Peace or Partition?

Russians and Americans speak about Ukraine, without Ukrainians

Tomorrow in Ukraine, Russian soldiers will attack Ukrainians. Russian drones and bombs and rockets will target Ukrainian homes. A criminal war of aggression will continue.

Tomorrow in Saudi Arabia, Russian officials will discuss the future of Ukraine with an handful of Americans, delegated by a president who sympathizes with the Russian view of the war. The Russians will have the luxury of talking about Ukraine without the presence of Ukrainians.

The headlines are about “peace negotiations.” But what is really going on? How should we think about this unusual encounter in Saudi Arabia?

Here are ten suggestions, drawn from years on working on relations among the three countries, and from some recent personal observations at the Munich Security Conference.

1. Be critical of the words on offer. Question the word “peace.” The term used in the media is “peace negotiations.” The United States and Russia are not at war. Russia is at war with Ukraine, but Ukraine is not invited to these talks. Russian authorities, for their part, do not generally speak of peace. They present the talks with the United States as a geopolitical coup, which is not the same thing. The highest Russian officials have repeatedly stated that their war aims in Ukraine are maximalist, including the destruction of the country. Informed observers generally take for granted that Russia would use a ceasefire to distract the United States and Europe, demobilize Ukraine, and attack again. This is not a plan that the Russians are working very hard to disguise. It is a simple point, but always worth making: there could indeed be peace tomorrow in Ukraine, if Russia simply removed its invasion force.

2. Consider the horrid negotiating tactics of the United States. They are are so disastrously bad that they call into question whether these talks can even really be considered negotiations. Trump and everyone around him keeps emphasizing that the United States is in a hurry. But no negotiator would so this. Admitting urgency grants to the other side the easy move of dragging their feet to get concessions. And these are already on offer! Members of the Trump administration and Trump himself keep conceding essential points to Russia in advance of any actual talks and in public (territory, NATO membership, timing of elections, even the existence of Ukraine) — issues that are not only essential to Ukraine but elemental to Ukrainian sovereignty. The only way such American behavior makes sense is if we consider that the Americans are negotiating as Russians. But if everyone in Saudi Arabia is on the same side, these are not negotiations. “Talks” is safer.

3. Don’t forget that law and ethics are part of reality. The United States has chosen to negotiate with the aggressors (the president of the Russian Federation has been indicted for war crimes) rather than support the victims. By reaching out to Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has ended the Russian leader’s international isolation. By speaking of Putin as someone who supposedly wants peace rather than as the aggressor in the bloodiest war since 1945, or as someone who has been indicted for war crimes, Trump is seeking the cleanse the the moral stain from the person who broke the most fundamental of international laws by invading another country. Even if the talks have no other consequences, Trump’s rehabilitation of Putin is a meaningful one for Russia.

4. Emphasize the absence of Ukraine. It is a truism of international history, as well as simple common sense, that if you are not at the table then you are on the menu. Discussions with Russia about Ukraine without Ukraine create a structural situation in which the basic interests of Ukraine and Ukrainians cannot be represented. No historical analogy is perfect, of course; but precedents for such treatment in Europe include the Munich accords of 1938 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. A longer record can be found in the history of colonialism.

5. Remember that Ukraine is a sovereign state and the victim of the war. The combination of pageantry and mystery around such talks elevates their participants to the central actors of the story. If summitry storytelling is done carelessly, it can create the impression that Russia and the United States somehow have the authority to decide the future of Ukraine. It is very possible that they will try to do force Ukraine to do things, using coercion or blackmail, and it should be made clear that is implied in any agreement about Ukraine without Ukraine. No agreement between Russia and the United States has legal application to Ukraine. It is certainly worth knowing and mentioning that Ukraine has patiently built consensus around its own peace formula. It is worth reviewing, if only for background knowledge of the basic issues.

6. Consider what we know about power. In war, there are winners and losers. Aggressors make peace when it appears to them that their aggression is no longer in their interest. Talking is incidental to this. It is rather surprising to hear Trump people, who talk so much about strength, repeatedly making the left-wing summer-camp point that all we really need for peace is to get together and talk. If the Trump administration were serious about getting to peace in a hurry, they would apply pressure to Russia and accelerate support for Ukraine. Since they are doing neither of these things, they either misunderstand power or they are not aiming for peace.

The Dnipro River, from Khortytsia Island, TS

7. Resist Russian propaganda. For Russia these talks are an occasion to spread their line. Russian propagandists will have things to say about the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state, the patterns of Ukrainian history, the people who govern Ukraine, and so on. The talks will be their occasion to try to get international reporters to repeat those claims.

8. Be critical of American propaganda as well. The Russians have liked to spread stories about supposed waste in Ukraine. The Trump people have their own use for this. It fits their sense of grievance, which is how they approach every subject. Trump’s people focus on the idea of “recouping the costs” of U.S. aid to Ukraine. This is unserious and misleading. The main US budgetary problem is that the wealthy do not pay their share of taxes. All talk by this billionaire-dominated administration of recouping costs is dubious for that reason alone. Most of the American military contribution to Ukraine stays in the United States, keeping factories running and paying American workers. In general the weapons the US has sent to Ukraine were obsolescent and would have been destroyed, at costs to the US taxpayer, without ever being used. The U.S. has contributed less to Ukraine than has Europe. As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. lags far, far behind the countries that the Trump people relentless criticize. The effective cost to Europeans has in fact been far higher, since sanctions on Russia mattered far more to European economies than to the U.S. economy. The essential costs of the war in Ukraine have been paid by Ukrainians, not only in huge economic losses, but in millions of forced migrations, hundreds of thousands of injuries, and tens of thousands of lost lives. In resisting Russia, Ukraine has also provided tremendous economic and security benefits to the United States. What the United States has learned from Ukrainians about modern warfare — and that is just one of many benefits — easily justifies the costs, even in the most narrow security terms.

9. Weigh Trump’s vulnerabilities. For decades now, Trump has tended to repeat what Soviet and then Russian leaders say. He speaks to Putin regularly and has expresses his fascination. He repeats Russian talking points on the war. The notion that the war is costly to the United States is a point where Putinist and Trumpist propaganda overlaps, and seems targeted to one of Trump’s obsession that he is being ripped off. Ukraine, of course, is the party that has suffered the economic costs. But redefining the war as an opportunity for the United States to make money seems designed to manipulate Trump.

10. Reflect on colonialism. Russia’s war against Ukraine has been obviously colonial, in every sense of the word. Moscow denies that Ukraine is a state, that Ukrainians are a people, that their elected leaders are legitimate. A war cloaked in such colonial ideology enables the exploitation of stolen Ukrainian resources, right down to and including stolen children. In recent weeks, the Americans have begun to speak with great interest of Ukraine’s mineral resources. At the Munich Security Conference, Americans asked the Ukrainian president to concede half of his country’s mineral wealth forever in exchange for a pat on the head today. It could well be that the United States intends to use the threat of Russian violence in order to seize Ukrainian wealth— “we could stop the war, but we need your resources first.” A protection racket, in other words.

So: in repeating the notion of “peace negotiations” might we not be contributing to a charade? From the facts noted above, three possible framings of the Russian-American talks emerge. First, the Americans sincerely want peace but are just stunningly incompetent. Second, the incompetence is by design; the game is rigged to generate an agreement between Russia and the U.S. that is unacceptable to Ukraine. Third, Putin and Trump have already worked out common plans for the colonial domination of Ukraine, and the talks just provide cover.