President Trump and his emissaries proposed a 30-day ceasefire in the fighting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy immediately accepted the deal. Vladimir Putin has not. So Putin is the warmonger here, but his admirer Trump won’t accept that truth and excoriate Putin for his reluctance. Imagine if Putin was saying yes and Zelenskyy was hedging, Trump would then probably be ordering missiles to be launched against Kyiv.
Putin says that any agreement would have to address the “root causes” of the war.
What are those causes, then? This catastrophe, which has killed hundreds of thousands, has one primary root cause, and that is the Russian president himself. This is Putin’s war, launched and sustained in furtherance of his expansionist desires, which rest on a nostalgia for an imperial Russia and the might of the Soviet Union. Sharp readers will recall that the USSR extended past Russia and Ukraine; this is a vision that is incomplete without looking afield to Estonia, Lithuania (both NATO members) and other former republics. Putin has also been quite clear that he’s looking afield to countries like Poland and Bulgaria, also NATO members.
There has never been reason to think, and there certainly is no reason to think now, that appeasing Putin is going to lead to him backing off from these grander schemes. This is not how things have ever worked in history, and for all the mystique that Putin tries to generate around himself, he’s not a particularly complex guy.
He wants power, he wants to enrich himself and his handpicked oligarch buddies (so long as they toe the line) and he wants a globally hegemonic Russia imposing its odd mix of pseudo-traditional values and cronyism on everyone else. Every additional territory is a set of resources and land to be carved up for himself and his buddies, and being handed even a fraction of everything he wanted in Ukraine is going to embolden him.
The “red lines” that Ukraine has rolled out really are the bare minimum; Russia cannot be allowed to, in the 21st century definitively take territory by force, it should not get to illegally keep children and other civilians detained or deported to Russia — a set of practices that could well constitute war crimes — and it should absolutely accept Ukrainian security guarantees to ensure that they cannot simply renege on this deal at any time.
After three years of grueling conflict, pinky promises are not going to be enough; if that means EU troops in Ukraine and the rapid expansion and rearming of European militaries that can less and less count on the U.S., then so be it.
Everyone wants peace in the end, but the structure of that peace matters much. There’s a word for a peace where one side is forced to make heavy concessions, and that word is defeat. A defeat for Ukraine would have long-term consequences for the security of not just the region but the world, namely because it would not be a lasting peace. It would be a prelude to the rest of Putin’s now-emboldened imperialist agenda, which will create far more war in the long run.
Putin has shown himself ready and willing to sustain heavy battlefield losses to further his goals. He can’t receive the message that it was worth it.