During a visit to Kyiv last weekend, I kept asking Ukrainians a question that vexes me: Is your war against President Vladimir Putin — or against Russia itself? Nearly every time, I got the same unyielding answer. The enemy is a Russia that must be defeated and transformed.
Through Ukrainian eyes, this terrible conflict has become a clash of civilizations. They argue that most Russians support Putin’s brutal war in the way that most Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Unless Russia as a nation abandons the imperial dreams that Putin has evoked, the conflict cannot be resolved through negotiations.
“Russia has to go through the same process that Germany did after World War II”, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak insisted Saturday in an interview with me and the other members of a group organized by the German Marshall Fund, of which I’m a trustee. “If Russian society doesn’t understand what they’ve done, the world will be brought into chaos”. He enthusiastically predicts that postwar Russia will dissolve into five or six smaller nations.
This Ukrainian desire for total victory — though understandable for a country that has suffered a vicious assault on its civilian population — poses a painful dilemma for the Biden administration. As President Biden made clear in a May 31 essay in the New York Times, the United States seeks “a negotiated end to the conflict” in which Russia withdraws from occupied territory. Biden seeks a Ukrainian victory, but not a total Russian defeat.
For me, thinking about how this war ends juxtaposes two conflicting lessons of the 20th century. Historians generally agree that the punitive peace imposed on Germany after World War I helped bring on the vicious Nazi quest for revenge. But historians also agree that the decisive outcome of World War II, with Germany and Japan pounded into unconditional surrender, allowed the miraculous postwar rebirth of both countries.
Ukrainians, from senior leaders to ordinary citizens, appear convinced that Putin’s Russia must be vanquished, not just Putin himself. Olga Datsiuk, a 33-year-old television producer, relaxing over lunch in a cafe, was smiling but emphatic in an interview Saturday. “We feel that Russia and Russians are responsible for all of it”, she said. The same view was expressed by Sergiy Gerasymchuk, who runs a foreign policy think tank called Prism: “It’s not Putin; it’s Russia”, he told us. “There is a chance for reconciliation, but not in my lifetime”.
The Ukrainian narrative centers on the diverging paths the two countries took after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ukrainians turned West, toward the European Union and embraced a freewheeling if corrupt version of democracy. Russia flirted with the West at first, under President Boris Yeltsin, but after a decade of chaos and humiliation, Russians welcomed the strong hand of Putin when he was elected president in 2000.
Russia never had a thorough post-communist housecleaning, and in the Ukrainian view, that’s the root of the current catastrophe. “Russians, somehow, are afraid [of democracy]”, said Datsiuk. “This is what Ukrainians will never understand. They choose safe space and warm food instead of freedom”. The two societies diverged, says Alina Frolova, a former deputy defense minister who now heads a think tank called the Center for Defense Strategies. “Russia had 10 years of freedom after 1991, but they chose to go back to their traditional empire”.
Ukraine’s pro-Western democracy threatened Putin, and he has worked relentlessly, obsessively, to crush it. His war against Ukraine began in 2014, when he seized Crimea and parts of the Donbas region, and it culminated in this year’s scorched-earth invasion.
But Russian assaults have only deepened Ukraine’s separate identity. A gathering of Ukrainian intellectuals in June sponsored by two leading universities drew up a list of 74 ways the war had changed society. Valerii Pekar, a member of the group, described this new spirit as “civic Ukrainianism” — in its national pride, love for its armed forces and embrace of a European, democratic future.
So how will this clash of civilizations end? In the West, people try to imagine a negotiated peace. Putin might withdraw to the preinvasion lines. … Or mediators might devise a formula to defer final resolution of the status of the occupied territories. … Or the Russian army might rebel against the Kremlin’s dictates. ... Or Putin might be replaced by a successor who is unable or unwilling to continue the war.
Ukrainians I met in Kyiv unanimously rejected any such interim settlement. They want Ukraine to win back all of its territory, and Russia to lose decisively. The war will end, said Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the national security and defense council, “when the Russians understand that they have zero chance of victory”.
Americans have the painless exhilaration of watching Ukrainians fight for freedom. But there will be growing risks for us, too, if the war continues to escalate. We should calibrate them carefully and avoid direct U.S.-Russian conflict. But we can’t escape the dangers entirely.
Surely, this is a war worth winning. I don’t want to see Russia destroyed, and I think any argument that it is forever an alien civilization is wrong. But the ideology that Putin represents, and that many Russians embrace, must be defeated.
David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “The Paladin”.