The Russo-Ukrainian Talks and the Emptiness of the West's Promises of NATO Membership to Ukraine

Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko just published a very interesting essay in Foreign Affairs about the talks between Ukraine and Russia at the beginning of the war. There is still a lot of uncertainty about those negotiations, but I’m glad that, after 2 years, someone finally took a serious look at them. As I repeatedly deplored in the past, ever since the talks broke down, the Western media have largely ignored the issue. Despite the fact that multiple participants have come out and provided details about the talks, which suggested that the West had discouraged Ukraine from pursuing a negotiated settlement, there was no effort to find out exactly what happened. Every time new details on the talks emerged, critics of the West’s policy on Ukraine claimed they had failed because of the West, while the majority of commentators loudly proclaimed that there was nothing to see. According to them, there was no need to even look for evidence about what happened, since Eternal Russian Essence Theory already delivered the obvious answer, namely that Russia never negotiates in good faith and this case was no different. However, the fact that journalists apparently didn’t try to dig up more details suggests that some of them at least were afraid of what they might find if they did, a phenomenon I have dubbed “strategic incuriosity”.

This strategic incuriosity was all the more remarkable that, as I also noted before, it wasn’t particularly hard to come up with perfectly legitimate reasons why the West might not have looked very favorably upon those talks. In particular, because according to various testimonies by participants the draft treaty required major Western countries to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, it wouldn’t have been surprising if, being unwilling to provide them, the West had tried to discourage that notion. In fact, it may even have been that Putin expected the West to scuttle the deal for that reason and that it only went along with the Ukrainians because of that expectation, as it would allow him to blame the failure of the talks on the West. This possibility is consistent with the view that Russia didn’t negotiate in good faith, but it was never explored because, in their haste to declare any kind of negotiations with Russia pointless, it didn’t even occur to the hawks. In any case, without knowing more about the nature of the security guarantees that were part of the draft agreement and in particular about how they were formulated, it was impossible to determine whether this could explain why the West discouraged Ukraine from pursuing a negotiated solution with Russia, but since journalists were afraid of what they might find if they dug into the issue we were left to speculate about it.

Thanks to Charap and Radchenko, however, we now have a much better picture of what the security assurances in question consisted in. Had they been weak and vague, my hypothesis that Western countries discouraged the Ukrainians from pursuing this deal because they were unwilling to provide such guarantees would have been less plausible, but since the relevant passage of the draft agreement published in Foreign Affairs show they were actually strong and clear, I think that hypothesis looks pretty good in light of that evidence. Charap and Radchenko agree and, in their essay, interpret the failure of the talks as the combination of several factors, of which the West’s reluctance to provide the kind of security guarantees included in the draft agreement was but one. I find their account of the causes of that failure broadly convincing and, on the whole, their essay has made me more confident that the chances of a negotiated solution in the spring of 2022 were very slim. Too many conditions would have had to be met for it to work that were unlikely to be met. In fact, what I didn’t like in their essay is that, while it makes that pretty clear, they still imply that Ukraine and Russia were close to a deal at the time. Of course, that’s not what Charap and Radchenko’s critics took most issue with though, instead they thought it’s simply obvious that Russia wasn’t negotiating in good faith. But while this may be true, it’s certainly not obvious, they’re just saying that because they’re hysterical and for them it’s axiomatic that Russia is never negotiating in good faith.

Coming back to the issue of the West’s policy toward Ukraine, I think there is a good case to be made that it’s profoundly immoral, but it’s not the case that most critics of the West’s policy make. Indeed, most of them think that Western countries scuttled a deal between Ukraine and Russia in the spring of 2022 because they wanted to bleed Russia even if that meant sacrificing Ukraine in the process, but as I argued before I don’t think that hypothesis is very plausible in light of what the West has done since the beginning of the war and as we have just seen the new details on the talks between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022 actually make another hypothesis as to why the West discouraged Ukraine from pursuing this deal very plausible. In my view, since the talks left many important issues that would crucially affect the stability of post-war relations between Ukraine and Russia unaddressed and since it was doubtful they would be subsequently addressed in a way that would make the risk of another conflict low enough, Western countries were quite justified to discourage the Ukrainians from any notion that they would agree to provide the kind of security guarantees on which a deal hinged. It would be reckless of Western officials to agree to provide security guarantees when the probability that we’d eventually have to honor them was quite high and doing so would get us into a war against Russia. I simply don’t think that Ukraine’s sovereignty, which I don’t see as a core Western interest, is worth taking such a risk.

Even if you think that I’m wrong about that, the fact that Western officials discouraged their Ukrainian counterparts from pursuing a deal that would have rested on multilateral security guarantees suggests that, despite their apocalyptic rhetoric about what is at stake in Ukraine, they agree with me on that point. But since I also doubt that anyone in Washington, Berlin, Paris or London believes it’s likely that the war will end with a comprehensive political solution addressing every outstanding issue between Ukraine and Russia, unless Western officials have become dramatically less risk averse since the spring of 2022 (which I see no reason to believe), this in turn suggests that they have no intention of following through on their promise that Ukraine would join NATO after the war. Indeed, except for the scenario of a decisive Russian victory that would result in the annexation of the left bank of the Dnieper by Russia and leave only a rump Ukraine politically subordinated to Russia on the right bank (which I think is unlikely and in which Ukraine would obviously not be joining NATO), the only scenario in which the risk of a resumption of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine after a durable ceasefire has been signed would be sufficiently low is a decisive Ukrainian victory followed by regime change in Russia that results in the installation of a pro-West government, but while many pro-Ukrainian commentators fantasize about that, nobody serious believes anything of the sort is likely to happen.

What is happening is that Western governments agreed to promise that Ukraine would eventually join NATO, while refusing to give a precise timeline, as a compromise with Central and Eastern European governments (who unlike their Western counterparts genuinely want to bring Ukraine into NATO if only because they’d rather fight a war with Russia in Ukraine than on their territory), but the new details about their attitude toward the Russo-Ukrainian talks in the spring of 2022 suggest they don’t intend to follow through on that promise. Of course, that is the same thing that has been going on since 2008, when a compromise was reached at the NATO summit in Bucharest whereby members of the Alliance agreed not invite Ukraine to join NATO at this time but affirmed that it would eventually happen. Just as it made a war between Ukraine and Russia more likely then, this empty promise makes it harder to end it now, but NATO’s internal divisions and the fact that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, a large part of Western foreign policy elites persist in believing that Russia doesn’t really care about NATO expansion make that inevitable at the moment. It will probably take a lot more death and destruction before this changes.