Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is the latest western leader to arrive in Moscow – and he may be the last before Russian troops cross into Ukrainian territory. Mr Scholz’s immediate task on Tuesday will be to make clear the high price that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, will pay if he decides to turn a war of nerves into a war. Given that Germany has been seen as being a European power with the closest economic ties with Russia – notably via the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline – his words ought to carry some weight in the Kremlin.
Mr Putin may not care, but he should. The US’s megaphone diplomacy has seen Washington present a public case for a real and present danger – even naming the date of a possible Russian offensive this week – that narrowed the gap between western allies on the level of Russian sanctions which could successfully deter an invasion. Russia’s hybrid war strategy is based on sowing confusion and disinformation. The US, by revealing intelligence in real time, has put Russia on the defensive, preventing it from using such tactics to shroud its moves.
There are 130,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders. It is possible that Mr Putin is bluffing; the west’s warnings may make it harder for him to retreat without appearing humiliated. That might be a better problem for the world to have than the US projection that Russian forces could overwhelm Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, within two days, leaving as many as 50,000 civilians dead or wounded.
Mr Putin helped create the current Ukrainian internal chaos. It was his bloody invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territory in 2014 that turned the anger behind the protests in Kyiv against corruption, brutality and oligarchical rule into a much harder anti-Russian feeling in Ukraine. Today that is not anti-Russian so much as anti-Putin sentiment. The Russian president’s waning influence in Kyiv has largely been a problem of his own making. Russia’s actions have also lent credibility to the idea it is a rogue state.
Diplomacy should be a way of reaching a destination that all parties can live with. It’s hard to see what safe haven that might be in the short term for Ukraine and Russia. Mr Putin would probably want a Ukrainian regime in power that is, if not pliant, at least friendly to Russia. But that is a faraway prospect without giving up control of the Ukrainian provinces currently in Russian hands. Ukrainians will not stand, quite reasonably, for their territory to become formalised as a cat’s paw for Moscow.
Nato is no real threat to Mr Putin’s supremacy inside Russia and neither is a functioning democracy on Russia’s border. As his military creeps towards the Ukrainian border, talks are still the best way of exploring what he may accept. He could be president until at least 2036. All this makes it important for western leaders to engage with Moscow. Russia is unlikely to ever get a cast-iron commitment that Ukraine will never join Nato, but it might get assurances behind closed doors that that won’t happen any time soon. Mr Putin could be offered talks over wider Russian concerns. It was encouraging that on Monday, when the Russian president asked his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, about the likelihood of a deal with the west over Ukraine and Nato, he replied: “There’s always a chance.”
At present, what Moscow will do and how the west will respond are unknowns. But there are things that should be said publicly to reassure allies, and others that should be said privately to calm – and deter – adversaries.
