Why Putin Needs A Deal As Much - Or More - Than Ukraine

The invasion and subsequent war have been hard for Ukraine and its citizens. But it has also been catastrophic for Putin. His military has been exposed as an incompetent, corrupt paper tiger, incapable of subduing a country one sixth its size. His economy is in free fall, propped by usurious loans from China. And the territories he is demanding to annex are shattered piles of smoking rubble, populated by a diminished and impoverished collection of unskilled elderly who will be a drain on his treasury for decades. Any new ground he seizes will become a source of unending resistance requiring further commitment of troops without any commensurate benefit. 

In short, Putin needs a ceasefire he will pretend to resist in order to save himself from his own arrogance and failure. JL

Holman Jenkins comments in the Wall Street Journal:

The war has been a disaster for both Moscow and Kyiv. The Ukrainians have shown themselves not controllable from Moscow or Washington. Their losses they will find hard to forgive. For his part, Mr. Putin must know the territorial gains he keeps striving after, at huge cost to his soldiers, will be his future eyesore and money pit at best, and more likely a source of insurgency, vandalism and sabotage that will weaken the Russian state and metastasize across the region for decades to come.

Joe Biden’s decision this week to let Ukraine use U.S. missiles to hit Russian territory came only after Russia had already moved many key targets out of range; it came after Ukraine had spent its short supply of U.S. rocketry on lesser targets that were previously permitted.

Britain, based on the new U.S. policy, allowed its Storm Shadows to be deployed against a command bunker in the Russian town of Marino on Wednesday, wounding and possibly killing a North Korean general. Now the U.S. will have to be alert for a North Korean attack on American or British interests, one of several paths to a wider war.

For some in Trumpworld, criticizing the Biden decision is a freebie that only accentuates the mess the administration is leaving. But the U.S. needed an answer to Russia’s deployment of North Korean troops and expanded strike authority had been signaled as the next step on Washington’s otherwise planless escalation ladder.

Planlessness has been the Biden approach from the start, though often mischaracterized as a pointillist gauging of Putin “red lines.” In his defense, anything else was likely beyond Mr. Biden given his diminished state. Still, the future is arriving too fast now for Democrats even to blame Mr. Trump.

Our Ukrainian allies are overstretched and losing ground. Biden slogans such as “as long as it takes” and “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” only concealed a dangerous nonmeeting of minds between the U.S. and Kyiv over Crimea and other war aims. Even Ukraine’s failed 2023 offensive, it becomes clearer than ever, was a hapless byproduct of Kyiv trying to guess at and manage the internal politics of its indispensable but passive-aggressive U.S. ally.

A new strategy was going to be needed whoever won this month’s U.S. election, as Mr. Biden’s friendliest judge, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, has acknowledged.

The question all along should have been whether such strikes serve U.S. interests. Yes, because they provide the best means immediately at hand to raise the cost to Mr. Putin of a war that he must voluntarily end.

Ditto the vaporous debate over whether law and international-relations theory smiles or frowns upon the seizing of Russia’s offshore financial assets. We should be way past such niceties by now. Ditto the parade of one-off Washington and European budget and weapons commitments. Enough already. Enunciate five- and 10-year plans for training and equipping Ukraine to NATO standards.

Mr. Biden, alas, wasn’t a president even Democrats wanted to follow, having been placed in his job as a Covid placebo in 2020 by the party’s more compos mentis leaders to stop the Bernie Sanders wing.

Generously, we might say he never possessed the political oomph to do more than keep Ukraine afloat while trying to change the subject whenever possible.

Unfortunately, Mr. Trump’s known virtues make it unlikely, even if he can now deliver a cease-fire negotiation, that he will produce anything resembling stability once the confetti is swept up.

You might even ask if the war is stoppable at this point. Will Ukraine become Afghanistan in the middle of Europe?

The Ukrainians have shown themselves not controllable from Moscow or Washington. Their losses they will find hard to forgive. For his part, Mr. Putin must know the territorial gains he keeps striving after, at huge cost to his soldiers, will be his future eyesore and money pit at best, and more likely a source of insurgency, vandalism and sabotage that will weaken the Russian state and metastasize across the region for decades to come. If you’re Poland or Finland, it’s not unthinkable that, in 10 or 20 years, you might have to resume sovereignty over border areas long ago stolen by Stalin.

The war has been a disaster for both Moscow and Kyiv, though Mr. Putin will call himself a winner under any outcome. Indeed, I expect his key ask will be a secret codicil banning the phrase “strategic defeat for Russia,” which has clearly become neuralgic for him (this phrase got yours truly named to the Kremlin’s sanctions list).

He may not say so, but Mr. Putin secretly knows that Russia has long benefited from the stability provided by NATO, without which the Soviet Union’s unraveling 35 years ago could have been a lot more fraught and dangerous.

Any deal struck now among Mr. Trump, Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelensky and Mr. Putin had better keep this in mind. Needed will be a big and lasting financial and military investment from Europe and the U.S. to avoid the Afghanistan scenario.