"Putin Needs an Off-Ramp", Tom McTague

Tom McTague is not the first to point out that a cornered Putin is an extremely dangerous Putin but his Atlantic piece makes the case more clearly than other pieces.

It's true that Putin wants the West to worry about getting into a World War III-style conflict with Russia, and there's some wisdom in not rising to his bait. However, it's also true that if Putin feels Russia — and therefore he — is cornered, he will feel his own political and perhaps literal survival are at stake.

When a gambler has already lost so much that he will go bankrupt unless he can turn it around, the logical thing for him to do is to continue upping the stakes. This is the desperate opponent the West may now face. Worse: This is the opponent whose bloodstained debts the West may have to to write off.

Britain’s defense secretary has said that Putin “is a spent force in the world.” His French counterpart has declared, “Ukraine will win.” A consensus is building in Western capitals that Russia’s calamitous handling of the conflict means it may already have lost—indeed, that its political goals may never have been realizable in the first place, given the size of Ukraine and the opposition of its people to Russian control.

These statements, however, exhibit a dangerous combination of escalation, wish fulfillment, and, most worrying of all, truth.

The danger of escalation is by now obvious. "Wish fulfillment" refers to the evident hope among a lot of Westerners that Ukraine can defeat Russia simply by outlasting its offensive. Recent developments suggest that the Russian military is prepared to grind down Ukrainian resistance, however costly the effort will be. The danger for us is that our desperate wish will get in the way of finding an unpalatable but less bloody diplomatic solution, and that we'll cling to what might be an unrealistic image of Putin and Russia as paper tigers.

Finally, truth, which is to say, the possibility "that Putin’s regime really is as weak as people suggest". If that's the case, we are back to Putin feeling an existential threat to his rule and his life, with all the attendant danger his having nothing to lose carries.

McTague lists a few guidelines for the West to follow; I won't list them here because you really should read his piece. His main takeaway, though, is:

Ultimately, diplomacy will have to get each side to agree to a deal that allows each to save its dignity—even though one side does not deserve to have its dignity saved.

The Cuban missile crisis ended with Russian missiles turning back while the Americans agreed not to invade Cuba, and to remove their missiles from Turkey. Historians disagree over whether this maintained the status quo in terms of the overall balance of power between the two sides, or left Russia slightly better off than when the crisis began. Either way, it ended without catastrophic miscalculation and with a compromise balanced enough that both sides were able to save face.

Like it or not, Putin's invasion of Ukraine is not an opportunity for the West to depose him. The West also can't really hold him accountable, the way other autocrats have been held accountable for their crimes. These things are beyond our power because Russia is not Panama or Libya. All we can do is to make ending his invasion as much in his own interest as possible.