Den försvunne Putin

I det nya numret av Foreign Affairs finns en längre essä om Ryssland av Princetonprofessorn Stephen Kotkin.

I ett avsnitt utgår han från professor Stefan Hedlunds ”Russian Path Dependence” och dess analys att Ryssland trots tre kollapser (1610 – 13, 1917 – 18 och 1991) ”each time was revived fundamentally unchanged”.

Jag tänkte på detta under de senaste dagarnas mediehysteri om den ”försvunne Putin”. Ska man förstå Kotkin så är det Ryssland det handlar om – snarare än om individen Putin.

Kotkins essä är som sagt lång men här ett nyckelavsnitt om framtiden:

The European Union cannot resolve this latest standoff, nor can the United Nations. The United States has indeed put together “coalitions of the willing” to legitimize some of its recent interventions, but it is not going to go to war over Ukraine or start bombing Russia, and the wherewithal and will for indefinite sanctions against Russia are lacking. Distasteful as it might sound, Washington faces the prospect of trying 
to work out some negotiated larger territorial settlement.


Such negotiations would have to acknowledge that Russia is a great power with leverage, but they would not need to involve the formal acceptance of some special Russian sphere of interest in its so-called near abroad. The chief goals would be, first, to exchange international recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea for an end to all the frozen conflicts in which Russia is an accomplice and, second, to disincentivize such behavior in the future. Russia should have to pay monetary compensation for Crimea. There could be some federal solutions, referendums, even land swaps and population transfers (which in many cases have already taken place). Sanctions on Russia would remain in place until a settlement was mutually agreed on, and new sanctions could be levied if Russia were to reject negotiations or were deemed to be conducting them in bad faith. Recognition of the new status of Crimea would occur in stages, over an extended period.


It would be a huge challenge to devise incentives that were politically plausible in the West while at the same time powerful enough for Russia to agree to a just settlement—and for Ukraine to be willing to take part. But the search for a settlement would be an opportunity as well as a headache.


NATO expansion can be judged to have been a strategic error—not because it angered Russia but because it weakened NATO as a military alliance. Russia’s elites would likely have become revanchist even without NATO’s advance, because they believe, nearly universally, that the United States took advantage of Russia in 1991 and has denied the country its rightful place as an equal in international diplomacy ever since. But NATO expansion’s critics have not offered much in the way of practicable alternatives. Would it really have been appropriate, for example, to deny the requests of all the countries east of Germany to join the alliance? 


Then as now, the only real alternative was the creation of an entirely new trans-European security architecture, one that fully transcended its Cold War counterpart. This was an oft-expressed Russian wish, but in the early 1990s, there was neither the imagination nor the incentives in Washington for such a heavy lift. Whether there is such capacity in Washington today remains to be seen. But even if comprehensive new security arrangements are unlikely anytime soon, Washington could still undertake much useful groundwork.


Henry Kissinger formulerade sin tanke om detta i en Washington Post-artikel för ganska precis ett år sedan. Den inleddes så här:

Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation. But do we know where we are going? In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.

Detta att the test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins är en vis mans kommentar vars relevans sträcker sig mycket längre än till dagens heta samtalsämnen.

Hur som helst tycks Putin inte längre vara försvunnen. Men hur politiken där och här kommer att se ut vet varken professorerna Kissinger eller Kotkin.