Russian president and aspiring czar Vladimir Putin has lost his war of aggression against Ukraine. Even should a bizarrely pro-Russian U.S. president force Ukraine to accept virtually all of Putin’s demands, the Russian dictator lost this war. Ukraine certainly hasn’t won by conventional measurements, despite over three years of heroic struggle: Stunned by the American betrayal of Kyiv’s freedom fighters, the world will judge Ukraine to be the clear loser. Indeed, there is now no possibility that the Ukrainian territory occupied by Putin’s inept-but-tenacious military will all be returned to Kyiv’s control—and perhaps none of it will.
Yet, should we strive to be objective, briefly suspending our natural sympathy with Kyiv, Putin’s territorial gains suddenly look like poison pills: Russian troops have destroyed much of Donets and Luhansk—the Russian-speaking eastern frontier provinces of Ukraine now largely in Moscow’s possession—and Putin lacks the money to rebuild more than a few showcase sites. Russian occupiers will also face decades of guerilla warfare and assassinations. Meanwhile, rump Ukraine—where the destruction has been milder (if grim enough)—will benefit from international largess to construct a prosperous, Western-oriented object of jealousy for Russian citizens condemned to drab lives beyond Ukraine’s revised borders.
So…might it be a blessing, if in an ugly guise, that Crimea and those eastern provinces will not return to Kyiv’s control? Strategic wisdom would see Ukraine’s negotiators concentrating on terms such as security guarantees and substantial peacekeeping forces from the free world (if not from the USA), along with the acknowledged right of Ukraine to determine its own future—including European Union membership and eventual affiliation with NATO, or with a new European defense league (if American treachery and tantrums invalidate NATO). A smaller, more-agile Ukraine could prove more prosperous as well as more viable.
None of this is meant to excuse Russian barbarism and aggression, which merit total defeat. Rather, it seeks to see beyond today’s blinding passions—the initial reaction to any truce or treaty will be one of rage, shame, and hysteria…and the instant analysis will be wrong.
To determine who really wins or loses, consider what Putin needed so desperately from Ukraine that he launched a war—one that now has devoured Russian budgets and blood, exposed Moscow’s many weaknesses, triggered the emigration of Russia’s highest-skilled youth, excited fresh antipathy toward Russia globally—and worsened the Russian demographic decline that worries Putin above all else. Russia today has a fading, aging, unskilled population concentrated in that vast country’s west. The Russian far east is increasingly indefensible, and, unlike Putin, China’s leadership is patient.
Putin did not order the kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children out of sheer nastiness (although he’s capable thereof). Russia needs bodies—white bodies, in the program of Russian nationalists—to retain its long-since-compromised identity and slow its demographic bleed-out. Racial fears and hatreds haunt Russians. Hence Putin’s initial deployments of military units composed of Asian ethnicities: They were brown-skinned and expendable.
The Russian czar/president also sincerely believes that Ukraine is Russian property, that the (relatively) peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union did Russia a terrible injustice when the world recognized an independent Ukraine. Yet, thanks to the repeated redrawing of borders over the centuries, Ukraine contains territories that never belonged to czarist Russia. Indeed, Warsaw would have a far better historical claim to western Ukraine than would Moscow. And now-obscure regions, such as Ruthenia, Galicia (not the Spanish one) or tiny Bukovina, were Austro-Hungarian properties by and large. Turks and Tartars have a far longer history with Crimea than Russia (or Ukraine).
Leaping from bad to worse, Stalin and his successors made a dreadful mess of internal boundaries, attaching Donetsk and Luhansk to Soviet Ukraine to dilute Ukraine’s ever-restive non-Russian majority. Crimea was tacked onto Ukraine in the 1950s, a gift from half-Ukrainian party boss Nikita Khrushchev. The point is that citing historical territorial rights may be vital to Putin, but Russia’s case is the region’s weakest…not to mention the hatred its neighbors have felt, feel, and will feel toward the over-inflated Grand Duchy of Muscovy in any pompous guise. Putin is captivated by a resentfully rewritten past. Ukraine, for all its current agony, has a future.
Despite American perfidy toward Ukraine’s heroes and the near-inevitability that the American president will advance Putin’s case, Ukraine has gained an even more profound sense of national identity than it had when it first escaped the Soviet grip. Putin’s lucky his forces were unable to thrust deeper into Ukraine, beyond the Russian-speaking zones. A conquered Ukraine would not have been a vanquished Ukraine; rather, it would have continued to bleed Moscow for decades. Even Stalin could not extinguish Ukrainian identity, despite starving as many as four million Ukrainians to death.
And Putin’s a punk compared to Stalin.
The coming weeks and months will be horribly painful and unjust for the Ukrainian people. But a generation from now, it will be recognized that Putin brought disaster upon Russia with his ill-judged invasion three years ago. And Ukraine will shine.
