PUTIN V. TRUMP: BATTLE FOR UKRAINE’S LEGACY

We are facing an extraordinary nexus point in the new year. Once Donald Trump is sworn in as President on January 20th, things are going to change. I have lost all interest in what happens inside the United States once he’s sworn in. The majority that voted for him and those who didn’t bother to vote against him, must now reap what they sow. I can’t do anything about it, and I will not aid such an administration in any way.

We must now wait to see not what the new administration says but what it does.

There is an irony that for Putin and Trump, this is their last hurrah. This is their legacy moment. Putin is aiming to re-establish the lost empire of Imperial and Soviet Russia. Trump will want to leave office having achieved something on the international stage that is truly momentous. He covets a Nobel Peace Prize because for reasons even Obama could never understand, he was awarded one. Putin and Trump have a point to make. Ending the war in Ukraine will be what Trump wants. Winning it is what Putin wants.

Putin has a set of dilemmas on his hands. On the one hand his economy is facing, in human terms, gross indigestion, a severe case of high blood pressure, a stroke, a heart attack and corruptive cancer eating it from the inside out. He knows that if it doesn’t get treatment soon, it’s going to collapse and die. It’s like an old man running up a hill with the end in sight, but it’s just out of reach, and he hasn’t quite got enough energy left to make it – and yet he seems to be prepared to die trying.

In Russia the government and media line is that Russia doesn’t need the West to be part of the peace negotiations. They see it that all they need is direct talks with a new Ukrainian Government and the war will end rapidly. The use of the ‘new’ element here is a direct encouragement to forces inside Ukraine, that all they have to do is remove Zelensky and his ministers and peace can come with extraordinary speed.

And as the Russians put it in their discussions, ‘you know the kind of peace we’re talking about’. By which they mean Ukraine as a rump state, with a Moscow backed government, occupied by Russian troops and the FSB, with the oblasts Russia claims permanently removed and fully integrated into the Russian empire.

The thing for Putin is that anything less than that is not really the victory he wants. it would be half hearted and incomplete in his mind, no matter what spin he places on it as some glorious victory back home. And that means that for him and for Russia it’s unfinished business. Which means that from his perspective, given the opportunity, he could and probably would, strike again.

Even as I write, new analysis is making it clear that Russia is looking to gain as much land as possible and may even decline to consider any form of negotiations if it feels its closer to victory.

Trump will do whatever makes him look best. He wants to be seen as stronger than Putin, which means he needs to be able to win the peace and end the war on reasonable terms for Ukraine. Ukraine will have to concede land (at least for now) – Putin won’t accept less and I think that despite the fact they hate it principle, Ukrainians would make concessions. It’s this that is driving Putin’s war right now. The more he can take the more argument he has to keep it.

But there has to be an ‘or else’. Trump can’t stand there demanding peace, or give away the best of Ukraine, without Ukraine agreeing. Just negotiating a deal Moscow accepts if it’s beyond the pale for Ukraine, is meaningless. It’s always possible Trump would try and blame Ukraine, but I suspect Europe would stand up for it and even his own administration at present looks unlikely to accept that position unquestioned.

Trumps new National Security Policy Director (do yourself a favor and don’t look him up because you’ll cringe inside), Sebastian Gorka, spoke only Sunday of, ‘the ex-KGB Colonel and thug that runs Russia’. he also added what many people hope will be Trump’s preferred way forward – there will be peace, and if you won’t agree, then the aid the US has provided Ukraine so far will look like peanuts.

Such a threat has two outcomes. Russia ignores it or it accepts it. If it ignores it and takes the risk because it thinks it can overcome Ukraine before that scale of aid arrives, the war goes on. Especially if Putin thinks he can make his economy last the final stretch.

If they accept it, and Ukraine also accepted without legally ceding the land its lost at the point of contact – similar to how the Korean War ended in 1953 – and there is no formal peace but a de facto end to fighting, that at least is something. It will likely mean a new Iron Curtain along the contact line. It will need policing, it will mean Ukraine is permanently armed to the teeth. It may even get into NATO – Russia will try and prevent that, even if it can’t stop Ukraine joining the EU.

But the armistice line if that’s what it ends up being – is not the end of legal hostilities. Technically Russia and Japan and the UN and N.Korea are both still at war because no peace has ever been signed since 1945 and 1953 respectively.

What cannot be allowed is Russia dictates what Ukraine can and cannot do post conflict. It can’t be allowed to make demands over disarming, army size, neutrality, and so on. This isn’t going to be Versailles in 1919, a simple diktat to Germany that blamed it for everything and made it pay for the damage caused. Russia can’t be allowed to claim that level of victory.

And that’s why sanctions must remain in place until the fighting stops, and then they’re slowly released as its clear there is no immediate threat of the fighting restarting, because that’s the one aspect we can’t ignore – Russia cannot be trusted.

Russian government and media is ruthlessly hostile to Ukraine’s freedom. The mere existence of its independence is anathema to them. They want to eradicate the Ukrainian state because they see it as having zero legitimacy. It’s just a historical aberration that only Russia is entitled to correct and everyone else needs to get out its way as it does so.

What we will have to accept is that Russia will hate the West and the United States, for having stopped them yet again. And while it will stop the war in Ukraine, at least for the immediate future, you can bet your bottom dollar an aggrieved Russia will be back for more in one way or another at some time in our lifetimes. And this time they have friends. China, Iran and Kim in The North. A more deranged and disturbing set of enemies that we will have to face down for the next however many years it takes.

There is some closing advice form former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing Wen, who made it clear at the Halifax Security Conference this week, that the best way to deter China is to arm not Taiwan, but Ukraine. The West prevailing one way or another over Russia, and securing Ukraine’s future, is a greater deterrent to China than anything else. If anyone should know, the former President of Taiwan certainly does.

Trump has an opportunity to make this end the right way and receive the praise and admiration his character type needs. Does he have the right people and the savvy to make it happen? History can be made, good or bad. We will just to have stand by and watch.

My personal view is that Ukraine would be best off with a line of contact armistice. No legal ceding of territory. Quick accession to NATO – inside 18 months ideally. Multiple military, binding, security guarantees from the West to give it an Article 5 type support before its actually a member. Join the EU, and rebuild a new economy, a new decentralized power grid, a new military.

And wait. Because Russia will change, its economy will be in crisis, sooner or later, as Russia falls into a pit of its own making, Ukraine will, eventually, get its land back.

The Analyst

Slava Ukraine!

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