PUTIN’S SECOND WAR, after brutally crushing Chechnya in 2000, was with Georgia, which broke out between 7-12 August 2008. The fighting stopped almost as suddenly as it started. Unlike the current Ukraine war, Russian forces could claim, at least to some extent, that they were responding to a Georgian attack.
After unwisely allowing themselves to be provoked, on 7 August that year, Georgian forces crossed into Russian held territory with heavy weapons, egged on by their then pro-western leader Mikheil Saakashvili. What followed was a swift Russian counter-attack which turned into a rout of the Georgians, quite unlike the fierce and brave resistance Ukraine’s defenders are showing.
Russian forces were poised near Tbilisi ready to lay siege. Fearing the inevitable bloodbath, on 12 August, French President Nicolas Sarkozy managed to secure a ceasefire after a phone call with Putin, and the basic contours of a peace deal were ironed out over the next few days.
The Georgia conclusion
The gist of this was that Russian forces agreed to return to their initial positions, prisoners were exchanged and Georgia agreed that they would renounce the use of force to resolve the status of Russian backed secessionist areas in Georgia.
In reality, these Russian enclaves became even more militarised with a Russian Army presence. Georgia has lost them for the foreseeable future.
Interestingly, Putin did not formally demand that Georgia remove its application to join NATO or the EU as part of the ceasefire. In practice, however, Georgia’s application for full membership of both entities was put on ‘ice’ by western states, especially as it was perceived that Saakashvili had acted so rashly.
However, today Georgia is clearly a western-oriented country and has a strong partnership association with NATO, including joint military training, just as Ukraine has. There is also an association agreement with the EU and more liberal visa rules. It seems very unlikely that the Ukraine war will end with this outcome. Macron has spoken with Putin several times and has little to show for it.
Putin’s folly in Ukraine
In contrast to the Georgian war, the invasion of Ukraine is a more foolish and open-ended military operation, that has gone horribly wrong for Putin. No quick victory or rout is obvious. Putin, therefore, needs a tangible military victory before he can agree to any ceasefire, and he may also have minimal geographic objectives, notably the port of Odessa or seizing as much of the coast as he can, which would allow him to economically strangle Ukraine.
Some analysts believe that Putin has therefore resigned himself to a slow bloody war of attrition that could go on for months. The 1999-2000 Russian siege of Grozny lasted four months while the Russian backed siege of Aleppo extended from mid-summer to December 2016. Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa may be battlegrounds for weeks if not months more.
Moreover, why would Putin settle for a deal that merely brings him back to the position he had before the invasion – annexation of the Crimea and ‘controlling’ the puppet enclaves of the Donbas? There is no way he will be as ‘generous’ as he was with Georgia in 2008.
However, if the Ukrainians manage to hold on militarily, or possibly with greater western support if they inflict significant reversals on Putin’s forces, then whoever leads Russia by the autumn may be simply forced to accept a Georgia style ceasefire which marks a return to something like the status quo before the invasion.
This is one reason why military aid for Ukraine is so important. Negotiation with Putin from a position of military weakness or strength will have a direct relationship upon what sort of Ukraine emerges.
Finlandisation as the endgame?
Finland ended up signing treaties with Stalin in 1947 and 1948 after fighting two wars against the Soviet Union. The first “winter war”, between November 1939 to March 1940, occurred when Stalin invaded Finland, just like how Putin has invaded Ukraine.
In an echo of today, the Finns fought heroically and the Red Army disastrously, but in the end, they were forced to sue for peace. This war was continued when Nazi Germany invaded Russia in 1941. By 1944 the Finns realised they were on the losing side of World War II and they negotiated a separate armistice.
This political and psychological context here is quite different from Ukraine today.
Finland was on the losing side of a much wider war, not just once but twice. Notwithstanding this, Stalin was prepared to be relatively generous probably because he was preoccupied with crushing freedom in Poland, East Germany and the rest of what became the Warsaw Pact.
So Finland was not re-annexed (unlike the Baltic states) nor were Finnish Communists empowered to simply take over. Finland was allowed to keep her democratic institutions and free and fair elections. Finland was also allowed to continue to trade with the west, although this was hedged.
Finland only became a full member of the European Free Trade Area in 1986, and joining the EEC was out of the question. Moreover, Finland had to pay enormous war reparations, turning a sector of the Finnish economy into serving the Russians. They also had to accept a large Russian military base on their territory, which was only removed in 1956.
Finland was therefore obliged to be a neutral state, not by choice, but through a mixture of formal written guarantees but also many informal ‘understandings’ between Russian leaders and a handful of senior Finnish politicians.
While Finland could remain a free western-oriented country they had to do nothing as regards military and foreign policy that might threaten the USSR, or even displease it. That meant often returning Russian dissidents back to the KGB. It also meant not condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the systematic human rights violations.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, premier of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev had perfected the art of not so subtly interfering in Finnish politics to signal his displeasure at the make-up of Finnish coalition governments: some Finnish parties had to informally agree to not join a government regardless of their votes, lest it offend the Russians. The Soviet Politburo repeatedly signalled that they expected the key personality of Urho Kekkonen to remain President of Finland as long as possible, as he was ‘their man’ whom they could do business with. He dominated Finnish politics for almost two decades.
After 1991 Finland dumped their servile relationship with Russia and while remaining non-aligned they have joined the EU and have become very close to NATO without actually joining it, yet.
All Finns understood these horrible compromises as necessary given their history and as part of a wider Cold War. People today who advocate historic Finnish style neutrality as a quick fix for the Ukraine war would do well to understand that something as subtle or consensual is very unlikely to work today.
For a start, Putin will want guarantees that he can control domestic Ukrainian politics with a lot more certainty. If free and fair Ukrainian elections are permitted, these will likely produce independent-minded governments that will sooner or later, simply not play along.
If Ukraine is allowed to keep its trade and association agreements with the EU this will further undercut Putin’s attempt to control the country.
Ukraine as a vassal state
So while what Putin wants might be called ‘Finlandisation’ to make it sound more acceptable to western audiences, it probably will be much more invidious, and closer to making Ukraine a vassal state like Belarus.
In this scenario, it is possible that NATO membership may be taken off the table by the Ukrainians themselves to placate Russian demands. In fact, many NATO states would be relieved with that outcome and they could place pressure on the Ukrainians to accept such a condition.
Remember, NATO has actually adopted a policy of not giving Ukraine full membership and instead has offered them and other states a vaguer association and cooperation template. The possible future membership of NATO by Ukraine is thus quite a bit of a red herring dangled by Putin’s western apologists, experts and academics who should know better.
Moreover, the neutrality of Ukraine will not solve the political problems that Putin now has; Ukrainians want to be a free and democratic pro-western state with minimal influence from what is revealed to be a despotic Russian regime. They all hate Putin and many hate Russia. They will resist whatever way they can.
Putin can’t afford to give them a genuine Finland style deal and the Ukrainians do not psychologically seem near to accepting the defeat that would require them to accept it.
If their cities fall, a large scale insurgency will continue and this is a serious military threat for the Russians who cannot control a country the size of Ukraine. In contrast to the Finns in 1946, Ukrainians don’t accept they are beaten yet, and they know they are not on the wrong side of history.
Stumbling towards a partition style conflict-like Kashmir?
One other way the Ukraine war may end is with a de facto military partition that produces two distinct Ukraines: a western, democratic one and an eastern entity, Russian backed and controlled.
This has similarities with how the tragic case of Kashmir played out after 1947. Pakistan retains control of a large segment and India a much larger portion of the territory (China is also involved but we can ignore this detail). Both India and Pakistan have never agreed an official demarcation line and the border is a UN established line of control after the 1965 war.
A large Muslim population inside Indian Kashmir refuses to accept Indian sovereignty and an insurgency, supported by Pakistan, continues to unfold seemingly without end. Indians and Kashmiris are trapped in a vicious and brutal guerrilla war that neither side can apparently win but both cannot afford to lose.
This violence and rivalry continue with the shadow of Indian and Pakistan nuclear weapons threatening each other and the possibility at any time that a much bigger conventional war over Kashmir could break out between the two.
If this is Ukraine’s future, it suggests that conflict, fighting and instability will be endemic there for many years and possibly decades to come. This violence would forge long-lasting patterns of animosity between Europe and the Russian Federation.
There would be no going back to the relationship before February 2022. Indeed for the next decades, Russia may never return to the wider western economy as anything other than an increasingly marginal supplier of energy commodities which over the long term will be reduced in preference for other suppliers and sources of energy.
A Cold War every bit as intense and heavily armed is as conceivable as the one that prevailed between 1948 and 1990.
Importantly, NATO may well call Putin’s bluff on nuclear threats as Pakistan has repeatedly been able to do in Kashmir, by supporting with arms a large and long-term insurgency inside Ukraine.
Or NATO and the EU may offer full membership to the ‘rump’ western Ukraine and provide them with the military means to counter balance the Russian backed occupied zone. This would look something like the stand-off between South and North Korea and could be as long-lasting.
Such an outcome might actually be preferable for many Ukrainians compared to the much touted Finlandisation, which is another reason why that solution may not work.
Yet it would scarcely be sensible for Putin to agree to such a partition. A rump western Ukraine would forever be a thorn in the side of the Russian occupied or annexed part, in the same way, that rivalry between East and West Germany was intense and at times pathological. It was the cornerstone of the Cold War. Equally, the possibility for insurgency and revanchist wars following the Kashmir playbook would be entirely foreseeable, meaning that it would be unlikely to be perceived as a stable outcome for Russia.
However, it may be what the military situation on the ground produces: a bloody stalemate whereby Russia can seize some cities in the east and south of Ukraine, but only after making them rubble, yet the Russian military may not be able to seize or hold the entire country. A rump ‘free’ Western Ukraine would thus emerge by military default and a Kashmir type conflict would be set in stone.
None of these analogies is a perfect model to understand where the Ukraine conflict may end up. It is quite possible that what will emerge is some mixture of all three scenarios with entirely novel elements. However, taken together they do reveal some issues which will be central whenever the fighting abates, either because of stalemate, exhaustion, or defeat by one or both parties.
Notably, the analyses here suggests that the fighting is more likely to continue and be long-lasting rather than simply ending within days and weeks. Most of the scenarios involve a semi-autonomous and possibly independent Ukraine continuing to exist, although Finlandisation may be a code word for actually a much tougher imposed vassalage.
However, a genuinely autonomous but possibly partitioned Ukrainian state could easily continue to associate with NATO and the EU, and possibly even join.
Putin may be delusional enough to think his military can crush all opposition and simply impose a solution but this seems unlikely, at least for now. Indeed the longer he opts for a war of attrition the more likely he is to end up with a Kashmir type partition and insurgency. And if tries to impose a Finland style neutralisation his dilemma is this would literally leave Ukraine free of his influence and the Ukrainians are unlikely to play along as the Finns did.
To settle for a return to the status quo, Georgia style, would be the best humanitarian outcome and the best for Ukraine right now, but for both those reasons, Putin is unlikely to agree to it.
Worryingly for the Ukrainians, given the seeming failure of Polish attempts to transfer fighter jets or the recent comments by the German chancellor that there is no military solution, Putin may be correct in assuming that western countries will not intervene with enough military support to make any Ukrainian military resistance credible enough to force him into negotiations.
Yet one of the ironies of choosing the path of war is that leaders who do so are at the mercy of whatever victories their generals can bring them but also whatever the opposition is willing to suffer.
For Ukrainians, this has been already too much but one of the lessons of modern conflicts has been the longevity and intractability of wars. There will then be no neat, easy or clear-cut endgame. The best we might hope for is that all the parties to the conflict stumble around the least worst options.
Dr Brendan Flynn is head of discipline for Politics and an assistant professor/lecturer at the School of Political Science and Sociology, NUI Galway. He researches maritime security and defence and security studies more broadly, as well as environmental and security issues concerning climate and energy. An edited version of this article appears on NUI Galway’s Cois Coiribe platform for academic opinions, analysis and insights
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