A commentary by a former ambassador to Russia, Italy and the European Union as well as High Commissioner to the U.K. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.
Nothing transforms a society like total war, especially in a country defending itself against an invading enemy.
Ukraine will never be the same, but not in the way Vladimir Putin intended. When it ends, a united Ukraine will be set on the path of European integration it had sought while a degraded Russia, again a police state, snarls sullenly on the fringes.
There are really three “wars” being waged: the frontline battlefield takes precedence. But the communications and diplomatic-industrial competitions will also shape the outcome.
The contrast between Ukraine’s fighting performance and Russia’s is striking.
Yet, Putin believes that Russia’s three-fold population advantage, its relentless attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, and its vast space and capacity to amp-up arms production while being immune to reprisal homeland attacks will enable Russia to outlast the West.
Ukraine has lost perhaps a hundred thousand killed — by some estimates, half the casualties of Russia; there are 10 million displaced persons, internal and external; the World Bank calculates reconstruction costs at $350 billion, twice Ukraine’s GDP. But the war has united the Ukrainian people for the first time, across linguistic, regional, and even historic lines.
From within his bubble of total control, Putin may assume Russians are united because he has crushed all protest. But only about 20 per cent of the population, from the xenophobic hard-right, buy into Putin’s re-set of nationalist aggression, nostalgia for Russian grandeur, and hostile sense of victimization by the West, though they monopolize TV and what remains of social media.
Another 20 percent who hate the war are silent, excluded from social media and intimidated by the harsh costs of demonstrative protest. A remaining 60 percent have tried to ignore the war, a task increasingly difficult as body bags come home and economic costs go up, though the Russian consumer economy shows more resilience to sanctions than expected.
Ultimately, it is people who decide history, not demagogues trying to orchestrate popular sentiment behind historical myths of concocted national grandeur.
The two peoples in this war are propelled by contrasting zeitgeists of national spirit. Putin drives his assault on Ukraine from his reverence of “vlast” — force, power — as the command motif in Russian history.
Ukrainians draw from a contrary force — “volya” — popular will, freedom. Their volya to defend their homeland and their freedom has shown its motivational superiority to the vlast channeled by conscripted invaders. If the West provides President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with timely and decisive arms and ample munitions, Putin will not achieve his objectives.
Ukraine is clearly winning the communications war. Zelenskyy, its Churchillian champion, has inspired free people with the power of his message of Ukrainian volya.
European leaders and publics grasp the war’s existential stakes, and continue to accept the obligation of full if costly support for “as long as it takes.”
Europe has welcomed eight million Ukrainian refugees, another outcome beyond Putin’s woeful inability to understand the human factor.
The international communications war intersects with that of global diplomacy, bearing on sanctions policy and a competitive race to replenish military equipment. A critical question today is about China’s intentions, with the threat of Beijing supporting Moscow with lethal weapons having been dangled following U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s meeting with Wang Yi, China’s highest-ranking diplomat, in Munich last week.
Beyond the West, most of the world is not directly engaged. Eighty-five per cent of the world’s population is in countries whose leaders are not sanctioning Russia. Most of the world’s peoples have not experienced a gain in living standards in the 15 years since the 2008 financial crisis that depleted confidence in the rules-based international system that seemed to them to sponsor growing disparity and unfairness.
They are primarily preoccupied with the impact on their lives of the inter-active “polycrisis” of climate, pandemic, massive debt, migration, etc., and the sheer difficulty of delivering satisfactory governance against the tumult promoted by illiberal populist nationalist opponents.
The motif of defending freedom is a motivator for legislators and publics in democracies, reinforcing Ukraine’s support from democratic citizens everywhere. But for much of the world this is abstract. A more relevant message would emphasize the universal existential need to defend the shared postwar norm that forbids invasion by force.
There is no shortage of countries in the world whose populations fear aggression from a more powerful neighbour. Deterring and punishing aggression is for their protection as well as Ukraine’s.
Our somewhat exhausted democratic governments, while staying the course on supporting Ukraine, must reserve enough policy bandwidth to pursue the one-world obligations that enable the rules-based system to address the needs of the rest of the world. That will help to solidify an international consensus against this invasion and war and hasten a negotiated conclusion once the sides are more ready.
Right now, it is unlikely either side can wholly defeat the other, though expected competitive winter and spring offensives aim to improve respective territorial positions on the map, which today shows Russia occupying 17 per cent of pre-2014 Ukraine, before its occupation of Crimea.
Until belief in decisive wins on the part of both parties subsides, there will be no serious negotiation. The war of deadly attrition and urgent supply of weapons of increasing range and force will continue.
Early in the conflict, it was generally thought that an adequate Ukrainian “win” would be to repel the invasion.
In March, Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers explored at least semi-seriously a truce package including formal alliance neutrality for Ukraine but hard security guarantees, Russian withdrawal to the lines of Feb. 23, 2022, and a freeze to negotiate sovereignty of lands seized in 2014, including Crimea.
Such an outcome is unthinkable today. A transformative effect of war is the intensification of mutual hostility at the people-to-people level.
Pre-war Ukraine was a composite of a Ukrainian-speaking majority generally fluent in Russian and a Russian-speaking minority that felt “at home” in Ukraine while also looking to Moscow and the Russian-speaking “world” for cultural cues and trends. Many families were intermarried.
The war crimes by Russians and projection propaganda by Putin accusing Ukraine of genocide now make intolerable the notion of ceding any land with Ukrainian populations to Russian control. Putin has killed any positive feeling between the peoples.
As to Putin’s apparent belief that Ukrainian volya to resist will break under the force of Russia’s destructive vlast, it is clear now that he is wrong. In consequence, Western support is increasing, with significant incremental equipment upgrades.
Some raise the danger that this could become another “forever war” tiring western public opinion, which Trump and imitators will exploit.
The volya narrative of Zelenskyy and Ukraine is too powerful for that to happen.
President Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine this week underlines continued U.S. leadership commitment. Germany’s own transition past its foundational post-war inclination to keep a low profile on issues and engagement of military conflict, reinforces the message of unity.
It may support Putin’s revised message that this is really a war between Russia and the West, but its firm clarity of shared purpose with Ukraine should also give him pause.
There will be an end. It is not in sight, but a propitious destination is discernible. The reckless and dangerously determined dictator will conclude that his campaign against Ukraine has failed, and will try to cut his losses.
Accountability for this massive crime of aggression cannot just be traded off. Russians might do their own reckoning, to be able to look again to the future, and not backward to a concocted and misrepresented past.
If not, they could face degraded and depleted isolation in a European neighbourhood that will be wary and cold. Ukraine will join the EU and what Mikhail Gorbachev foresaw as a European Common Home, hence realizing the hope of its Euromaidan revolution nine years ago.
