Mounting evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine continue to emerge even as negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are underway in Turkey. As the Atlantic Council reports on Friday:
Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion has seemingly altered Russia’s war goals, creating space for diplomatic negotiations to advance. That was on display as negotiating teams from both countries huddled in Istanbul on March 29 for talks which, by all indications, were the most productive so far, and the two sides appeared closer to ending the war than before.
The evidence of war crimes, coupled with increasing calls for Russian Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian leaders to stand trial, highlights the difficulty in reconciling the tension between conflicting imperatives. The demand for justice will have to be balanced by the urgency of bringing the war to an end as quickly as possible. Ukraine and the broader coalition of countries arrayed against the Russian invasion will need to sort out their priorities.
To discuss possible paths to peace and the larger prospects for a post-war settlement, I spoke with Stephen Wertheim, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Wertheim, who is also a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School, brought a sober, realist perspective to this discussion.
Coming Attractions
My household is currently bedevilled with Covid. Fortunately, all cases are mild so far.
In the meantime, I’ve already recorded some podcasts that will air in the coming week. Look forward to Eric Levitz talking about Compact magazine’s attempt to fuse social democracy with traditionalism, Jacob Bacharach on the financial troubles of a neo-conservative flagship journal, and John Ganz on the fear of Critical Race Theory.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Pre-emptive self-defense is an iffy concept in international law, but the USA invoked it in 1962 when it felt threatened by the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. JFK vowed to start shooting if the USSR didn’t remove the missiles. He didn’t consult with or defer to the wishes of the government of sovereign Cuba.
Russia reasonably perceives a danger from NATO, which is a military alliance whose constituent governments, even more so than Russia’s, are captured by for-profit interests whose mandate is the acquisition of resources and markets. NATO has expanded eastward for 25 years, with armed interventions in places way east of the North Atlantic.
Russia and China have given notice that a unipolar security arrangement is no longer acceptable to them, but up to now the West has dismissed their concerns as absurd. US hegemony has given us a planet of slums. It isn’t worth fighting for, particularly if Ukrainians are the only people who must do the fighting.
The off-ramp in Ukraine is to acknowledge that Russia has legitimate security concerns just like Uncle Sam did in 1962. The West should agree, à la the Monroe Doctrine, to roll back NATO and set up some sort of DMZ along Russia’s western border.
The carnage in Ukraine should persuade us of the need for a mandatory procedure for non-violent dispute resolution. And then we can move from the charade of ‘arms control’ and ‘non-proliferation’ to actual disarmament.