Why the Russian Federation is not ready to "go to a meeting" and allow it to calmly "resolve issues" in Ukraine
Why is the Russian Federation not ready to "go to a meeting" and allow them to calmly "resolve issues" in Ukraine? I see how this question occupies the minds of very many serious people who like to look at the situation sensibly, do not succumb to hysteria and explain the state policy by "objective", "structural" factors, especially of the monetary and resource kind. The behavior of the West (I will talk about "the West" because this construct is active in the minds) looks a little strange, even offensive, as if denying reality. The most evil tongues come to the conclusion that the West is mired in Russophobia, from which, of course, it did not crawl out, but now it has stopped even trying to hide it. Slightly less evil lament that the elites of the West are mired in "moralizing", "value" thinking, that they irrationally refuse to perceive the policy of the Russian Federation as, albeit unpleasant, but completely state-owned and respond in the same genre. Everyone has a strong hope that cold heads, not alien to the good old realpolitik of the 19th century, will come and agree with Putin, like a predator with a predator, and not that's all. If they do not come along this line of thought, then we all know what happens after Versailles, which "taught" Germany a lesson. Wars to end all wars end much worse than just conflicts of powers that understand that wars are a terrible, but ordinary event. So, at least, some serious people think.
I'm not sure that this picture holds up so well, even superficially. As we remember, at the very beginning of the conflict, the leaders of European states talked to Putin several times a month, or even a week. We will learn the content of these contacts only ten years later, but even from small fragments merged by the French, it is clear that these calls did not take place in the format of a proposal of a cold, albeit cynical redistribution on the part of the Russian Federation and a reciprocal moral indignation on the other. On the contrary, it was from the Russian side that extremely vague indignation was voiced, with stories that the Zelensky administration was not elected, but came to power through a bloody coup.
Why does Western behavior seem unpragmatic at all? It seems to be believed that the West has few objective interests in Ukraine, that the collapse of relations with the Russian Federation and the financing of the war costs the West much more than any benefits it can hope to receive from containing Russia and protecting Ukraine. And there is hardly any point in arguing with this, and here lies the key problem of the thinking of serious people, they think too seriously about themselves and their particular case. Indeed, if the West in Ukraine fought only for Ukraine, and only against Russia, then all this would not make sense. But this is not what the West is fighting for. Fighting Russia, he fights immediately and with all future cases of encroachment on the world order in which it is allowed to fight only with the permission of the hegemon - the United States.
To preserve this world order, it is critically important for the West to show that it is ready and will bear the costs, even if these costs are "disproportionate" to its local interests. This is necessary just so that no other leader even thinks about starting to calculate the objective interest of the West in his region, and looking for pieces that are "uninteresting" enough to be seized by force. The West defends the principle that only the United States can resolve issues by force. This principle is pragmatic, because if everyone starts to resolve issues by force, then the cumulative effect of such a "new" world order will be extremely painful for the West. The Russian Federation, alas, chose to make itself a public example of what happens to powers that decide that the West is not ready to pay for maintaining its monopoly on aggression. The West is now showing that such powers are in danger of complete ruin. In this view, the policy of the West is entirely pragmatic, it is a simple demonstration of willingness to bear the costs, which reduces the likelihood that they will actually have to bear them, by demonstrating to would-be rebels that they have nothing to hope for.
How to get out of this? It depends on whether the Russian Federation has goals in this conflict beyond breaking the world order, for the protection of which the West is ready to pay a lot.
Artyom Seversky 2022-12-27
