Let's Talk Unanticipated Consequences

I was finishing up yesterday's post with a remark about unanticipated consequences of the Russo-Ukraine War, and the image above came to mind. It's a photo of the French army occupying the Ruhr district in Germany in 1923 as a result of German defaults on reparation payments after World War I. Ukraine President Zelensky has

called on Russians to learn the words ‘reparations’ and ‘contributions’. He stressed that Russia would reimburse Ukraine for everything that was destroyed during the war.

Something like this must inevitably occur if the world is to avoid a circumstance where Russia simply withdraws from Ukraine, rebuilds for some period of years, and tries the same thing again. The same applies to war crimes. The evidence of large-scale executions of civilians in the liberated Kyiv suburbs Bucha and Irpin is an indication that such massacres are probably even more widespread and will need full investigstion and prosecution.

The problem is enforcement. Ukraine already has a restraining order against Russia from the UN Court in the Hague:

Russia was ordered to halt its invasion of Ukraine by the United Nations’ top court Wednesday, in a preliminary decision that appeared to have largely symbolic significance.

Ukraine initiated the case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague to contest President Vladimir Putin’s official explanation for entering the country as an effort to end a “genocide” of pro-Russian separatists.

Any further orders from the UN will either be vetoed by Russia or simply disregarded. Neither the US, the EU. NATO, nor Ukraine will be able to push enforcement measures through the UN like those enacted for Iraq in 1990-91. This was the same problem France encountered after Versailles, and the only way it could collect was with its own military intervention forcing renewed supranational negotiation whose result nevertheless "proved unworkable", even though its US author received the Nobel Peace Prize.

I don't think a Versailles type solution involving reparations will work any better this time. On the other hand, war crimes trials like those of German and Japanese leaders after World War II were possible because the Allied victories were complete, their territories were occupied and under martial law, and the relevant authorities were able to lay their hands on the war criminals directly. After World War I, Germany was not directly occupied, and matters like collecting reparations were never satisfactory.

Reparations and war crimes tribunals will never be possible, and certainly never enforceable, in a negotiated settlement of the Russia-Ukraine War. Nor will any UN based settlement be effective as long as Russia remains on the Security Council with veto power. They'll simply establish conditions for renewed Russian aggression like the conditions after World War I.

However, I do see problems with gaming the end of the Russo-Ukraine War out this way. The biggest is overestimating Russia, which has been a characteristic of Western strategy throughout. To paraphrase a wise community organizer, never underestimate the ability of Russia to [mess] things up. This has been my guiding perspective as I've followed the war, but the extent of the Russian collapse around Kyiv surprised even me.

Mikhail Gorbachev is reported to have said the Chernobyl nuclear accident led to the collapse of the Soviet Union by bankrupting it. I suspect that an estimate I've heard of the Russians losing $10 billion so far in destroyed and abandoned military equipment from the war is wildly lowball. The impact of sanctions will likely be far lower than the impact of sacrificing immense national treasure in this great military potlatch, with the additional disaster of lost military credibility worldwide.

Even now, this has been enough to suggest the Japanese can challenge Russian possession of the Kuril Islands, and I definitely would not rule out the Poles challenging Russia in Kaliningrad.

I think an unavoidable outcome of the war will be an increase in Ukraine's prestige, an equivalent decline of Russian prestige even without potential war crime tribunals, the emergence of Zelensky as a European power player, and the decline of a three-poled theory of world politics with the further disintegration of the Russian state.

I'm still wondering what else this could lead to, but again, I would not underrate the effect of schism within Orthodoxy.