“While the U.S. has many vital national interests,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote recently, “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”  

The comments inspired a wave of disapproval from conservatives and Republicans, including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the Washington Post columnist George Will, who quipped, “If that is his settled view after the dust settles and he elaborates on this, then he’s not fit to be president, period.”

As an inveterate critic of Woodrow Wilson, Will should know better. DeSantis was merely taking a realist foreign-policy stance at a time when elites in both parties have gotten into a dangerously Wilsonian frame of mind. With support for Ukraine aid falling among Republicans, DeSantis’s comments were also more in tune with where GOP voters are, and are likely to be in the months ahead.

[Read: Zelensky has answers for DeSantis]

The legal case against Russia is open-and-shut. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian government recognized the borders of the new Ukraine, and further guaranteed its sovereignty in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine is a sovereign state, entitled to political independence and territorial integrity. Russia’s war of aggression is clearly a violation of international law.

But the matter is more complicated than that. One of the most far-reaching consequences of Wilsonian idealism has been to turn all international conflicts into primarily legal disputes in which the key question is who is right and who is wrong. The trouble with that approach is that the strategic and historical dimensions of those conflicts tend to disappear from the policy calculus, with baleful consequences.

How Ukraine Became Independent

The hard truth is this: Ukraine’s 1991 borders were partly a subterfuge of Soviet propaganda and did not fully make sense for an independent country alongside Russia. Containing large swaths of historical Russia, millions of ethnic Russians, and a crucial Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula (which was transferred to Ukraine only in 1954 and is home to few ethnic Ukrainians even now), those borders actually guaranteed Russian hegemony in the short term. They’re why pro-Russia presidential candidates won almost every election in Ukraine from 1991 until the “Euromaidan” revolution of 2014. Indeed, Ukrainian-nationalist parties have ruled for the past decade partly because the electorate no longer includes residents of the Donbas or Crimea, the heavily Russian areas that either broke away or were seized by Russia after the pro-Russian government was deposed in 2014.

Hence, from Russia’s point of view, the commitments of 1991 and 1994 were mostly a formality, because Moscow expected Ukraine to remain firmly in its orbit. But those guarantees only kicked an explosive can down the road, because if a strong Ukrainian-nationalist movement should ever arise, as it has now, oriented toward Europe and bent on independence from Russia, the 1991 borders would create a fatal conflict between Ukraine’s nationhood and that of the Russians, many of whom view Ukraine—especially east of the Dnipro River—as an inseparable part of Russia.

[Max Abrahms: I teach international relations. I think we’re making a mistake in Ukraine.]

Russia may be waging a war of aggression as a matter of law, but as a matter of history and strategy it is moving to forestall a grave deterioration in its strategic position, with stakes that are almost as existential for it as they are for Ukraine. And as former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said recently, “Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends.”

When the U.S. agreed to recognize Ukraine in 1991, it should have realized that Ukraine’s borders could prove enormously destabilizing, like the nuclear forces and Black Sea fleet that Ukraine had also accidentally inherited and which the U.S. wisely insisted be transferred to Russia in 1993–94.

The U.S. should have treated the 1991 borders as provisional and encouraged Russia and Ukraine to agree on a peaceful adjustment. With Europe flourishing on one side and Russia a moribund kleptocracy on the other, Ukrainians’ desire for independence from Russia was almost certainly inevitable. As Ukrainian nationalism gathered strength, Russia could perhaps have been persuaded to agree to a territorial adjustment.

Governor DeSantis was right on another score: The proximate cause of the war was definitely a territorial dispute, but of a very special kind. After the Euromaidan revolution, Russia felt it had no choice but to annex Crimea, because it couldn’t risk losing Sevastopol. But it still did not annex the eastern Donbas, which it was also occupying, insisting instead on its reintegration into Ukraine under the terms of the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015, which it saw as vitally necessary to restoring its control over the whole of Ukraine. For the same reason, Ukraine’s nationalists soured on the Minsk Agreements: With those territories in limbo, the nationalists had been able to achieve a degree of independence that would have been impossible otherwise.

America’s Blank Check

As tensions mounted in 2020 and 2021, Germany and France grew anxious to persuade Ukraine to implement the Minsk Agreements, in which all the major issues were territorial. But, with their customary professions of high moral and legal principle, the Americans undercut those diplomatic efforts, encouraging the Ukrainians to dig in their heels and dare Russia to do something about it. It was an implicit blank check and had the same effect as when the kaiser wrote one a century ago, namely to entice the recipient to risk a catastrophic war with Russia.

It is crucial to understand the dangerous role that America is playing. The sheer scale of U.S. aid to Ukraine has become a decisive factor in the course of the war. Don’t be deceived by President Joe Biden’s claims that we are helping Ukraine without getting involved in the conflict ourselves. Even according to the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual, the U.S. is already a de facto belligerent in the Ukraine war.

The lack of strategy behind the deluge of American missiles and tanks flowing into Ukraine is frightening. The U.S. is giving Ukraine enough aid to prevent a Russian victory, but the stated aim of liberating all of Ukraine’s territory, “as long as it takes,” isn’t remotely plausible and is contradicted by other aspects of U.S. policy. This is not the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where the Soviets could afford to cut their losses. Even a return to the status quo ante of January 2022 would likely be unacceptable to the Russians. The Russians are almost certainly prepared to lose—and kill—millions of people before giving up the territory they have now. And because the U.S. has thus far insisted that the weapons donated to Ukraine not be used inside Russia, U.S. strategy is currently optimized for making the war last as long as possible without a decisive result.

What’s more, even if Ukraine’s war aims could be achieved, what would Ukraine do then? It could either reintegrate the Russian populations and risk once again becoming a Russian puppet, or disenfranchise them through repression or wholesale expulsion, which, besides violating international humanitarian law, would likely trigger another war. Hence, Ukraine’s stated war aim—the complete liberation of its 1991 territory—might not even be desirable from Ukraine’s point of view.

America’s Vital Interests

The overriding priority of U.S. foreign policy in the century ahead will be to tame the rising power of China. DeSantis’s observation that “the Biden administration’s policies have driven Russia into a de facto alliance with China” is a crucial one. One might add that U.S. policy is accomplishing that quite against Moscow’s will, because a brief glance at the map suffices to see that China’s increasing control over its “near abroad” puts it on a collision course with Russia along a roughly 6,000-mile front, if you include buffer states. In the century ahead, Russia’s only alternative to domination by China is very likely an alliance with the United States, and that is an alliance the U.S. cannot afford to forfeit. Allowing Russia to slip into China’s orbit would bring Chinese power into the very heart of Europe.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

To be sure, there is a “realist” case for supporting Ukraine in its stated war aims. The linchpin of that argument is an analogy to 1938: If Vladimir Putin isn’t stopped now, then, like Hitler, he will only try to seize more territory. That argument is creditable but misses a key difference between the two situations. In the 1930s, Czechoslovakia was the central pillar of the Allies’ entire defensive strategy. It had to be defended at any price—otherwise the correlation of forces would shift overwhelmingly in Germany’s favor, and Hitler’s conquest of Europe would become unstoppable. By contrast, even if Russia can overcome its surprising military weakness and defeat Ukraine, it will be no closer to realizing Putin’s impossible dream of reincorporating the Baltic states, which, while small, are firmly under NATO’s nuclear umbrella. Putin surely knows that every inch of NATO territory is hopelessly beyond his reach, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must know that as well, his warnings to the contrary notwithstanding.

Ending the War

Before Woodrow Wilson left his dubious stamp on international relations, wars typically ended in peace treaties. Many of those treaties involved territorial settlements, reparations, and other inducements to stop fighting.

Scholars have noted the vertiginous decline in peace treaties in the era of the United Nations. Part of the reason is that modern international law penalizes compromise. For example, international criminal prosecutions have gravely complicated truth-and-reconciliation processes, whose amnesties are often not recognized outside the country where they were granted. Similarly, although Putin surely knew that he was committing a war crime by invading Ukraine, the International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of an arrest warrant for him can only make the stakes of the war even more apocalyptic for the Kremlin.

Wilsonian professions of high moral and legal principle can be an obstacle to compromise, particularly when they become inflexible policy positions. But they also represent what is best in Americans’ view of themselves and of the world—pacifism and benevolence tempered by the instinct to stick up for the underdog and stand up to the bully. Presidents like Ronald Reagan succeeded by finding the balance of idealism and realism, tapping into deep wellsprings of democratic sentiment to give compelling force to their realpolitik. The most important part of DeSantis’s comments signaled a similar approach: “Without question, peace should be the objective.”

Peace should be the overriding objective now, but it will require a willingness to compromise. As the great Cold War game theorist Thomas Schelling observed, parties to a conflict are always negotiating, even if tacitly. If we get beyond their maximalist positions to what each side really needs, a compromise may be possible.

The 1991 borders created a painful dilemma for Ukrainian nationalists. They could have political independence or they could have full territorial integrity, but not, in the real world, both. In the years since the rupture of 2014, Kyiv has tacitly chosen political independence over territory. Russia is facing the mirror image of that dilemma. Putin wants Ukraine to cede the territory Russia now occupies, and to pledge that it will stay out of NATO. Russia must know that it can’t have both of those things while NATO is backing Ukraine. By “annexing” Crimea and now Donbas, it has tacitly chosen territory over political control.

That should help us see the outlines of a durable peace through the fog and din of war. The U.S. should encourage Ukraine to sell the Russians the territory they now occupy in exchange for a large sum that includes reparations. Many wars have been honorably settled that way. A more homogeneously Ukrainian state would be more politically stable and could join the European Union and perhaps even NATO one day.

Absent a negotiated settlement, the most likely (and fraught) end to the war in Ukraine is a unilateral Russian cease-fire, backed by a threat of massive escalation (read: nukes) if the fighting continues. In the long run, a war that ends without a formal peace settlement could mean decades of sanctions, turning Russia into a pariah state, and almost certainly forcing it to accept de facto Chinese suzerainty. The nonrecognition of forcible territorial changes has become a bedrock principle of U.S. foreign policy, but it is another example of how an excessively rigid legalism can sometimes aggravate rather than cool international conflicts.

If Russia declares a cease-fire, the Biden administration will face the decision toward which its policy has been driving it all along: whether to break its promises to Ukraine or dramatically escalate U.S. involvement. The first would gravely damage American prestige and embolden China, while the second would almost certainly lead to a nuclear showdown. Both horns of that dilemma carry totally unacceptable risks, which is why the United States should never have gotten involved in this war to begin with.

A little realism can make idealism go a long way.

The man introduced to me in the southern port city of Odesa as Taras does not look like what he is: the founder of the civilian resistance to Russia’s military occupation of southern and eastern Ukraine. He’s no tough Marshal Tito or ethereal Mahatma Gandhi. He looks, in fact, like your typical Gen Z tech worker: early 20s, lean, trendy—and he’s always online. He likes to talk about English Premier League football games from the 1980s, but only because he’s seen them on YouTube; he can name scores of Premier League players, but only because he’s used their avatars in the FIFA video game. He adores Instagram.

Since April, Taras has led a group named Yellow Ribbon, which took up the principles of nonviolent resistance soon after the Russians overran his home city of Kherson. (Taras is a pseudonym he uses to help protect his identity from his Russian enemies.) Its goal: to resist Russian occupation through peaceful means wherever possible. The group has now spread throughout the occupied territories of Ukraine, and as it has done so, its reputation has grown. Late last year, Yellow Ribbon was one of four Ukrainian groups honored with the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the European Union’s main award for the defense of human rights.

[David Patrikarakos: Russia’s hunger war]

What distinguishes Yellow Ribbon from traditional nonviolent resistance movements is its emphasis on the digital. The group’s growing numbers of activists stay connected via a chatbot plugin on the group’s Telegram messaging app. Prompted by the chatbot’s automated questions, activists in the occupied territories can access various resistance tasks to carry out on the ground. The system enables Yellow Ribbon to share the materials and techniques necessary for the resistance to make its activities visible in the real world of the occupation, while safeguarding the anonymity of the participants against Russian efforts to penetrate the network. Among the clandestine actions guided by the chatbot are scrawling pro-Ukraine graffiti, tying yellow ribbons around objects in the streets, and projecting slogans onto buildings taken over by the Russian administration. Such nonviolent actions have made Yellow Ribbon famous across Ukraine—and a serious problem for Russia in the occupied areas.

At first, the Russians ignored the group to avoid amplifying its work. Eventually, as Yellow Ribbon’s activities grew, they were forced to respond. Yellow and blue paint began to disappear from shops in occupied areas. Buying anything yellow became almost impossible; people were reduced to cutting patches of the color out of old clothes.

Even Russian soldiers began to feel the effects of Yellow Ribbon’s activities. Taras told me that after graffiti appeared near the entrance of a Chechen base in Melitopol, another occupied city in south-eastern Ukraine, the soldiers changed their location and started going about town in civilian clothing rather than military uniform.

Access to the Telegram chatbot has allowed resistance activists to spring up across the occupied territories; many of them were women, who, I was told, could more easily pass unnoticed by the Russian occupiers. Earlier this year, I met Liliyia Aleksandrova in Kherson, which was recaptured by Ukrainian forces late last year—though artillery shelling still roared in the background as we spoke. Prior to the occupation, Aleksandrova had, she said, been a middle-aged “mama.” When the Russians first came to Kherson, she attended some street demonstrations, but the tear gas and soldiers soon put a stop to things. “It was clear we couldn’t protest publicly anymore,” she told me. “I was thinking about what I could do for my country; I had to do something to be useful.”

On Telegram, she came across Yellow Ribbon and, using the group’s chatbot tool, she began downloading instructions for tasks. She put up yellow ribbons everywhere she could—on buildings, lampposts, and fences—and took photos. Once or twice, she was almost caught, but she continued. Her work was everywhere around the city. As we talked, we passed Yellow Ribbon graffiti on a street wall. “I did that,” Liliyia told me with quiet satisfaction.

The first time Taras saw the Russians after the February 24 invasion, they had taken an office in the city’s main square; then they took the main police station. By March 2, they were in full control of Kherson. “No one knew what would happen tomorrow or the day after,” he told me when we met earlier this year in Odesa. He’d spent most of last year living under occupation in Kherson before its liberation in November.

Ukrainian partisans have launched sporadic attacks in Russian-occupied areas, but Taras had no military training, so any resistance activity he took on had to be nonviolent. He drew inspiration from earlier causes such as Germany’s White Rose student group, which opposed the Nazis; the U.S. civil-rights movement; and Czechoslovakia’s 1989 protests that led to the Velvet Revolution. Gandhi called nonviolent resistance “mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”

[Anne Applebaum: The brutal alternate world in which the U.S. abandoned Ukraine]

According to Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, both political scientists and co-authors of the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, taking up arms has traditionally given regime opponents a 26 percent chance of succeeding in their aims, whereas the tactics of nonviolent resistance have a 53 percent success rate. Countries where nonviolent, rather than violent, resistance led to change were more likely to remain democratic after the crisis ended.

Taras knew many people who wanted to act but for whom armed resistance was not an option. He could, he calculated, attract many more recruits through nonviolence. Almost anyone can participate: Its methods are highly accessible, and no specialist equipment or skills are required. He grasped that nonviolence’s main advantage over violence is scale—the number of people it can rally to a cause is exponentially greater.

Taras knew he could count on the 10 employees of the IT company he ran in Kherson, plus some people in other companies he worked with. This was enough to form the basis of what would become Yellow Ribbon. Even today, the core group of coordinators remains small—about 40 people, all of them known personally to Taras from before the occupation. Most are in their 20s.

At first, the Russians allowed residents of Kherson to protest in person, and many did, going to the central square, waving Ukrainian flags, and demanding the troops leave. Pooling cash, Taras’s group decided to buy online advertisements to spread the message. It gravitated easily from organizing IT projects to rallying support for the local protests and other pro-Ukraine activities through March and into April.

Then, in late April, a rumor spread through the city that Russia was making preparations for fraudulent referendums in occupied cities across the south. The result would be a foregone conclusion; the territories would be annexed to Russia. The resistance activists knew they had to act.

On April 23, they set up a Telegram group that they named Yellow Ribbon, a reference to the color on the Ukrainian flag, to spread pro-Ukraine messages and encourage people to paste leaflets and posters around Kherson. The platform would also work with local media to promulgate similar messages. Taras realized they could now reach hundreds of thousands of people.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

“That’s what you can do with a digital component: reach larger audiences, spread more messages, get people to go out and protest, and do so successfully,” he told me. “We saw it work; things started to build like a snowball.”

The first demonstration, which took place on April 27, was modest in size—maybe 500 people. The Russians were out in force and used tear gas and stun grenades against the protesters. The physical demonstration may have been small, and was quickly put down, but online, via the Telegram channel and on social networks, it went viral. Moscow did eventually hold the referendum, but not until the end of September.

Another protest was planned for May 9, by which time things were getting more dangerous. Within five minutes, the protest was broken up by Russian forces. After the FSB, Russia’s state security police, came to town, the first local collaborators emerged, and activists started to disappear. Taras and his team made the decision to shift their strategy away from street demonstrations. If the resistance could not occupy the streets, it would occupy the online space.

In June, the group used Instagram to create a virtual street protest that included images of flags and banners on a visualization of a street in Kherson. Every person who attended had to write “Kherson is Ukraine” in the comments section. From these posts, the group calculated that 40,000 people had joined from Kherson and 16,000 from Mariupol. The Yellow Ribbon message spread across not only pro-Ukraine but pro-Russia platforms as well.

As Yellow Ribbon’s name and activities grew, new problems arose. Its activists were in constant danger of arrest. The group put several security protocols in place. Unlike specialized messaging platforms such as Signal, Telegram was already in widespread use by Ukrainians and Russians alike, rendering the app’s presence on a phone unsuspicious. Telegram can also be deleted from a phone, removing all the messages, and then downloaded again—with all of the messages still intact.

[Gil Barndollar: Ukraine has the battlefield edge]

Getting people out of jail became a priority for the group. That generally meant one thing: bribes. Usually, it was easy to pay Russian soldiers or local collaborators to release an activist who’d disappeared. Taras knew businessmen in the city who had dealings with the Russians, and he used them as intermediaries. He’d pay them, and they’d pay the Russians.

Then, in late September, the group set up the chatbot. The technology enabled Yellow Ribbon to radically scale up its activities, allowing it to evolve from being a local resistance movement into something more powerful: a franchised one. People like Aleksandrova began to open cabinets across the occupied territories—in Melitopol and Donetsk and Luhansk, even in Crimea.

Over coffee in Odesa, Taras showed me the chatbot homepage on his laptop. In Crimea, chatbot volunteers tied a yellow ribbon on a tree near a shipping port. In September, leaflets announcing Crimea is Ukraine! and Opening soon! were pasted on a government building there. Ukrainian-flag graffiti appeared in Donetsk, and in Melitopol posters mocked the Russian passports that locals were being pressured to get.

The group also taught people how to make stencils in the shape of the “3CY” initialism for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and, using torches, project them onto official buildings. In late January, one appeared on the Russian administration’s office in Melitopol.

[David Frum: Zelensky recalled us to ourselves]

Most of the time, the group judged, Russian soldiers hadn’t themselves seen the resistance graffiti or leaflets in the city, but a monitoring team would report the photo of it that subsequently appeared online. Back in May, the Russian TV channel Izvestia paraded some purported Yellow Ribbon activists from Mariupol, who claimed that they had been paid to put up leaflets (as an alternative to other hourly paid work, which encouraged Russian viewers to infer that they were prostitutes).

The Yellow Ribbon team started noticing people whom it suspected were FSB personnel using the Chatbot app to pose as activists and request to meet in person—a clear violation of security rules. The team’s members, Taras told me, also received phishing links almost daily. In this sense, the digital amplification has increased the reach and impact of the ground activity, forcing the occupier to respond to it.

Eventually, the group’s presence attracted attention in Moscow. Yellow Ribbon’s work prompted a “concerned citizen” in Crimea to message the local Russian Investigative Committee’s Telegram channel: “I request you begin investigating the terrorist activities and spreading of ideology by the Yellow Ribbon group.” On January 27, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow issued a letter saying that the activity was being investigated, and two days later, a subdivision of the ministry confirmed that it was now regarded as a criminal matter.

A Russian organization calling itself the Committee for the Defense Against Traitors released a video claiming that the group was engaged “in the information war” to push the agenda of “terrorists.” These sorts of attacks are only to be expected: The group’s activities are not just a constant reminder that the locals reject the occupation but also a living rebuttal of Russia’s entire narrative justifying its invasion.

Recently, I spoke with Ivan, a colleague of Taras’s who helped set up Yellow Ribbon back in April last year. (Again, I am using a pseudonym to protect his identity.) Another Kherson native, he is Yellow Ribbon’s main coordinator. When the Russians withdrew from the city, he went to nearby Melitopol, which remains under Moscow’s control. Ivan stayed behind enemy lines, he explained, because the group needs to ensure that the movement keeps growing, especially in that city and other still-occupied areas. It’s hard to find the right materials and places to print, and they need to keep their network of activists in play across the region.  

“Things in Melitopol are tough,” he told me over an encrypted voice call. “The Russians have instituted an ‘anti-terrorist’ regime on the streets, which means increased patrols and video cameras everywhere. A lot of soldiers have arrived from Russia—and they are making a lot of arrests. It’s hard for us to work here now.

“The Russians can be brutal,” he went on. “But it depends on what unit they’re from—the Chechens are really bad. They think that this is their territory.”

[Tom Nichols: Putin’s desperate hours]

Ivan and his fellow activists keep a low profile, especially when they go out to buy necessities. Security is paramount. “I try not to be too active on the streets but instead focus on how to bring in the materials into the city and where to hide them,” he told me. “I work with VPNs and hosts and proxies to make sure my internet connection is safe. I have five cellphones and move from safe house to safe house each night or week.”

Taras left Kherson last August, before the city was liberated. He traveled by car, carrying just one sports bag and about 170,000 roubles (approximately $2,300), which he gave to the soldiers manning a checkpoint out of the city. When he handed over the cash, he felt like telling them they were welcome to it because he’d never be needing roubles again, but he refrained, and instead drove through the barrier in silence, back into free Ukraine.

Since then, he has continued to coordinate Yellow Ribbon’s activities from inside Ukraine. The group plans to expand its activities. The chatbot now serves about 4,600 open cabinets, but the group hopes to get that number to 100,000. This has helped change the nature of nonviolent resistance movements, which in the past tended to center on a single, charismatic figure, such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi. Instead, Yellow Ribbon, with its army of activists across occupied Ukraine, creates impact through a shared disgust at what Russia is doing, unifying opposition to the occupation. Its great strength lies in its digitally diffuse activism—which makes stopping it much harder for the Russians.

“I hope that liberation will come in the next three months,” Ivan said at the end of our conversation. “When it does, we will take our Ukrainian flags to the main square and celebrate with our military, as we did in Kherson.”