Defuse Ukraine
It is possible that Mr Putin’s bottom line in this conflict is simple: he wants to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and have assurances that the United States and NATO will never place offensive weapons that threaten Russia’s security on Ukraine. threaten territory.
There seems to be trading room on those two points. While the United States says it will never part with NATO’s ‘open door’ policy — meaning each country is free to make its own choice whether to join the Western alliance — the reality is clear. : Ukraine is so corrupt and its grip on democracy is so weak that no one expects it to be accepted for NATO membership in the next decade or two.
Mr Biden has been clear on this.
“The chances of Ukraine joining NATO in the near term are not very likely,” he said at a news conference on Wednesday. “So there’s room to work if he wants to do that.”
It seemed an open invitation to offer Russia some assurance that Kiev’s NATO membership would be off the table for a decade, or two, or perhaps a quarter of a century. But the Biden administration has drawn a red line by giving Mr Putin the right to veto which countries can join NATO.
More complex is the negotiation of the reverse problem: how the United States and NATO operate in Ukraine. Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the United States and NATO countries have steadily provided Ukraine with what the West calls defensive weapons, including the ability to disable Russian tanks and planes. That flow has accelerated in recent weeks.
To hear Mr. Putin, those weapons are more offensive than defensive — and Russian disinformation campaigns have suggested Washington’s real goal is to place nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Government officials say the United States has no such plans — and some sort of deal, as one official said, should be “the easiest part of this,” as long as Russia is willing to withdraw its medium-range weapons as well.
Overthrow the European Order
Mr Putin has made it clear that he wants to restore what he calls Russia’s “sphere of influence” in the region – essentially a return to Cold War order, before Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin agreed in 1997 that former Soviet states and the countries of the Warsaw Bloc can choose whether to join NATO. Since then, the alliance has roughly doubled in size.
