Reply to commentaries

“… there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

–Lord Henry Wooton to Basil Hallward in The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde, 1974)

Many thanks to Luiza Bialasiewicz for her introduction and to Anghel, Kimmage and Oksamytna for their incisive commentaries. They give new meaning to Wilde’s famous quote for they talk about my article – and suggest its scandal here and on social media – while managing not to talk much about what I actually argue. They find many faults: no heavy policy lifting, no discussion of Putin’s ambitions, no moral and strategic clarity about the evil of Russian colonialism. Lord Henry would, no doubt, understand. I can imagine him admonishing me: “my dear fellow, what odd creatures you academics are. The only sensible thing to do when discussing war is to praise our side’s virtue and disparage the enemy at every turn. Anything else is bad form.” Indeed.

Nevertheless, let me suggest that our (non)exchange, such as it is, reveals something of the culture of debate on this war and provides some evidence for the argument I sought to make. Allow me to contextualize the piece and sharpen its political implications before engaging the commentaries. I conclude by addressing Ukraine’s seizure of Russian territory which reveals a changed attitude toward negotiations and territory.

First, my essay is not a full analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war. Yet the commentators approach it as such, and unsurprisingly find it wanting. My starting point is a core concept in political geography: territory (Storey, 2024). The essay is a companion piece to ongoing collaborative research on how ordinary Ukrainians think about territorial concessions and the costs of peace. It considers the discourse of policy elites within Ukraine’s support coalition instead of ground-level views. The territories-in-contestation theme also links to research I have conducted with colleagues on Bosnia, Georgia’s breakaway regions, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria. This is standard political geography.

Second, the article is a work of critical geopolitics, specifically an empirical analysis of geopolitical culture. Rather than naturalizing the categories of practice of conflict parties, these are its object of analysis. I strive to describe the discourse of policy makers, the doxa of geopolitics, what they use to make meaning. To do this in a rigorous way requires academic distance from these discursive practices, treating them as anthropologists might approach a strange culture (thus the taboo as an analytical category). Here disciplinary background matters because the commentators approach geopolitics differently. All operate, with diverse positionalities and power, within the culture I am seeking to describe and analyze. My article made no policy recommendations but instead presented dilemmas and questions. I think this was frustrating for my interlocuters so they creatively translated it into policy positions they could analyze and critique. But my goal was to describe rather than prescribe. That description accurately captures the discursive policing that characterizes the West’s geopolitical storylines on the war. There is an implicit critique so let me speak normatively more directly here. First, treating geopolitical causes as sacred, as beyond any consideration of costs and consequences, is dangerous in a world of nuclear armed great powers. In geopolitics, the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. Second, denigrating diplomacy and dialogue amidst the uncertain dynamics of war-making is likewise dangerous. Hawkish biases should be overcome. The West needs to be open to negotiations and talks with its enemies, to jaw jaw not war war. That’s it. That’s the extent of the ‘policy implications’ of the essay. I don’t work in this field.

There are two key words in the subtitle to my article that foreground the argument largely unengaged by the commentators: ‘public aversion.’ First, there is an important tension between public statements and positions articulated by Ukraine’s supporters and their private deliberations. That tension is why the taboo discussed in the paper is never complete. It is a ‘seeming’ and ‘nearly’ taboo. It is, as I point out, fragile. And it comes with its own geopolitics of application and exception, as the treatment of Israel reveals. The tension between the public and the private, between stated ideals and revealed practices is what the paper seeks to describe. Declaring the paper ‘inconsistent’ on the taboo, as Oksamytna does, misunderstands the argument. Having a taboo is a matter of political struggle over what is publicly thinkable and what is not.

Second, aversion is the desire to avoid, to not discuss ugly and tragic dilemmas. What the paper suggests, in its conclusion, is that acts of asserting the territorial taboo are themselves forms of aversion to difficult strategic choices about the costs of the war, and about its larger consequences. What is notable about the three commentaries is that all express aversion to what they claim are my ‘policy recommendations’ that Ukraine concedes territories to Russia for ‘peace.’ All assert the wisdom of the current policy hostility to negotiations with Russia, and what we might term a ‘no surrender’ policy on territory. That is understandable but it is a policy position that demands discussion of its burdens, costs and realistic prospects of success, not to mention its practicality and ethics (how, for example, do you ‘liberate’ and ‘de-occupy’ Crimea?). All fail to discuss costs and trade-offs. All commentaries, in other words, end up illustrating my paper’s concluding suggestion that the territorial taboo functionally works as avoidance of the painful but necessary debate on the tragic dilemmas and trade-offs of the Ukrainian war. This war is a set of nested multiscalar conflicts that stretch from the local to the global. The war’s costs are not just localized in Ukraine (though they are most graphic there) but extend well beyond to encompass the stability of European states, the rise of the far-right and the fate of democracy, and the broader social and environmental costs of prioritizing great power competition in a time of polycrisis (Tooze, 2022). Thinking within a Ukraine-Russia frame without regard for financial sustainability, political feasibility, other wars (Gaza, Sudan, Ethiopia, Myanmar) and global geopolitical tensions, not to mention our shared climate emergency, is aversion and avoidance. We need a better debate on these matters.

Let me briefly address each commentary. Oksamytna gives voice to the storylines most Ukrainians use on territorial integrity and Russia. They express the territorial taboo and broach no broader discussion. Thus, my question at the end – can righteousness be ruinous? – is seen not as a dilemma but as insufficient moral clarity. Stunningly, my essay is translated into the charge that I find “it problematic that Ukraine is not pushed into conceding territory to Russia.” To suggest that Ukraine is in a no-win war, that it risks further territorial losses, and demographic tragedy is not to approve such a condition. It is to confront material realities and unpalatable truths. It is to ask for serious discussion on the tragic trade-offs of this war, for a realistic pathway beyond its present attritional horrors. I’m under no illusion that freezing lines of control or de facto territorial losses will bring a stable peace. There is no happy peace for Ukraine in the near future as long as Putin is in power.

My article does not get into the important question of privilege and hierarchy in international affairs beyond noting that it is now a matter of cultural debate given the Gaza horror. Ukraine is objectively privileged relative in the military aid it receives in its fight against Russia relative to, as I vividly recall, the Bosnian government during the Bosnian War (1992-1995), when it was the subject of an arms embargo. But ‘privileged’ is not the right word for a country and people under daily deadly assault. Zelensky’s plea in April 2024 that Ukraine deserved the same military help as Israel after its allies shot down a massive military barrage from Iran gave voice to a feeling that Ukrainian lives were secondary relative to the US’s other allies (Santora and Biggs, 2024). The subject of necropolitics – who gets the resources to live and who gets exposed to death – is a vital matter in contemporary geopolitics, and only likely to become more salient (Mbembe, 2019). Unfortunately, we are already seeing a significant backlash in Europe and the US that is denigrating the claims of Ukrainians to safety and security relative to that of state nationals.

Anghel’s response elaborates the dilemmas facing Ukraine and the rationality of its commitment to war. Again, there is misinformation on my position. Nowhere do I write that transferring Ukrainian occupied territories is the ‘best solution to end this war’ or a frozen conflict is the ‘best option’ Ukraine could hope for. Rather it is to recognize that Russia has occupied Crimea and parts of the Donbas for more than a decade. It now controls 18% of Ukraine, a figure that is creeping upwards. To say that a frozen conflict is the most likely outcome given past history and current circumstances is not to view this as desirable or the ‘best solution.’ Rather with nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons in the picture, it is not difficult to envision even more negative outcomes. Nowhere do I advocate “hasty peace negotiations with no external guarantees for Ukraine.” Anghel criticizes me on a subject I don’t write about. My paper is not, as her subtitle has it, an ‘analysis of ceasefire negotiations.’ It’s about explaining the public reluctance of Ukraine’s backers to countenance negotiations that most privately recognize are necessary. While Anghel helpfully elucidates the massive obstacles to peace, there is no recognition of tragic trade-offs, and priorities beyond the Russia-Ukraine frame. What is the theory of Ukraine’s victory? How is Russia to be comprehensively defeated without provoking nuclear war? Deterrence failed to stop Russia invading Ukraine so why should we assume that nuclear deterrence will work to dissuade Putin if he is facing immanent defeat? Her desire for a “different answer” for that Ukrainian army officer suggests advocacy for Ukraine joining NATO, a position favored by a number of academics (Somoff, 2024). This strategically commits the US as the central military power in NATO to risk New York for the defense of Odesa, a considerable geographical expansion of the Cold War nuclear balance of terror when Berlin was the frontline city. I am skeptical this will happen but if it does, and Ukraine becomes a highly militarized NATO rampart next to Russia, I doubt that this outcome will be strategically stable and peaceful. (Political backlash against NATO’s enlargement is a growing force in the US, Germany and elsewhere). With strategic arms control agreements abandoned, this is likely to consolidate a condition of permanent militarized insecurity in Ukraine and Russia, across the European continent, and beyond. Let us debate this in good faith – and discuss the strategic wisdom of NATO’s Bucharest Declaration and ‘open door’ policy -- rather than guilt trip our way to an unsustainable strategic condition.

Third, Kimmage’s commentary elucidates some implications of my article in an elegant way. He provides a robust defense of the existing policy and ‘conventional wisdom’ on the war. However, he does stretch my argument into a policy advocacy that goes beyond what I write. His claim that the second ‘central claim’ of my essay is that policy narrowness blocks implementation of an alternative policy is not one I recognize or develop in any way. That I downplay the strategic threat posed by Russia because I don’t address the ambitions of Vladimir Putin’s Russia is desire for a different paper. (I addressed Russia’s ambitions elsewhere in Toal [2017] and Toal [2024]). Kimmage helpful extends aspects of my argument, though I do not see the problem as ‘group think’ – a bureaucratic politics category of analysis not appropriate to the broader geopolitical culture -- so much as a dangerous marginalization of diplomacy, and the value of always being open to talk, especially to nuclear armed enemies. Past failures should never preclude present efforts (thus my objection to essentialist thinking). I am more skeptical than he about the wisdom of current policy in part because I am highly sensitive to the role that hubris, blunders, misperceptions and unintended consequences play in history. Historians get this. We got lucky in the dangerous days of the early eighties in Cold War Europe, and very lucky with the quality of leadership at the end of the eighties (Brown, 2020). Our generation now has the task of sustaining a taboo that has burdened the world since World War II, the nuclear taboo (Tannenwald, 2007). Putin has indeed become a radical messianic revanchist, and the deeper he descends into barbarity the more dangerous and unpredictable the war becomes. Poland, for example, may well intervene if its feels that Ukraine risks significant battlefield losses and potential collapse. Foreign Minister Sikorsky has suggested that Poland shoot down Russian missiles in Ukrainian airspace, potentially entangling NATO in the war (Minder, 2024). The instability and enduring escalatory potential of the war underscore the importance of having a diplomatic track alongside military support.

My concern that the war is ruinous for Ukraine is based on its material human and environmental costs. But Ukraine’s leadership will decide how much its population can bear. Whether public opinion in Ukraine is willing to accept territorial concessions with Russia is a subject my colleagues and I actively research (Bakke et al., 2024). Assessing public opinion in a country at war is difficult, and the method of polling – computer aided telephone interviews on mobile phones – creates significant selection and response rate biases. KIIS polling from this summer suggests that the number of Ukrainians willing to countenance general unspecified territorial concessions has risen steadily but is still a minority position, attracting one-third of respondents (Figure 1). Those closest to the frontlines in the south and east tend to reveal higher levels of willingness to make territorial concessions. But the data suggests that attitudes change depending on the promise of security guarantees to Ukraine. I don’t doubt that part of the Ukrainian population will be irreconcilable toward any ugly peace settlement involving Ukrainian territorial losses to Russia but I do expect that war exhaustion will be the immediate sentiment of the majority of Ukrainians. Long term, any settlement is likely to be dogged with severe legitimacy problems.OPEN IN VIEWER

The paper was written in response to debates in the summer of 2023. Since then there have been a number of significant developments. War fatigue has grown in Western capitals while the political and financial limits of supporting Ukraine are more salient. Mindful of this President Zelensky publicly recognized in July 2024 that negotiations will be required to end the war, and that Ukraine and Russia will have to sit down together and talk. Ukraine has actively enlisted the help of China and India to bring Russia to the table. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a country that helps Russia’s war effort by purchasing its oil, visited Kyiv on 23 August 2024 as part of this effort.

Most significantly, on 6 August 2024 Ukraine launched a surprise invasion of Russia in the lightly defended Kursk region with the aim of undermining Putin’s regime and relieving military pressure on Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. Zelensky presented Ukraine’s seizure of Russian territory it does not claim as leverage to force Russia into negotiations that involve trading territories. Zelensky described the Kursk operation as “a plan to compel Russia to end the war diplomatically. The war will inevitably end in dialogue but we need to enter that dialogue from a position of strength” (quoted in Miller, 2024). Ukraine’s invasion, though, derailed secret efforts to negotiate a partial cease-fire with Russia (Khurshudyan et al., 2024). Elsewhere Zelensky justified the invasion thus: “Our operation aims to restore our territorial integrity. We capture Russian soldiers only to exchange them. The same goes for territory. We don’t need their land” (Engel et al., 2024).

These developments may mark an important de-sacralization of the question of territory in the conflict, potentially moving diplomacy beyond the territorial taboo. Whether it will work or not is an open question. Russia, however, may not be interested in negotiations at a time it is making gains on the battlefield within Ukraine and rolling back Ukraine’s gains in Russia. Ukraine’s redeployment of reserve military forces from the Donbas for its Kursk incursion is a risky gambit, arguably a case of ‘risk tolerance in losses’ behavior. The fact that Ukraine’s wartime allies were not informed about this operation beforehand and that further ‘red lines’ are being breeched in its wake (coalition approved and coordinated deep missile strikes into Russia) underscores the dangerous drift of this war toward further expansion and escalation.

Finally, let me conclude with an observation of territory and aesthetics. Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a searing critique of narcissism, of the seduction of immortal fame and the hiding of material and moral costs. This is certainly applicable to Vladimir Putin, botoxed and stately, fashioning himself as a new Peter the Great “gathering Russian lands.” The enlarged map of Russia displays new territories as aesthetic objects affirming the timeless glory of the great leader. Hidden are the war crimes, the erasure of Ukraine, the horror of the ‘meat grinder,’ the unforgiveable merciless war against Ukrainian infrastructure, ecology and people. But, like Dorian Gray, a day of reckoning will come.