Thread by @RTPerson3

Peace negotiations to settle Russia’s war against Ukraine are doomed to fail. Pressuring Kyiv to bargain with the devil in Moscow is misguided, misinformed, and downright dangerous. I explain why in my latest @JoDemocracy article. THREAD 1/ journalofdemocracy.org/articles/why-u…

Most proposals for peace start with the flawed assumption that there is some division of Ukrainian territory plus policy concessions & security guarantees that could be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine. Find that “winset” and you’ve got a settlement. The problem is that Russia’s underlying motivations for invading weren’t territorial or even about NATO membership. 2/

Trading territory and policy concessions would not resolve the underlying drivers of the conflict, so making these the basis of peace negotiations is bound to fail. Even if Russia keeps its illegally annexed territories and gets assurances of permanent Ukrainian neutrality (ie, no NATO membership ever), the underlying causes of the war would not be settled. So what is this war really about? 3/

For the last 20+ years, Putin’s Russia has waged a relentless war against Ukrainian democracy and sovereignty. It started with Russia’s attempt to rig the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections and install a loyal puppet in Kyiv. But that attempt failed and led to the Orange Revolution in 2004-5. When their democracy and sovereignty was threatened from the outside, the Ukrainian people stood up and said NO. 4/

When Russia’s authoritarian puppet Yanukovych chained Ukraine’s future to Russia’s in 2014, the Ukrainian people stood up and said NO during the Revolution of Dignity. So Putin invaded Crimea, stoked a rebellion in the Donbas, and tried – but failed – to engineer the collapse of Ukraine’s post-Maidan democratic government. 5/

Even the Minsk-II agreement, forced on a desperate Ukrainian government at the end of a gun, was a Russian attempt to hack Ukrainian democracy through the back door through forced federalism that would have given Russia’s Donbas proxies (and their Muscovite handlers) veto power over Ukraine’s foreign policies. It failed because if implemented it would have been the death of independent Ukraine. 6/

Time and time again, when Ukrainians were given a democratic choice, they chose a future with the West, not Russia. That’s something that Putin could not live with. So by 2021-2022, he concluded the only way to settle the problem of Ukrainian democracy was to invade and decapitate the democratically-elected @ZelenskyyUa government. But his little 3-day “special military operation” failed. 7/

Having failed to destroy Ukrainian democracy, he ordered his military to destroy the Ukrainian state and – more importantly – the Ukrainian people. There is clear evidence that Russian forces have conducted genocidal acts in the occupied territories as Putin seeks to erase the Ukrainian nation from the map. 8/

Here’s the problem: territory and policy may be divisible and negotiable, but the survival of Ukrainian sovereignty, statehood, democracy, and nation are indivisible. There’s no way to slice and divvy up 70/30 or 60/40 a nation’s right to exist. What is there to bargain over? 9/

Most of those beating the drum for negotiations with Putin ignore the fact that he has shown NO signs of moderating the maximalist war aims I’ve described above. He remains 100% hellbent on destroying Ukraine and installing a vassal (like Lukashenko) to rule Ukraine with an iron fist and do Russia’s bidding. 10/

Here’s the kicker: Putin will not stop fighting for this as long as he thinks he has a chance of succeeding. That part is critical – we’ll come back to it below, because it’s the only way to alter the trajectory of the war. 11/

But what if some great dealmaker succeeded in hammering out a ceasefire that both sides – however reluctantly – signed? Such an agreement would be dead on arrival due to intractable credible commitment problems. 12/

With Putin’s 20-year history waging hybrid war against Ukraine, Kyiv has little reason to believe that Putin would respect any agreement he signs. After all, just look at his record on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 2004 treaty on the Russia-Ukraine border that he signed. Why would this time be any different? 13/

And Putin’s visceral hatred of democracy means that he would never trust a commitment made by a democratic Ukraine or its Western democratic allies. He only trusts what he can control, and he can’t control the Ukrainian people – that’s why he’s now trying to eliminate them. 14/

Nor is there any third-party peacekeeping force that is large enough or legitimate enough to keep the peace along such a massive line of contact. The region is littered with examples of failed peacekeeping missions that were much more manageable. Why would this one succeed, even if someone were willing and able to take it on? 15/

Given the maximalist stakes and severe credible commitment problems that will bedevil any peace negotiations, I argue that the war will never be settled at the negotiating table. Win, lose, or draw, it will be decided on the battlefield. 16/

Putin will keep fighting his all-or-nothing war in Ukraine for as long as he thinks he has a chance of succeeding. Western pressure on Ukraine to negotiate confirms his belief that he can outlast Kyiv and its allies. He believes that time is on his side. Why settle when you think you’re winning? 17/

The way to end the war is not to force a diplomatic settlement. The way to end it is to force Putin to realize that he cannot win. This means drastically raising the cost of continued fighting for Russia by significantly increasing Western economic and military assistance to Ukraine. And yes, Ukraine needs to come to terms with lowering its conscription age if it hopes to prevail with Western backing. 18/

I don’t know what the chances are of Russia’s unambiguous military defeat are if we step up and give Ukraine the support it needs. Maybe a long-term Korean-style stalemate is the best we can hope for. But current levels of support are just enough to let Ukraine slowly bleed to death without committing decisively to their future existence as a sovereign people. The stakes are too high – will we seize the moment before it is too late? 19/

Read the full article in the January issue of @JoDemocracy. It’s free to read from @JHUPress through the end of the month. Слава Україні! 🇺🇦journalofdemocracy.org/articles/why-u…