An Oligarch’s Guide To Ending The War In Ukraine – OpEd |
Here’s how oligarchs play their game of geopolitical three-card monte. They attract attention by promising the moon. Then they hide their real motivations in a duplicitous shuffle of the cards. The ensuing action is a razzle-dazzle of distraction. In the end, the oligarchs win, and everyone else loses.
On the Russian side, oligarch-in-chief Vladimir Putin talks about this territory and that territory. Sure, he wants Russia to colonize more land in Ukraine. But the territory is less important than his conception of an enlarged Russian ethno-space that crowds out the European Union and NATO by asserting an illiberal politics, a petrostate oligarchy, and superpower ambitions. The land is but a means to another end.
On the American side, Donald Trump talks about this peace and that ceasefire. Sure, he wants to get his much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize. But what he and his grifter-negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner really want to secure is a piece of the billions of dollars in Russian assets frozen in accounts in Europe and a cut of the profits from U.S.-Russian commercial deals once Russia has been welcomed back into the global economy. Any peace deal is but a means to that lucrative end.
On the Ukrainian side, Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration talks about defending this territory and that territory. Sure, they’ve wanted to kick out the Russian occupiers ever since 2014. But in a situation where the war has clipped the wings of so many oligarchs, a group of high-level officials have also been involved in a $100 million kickback scheme that shoveled money into their own pockets at the expense of the Ukrainian energy sector and the war effort more generally. Collective sacrifice was but a means to achieve their personal ends.
For some observers, the war in Ukraine is not so much a battle over territory but an opportunity for the military-industrial complex to make money. It’s certainly useful to root around beneath the rhetoric of the leaders to uncover institutional motivations. But however much contractors are indeed profiting, the conflict can’t be explained with such simplistic cynicism.
So, for instance, the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to advance a kind of global Putinism. Ukraine fought back to avoid the fate of the colonized: death, imprisonment, forced assimilation. In the United States, military assistance for Ukraine was a substitute for direct intervention which, under Trump, has given way to an all-out effort to walk the United States back from even this limited support.
To understand Trump’s latest “peace proposal,” meanwhile, a more sophisticated cynicism is required, beginning with a focus on the negotiators. The deal was initially worked out not by diplomats, like Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but through a set of conversations between billionaire envoy Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, an economist in charge of Putin’s slush fund, which masquerades as a sovereign wealth account.
The initial 28-point plan that emerged from these discussions looked like a set of Kremlin talking points whose sharpest edges have been subsequently filed down through negotiations with Ukraine. Beneath the back-and-forth over territorial considerations and security guarantees, the proposal offers an opportunity for oligarchs in Russia and the United States to engage in large-scale profiteering. Ukraine, meanwhile, is the patsy that keeps trying to avoid losing at this high-level game of three-card monte.
The Trump administration timed its current deal to coincide with a political scandal upending the Ukrainian government. Ten days before Trump’s........