Vasily Kashin, the Director of the prestigious Higher School of Economics’ Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies, followed in the footsteps of fellow leading experts Dmitry Trenin and Ivan Timofeev by sharing a surprisingly candid take about their country. The aforementioned top experts respectively called for correcting foreign policy misperceptions, including about Ukraine, and prioritizing modernization reforms lest Russia be left far behind its peers if they’re further delayed.
Kashin took everything much further in his article for Russia In Global Affairs (RIGA), which Russian-based Irish journalist Brian McDonald described as “the closest thing Russia has to an establishment foreign policy journal”, titled “The Cast-Iron Prose of Reality”. He argued that the “Spirit of Anchorage”, which Putin’s close aide Yury Ushakov recently pretended to know nothing about despite it being coined by his fellow officials, is the best option for ending the Ukrainian Conflict.
RT’s Sergey Poletaev reminded readers that the formula is as follows: “If Trump forces Zelensky to abandon Donbass, Putin will in response declare a ceasefire in exchange for the thawing of economic ties with the US. At the same time, no one is removing the fundamental claims against Ukraine, usually referred to as ‘Istanbul plus territories’, from the agenda.” Kashin is convinced that this would amount to a “major victory” for Russia due to it and Western-backed Ukraine now being “comparable opponents”.
He then addressed critics of this compromise by arguing that “The goal of ‘liquidating the anti-Russian regime’ in Ukraine is fundamentally unattainable at this stage without a complete, long-term military occupation of the entire country”. Likewise, “hopes of annexing new large Ukrainian territories to Russia in the event of a hypothetical collapse of the Ukrainian front seem outlandish. Russia lacks the capacity to sustainably control and manage such territories”.
According to him, “we have no reason to expect the positional stalemate in the war in Ukraine to be overcome in the foreseeable future.” Kashin elaborated that “the idea that we can quickly collapse the Ukrainian front by ‘mobilizing, straining ourselves, and striking with all our might’ should also be discarded and forgotten. The Russian command is acting within its existing limitations, striving to achieve the best possible result.” He also said that Ukrainian air defenses deter long-range strategic bombing.
Taking out Zelensky and other senior Ukrainian figures “would not lead to Ukraine’s immediate defeat and, overall, would have little impact on Russia’s achievement of its wartime goals”, especially as regards strikes against its military command since it’s “long been concealed and dispersed.” He also responded to Sergey Karaganov’s calls to attack NATO by arguing that this should only be done in self-defense. Suffice to say, Kashin’s article is unprecedented in its candid assessment of the special operation.
Never before has anyone of his caliber openly spoken about Russia’s “existing (military) limitations”, let alone in a way that’s meant to promote a compromise solution to the conflict as opposed to further escalation like the hawks have long called for. This suggests that Putin is indeed considering (potentially painful) compromises as argued here and that this has already been conveyed to some Russian experts like Kashin and RIGA’s Editorial Board for preconditioning the public beginning with their fellow experts.
