Any territorial concessions by Ukraine in a peace agreement with Russia will reward crimes and aggression. They will encourage, not end, Russia’s attacks on countries in its neighbourhood and elsewhere in Europe.
Fallacy
The belief that Russia and Ukraine need to strike a deal (see preceding chapter) is frequently accompanied by the belief that a settlement has to include some Ukrainian territory being conceded to Russia, because Russia won’t settle for an outcome that does not include territorial gains. In this view, Crimea is often presented as the least problematic potential concession for Ukraine: supposedly a post-Soviet ‘grey area’ in terms of recognized borders.
Analysis
Ukraine’s 1991 borders have more than once been recognized by both Ukraine and Russia in international and bilateral agreements. Advocates of territorial concession therefore need to explain what other problems are supposed to be solved by rewarding Russia for its aggression. A territorial giveaway might be defended by some as a price worth paying for a lasting end to Russia’s efforts to destabilize its neighbourhood and create a 21st-century sphere of Russian domination. It is more likely to achieve precisely the opposite: emboldening Russia to sustain an expansionist strategy.
Russia under Vladimir Putin’s leadership has spent two decades frequently and systematically attacking the independence and sovereignty of many of its neighbours. Against this background, it is implausible to imagine that Putin would accept Ukrainian territorial concessions with relief, reflect on his good fortune, and resolve never again to gamble his country’s future on disastrous military adventures. Territorial concessions will, on the contrary, give a firm basis on which Putin and/or future leaders in the Moscow Kremlin can claim success for a strategy of weakening and destabilizing the neighbourhood. Aspiring future Russian leaders will not choose a sober and repentant path of good-neighbourliness. They will seek to garner domestic public support with similar ‘make Russia great again’ manifestos.
But isn’t Crimea a special case? Many well-intentioned advocates of an urgent negotiated peace see Crimea as somehow different. This view rests on various arguments: that Crimea is ‘more historically Russian’ (a view which ignores the Crimean Tatar perspective, and the centuries of history that preceded the Russian footprint on the peninsula); that its population is ‘predominantly Russia-leaning’ (although the last credible opinion poll before Russia’s 2014 annexation showed 67 per cent of respondents preferred Crimea to remain Ukrainian); and that its transfer in 1954 from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet republic was an anomalous endo-Soviet ‘mistake’, making it a grey area in the context of post-Soviet border recognition. As a result, Ukraine can (or ought to) see Crimea as a more dispensable concession.
These arguments dangerously fail to address a fundamental point: a Crimea concession would be, as much as any other territorial transfer, a change to recognized 1991 borders, and a reward to Russia for its aggression. It would therefore not only fail to deter the Russian regime’s campaigns to steal the territory and sovereignty of its neighbours. It would confer legitimacy on them.
But the crowning unwisdom in seeing Crimea as some sort of lower-cost consolation offering to Putin is a failure simply to look at the map. Crimea provides a geographical and logistical springboard from which Russia would with high likelihood launch future attacks on Ukraine, as well as further efforts to disrupt and destabilize the wider region, and hold to ransom the peaceful conduct of commercial navigation in the Black Sea. Nor would leaving the status of Crimea on ice for a few years make the issue easier to handle in future. Crimea would not remain frozen in time. It is much more likely that continuing Russian occupation would accelerate Moscow’s efforts to militarize and Russify the peninsula.
An adage well used in several Slavic languages describes a situation where conflicting demands can be reconciled as one where ‘the wolves are sated, but the sheep remain whole’. Territorial giveaways to Russia will achieve neither of these conditions.
The way forward
Absent an unlikely change in strategy and/or leadership in Moscow, a comprehensive defeat of Russia’s threat to countries in its neighbourhood needs to remain a key objective for the West. Rather than offer Russia inducement to negotiate, the effort to drive up the costs of its deluded strategy must be continued and enhanced. A Russia which ceases to export ‘Wagner values’ and recognizes the benefits of constructive and cooperative partnerships in the wider European region may seem a distant prospect now. But until there is a satisfactory minimum of shared vision on what will bring that region stability and success, a rush to negotiations is unlikely to end well.
In short, Crimea is not a ‘special case’. Russia must be defeated, not appeased. Deterrence and containment of Russia must remain key objectives for Western governments and their allies.
