A Ukrainian soldier stands in the trench on the line of separation from pro-Russian rebels in Mariupol in the Donetsk region on Jan. 21. (Andriy Dubchak/AP)
KYIV, Ukraine — With 100,000 Russian guns pointed at their heads, Ukrainians appear to take a stoical pride in not seeming rattled. They appear ready for what could be a savage war. Their main worry is that the United States and its allies will get so nervous they will yield to Russian pressure.
Driving through Maidan Square in a light snow on Friday afternoon, with traffic snarled and the lights of the city blazing, you could almost think this was normal life, on the eve of what could be a Russian invasion. Some people with money are buying dollars and property abroad. But the restaurants are full, and Ukrainians appeared to get the jitters only when President Volodymyr Zelensky told them this past week not to panic.
Over several days of intense conversation here, I heard the same message of resistance. Russian President Vladimir Putin might imagine that Ukrainians share his almost mystical conviction that Russia and Ukraine are the same country, but if so, he’s wildly mistaken. Putin’s eight years of war against Ukraine, beginning with his seizure of Crimea in 2014, have made him nothing but enemies here. Polls say that even a large majority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians oppose him.
“Don’t trust Putin. Don’t fear Putin,” said former president Petro Poroshenko on Friday during a conversation with a group organized by the German Marshall Fund. (I’m a trustee of GMF but came here as a journalist, along with Sylvie Kauffmann of the French newspaper Le Monde and a half-dozen others, including two German parliamentarians and analysts from NATO and the European Union.)
It was partly bravado, but a defiant Oleksiy Danilov, the head of the national security and defense council, told our group: “Since 2014, we have been in a state of war with Russia. There are no people other than us who will defend us. Even if we don’t receive weapons [from the West], we will strangle them with our bare hands.”
Ukraine is where the dissolution of the Soviet Union was ratified in 1991, when 92 percent of Ukrainians voted for independence in a referendum. Putin has said that he regards the Soviet collapse as a tragedy that he is determined to avenge — and that resolve has led him inexorably toward this confrontation. He sent troops to the border in April, paused for a round of diplomacy with President Biden in Geneva in June, and then stormed back to the Ukraine border in October with what U.S. intelligence concluded was a force ready to invade all the way to Kyiv.
As the Biden administration mobilized NATO resistance, Putin has doubled down repeatedly, saying that he wants to dismantle the post-Cold War architecture of Europe and insisting on promises that Ukraine will never join NATO. On Friday, against a firm NATO rejection of that ultimatum, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov went even further, demanding that the alliance withdraw its troops from Russian neighbors Bulgaria and Romania.
Putin has left little room for maneuver or compromise. He evidently feels that now is the time to strike — when the United States is politically divided, with what he apparently sees as a weak and compromising president. Biden did not help himself when he talked Wednesday about his expectation of a small Russian invasion — a suggestion of accommodation that he had to reverse the next day. It’s also unfortunate that NATO’s unity has appeared fragile this week with France and Germany both appearing uncertain about following the United States’ lead.
Putin has prepared well for this strategic moment. Russia’s financial reserves are substantial enough to ease the impact of sanctions, at least initially, and energy prices are high. And Russia’s military alliance with China hasn’t been this strong in decades. Putin’s popularity has been sagging, but given Russia’s prospects for long-term decline, it probably won’t get any better. For the Russian leader, this is a window of opportunity that won’t last.
“What I am concerned about is that Russia is putting itself in such a position that it can’t step back,” argued Dmytro Razumkov, a young member of the Ukrainian parliament who led Zelensky’s party there and has now formed one of his own.
Opinions on Russia and Ukraine
A similar view that there might be no escape came from Ihor Zhovkva, the senior foreign policy adviser in Zelensky’s administration. “Ukraine is not in a panic,” he told us. “We understand we will have to fight. This is our destiny.”
Over and over, here and in Warsaw, I heard an argument that the United States must stop being reactive in dealing with Putin. The Russian leader loves to provoke anxiety in the West, and he has shown with Ukraine that he’s ready to turn the dial way up. He’s apparently convinced that the United States and Europe in the end will prefer accommodation to an ever-escalating crisis.
“Putin wages war without any rules,” says a senior Ukrainian defense ministry official, sitting across from a painting depicting a wild cavalry charge by warriors from several centuries past. The Russians have a name for Putin’s form of intimidation. They call it “bespredel,” a Russian mafia term that means, “without limits.”
It falls to Biden to find a way to contain this bullying Russian leader without triggering an all-out war in the heart of Europe. The best advice I heard, echoed by the most thoughtful analysts in Kyiv and Warsaw, is that the United States and its allies must check the balance of intimidation — by taking action themselves rather than responding to Moscow. Impose severe sanctions on Russia now, rather than after it has rolled into Ukraine. If Putin persists in covert actions in the West, match him.
“You cannot permit the Russians to believe you are afraid of an escalation. They will use it time and again,” argued one of Poland’s wisest Russia analysts during a conversation on Wednesday in Warsaw. “Restraint does not stabilize Putin. It encourages him.” To paraphrase the analogy coined by the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, Putin thinks that accommodationist Americans are now, similar to Europeans, from Venus — while warlike Russians are very much from Mars.
It’s a dizzying and frightening prospect, to imagine a war triggered by a doomed attempt to rewrite history. The most reassuring note is that Ukrainians, in the eye of the storm, don’t appear all that worried. I posed to Ukraine’s defense official the question asked by Gen. David H. Petraeus at the beginning of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, “Tell me how this ends.” The official answered without hesitation: with Ukrainian sovereignty over all of its territory.
