Council of Despair, Council of Hope
What We Can Learn Institutionally from Past Russian Defeats
As Russia stumbles toward what seems to be ultimate humiliation—or at the very best, a Pyrrhic stalemate—in Ukraine, I’m struck by certain similarities between this crisis and past situations in which Russia was compelled to retreat.
The Berlin Blockade, which stretched from June 1948 to May 1949, is a particularly intriguing point of reference. In both postwar Berlin and 2022 Ukraine, Moscow calculated that it could quickly and easily achieve its objective. West Berlin, completely surrounded by Soviet-controlled territory, seemed ripe for the plucking in early 1948. Surely the city would capitulate quickly if the Soviets cut off road, rail, and water access? That easy optimism had its modern-day analogue in Moscow’s assumption that Ukraine’s comedian-led government would fold quickly in the face of a Russian strike on Kyiv.
In both contexts, of course, those calculations proved disastrously wrong, and what had appeared to be easy victories turned into nightmares for Russia and galvanizing moments for the West. The Berlin Blockade in many respects united an exhausted Western Europe against the Soviet threat. And just as it clarified Western threat perceptions, the crisis showcased Western technological and logistical prowess and assured many Europeans that the United States had the wherewithal to protect it. The United States and its partners built an astonishing air bridge to West Berlin that kept the city alive in face of a months-long Russian strangulation. What the air bridge was to Berlin, HIMARS and other Western military technology are in today’s Ukraine: evidence that the West has the money and skills to best Moscow.
There’s another Russian humiliation that bears examination: the 1999 NATO victory in Kosovo. In that case, Moscow mostly sided with Serbia and refused to give the Western military operation the imprimatur of the UN Security Council. During the spring and summer of 1999, Russia watched angrily, and mostly impotently, as a high-tech NATO air campaign steadily ground down Serbian forces. Belgrade finally agreed to relinquish control of the Albanian-majority province and to accept the entrance of a muscular NATO peacekeeping force.
In all three situations—1948 Berlin, 1999 Kosovo, and 2022 Ukraine—there have been substantial risks of escalation. During the Berlin Blockade, U.S. and Soviet aircraft flew in close proximity, and there were several near misses that could have touched off active combat. In the final days of the Kosovo crisis, Moscow dispatched a Russian unit that was assigned to peacekeeping duties in Bosnia to seize the airfield in Kosovo’s capital, setting up a dangerous standoff. The risks of a broader conflagration—whether through the use of nuclear weapons, further sabotage of Western energy infrastructure, or some cross-border incident—are evident everywhere in Ukraine.
Given those stakes, it is important to consider the ways in which the earlier crises ended. In particular, diplomats may want to think about the possible utility of what has now seemed to be a feckless institution—the UN Security Council. In the Berlin crisis, U.S. and Russian diplomats posted to the United Nations consulted quietly on the margins of Security Council meetings, talks that eventually produced a diplomatic breakthrough. And during the Kosovo conflict, the permanent Council members negotiated a resolution that provided a bit of diplomatic cover for Moscow, which was able to use its veto threat to extract certain (largely symbolic) concessions from the West. “Formulated as a resolution of the UN Security Council,” Russian president Boris Yeltsin wrote later, “[the Serbian[ surrender ceased to be humiliating.”
As the Ukraine war has ground on, there have been plenty of understandable broadsides against the Security Council as an institution. Observers have discovered or rediscovered the institution’s central defect: its inability to act when a permanent member is determined to wage war. The result of that new grappling with the Council’s limitations has been mostly impractical calls for Russia to be evicted from the Council or for even more sweeping reorganizations of the United Nations.
But the Council’s glaring defect has a silver lining: precisely because the veto power prevents permanent members from being forced into any course of action, the institution can in certain circumstances be a suitable mechanism for exiting from crises that threaten world peace in ways that preserve shreds of great-power dignity.
At the moment, with Western outrage cresting and Ukraine moving from victory to victory on the battlefield, there’s little appetite for smoothing Moscow’s exit or minimizing its humiliation. Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin succinctly captured that sentiment with her insistence that the only off-ramp for Russia was to “leave Ukraine.” Western diplomats may want to consider creative ways to package that outcome—or more complicated and less satisfying ones—by employing a tool that has proved helpful in the past.