Look to Korea for an end to war

The magic of kingship is draining away from Vladimir Putin. The short-lived Prigozhin mutiny - more Gilbert and Sullivan than Wagner - has left Putin in power but a shrunken figure.

The normal strongman response to a botched baby coup would be a staged diversion, a vengeful purge, an escalation in the Ukraine war; more nastiness all round. But there is another option open to the wobbly Kremlin leader: to fight and talk. It’s time to exploit that moment, to shift gear.

The energetic Western backing for Ukraine is based on the quiet assumption that at some point Putin will decide that the costs of war outweigh the benefits. The Prigozhin crisis shows that the Putin war calculus has to change. Internal stability is too brittle. The economic situation is not as strong as it appeared at the outset of the conflict.

A simple audit shows that Putin cannot afford a long war. The labour force has contracted by 1.5 per cent since the invasion began 16 months ago. That’s down to conscription and young people fleeing abroad.

The labour market is tight, wages will have to go up and so, with war costs rising steeply, inflation is likely to take off. Oil prices are slowing. The Russian economy is increasingly isolated, mirroring the fortunes of the country’s leaders. Putin, in short, cannot support a long war financially or politically even though his trump card has always been his ability to outlast Western enthusiasm for Ukraine. His gamble: the US presidential election next year would give a platform to America First Ukraine-sceptics. While his own re-election in 2024 would be a shoo-in.

Now, that bet is off. As for the West, it too is developing war fatigue. Despite some Ukrainian breakthroughs in the past week, Western politicians plainly fear that a long stalemate will sap electoral support for the supply of high-tech weaponry.

The promise that Russian troop morale would crack once confronted by big western firepower hasn’t yet materialised. Russian soldiers are adapting rather than fleeing the field. That could change, of course. It is what Leo Tolstoy called the x factor: “The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the resulting force.”

This sense that nothing will be resolved soon on the battlefield has prompted some concentrated thought, in Washington at least, as to how to end the war.

The starting point has to be that neither Russia nor the United States has an interest in the war spiralling into a global confrontation. The US has been explicit, while supplying ever more powerful weapons, that Ukraine should not use them to invade Russian terrain.

As it turned out last weekend, the force that was rumbling up the M4 to Moscow was a Russian one, driving Russian tanks, headed by a Kremlin caterer - not the Ukrainians.

It is increasingly clear that Ukrainian special forces blowing up Russian fuel depots can no longer be seen as escalatory. They don’t use Western weapons, the saboteurs could be disaffected Wagnerians, and the logistics network of an invading force seems to be fair game. As for Putin, he may not trust his army generals to escalate. He does have other options, having planted mines in the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, the largest in Europe. And there are strong indications that Russia could - by mining arable land, by blowing up dams, restricting Ukrainian grain exports - be planning to close Ukraine down as the breadbasket of Europe.

Perhaps the most sinister appointment in the Kremlin team is Dmitry Patrushev as Russian agriculture minister. His father, Nikolai, is head of Putin’s security council. Food is one of Putin’s weapons.

The model if not for a settlement then at least for a cessation of hostilities could, it is being argued in the US foreign policy establishment, be Korea, which this year celebrates 70 years of an armistice between north and south.

Carter Malkasian, head of defence analysis at the US Naval Postgraduate School, says: “A complete victory for Ukraine and the West and a total defeat for the other side would be a welcome end to the Ukraine war, just as it would have been in Korea. And, as in Korea, the risk of escalation confounds such an outcome.” Realpolitik, in other words, will have to dilute maximalist demands. The Zelensky administration knows this but cannot go public as long as it is fighting an existential struggle.

The West must respect this while at the same time providing, with tanks and ammo, useful signposts for the future. The communist invasion of the south of Korea in 1950 led to mountains of dead but, thanks to the stability offered by an internationally brokered armistice, South Korea became an economic powerhouse and is now a flourishing democracy. That does not mean it can relax, not with a menacing North Korea next door. But there has been no full-blown war; it had Western security guarantees. The North, under its savage leader, is still a pariah state.

The comparisons are not perfect - for one thing, Western soldiers were on the ground during the war - but the Korean peace path has some straightforward lessons.

First, back-channel talks need to be held even while the fighting continues. Second, neutral arbiters should be brought in when things get sticky. And Western security assistance to Kyiv needs to become conditional on negotiating concessions.

Is that a sell-out to Putin? No. If the talks work they can engineer his masked surrender. If they don’t, many more people will die while the world waits for Russia to sort itself out.