2022.05.23 普京输了，战争才会结束

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The War Won’t End Until Putin Loses
Offering the Russian president a face-saving compromise will only enable future aggression.

By Anne Applebaum
Vladimir Putin sitting at the end of a long table
Mikhail Klimentyev / Sputnik / AFP / Getty
MAY 23, 2022
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About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

The expression off-ramp has a pleasing physicality, evoking a thing that can be constructed out of concrete and steel. But at the moment, anyone talking about an off-ramp in Ukraine—and many people are doing so, in governments, on radio stations, in a million private arguments—is using the term metaphorically, referring to a deal that could persuade Vladimir Putin to halt his invasion. Some believe that such an off-ramp could easily be built if only diplomats were willing to make the effort, or if only the White House weren’t so bellicose. It’s a nice idea. Unfortunately, the assumptions that underlie that belief are wrong.

The first assumption is that Russia’s president wants to end the war, that he needs an off-ramp, and that he is actually searching for a way to save face and to avoid, in French President Emmanuel Macron’s words, further “humiliation.” It is true that Putin’s army has performed badly, that Russian troops unexpectedly retreated from northern Ukraine, and that they have, at least temporarily, given up the idea of destroying the Ukrainian state. They suffered far greater casualties than anyone expected, lost impressive quantities of equipment, and demonstrated more logistical incompetence than most experts thought possible. But they have now regrouped in eastern and southern Ukraine, where their goals remain audacious: They seek to wear down Ukrainian troops, wear out Ukraine’s international partners, and exhaust the Ukrainian economy, which may already have contracted by as much as half.

Eliot A. Cohen: What victory will look like in Ukraine

Buoyed by oil and gas revenues, the Russian economy is experiencing a much less severe recession than Ukraine. Unconcerned by public opinion, the Russian army seems not to care how many of its soldiers die. For all of those reasons, Putin may well believe that a long-term war of attrition is his to win, not just in southern and eastern Ukraine but eventually in Kyiv and beyond. Certainly that’s what Kremlin propagandists are still telling the Russian people. On state television, the Russian army is triumphant, Russian soldiers are protecting civilians, and only Ukrainians commit atrocities. With a few minor exceptions, no one has prepared the Russian public to expect anything except total victory.

The second assumption made by those advocating off-ramps is that Russia, even if it were to begin negotiating, would stick to the agreements it signed. Even an ordinary cease-fire has to involve concessions on both sides, and anything more substantive would require a longer list of pledges and promises. But brazen dishonesty is now a normal part of Russian foreign policy as well as domestic propaganda. In the run-up to the war, senior Russian officials repeatedly denied that they intended to invade Ukraine, Russian state television mocked the Western warnings of invasion as “hysterical,” and Putin personally promised the French president that no war was coming. None of that was true. No future promises made by the Russian state, so long as it is controlled by Putin, can be believed either.

Nor does Russia seem to be interested in adhering to multiple treaties it is theoretically obligated to follow, among them the Geneva Convention and the United Nations’ Genocide Convention. Russian troops’ behavior in this war demonstrates that there is no international agreement that Putin can be counted on to respect. Regardless of what he might promise during peace negotiations, Western officials would have to assume that any Ukrainian populations handed over to Russia would be subject to arrests, terror, mass theft, and rape on an unprecedented scale; that Ukrainian cities would be incorporated into Russia against the will of the public; and that, as in 2014, when Russian proxies in the Donbas agreed to a truce, any cease-fire would be temporary, lasting only as long as it would take for the Russian army to regroup, rearm, and start again. Putin has made clear that destroying Ukraine is, for him, an essential, even existential, goal. Where is the evidence that he has abandoned it?

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Peter Pomerantsev: ‘We can only be enemies’

The third assumption is that this Ukrainian government, or any Ukrainian government, is politically able to swap territory for peace. To do so would be to reward Russia for invading, and to accept that Russia has the right to kidnap leaders, murder civilians, rape women, and deport anybody it chooses from Ukrainian territory. What Ukrainian president or prime minister can agree to that deal and expect to stay in office? Russian cruelty also means that any territory that is temporarily ceded will, sooner or later, become the source of an insurgency, because no Ukrainian population can promise to endure that kind of torture indefinitely. Already, guerrillas in the city of Melitopol, occupied since the first days of the war, claim to have killed several Russian officers and carried out acts of sabotage. An underground is emerging in occupied Kherson and will appear in other places too. To concede territory for a deal now will simply set up another conflict later on. The end of one kind of violence will lead to other kinds of violence.

This does not mean that the war can or should go on forever, or that diplomacy has no place at all. Nor does it mean that Americans and Europeans should be blind to the real challenges that a long conflict will pose to Ukraine. The Western coalition backing Kyiv could certainly fray; the wave of adrenaline that has so far propelled the Ukrainian army and leadership could crash. Ukraine’s economy could grow worse, making the fight much harder or even impossible to sustain.


But even so, off-ramp remains the wrong metaphor and the wrong goal. The West should not aim to offer Putin an off-ramp; our goal, our endgame, should be defeat. In fact, the only solution that offers some hope of long-term stability in Europe is rapid defeat, or even, to borrow Macron’s phrase, humiliation. In truth, the Russian president not only has to stop fighting the war; he has to conclude that the war was a terrible mistake, one that can never be repeated. More to the point, the people around him—leaders of the army, the security services, the business community—have to conclude exactly the same thing. The Russian public must eventually come to agree too.

Defeat could take several forms. It might be military: The White House should now increase not just the level but the speed of its assistance to Ukraine; it should provide the long-range weapons needed to take back occupied territory and perhaps also assistance with quicker distribution of those weapons. Defeat could be economic, taking the form of a temporary gas-and-oil embargo that finally cuts Russia off from the source of its income, lasting at least until the war ends. Defeat could involve the creation of a new security architecture, one based on new kinds of security guarantees for Ukraine, or even some type of NATO membership for Ukraine. Whatever form that takes, it has to be substantially different from the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine was offered security “assurances” that meant nothing at all.


Defeat could also include broader sanctions, not just on a few select billionaires but on the entire Russian political class. The Anti-Corruption Foundation led by the jailed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has drawn up a list of 6,000 “bribe-takers and warmongers”—that is, politicians and bureaucrats who have enabled the war and the regime. The European Parliament has already called for sanctions on that group. If others follow, maybe some in the ruling elite will finally be persuaded to start looking for new jobs, or at least start talking about how to make changes.

Charles A. Kupchan: Ukraine’s way out

Although saying so is considered undiplomatic, the American administration clearly knows that the defeat, sidelining, or removal of Putin is the only outcome that offers any long-term stability in Ukraine and the rest of Europe. “Putin,” said Joe Biden in March, “cannot remain in power.” In April, Lloyd Austin said that he hoped “to see Russia weakened to the degree it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Both of these statements by the American president and his defense secretary were treated as gaffes or as policy mistakes—thoughtless remarks that might irritate the Russians. In truth, they were half-articulated acknowledgments of an ugly reality that no one wants to confront: Any cease-fire that allows Putin to experience any kind of victory will be inherently unstable, because it will encourage him to try again. Victory in Crimea did not satisfy the Kremlin. Victory in Kherson will not satisfy the Kremlin either.


I understand those who fear that, confronted with an impending loss, Putin will seek to use chemical or nuclear weapons; I worried the same at the start of the war. But the retreats from Kyiv and Kharkiv indicate that Putin is not irrational after all. He understands perfectly well that NATO is a defensive alliance, because he has accepted the Swedish and Finnish applications without quibbling. His generals make calculations and weigh costs. They were perfectly capable of understanding that the price of Russia’s early advances was too high. The price of using tactical nuclear weapons would be far higher: They would achieve no military impact but would destroy all of Russia’s remaining relationships with India, China, and the rest of the world. There is no indication right now that the nuclear threats so frequently mentioned by Russian propagandists, going back many years, are real.

By contrast, a true defeat could force the reckoning that should have happened in the 1990s, the moment when the Soviet Union broke up but Russia retained all of the trappings and baubles of the Soviet empire—its UN seat, embassies, diplomatic service—at the expense of the other ex-Soviet republics. The year 1991 was the moment when Russians should have realized the folly of Moscow’s imperial overreach, when they should have figured out why so many of their neighbors hate and fear them. But the Russian public learned no such lesson. Within a decade, Putin, brimming with grievances, had convinced many of them that the West and the rest of the world owed them something, and that further conquests were justified.


Military loss could create a real opening for national self-examination or for a major change, as it so often has done in Russia’s past. Only failure can persuade the Russians themselves to question the sense and purpose of a colonial ideology that has repeatedly impoverished and ruined their own economy and society, as well as those of their neighbors, for decades. Yet another frozen conflict, yet another temporary holding pattern, yet another face-saving compromise will not end the pattern of Russian aggression or bring permanent peace.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



普京输了，战争才会结束
向俄罗斯总统提供面子上的妥协，只会使未来的侵略成为可能。

安妮-阿普尔鲍姆报道
普京坐在一张长桌的末端
Mikhail Klimentyev / Sputnik / AFP / Getty
2022年5月23日
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关于作者。安妮-阿普尔鲍姆是《大西洋月刊》的一名工作人员。

匝道这个词有一种令人愉悦的物理特性，让人联想到一种可以用混凝土和钢铁建造的东西。但目前，任何谈论乌克兰的 "下坡路 "的人--许多人都在这样做，在政府中，在广播电台中，在无数次的私人争论中--都是在用这个词做比喻，指的是一个可以说服弗拉基米尔-普京停止入侵的交易。一些人认为，只要外交官愿意做出努力，或者只要白宫不那么好战，这样的一条下坡路就很容易建立起来。这是个不错的想法。不幸的是，支撑这种信念的假设是错误的。

第一个假设是，俄罗斯总统想要结束战争，他需要一个下马威，而且他实际上是在寻找一种挽回面子的方法，用法国总统埃马纽埃尔-马克龙的话说，是为了避免进一步 "羞辱"。诚然，普京的军队表现糟糕，俄罗斯军队出人意料地从乌克兰北部撤退，他们至少暂时放弃了摧毁乌克兰国家的想法。他们遭受的伤亡远远超过任何人的预期，损失了数量惊人的装备，并表现出比大多数专家认为可能的更多后勤无能。但他们现在已经在乌克兰东部和南部重新集结，他们的目标仍然很大胆：他们试图削弱乌克兰军队，耗尽乌克兰的国际合作伙伴，并耗尽乌克兰的经济，而乌克兰的经济可能已经收缩了一半之多。

Eliot A. Cohen: 乌克兰的胜利会是什么样子

在石油和天然气收入的推动下，俄罗斯经济经历的衰退比乌克兰要轻得多。由于不受公众舆论的影响，俄罗斯军队似乎并不在意其士兵的死亡人数。由于所有这些原因，普京很可能认为，长期的消耗战是他的胜利，不仅在乌克兰南部和东部，而且最终在基辅和其他地方。当然，克里姆林宫的宣传人员仍在告诉俄罗斯人民这一点。在国家电视台，俄罗斯军队是胜利的，俄罗斯士兵在保护平民，只有乌克兰人犯下暴行。除了几个小的例外，没有人让俄罗斯公众准备好期待除了全面胜利之外的任何东西。

主张走下坡路的人做出的第二个假设是，俄罗斯即使开始谈判，也会坚持它所签署的协议。即使是普通的停火也必须涉及双方的让步，而任何更实质性的东西都需要更长的保证和承诺清单。但是，厚颜无耻的不诚实现在是俄罗斯外交政策以及国内宣传的一个正常部分。在战争前夕，俄罗斯高级官员一再否认他们打算入侵乌克兰，俄罗斯国家电视台嘲笑西方的入侵警告是 "歇斯底里的"，而普京亲自向法国总统承诺不会有战争。这一切都不是真的。只要是由普京控制的俄罗斯国家，其未来的承诺也都不能相信。

俄罗斯似乎也没有兴趣遵守它在理论上有义务遵守的多项条约，其中包括《日内瓦公约》和联合国《种族灭绝公约》。俄罗斯军队在这场战争中的行为表明，没有什么国际协议是可以指望普京尊重的。无论他在和平谈判中可能承诺什么，西方官员将不得不假设，任何被移交给俄罗斯的乌克兰人都将遭受前所未有的逮捕、恐怖、大规模盗窃和强奸；乌克兰城市将在违背公众意愿的情况下被并入俄罗斯；而且，正如2014年俄罗斯在顿巴斯的代理人同意休战一样，任何停火都是暂时的，其持续时间仅相当于俄罗斯军队重新集结、重新武装并再次开始的时间。普京已经明确表示，对他来说，摧毁乌克兰是一个基本的，甚至是生存的目标。哪里有证据表明他已经放弃了这个目标？

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彼得-波梅兰采夫："我们只能是敌人

第三个假设是，这个乌克兰政府，或任何乌克兰政府，在政治上能够以领土换取和平。这样做将是对俄罗斯入侵的奖励，并接受俄罗斯有权绑架领导人，谋杀平民，强奸妇女，并将其选择的任何人驱逐出乌克兰领土。哪个乌克兰总统或总理能同意这种交易并期望继续任职？俄罗斯的残忍还意味着，任何暂时割让的领土迟早会成为叛乱的源头，因为没有一个乌克兰人能够保证无限期地忍受这种折磨。在战争初期就被占领的梅利托波尔市，游击队已经声称杀死了几名俄罗斯军官并进行了破坏活动。在被占领的赫尔松市，一个地下组织正在出现，并且也将在其他地方出现。现在为达成交易而让出领土，只会为以后的冲突埋下伏笔。一种暴力的结束将导致其他类型的暴力。

这并不意味着战争可以或应该永远持续下去，也不意味着外交手段根本就没有地位。它也不意味着美国人和欧洲人应该对长期冲突将给乌克兰带来的真正挑战视而不见。支持基辅的西方联盟肯定会受到影响；迄今为止推动乌克兰军队和领导层的肾上腺素浪潮可能会崩溃。乌克兰的经济可能会变得更糟，使战斗更难甚至不可能持续。


但即便如此，"下坡路 "仍然是一个错误的比喻，也是一个错误的目标。西方的目标不应该是为普京提供一个下坡路；我们的目标，我们的终局，应该是失败。事实上，为欧洲的长期稳定提供一些希望的唯一解决方案是迅速击败，甚至借用马克龙的话说，是羞辱。事实上，俄罗斯总统不仅要停止打仗；他还必须得出结论，这场战争是一个可怕的错误，一个永远不能重复的错误。更重要的是，他周围的人--军队、安全部门和商业界的领导人--必须得出完全相同的结论。俄罗斯公众最终也必须同意。

失败可能有几种形式。它可能是军事上的。白宫现在不仅应该提高对乌克兰的援助水平，而且应该提高援助速度；它应该提供夺回被占领土所需的远程武器，也许还应该协助加快分发这些武器。战败可能是经济上的，采取临时的天然气和石油禁运的形式，最终切断俄罗斯的收入来源，至少持续到战争结束。战败可能涉及建立一个新的安全架构，一个基于对乌克兰的新型安全保障的架构，甚至是某种类型的乌克兰的北约成员资格。无论采取何种形式，它都必须与1994年的《布达佩斯备忘录》有实质性的区别，在该备忘录中，乌克兰得到的安全 "保证 "根本没有意义。


失败还可能包括更广泛的制裁，不仅仅是对少数特定的亿万富翁，而是对整个俄罗斯政治阶层。由被监禁的俄罗斯持不同政见者阿列克谢-纳瓦尔尼领导的反腐败基金会制定了一份6000名 "受贿者和战争贩子 "的名单--即那些为战争和政权提供支持的政治家和官僚。欧洲议会已经呼吁对该群体进行制裁。如果其他国家效仿，也许一些统治精英最终会被说服，开始寻找新的工作，或者至少开始讨论如何做出改变。

Charles A. Kupchan：乌克兰的出路

尽管这么说被认为是不符合外交惯例的，但美国政府显然知道，击败、排挤或清除普京是在乌克兰和欧洲其他地区提供任何长期稳定的唯一结果。"普京，"乔-拜登在3月说，"不能继续执政。" 4月，劳埃德-奥斯汀说，他希望 "看到俄罗斯被削弱到它不能做入侵乌克兰的那种事情的程度"。美国总统和他的国防部长的这两项声明都被视为失言或政策错误--可能刺激俄罗斯人的不经意的言论。事实上，它们是对一个没有人愿意面对的丑陋现实的半表述的承认。任何允许普京获得任何形式的胜利的停火都将是内在的不稳定，因为这将鼓励他再次尝试。克里米亚的胜利并没有让克里姆林宫满意。在赫尔松的胜利也不会让克里姆林宫满意。


我理解那些担心面对即将到来的损失，普京会寻求使用化学或核武器的人；在战争开始时我也担心。但从基辅和哈尔科夫的撤退表明，普京毕竟不是不理性的。他完全明白北约是一个防御性联盟，因为他已经接受了瑞典和芬兰的申请，没有争论。他的将军们会进行计算并权衡成本。他们完全能够理解，俄罗斯的早期进展的代价太高了。使用战术核武器的代价会高得多。它们不会产生任何军事影响，但会破坏俄罗斯与印度、中国和世界其他国家的所有剩余关系。现在没有任何迹象表明，俄罗斯的宣传人员经常提到的核威胁（可以追溯到很多年前）是真实的。

相比之下，一场真正的失败可能会迫使俄罗斯进行本应在20世纪90年代发生的清算，那是苏联解体的时刻，但俄罗斯保留了苏联帝国的所有装饰品和饰品--其联合国席位、大使馆、外交服务--而牺牲了其他前苏联共和国。1991年是俄罗斯人本应意识到莫斯科帝国扩张的愚蠢的时刻，他们本应弄清楚为什么他们的许多邻国憎恨和害怕他们。但俄罗斯公众没有学到这样的教训。在十年内，满腹怨气的普京让许多人相信，西方和世界其他国家对他们有所亏欠，进一步征服是合理的。


军事上的失败可以为国家的自我审视或重大变革创造一个真正的机会，就像俄罗斯过去经常做的那样。只有失败才能说服俄罗斯人自己质疑一种殖民主义意识形态的意义和目的，这种意识形态几十年来一再使他们自己以及邻国的经济和社会陷入贫困和毁灭。另一个冻结的冲突，另一个暂时的保持模式，另一个面子上的妥协不会结束俄罗斯的侵略模式或带来永久的和平。

安妮-阿普尔鲍姆是《大西洋月刊》的一名工作人员。