Three Times Ukraine War Might Have Stopped, but Didn’t

A former director of the CIA, David Petraeus, has given his assessment of how the war in Ukraine might end — but the big question almost a year since Russia stormed into Kyiv’s backyard is why it’s taking so long. General Petraeus, who headed the CIA between September 2011 and late 2012, told CNN’s Peter Bergen that he sees the war ultimately ending in a negotiated resolution when President Putin “recognizes that the war is unsustainable on both the battlefield and on the home front” and also “when Ukraine reaches the limits of its ability to withstand missile and drone strikes” and gains “an ironclad security guarantee.”The retired general, now 70, had much more to say than that, and as the bleak anniversary approaches there is no shortage of punditry and prophesying afoot. Yet as national security analysts and world leaders begin to weigh in, it is worth looking at a couple junctures where a ceasefire might have emerged but did not. Ahead of an anticipated later-winter renewal of Russian offensives and Ukrainian counter-offensives, such opportunities may become fewer and farther between. First, though it almost goes without saying, Vladimir Putin had no justifiable reasons to mount an invasion of a neighboring country. Exactly how the Russian leader’s well-known ruthlessness overran his perception of reality may never be known. Yet the signals he received from the policy postures of two American presidents, both Democrats, arguably paved the way. First came Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. That seismic event was preceded by the Maidan Revolution that February, when Washington supported the ouster of a pro-Russian, democratically elected president. That Mr. Putin snapped up the Crimean peninsula with ease and scant consequence (sanctions and the toothless Minsk agreements amounted to naught) speaks volumes about President Obama’s experience level and suggests that his team in Ukraine — led by a former ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and a state department dynamo, Victoria Nuland — had their eyes on the wrong ball. Secondly, where was President Biden when an Israeli effort came tantalizing close to dousing the flames in Ukraine? After Russia invaded on February 24 but while the war was still in the early stages, Prime Minister Bennett flew to Moscow for a meeting with Mr. Putin. While Mr. Bennett acknowledged that his outreach was done in coordination with Washington, it seems by his own admission that there was not much in the way of post-parley support. That is significant because Mr. Bennett said that the Russian president was ready to yield on the “demilitarization” of Ukraine and that President Zelensky would have given ground on Ukraine’s pursuit of membership in NATO. In a lengthy interview earlier this month, Mr. Bennett said that 17 draft agreements for a ceasefire were drawn up and that he “was under the impression that both sides very much want[ed] a ceasefire.” However, he said, “they blocked it, and I thought [they were] wrong.”Like every Israeli leader, Mr. Bennett is not one to mince words or peddle platitudes. “They” was a clear reference to the Western countries that back Ukraine. On a practical level, that means America and to a lesser extent Britain. In a stark counterpoint to Mr. Bennett’s efforts to bring about a ceasefire, a former British premier, Boris Johnson, reportedly interceded later in the game to put the brakes on any incipient accord. Mr. Johnson’s reasons were not nefarious, and the charismatic Briton is widely acknowledged to have galvanized the West against the Russian war machine more than any other politician. In the context of the history of the ongoing attritional warfare in much of Ukraine, though, they bear a closer look. Some of that scrutiny came last May via a report in the pro-Western newspaper Ukrainska Pravda. According to that article, in the course of an unscheduled visit to Kyiv in April, Mr. Johnson told Mr. Zelensky that the “collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelensky should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined” and that now there was a chance to ‘press him.’”Subsequent to that communication, “the bilateral negotiation process was paused.” It has not resumed. Seventy-two hours after Mr. Johnson departed for London, Mr. Putin said that talks with Kyiv had “turned into a dead end.”There is no doubt that Boris Johnson is a master political strategist and it is likely his advice to Ukraine was also fueled by reports of Russian brutality. It is also hardly a secret that humiliating one’s enemy puts one in a much better position to negotiate in the long run. In the short run, though, the forecast calls for chaos. The Financial Times reports that Russian artillery strikes are being carried out at their highest rate since last summer, up to 100 a day.According to a German intelligence assessment, Ukraine’s battle casualties are in the three figures daily. American officials estimate that Russian casualties are higher, on the order of 4,000 a week. One problem that many in the West still fail to internalize is that Mr. Putin apparently doesn’t really care about either.

Three Times Ukraine War Might Have Stopped, but Didn’t

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