If you feel like binging on perspectives on the Ukrainian war, this is an 8 1/2 hour video of an English-language conference, and there's an additional two hours on a video of the 2nd day of the conference.
Ukraine's official perspective
Ukraine's public pitch is basically: Western nations should give Ukraine anything and everything they ask for and if they don't, a mega-domino-theory scenario will kick in where Russia will take over all of Europe and democracy will be destroyed forever. Or something along those lines.
Since Ukraine has been in basically a nothing-to-lose situation, I can understand why would take a position like this and scold their de facto allies as having been suckers and wimps for ever engaging Russia in any kind of cooperative way over anything.
Still, the Ukrainians call for things like setting up a no-fly zone against Russia. Which means in practice the United States shooting down Russian planes and even taking out Russian antiaircraft installations in Russia itself. Calling for a world war - and that's what we're talking about here - is a reckless thing to do. That could be one of the things behind Tom Friedman's cryptic comment:
... privately, U.S. officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine’s leadership than they are letting on. There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — considerably more than has been reported." (Why Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan Is Utterly Reckless (New York Times 08/01/2022)How long will the war go on?
The easy answer is that it will continue until both sides see more disadvantages than advantages in continuing. But that isn't an purely material or financial consideration. Factors like patriotism, leadership ambitions, and saving face all play big roles. Here the famous statement of Basil Liddell-Hart, “The purpose of war is to make a better peace,” is very relevant.
It could well go on for years.
Ukraine, the EU, and NATO
The polemics over the causes of the war have made it an article of faith for New Cold Warriors that Russian concerns over Ukraine joining NATO and/or the EU had nothing at all to do with Russian actions. It's a ideological rather than any kind of practical argument.
But what comes after the war? Any near-term peace settlement is likely to involve some kind of practical and even formal neutrality for Ukraine. Even if Russian leadership to suddenly (miraculously) decide they had no objection to Ukraine joining the EU and NATO, the process for Ukrainian accession to either would be a years-long process.
As awkward as it might be for New Cold Warriors to admit, The US in particular looked at NATO expansion as a kind of "freebie," in that they saw Russia as effectively so permanently weakened that they wouldn't be able to mount any effective military action against the new NATO members. That's why NATO is now scrambling to station hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Baltic countries to provide an actually credible conventional military defense to deter a Russian attack there.
NATO now has a whole new set of calculations when it come to its goal, formally stated in 2008, of making both Ukraine and Georgia NATO members. (A commitment done in a worst-of-both-worlds form that may be one of the dumbest diplomatic blunders in history.) Now it's clear that NATO would have to station large numbers of troops in Georgia and Ukraine in that scenario and creat a prolonged period of much-heightened risk of US-Russia direct conflict. And, not least of the problems, keep Russia heavily dependent on China for the foreseeable future.
And it's always worth keeping in mind as well that the EU Treaty includes a mutual-defence clause. So accepting Ukraine as a full EU member before a stable settlement is achieved would basically be all of the EU countries declaring war on Russia. And most EU members are also NATO members. This doesn't seem like a great idea. If the EU governments can't manage the current refugee flows - and they are doing a poor job of it so far - no way they're going to go into a direct war with Russia unless it invades a current EU and NATO country.
American goals in the war
It's not at all clear to me at this point what the Biden Administration sees as the end goal. He himself made what was passed off as a slip of the tongue saying that Putin should be removed. And DefSec Lloyd Austin said the goal was to weaken Russia militarily to the point it would not be able to carry out another invasion like this. That sounds like a couple of orders of magnitude beyond restoring Ukraine's sovereignty over all its territory. (US pledges extra $713m for Ukraine war effort and to weaken Russia Guardian 04/25/2022)
And assuming we get to Austin's stated goal with no nuclear war, that pretty much leaves Russia with all its nuclear weapons as a very dependent partner of China. Add to that: massive famine in mostly poor countries from Ukraine's grain exports being devastated and maybe Russia's sanctioned (the recent Ukraine-Russia-UN agreement on grain shipments is a gleam of hope here), drastic readjustments of energy suppliers (with critical help from our lovely friends in Saudi Arabia who have their own dubious priorities), and the almost-sure-to-come political crises in EU countries over Ukrainian refugees. The upcoming Italian election campaign is likely to feature some heavy anti-refugee rhetoric. The conversation about the war is likely to change an awful lot over the next six months.
State Department spokesman Ted Price addressed US goal in a Press Briefing of 08/18/2022, emphasizing the goal of restoring Ukrainian sovereignty:
Everything we have provided our Ukrainian partners has been in the name of one principle, and that’s self-defense, because what our Ukrainian partners are facing is an external aggressor, a country – a foreign country crossing over sovereign Ukrainian borders onto independent, sovereign Ukrainian territory as part of an effort to wrest an independent country away from the Ukrainian Government and ultimately the Ukrainian people.But he continued directly by stressing the US intends to keep the conflict contained:
So yes, we have provided precisely what our Ukrainian partners need to defend against this external invader, against this external aggressor. At the same time, we’ve also been clear that it is not in Ukraine’s interest, it is not in NATO’s interest, it is not in Europe’s interest, it is not in our interest to see Russia’s aggression against Ukraine become a broader conflagration, and for this war to spill beyond the borders of Ukraine more broadly into Europe, or potentially bringing Russia into conflict with NATO and the United States. That is not in anyone’s interest. [my emphasis]This is a seemingly clear statement of intention to avoid the broader conflict a no-fly zone by NATO would represent. But it also doesn't rule the prospect of a protracted war in Ukraine.
Regime change in Russia?
The foreign policy establishment can be very imaginative when it comes to diplomatic polemics and talking itself into supporting risky and even reckless actions. But when it comes to Russia, they will have a hard time breaking out of the habit of thinking of Russia in their optimistic-arrogant post-USSR framing. "Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness," Obama said in 2014, in one of his prounouncements that didn't age so well. (Steve Holland and Jeff Mason, Obama, in dig at Putin, calls Russia 'regional power' Reuters 03/25/2014)
But hoping for a replay of a series of events like the one that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact would be a very risky brand of imagination on which to base Western policies.As George Beebe writes (NATO’s Tunnel Vision Quincy Brief 28 08/11/2022):
Opinion polls suggest that Putin is more popular than he was prior to the war. Although Russia is taking a sizable economic hit from sanctions, the ruble is trading higher than it was before the war, and Russian energy earnings have gone up even as its export volumes have declined, thanks to rising oil prices and reluctance outside the West to join in sanctioning Russia. Western sanctions and military aid have reinforced perceptions in Russia that the war is not against Ukraine but with the West, which is intent on Russia’s demise.7 So far, Russia’s battlefield losses seem to be producing a patriotic, rather than an anti-Putin, response.Beebe cautions especially against any assumption that any Putin successor "would be intent, like Gorbachev in the waning days of the Cold War, on democratizing Russia and making amends with the West." He holds this to be "perhaps even more unlikely than Putin’s near-term ouster." He continues:
Certainly, there are many Russians, particularly in elite circles in Moscow and St. Petersburg, who are unhappy about the rupture in relations with the West and would like to see efforts to repair them. Some privately believe that Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was unnecessary and counterproductive, and they are horrified by the brutality of the war. That said, in contrast to the late Soviet and early post-Cold War periods, many of these same people are quite disillusioned with what they see as an increasingly decadent and illiberal West. And after the fiasco of Western reforms in the 1990s, many of those who would like to see Russia become more democratic believe that its form of governance should evolve gradually in consonance with Russian traditions, culture, and history, rather than by forced imitation of American or West European models. Russians across the political spectrum agree that NATO expansion is a threat to Russian security, as Gorbachev himself has long believed. [my emphasis]Even though Gorbachev has insisted that the supposed commitment by the Bush I Administration on stationing NATO troops in East Germany was not the general commitment to not expand NATO in eastern Europe that Putin's government and some Western critics have claimed that it was, he shared the belief that Russian should regard the later NATO enlargement as a potential security threat.
Sanctions
Economic sanctions seem on the face of it to be less drastic than military action. But I'm convinced the US public and many policymakers have a general impression that they are far more effective than they typically work out to be in practice. When a country's leaders and their political case believe something is in their vital national interest (their form of government like in Venezuela and Cuba now or Iraq in the 1990s, a military project like Iran's nuclear program, or a national security priority as Russia officially regards Ukraine), they won't be inclined to easily back down in the face of sanctions.
And sanctions tehmselves become an obvious nationalist rallying point for even unpopular regimes. And understadably so. Sanctions aimed at denying a country access to military technology, supplies, or resources are one thing, though not likely a popular thing in the target country. But sanctions aimed at impoverishing the civilian population to induce a switch to a government more to the liking of the country imposing the sanctions are a much more volatile kind of undertaking.
And any diplomatic settlement short of a unliteral surrender by Russia would require dropping Western sacctions in return for military and political concessions. If the Lloyd Austin position on US war aims is the actual Biden Administration policy, would the US be willing to drop sanctions even in return for a full Russian withdrawal from Ukraine?
And in the Ukrainian case, the European allies of the US are bearing more of the costs of the sanctions than the US. The market for US oil is even helped by the sanctions against Russia.
Ukrainian refugees
I'm leery of talking about refugees as a threat to the EU in any way. Because that can very easily play into the xenophobic rhetoric of the far right, and of radicalized conservatives, who always talk about refugees as a threat and a burden ("carravans," "illegal migrants").
But Putin's government would be foolish not to see that as a weakness that could potentially work to Russia's favor in the goal of strenthening the EU. The European Union didn't roll over and die after Brexit. In fact, Britain itself is taking more of very much self-imposed economic blow because of it than the EU.
But fear and hatred of foreigners has always been a key element of fascist propaganda. Refugees make a useful political target because (1) people can see them in their own cities and towns, (2) they have restricted legal rights and are initially very dependent on assistance of the host country, and (3) they mostly can't vote in elections in their host countries.
To any rightwing demagogue, that combination spells T-A-R-G-E-T.
The UN Data Portal on Ukrainian Refugees is a reminder that the number of refugees from Ukraine is still an estimate, which itself is a measure of how unprepared the EU countries are for such an inflow. (The EU officially designates Ukrainian refugees as "displaced persons," a different legal category than "refugees." But they are generically refugees in normal journalistic usage.)
Essentially, that data as of 08/16/2022 indicates that there are currently something like four million Ukrainian refugees in central and western European countries, mostly in EU countries. As many as four million or more have fled Ukraine since February 24 and then gone back. Around two million or so Ukrainians have gone to Russia, though how that number breaks down between people fleeing war and people forcibly deported is not apparent.
Ukraine has a population of 44 million. The UN data show that at least ten million of them have left Ukraine during the war. Even keeping in mind that four million may have gone back, this is still a massive displacement of people. And that doesn't count how many have been internally displaced, in addition.
And this is just in the first six months of the war. If the war goes on for another year, the number of external refugees in EU countries could be double that. Like most refugees, most of them would presumably like to go back home. But the longer the war continues, the more established refugees will become in their host countries and much more destruction will take place in Ukraine. Even if the war ended today, a significant percentage of the refugees currently in the EU would stay permanently.
Russian information operations can be expected to encourage and amplify anti-refugee messaging in the EU, which the far right would do even without Russian encouragement. The effectiveness such political moves depends critically on how well the European conservative parties in particular push back on anti-refugee agitation.
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