Why threatening Putin with sanctions over Ukraine won’t be enough

WASHINGTON — When Klaus Fuchs, the German physicist and Soviet spy who stole information about the Manhattan Project, died in East Germany in 1988, no high Soviet official attended his funeral. But a 35-year-old KGB agent stationed in Dresden did: Vladimir Putin. In 1990, after East Germany lurched out of the Soviet orbit, Putin drove home to a comparatively backward

Russia with a trophy of socialist achievement strapped to the roof of his car: a washing machine.

Putin is a coarse fabric woven of humiliations and grudges, with a common thread: Loathing of NATO is the distillation of his smoldering fury about Russia’s, and hence his, diminishment. When President Joe Biden speaks of Putin’s security “concerns,” Biden adopts Putin’s cynical vocabulary, thereby giving a patina of normal geopolitics to what actually is more radical and sinister — the aggressive cultural illiberalism and wounded national vanity that fuel Putin’s assault on Europe’s norms and security architecture.

It has been well said that the most important event in Russian politics in this century happened outside Russia: Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004-05, which expressed a broad revulsion against Russia and yearning for a Western orientation. Hence the audacity of Putin’s claims that Russians and the 44 million Ukrainians are “one people.” Rhetoric that flaunts the speaker’s contempt for reality — last May, Putin said the Soviet Union fought Hitler “alone” — can be a precursor of audacious actions to violently revise reality.

In 1994, Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine yielded the 1,900 nuclear weapons on its territory, and Russia agreed to “respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine” and to “refrain from the threat or use of force” against it. This agreement was shredded in 2014, a time when Ukrainian demonstrations advocated a substantial trade agreement with the European Union. Putin annexed Crimea and launched the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 14,000 people.

Two years ago, Lilia Shevtsova, the author of “Putin’s Russia,” wrote “Russia’s Ukraine Obsession” for the Journal of Democracy. She argued that Ukraine’s pivot toward Europe, and away from Russia’s attempt to reduce Ukraine to the status of “an ersatz state,” poses “civilizational challenges.”

“The Kremlin’s actions in and propaganda about Ukraine have been aimed, in part, at stamping out the very idea of European values.” And at warning Russians about “the price of showing insubordination.”

Therefore, Shevtsova wrote, Putin does not want a facesaving de-escalation. He wants to prevent a Westernized Ukraine from becoming “a dangerous model for emulation,” a demonstration that “a society that has experienced the same history of Sovietization as Russia is capable of overcoming this legacy and becoming a rule-of-law state.” Unfortunately, “Russia’s determination to make Ukraine ungovernable often seems stronger than Europe’s commitment to helping Ukraine to move forward along its chosen proEuropean trajectory.”

Abandoning Ukraine to Putin, she wrote, would be “a deeply embarrassing defeat for the liberal democracies.” Of which there are fewer than there once were.

Recourse to sanctions has become the default setting for U.S. policy, and a substitute for effective policies. Writing in the Financial Times, Megan Greene of Harvard’s Kennedy School says the U.S. government’s tabulation is that the use of sanctions has increased 933 percent between 2000-21. “Russia,” she says, “is already heavily sanctioned,” with no discernible improving effect on Russia’s behavior regarding Ukraine, cyberattacks, the assassination of Putin’s opponents abroad, or domestic civil liberties.

Russia is not just a “gas station masquerading as a country” (John McCain) and not just “sitting on top of an economy that has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else” (Biden). Russia also has ambitions, neuroses and no compunction about using war — and disruptions and subversions that blur the distinction between peace and war — to advance its ambitions and assuage its neuroses.

At a nearly four-hour news conference last month, Putin seemed to object even to missile-interceptor systems, which are definitionally defensive, in Poland and Romania, both NATO members. His multiplying demands amount to control of Ukraine’s foreign policy. And the neutering of NATO: He demands an end to NATO “military activity” in Eastern Europe, including in member states such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The E.U. should help hasten Ukraine’s compliance with criteria for membership, and NATO should move significant military assets closer to Ukraine. The United States and NATO, says Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have an “unwavering commitment … to Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says that although Ukraine is not a member, it “is a partner, a highly valued partner.” Prove it.

George Will’s email address is [email protected].