Never to Go to War Again
Thomas Fifty. Friedman
I Meet Iii Scenarios for How This War Ends
The battle for Ukraine unfolding earlier our optics has the potential to be the well-nigh transformational event in Europe since World War II and the most dangerous confrontation for the world since the Cuban missile crisis. I see three possible scenarios for how this story ends. I telephone call them "the full-blown disaster," "the dirty compromise" and "salvation."
The disaster scenario is now underway: Unless Vladimir Putin has a change of heart or tin can exist deterred by the West, he appears willing to kill every bit many people as necessary and destroy equally much of Ukraine'southward infrastructure as necessary to erase Ukraine as a gratis independent state and culture and wipe out its leadership. This scenario could pb to state of war crimes the scale of which has not been seen in Europe since the Nazis — crimes that would make Vladimir Putin, his cronies and Russia equally a country all global pariahs.
The wired, globalized world has never had to deal with a leader defendant of this level of war crimes whose state has a landmass spanning xi time zones, is one of the world's largest oil and gas providers and possesses the biggest arsenal of nuclear warheads of any nation.
Every day that Putin refuses to finish nosotros go closer to the gates of hell. With each TikTok video and cellphone shot showing Putin'south brutality, it will be harder and harder for the world to await away. But to intervene risks igniting the first war in the heart of Europe involving nuclear weapons. And to let Putin reduce Kyiv to rubble, with thousands of expressionless — the mode he conquered Aleppo and Grozny — would allow him to create a European Afghanistan, spilling out refugees and chaos.
Putin doesn't have the ability to install a puppet leader in Ukraine and just leave him there: A boob would face a permanent insurrection. Then, Russian federation needs to permanently station tens of thousands of troops in Ukraine to control it — and Ukrainians will be shooting at them every day. It is terrifying how picayune Putin has thought near how his war ends.
I wish Putin was just motivated by a want to proceed Ukraine out of NATO; his appetite has grown far across that. Putin is in the grip of magical thinking: As Fiona Loma, one of America's premier Russia experts, said in an interview published on Mon by Politico, he believes that there is something called "Russky Mir," or a "Russian World"; that Ukrainians and Russians are "one people"; and that information technology is his mission to engineer "regathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom."
To realize that vision, Putin believes that it is his right and duty to claiming what Colina calls "a rules-based organization in which the things that countries want are non taken by force." And if the U.S. and its allies endeavor to get in Putin's way — or try to humiliate him the way they did Russian federation at the cease of the Cold War — he is signaling that he is ready to out-crazy us. Or, as Putin warned the other day before putting his nuclear force on high alarm, anyone who gets in his way should be ready to face "consequences they have never seen" earlier. Add to all this the mounting reports questioning Putin's state of heed and you have a terrifying cocktail.
The 2nd scenario is that somehow the Ukrainian armed services and people are able to hold out long enough against the Russian blitzkrieg, and that the economic sanctions get-go deeply wounding Putin'due south economy, so that both sides feel compelled to accept a dingy compromise. Its crude contours would be that in return for a finish-burn down and the withdrawal of Russian troops, Ukraine'due south eastern enclaves now under de facto Russian control would exist formally ceded to Russia, while Ukraine would explicitly vow never to join NATO. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, the U.Due south. and its allies would agree to lift all recently imposed economical sanctions on Russia.
This scenario remains unlikely because it would crave Putin to basically admit that he was unable to achieve his vision of reabsorbing Ukraine into the Russian motherland, later paying a huge price in terms of his economic system and the deaths of Russian soldiers. Moreover, Ukraine would have to formally cede role of its territory and accept that it was going to be a permanent no homo's land between Russia and the rest of Europe — though information technology would at to the lowest degree maintain its nominal independence. Information technology would also require everyone to ignore the lesson already learned that Putin can't be trusted to leave Ukraine lonely.
Finally, the least likely scenario but the ane that could have the all-time outcome is that the Russian people demonstrate equally much bravery and delivery to their own liberty as the Ukrainian people have shown to theirs, and deliver salvation by ousting Putin from office.
Many Russians must be starting to worry that as long as Putin is their nowadays and future leader, they accept no future. Thousands are taking to the streets to protest Putin's insane state of war. They're doing this at the risk of their own safety. And though besides soon to tell, their pushback does make you lot wonder if the and so-chosen fear bulwark is being broken, and if a mass movement could eventually end Putin's reign.
Even for Russians staying tranquillity, life is of a sudden beingness disrupted in ways small and big. Every bit my colleague Mark Landler put it: "In Switzerland, the Lucerne music festival canceled ii symphony concerts featuring a Russian maestro. In Australia, the national swim team said it would cold-shoulder a world title meet in Russia. At the Magic Mountain Ski Area in Vermont, a bartender poured bottles of Stolichnaya vodka downward the drain. From civilization to commerce, sports to travel, the world is shunning Russia in myriad ways to protest President Vladimir V. Putin's invasion of Ukraine."
And then there is the new "Putin tax" that every Russian volition have to pay indefinitely for the pleasure of having him every bit their president. I am talking near the effects of the mounting sanctions existence imposed on Russia past the civilized earth. On Monday, the Russian central bank had to keep the Russian stock market closed to forbid a panicked meltdown and was forced to raise its benchmark involvement rate in one twenty-four hours to 20 per centum from 9.5 percent to encourage people to concur rubles. Even then the ruble nose-dived by well-nigh 30 percentage against the dollar — it'southward now worth less than 1 U.S. cent.
For all of these reasons I have to promise that at this very moment there are some very senior Russian intelligence and military officials, close to Putin, who are coming together in some cupboard in the Kremlin and saying out loud what they all must exist thinking: Either Putin has lost a step as a strategist during his isolation in the pandemic or he is in deep denial over how desperately he has miscalculated the force of Ukrainians, America, its allies and global civil lodge at large.
If Putin goes ahead and levels Ukraine'due south biggest cities and its capital, Kyiv, he and all of his cronies will never again see the London and New York apartments they bought with all their stolen riches. There will exist no more Davos and no more St. Moritz. Instead, they will all be locked in a big prison called Russia — with the liberty to travel simply to Syria, Crimea, Republic of belarus, North Korea and Red china, peradventure. Their kids will be thrown out of private boarding schools from Switzerland to Oxford.
Either they collaborate to oust Putin or they volition all share his isolation jail cell. The same for the larger Russian public. I realize that this last scenario is the most unlikely of them all, merely it is the ane that holds the most promise of achieving the dream that we dreamed when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 — a Europe whole and free, from the British Isles to the Urals.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/opinion/ukraine-russia-putin.html
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