The lose-lose outcome in Ukraine

The lose-lose outcome in Ukraine

Daniel W. Drezner — Read time: 3 minutes

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The lose-lose outcome in Ukraine

Putin puts all his cards on the table

Russian President Vladimir Putin signs decrees on the recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic on Monday. (Aleksey Nikolskyi/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

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Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

Yesterday at 7:00 a.m. EST

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

Yesterday at 7:00 a.m. EST

That meeting ended with his security council recommending that Putin walk away from the Minsk accords and recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway republics in a reprise of what happened in Georgia in 2008. A few hours later, Putin directly addressed Russia. It was a stemwinder of a speech that ended with him recognizing the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Much of it seemed to be lifted from his disquisition last summer about how Ukraine was not really a sovereign country. As the young people would say, there was definitely a vibe shift.

So, beyond confirming a lot of U.S. intelligence warnings, what are the takeaways from Monday’s developments? They are both obvious and grim.

1) This is only the beginning. Recognizing the two republics and signing friendship treaties with them gives Russia a legal pretext to deploy troops to the Donbas. Maybe they then provoke the Ukrainians by trying to take all the territory claimed by those republics. But it seems unlikely that the military escalation will stop there. As Michael Kofman tweeted, “Russia doesn’t need 190k troops on Ukraine’s borders to recognize the independence of separatist republics. These troops are not even near the Donbas. This is the first step in what will likely be a large-scale Russian [military] operation to impose regime change.”

2) The economic ramifications will be considerable. It’s easy to point out that Russia’s economy is not terribly large compared to the United States, European Union, China, India or any other great power. But that is a deceptive way of looking at how sanctioning Russia would affect the global economy. The global economy is already facing an array of stressors, including the coronavirus pandemic, inflation and supply chain problems. Neither Russia nor Ukraine is a large market, but each country is a key supplier of a variety of goods including natural gas, wheat and palladium. As Patricia Cohen and Jack Ewing of the New York Times note, “isolated shortages and price surges — whether of gas, wheat, aluminum or nickel — can snowball in a world still struggling to recover from the pandemic.”

Furthermore, Putin is likely to respond to sanctions with more cyberattacks, which might lead to retaliatory cyberattacks from NATO, and the collateral damage from such attacks on the global economy will sting a bit.

3) It’s possible to implement the best policy and still lose. In the past few months I have talked to folks across the foreign policy spectrum as the Ukraine situation has worsened. These include skeptics of President Biden’s overall foreign policy approach and miscues made during his first year in office. And the consensus is that Biden’s approach, apart from one gaffe, has been about as good as one could hope. He has consulted with allies, prepared for contingencies, and thrown the Russian state a little off balance by publishing intelligence before Russia has been able to surprise folks as in 2014.

All of this has raised the costs for Putin to move on Ukraine. The Russian economy will not be in a good way as things escalate. Monday’s weird Russian security council meeting revealed that not all of Putin’s team was as gung-ho about this move as he was. Nonetheless, Putin has clearly decided he is willing to pay the price to expand Russia’s borders.

Biden did almost everything right, and has worsened Putin’s strategic situation. Nonetheless, everyone will lose in the coming weeks.