A few thoughts a year into the end of the war in Ukraine.

I’ve generally tried to avoid speculation in my public comments about this war, but in conversation with a friend from Kyiv a year ago this was my educated guess about what might happen:

I think this is still the Kremlin’s governing logic, though unexpectedly fierce resistance from Ukraine and NATO may have forced Russia to settle for the Donbass and abandon its hopes for a land bridge to Crimea. This explains why the Russian military is still only partially mobilized; breaking the current stalemate would demand a radical escalation in force, and since Putin will likely bargain those gains away anyway it just isn’t worth the cost. That said, it’s a mistake to take for granted that anyone in this war will act rationally, so take this guess for what it’s worth

In any case it’s much easier to hold an entrenched position than to go on the offensive. Sanctions will devastate Russia’s economy in the long term, especially for its working class, and disrupted supply chains may continue to degrade its military (depending on how things go with China). Ukraine, aided at current levels of investment by NATO, should be able to hold the line against Russian forces, defending cities like Kharkiv and occasionally taking back (or losing) contested territory on the front. But Russia should have little difficulty holding its general east / southeast position for the foreseeable future.

Hawks generally define victory against Russia as a return to 2013’s territorial status quo ante, but this would clearly require an escalation of intervention by NATO that’s several orders of magnitude beyond what any member nation has proposed. A massive surge in ground forces to uproot the Russian military and push it back across the border, meaning NATO boots on the ground; massive ground-up investments in air defense, and a bolstered naval presence in the Black Sea; and massive investments in border security and COIN. With NATO member nations already growing restless about current levels of spending it’s extremely difficult to imagine anything even remotely like this. And Russia, correctly, would take this level of escalation as a direct declaration of war, making retaliation against member nations inevitable.

For these reasons, it seems to me that NATO can only deliver two outcomes to Ukraine: a frozen war that will devastate the entire country and place its entire population in danger, possibly for decades; or a world war that would do the same much more quickly, and with the added likelihood of nuclear escalation. The only alternative — a settlement the gives Russia an incentive to end the war, probably by ceding the Donbass — is a terrible outcome for Ukraine, but remains vastly preferable to any military solution NATO can offer.

This is why my position is still what it was a year ago: Ukraine should sue for peace. Hawks who are calling for escalation by NATO are implicitly conceding that its present investments aren’t enough to win, so they should at the very least be able to understand that a peaceful settlement would be better than a frozen war. But from there the logic of the situation is merciless, because an escalation big enough to actually kick Russia out of the country is politically impossible domestically and brings with it a completely unacceptable risk of direct retaliation.

A recurring response to this sort of reasoning has been to insist that the choice of war or diplomacy is not ours to make; Ukraine has a right to defend itself, and we have an obligation to save as many lives as we can. I agree with all of these points, but they do not actually amount to a case for military intervention. If the people of Ukraine want to continue a fight that is completely unwinnable (for reasons given above), that is their prerogative; but humanitarian intervention / harm reduction arguments require us to take responsibility and exercise our own judgment about what we can do to save the most lives.

That’s why the recurring complaints from the hawks about “condescension” strike me as completely uncompelling. It’s entirely possible that Ukrainians who think that they can win this war are correct, and that I am wrong; but my responsibility to save lives doesn’t allow me to delegate my judgment about how to do it to someone else. Neither do the demands of solidarity. It’s hard not to detect in those objections the ugly ideology of identitarian deference — a crass perversion of standpoint theory which insists that oppressed people should not merely be given a hearing about how to fight their oppression, but that we must simply defer to their ideas on how to do it. That reasoning is great for brow-beating and guilt-tripping people in the discourse, but it isn’t something that moral responsibility allows us to take seriously.

None of this means that the United States needs to stand by passively; there are all kinds of things we can do to bring this war to an end as quickly and humanely as possible. We should first and foremost end our sanctions against Russia, which are exceedingly unlikely to uproot its military from eastern Ukraine but which are exceedingly likely to hurt innocent and powerless Russian civilians. Second, we should do everything we can to sweeten the pot for a diplomatic settlement. So far we’ve spent $47 billion on military aid; shift those funds towards incentives for both sides to end the war. Promise them as donations to the Green Climate Fund earmarked for both countries, because we need to be making those investments anyway. Put debt relief on the table. Third, immediately agree that Ukraine will not be invited to join NATO. This cannot be used as a bargaining chip because that would give Ukraine another reason not to settle; but taking NATO membership off the table will immediately take away a major incentive Russia has to continue fighting, and it should happen regardless. Fourth, immigration support for war refugees and defectors alike. And fifth, negotiate an aggressive new nuclear disarmament treaty.

Hawks will argue that a favorable settlement for Russia would reward bad behavior, but this just takes for granted that a boundless lust for conquest rather than particular grievances (legitimate or illegitimate) are what drove Putin to war. It also doesn’t account for the way that this approach would change Russia’s ability to wage war in the future. Opposition to NATO consolidating its position in Ukraine is one thing and plainly accounts for most international support for Russia’s invasion. But attempts to expand into neutral countries or longstanding NATO strongholds like Poland would be quite another, and it seems untenable to just take for granted that countries like China and India would remain neutral in that case. A humiliated Russia with its grievances and its network of international allies still in place strikes me as much more dangerous than a Russia that has resolved those grievances, that has been reintegrated into the international community, and that would risk alienating its most powerful allies with a future attack. The proposals I’ve listed here are in any case by no means exhaustive, but they should give a sense of all the things the United States could be doing to end this war that do not involve blowing people up.