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Hugo Rifkind
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Putin’s next move? A truce to split the West
Any Kremlin peace offer will be designed to divide President Zelensky’s allies and force him to make concessions
Comment
US Congress stops financing them.
Then you will have transformed
the situation and, in some ways,
actually won.
Be warned, however, that this neat
little plan could go badly wrong. If
the Ukrainians manage to puncture
your line in the south or hold you off
in the east, there will be no real
victory, even a scaled-back one, to
proclaim. That is the importance of
the fighting taking place at themoment and the continued flow of
lethal aid to Ukraine. The other
thing that could go wrong is that the
West sees this plan coming.
If western leaders resolve that
they know full well you will not be
serious about peace; that you never
intend Ukraine to be secure; that
they will refrain from telling a
nation fighting for its freedom and
existence what concessions it might
make; that they will maintain all
sanctions unless Ukraine’s economy
can function in the future; that
they will support insurgencies in
occupied areas; that they will let
President Zelensky judge any plan
for a ceasefire; and that they will not
fall for a ploy designed to divide
those who have rightly united
against you; if the West can hold
its nerve — well then, you really
are in trouble.commentators will say, “Hurray, we
always knew he wanted an off-ramp”,
and, “All wars end in agreement” and
discuss how the cost-of-living crisis
could be helped by your very
generous offer to desist from the war
you started.
You will make long, reasonable-
sounding phone calls to their
capitals. While there will be no point
bothering with London or Warsaw,
President Macron will listen to you
for hours. Mario Draghi, in Rome,
will agree that a ceasefire is urgent.
President Erdogan will keep blocking
Finland and Sweden from Nato with
a bit of quiet encouragement. And
Chancellor Scholz may not know
what to do.
With luck, you could produce a
situation in which the West becomes
divided, the Ukrainians feel betrayed,
the EU never admits them and theIf President Putin can gain ground in
the east, he may declare victoryMinsk agreements for seven years,
which you have now abrogated
anyway. Your plan is to divide the
West, and pose a terrible dilemma
to the Ukrainians, pretending to seek
a permanent peace while keeping
your boot on the economic windpipe
of Ukraine — access to the
Black Sea.
Such talks could go on for years,
while you build some better armed
forces and Ukraine remains a
crippled economy, unable to export
its grain, with all those mines drifting
in the sea and the Russian navy so
close to Odesa. Eventually you will
say negotiations have broken down,
and you will invade again and finish
the job.
Yes, this is how you can turn the
tables. All you need is to make two
things happen. The first is to
get a bit nearer to having a frontline
that really does represent a victory.
This is why you are throwing
everything at Severodonetsk, to get
control of the whole Luhansk region,
while digging defences in the
Kherson region, to resist any
Ukrainian counteroffensive in
the south.
It also explains why you withdrew
in the face of counterattacks that
broke your attempt to encircle
Kharkiv in the north. Holding what
you have gained in the south while
gaining in the east is your strategy.
You can then claim to control the
Sea of Azov, maintain fresh water
supplies to Crimea and to have
“liberated” Donbas.
The second thing you need is for
the West to get itself into a muddle
over its aims and put pressure on
Zelensky to make concessions to you.
Otherwise, your bluff of proclaiming
victory and a ceasefire, just at the
point you can’t gain much more,
would be most embarrassingly called.
Ideally for you, westernI
magine you are Vladimir Putin
deciding what to do next. This is
not easy: you are most unlikely,
as a Times reader, to be a war
criminal responsible for tens of
thousands of deaths. It is unpleasant
to think our way into the mind of a
paranoid, obsessive and isolated man
who, by attacking a peaceful
neighbour, made the most
catastrophic misjudgment of the
21st century so far. But you have to
do it, because you, and all of us in
the western world, have to be
prepared for what his next move
might be.
You have realised that you were
badly informed, back in February,
about many matters, particularly the
vigour of the Ukrainian defence and
the incompetence of your own
armed forces. That is why you
arrested those senior intelligence
officers. As you receive briefings
from generals, you note that hardly
any of them will survive the purge
that will follow this war. After all,
someone has to take responsibility
for the huge losses suffered and
that’s definitely not going to be you.
You, Putin, have already scaled
back the objective of the “special
military operation” to be the
conquest of Donbas. You got away
with explaining through your
state-run media that sending those
thousands of armoured vehicles on a
failed attempt to take Kyiv was just a
cunning ruse to distract the enemy.
Since you are now personally
directing much of the military
campaign, however, you realise that
your army can’t take another three
months like the last three. You know
you have a big choice to make — and
there are two options.
One is to mobilise for a much
bigger, longer war. But that would
require the conscription of huge
numbers of young Russians, and the
time to launch that was weeks ago.
In any case, it would need a lot more
military equipment, and you are
running low on stocks.
There is a version of this option
that involves using a tactical nuclear
weapon to break the stalemate. But
you accept that even the Chinese
would abandon you at that point,
and those generals may come for you
in the night even before you can
pack them off to Siberia.
Luckily for you, there is another
option, and one that suits your
playbook very well. At some point in
the coming weeks, when your
remaining forces are just about
exhausted, you will declare that you
have won. You will magnanimouslyoffer a ceasefire to the Ukrainians.
The areas you have overrun will
simultaneously ask to be
incorporated fully into Russia, and
you will say that you will consider
those requests while awaiting the
reaction to the ceasefire proposal, to
increase the pressure on the
Ukrainians to stop fighting.
You will also announce that you
are ready for peace talks to reach a
full agreement and deal with the
whole problem for the long term.
Of course, you will ensure those
talks never get anywhere. You
weren’t born yesterday. You managed
to string everyone along with theTalks could go on for
years while Russia
builds a better army
Macron will listen to
Putin. Scholz might
not know what to do
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Haguethe times | Tuesday May 24 2022 25