What Do You Do with a Broken Country?

Maybe it’s just the typical early morning dread that hangs around until the second cup of coffee is poured, but it seems increasingly clear to me that Ukraine cannot be saved. Kyiv doesn’t have the means to resist, and Ukraine doesn’t have enough strategic importance to the West for us to commit to the actions that would be necessary to save it from its large and aggressive neighbor.

But if the country can’t be saved, might there be something of Ukraine to be salvaged?

Before we get to that though, a little something that occurred to me yesterday after reading that some Ukrainian Jews had been ordered to “register” with the pro-Russian paramilitaries in the east. If I were president I’d have immediately and very publicly ordered a Marine amphibious group to the Black Sea. Not to wage war, or even to threaten war — but to assist, if need be, with the evacuation of Jews to Israel or to our shores. Odessa is awfully far from the Donbas to be convenient for refugees, but it’s a safe bet not even Vlad the Bad would want to mess with U.S. Marines on a mercy mission. That kind of thing would go a long way to restoring some of our standing with “New Europe,” too. In fact, positioning the Marines for potential rescue missions is a good idea, even if the registration story turns out not to be true as my friend Greg Hill informed me last night.

So. Back to the question of what might possibly be salvaged of Ukraine — and my eyes wander to the left side of the map.

The western third of the country was Polish between the world wars, and before that it was the eastern half of Austrian Galicia. Before that Galicia was part of the old Poland-Lithuania empire. The people there might speak Ukrainian, but culturally they have faced west far longer than they faced Moscow — or even Kyiv. The dominant religion is Catholicism, not Eastern Orthodox.

With that in mind, maybe it’s not too late to cut a deal with Putin. He gets everything up to and including Kyiv and its environs, although he might not want to outright annex the more Ukrainian bits directly to Russia. Federation, Finlandization, or something similar might be the best bad fate for central Ukraine. The Donbas and the Russified east and south Moscow would gobble up whole, of course.

But the price of our acquiescence would be federating western Ukraine — old Galicia — with our Polish allies. The two have a long and pretty decent history together, and something slightly short of total reunification might be the best outcome for all involved, provided the locals were all happy with the new arrangement. A plebiscite — an honest plebiscite — would put the democratic seal of approval on the deal. If need be, we could sweeten things with a side deal with Moscow that no NATO troops would enter Poland’s new Galician region if no Russian troops entered the Kyiv area.

It’s an awful thing to partake in the dismemberment of an independent country. But when all the other likely outcomes are worse, then it’s time to think outside the map.