Visualize World Peace Prize, Ukraine Edition

Over at Axios, Barak Ravid reports on a new Trump (well, sort of) plan to end the war in Ukraine by giving Putin pretty much everything he wants.

• The 28-point Trump plan calls for Russia to gain full de facto control of Luhansk and Donetsk (together referred to as the Donbas), despite Ukraine still controlling around 12% of the territory there.
• Despite being under Russian control, the areas in Donbas from which Ukraine would withdraw would be considered a demilitarized zone, with Russia not able to position troops there.
• In two other war-torn regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, the current lines of control would mostly be frozen in place, with Russia returning some land, subject to negotiations.

The plan also calls for the United States “and other countries to recognize Crimea and the Donbas as lawfully Russian territory” but does not require Ukraine to do so.

Ravid writers that a “Ukrainian official claim the plan also included limitations on the size of the Ukrainian military and on its long-range weapons in return for U.S. security guarantees.” He notes that it’s “unclear what the U.S. security guarantees would entail beyond a promise to defend against further Russian aggression.”

Let’s set aside more abstract, but not necessarily unimportant, questions about what this would mean for the evolving shape of international order, given the territorial integrity is one of its foundational principles. Despite a handful of violations, including China’s annexation of Tibet and Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, the prohibition on seizing another country’s territory has held up surprising well over the last eight or so decades.

Instead, let’s cut to the chase. The only way Ukraine and our European allies agree to this arrangement is if the U.S. basically says “we will make it impossible for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia.” From a pure power-politics position, this would be an extremely bad move. It would mean the de facto end of credible American security guarantees in Europe.

Which is why the plan rests on a fundamental paradox. The United States needs that very same credibility, first, to sell Ukraine and Europe on the plan and, second, to prevent future Russian aggression Ukraine.

Otherwise, the plan suffers from the same familiar flaws we’ve talked about before. The Russian power-political toolkit is very predictable. I hate the term “hybrid warfare” because it mostly describes pretty bog-standard techniques that states use to increase their influence and undermine their targets. Some of the capabilities might have changed over the decades — states now have access to a suite of digital tools that didn’t exist forty years ago — but the fundamental logic remains the same: weaken targets by undermining their domestic stability, coerce them through means short of full-scale conventional warfare, and the like. I don’t see why Moscow wouldn’t immediate return to doing the stuff it always does to unfriendly neighbors in its sphere of ‘privileged interests.’

Unless the Trump administration is really serious about robust security commitments (spoiler: it isn’t), I very much doubt that the United States could deter Moscow from pushing hard on Ukrainian stability and sovereignty; the biggest danger associated with an ambiguous security guarantee is not that United States will renege. Rather, It’s that Russia will miscalculate. That is, believe that the United States won’t honor its commitment to defend Ukraine — and learn too late that it was wrong.

Either way, you can bet Russia will have every incentive to “probe” half-assed security guarantee by violating Ukrainian airspace, moving troops in and out of the demilitarized zone, and trying to engineer “frozen conflicts” in parts of Ukraine that it doesn’t control.

Unfortunately, I have a meeting to run to. I’ll try to write more later — if the supposed plan isn’t already DOA by the time I get back.