A year ago, I wrote an article entitled, A Ukrainian-Russian Border Plebiscite? Anyone Got a Better Idea? I hate to repeat myself, but unfortunately, one Trump-Putin and two Trump-Zelensky meetings later, I think we can safely conclude that the answer to the question posed was No.
To reprise, do I think it likely that future negotiations will result in an internationally supervised vote in which the mixed Ukrainian/Russian border populations declare their preferred nationality, district by district, and the two nations governments abide by the decision? Unfortunately, I do not. But then likelihood is never the principal concern in times of war. After all, was it ever actually likely that Ukraine could withstand the onslaught of its larger neighboring country (and former co-republic of the Soviet Union)? Or was it ever really likely that Russia could entirely overrun the country that it claimed had no legitimate existence?
(To quickly clarify my stance on all this, Ill agree with the political scientist C.J. Polychroniou that it is the U.S. that is principally responsible for the Ukraine crisis although Putins invasion of Ukraine is unmistakably a criminal act of aggression U.S. responsibility lying in expanding NATO, its anti-Soviet alliance, into an anti-Russia alliance in the post-Soviet era.)
Could such a proposal nonetheless be of value, long-shot though it may be? Before considering this question for the future, lets consider whether it might already have had some untapped value. As we know, Donald Trump won the White House by an very thin margin in November, 2024. During the campaign, Trump laid a claim on being the peace candidate. While there was absolutely no difference in the two candidates support for the Gaza extermination campaign unleashed by Israel in response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre, Trump declared his intent to end the Ukraine war. And while his boast that he could do so in a single day might be dismissed as typical Trump blather, Harris in line with her role in the Biden administration offered no proposal at all for ending the war, other than turning its tide by continued arming of Ukraines defense, an eventuality that seemed increasingly implausible. In other words, the Democrats appeared to offer the prospect of endless war.
And the idea that simply staying the course might somehow bring the war to an end was rendered even less plausible by the fact that Biden Administration Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had publicly declared a weakened Russia as a goal of U.S. military support for Ukraine and Biden himself had declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin could not remain in power. These were goals clearly beyond simple defense of Ukraine. Even more significantly, credible sources have reported that representatives of NATO governments had sabotaged Russia-Ukraine negotiations in 2022.
On top of that, all of this came in a context in which otherwise usually reliably antiwar voices who might normally be expected to argue for alternatives to continued war were rendered mute, seemingly in a state of shock from finding their government supporting what they deemed to be the right side in this war. Public calls for negotiations were rare, and suggestions as to the content of such negotiations almost non-existent. In short, there was virtually no antiwar movement that one could have imagined having any sway with a Harris White House. In a match-up of the implausible versus the non-existent, the implausible will generally carry the day.
Harris lost the popular vote by 1.47 percent, meaning that a turnaround of .74 percent or 3/4 of one percent would have flipped the lead. Of course, as most Americans realize even if they may not quite understand all of how or why it is not the popular vote that is decisive but the vote of the Electoral College which Trump won by a 312226 margin. While that gap is substantial, the underlying reality was much closer. If Harris had reversed a total of just 104,884 votes in three states Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, she would have prevailed by a 270268 margin. An across-the-board, nationwide shift of .86 percent would have produced that result.
Could a dramatic Harris break with the Biden Administration by proposing something like an internationally supervised vote in the contested areas of Ukraine and Russia have delivered the Democrats from the perception of being the party of war without end and produced a voter shift sufficient to change the outcome? Obviously well never know. Anyhow, that was then and this is now and the question becomes whether a plebiscite proposal holds any value today.
To answer yes to that question requires two things. The first is a belief that ideas can matter in foreign policy, that world opinion matters. It must be granted that experience strongly suggests the opposite, but in the absence of an alternative and if we can accept the plausibility that the idea could have had an impact in the past, perhaps we can be excused for making the leap of faith. And one thing in favor of the idea of advocating such a vote is that anyone who might choose to pick up the baton will want for neither mechanism nor precedent. Both Ukraine and Russia already participate in two organizations with relevant experience the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the latter probably being the logical choice. OSCE has not only sent election observation missions to both countries in the past, but it has the experience of organizing and administering the first voter registration and elections in post-war Bosnia. (This writer has participated in OSCE missions to all three of those countries.)
The wars in Bosnia and the rest of Yugoslavia had been Europes most violent post-World War II event until the Ukraine War, and they bore one fundamental but seldom noted similarity to it: the break-ups of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union both resulted in millions of their former citizens now living in countries where they and many of their neighbors did not feel they belonged, and where they often did not enjoy the same rights of citizenship they previously had. Appreciating that similarity also seen in other border areas between Russia and former Soviet Republics such as Georgia and Moldova at the least allows us to envision a peaceful ballot box process that might achieve a recognizably fair and equitable outcome, if there were a will to make it happen admittedly a very big if.
The second requirement represents by far the steeper hurdle: How to introduce the idea into the public domain as something for people to even imagine? It requires champions capable of drawing significant public attention to it. Where might they come from? Not from the belligerent governments, certainly. And probably not from any other government either, since few governments are likely to be about the business of suggesting that internationally recognized borders are anything less than sacrosanct. A member of the U.S. Congress, possibly? Or the German Bundestag, the British or French Parliament, etc.? Or an insurgent candidate for, or an non-governmental party in one of these bodies? I would like to think that this article could be out of date and pointless by the time it reaches the reader, but then I hoped that a year ago. In the meantime, if you are amenable to the idea and know of anyone in the above categories that you think might also be, consider contacting them.
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