Why do countries go to war? The costs, after all, are huge. Even the winner loses a slab of wealth and places many of its people in harm’s way. For the weaker party, the price ought to be prohibitive. If you are going to lose anyway, giving the other side what it wants without being defeated first is, from a coldly rational perspective, the correct policy.
So, let’s ask the question in the context of Ukraine. Why are two serious, advanced, literate societies on the brink of an all-out conflict?
From Kyiv’s perspective, the answer is straightforward. Anything, even a destructive war with mass casualties, is better than another Russian occupation. The Holodomor, the deliberate destruction of Ukrainian society through shootings, deportations, and targeted starvation, was the foundational event of modern Ukraine. Every family was touched by the horror. Eyewitness accounts from 1933 are almost unbearable to read. Here is a passage from Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands:
I could have picked even more harrowing images. Some Ukrainians were driven to killing and cannibalizing some children to keep the others alive. But I don’t want to upset you — I simply want to explain why, from a Ukrainian perspective, an endless guerrilla war might seem preferable to renewed Kremlin rule. And to the extent that the prospect of an open-ended insurrection might deter Vladimir Putin, that policy might be described as rational.
What, though, is in it for Russia? Why embark on a campaign that will further deplete the treasury? Why incur casualties, trigger economic sanctions, and risk years of unwinnable Afghanistan-style counterinsurgency?
What could possibly offset such costs? The sowing of division among Western allies, detaching Germany from the more hawkish Anglosphere states? That has already been achieved.
A reunification of the three Russias — Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus? Might Putin see himself as bringing together a people bonded by a shared church and common descent from the Rus? Perhaps. But what benefit is there in jamming together peoples who have come to see themselves as distinct? That great Russian patriot Alexander Solzhenitsyn reluctantly accepted that Stalin’s crimes had “permanently alienated Ukraine from the motherland.” Imagine if, using a similar line of reasoning to Putin’s, Germany were to invade Austria, or Spain Mexico. There is a reason the international order rests on a measure of self-determination.
From the perspective of the Russian people, the downsides clearly outweigh any gains. But the incentives of Putin do not align precisely with those of his country. Like all autocrats, he needs his subjects to be kept in a state of anxious, wounded patriotism. Nations that feel themselves to be under siege are keener on strongman rule than those enjoying peace and prosperity. Like so many dictators over the years, Putin seeks to deflect criticism by keeping a series of simmering conflicts going at all times — as Shakespeare put it, “to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.”
What most offends him about an independent Ukraine is not that he dreams of being, Romanov-like, “Sovereign of all of Rus: the Great, the Little, and the White.” No, what offends him is the fear of a kindred society on his borders, infecting Russians with notions of multiparty democracy and limited government.
It is not quite true that no two democracies have ever gone to war. There have been wars between Peru and Ecuador, Israel and Lebanon, and El Salvador and Honduras. The grisly conflicts that marked the dissolution of Yugoslavia were also between democracies. But such wars are rare. As a rule, democracy aligns the interests of rulers and ruled, and so makes aggressive war less likely.
That is why the rest of us cannot be indifferent to the fate of Ukraine. A world in which Ukrainian sovereignty is snuffed out is a world in which dictators are stronger and democrats are weaker. Such a world, as well as being more wretched, will be more warlike. The spread of representative government, and the emergence of more numerous, smaller, and more democratic states since the 1950s, has coincided with historically low levels of interstate war. We cannot give up on the one without jeopardizing the other.
That is why Ukraine is everyone’s business.
