[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. It's the last day of our winter membership drive. Thank you for your support. Fred Kaplan from Slate has been a guest on this show many times with lots of insight into world affairs, but I don't think I've ever been as excited to have him on the show as I am right now.

With a leap of imagination and a grasp of reality, Fred's new article actually describes a path to a negotiated settlement in the war in Ukraine, when most people are just talking about how evil Putin's invasion is, which of course it is, but now let's think the next thought. Fred Kaplan writes the column War Stories for Slate and is the author of many books, including his latest released in 2020, which, unfortunately, feels very relevant right now called The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War.

His new article on Slate is simply called How to End the War in Ukraine. Fred, thanks for coming on for this and thinking through a possible solution, not just documenting the battles. Do we have Fred?

Fred Kaplan: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Oh, there we go. Fred, can you hear me?

Fred Kaplan: Yes, I can hear you.

Brian Lehrer: Good. Now I can hear you. We'll get into your five-point peace plan. Just to establish your basic premise first from a real politics standpoint of what a settlement needs to look like, you wrote the deal has to give Putin something he can label as a victory, but at the same time, not reward Putin for the invasion. Those sound mutually exclusive. Are they not?

Fred Kaplan: Well they do sound mutually exclusive, but for example, let me give you one case. One condition would be that Zelenskyy says that Ukraine will not join NATO. There is a provision in the amended Ukrainian constitution which requires the government to seek NATO membership. You just get rid of that amendment. Now, is that a concession? Is that a victory?

Zelenskyy has said, just in the past few days that he's cooling down on his demand that they join NATO. He realizes that Ukraine wouldn't become a member of NATO anyway, so he's willing to compromise on that point. It's not really a defeat for Zelenskyy because Ukraine wouldn't join NATO probably for another decade anyway, whereas Putin could declare it a victory, but it's not really a victory because it's something that he could get without any huge loss to Ukraine.

Brian Lehrer: Because it was going to happen. Go ahead.

Fred Kaplan: My provision on that though is that Ukraine still be allowed to form some kinds of security arrangements with other countries. I think, right now, Putin is still at the point where he wants Ukraine to demilitarize and de-Nazify as he puts it. That's a no starter. It stays that way.

Brian Lehrer: Right. The hard part of any piece talks, I guess, is face-saving as you make concessions, especially in the world of power politics, and I imagine even more so for someone who is old school [unintelligible 00:03:27] like Putin, who's infamous for how much his sense of his own masculinity rides on how much he can look like the big dog. Something that lets him say that to the world, but doesn't actually give up anything for the Ukrainian people.

You've got a five-point plan for a negotiated peace in Ukraine. Here are the basics, folks. I'm going to run this down from Fred's article, and then we'll go into detail. Ukraine would agree not to join NATO, as you just said, and Ukraine would so recognize Crimea as part of Russian territory. Russia would have to withdraw all its troops for its part back to their home bases, back inside Russia.

Both sides would have to agree to something neither might want right now, a referendum supervised by the UN in the Eastern Ukrainian Donbas region that has the Russian separatists. The West would gradually lift sanctions as the final piece, as Russia complies with its part.

First of all, if that's a decent summary, let's go through the difficult proposals there, difficult to swallow because they do give Putin some things. Number one, we touched on already, Ukraine promises not to join NATO. If Ukraine had made that promise originally, there would probably be no war in the first place. It's that right that Ukraine is fighting for. Why give that to Putin now?

Fred Kaplan: Well, as I say, it's unclear about that. It's looking more and more like that, it was a pretext on Putin's part. He wants Ukraine, not only not to join NATO, but to essentially become a Russian vassal, not to have any foreign troops, any foreign weapons on Ukrainian soil, to become neutral, where neutral is defined as essentially doing whatever Russia wants them to do.

That, I need to reemphasize, is not a part of my peace proposal. I should also just put one premise here, and that is, I don't think any of this is going to happen until both sides are desperate to have the war end. I think, for at least the next couple of weeks. It's hard to believe that this war has only been going on for a couple of weeks. It feels like months. Putin's inclination when he's frustrated on a battlefield is just to turn up the pressure and just to start blowing things up randomly.

Look at Chechnya, the place was reduced to a wasteland, and I think he wouldn't mind reducing Ukraine to a wasteland. Already there is something like 2 million refugees from Ukraine. The question is, none of this would have any meaning at all unless both sides are willing to accept that continuing to fight is just going to make things worse. The worst part for Russia is that their military turns out to be not very good at fighting multi-pronged combined arms, military offensives.

They're getting hammered and slowed down by what would've been, in their books, a fairly primitive military force. Both sides have to be willing to accept some compromise, which I don't think Russia is at the moment.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Not yet. Negotiations always depend on how much power, how much leverage each side has. I guess, they both think, right now, that continuing the war is to their advantage. Your point number two in the peace plan, recognizes Crimea as part of Russia. It was Russia's invasion of an annexation of the Crimea section of Ukraine in 2014 that started this whole era there in the first place. It was an outrageous power grab by Putin then. Why give it to him on paper now?

Fred Kaplan: Let's look back at 2014. He moved in and annexed Crimea without firing a shot, with no armed resistance whatsoever. If that's all he was doing now, would Ukraine really go to this much trouble to hang on to Crimea? Would they have so many bombs going off, being subjected to so much shelling, 2 million refugees? I don't think so. The fact is, this sounds very coldhearted, but Nikita Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 as a gift for, I think, it was the 300th anniversary of Ukraine.

It didn't mean anything. They were both part of the Soviet Union back then. This means there was no independent Russia, independent Ukraine. They were both part of the Soviet Union. It was a very symbolic thing. Most people in Crimea consider themselves Russians, really. I'm just saying it's not worth it continuing to fight a big war. It's already there.

Brian Lehrer: It's already a fact, they already have Crimea.

Fred Kaplan: Ukraine is not going to grab it back at any-- that's just not going to happen.

Brian Lehrer: Related, and maybe this is the most complicated and interesting part, your proposed peace agreement for the Eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas that has Russian separatists and that Putin started this war by recognizing the so-called independence-self, you propose a referendum. Explain.

Fred Kaplan: Well, Donetsk and Luhansk districts of Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. This is what the war, since 2014, has been fought over. There are pro-Russia separatists backed by Russian military fighting against the Ukrainian military. Each district is roughly halfway divided between people who consider themselves Ukrainians and people who consider themselves Russians. 14,000 people have been killed in this war since 2014. This is not some little skirmish. It's the cause of much conflict and bitterness within Ukraine. My idea is to have a free and fair, if such a thing is possible, referendum. Who do you want to be a part of? Do you want to be an autonomous region of Ukraine or do you want to be part of Russia? Settle it that way.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that if they go with Russia, it's not a complete win for Russia. By having them be an autonomous region of Ukraine, Russia can influence Ukrainian politics, can even put up a veto to certain aspects of Ukrainian foreign policies, such as joining the European Union. It might actually be to Ukraine's long-term advantage to have those regions out of Russia.

Now, my other idea was that whoever wins this referendum, those districts become demilitarized zones between Russia and Ukraine. The fighting stops. There's no more fighting and, in fact, there's no more military deployments. It becomes a buffer between the two states.

Brian Lehrer: Is this proposal, in a way, just a very belated breakup of another country like others broke up after the fall of the Soviet empire 30 plus years ago? Czechoslovakia broke up into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. They didn't want to be one country anymore. Yugoslavia broke up into Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, et cetera. Those people didn't want to live with each other. Maybe this break up into smaller nationalisms and national identities isn't the worst thing in the world. Does the rationale go something like that?

Fred Kaplan: Yes, something like that. Look, in these kinds of situations, either a war goes on for a very long time and things continue to fester, or they break up. In our own civil war, the North unequivocally defeated the South in its civil war. However, the South you actually might say, 20 years later, with the defeat of reconstruction, might have won the war. I know people who think that the United States would have been better off, at least as long as slavery had been abolished, if the Union and the Confederacy had remained separate.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's a big if. I certainly know New Yorkers today who would say, "Oh, you know that new Texas secession movement, go. Good riddance." [crosstalk]

Fred Kaplan: Yes, let's let them.

Brian Lehrer: Then there would have to be some protections for those Ukrainians in the Donbas East who didn't want to go with Russia and who might be subject to internal genocide like the Bosnian Muslims were.

Fred Kaplan: Well, that's what I say. There would have to be demilitarization of that region. I'm not saying that any of this is easy or even likely. I'm not working for the State Department, and there might be a reason for that. I'm just saying these are the issues that would have to be resolved, one way or another, if this thing is going to end without the complete obliteration of Ukraine and without the complete decimation of the Russian military.

It might be a fantasy, but I'm saying, if this is going to end diplomatically, peacefully, without going to complete all-out destruction that really we've never seen for a long, long time,-

Brian Lehrer: It's happening before our eyes.

Fred Kaplan: -it has to address these issues. These are the issues that would have to be addressed. That's all I'm saying.

Brian Lehrer: We have just a few minutes left with Fred Kaplan, the Slate Magazine columnist, whose new article is called simply, How to End the War in Ukraine. I think your proposal was very interesting, but it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not a Ukrainian who would have to live with its terms. In the real world, there were real peace talks the last few days between Russia and Ukraine and they broke up with no agreement.

As we said earlier, negotiations take place in the context of power. I guess both sides are not ready for the type of peace accord you propose because each side thinks it will gain more leverage by continuing the war at this moment. To that point, before you go, one of the really interesting things in your article is your idea that the longer Putin keeps shelling civilians in Ukraine, the more deeply he will lose what even he sees as the ultimate global contest. What global contest is that?

Fred Kaplan: The global contest for power and influence in the world and for capturing markets and for, in the case of Putin's goals, exploiting fissures within the Western alliance and cutting off the United States from its TransAtlantic avenues so as to make Russia itself stronger. It's completely backfired in that regard. NATO is more cohesive than it's ever been. US leadership of Europe is more accepted than it's been in a long, long time.

I think it was Daily Kos had, in a headline, that Putin managed to kill off German pacifism and Swiss neutrality in one weekend. It's remarkable. Even in the private sector, where there's been a lot of investment of certain things in Russia, companies are pulling out, even when they're still making a profit because, to their shareholders, to public relations and so forth, it's becoming embarrassing to have any affiliation with Russia. This is going to read down to Putin's disfavor.

He has one-man control over Russian politics right now, but there are a lot of very wealthy Russians who have become wealthy owing to their association with Putin and now they're losing a lot of this wealth because of their association with Putin. The military, they cannot be happy with what's going on. The military has long been bitter toward Putin because he hangs around too much into their eyes with his old KGB pals. Intelligence agencies have more power than the military.

This may be fantasy or wishful thinking, but there's the recipe brewing here for some coup d'etat. I think the longer that Putin continues to alienate himself and isolate himself from the rest of the world, those factions within Russia who depend on having a connection with the rest of the world might be more likely to plot something.

Brian Lehrer: Fred Kaplan writes the War Stories column for Slate. His latest article, How to End the War in Ukraine. Fred, thank you so much.

Fred Kaplan: Sure. Thank you.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.