Former U.S. Ukrainian Ambassador talked about the Russian war in Ukraine

By Mark Muckenfuss

Former Ukrainian Ambassador Steven Pifer told a crowd in the CSU Monterey Bay World Theater on March 9  that he doesn’t see an end to the war in that country coming anytime soon.

“I can’t tell you exactly how the war is going to end, except that I think there will be a Ukraine (afterwards),” Pifer said. Any negotiations will mean compromise, and he added, “It’s going to be a choice by (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelensky and the Ukrainian leadership. That’s got to be figured out by the Ukrainians.”

The Ukrainian ambassador from 1998 to 2000, Pifer was speaking as part of the fifth annual Festival of Languages, Culture and Ideas. The event ran March 9-10 and featured Cuban music, a karate demonstration, a Japanese tea ceremony, T-shirt screen printing, and more.

The bulk of his address examined the background of the conflict and provided an analysis of the motives and miscalculations behind the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin before the start of the year-long war and since. He credited the Biden Administration for using effective diplomacy to unite the western European countries in their response to the war, but said he thinks it needs to be more aggressive in its support of Ukraine. 

The conflict, he said, has put Putin and Russia in a bad place. 

“It’s been a disaster for Russia,” he said, noting that more than 60,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, the country’s military arsenal has been severely depleted, and sanctions by the United States and the European Union have damaged the Russian economy.

The war has shaken the geopolitical landscape, and Pifer thinks it will have cultural ramifications for years to come. 

“The war is having a significant impact on how Ukraine self-identifies,” he said. 

Whereas those in the country who ethnically identify as Ukrainian have lived alongside a minority that identifies with its Russian roots, Pifer said that could change. 

“Putin’s war is going to create a generation that hates Russians,” he said.

In the long term, he doesn’t think it will get much better for Putin or Russia.

“It will be a long time before we get back to anything that could be considered normal relations between Russia and the U.S.,” he said. And, while he specified he is not advocating a policy of regime change, he added, “I don’t see how any American president or European leader could deal with Vladimir Putin at this point.” 

Pifer is a nonresident senior fellow in the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, and the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, and an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. According to the Brookings Institution, Pifer spent his 25 years with the State Department focused on U.S. relations with Europe and the former Soviet Union and on arms control and security.