What might Putin settle for in Ukraine?

Amid the smoke of the battlefield, the roar of artillery and the sufferings of the innocent, we are no nearer to answering the big questions. They centre around one conundrum: what are Putin’s war aims and can his generals deliver them?

The expectation is that Russia will launch an almighty offensive on the Donbass front. They will be facing 40,000-45,000 of Ukraine’s best troops who have had time to dig in. Their courage and determination are exemplary. Ready to defend civilisation with blood and lives, their fallen deserve to be numbered with the Spartans at Thermopylae: with heroes and paladins down the ages. It is to be hoped that in the future, the children of a free Ukraine will be able to salute the memory of those who died to defend that freedom.

Yet there may be limits. If the Russians are prepared to throw in everything they have, it would seem that they must prevail. But what if that turns out to be wrong? Suppose that their troops simply will not fight? After all, this was meant to be a blitzkrieg: a contest over in a week. It is now entering the third month. Putin himself cannot afford to fail. That would lead to a serious risk of lead-poisoning. So if this offensive went the way of the assault on Kyiv, bogged down in failure, what would he do? We can safely assume that he would not behave like a Spartan at Thermopylae. We would be more likely to see chemical weapons or tactical nuclear ones, plus everything possible to deprive the world economy of raw materials. None of these are pleasant thoughts. It may be that this year, Lent did not end at Easter.

Could there be an alternative? It is generally assumed that Putin had planned to end his campaign by 9 May, the day the Russians celebrate the anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic – i.e. Second World – War. He would then have had a triumph on a Roman consul’s scale. One would have thought that after 75 years of communism, the Russian populace would have learned not to believe a word that their government said, but that may place too much faith in their cynical common sense. Given his control over Russia’s domestic media, could Putin hope to get away with simply declaring peace and calling it a victory. It seems unlikely, but if the alternative is endless fighting plus equally prolonged economic dislocation, could there be a chance?

Might the Chinese be willing to mediate? I have heard opposite arguments from two well-respected China hands. One of them believes that President Xi will welcome anything that weakens American credibility. The other thinks that he might be more worried about economic disruption, because that could weaken his prestige at home.

Either sounds plausible. It may even be that the Chinese leader has still not made up his mind. So we are left trying to fathom the mental processes of two characters who are as powerful as they are inscrutable. But one point is clear. If the war goes on beyond 9 May, it is likely to continue for a long time to come, possibly involving an attempt to press on to Odessa and then Transnistria.

That would mean a second cold war. It would be prudence, not cowardice, to ensure that it did not become a hot one.

At this dangerous juncture, hindsight might seem futile and irrelevant, if not indeed deeply irritating. But that is not necessarily so. If we can work out what we did wrong in the past, we might be less likely to repeat the mistakes in the future.

In retrospect, there should have been a radical rethink of the West’s security posture after the end of the Cold War. Nato had been founded to keep the Germans down, the Americans in and the Russians out. By the early 1990s, those vital goals had been achieved. It was time for new, global tasks and in some cases, there were arguments for a cautious attempt to recruit the Russians as allies. They had every reason to be wary of Muslim fundamentalism. Equally, with the end of the Soviet empire in Europe, we had no strategic quarrel with the new Russia.

Moreover, and although there is no justification for Russian belligerence, it is possible to understand resentments about the expansion of Nato. Why should the West wish to perpetuate and expand an anti-Soviet military alliance, when the Soviet Union had abolished itself? Why should we not do more to build on peaceful co-existence and turn that Khrushchev-era phrase into a lasting peace?

There are those who believe that Putin might have been open to Western friendship during his early years. If so, we were wrong to allow that window to close – which it did, probably before 2010. By then, moves towards the growth of civil society and the entrenchment of a democratic political culture were losing ground. Russia was turning into a gangster-ocracy while Putin himself was increasingly behaving like a dissed teenager, and one with nothing to fear from the grown-ups (inasmuch as that term applied to the West).

Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea, Syria: the Russians did what they liked. Red lines came, and went. The West seemed to have other preoccupations. Societies that are mired in gender wars and culture wars do not seem much of a threat to those who still know what real war means.

So we can probably assume that Putin was unpleasantly surprised by the West’s initial response, just as many Westerners were pleasantly surprised. Then the cracks appeared, especially in Germany. For about two weeks, it had seemed that the Germans had fully joined Nato. But the threat to gas supplies brought them to heel. Staying warm turned out to be more important than self-respect. Nor do we know how Emmanuel Macron will behave. Will he be prepared to negotiate a common front with Nato, and even put pressure on the Germans, or will he continue to nourish fantasies about a French third way?

Everything is uncertain. The Russians must feel less under threat from Western diplomacy than they did a month ago.

They still have to deal with the little matter of the Ukrainian army. If a peace could be negotiated with minimal territorial concessions in the Donbass, this writer would applaud and treat taunts of “appeaser” with equanimity. But that seems unlikely. “Let slip the dogs of war”. It will be a long time before they return to their kennels.