If there are still policymakers and analysts in the West who believe peace is possible between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine, they would be well advised to read Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s recent interview with the Agence France-Presse. Zakharova is of course expressing the views of her master, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and his master, Putin.
Here are her/their conditions for what Zakharova calls “peace”:
- The West must stop supplying Ukraine with arms — and thereby leave Ukraine open to Russian aggression at any time and at any place.
- Kyiv must accept the “new territorial realities” and accept the permanent loss of the provinces Russia has officially annexed: Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, with more to come if newer realities were to arise, as they surely would.
- Ukraine should have neutral status, and thus revert to the period before Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, when Ukraine was neutral (as it had been since achieving independence) and yet Russia still attacked.
- The rights of Russian-speaking inhabitants of Ukraine should be protected — which they are, by any measure (just take a stroll down any street of any city in Ukraine and listen to the Russian language being “repressed”), so Zakharova’s invocation of this point is little more than Moscow’s insistence (for several decades and, in fact, for several centuries) that the Ukrainian language and culture must be restricted.
Unsurprisingly, given that these demands would deprive Ukrainians of their identity and reduce Ukraine to a colony of Russia, Zakharova said, “At the moment, we do not see the political will for peace either in Kyiv or in the West.”
No kidding. Why would anyone agree to suicide?
But things get better. The following comment by Zakharova pretty much summarizes the Russian approach to the war: “We will not allow the existence on our borders of an aggressive Nazi state from whose territory there is a danger for Russia and its neighbors.”
It surely goes without saying that Ukraine — having lost over 6 million people to Nazi aggression — is not, has not been, and will never be a Nazi state. Ukraine does not and has not harbored aggressive intentions toward Russia (if only because Russia is a regional superpower with nuclear weapons and Ukrainians aren’t daft enough to attack such a country, regardless of its behavior toward Ukraine), and that its territory cannot possibly serve as a springboard for “a danger” — not just to Russia, but also to its neighbors.
Which neighbors does Zakharova have in mind? Belarus? Kazakhstan? Finland? China? Can she be serious? Or has life in Putin’s parallel universe utterly clouded her mind?
It should be clear from Zakharova’s statements that Russia wants no peace. It wants war and conquest and submission. But not just with respect to Ukraine. That would be bad enough. Zakharova’s comments express general principles that could be applied with equal plausibility to a slew of neighboring states.
After all, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Finland and Lithuania, among others, receive Western weapons, allegedly “violate” the rights of Russian speakers (so much so that they’ve forgotten to rid themselves of their pesky European Union passports), and are no less “aggressive Nazis” than the Ukrainians. If Russia cannot allow the existence of an aggressively Nazi Ukraine, it surely cannot allow the existence of aggressively Nazi countries such as these.
In effect, Zakharova — and, through her, her masters, Lavrov and Putin — has declared war against the West in general and its frontline states in particular. In so doing, she’s actually done the West a great service. It’s become fashionable to say that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is only about Ukraine, and that Ukraine doesn’t really matter. In fact, the raison d’être for Russia’s war against Ukraine applies to much of Europe and Asia.
Like Ukraine, the United States and Europe face an existential challenge. The war and genocide Putin unleashed won’t stop in Ukraine. Given the open-endedness of the goals Zakharova highlighted, Putin or his successor has every reason to subjugate all of Ukraine and then keep marching westward — and eastward and southward.
The Baltic states and Moldova, small and vulnerable, would be next. Kazakhstan, with a large Russian-speaking minority in its north, would follow. Armenia and Georgia would round out the picture, at least for the time being.
At some point, the West will have to cave or fight, a lose-lose condition that it will have brought upon itself by believing that talking peace with Putin was possible.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”