regimes in those states coincided with the resurgence of activism by Russian dissidents like Alexei Navalny. Putin knew that he had to put the vampires back in charge in Ukraine, or the whole network underpinning his power might unravel and bring him down with it. That is what this war has been about all along, and that is why there is little that anyone can offer Putin in pursuit of a negotiated peace. Anything short of sinking his fangs back into Ukraine’s arteries will not appease him, and the Ukrainians know it.
Since the ends Putin has been pursuing are so transparently and egregiously illegitimate, any “compromise” aimed at avoiding tragedy will inevitably produce a tragedy as bad or worse. This is clearest from the perspective of the Ukrainians. The horror of more death and destruction is awful. But the horror of trading in their new but vibrant democracy for the rule of Vladimir Putin (a man who, for example, builds palaces for himself at the cost of $1.4 billion while poisoning his opponents with polonium) is even worse.
Yet even if we branch outward from the perspective of Ukraine to that of the entire world, there is no redeeming value in offering Putin an “off ramp.” Pundits express understandable concern about the prospect of Putin using nuclear weapons (there is obviously no limit to how many he is willing to murder), but the very nature of his threat compels world leaders to ignore it. Since Putin’s goals in this conflict are completely and transparently illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, there is no way that any degree of success he garners will be perceived as anything but the fruits of nuclear blackmail. If he gains a single square yard of terrain, the world will know that it was given to him solely because he threatened to commit unprovoked mass murder.
When blackmail succeeds once, it will inevitably be tried again. Any nation or leader who has any conceivable pecuniary interest, no matter how criminal, will maneuver to achieve those ends through threat of nuclear arms. Nations who have nuclear weapons will brandish them freely. Nations that lack nuclear weapons will pursue them ardently. That dynamic can only end one way: with a nuclear conflagration. The choice before leaders right now is thus clear: we are poised between the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe if they move to thwart Putin and the certainty of nuclear catastrophe if they do not.
There is only one outcome of the Ukraine war that can be acceptable to decent people throughout the world: every Russian soldier must leave every square foot of Ukraine, including the Donbas region and the Crimea. Any other aspect of the aftermath of the war might be negotiable (reparations for Ukraine from Russia, consideration of the rights of Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine, etc.) , but Vladimir Putin’s illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine (which began in 2014) must be undone. That should be the message coming from every capital in the world, but especially from Washington, D.C. Any fear that such unequivocal demands pose risks is pure folly. Until Putin knows that his opponents truly understand what is at stake, he will continue to play for time and hope that his foes’ political will and unity will collapse. If he were ever given a clear signal that the jig was up, his bluster would evaporate.
The entire world is frozen between despair and hope in Ukraine. If Putin’s vicious gambit succeeds to any degree, the future trajectory of global affairs will be grim. The neo-fascist politics Putin advocates will spread, and more governments throughout the industrialized world will fall to vampiric cleptocracies. Global diplomacy will degenerate into a farcical game played by gangster regimes bent on plunder. Violence will proliferate.
If Putin can be thwarted, however, the effects will range from the benign to the marvelous. Democracy could take hold in the former soviet republics, perhaps even in Russia itself. A new age of global cooperation and shared prosperity might ensue. That message should be broadcast by world leaders clearly, especially to the people of Russia: a better world awaits everyone, if only this mad spasm of murderous greed and villainy can be made to abate.
