Now that Russia said it was withdrawing from Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, and concentrating on the eastern part of the country, it didn’t declare its end-plan, and although it has become clear that it is facing more Ukrainian resistance than it had thought, it is not clear what it wants Ukrainian leaders to do, even though Russia still maintains the upper-hand.
This situation has flared up a new set of debates in the US about what Ukraine would, or should, do.
The debate has been clouded, not only by Russia's secrecy and ambiguity, but also by Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s opposite strategy of being outspoken and emotional. Add to that his changing position about his future relation with Russia:
Once he said that negotiations with Moscow and its pledge to reduce attacks on Ukrainian cities were just “words.” At another time he said: “We all equally want to win, but there will be battles ahead. We still have a difficult path to travel to get everything we are striving for.”
Last week, the Washington Post described Zelensky as “The 44-year-old Ukrainian comedian who has evolved from a political neophyte, widely doubted among Western leaders and Ukrainian voters in the run-up to the war, into a crisis commander who has cemented his place in the history of Ukrainian nationhood and inspired a will to resist at home and abroad with personal bravery.”
This is a description of Zelensky that added to the uncertainties and complexities of the American debate about his and his country’s future.
Here are three opinions from this debate:
First, Zelensky “is the real dilemma in my mind,” said Keith Darden, a political science professor at the American University in Washington, DC, and author of two books, “Crisis in Ukraine” and “Economic Liberalism and Its Rivals: The Formation of International Institutions among the Post-Soviet States.”
Second, Zelensky “is in a sort of Catch-22 [a contradictory or self-defeating course of action],” said Mikhail Minakov, an expert on Ukraine at the Kennan Institute, a branch of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, DC. A Ukrainian who was born in the former Soviet Union, he authored, among many books on Ukraine, “Development and Dystopia. Studies in post-Soviet Ukraine and Eastern Europe” and “New Ukrainian Exceptionalism,” (both books in English).
Third, “The Russians underestimated Afghanistan's mullahs in the 1980s.They seem to have underestimated Zelensky today,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA expert on Afghanistan, and now at Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.
Following are excerpts from the respective opinions of the above experts, drawn from their tweets, websites and statements to the media.
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Keith Darden: “A Dilemma”:
“Ukrainian President Zelensky has relied on intense feelings of nationalism to continue to fight this war, but those are exactly the forces that make it extremely difficult to put this war to an end. That’s the real dilemma in my mind …
The Kremlin's requirements for stopping the onslaught of attacks on Ukraine give Zelensky a place to start negotiations and he could compromise on several issues.
However, a fatal blow to Zelensky would be accepting Russia's demand that he (a) halts his pursuit of NATO membership; (b) can't accept military assistance from NATO countries, and (c) Ukraine should be a demilitarized country …
When you're suffering an invasion of your neighbor and they're asking you to demilitarize, it's not an option. The only thing saving Ukraine is its military, but a military facing a stronger military ...
That kind of territorial change would completely reorder the politics of Ukraine as a whole in a way Moscow would see as favorable.
Putin could go further. Recently, Russian state television aired a map of Ukraine with the territorial “presents” gifted to Kyiv by czars, Bolsheviks and Soviets. Putin's military campaign may entail slicing away Ukraine’s coast and eastern industrialized regions, in addition to the west, leaving a small, unviable rump state, while annexing parts of the country to Russia …
But, we (the Americans) don’t want to go to war over Ukraine and we have made that very explicit. But we also don’t want the war against Ukraine to go unpunished.
But those two things might not be compatible.
It is hard to contain an escalatory cycle like this …”
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Mikhail Minakov: “Catch-22”:
“Right now, everyone in Ukraine, starting with Zelensky, is eager to resist — eager if not to win, then to batter Russia as much as possible ... Zelensky is in a sort of Catch-22 [a contradictory or self-defeating course of action]. He tries to find the possible way of staying in this position, remaining charismatic, but at the same time to find a solution …
He has to find a solution because Russia, despite its recent setbacks in Ukraine, still has enormous power, and the West, on the other hand, has the only power of punishing Russia outside the military front.
Will that work?
The question is who are the groups that are hit by these sanctions? So far, the most probable scenario is that the blow is to the upper five percent of the population, while the people from smaller towns and from rural areas and from provincial Russia will be less impacted.
And if that’s true, then there will be some support for Putin, or he can at least try to gather this support there.
And, it could provide a regime with some legitimacy …
On the other hand, the invasion of Ukraine could be the beginning of the end of the Putin regime.
During his rule, there have been two social contracts:
One with the population, telling them: 'You rank and file citizens, get your income for your household, and you will be economically well-off—in exchange for your political rights—and, you will be defended socially and from criminality.' Right now, this contract is most probably broken.
Second, the contracts with the elites. Elites were not involved in this decision-making, and the sanctions are killing their wealth. You literally can see that every week, these Forbes List people are losing half of their wealth and it seems to be continued—especially in those zones where they were bringing their capital from Russia …
The attack on Ukraine was not just an absolute crime. It was an irreparable mistake that put into motion the end-game for Putin's regime in Russia …"
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Bruce Riedel: “Like Russian Afghanistan”:
“The Russians underestimated the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s. They seem to have underestimated Zelensky today.
But, there’s irony in that failure: Putin, in invading Ukraine, has appeared bent on restoring the glory lost when the Soviet Union broke up, an event he has described as the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
Yet, by making some of the same mistakes that haunted Soviet leaders until the day their empire fell apart, Putin has put Russian power — not to mention his own future — in doubt.
In setting out to reverse history, he may instead be repeating it...
Yet, if anything, this war is going far worse for Moscow.
I was working in the CIA’s operations center on the night that Soviet paratroopers began landing in Afghanistan. The U.S. policymakers had rapidly seized on the idea that “this could be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.” Washington could help by supplying money and arms to the rebels, funneling that assistance through Pakistani partners.
“The U.S. role [in Afghanistan] was basically the quartermaster of the war. That’s the role that Biden and company envision for the U.S. again.
As was true in Afghanistan, Moscow appears to have been caught off-guard by the backing that Ukraine is getting from beyond its borders.
Before the invasion, NATO, the European Union and the United States were all racked by internal division. President Biden had just overseen his own humiliating retreat from Afghanistan and was believed to have little appetite for confrontation.
But the West has shown unexpected unity in sticking up for Ukraine. And this time, the support is coming not in the shadows, but in the wide open.
The weaponry, too, is more sophisticated now. Much of the early assistance to the mujahideen came in the form of small arms, such as rifles, with anti-aircraft Stinger missiles arriving only after years of combat …”
