Yet Again, What Is The End State?

It isn't hard to search the web and find speculative maps that have been created over decades purporting to show an eventual partition of Russia -- the one above is just one such. What surprises me is that as far as I can tell, nobody at all has put anything like this up in light of developments arising from the current Russo-Ukraine War. Indeed, news reports yesterday indicated that Ukraine's application to join NATO caught the Biden administration off guard. Isn't that peculiar?

Until very recently, everyone from Henry Kissinger to Donald Trump seems to have taken it for granted that there was a Russian-NATO balance of power secured by, among other things, a vague understanding that Ukraine would remain a neutral buffer, except that Russia occupied the Donbas and Crimea in violation of previous security guarantees, except this made it an even surer deal or something. If we talk about starting World War III, thinking this sort of complacent castle in the air would guarantee world peace ranks with the idea that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the deeply unpopular heir apparent to the Austrian throne, by a bunch of fringe Serbian nationalists, could hardly upset the European balance and start World War I.

Current statements from the Kyiv government suggest the application to join NATO should not have been a surprise:

In the defense sector, Ukraine is already cooperating with NATO more deeply than some of the Alliance’s members.

That’s according to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, Ukrinform reports referring to his Facebook posting.

"From the moment of my appointment to the post of Minister of Defense of Ukraine, I have repeatedly emphasized across various platforms the priority of my work – to implement integration into NATO de facto. So that at the moment when a political consensus of 30 countries is formed, the integration will take place de jure," Reznikov noted.

. . . "The historic decision to submit an application to join the Alliance is to continue integration. We will go through this path step by step. Today we have a large arsenal of Western weapons with which we are successfully beating Russian invaders. 11 months ago, when I asked to provide Ukraine with Stingers, in response I heard that it was impossible. Now everything has changed. The Ukrainian people, Ukrainian defenders, and authorities have made the impossible possible. Everything will work out for us," Reznikov stressed.

This suggests to me that Ukraine is at least well ahead of US policymakers in thinking about their overall objectives in the war. In the story I linked at the top of this post,

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when asked whether she supports Ukraine's accession to NATO, avoided a direct answer, Politico said. Instead, she reaffirmed her support for “security guarantees” for Kyiv.

“We are deeply committed to promoting democracy in Ukraine. Let's win this battle. However, I would prefer they have the security guarantees,” Pelosi said.

The "security guarantees" she refers to appear to be the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that established Ukraine would give up the former Soviet nuclear weapons on its territory in return for guarantees from both the West and Russia that its territorial integrity would be maintained. But Putin violated this by taking over Crimea and the Donbas in 2014; the West did nothing. How does Speaker Pelosi expect this to work any better in the future than it did then?

President Zelensky's goals for Ukraine are pretty simple, a return to the pre-2014 borders, plus war crimes trials for Russia, plus war reparations, plus the condition that any negotiations will be conducted with a Russian leader other than Putin. These strike me as reasonable, but the reality of the matter is that a mere Russian withdrawal to pre-2014 borders under a renewed Budapest Memorandum won't work unless a radically different Russia without an expansionist agenda is involved -- and this leaves out Nuremberg style trials, reparations, and the departure of Putin.

Ukraine can and will militarily push Russia back to the pre-2014 borders, but NATO and the West will need to enforce any resulting agreement. There's no question that a minimum condition to make this workable will be for Ukraine to join NATO. After all, historically neutral Sweden and Finland have grasped the same reality; why shouldn't Ukraine? Why, after seven months of war, is this such a surprise to the West, especially in light of the existing de facto cooperation?

Note in the hypothetical map at the top of this post, a rump Russia is shown as "occupied". Occupied by whom? Frankly, I think something like this will need to happen in the wake of an initial cease fire in the war -- how else can there be guarantees of war crimes trials, or for that matter reparations? It's a little disturbing that nobody is thinking about this.

On the other hand, I suspect Zelensky is a couple of moves ahead of even that plan.