Putin’s War

Obama had no good options to stop the invasion. In fact, the only mistake the president made was ever suggesting there would be “consequences.”

By Fred Kaplan

179667370-russias-president-vladimir-putin-welcomes-us-president — President Vladimir Putin of Russia welcomes President Barack Obama at the start of the G20 summit on Sept. 5, 2013.

Is the West about to go to war with Russia over the fate of Ukraine? The question should answer itself. I can’t imagine many Americans or Europeans willingly spending “blood and treasure” to keep Moscow’s mitts off of Kiev and Kviv. So why, then, did President Obama publicly warn Vladimir Putin that armed aggression against Ukraine would lead to “consequences”?

What “consequences” did Obama have in mind? To put it another way, what cache of consequences could the United States fling at Moscow that would make Putin (or any Russian leader) change his behavior, or alter his cost-benefit calculus, when it comes to Ukraine?

Putin may face a bad month or so in the world media—perhaps face some sanctions and other troubles—for moving tanks, planes, and Russia’s own brutal brigade of riot police to quash protesters, overthrow parliament, and restore some version of the old regime. But in his mind, that’s nothing compared with the prospect of losing Ukraine.

Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents and the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Putin, after all, has lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20^th century. He considers Ukraine to be a Russian “territory,” not an independent nation (and said so to President George W. Bush in 2008). And the Crimean peninsula, which Nikita Khrushchev ceded to Ukraine in 1954, is Ukrainian in name only, and even then just barely. (Khrushchev didn’t quite surrender the land but declared it an autonomous enclave.) The Russian Navy maintains an important fleet there; most of its people speak, and regard themselves as, Russian. In the ongoing crisis, Putin did send troops to seize Crimea—to the complaint of few locals.

Yes, Russia signed an accord guaranteeing Ukraine’s borders, and Secretary of State John Kerry scored debater’s points by noting that Putin couldn’t very well insist on Syria’s sovereignty while violating Ukraine’s. None of this matters to Putin, nor would it have to any other Russian leader in memory. Putin could cite the Crimean people’s pleas to restore order in their streets (not that they’d been teeming with disorder). If the crisis persists, he could easily find someone in the eastern part of the Ukrainian mainland—which is largely pro-Russia—to issue similar pleas. “I’m not invading Ukraine,” he could say, “I’m only answering the calls for fraternal assistance from citizens endangered by hooligans and terrorists.” (Indeed, in his phone call with President Obama today, Putin reserved the right to protect Russian interests in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.)

Of course, these are rationalizations, not real reasons. Putin’s principal motive, now in the Crimea and possibly later in eastern Ukraine, is to reassert Russian hegemony.

Is this horrendous? Yes. Is it a big surprise? No. What can we do in response? Not a whole lot—again, unless we want to go to war, which would be stupid. There are good reasons why even George W. Bush backed off (or at least stopped short of pursuing) a pledge to consider Ukraine for NATO membership. First, calmer minds weighed the level of Western interests in Ukrainian independence against the cost of defending it in a pinch, and found the former coming up short. (A military alliance like NATO, in which an attack on one is seen as an attack against all, should mean something.) Second, polls suggested that only a minority of Ukraine’s citizens wanted to join this alliance; about 40 percent saw NATO as a threat.

In 1959, and again in 1961, when Khrushchev threatened to occupy West Berlin, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy called his bluff, and Khrushchev backed down. If Khrushchev had sent in tanks, the United States couldn’t have staved them off. (Berlin was in the middle of East Germany, and at the time NATO had only small conventional armies.) But West Berlin was a key Cold War battleground, a symbol of freedom and the home to millions of people who had been promised American protection. Eisenhower and Kennedy said that they were willing to go to nuclear war to keep West Berlin free—and Khrushchev believed them enough to back down, in part because, despite his belligerent claims to the contrary, he had almost no nuclear weapons of his own. (Kennedy actually ordered a top-secret study on whether a nuclear first strike against Soviet military targets was feasible; it turned out, it was.)