Andrew S. Weiss
In his State of the Union address, President Obama appeared eager to declare victory in Ukraine, saying the united front against Vladimir Putin had worked and that “Russia is isolated, with its economy in tatters.” The ever-touchy Russian president appeared to respond a few days later, through his separatist proxies, with a dramatic surge in violence in south-eastern Ukraine and last Saturday’s deadly artillery attack on the strategic port city of Mariupol, which killed at least 30 people.
Thus far, Obama seems to be sticking to his administration’s customary response, emphasizing that sanctions are the primary tool to force Putin to reverse course and that the West is not prepared to confront Russia militarily. “We will continue to take the approach that we have taken in the past, which is to ratchet up the pressure on Russia," he said at a news conference in New Delhi on Sunday.
The question is whether this approach is enough to prevent the full unraveling of the cease-fire and shield the fragile Ukrainian state from what George Soros has aptly described as Putin’s true intention: to “destroy the new Ukraine before it can establish itself … while maintaining deniability.” The immediate violence around Mariupol and elsewhere in the Donbas may pause, but the pattern is clear—Russia will back the separatists in order to disrupt Ukraine and keep the West off-balance. Barring any changes, this is what we can expect for the long term.
There aren’t many credible options for averting this outcome. But perhaps the least unpalatable of an array of unsavory options is for Obama to take another look at a serious diplomatic effort with the Europeans to end the conflict once and for all. While there are new hints that Secretary of State John Kerry is eager to throw himself into the crisis, such moves are unlikely to pay off unless Obama personally gets involved. The president’s clear reluctance to engage in direct dialogue with Putin has been a curious feature for U.S. policy, given his readiness to engage with the leaders of longtime adversaries such as Iran and Cuba without pre-conditions. The Europeans lack credibility on two items important to Putin: ensuring recognition of Russia's global role and stirring Russian anxieties about possible direct military support to Ukraine.
Yet in other respects this may be what passes for an optimal moment in this crisis. In December a series of shocks battered the Russian economy, compounding the damage from the sanctions program and giving rise to hopes that the West’s strategy was working. Obama’s State of the Union confidence was unsurprising against the backdrop of a 50 percent drop in oil prices since June and a dramatic Russian currency crisis. But now, rather than simply asserting that Putin has won only a pyrrhic victory in Ukraine, Obama should use his position of strength to push for a longer-term settlement.
Obama may have his own reasons for not letting the dramatic rupture in U.S.-Russian relations spiral out of control. For several months, the White House has quietly tried to work with the Russians on a handful of issues of paramount importance to Obama’s foreign policy agenda. That cherry-picking approach has dampened the administration’s willingness to apply more pressure on Putin, say, by providing lethal military assistance to the Ukrainians. The fear has been that the Russians might retaliate by escalating the fighting inside Ukraine or by withholding cooperation in areas where their cooperation is a must-have such as the Iran nuclear negotiation, the fight against ISIL, and an IMF/EU/U.S. emergency financial package for Kyiv.
Obviously, any new outreach by Obama and other Western leaders to Putin is fraught with risk, given his dreadful track record on Ukraine, constant distortions, and endless stream of broken promises. It may very well not pay any dividends in the near-term. And the content of a deal may look surprisingly familiar to those who negotiated the now-shattered cease-fire in Minsk last year. But, given how many levers Putin has at his disposal to make mischief inside Ukraine, there should be no illusions that the current approach is sustainable or that post-Maidan Ukraine can survive a lurch back into war.
To understand why, it’s worth reviewing how we got here.
Last summer the separatists were rapidly losing ground to Kyiv, leading Moscow in late August to escalate its involvement and make clear that it is prepared to escalate indefinitely. Unfortunately, Ukraine cannot win that fight. The original cease-fire hammered out in Minsk by Ukrainian, Russian, and Swiss negotiators came in the wake of a dramatic Ukrainian military defeat at the hands of the separatists and regular Russian army units who crossed the border in significant numbers. At the time, Obama and NATO leaders meeting in Wales threw their support behind the Minsk agreement both because it was clear that Moscow was not prepared to let Kyiv crush the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and because NATO was not prepared to intervene to help Ukraine.
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