Transcription
The single most important thing happening in the world right now is the war between Russia and Ukraine. Now that the war has gone past three months, the actions on the ground and in the propaganda racket are starting to tell a better story of exactly why all of this is happening.
In this video, we are going to explore the causes of the war. This process will run over the course of four phases. First, we will discuss the substantive issues they are fighting over. Second, I will explain why those easy answers are, at best, half-explanations for the conflict. Third, we will go over explanations for why bargaining failed between Russia and Ukraine. And finally, we will talk about what each of the mechanisms for war imply about how the war might end.
Long-time viewers of this channel will be familiar with some of the discussion ahead, but it will still be helpful to put it all together in one coherent framework. And if you have heard enough about one of these causes, you can always turn on chapters to jump to the next one.
With that, let’s get to it. We are going to start with the substantive causes of the war, and the first of these are the Separatist Regions. Tensions in Ukraine are nothing new. Way back in the 2004 Presidential election, pro-West candidate Viktor Yushchenko squared off against pro-East candidate Viktor Yanukovych. In the runoff election, Yushchenko received 46.69%, while Yanukovych received 49.42% of the vote. However, international election observers deemed the results fraudulent, and both candidates declared themselves victor. After rerunning the runoff, Yushchenko won with 52% of the vote to Yanukovych’s 44.19%. The major problem here was that the vote was heavily divided by region. Yanukovych was popular in eastern Ukraine, where Russian is the dominant language, and Yushchenko was popular in the west and center, where Ukrainian is the dominant language. Nevertheless, six years later, Yanukovych would emerge victorious in the next presidential election.
But in 2013, the Euromaidan Crisis began. Ukraine looked set to agree to a trade deal with the European Union. Suddenly, though, Yanukovych deviated to supporting the Eurasian Economic Union, Russia’s trade bloc. This led to protests in Kyiv’s Maidan Square—hence the name—and a popular uprising. In short order, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Russia annexed Crimea. And two separatist regions—the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic—declared themselves independent. Since then, Ukraine has been fighting a war against them. Political scientists do not classify these as interstate wars because regular Russian soldiers were not taking part in it. However, many private Russians were taking part, and there is little doubt the breakaway governments were receiving support from the highest levels. In that regard, the 2022 invasion is just a continuation of the previous form of the war. Overt actions allow Russia to put greater pressure on Ukraine and perhaps finally make progress in capturing the entirety of the regions.
Second, and getting progressively larger with Russia’s aims, is a Crimean land bridge. Crimea is a peninsula that juts out of Ukraine, not Russia. Zooming in on this, for all Russian intents and purposes, Crimea is essentially an island territory. Between 2014 and 2018, traffic coming in and out of Russia had to go via ferry. This was impractical over the long term. As such, Russia started building the Crimean Bridge in 2016. Two years later, it opened for cars and trucks. A parallel rail bridge opened one year after that. But that is still only a single access point for a population of 2.4 million people. If Russia were interested in expanding its borders, the strip of territory running along the Dnipro River up to the Donbas is an obvious place to start. And Russia succeeded in this effort when Mariupol fell on May 20, 2022.
Next up: Russian Irredentism. “Irredentism” is just a fancy term for wanting previously held land back. With that in mind, this explanation is basically taking the previous explanation for war and turning it up to 1000. Instead of being interested in capturing just a land bridge through Eastern Ukraine to Crimea, imagine instead that Putin had dreams of reestablishing European borders similar to those during the Soviet era. There is good evidence for this. Since 1997, Russia and Belarus have formed a supranational “Union State”, with the eventual goal of essentially merging the two countries. Abkhazia and South Ossetia—the breakaway regions that have been de facto states since the 2008 Russo-Georgian War—participate as observers. So too does Transnistria, which has been de facto independent since a 1990 civil war with Moldova. It will not surprise you to find out that Russian troops intervened in that one too. More recently, in 2021, Putin published an essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, which basically argued that Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians are all a common people. Putting these pieces together, Putin’s grand goal under this theory for the war is to reestablish something like the old Soviet borders, or at least the regions that are willing to come along for the ride.
Fourth on the list: pure east-west rivalry. The war might not be about Ukraine per se but rather a broader battle between Russia and the West. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has steadily crept eastward. First, unification pushed NATO through the former East Germany. Then the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia all followed in 2004. Then Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020. If Putin views the Cold War as having never truly ended, each of these departures represents further deterioration of Russian influence. Fighting a war to capture Ukraine is then just a first step in a longer plan to push further back.
Number five: Energy. As it stands right now, Europe depends on Russia for its energy needs—to the point that Europe is still buying much of that fuel despite the other economic sanctions. This gives Russia an enormous amount of market power. It can take advantage of its geographic proximity to Europe to sell the fuel at substantial profits. The problem is that Ukraine is not yet in a position to fuel Europe. You see, there are enormous untapped oil and gas deposits here, here, here, and here. Their proven natural gas reserves rank second in Europe, only behind Norway. Although Russia dwarfs all of these numbers, the ability to extract and sell to willing trade partners would make Ukraine a major competitor—if they can get their wells online. And that’s a big if. Obviously, Russia would benefit from capturing and extracting the fuel from those deposits, particularly in the Sea of Azov and west of Crimea, which would be easier to control. However, the war may not be intended to do that specifically. Instead, merely starting the war prevents Ukraine from beginning extraction. And as long as fighting continues, the energy reserves may as well not exist, which thereby preserves Russia’s market power. In fact, the very instability of the war has caused Ukraine’s international business partners to withdraw from the projects, and it is difficult to imagine any company that would jump at the chance even if the war were to end tomorrow.
Number six: Water. Another issue is the water crisis in Crimea. Back in 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in haste, taking advantage of the chaos over in Kyiv. Everything else was an afterthought. That included water. You see, Crimea’s main source of water used to be a canal that runs from the rest of Ukraine. In response to the Russian annexation, Ukraine took the obvious step: they dammed the canal. This has led to water shortages in Crimea, especially for the agricultural sector. Estimates are that Crimea loses more than 200 million dollars each year as a result. Over eight years, that’s 1.6 billion. Starting the war meant that Russia could destroy the canal and secure future water access.
Number seven: Nazis. This is the worst of the options. If you go back to Putin’s address that began the war, the purpose of the invasion was to “strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine”. Now, it is true that there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine. But there are neo-Nazis all over Europe, including more than a dozen groups in just Russia all by itself. The fact is that Nazis do not have any meaningful support or political power within Ukraine. To underscore that point, Zelensky is Jewish and had members of his extended family die in the Holocaust. Furthermore, Russia defeated the Azov Battalion—the group most commonly cited as harboring fascist ideologies—in the Battle of Mariupol. Yet the war continued. But if you understand the broader propaganda effort at home, this wild claim begins to make more sense. Remember Victory Day? That annual gigantic holiday and patriotic parade that Putin is so fond of? It celebrates the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II. And the Russian people have legitimate reason to be proud of their accomplishment. After all, the Soviet Union lost about an eighth of its population during the war. Consequently, if you are Putin, anything that ties the current war to the Great Patriotic War as it is called in Russia is good for business. But it’s definitely not the reason the war is happening.
All told, we have seven areas of dispute between Russia and Ukraine, six of which are plausible. There is a good chance you have heard of them before. After all, it is difficult to give a coherent narrative of the war without citing at least some of those explanations. However, perhaps the most important finding in the research on war is that none of them fully explain the conflict. At best, they are collectively half-causes of war. Let’s take the territorial explanation as an example. To illustrate, we turn to some lines on maps. If Ukraine and Russia fight a war to a complete military conclusion, there are many different possible post-conflict borders. Here, everything to the west stays Ukraine; everything to the east becomes Russia. Or maybe Russia will turn things around and capture a whole lot more land, leaving us with this border. Maybe things will stay roughly like they are, leaving only partial gains for Russia. Maybe Ukraine’s counterattacks will be extremely successful, and Ukraine will reestablish something close to the pre-war line of control. And maybe there is a small chance that Ukraine could even recapture Crimea. If we take these and the other possible outcomes and weigh them by their relative likelihoods, we might get something like this as the average expected outcome. Wherever that line is, think about what would happen if the parties simply implemented it right now. By definition, neither country could hold more territory in expectation by fighting a war instead. And by implementing it, no one else has to die, no more money has to be spent on tanks, and we can go back to some semblance of normalcy in Europe.
In fact, there is some wiggle room on these settlements. The space between this yellow line and the white line represents Ukraine’s costs of war. All we need to do is convert Ukraine’s value of lost life and monetary inefficiencies into square kilometers of land. I know that seems weird, but governments make these kinds of strange comparisons all the time. Tons of agencies do this within the United States government alone. And for them, the estimate is ten million dollars per person. We can do the same for Russia’s costs of war using this red line. Any division of territory between the yellow and red lines is mutually preferable to war. While it is easy to visualize this in terms of a territorial dispute, the same logic applies to the other topics. Take energy reserves as another example. Imagine that this green bar represents the total profits that could be made with the fuel in question. Perhaps a war would see the value divided proportionately like this. But war will destroy some of those profits both due to death and lost investment opportunities. As such, the actual division will be like this. If Russia is really threatened by a glut of European energy, why not create a joint company that could drill the wells and share larger profits for everyone? That might sound weird, but it has historical precedent. Let’s head over to the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. I’d like you to meet Percy Cox, a British High Commissioner from the 1920s in the area. He liked to draw lines on maps almost as much as I do. In particular, he drew a somewhat arbitrary neutral zone between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that looked roughly like this. This was not much of an issue until 1938, when oil was discovered in Kuwait, suggesting that the neutral zone may be valuable. The situation had the perfect makings for a conflict, with each potentially claiming rights to the possible deposits. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the companies formed a joint venture to extract the oil and split the revenues from it. And even though Kuwait and Saudi Arabia divided the neutral zone itself in 1965—giving us today’s borders—oil revenues are still divided according to the earlier agreement. This kind of solution also works with autonomy. Simply calculate what the expected level of autonomy would be given a war and implement that. Indeed, doing this is extremely common worldwide. China has Hong Kong and Macao, two of the most famous ones, as well as more than 100 others, including Tibet. We also have one here in the United States: Puerto Rico. Autonomy agreements are why civil wars are not as common as they would be otherwise.
To sum up, this is why war is puzzling. In theory, a range of settlements exists that leave both countries better off than had they fought a war. That’s a large reason why wars are rare—the average probability that a given country starts a war against another given country in a given year isn’t 20% or 10% or 5% or even 1%. It’s well below that. Of course, that 0.31% does happen every now and then, as we are seeing with Russia and Ukraine. But if we want to understand why any war happens—this one included—we need to explain why the parties could not reach one of those negotiated settlements instead. In other words, we need to think of this as a two-step process. First, we need something that they are both willing to fight over. And second, we need what you might call a “bargaining friction”—something that prevents them from reaching one of those negotiated settlements. To get war, we must have a little from column A and a little from column B. If we have one without the other, then we do not get war.
What fits into column B? We can begin with the last of the remaining explanations for the war commonly discussed in the public sphere. And that’s number eight: Preventive War. This is the most understood source of bargaining failure in the current war, and it is one we have discussed specifically here before. The short version of the explanation, as Putin tells it, is that Ukraine was improving its ties to NATO. If Ukraine were to join and successfully integrate with NATO, it would benefit from the alliance’s military strength. That would make coercing Ukraine more difficult in the future. Thus, Putin had to strike while the opportunity presented itself. To visualize this explanation, imagine that Russia’s war payoff net costs is right here at about now. If Ukraine joins NATO, the balance of power shifts over here. Now the best Russia can obtain in a future settlement is at the yellow line. But that is worse than fighting under the more favorable military balance right now, represented by the previous red line. Hence the war. This would appear to be the second time in recent memory this has happened. Back in 2008, Georgia was making similar overtures. Then Russia invaded to convince NATO that further integration was too risky. Putin has also suggested, most recently during his May 9 Victory Day speech, that “Kyiv declared that it could attain nuclear weapons.” If true, this would have a similar effect on the balance of power. However, while we have previously discussed that Ukraine has the technical capacity to build nuclear weapons, they are nowhere close to doing so, nor are they taking steps to change that. That aside, the shift from a potential alliance partnership is good enough by itself to constitute a bargaining problem, so we can add it to the column.
Next up, number nine: Preemptive War. This is a more recent argument that Putin put forth, also from his May 9 Victory Day speech. “We saw the military infrastructure being built up…. The threat grew every day. Russia launched a pre-emptive strike at the aggression.” There is some subtlety here. Although preventive and preemptive war sound similar, they are different. A preventive war is fought to forestall a long-term shift in the balance of power, like when the United States invaded Iraq ostensibly to stop Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. A preemptive war, like what motivated the start of World War I, is fought to exploit first-strike advantages and deny them to your opponent. Visually, if Ukraine initiated the war, perhaps the balance of power would have looked like this. But if Russia initiated the war, maybe the balance of power would have looked like this instead. This might be a large difference in power compared to each side’s costs of war. Under such circumstances, this is the minimum division necessary to satisfy Russia. Meanwhile, this is the minimum division necessary to satisfy Ukraine. These are not compatible, so the parties are destined to fight a war. This is a lot of lines on maps, but in the end it is just a complicated way of arriving at the classic game theoretic model known as a prisoner’s dilemma. Such preemptive wars are rare historically. The most well-known is the aforementioned World War I and the “Cult of the Offensive”. Following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, European leaders worried that whoever struck first would have a decisive advantage. This was the origin of the infamous Schlieffen plan, named for German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen. Another example is the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Six-Day War. Here, Egypt began moving troops into the Sinai Peninsula. Israel, convinced that an attack was imminent, took the initiative. Finally, China took great pains to silently move into North Korea, catching the United States by surprise in the Korean War. This stopped what might have otherwise been a complete military victory for the southern coalition. The rarity of such events continues through today, because there is not much evidence that Russia was trying to exploit a first-strike advantage here. It’s also hard to square a first-strike advantage existing when a war was already going on in the Donbas, which Russia was an unofficial participant in. Nevertheless, it is understandable why Putin would want to frame things in this way. Under international law, preventive war is illegal. Preemptive war, on the other hand, is legal. The framing is best thought of as a public relations stunt, and so we will cross it off the list.
Number ten: Miscalculation. There are so many ways Putin appears to have miscalculated that we could do an entire video on the subject. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the ease by which Putin thought Russia could steamroll Ukraine. The number of Russian forces deployed to Ukraine is estimated to be around 200,000. The standard rule of thumb is that an attacking side needs a three-to-one manpower superiority to overcome the advantages the defense has from fighting from entrenched positions. Ukraine also has about 200,000 armed forces. That’s a one-to-one ratio, and nowhere near what you would want it to be. Although there is no similar consensus on rules of thumb for occupation forces, a good minimum is one soldier for every 100 inhabitants. However, Ukraine has a population of more than 40 million. That’s just one for every 200. The gap appears to be because Putin believed that Ukraine would fold easily, many of its citizens would welcome their Russian “liberators”, and Zelensky would be easily removed as an unpopular leader. Instead, Ukraine has shown tremendous resolve, and Zelensky has become a figure to rally behind. We can go back to lines on maps to visualize the problem. Imagine that Russia thought that the military balance was favorable to it. It would therefore want to drive a hard bargain, with the red line being the minimum threshold in terms of a settlement. But if Ukraine knows that the actual balance looks closer to this, it would reject Russia’s proposal and fight instead because it needs to get out to the yellow line to be satisfied.
Preventive war, preemptive war, and miscalculation as causes for war fall under a class known as rational, unitary actor explanations. They have a long history of study within the field of international relations. We describe them as rational because the states can be fully strategic and still find themselves in war. They are unitary actor based because we are thinking of the states as single entities and not represented by biased leaders. These prerequisites indicate that there are two more places to look, even as we formally remove first-strike advantages from the list.
And we continue with our explanations for war with number eleven: Irrationality. I find this to be uncompelling and, to be honest, a lazy take on the war. The basic argument for irrationality is two-fold. First, Putin’s desire to take over Ukraine does not make sense. Second, the war has gone so poorly for Putin that the only possible explanation for this is that there is something going wrong in his head. Let’s take those points one at a time. You and I may agree that fighting a nakedly territorial conflict in the 21st Century is an … interesting choice, and may be something better left to the days of the World Wars. But there is a huge difference between having abnormal preferences and being crazy. There’s no accounting for taste. Meanwhile, it is weird to think that Putin—someone who had been so calculating to ascend to the presidency of Russia and who since taking office has carefully maintained power despite institutional rules that should have made that difficult—would somehow turn out to be irrational all along. Sure, it could be a new development. But an age of 69 is not that old. And in any case, the poor strategy implemented is more readily explained by the political environment around him. He has been isolated during the pandemic. And as an autocratic leader more generally, it is difficult to convince those around you to give true information and not just tell you what you want to hear. That’s a recipe for a war via miscalculation, rationally occurring but still looking silly in retrospect. Regardless, the irrationality argument overlooks a critical piece of evidence: Putin’s decision to invade has been very popular at home. Before the war, Putin’s approval sat at 67.2%. After the war began, Putin received a classic rally-round-the-flag bump to 81.6%. And odds are those numbers are legitimate despite the difficulty of polling citizens of autocratic governments. To be clear, those numbers may eventually drag down. But for now, this actually looks like a pretty good plan for Putin on the domestic front.
Which takes us to number twelve: Putin’s Personal Benefits. This is more than just saying that Putin does not internalize the costs of war like the rest of his citizens. Even if he were sitting in the Kremlin and suffering nothing from the conflict, that still just takes Russia’s costs to 0. As long as Ukraine views the war as costly, there is still room to negotiate. Instead, the best argument here is that the war has helped Putin consolidate power. The rally-round-the-flag effect causing a 14-point boost in Putin’s poll numbers would certainly help in that regard. It’s possible that Putin felt pressure from a domestic challenger and wanted to exploit a rally-round-the-flag effect to make a coup less attractive. Alternatively, if the potential challengers were from the military, simply sending them to the front lines at worst keeps them out of Moscow. And at best—from Putin’s perspective anyway—they may never return home. And that has happened quite a bit already. This is pure speculation, of course. And it’s the type of thing we are unlikely to know about until well after the war ends. Regardless, when those personal benefits are large, the “negative” costs of war can make conflict efficient and eliminate any room to negotiate.
Eliminating irrationality as a possibility leaves us with six substantive issues and three bargaining frictions. The key takeaway here is that we need at least one from each of the columns; otherwise, we don’t get war. And it may very well be the case that multiple of these factors were at play. Further parsing which of these was the driving force behind the war will be difficult to do until the history books are written. For now, the best we can do is think about what each of these causes implies to see how the war might end.
Let’s start with the substantive causes of war. These are basically all the same story, and it’s not good news. If these were the only reasons why wars were fought, then the average war would last a very long time. After all, resolving it would mean military defeat for one side. Either the attacker is defeated and can no longer capture the good. Or the attacker captures the good and militarily defeats the other side, to the point where the defender can no longer try to retake it. It’s possible that this might happen between Ukraine and Russia. But it will only go one way. Ukraine, as plucky as it has been for the last three months, simply does not have the manpower to invade Russia and destroy all of its military power. Ask Napoleon how that one went. Russia may have the ability to do that to Ukraine. But even then, that seems unlikely given the struggles Russia has had with its Kyiv offensive. And indeed, military defeat is rather uncommon in wars, only occurring in about a third of them.
The other way the war can end as a result of the substantive causes is an underlying change in preferences. Basically, the causes just cease to exist. It’s unlikely Zelensky is going to suddenly decide that parts of Ukraine are no longer something he is interested in. It’s also unlikely that Putin is going to suddenly decide that parts of Ukraine are no longer something that he is interested in. What is more plausible is that Putin is forced out. This is part of the U.S. strategy to influence the outcome of the war. Sanctions will eventually cause problems with Russia’s ability to physically continue the fight. But the direct economic damage to the Russian economy is designed to incentivize challengers to Putin’s control over the country. One way this could occur is through popular uprising. However, because of the rally-round-the-flag effect, this is unlikely in the short term. That said, some projections predict a greater than 10% recession for the Russian economy this year. That type of lagging indicator will change minds. The progress of the war can also have an effect. It appears that the general public thinks that the “special military operation” has broadly been successful so far. That might change as more soldiers rotate home and share their first-hand experiences with friends and family. This is the same process that led to domestic turmoil during the Soviet-Afghan War from the 1980s. For similar reasons, Putin could face a coup from someone deep inside the government. There are a handful of hurdles here too, Putin’s current popularity among the masses being at the top of the list. One final possibility that has nothing to do with the war itself is that Putin could die of natural causes. Analysts have pointed to Putin’s odd grasping of a table during a meeting with his defense minister as evidence of some kind of illness. I am not qualified to comment on whether that might be true, so I won’t. But leaders can die of natural causes in the middle of war. Just ask Franklin Delano Roosevelt about that one.
In theory, it is possible that the new leader would simply not care at all about the issues at stake and withdraw from the war accordingly. Russia’s departure from World War I following the October Revolution comes close to looking like that. But even then, their treaty with the Central Powers ceded the Baltic states and made Ukraine independent. Eventually, the Soviet Union would want those back. Instead, the new leadership is altering the bargaining incentives. They might care less about the issues at stake or generally have higher costs of war. This can alter the bargaining incentives to allow for agreements to work that would not have previously. New leaders also don’t have their fates tied to the war. Thus, they can end unnecessary conflicts without worrying they will lose power. This solves the personal benefits problem that can otherwise kill a settlement. With costs back to being positive for both sides, the parties can reach a deal. For example, Richard Nixon could leave Vietnam because it was not his war. Lyndon B. Johnson owned the political responsibility for that conflict, and in fact, Nixon came to power as a result of Johnson’s unpopularity from the war.
Keeping in line with this theme, when it comes to the bargaining problems more generally, you do not need a military defeat to end the war. For preventive motivations specifically, the cause of the war is a long-term shift in the balance of power. Thus, if you stop the source of the power shift—and make tomorrow’s balance the same as today’s—you no longer need to worry about the future. Israel, for example, did not feel the need to fight full-length wars against Iraq in 1981 or Syria in 2007. They simply bombed those countries’ nuclear facilities and went home, satisfied that they could no longer be used as part of a potential nuclear weapons program. If Putin started the war because he was worried about Ukrainian entry into NATO, then the war should end when that is no longer a possibility.
Two key points over the last three months cast some doubt on whether the preventive motivation provides a good narrative for the war. First, Ukrainian membership in NATO seems dead in the water at this point. NATO has a precondition that member states resolve their land disputes before joining the alliance. In fact, this precise policy is how Russia kept Georgia out. Putin simply invaded once Georgia started showing interest, and that ended that conversation. The counterpoint here is that Russia might still be worried about the level of arms transfers the West gives to Ukraine short of actual NATO membership. Continuing the war to a complete military conclusion would mitigate that. On the other hand, Russia’s current tactics do not indicate that is what is happening. The start of the war looked like that: it was a general invasion, coming from the north, pushing east, and radiating outward from the south. But Ukraine repelled the attack on Kyiv, the eastern front stalled, and the southern front has been mostly pushed back to the Dnipro River. If Russia were worried about the long-term capacity of Ukraine, one would expect a more general campaign focused on destroying more Ukrainian infrastructure. Instead, the focus since the beginning of April has been sealing the land bridge along the Sea of Azov. This has destroyed infrastructure in that area, but not elsewhere.
There is still one way to rationalize this on preventive grounds. Russia might recognize there will be some unavoidable long-term military buildup in Ukraine at this point. However, by fighting and taking territory now, Russia can install fortifications in the meantime that would counteract that buildup. This would mean that Russia will seek to end the war once Putin believes he has a strip of territory that is defendable, regardless of upcoming Ukrainian-Western interactions.
Finally, we can look at the end of the war from an informational perspective. If uncertainty causes a war, that war should end once the source of the uncertainty is gone. Perhaps Russia once thought that the distribution of power looked like this. And Ukraine thought the distribution of power looked like this. But now they know that the distribution of power is actually here. Once we superimpose the costs of war back on the map, we have a nice range of settlements that both sides know they should prefer to war. This learning process is known as “convergence”, and it is perhaps the main reason why so many wars end in a negotiated settlement. If the war ends soon, convergence is the most plausible interpretation of what happened. Putin seemed to think that the war would be straightforward, the Russian military would dominate the Ukrainian military, Ukrainian citizens would welcome the invasion, and that the northern deployment could easily waltz into Kyiv. The first six weeks of the war proved how wrong those beliefs were. From a convergence perspective, this seemed like a plausible time for the war to end. However, as we just discussed, Russia switched tactics and turned its force exclusively to the area around the Sea of Azov. That’s a new type of battle, and perhaps a new disagreement over what the likely outcome would be. However, very little territory is exchanging hands at the moment. That’s a good indicator that not too much is left to learn, which paves the way for negotiations to be fruitful. One caveat here is that the source of uncertainty may not be what is happening now but rather what will be happening six months from now. Can Ukraine successfully convert its citizens into a full-fledged fighting force? Ukraine might think so, but Russia might be skeptical. Will Western support remain strong, or will it peter out as the news headlines move on to whatever new disaster is happening in the world? Again, the West might anticipate continued strength, but Russia might not. If that’s where the uncertainty is, then the learning process will take longer to complete, and the fighting will go on.
And that does it. Twelve causes of the war… or perhaps more accurately, nine causes of the war… and what they say about the chances of a peace agreement. Do you see any other causes that I might have missed? If so, let me know in the comments. And if you enjoyed this video, please like, share, and subscribe, and I will see you next time with some more lines on maps. Take care.