Analysis | To End the War in Ukraine, Follow Estonia, Not France

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Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine without any provocation — and even before then — a certain type of politician and pundit has been demanding that Kyiv and the West “negotiate” with the Kremlin. There are no “military solutions” to this war, or to any conflict with Russia, only “diplomatic” ones, goes the narrative. Anyone who doesn’t get that, by implication, just doesn’t want “peace” badly enough.

Others counter that this line of reasoning flips reality on its head. If there’s anything “the West” has done in profusion since Putin came to power two decades ago — and kept trying to do since his invasion this year — it’s talk. Just think of the pilgrimages to Minsk in 2014-15 by the leaders of Germany and France, or the queue of Western leaders trying to talk Putin out of invading earlier this year.  

The problem is that Putin, during all these years, has been “negotiating” in bad faith. Since his attack this year, moreover, he has escalated and confused his war aims so recklessly that it’s not clear what Kyiv or its supporters would even negotiate about. 

If Putin had consistently said that he “only” wants Crimea and the Donbas, and is prepared to give something in return, a compromise — while still morally disgusting — would at least be imaginable. But Putin wants to extinguish Ukraine as a nation, and claims that his “special military operation” is necessary to “de-Nazify” the country. 

How do you take seats around a negotiating table when that table is littered with such phantasms? In return for a truce, would you allow Putin to commit just half a genocide, or one third? Would you bargain for one quarter of your national survival, in return for “peace”? And even then, how would you know Putin won’t be back a year later for the remainder? That, in effect, is what happened between the Minsk Agreements in 2014-15 and his full-bore assault on the whole of Ukraine this year.

As it happens, each of the two sides in the debate has an eloquent embodiment in a Western leader. Speaking for the let’s-negotiate faction is French President Emmanuel Macron. Articulating the counter argument is Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas.

Macron comes from a long Gaullist tradition, in which France generally sides with the “Anglo-Saxon” and wider West but simultaneously stays geopolitically aloof within it. This stance notably includes maintaining a separate — and rather accommodating — relationship with Moscow. 

This legacy colored Macron’s reactions even after Putin’s invasion this year. Of course, he’s as horrified by Russian atrocities in Ukraine as anybody. At the same time, he sees his own role as a mediator, and has opined publicly that “we must not humiliate Russia,” but “build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.” This month, while visiting US President Joe Biden, Macron even said that the West must “give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”

Macron is thereby buying into Putin’s cynical fiction that Russia is really just terrorizing Ukraine in self-defense against NATO. Implicitly, Macron is going along with Putin’s propaganda, which is based on inverting the roles of victim and perpetrator. If anybody has to give security guarantees in peace negotiations, it’s Russia; if anybody must receive them, it’s Ukraine.

Representing the stand-firm side is Kaja Kallas. She speaks from the perspective of the three Baltic republics — her own Estonia as well as Latvia and Lithuania — that were swallowed by the Soviet Union and in effect subjugated and colonized by Russian imperialism. Like many Balts, Poles, Finns and others, Kallas is convinced that if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine, he’ll keep coming for the rest of the region. You don’t stop a bully by appeasing him, she argues, but by showing him limits.

Her country’s experience as Moscow’s former colony and next-door neighbor has also given Kallas valuable insights into the Kremlin’s negotiating mentality. In her telling, Andrei Gromyko, a Soviet diplomat, summed it up best. 

First, the Russians demand the maximum — and indeed something that they didn’t even have before. In this case, that might include a withdrawal by NATO from central and eastern Europe. Second, they present ultimatums and make outrageous threats. Witness Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling. And third, they don’t give one inch in negotiations, because they assume that there’ll always be some people in the West (Macron?) who’ll offer them something. 

That way, summarizes Kallas, the Russians believe that they can end up with a third or even a half of something they didn’t have before. That could be a large portion of Ukraine, in this case.

Wars end either with the surrender of the losing side or in negotiations. In this case, surrender is unlikely. Ukraine can’t and won’t capitulate, because doing so would mean annihilation. Putin won’t concede defeat because that would spell his political (or even physical) demise.

One day, therefore, there must and will be negotiations; merely pointing that out is banal. The crux is: When, and on what terms? In pondering this question, the West will do well to heed Kaja Kallas, not Emmanuel Macron — and to keep making the Ukrainians as militarily strong as they can possibly be.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

Germany Just Averted Its Own Jan. 6, and Maybe the Fourth Reich: Andreas Kluth

A Year in the War That’s Killing Putin’s Lies: Leonid Bershidsky

• Stop Calling Everything You Disagree With ‘Anti-Democratic’: Tyler Cowen

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. A former editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist, he is author of “Hannibal and Me.”

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