The Russian invasion of Ukraine will soon be a year old. The possibility of peace talks at the moment seems unrealistic, but all wars end sooner or later.
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland shared her thoughts on the outcome of the year-long war and the outlook for that conflict during a conference at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“The past never dies”
Victoria Nuland, who has spent much of her diplomatic career in Russia, shared her recollection of how she felt realizing that “Putin could launch a major new attack on Ukraine as early as November 2021”.
Discussion of the development of the war in Ukraine at the Carnegie Endowment
“We already then started to declassify the intelligence and share it with allies and partners, warning that the Ukrainians should start preparing… Personally, I had a lot of time to think about it. I must say that ‘at first, I really hoped the intelligence was wrong,” Nuland admitted.
According to the Under Secretary of State, “when Putin deployed about 100 battalion battle groups to Ukraine’s borders,” the United States spent the entire month of January 2022 trying to convince Moscow not to use to military force.
“When the Cold War ended, we all hoped that all countries would move towards democracy. We hoped that China, if we brought it into the global system, would become more open. We were convinced that we would transform the G7 into a G8. That if we bring Russia and NATO closer, it will create a wider area of ​​peace. And that every nation will be able to live with sovereignty and dignity. And then a guy like Vladimir Putin comes along who wants to go back and recreate the Soviet Union! Nuland said.
“We knew this would be a tragedy not only for Ukraine. Those of us who grew up hoping for a better Russia and feel sympathy for the Russian people, it hurts to see Putin do this. cruel choice. As a result, the future of a whole generation of Russians will be very limited, because there will be no more investment in their education, infrastructure, technology and promotion, and everything will go to the imperial war of Putin and his perception of fame.
“History does not repeat itself, it rhymes”
There were many historical parallels. Nuland thinks that “the world seems to have gone back centuries, when rulers with imperial views decided what they could determine: what would bring glory to their country and what would be tolerated internationally; what is right and what is human.
However, it turned out that historical parallels exist not only for dictators, when “Ukrainians managed to repel Russian troops and defend Kiev.” “I don’t think Putin expected something like this, not to mention the reaction of all the other countries and their support for Ukraine,” she said.
According to the Undersecretary of State, the Russian armed forces have so far lost about 200,000 people: “All these mass graves, filtering Ukrainians, including children, sending them to Russia, to camps, attacks of long-range missiles on heating plants in the middle of winter – it was difficult to prepare for this and to foresee such a level of cruelty during the Second World War.
“The West has rallied, but there are countries in the world that have their own interests”
The “mourning” of the United States and Western countries, according to Nuland, was the reaction of some world leaders to Russian aggression.
“Many countries are deeply ambivalent about how to respond to this war,” Nuland said, recalling long-standing historical ties between India and Russia. “Their army, from the sixties, was armed by the Soviet Union, then by Russia”, explained Victoria Nuland, “So when you say to the Indians, ‘don’t deal with them in the arms trade any more’, they ask: “what should we do?”.
There are also positive examples: for example, according to Nuland, “Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Russia in OPEC+ continues to demonstrate that in the global oil sector, they understand that doing business with Vladimir Putin involves more risks than rewards”.
“When it comes to Israel, unfortunately, their leaders continue to believe they have a ‘special relationship with Putin’, even though no one knows better than the Israelis what happens when war crimes go unaddressed,” he said. said Nuland.
“The bottom line is that the Europeans have taken unprecedented steps to support Ukraine,” Nuland said.
According to Victoria Nuland, “the whole conflict could end tomorrow if Putin stops fighting and leaves Ukraine”. But “we have to understand that as long as Putin or someone like him is in power, war will come back.”
“The threat of escalation has always been with this conflict,” Nuland said. – Whenever you think you are in a conventional war, Putin escalates the situation. Partly it will get worse, because it is like that: it does not care about human life – both the life of its citizens and the life of Ukrainians. Don’t expect Putin to give up the escalation. The question is, will he succeed?
How will the war end?
US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland described the conditions necessary for the end of the war: “It must end in a strategic defeat for Putin. It should end with Putin not being able to… return to Ukraine, not in six months, not in six years. It should end with an autocrat of enormous imperial ambitions from the 18th or 19th century being told a resounding “no” not only by the country he has invaded, but by the entire civilized world. Because if we don’t, every other dictator on this planet will try to do the same, undermining the order that has largely ensured global security and prosperity for the past few decades.”
Victoria Nuland
“We are talking about Ukraine, but at the same time we are talking about the world world order, the world in which the United States has ruled and which has been guarded for all these years. We are talking about the Charter of the United Nations. These are the values ​​we hold dear,” Nuland said.
