Late in the evening on January 26th, in a moment of throwback diplomatic theatre, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, John Sullivan, arrived at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a towering Stalinist edifice in central Moscow, to hand-deliver a written response to Russia’s demands. The letter represented the latest move in a fraught geopolitical back-and-forth that began last year with a surge in Russian military forces along the border with Ukraine.
In December, the Kremlin had insisted on a set of “ironclad, waterproof, bulletproof” guarantees, in the words of Sergei Ryabkov, the Russian deputy foreign minister—including a promise not to expand NATO farther eastward and to withdraw foreign military infrastructure from the fourteen countries in Central and Eastern Europe that joined NATO after 1997. The Russian demands contained a degree of unabashed chutzpah that belied how little chance they had of being accepted.
On February 2nd, the Spanish paper El País published a leaked version of the U.S response, which suggested further negotiations between the two countries but did little to satisfy the more expansive and strident Russian proposals. “What’s clear is that the demands that Russia has advanced and describes as imperative cannot be met by the West,” Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told Kommersant, a Moscow paper. On this question, Putin is not naïve, Trenin said. “The question is what his answer will be to the rejection of those demands.”
The day before the U.S. letter appeared in El País, Putin, after remaining silent on Ukraine and tensions with the West for more than a month, finally addressed the subject. “The principal Russian concerns turned out to be ignored,” he said, going on to claim that it was the U.S. that was trying to force Russia into a conflict. Still, he said, “dialogue will be continued,” adding, “I hope that we will eventually find a solution.”
This was less than a formal answer to the U.S. letter—that is still being formulated, according to Putin’s spokesperson. In the meantime, these seemingly mixed messages, like so many data points in this unfolding saga, have served as a kind of Rorschach test for those tracking Russia’s military buildup: Putin is either laying the groundwork for a blitzkrieg invasion or searching for a face-saving way to back down. (He might also be playing for time while he determines which of those options to choose.)
In Washington, it can feel as if war is all but inevitable. “I’ve heard from colleagues in D.C. that they’ve never seen the American policy community so unanimous about anything,” Kadri Liik, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said. (Liik herself doesn’t share the sentiment: “I don’t think a big war is likely.”) Last month, according to the White House, Biden warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that there is a “distinct possibility” Russia could invade in February. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said, “Putin has a lot of options available to him if he wants to further invade Ukraine, and he can execute some of those options imminently.”
As concerns about Russian troop movements were growing in December, I spoke with Tatiana Stanovaya, the head of the analysis firm R.Politik. “I have the sense that Putin sees a new grand agreement with Biden as the most preferable form of victory,” she told me. “War with Ukraine would be a desperate measure he would see as forced on him by circumstance—which doesn’t mean he won’t do it.”
In the weeks since, American and Russian officials have engaged in a flurry of diplomatic contacts: first Ryabkov met with Wendy Sherman, the Deputy Secretary of State, in Geneva. Then their bosses, Sergei Lavrov and Antony Blinken, held their own summit, followed by a phone call on February 1st. Now more talks will apparently follow. “The assessment in policymaker circles in Moscow, at least so far, seems to be that the talks have not been useless,” Maxim Suchkov, the director of the Institute for International Studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, told me. “If only for the reason that they have gotten the Americans to address things they were previously unwilling to discuss. I mean, for the first time in years, the very meaning and wisdom of NATO enlargement is up for debate.”
As Suchkov imagined—and he emphasized that it was no more than a guess—even if Putin doesn’t think that U.S.-Russia negotiations will, in the end, fully satisfy Russia’s security concerns, “he may be willing to continue, to see if he can’t lay the groundwork for even partial solutions, and to see what advantages may appear along the way.” He pointed out that the Russian side has not received anything like a positive answer to its maximalist demands yet speaks of further diplomatic contacts. “If it was as simple as getting a ‘no,’ ” Suchkov said, “they would have ended all these conversations in Geneva, and that would have been that.”
When I checked in with Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs, and among the sharpest and most well-informed foreign-policy observers in Moscow, he made it sound as if the current escalatory cycle—Russian troop movements and ominous talk of “military-technical solutions” on the one hand, Western threats of sanctions and arms shipments to Ukraine on the other—was the natural, even obvious, prelude to a more substantive diplomatic track yet to come. “No one can say anything for sure,” Lukyanov told me. “But we should, at the very least, understand the genre in which all these moves are taking place: it looks like a classic diplomatic game of escalation, in which both sides, Russia included, demonstrate their adamance with rather dramatic gestures.”
In this paradigm, Lukyanov went on, Russia may continue to raise the “emotional and psychological pressure” but will ultimately seek to guarantee its security interests, at least as the Kremlin sees them, via some sort of documented agreement. “It’s become clear that when the diplomatic process is very measured, nothing happens at all,” Lukyanov said. “You need a shock effect, like in psychoanalysis, to knock the patient out of his comfort zone. In this regard, you could say that Russia has already achieved something.”
Lukyanov expanded on the idea in an interview with Vladimir Pozner, a revered stalwart of Russian television, which aired on Channel One, Russia’s main state-run network. Lukyanov did not fully dismiss the chance of military operations but said that he considered it the far less likely outcome. “If you go by the public rhetoric, it seems like there’s indeed nothing to talk about: our demands were presented, they were rejected, and that’s all,” Lukyanov said. “But it turns out that’s not all. And therein lies the purpose of the game—that is, the coming shift to the real conversation, a discussion about a new status quo.”
That conversation, if it indeed happens, will be technical, boring, and drawn-out, with plenty of opportunities for both Washington and Moscow to project victory, or at least an air of satisfaction that their core interests have been respected. As Trenin imagined, in such a case—the “logical” scenario, as he put it—the Kremlin could proclaim “we had to break the impasse” and that “we managed to get something out of it.”
One obvious topic on which the two sides may be able to agree is limiting the deployment of intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Ivan Timofeev, a director of programs at the Russian International Affairs Council, suggested that a potential agreement could include the withdrawal of some NATO military infrastructure in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe (among Russia’s chief priorities) and impose limits on Russian military exercises in that same space (of no less worry for Western capitals). These issues are covered by dormant treaties that could be resurfaced were Russia to agree to discuss them separately from its main strategic demand.
That, unsurprisingly, is the trickiest point: the future of NATO and the question of Ukrainian membership. Neither Washington nor Kyiv is ready to forswear Ukraine’s sovereign right to choose its alliances. Timofeev suggested that Russia could be content with a formulation in which Ukraine retains that freedom in theory but in practice states its neutrality, meaning that it agrees not to exercise that freedom in the near future. “History has seen such compromises before,” he said. “In the Cold War, the international community managed to negotiate the neutrality of Austria and Finland.” But why should Kyiv go for such a thing? And would Washington ask it to?
On Pozner’s show, Lukyanov floated another idea that has taken on some traction in Moscow. He brought up the Minsk agreements, a series of peace accords signed in 2014 and 2015; as written, they would grant wide autonomy to the would-be separatist regions in Ukraine’s east, providing an effective veto over strategic questions of the country’s foreign policy. That, in turn, could present a de-facto mechanism of preventing Ukraine’s membership in NATO. “If Ukrainian politics will be governed by the Minsk agreements, then a certain safety latch appears for Russia,” Lukyanov said. The problem is that Ukraine is equally aware of this and is understandably wary of implementing an agreement that it sees as hobbling its sovereignty for years to come.
Of course, the very notion of a negotiated solution may prove delusional. On January 30th, the New York Times published a story on the coterie of paranoid and bellicose security officials who seem to have Putin’s ear these days: “A sign of the harder-line turn that the Kremlin is taking as it escalates its fight with perceived enemies at home and abroad.” Trenin, in his interview, allowed for the possibility of such a turn solidifying into a formal shift in policy: “What if we are distancing ourselves from the period in which the main goal was to integrate into the world at large?”
Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and the research director of the Russia Studies Program at the think tank C.N.A., recently published an article that made a detailed and forceful case for the probability of a Russian invasion. “A large war in Europe is likely in the coming weeks,” he wrote. “It seems plausible that Russian forces would seize Ukraine’s eastern regions, as well as the southern port city of Odessa, and encircle Kyiv.”
When I spoke with Kofman, he said that anyone viewing the diplomatic track with optimism is “trying to find something that isn’t there.” He said, of Russia’s list of demands, “Sometimes I wonder if they’re not just trolling us, counting on getting an open refusal.”As of late January, Russia had assembled roughly a hundred and thirty thousand troops along the border with Ukraine, including as many as fifteen battalion tactical groups from the Eastern Military District, which is thousands of miles away. On January 28th, Reuters reported that Russian forces brought stores of blood and other medical supplies to the border. “The military deployment looks very real,” Kofman said. “If it’s a bluff, it’s an incredibly convincing one.”
But, even if Russia does move to again marshal military force against Ukraine, it’s not clear what form it will take; it may well involve something slippery and hard to discern. “People assume we will see a World War Two-style land war, but I imagine that, if and when Russia does do something, it’s bound to be much more limited, unexpected, cunning, and high-tech,” Liik said.
An aggressive campaign of cyberattacks could follow; so, too, could an ostensibly covert but full-throttled effort to topple the Zelensky administration and usher into power a pro-Russian government. The Kremlin may move to recognize the would-be breakaway republics in Ukraine’s east, an idea being floated by some Russian parliamentarians, and perhaps even incorporate them into Russia. Beyond that, Russia could try to put more direct pressure on the U.S., whether by teaming up with China or Iran, or by sending submarines armed with hypersonic nuclear-armed missiles to waters near the U.S. coastline.
For now, efforts to make sense of the likelihood of war are likely to induce whiplash. Depending on the hour, I’m convinced that war is implausible—or I’m certain it’s inevitable. I could almost sympathize with the anonymous source close to the Kremlin who spoke last week to Meduza, an independent news site. “In December, I was convinced that there wouldn’t be a war,” the source said. “Last week, I considered this a likely scenario. This week it’s rather unlikely.” Perhaps the only thing that’s certain is that war would be an outright disaster—not just for Ukraine but for Russia, too—yet, maddeningly, that doesn’t make it impossible.
