I’m a conflict mediator. This is our way out of the Ukraine crisis
The current western narrative on the Ukraine crisis is that Russia is a machiavellian power with an expansionist agenda. That view is shaping our response: we are matching Vladimir Putin’s aggression, meeting strength with strength and threats with threats. But what if we tried to get inside the mind of the enemy, and ask what was motivating the aggression? By doing so, could we break this cycle – and offer Putin a way out, too?
When the USSR deployed ballistic missiles to Cuba in the 1960s, their proximity to the US nearly unleashed a third world war. Sitting in Moscow today, does Putin see being encircled by Nato as an equivalent threat? After all, one of his core demands is that Nato curbs its expansion close to the Russian border, and that Ukraine must not join. Russia claims that the US repeatedly told Soviet leaders it would incorporate Russia into a cooperative European security framework. In practice, Nato emerged as a US-dominated security frame with about 75,000 US troops still on European soil. Great powers always treat with suspicion and hostility the presence of rival great powers on their borders.
Putin was always bitter about the collapse of the Soviet Union. He bided his time, and in 2014 Russia seized Crimea and sent troops into Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking
Donbas region to support the separatist movement.
Russia today is no benign liberal democracy and President Putin has an intelligence mindset, playing poker, not chess. He is prepared to threaten war, create chaos and spread misinformation to push back Nato from Russia’s borders. Using coercive diplomacy, he has amassed more than 130,000 troops on the eastern border of Ukraine, a continued threat to its sovereignty.
Yet however provocative Russia’s behaviour, western governments have a responsibility not to escalate the threat of war. The consequences of a direct US-Russian confrontation in Ukraine would be catastrophic on all sides. A full-scale conventional war could escalate into nuclear war. Even a limited war would create a ruinous global economic crisis that could destroy for the foreseeable future any chance of serious action against climate change.
I have worked in conflict resolution for the past 20 years and seen the dangers of stumbling into wars, unable to stop or turn back. Selling weapons to a country may look like a principled act in support of an ally but it usually takes them deeper and deeper into the quagmire of conflict. The US and the UK have instigated and been involved in four failed wars this century, but we