Why not try a different path to defend Ukraine?

In response to Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s border, the Biden administration is talking tough. America and its NATO allies are threatening sanctions, shipping Ukraine weapons, and placing troops on NATO’s eastern frontier — but promising they won’t fight to defend Ukraine. 

The reason for this hard talk with hard limits isn’t hard to find. NATO has no obligation to defend Ukraine — and the reason it has no obligation is that it refuses to make one, because Ukraine isn’t defendable.  

The U.S. long has wanted to draw Ukraine westward. But Ukraine is too unstable for NATO to risk integrating it. The reasons are partly geopolitical: Since gaining its independence in 1991, Ukraine has been preserved by fear, trapped between two blocs, like Central European states in the interwar period. Then, it was Germany and the Soviet Union; now it’s NATO and Russia, which sees a pro-Western Ukraine as a security threat. 

Russia’s bellicosity blinds us to the ways this crisis is partly of America’s making. It was America’s announcement of a path to NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine that provoked Russia’s intervention in Georgia in 2008. And it was broad Western support for Ukrainian ties with the European Union (EU) — and backing for an uprising against the pro-Russian president — that prompted Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and attack in Donbas.  

The U.S. says Russia is threatening the “rules-based international order.” But that order is threadbare, thanks to America’s endless wars. When then-Secretary of State John Kerry criticized Russia for “invading another country on a completely trumped up pretext,” he wasn’t thinking about the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. And Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed to America’s unauthorized intervention in Serbia to justify his in Georgia. 

America sees its policy of slow-walking Ukrainian integration as moderate — but a slow-motion takeover is still a takeover. NATO’s Drang nach Osten isn’t Hitlerian, or even Napoleonic, but it’s eastward, nonetheless. Today, Russia is advancing but, from the Kremlin’s view, it’s a counterattack. 

Ukraine’s forces also aren’t up to NATO standards. But we’ve had 25 years to improve Ukraine’s military. NATO admitted the Baltic states before they were ready, and their geography is even less defensible. Russia was weaker then — but that begs the question: What’s holding back Ukrainian integration?  

The reason is Ukraine itself. It has been divided between a more European-oriented, Ukrainian-speaking west, and a more Russian-oriented, Russophone east. Ukraine in its internationally recognized borders is susceptible to Russian influence because of who its people are. 

Public opinion has hardened against Russia since 2014, but Ukrainians are hardly united. In the last elections, pro-Russian parties won majorities in Ukrainian districts adjacent to the separatist zones. Public opinion has skewed anti-Russian because millions of pro-Russians in Crimea and Donbas aren’t part of that public anymore. 

America’s anything-but-force brinkmanship might deter a Russian invasion, but it won’t get back the territories Russia already controls — though if it did, Ukraine would be even less fit to integrate into the West, and less willing. Leaving Ukraine in unaligned limbo is a formula for instability that threatens Ukraine’s people and stresses NATO consensus: not a buffer zone, but a shatter zone, a real and potential blood-land. Stability requires a clear demarcation between NATO and Russia.  

But where should that line be? NATO won’t concede Ukraine. But neither can it just extend its security umbrella. It needs to negotiate a new line of confrontation between Russia and an integrated Ukraine and defend that. So, what kind of Ukraine might be united and stable enough to integrate into the West?  

What about a smaller one: We could better build up a defensible, democratic Ukraine embedded in European security structures without its pro-Russian regions. 

There’s a path to a smaller Ukraine, apart from letting Russia invade. Ask Ukrainians if they wish to remain in a country intending to join the EU and NATO, or separate and join Russia. Plebiscites could cover the separatist zones and adjacent districts that voted pro-Russian. Let the south vote, too; let each region decide if it wishes to join Russia or the West. 

Plebiscites might spark conflict, but where are we headed now? Has supporting Ukraine’s fictional territorial integrity, without offering a real alliance, kept war at bay? Principles such as territorial integrity and sovereignty define the global order, but they don’t defend Europe; NATO does.  

America shouldn’t impose a solution on Ukraine. But it can condition NATO membership on bold steps and not stand in the way. Imagine if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky decided to trade sovereignty over the east for a free hand to join the West. We’d be fools to tell him not to because of global principles.  

As French President Emmanuel Macron noted after his talks with Russia and Ukraine on the crisis, “We have to think about the sovereignty and independence of these countries in a different form … reimagining a way toward stability.”

It’s awkward to propose territorial revisions under threat of invasion. But it’s a bit late for peacetime planning. We’ve wasted a quarter-century not encouraging Ukraine to take steps that might make integration and stability possible. We haven’t followed the advice of E.H. Carr, who warned that if you don’t create paths for peaceable change, you can expect the other kind.  

Even if we avoid a shooting war, the underlying conflict won’t have changed, and Ukraine will still be unfit for NATO. To chart a different path, we’ll need to take the interests of Ukraine’s pro-Western populations, its alienated easterners, and their powerful patron into account.  

And ours: It’s our own interest to help Ukraine change before we tie ourselves to its destiny. Because right now we find ourselves preparing for war over a country we are unwilling to defend.  

Timothy William Waters is a professor at Indiana University. He is the author most recently of “Boxing Pandora: Rethinking Borders, States, and Secession in a Democratic World” (Yale University Press 2020).