It is said that conflicts can be avoided by dialogue and dissuasion. I am deeply regretful of the severe and worsening conflict in Europe. I can't help to wonder what steps should have been taken to avoid actual military incursion at all.
Perhaps we can apply those theories to other regions of the world that are currently at risk of escalation.
What could have been done to avoid and dissuade the escalation?
By accepting Ukraine to NATO, the current conflict could have been avoided.
Out of the former Soviet Republics, all the countries that later became NATO members (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) have not been invaded by Russia since the Soviet Union collapse. Conversely, all the countries that have been invaded by Russia since that time have not been NATO members (Moldova in the 1990s, Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 and 2022).
References:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that if his country had been admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance earlier, then Russia would not have invaded the country.
“If we were a NATO member, a war wouldn't have started. I'd like to receive security guarantees for my country, for my people,” Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on “GPS [...].”
An avenue to avoid further escalation would have been better deterrence from the US and Europe before the invasion, making the cost of the invasion clearly prohibitive.
This covers not only military help to Ukraine, but the messaging as well: US and Europe stated what they would NOT do (heavy equipment delivery and direct military intervention). This would have reduced the risk and uncertainty of an invasion for the russian leadership, as argued by the Wall Street Journal. On the contrary, "strategic ambiguity" has been a staple of the US position on a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
As answered by Thomas Koelle, a better estimation of the russian military strength would have resulted in stronger deterrence as well.
On the other hand, some argue that deterrence succeeded somewhat in avoiding a larger European conflict (War on the Rocks). It is, of course, impossible to know for certain.
It is unlikely that more concessions would have helped, as they didn't help Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. Similarly, Russia does not fear a NATO invasion (otherwise their troops would be at the Finnish border, not in Ukraine).
I will not focus on what could have been done pre-Euromaidan.
After the war in 2014 especially Merkel did not want to escalate the conflict and wanted to stop the current war.
That resulted in Minsk II agreement that was a very hard negotiation where both parties gave more than they would. Nothing could have been negotiated further after that. After that I don't see how more negotiations could come much further.
The other answer to the question is of course that Russia would not have invaded if they had correctly estimated the amount of weapons especially USA was willing to commit to Ukraine.
It's true that conflicts can be avoided with dialog and discussion, but dialog and discussion are impossible if one side chooses not to engage in them. Russia used a period of Ukrainian political instability to annex Crimea (rebuffing attempts by the Obama administration to negotiate the matter, and suffering through the subsequent economic sanctions), and then tried to solidify that control over Crimea by invading the eastern half of Ukraine, securing land routes the territory (which the Trump administration, with its weak 'cult of personality' foreign policy, more or less shrugged off). Russia's strategy was to secure quick victories, dig itself in, and refuse to discuss the matter, giving itself access to economically strategic Crimean ports without actually having to confront Western powers (diplomatically or militarily) at all.
Not a bad strategy, ethical issues aside, except that Putin overestimated the stature of the Russian military, underestimated Ukrainian resolve, and mistakenly assumed that American political polarization would delay the US from offering and organizing military support (which, honestly, was true throughout the Trump administration and the early Biden administration).
The annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine were a vanity project, meant to bolster Putin's image, maintain Russian hegemony over Ukraine, and provide economic windfalls for wealthy Russian partisans. Nothing was going to stop it short of some intervention prior to the annexation, but prior to the annexation Ukraine was one of those 'far away places' that had little impact on Western minds. Oddly enough, I suspect US involvement (and consequently the involvement of its allies) would have been far slower except that Trumpist political actors focused so much attention on Ukraine — conspiracy theories around Burisma and Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton's supposed email server, and Biden's effort as vice president to get rid of a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor — that Ukraine became an integral part of US political polarization.
Frame challenge the basic premise of the question start from an
It is said that (etc.)
with no source and no connection to the real situation on the ground. It seems just a made up rumour to justify the answers that quickly followed and make a case that does not exist.
Although now the Americans deny that Bush promised Gorbachev not to enlarge NATO the decision to accept Eastern Europe countries in the early '90s depended on the delicate balance of a cold war that was ending. But that is not the only issue. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was caught in a power struggle that caused economic crises, rigged elections, revolutions and eventually civil war (although current propaganda paints it as a pro-russia unrest).
The result is that Ukraine was not fit to join the NATO as internal conflicts were too strong. And in any case joining the NATO would not have solved the situation.
Nobody really knows how stable the Russian government was before the war, but the fact that they quickly exploited the war to marshal harsh laws against internal dissent, shows their weakness and their need to stabilise their position. Another factor that helped to stabilise their position is the high number of young people who were forced to flee abroad to avoid conscription. Many of those who could have provided manpower to revolts or revolution are now abroad or on the front line. This war has been very convenient for the oligarchs in Moscow.
So the truth is that it is not true that:
conflicts can be avoided by dialogue or dissuasion.
The question is based on a false premise.
This question seems to ask for a possibly unlimited list of causes, each of which could have bigger or smaller impact or be more or less avoidable. I'm going to address several ones, in separate answers, the way as it is seen here in Ukraine.
Another answer focuses on those mistakes made after the Euromaidan (2013-2014). I strongly believe that the real strategic mistakes were made after the collapse of Moscow's "USSR" in the 1990's:
The modern political institutions have been established by the winners of the WW2.
These institutions served the single major goal: preventing the nuclear war.
The main instrument of the nuclear containment was the UNSC veto power. It served as a substitute: a nuclear power pursuing its interest uses its veto right instead of doing so by launching the nuclear strike.
The Moscow's USSR has lost the Cold War and subsequently collapsed. It could have been the time to establish the new rules based on Russia's nuclear disarmament. Including other types of WMD like chemical and biological weapons that Russians still use in today's war in Europe (cf. the Salisbury attack).
The disarmament has failed miserably. Instead of decommissioning the WMD, Russia effortlessly received all nukes intact. This included all nuclear weapons the Moscow's "USSR" stored in Europe (so-called "Warsaw Pact" states) and 14 states liberated from the "USSR" rule. This included the nuclear arsenal stored on Ukraine's territory and passed to Russia was third largest in the world. Including dozens of Tu-95 and Tu-22 strategic bombers it uses today against Ukraine.
There were discussions on possible policy, which involved thinkers like Zbigniew Brzeziński and Henry Kissinger, and the final outcome was that the West does not interfere with the sustained Russian nuclear threat.
There is any number of actions that Russia could have taken to avoid this war.
Or was the question trying to imply that Russia has no agency and can only react? Well, if that's the case, I would disagree. Russia has its goals which it pursues regardless of external circumstances. It may point to those circumstances as excuses, but had they been different, that would just result in different excuses.
In order to not have the shortage of its own white Russian-speaking population, which is the sole reason Russia started this war, Russia could have pursued its own population-growth strategies.
Russia had plenty of warning time to know that its population was shrinking to the point where it would no longer service its territory. The demographic problem was being reported back in 2000s.
People everywhere respond to incentives. People start families when they feel a sense of security about the future and when they can find social support for raising children.
Most of Russia's wealth is concentrated in Moscow. The money flows there through administration of selling of natural resources extracted from the rest of the country.
Had Russia maintained more educational and industrial institutions around the country, it could have subsidized a middle-class lifestyle which would be more conducive to starting families. Instead it elected to allow the Moscow consumerism to dictate its economic decisions.
That meant cutthroat pricing on consumer goods. Essentially everything was outsourced and virtually nothing was produced. So people through out the country lost a sense of hope or purpose.
Which resulted in continued history, and eventually culture, of low birth rates.
For a while, Russia's solution was to keep corrupting Ukrainian politicians to keep Ukraine poor and within its sphere of influence. In 2014, Ukrainians protested for months. Eventually, the Russian puppet fled and Ukrainians elected a pro-Ukrainian politician.
Desperate to keep its source of cheap labor and general population replacement, Russia panicked and staged a laughable attempt at an infiltration.
Ukrainians, shocked by the fact that the so-called "brotherly nation" would send its army against them, simply didn't respond and let Russia take Crimea. Although some more-nationalist units fought back in the East and took back Mariupol, a city Russia also initially captured back then.
Eventually Russia went back to its old strategy of trying to corrupt local politicians and keeping a low-key conflict going in the East in the hopes that NATO would not consider Ukrainian membership because Ukraine was in a territorial conflict.
This strategy had a partial success until Ukraine elected Zelensky, who could be best described as a pot-hole President. He was spending most of his efforts on fixing roads and slowly fighting corruption.
This didn't work for Russia. Russia was hoping to present itself as a better value proposition to Ukraine (as in "we are the ones fixing the roads while your own government is corrupt"). So they invaded.
As a Russian I can identify two issues which fuelled this conflict:
I have an issue with other answers such as admitting Ukraine into NATO overnight or somehow forcing RF to give up its nukes/UNSC seat, because thinga obviously could get ugly much quicker leading to a hot nuclear war in this case.
Other answers focus on 21st century events leading up to the war. It's important to also consider the broader historical context. This map summarizes NATO expansion post-1990. Note it's slightly out-dated as Finland and Sweden are now ratified NATO members. The "Possible Expansion" arrows across their borders will soon become physical movements of military forces and construction of military bases:
The eastward movement of NATO forces during the last 25 years is often viewed as part of a historical pattern, at least from a Russian perspective. Allied European armies have marched on Russia repeatedly over the 19th and 20th centuries:
WW2 (planned):
WW2 (actual):
WW1 (in French but a high-quality map):
Napoleonic invasion:
Without linking dozens of resources to prove the point... in every single case, the invasion was foreshadowed by:
Also in every single case, millions of people died. The worst single Russian loss of life occurred when an allied army besieged Leningrad (St Petersburg). Finnish forces attacked from the north while German, Italian, Spanish, and Rumanian forces closed the siege lines from the south.
The various pro-Nato expansion arguments can be valid, from a Western perspective.
While these points be valid, the fact remains that western armies have continuously moved towards Russian borders since the 1990s. No amount of diplomacy would make those military movements appear less threatening. Expecting zero military response from Russia is naive. Russian-occupied Polish, Baltic, and Ukrainian territory arguably bought them enough time to survive WW2. What if Operation Barbarossa had begun from the Ukrainian border instead of the Polish demarcation line? This is not to say the Soviet invasion of Poland was morally justified, rather that Soviet authorities correctly realized they only had 2 options. Either (1) occupy part of Poland or (2) German forces would occupy and militarize all of Poland.
A final point is that Russia likely perceives Western military power as more threatening than ever before. Even during WW2, when Russia came closest to total annihilation, Germany was simultaneously fighting US, British, French forces. If a world war began today, Russia would be facing a far larger and more technologically advanced opponent.
One of the mistakes was definitely what is called NATO expansion into the East and especially the idea of accepting Ukraine and Georgia as members. This article in The Week deals with this question. I will quote some parts which are of importance for the question.
Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine has sparked a heated debate about NATO that boiled over into the Senate last week. Some argue that NATO's eastward expansion precipitated the conflict by threatening Russian security. Others retort that because the alliance is purely defensive, the only "threat" it posed was to Russian President Vladimir Putin's irredentist aspirations.
The latter argument is flawed. Whether or not NATO threatened Russia, Putin believed it did, and this belief informed his decision to invade. Moreover, Putin's concerns were predictable, and the war might have been averted had Washington taken them seriously.
In the run-up to the invasion, the White House refused to discuss NATO expansion with Moscow. Senior official Derek Chollet defended the refusal. "NATO is a defensive alliance. NATO is not a threat to Russia," he said – implying the issue was none of Russia's business.
Even if NATO were a "defensive alliance," Ukraine's accession would have implicated Russian security. Before the invasion, Putin clarified why he thought Ukraine in NATO would pose an imminent threat: Since the West does not recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea, he reasoned, any conflict there might be seen as a Russian attack on Ukraine, triggering Article 5.
These were not the rantings of a "mad man." In 2008, Ambassador to Russia and current CIA Director William Burns reported that "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)." In two and a half years of talking to hardliners, liberals, and everyone in between, Burns was unable "to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests."
Back in Washington, intelligence analyst Fiona Hill advised President George W. Bush not to invite Ukraine into NATO. "So, you're telling me you're opposed to freedom and democracy," Vice President Dick Cheney snapped.
Unable to turn Ukraine into a NATO member, the U.S. turned it into a NATO outpost, delivering billions in military assistance, conducting joint military exercises, running clandestine paramilitary training programs, swapping intelligence, and even participating in cyber operations against the Russian government. The U.S. created the worst of all possible worlds for Ukraine – a provocative NATO proxy on Russia's doorstep, but without NATO's security umbrella.
Putin is culpable for his criminal attack on Ukraine. But the prospect of Ukraine in NATO heightened Moscow's threat perception and made a geopolitical explosion more likely. That the U.S. refused to discuss the issue with Russia is especially mystifying given that Western leaders privately told Kyiv "you're not going to be a NATO member." A more rational diplomatic strategy would have been to advertise that NATO won't bring Ukraine into the MAP unless and until Russia attacked.
