The Biden administration would like to make one thing clear: It won’t throw Ukraine under the bus. If President Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t want to pursue a peace deal that could leave Russia with some Ukrainian territory, America won’t use its leverage as Ukraine’s main arms supplier to push him into negotiations.
“The United States is not pressuring Ukraine”, said national security adviser Jake Sullivan in early November, the day after NBC reported that he had broached the subject of negotiations with Zelensky. President Biden said, that same week, “We’re not going to tell them what they have to do”. And a week later, national security spokesman John Kirby asserted that “nobody from the United States is pushing or prodding or nudging [Zelensky] to the table”.
Well, maybe somebody from the United States should be. If an enduring peace can be had through negotiation — and we won’t know if it can until we explore that prospect — then negotiations would be in America’s interest. That alone might be enough reason for Biden to steer Ukraine toward the table. But as it happens, such a peace would be in Ukraine’s interests — and most of the world’s — as well.
To start with some of the more mundane virtues of near-term peace: The war is costing America lots of money. And this spending is inflationary at a time when inflation is a big global problem. The war also fuels inflation in other ways, notably by constricting the supply of energy to European allies. And, as those allies buy American natural gas as a substitute, some European officials are accusing the United States of profiteering, revealing tensions within the West that could grow as the winter proceeds.
Meanwhile, every day the war continues, more Ukrainians die, and more of Ukraine gets wrecked. And every day there is some risk of a fluke turning this into a wider war, featuring direct NATO involvement. Even if such a war didn’t go nuclear, the devastation could be vast. “World War III” might be an overstatement — but it might not (especially in light of a recent report that China and Russia have a secret mutual defense agreement).
So, what are the arguments against a peace that leaves Russia in control of some Ukrainian territory? The most common one involves a goal shared by the United States and Ukraine and many other countries: giving Russia a big dose of negative reinforcement for invading its neighbor. This punishment could deter Russia from repeating such aggression and deter other countries from aggression by reinforcing the norm against attacking sovereign nations (even if, awkwardly, the United States has violated that norm — which is also an international law — more than once in recent decades).
Obviously, pushing Russian troops back to pre-2014 lines (Zelensky’s stated goal) or even pre-February lines, would be a powerful form of negative reinforcement — and the more powerful the better. But it’s important to see that, even without that, this war has been extremely costly for Russia and for Vladimir Putin.
Samuel Charap, an expert on Ukraine at the Rand Corp., recently said, “Russia has already lost no matter where the line is. Russia’s strategic defeat … is already a thing. That’s done”. The reason, he said, is the “astonishing damage to (a) their military capabilities, (b) their international reputation, (c) their economy, their capacity to rearm. I mean, Russia has weakened itself in the last nine months more than any U.S. policy … could have done”.
In other words: Even if Russia held onto all or most of the territory it now has, its February invasion would be seen — by it and by other countries — as a very cautionary tale, in stark contrast to its casual seizure of Crimea in 2014.
Of course, there is one argument against a peace deal that, especially from Ukraine’s point of view, is potent: Justice demands that Russia give back all the land it took. But that’s a compelling argument for more war only if Ukraine has a good chance of getting the land back through continued fighting — and getting it back at acceptable human cost. The current state of play on the battlefield casts doubt on that premise.
There are, broadly speaking, three possible trajectories for this war:
1) Stalemate. Russia makes gains here, Ukraine makes them there, but no one gets the upper hand, and Russia holds onto roughly as much territory as it has.
Some people consider a stalemate implausible because Ukraine seems to have “the wind at its back” after Russia’s September retreat in the Kharkiv province and its more recent retreat from the city of Kherson.
But the Kherson retreat isn’t a leading indicator. Reportedly, it had long been favored by Russian generals who considered the Kherson position untenable, and they finally got Putin’s approval sometime this fall. And because the goal was to fall back to a more defensible position, protected by the Dnieper River, further Ukrainian advances on this front are unlikely anytime soon.
As for Ukraine’s breakthrough in Kharkiv province: It came in territory Russia had left undermanned. Since then, Russia has mobilized 300,000 troops, and its defensive lines are being steadily beefed up. With the exception of Kherson, battle lines have barely moved since mid-September.
2) Russian advance. In this scenario, the continued infusion of newly mobilized troops, along with the continued impairment of Ukraine’s logistics via infrastructure strikes, allows Russia to turn the tide. Putin finally achieves his initially stated territorial aims — wresting the Donbas provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk entirely from Ukraine’s grasp — and expands his holdings in the two other provinces he has since deemed “annexed”. And maybe he goes further. There are voices in Russia calling for taking everything east of the Dnieper.
3) Ukrainian advance. In this scenario, Ukraine makes big gains, pushing Russian troops back toward pre-February lines and possibly beyond them, maybe even to pre-2014 lines.
All three of these trajectories involve the continued death of Ukrainians and the continued destruction of Ukraine, and one of them involves further territorial loss as well. Only the third trajectory brings compensation for this carnage in the form of territorial gains.
And these gains come with an asterisk. Sustained advance by Ukrainian troops would be seen by Putin as an existential threat — not necessarily to Russia, but certainly to his regime, as his invasion came to be seen by more and more Russian elites as an abject failure. Fear of being deposed would make him more inclined to take risks on the battlefield in hopes of turning the tide. He might use tactical nuclear weapons, but even less extreme measures could draw NATO into the war.
NATO’s involvement is something Ukraine would welcome, but the fact is it could lead to an escalation that reaches horrifying levels. Nuclear war would be a real possibility, and even a nonnuclear version of World War III could leave Ukrainians wishing they’d settled for an imperfect peace.
In resisting a diplomatic solution, Ukraine’s political leadership is basically dismissing the first two of the war’s three possible trajectories and placing all its hopes on a particular version of the third trajectory that you might call the Goldilocks version: Ukraine pushes Russian troops toward Russia’s border, putting more and more political and psychological pressure on Putin, but that pressure isn’t so great as to trigger desperate measures that wind up devastating Ukraine.
This might seem like a bad bet, but when your country is invaded by a larger neighbor, you have to be open to taking risks, and you have to think positive. Besides, all national leaders face domestic political pressures that can divert them from pursuing the country’s true interests. We don’t know exactly what pressures bear on Zelensky, but the Ukrainian military does include politically powerful and intensely nationalistic elements that he may find hard to ignore.
If indeed Zelensky’s reluctance to negotiate is partly a product of political pressure, Biden would be doing him a favor by playing the heavy and pushing him toward the negotiating table, shielding him from the political fallout. Biden would also be doing Ukraine a favor. Continuing this war is much more likely to leave Ukraine under the bus than ending it is.
Robert Wright, whose books include “The Moral Animal” and “Nonzero”, publishes the Nonzero Newsletter and hosts the Nonzero podcast.