Should the West offer Vladimir Putin amnesty to end war in Ukraine?

Vladimir Putin has so far refused to discuss every “off-ramp” offered by the US to de-escalate the conflict in Ukraine, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.

Addressing reporters earlier this week, America’s most senior diplomat said the Biden administration has “sought to provide possible off-ramps to President Putin”, adding: “He’s the only one who can decide whether or not to take them.”

Rather than negotiating, Blinken continued, the Russian president has “pressed the accelerator and continued down this horrific road that he’s been pursuing”. Putin “has a clear plan right now to brutalise Ukraine but to what end?” he asked.

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Consensus is growing that the invasion has not gone to plan and has failed to deliver the quick victory Moscow anticipated. But Putin, who has one eye on his legacy and the other on threats from within Russia, is unlikely to de-escalate without winning clear Western concessions.

Winding down war

“In thinking about what to do about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” said David Lingelbach on The Hill, “two schools have emerged: involuntary and voluntary.”

The former “advocates various strategies to force Putin to change his actions”, he said, including “assisting Ukraine militarily”, “providing incentives for a Russian military or palace coup”, “promoting a Russian people’s revolution” and “jailing or even killing Putin”.

The voluntary camp, however, champions “various off-ramps that might be offered to Putin as ways to defuse the crisis”, he added. Some “would cause Putin to lose some of his oligarchic power and wealth”. But these options must “be perceived by Putin as ones in which he remains more or less in control of his future”.

Writing in The Times, Max Hastings said that “the only realistic hope” for a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine will require “a deal with Moscow in which painful concessions will have to be made”.

With Putin making veiled threats of nuclear war, the historian and columnist warned that “even the most loathsome dictator must be offered an escape route rather than being boxed into a corner”. And given the biting impact of Western sanctions, Putin increasingly cuts an isolated figure.

“No matter how painful,” The Times said, “we must bargain” with Putin. “We owe nothing less to the people of Ukraine, and to any prospect of restoring peace.”

NPR diplomacy correspondent Michele Kelemen said that if the end “goal is to get Russian troops out of Ukraine and end this conflict” that is “something that needs to be negotiated”. She added: “It would be better for Ukrainians if that happened soon.”

But Putin is going to want concessions in any negotiations, which Lingelbach admitted on The Hill may be “distasteful” for Western leaders confronted with evidence of Russia’s crimes during its unprovoked attack on its neighbour.

Deal with the devil

Amnesty International warned within days of the invasion that it had “irrefutable evidence” of breaches of the laws of war. These included “indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas and strikes on protected objects such as hospitals”.

After a Russian bomb killed three people, including one child, during a strike on a maternity and children’s ward of a hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol this week, evidence of potential war crimes is beginning to mount.

But regardless of how the war effort is progressing, Putin “doesn’t fear a coup by oligarchs”, said Steven L. Hall, a retired member of the CIA who was responsible for running and managing Russian operations for three decades.

Writing in The Washington Post, he warned that “the oligarchs aren’t the ones who would turn on” the Russian president, explaining that “there is something of a power-sharing agreement between Putin and his oligarchical team”.

This relationship is “one-sided and mostly economic”, he said. And the oligarch class has “no direct access to hard power, such as police or other armed security forces in Russia”, that would be necessary to remove him from power.

‘Odious’ options

With this in mind, the West is almost certain to end up negotiating an end to the war – and its future relationship with Russia – with Putin.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has already said that it is planning to open an investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity by Russia in Ukraine. The ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan has said he is “satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to believe that both… have been committed” during the war.

But “examples of offramps that could be offered to Putin” may end up including “a quiet retirement at his palace on the Black Sea”, said Lingelbach on The Hill. Far from winding up in The Hague, this may see Putin promoted “to some ex officio status as ‘father of the nation’ or some such”.

This option is “odious” to many Western observers of the conflict, he said, but “we must consider that he still remains very much in control of a nuclear-armed state.

“Oligarchs like him are used to getting their way, and if we wish to avoid a violent and messy transition, we would do well to remember that.”

Hastings in The Times said: “Despite Putin’s thinly veiled threats, we are still a distance from the brink of Armageddon.” But “western leaders in the weeks ahead need to contend not only with Russia but also with the rightful rage among their own peoples about the carnage Putin has unleashed”.

“We are unlikely to secure the outcome of this tragedy we all wish,” he continued, namely “an end of Putin, the humbling of Russia [and] a liberated Ukraine rebuilt with reparations paid by the nation that has wrought so much misery”.

Instead, an “attempt must be made” to “strike a bargain with a posturing Putin”.