A Pointed Response to Putin’s Provocations

Vladimir Putin’s bewildering aggression toward Ukraine took an ominous turn on Monday when he recognized the independence of two breakaway Ukrainian enclaves and ordered Russian troops into them as “peacekeepers.” The actions were accompanied by a new gush of concocted history depicting Ukraine as entirely a creation of Bolsheviks who were desperate to bolster their cause.

President Biden promptly condemned the actions and ordered sanctions against the two separatist regions. But he wisely desisted from firing the full fusillade of punitive measures he has threatened should Mr. Putin unleash the invasion he has prepared by massing Russian forces on all sides of Ukraine, including some in southern Belarus only about 140 miles from the capital, Kyiv. The possibility of deterring the threat of full-bore invasion through diplomacy simply cannot be abandoned so long as it has the slightest chance.

Though hawks like Senator Lindsey Graham are demanding crushing sanctions now, the potent punishment threatened by the United States and NATO — which is likely to include severely limiting financial transactions with major Russian banks; restricting the sale of technologies needed by Russian industries; closing the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline; and personal sanctions on Mr. Putin and his lieutenants — would become useless as a deterrent once ordered, making a full invasion more likely.

Recognizing the separatists in the “peoples’ republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk is not tantamount to that invasion. The separatists control only partial zones of the provinces they claim, and their enclaves have been under effective Russian control since the low-intensity conflict erupted in 2014.

Yet the spectacle Mr. Putin choreographed around his speech, including a meeting of his Security Council at which his lieutenants took turns making the argument to recognize the separatists, and the evacuation over the weekend of thousands of residents from the two regions in response to claimed bombardments by Ukraine, were actions clearly intended to convince Russians that they were being drawn into a conflict imposed on them by Ukrainian nationalists and manipulated by the United States and NATO.

Mr. Putin’s elaborate and grievance-filled riff on Soviet-Ukrainian history was another effort to persuade Russians that their nation has a legitimate historical claim to Ukraine, a theme that has become something of an obsession with the Russian president. In this installment, he argued that Ukraine was created as a separate republic by Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, to support the Bolshevik cause. That purportedly showed that Ukraine is somehow not a real state, though many a country has been formed in the breakup of empires, including, for example, the United States.

However flawed Mr. Putin’s history lesson, it added yet another degree of threat to the estimated 190,000 troops poised for action on and around Ukraine’s borders. And if Mr. Putin were to claim the whole of the oblasts, or provinces, of Donetsk and Luhansk as belonging to the “peoples’ republics,” and not just the enclaves now controlled by separatists, he would effectively strip a large and strategic area from Ukraine, including the important port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov.

Since starting the military buildup around Ukraine, Mr. Putin has issued a broad set of grievances and demands, effectively claiming that the United States and its allies reneged on a promise not to expand NATO to Russia’s borders, and demanding that the alliance stay out of Ukraine and pull back from Eastern Europe.

There are areas in which the West can reassure Mr. Putin, as the Biden administration has tried to do without surrendering core principles of the alliance or making decisions over the head of Ukraine. But nothing even remotely justifies invasion. Mr. Putin, however, has dismissed these efforts and has continued to ratchet up tensions.

That all this is happening in Europe in 2022, nearly eight decades since the end of World War II and more than three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is astounding. Though it was inevitable that a vast empire like the Soviet Union would not collapse without aftershocks, and these have regularly broken out in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Europe — including Russia’s annexation of Crimea — the notion of a vast seizure of territory in Europe via a full-scale war had seemed no longer possible.

Yet over his many years in the Kremlin, Mr. Putin seemed to nurture an ever stronger grievance over Russia’s, and his own, treatment in the West. And at some point last year, with his personal power effectively secured for the rest of his life, with the United States bitterly divided and seemingly tired of foreign wars, with NATO seemingly at odds, Mr. Putin evidently decided it was time to spread his rule over territories he convinced himself belonged to Russia.

What his calculations have evidently missed is that, whatever their history with Russia, Ukrainians have demonstrated no interest in getting under Moscow’s roof again. And the more Mr. Putin bullies them, the more strongly Ukrainians come to identify as Ukrainians.

Mr. Putin also seemed to overlook that Western democracies and the Western alliance, whatever their problems, remained capable of uniting against a common threat, and of joining together to threaten him and his country with debilitating economic and social damage. The White House has also done a good job of disclosing what its intelligence is gleaning about Russia’s tactics and intentions, repeatedly underscoring the cynicism of Russia’s claims.

The showdown is far from over. There are more feints Russia could make short of sending tanks across the border, including the sort of trouble it’s creating in eastern Ukraine or cyberattacks, like the one Western officials believe it recently made against Ukrainian banks.

Mr. Biden and his allies and partners have been right not to overreact, and to continuously offer Mr. Putin an exit strategy. High-level meetings have been scheduled; Mr. Biden has expressed readiness to meet Mr. Putin again; the leaders of Germany and France are in constant contact with him.

A wary patience at this point is not the same as appeasement, of which the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, accused the West. Whatever Mr. Putin’s end game, his moves for now seek to prod and provoke Ukraine and its Western friends into just the kind of overreaction the hawks advocate. There is no justification for Russia’s recognition of the two comical “peoples’ republics,” an action as illegal as it is outrageous, but the cataclysm that would befall Ukraine and Europe in the event of a full invasion warrants continuing to give diplomacy a chance.

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