Putin Isn’t Backing Down

Janine Davidson is distressed:

[T]he lack of de-escalation and the media war being conducted by Putin are both alarming signals to the international community that this tragedy has not fractured the resolve of the pro-Russian separatists, nor those in the shadows supporting them. Since the downing of MH-17, pro-Russian separatists have used surface-to-air missiles to bring down two more Ukrainian military jets; for now, there seems no interest in dialing down hostilities.

Eugene Rumer advocates talking to Putin:

It is impossible to rewind this tape, but even at this late point in the crisis there is no substitute for talks and compromise. A military solution is out of the question. Putin has made it clear that he does not want to send his army into Ukraine. He has also made it clear that he can and fully intends to keep Kyiv from winning the war in Eastern Ukraine by sending more fighters and more weapons there. At this point freezing the conflict in place and then looking for a way out of it appears as the only possible option. But that requires talking by all parties to all parties without preconditions. Piling on sanctions and arming Ukraine will only prolong this crisis.

Heidi Hardt downplays the value of direct negotiations between Russia and NATO:

The least costly but least effective route would be for NATO to reopen formal communications with Russia. As of May 1, NATO officially suspended all cooperation with Russia, including cooperation on terrorism, proliferation and other areas related to peace and security. As James Goldgeier writes, Russian President Vladimir Putin ultimately ‘wants instability, not stability, in Ukraine,’ suggesting that pressure for a negotiated solution may have some value. Putin, however, has shown resilience to both diplomacy and targeted sanctions in past crises, such as the 2008 Georgia conflict. This suggests that a return to dialogue or even offering Russia the benefit of reengaging in civilian cooperation would have limited value for convincing the government to stop arming and supporting the separatists.

Masha Gessen posits that Putin “has not lost his resolve to take eastern Ukraine, nor has it been affirmed—Ukraine has very little to do with this story at all”:

It’s not Ukraine that Putin has been waging war against: It’s the West. And if you analyze the Russian president’s statements and actions in the past week through the prism of Putin’s great anti-Western campaign, you will find very few contradictions in them—and even less reason to hope for peace.

Over the course of two and a half years, since starting his third term as Russian president against the backdrop of mass protests, Putin has come to both embody and rely on a new, aggressively anti-Western ideology. It began with simple queer-baiting of protesters, which included accusing them of being agents of the U.S. State Department, and quickly transformed into an all-encompassing view of Russia and the world that proved shockingly powerful in uniting and mobilizing Russia. The enemy against which the country has united is the West and its contemporary values, which are seen as threatening Russia and its traditional values. It is a war of civilizations, in which Ukraine simply happened to be the site of the first all-out battle. In this picture, Russia is fighting Western expansionism in Ukraine, protecting not just itself and local Russian speakers but the world from the spread of what they call “homosfascism,” by which they mean an insistence on the universality of human rights.