Salzburg Global Fellow Michael Kimmage assesses the current state of Russian-Western relations and provides recommendations
This op-ed was written by Michael Kimmage, who attended the Salzburg Global Pathways to Peace Initiative "Bear With Us: What Is To Be Done About Russia?" from October 18 to 21, 2023.
Unless there is sudden political upheaval of some kind, Russia is unlikely to lose its war against Ukraine. Russia currently occupies some seventeen percent of Ukrainian territory and is doing what it can to devastate Ukraine’s economic base and Ukraine’s viability as a state and society. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has made major territorial gains for almost a year, and Russia has demonstrated both the political will and the military-economic capacity to wage a long war. That the war will be long and unresolvable diplomatically should be one working assumption for policymakers. Another assumption should concern tension between Russia and the West, which will last as long as the war: zero-sum conflicts will flare in Europe’s contested areas (Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and the Balkans) for years and perhaps for decades to come as Russia attempts to tip the international system against the West. For Europe and the United States, three intersecting policy priorities arise from these assumptions about the war and its consequences: (1) the containment of Russia’s military power in Europe and Russia’s political power globally; (2) the effort to establish rules of engagement (conflict management) between Russia and the West; and (3) the practice of creative people-to-people and cultural diplomacy toward Russians living in Russia and toward Russians living outside of Russia.
Putin's Escalation and War Ideology
Russia’s war against Ukraine began in late February 2014. Having sought indirect control over Ukrainian foreign policy through the figure of Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president who fell from power in February 2014, the Kremlin decided to use military force in Ukraine, first in Crimea and then in the Donbas. After a year of active fighting, Russia fostered a diplomatic stalemate, which became informally known as “Minsk” diplomacy, after the city in which it was negotiated in September 2014 and February 2015. Instead of moderating his designs on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin grew more radical between 2015 and 2022, more accustomed to the projection of military power and more convinced that the West was in decline. His growing confidence in Russian power led him to invade Ukraine full-scale in February 2022. Although Russia has experienced countless setbacks with its brutal war, Putin shows no signs of changing his calculus or of setting aside his ambition to control Ukraine’s destiny. To the contrary: he has put the Russian state and Russian society on a seemingly permanent war footing.
In Russia, Putin has created the economic and ideological foundation for a long war. Western sanctions have impeded the modernization of the Russian military, contributing to shortages of material and economic inefficiency within Russia. Western sanctions have, however, been only a modest check on the Russian economy. Russia has many options with the export of gas, oil, and grain, and it has reoriented its economy away from the West, widening commercial ties with China and India and with an array of countries that are not cheering on Russia in its war but that have refused to break their ties with Russia and join the war-related sanctions regime. Though public opinion is hard to assess in Russia given that Russia has become a dictatorship, enough of it is pro-war or anti-anti-war for Putin to have the political clout he needs to carry on. The Kremlin has erected a sizable media and educational apparatus to enforce anti-Western and anti-Ukraine sentiment. Putin has invested heavily in an ideology of war.
Even if Putin were to no longer be present, the emergence of an anti-war leader in Russia is improbable. Since its creation in 2000, the Putin regime has privileged the security services including the police, the intelligence services, and the military. These institutions will constrain any future leader of Russia. The war has also checkmated Russian politics as far as Russia’s relations with the West are concerned. For Russia, the terms of normalization with the West are a complete withdrawal from Ukraine (including Crimea), the payment of reparations to Ukraine, and the establishment of war crime tribunals for those Russians who have committed war crimes. Such normalization would almost certainly include Ukraine’s entry into the European Union and the NATO alliance. It is doubtful that a Russian leader could permit any of this to happen, not just because the security services would object (which they would vociferously) but because a Russia excluded from the European security architecture coupled with a Ukraine firmly embedded in Western institutions would be unacceptable to most Russians. For as long as normalization with the West is unviable in Russia, there will be a war of some sort between Russia and Ukraine.
Russia's Current Relationship With the West Amidst the Ukraine War
Russia faces multiple obstacles in its war against Ukraine. One is the Ukrainian will to fight. Another is the widespread European support for Ukraine, and a third is a strong push from the United States to abet Russia’s “strategic failure” in Ukraine. Russia is addressing the first obstacle on the battlefields of Ukraine, where the Russian military has been stalled for about a year, neither winning nor losing Moscow’s terrible war. The second obstacle cannot be dealt with (by Russia) through conventional military means. Russia has been careful not to let its war spill over onto NATO territory; it has enough to contend with in Ukraine. Yet, because Europe backs Ukraine, Russia will be doing whatever it can to undermine “the European project” to bring about pro-Russian governments where possible, to foster chaos where possible, and to generate crises (through inflation and migrant flows) that will benefit politicians, movements, and parties that are anti-EU and anti-NATO. Russia has little direct influence in Europe at this point. At a time when centripetal political forces in Europe are gaining steam, it has many levers of indirect influence.
Russia approaches the United States much as it approaches Europe, but with the United States, Russia’s dilemma is not just European; it is global. The United States has come to represent an intolerable international order for the Kremlin; it is an order that is American-led, that is biased toward democracies, and that champions the territorial integrity of states that are not “great powers”. Russia cannot eradicate the vast alliances that have their center in Washington, it cannot reduce American military power, and it cannot eviscerate American soft power. Indeed, the United States has deftly employed its alliances, its military might, and its soft power to impede Russia in Ukraine. Yet Russia can build up alternatives to an American-led international system. It has done this through its own networks of partnership – first and foremost with China – through investment in Russian military power, and through an argument about a post-Western international system that has resonated globally since 2022. Without being able to supplant the United States, Russia can weaken the global sway of the United States, and for the Kremlin, weakening an American-led international system would pave the way to success in Ukraine.
The Potential for Containment
Russia cannot be outright defeated in Ukraine, and as a country, it cannot be defeated as such. Were Ukraine to push every Russian soldier off Ukrainian territory, which would surely take years for Kyiv to do, the war would not end. It would not end because Russia would retain the capacity to continue attacking Ukraine. The size of the Russian-Ukrainian border – plus the Belarus-Ukraine border, which was crossed in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine – makes Ukraine exceptionally difficult to defend. The war in Ukraine will end when Russia chooses to end it. Nor is regime change in Russia a military option for Ukraine or the West. Ukraine has no intention of invading Russia for the sake of taking Moscow. The Western powers have refused to send their soldiers to fight in Ukraine, not to mention in Russia, and Russia is of course a nuclear power, which, were it threatened with invasion or with the internal collapse of its political system, could conceivably use its nuclear weapons against Ukraine or against those countries that support Ukraine.
The Russia that cannot be defeated can be contained. In fact, a tacit containment policy has already been surprisingly successful in Ukraine. Bolstered by the megalomania and incompetence of Russia’s initial invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s valor and the military contributions of the United States and other countries prevented Russia from reaching Kyiv, from toppling the Ukrainian government, and from partitioning the country. By September and October 2022, Ukraine had regained substantial amounts of its territory, pushing Russian forces out of Kherson and out from Kharkiv oblast. In this war, Russian losses have been so severe, both in manpower and material, that the Russian army will need years to regain the strength it had in February 2022. Russia tried and failed to destroy Ukraine’s electrical grid in the winter of 2022-2023, and Russia will not be able to take any of Ukraine’s major cities for a long time to come, if ever. Without taking major cities, Russia will be unable to dictate political outcomes in Ukraine. In the future, Russia will struggle to hold the territory it has occupied, complicating Russian efforts to colonize the four oblasts it claimed to annex in October 2022.
Going forward, the containment of Russia should encompass two lines of effort, the achievement of as much security for Ukraine as possible and the blunting of Russia’s strategy to reorient the international system away from the West. Security for the citizens of Ukraine can only be achieved by containing Russia, a venture not confined to conventional war, and Kyiv’s restoration of occupied territory to Ukraine. The city of Kyiv may be a model in this regard. It is so well defended that, though still the object of Russian attacks, the number of civilian casualties there has plummeted. This perimeter of security can be extended to those parts of the country not occupied by Russia. Security also entails the containment of Russia’s intent to upend Ukrainian society and statehood, from the provision of humanitarian aid to Ukrainians to the protection of trade routes vital to the country, some of which run through the Black Sea and others through the Danube River. Maintenance of Ukraine’s electrical grid, its access to the internet, and its basic utilities advance the larger goal of containing Russia in Ukraine. The longer the war, the more focused effort it will take to contain Russia.
Russia’s evasion of sanctions, its use of mercenaries in Africa (and elsewhere), its weaponization of access to grain at low cost, and its soft-power attempts to blame the war on Western arrogance cannot simply be stopped. They can, however, be recognized as more than the flailing about of a declining power, for they are more than this. Russia timed its 2022 invasion of Ukraine to coincide with several shifts in the international political order: the rise of China and the emergence of “middle powers” like Brazil, India, and South Africa. The kind of hegemony the United States enjoyed at the time of the First Gulf War when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq faced the consolidated wrath of the outside world is over. In 2022 and 2023, the West has shown itself to be potent in Ukraine, but it is not winning the global argument about the war. Containing Russian plans to remake the international order will demand an awareness of these plans and concerted, imaginative diplomacy, a thousand acts of persuasion designed to undermine Russia’s “might makes right” thesis about the international system.
Disciplined Crisis Management
Russia’s war in Ukraine has a scale and a fluidity that defies Cold War precedent. The war has the potential to spread beyond Ukraine. It has terminated most diplomatic contact between Russia and the West, and it has resulted in the collapse of arms control. An age of instant communication is simultaneously an age of instant miscommunication, meaning that Russia and the West are one incident or accident away from direct conflict. This situation is in desperate need of disciplined management. Such management has nothing to do with negotiating a settlement to the war in Ukraine, for which the conditions are not in place. It should be conducted in private, away from the media glare, and may already be ongoing. It should consist of backchannel negotiation over the actual (as opposed to the performative) red lines to which Russia and the West will adhere, and it should provide channels for communication about events that might get misinterpreted in the fog of war. Though this will not be easy, due to the lack of trust for all the parties involved, it is urgently necessary.
Russia and the West can stave off worst-case scenarios by learning from the history of the Cold War. The Cold War began in absolute danger, as the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to navigate the nuclear era. Its culminating crisis took place in Cuba, in October 1962, when geopolitical competition and brinksmanship put the world on the cusp of a nuclear conflagration. After 1962, channels of communication were established, diplomatic acumen was harnessed, and arms control was embraced to furnish rules and etiquette for the Cold War. The degree of contestation did not diminish, in Vietnam for the United States, for example, or in Afghanistan for the Soviet Union, but the contestation was less anarchic than it was before 1962. It may take Russia and the West years to arrive at similar rules and etiquette. The difficulty of doing so is qualified, though, by the fact that crisis management is in the national interest of Russia and in the national interest of those countries that compose the West. In the end, the Soviet Union and the West negotiated their way out of the Cold War, the reward for decades of painstaking diplomacy.
Reconceptualizing Cultural Diplomacy
In addition to practicing containment and pursuing crisis management, the West should reconceptualize its cultural and people-to-people diplomacy vis-a-vis Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the frame for Western cultural diplomacy toward Russia was Russia’s integration into the West. Some hope was held out when Dmitry Medvedev was president from 2008 to 2012 that Russia might become a Western-style democracy and transcend its attachment to geopolitical competition with the West. This never came to pass. An alternate mode of cultural diplomacy has been to encourage political alternatives to Putinism through targeted support of the political opposition to Putin. This approach holds little appeal for several reasons: lack of Western leverage within Russia, lack of any idea of what would follow Putinism in Russia, and lack of interest on the part of most Russians in partnering politically with Western powers. It would be a mistake, though, to give up on cultural and people-to-people diplomacy toward Russia, even if the objectives of such diplomacy must be more modest than regime change or Russia’s integration into the West.
Cultural diplomacy should challenge the Kremlin’s presentation of the West in Russia. Well before the start of the February 2022 invasion, the Russian government had been shaping an image of the West (in Russia) as innately hostile, meddlesome in Ukraine, and decadent. With the war, the West has been repeatedly demonized in Russian media, blamed for the war, and portrayed as an ugly enemy of the Russian people. Western means for undercutting this narrative in Russia may be small, but where this narrative can be undercut it should be: by advancing the claim that for centuries Russia has been a part of Europe, by avoiding attributions of blanket or collective guilt to Russians for the misdeeds of their government, and by outlining a future for Russia-West relations that is not inevitably conflictual. Putin is skilled at trolling the West to get it to respond with anger to Russia, and Russia’s brutal war is very much worthy of anger, but the West need not take Putin’s bait. It need not respond directly to the Kremlin. It should determine its own language and priorities for dealing with Russia, especially for the Russia that lies outside the Kremlin.
As in 1917, Russia under Putin has driven hundreds of thousands of its best-educated, most liberal, most Western-leaning citizens from the country. They represent an enormous Russian diaspora, which has deep roots in Europe and the United States. The emigres produced by the Russian Revolution never returned to Russia en masse. They lost their political struggle with the Bolsheviks. Yet they often preserved the best of Russian political and artistic culture, not least in their creative work. A wall is arising between Russia and the West, and this wall will make people-to-people diplomacy inside Russia nearly impossible. People-to-people diplomacy can still be addressed to this diaspora, within which the best of Russian political and artistic culture may once again be preserved, trickling back into Russia as happened during the Cold War (with Boris Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago”, for example, which was first published in the West and then disseminated in the Soviet Union). Russian political history is nothing if not unpredictable. When the next rupture occurs, the diaspora and its ideas may have an important and constructive role to play. The West should do nothing to foreclose this possibility.
Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. He is also a senior non-resident associate at CSIS. From 2014 to 2016, Kimmage served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He writes widely on foreign affairs, history, and culture. His next book, "Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability", is forthcoming with Oxford University Press on February 24, 2024.
Michael attended the Salzburg Global Pathways to Peace Initiative titled “Bear With Us: What Is to Be Done About Russia?” in October 2023. This program enabled experts to convene at Salzburg Global Seminar for a high-level dialogue exploring scenarios and questions about what options exist to engage, contain, and hold Russia accountable in a post-war context.
