Lessons learned. How not to squander Ukraine's chance

A special project of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, "Ukraine Now. A Vision for the Future"

There are these moments in history, these kinds of Big Bang moments where you have a shot at leaving your past behind and breaking through to a new future. Right now, you have such a big moment here in Ukraine. How can it be used to get to another level? How can we make sure we don’t miss the chanсе of a lifetime? And what lessons could be learned from the history of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia and from the examples of post-Soviet recovery to ensure successful renewal? These are the questions we discussed during our interview for the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) project ‘UKRAINE NOW. Vision for the Future’.

What could we have done better before the war? I think it's an important question not only for Ukrainians but also for Americans and European leaders. And I would name a few lessons.

One, I think we collectively underestimated Putin's proclivity for using force to achieve his ideological objectives. We hoped falsely that he was a rational actor, that he would calculate the cost-benefit analysis and then decide, well, this will be too costly, I’d better not do this. And I think we grossly underestimated how his ideas and ideology motivated him. 

In the case of Mr Putin – he is an imperialist. If you read and look at what he says, he doesn't believe that Ukraine is a separate and independent nation. He doesn't believe that you guys are any different than Russians: you're just Russians with accents, in his view.

Then, if you remember, in the run-up to the war, there was lots of talk about NATO expansion, and that this is a war to stop NATO. I know my government and the Biden administration put much energy into trying to tell Mr Putin that we're not going to expand NATO because we don't want to threaten Russia. Well, I think in retrospect, we now understand that that was a complete misreading of his motivation. He wasn't worried about NATO expansion; he knew that Ukraine was not joining NATO anytime soon. He was motivated by other things, so I think that was a collective miscalculation that we had about what motivates him personally. 

The second thing is that collectively, your government, the Biden administration, and other members of NATO did not do enough to prepare militarily to try to deter this war. After Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, we should have had a program to arm the Georgians, to arm Ukraine to be prepared for a military attack from Russia. If you think about all the weapons that have come to your country from my country and many other countries around the world, what if all those weapons had been in place before February 24th? What if all those weapon systems had been installed before? Maybe we could have deterred Putin from invading your country. 

Therefore, the lesson learned for the future is that you cannot rely on anyone - diplomats or NATO or anybody from the outside – to defend your country. At the end of the day, Ukraine has to protect its own territory. Now we've tragically broken through the hesitation by the West of providing serious military assistance to your country because of this tragic war. And when the war ends, the imperative must be to arm Ukraine to the teeth. I think the parallels are countries like Taiwan or Israel that live in tough neighborhoods, have frightening neighbors next to them, and therefore devote extraordinary amounts of money and attention to defense. That will cost a lot of money and require restructuring attitudes towards the military in Ukraine. But tragically, I don't see any other choice. 

I worry that once there’s peace, everybody will say: oh, well, we don't need any more HIMARS, we don't need any more Javelins, we don't need any more aircraft. And I'm afraid I have to disagree with that. As long as Putin is in power in Russia, he will present a threat to your country. And therefore, the very next day after the war is over, you have to begin preparing to deter a future war.

In my country there's a lot of people that share some of Putin's statements about Ukraine: ‘Russians, Ukrainians they're all the same, aren't they? Their languages are basically the same, right? Didn't Russia start in Kyivan Rus?’ There are lots of people, even scholars and professors in my country, who think along those terms. So, another lesson learned from this tragic war is that collectively, with the help first and foremost of Ukrainian scholars, we have to have a program to re-educate the world about Ukrainian history so that these myths will finally be dispelled.

When I served in the government, we were always frustrated that in communication, Russians had one set of rules, and we had another: we were constrained by the truth. Mr. Lavrov, Zacharova, ‘Russia Today’, Simonyan, they're not constrained by the truth, right? It creates an asymmetry, it's an unfair competition. But I do think that we should not go down the path where we become more like them. That would be immoral and, in the long term, it would adversely affect our interests and undermine our values. But instead, we have to be much more aggressive, much more strategic about information. 

We need a more active campaign in promoting information. In my view, the United States is not spending enough money. The Chinese and the Russians outspend our platforms for this. I'm thinking about ‘Radio Liberty’ for instance, and ‘Voice of America,’ they're tiny little programs compared to ‘Russia Today’. This is a lesson from the Cold War: we got better at this; we spent more money promoting information. And today, it's even more challenging. It means investing in subsidizing all kinds of media – in your country, in my country.

I applaud what Biden's Administration has done to strengthen NATO, to arm Ukraine and set new sanctions for Russia – those three core components of their strategy I think they're doing well. But I think there's way more that should be done. We should be providing more weapons, better weapons, and providing them faster. It's just that simple. 

And it's the same with sanctions – we've done a lot, congratulations. But there's way more that you can do on individual sanctions. NACP has paved a roadmap for them. You have named literally the names that they could sanction if they wanted to do more.

Generally, it's hard to measure the effect of sanctions. It usually takes years to see the effect of sanctions on changing foreign policy behavior. The academic literature is mixed: there are some cases where it's worked, South Africa is a great case, and there are some cases where it hasn't. But I think there's another piece to sanctions that sometimes gets left out of the discussion amongst foreign policy circles: sometimes you have to do the morally correct thing irrespective of whether you think it will achieve the effect. 

When there's something so horrific that your government does, and it's a government that you support through paying taxes, it's a government that has created the permissive conditions for you to make money inside Russia, that means that you also have an individual moral obligation when that government behaves the way it does. And the fact that those on the list of sanctions are trying so hard to get off the list suggests that they're working, suggests that they're effective. If they were as ineffective as some critics claim, why would they be putting so much energy into trying to lift the sanctions?

And, of course, you need economic assistance. Without that, you know there would be even more problems inside Ukraine. And the West, I think, is doing a lot. But I worry that over time there will be exhaustion with that support, especially with economic assistance, because our economies are all suffering from inflation. There are political forces throughout European democracies and most certainly here, in the United States, that blame the inflation on sanctions. They just say it straight up: these sanctions are causing inflation, especially regarding gasoline prices. So it's important for Ukrainians and people like me to keep explaining why that's not the case. Why Putin is responsible for the uptick in prices, and the argument I always make is: yes, we cannot sustain billions of dollars of economic assistance forever to Ukraine, even a rich country like the United States. So the best way to stop that is to provide more military assistance now, more sanctions now, to speed the war’s end. To me, that's the logic, so I think anybody can provide that kind of explanation. 

I've participated in some conversations with your government about the recovery plan. I think it's right and proper that government officials in Ukraine and worldwide start planning for recovery now and not wait until the end of the war. So, I applaud that effort. 

If I were tweaking the plan, I would try to do two things. One is greater prioritization. Right now, it feels like everything under the sun needs to change. You have to do a sequence of things: what you want to do first, the things you want to do second, and the things you want to do third. Otherwise, where should one begin? And then second, I would just give more emphasis to political issues, transparency issues, and corruption issues, as you all are working on. This is not just an economic issue. This is a political issue. I think the political economy of reconstruction needs to be front and center, and not just one talking point among 15. 

I'm not one of those people in the West that says: oh, Ukraine's corrupt, and they'll never get better. No, there have been tremendous reforms in Ukraine over the last years, and you've been part of them, by the way, so you know that there's the possibility for change. I just think making that a higher priority and a greater focus would be good, not only because I think it's good for Ukraine, but I think it will help to attract more money both from governments and from the private sector that you're going to need to invest in Ukraine in the coming months and years. 

You see all kinds of solidarity towards Ukraine right now all over the world. And your President Zelenskyy has incredible support and goodwill towards him around the world. So to me, you need to use that moment very strategically because it'll fade over time - we'll get distracted with our own problems and our own elections. And that's where I think you say: ‘Forget about the old Ukraine – this is the new Ukraine’. And therefore, you highlight the deeper democracy and the deeper commitment to liberal economic reforms from the beginning, so that you attract that new capital. 

I do believe that there are these moments in history, these kind of Big Bang moments, where you have a shot at breaking through. To part with your past and to break through to a new future. I think of Germany after World War II. I think of 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, when some countries achieved that breakthrough, and some did not, you know. You think of Estonia today, they used that moment to do all the things we're talking about, and Estonia today is a completely different place than it was 30 years ago. Poland today is a completely different place because they managed to use that moment collectively. Ukraine and Poland started their processes of reform at basically the same GDP per capita, and we know today Poland is a lot richer, and a lot better off than Ukraine is, right? 

I really think that is a moment for Ukraine. And I'm talking about billionaires as well as school teachers when I say that. I'm especially talking about billionaires who just have to change their ways. If you just go back to the same structure of the Ukrainian economy from before, that will be a tremendous wasted opportunity. The same is true of too much centralization of the government and too big a government. That would be a giant wasted opportunity, too. And I do think it's a moment that is unlikely to ever happen again in the future if you get it wrong this time.

There's one giant advantage that Ukraine has that people forget when they talk about these moments of reconstruction comparatively. And it's something that I feel, and there's actually empirical evidence for it. You have a very vibrant civil society. You have a very vibrant decentralized local government – it has been a big achievement of Ukrainian reforms. And the combination of decentralization and vibrant civil society, I think, gives you great advantages for success. 

I am constantly inspired by young people that have worked in civil society, that work in government, and that go back and forth. That is huge human capital, a huge advantage that Ukraine has. That is, as part of the strategy for reconstruction, we both need to use it and continue to nurture and develop it. That will be the difference whether Ukraine has a breakthrough or not.

Michael McFaul, Professor of political science at Stanford University, Coordinator of The International Working Group on Russian Sanctions

Проєкт "UKRAINE NOW. Візія майбутнього" реалізується НАЗК за підтримки Антикорупційної ініціативи ЄС (EUACI) – провідна антикорупційна програма в Україні, що фінансується ЄС, співфінансується і впроваджується Міністерством закордонних справ Данії. Мета проєкту — окреслити бачення розвитку України після перемоги у війні з росією. В інтерв'ю з відомими українськими діячами, мислителями та лідерами думок ми шукаємо відповіді на питання про те, як змінюється держава сьогодні та якою вона має стати завтра.