Ukraine will be a 'wasteland'
Drone footage shot on Sunday captures fighting in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.(Reuters/AZOV)
Russia is talking to Ukraine. Ukraine has an open line to the West. France and Germany chat with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and French President Emmanuel Macron then calls President Joe Biden with updates. Turkey and Israel are leaning on Russia to stop the onslaught in Ukraine. And the US made clear to China in talks in Rome on Monday that it wants China to cut loose its new “no limits” friend in the Kremlin.
But more than two weeks into the Russian invasion, two-way talks between Russia and Ukraine, as well as the broader international effort, are getting nowhere. For “off-ramps” — the diplomatic buzzword of this crisis — to work, leaders have to want to take them. And there’s no sign that Putin, despite turning his country into an economic, diplomatic, cultural and sporting pariah, is getting cold feet.
Outsiders see the crawling Russian advance and reported heavy losses of Putin’s troops as a humiliation. But that's not prompting the Kremlin strongman to pull back; his psychology and contempt for Ukraine’s independence is likely to only unleash more mayhem. Brutal assaults on Ukrainian cities and an air raid on a military base near the border of NATO member Poland over the weekend are proof of that. Devastation in the city of Mariupol, including the horrific bombing of a maternity hospital, may well preview what is in store for the capital of Kyiv. While Putin may not be able to suppress all of Ukraine in a full occupation, he has the firepower to slowly destroy it and to send an exodus of refugees into Western Europe, which could upset the political equilibrium of the continent — another of his strategic goals.
An additional impediment to a swift diplomatic breakthrough is the fact that while strangling economic sanctions piled on Russia may create deep pain for Russians, they do not yet seem to be creating political turmoil that might threaten Putin’s authoritarian rule. And so far, the Russian leader appears more than willing to pay the price in Ukrainian and Russian blood to pummel Ukraine into submission. That means there’s little diplomatic leverage that can be brought to bear on Putin.
As Heather Conley, a former senior US national security official who now heads the German Marshall Fund of the United States, put it: “If Ukraine will not bend the knee for Russia, (Putin) will make sure that Ukraine is going to be a wasteland.”
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