After Crimea’s return to Russia, the West rallied together and took some steps to punish and isolate Russia. We must say that those steps had no serious consequences for Russia. Putin’s request to the Council of the Federation that it remove the authorization for the use of the armed forces is in no way a result or fear of Western sanctions. The refusal of the Russian leadership to occupy southeast Ukraine is not remotely a result of Putin “blinking” (in the words of columnist of The New York Times Tom Friedman) or being afraid of sanctions and as a result deciding to content himself with Crimea and leave the Russian-speaking southeast territories.

I think that, in the case of Ukraine, Putin’s policy is perfectly in tune with the great Chinese thinker and strategist Sun Tzu, who claimed that a hundred battles resulting in a hundred victories are still worse than a victory achieved with no battle. In our case, this principle means that it would have been reckless to enter into war with Ukraine if Russia could achieve its aims bloodlessly. Both the reabsorption of Crimea and the current developments in southeast Ukraine speak to the potential of Sun Tzu’s principles’ applicability to Russian-Ukrainian relations. The processes now unfolding both in eastern Ukraine and in Ukraine overall speak to such a dynamic.

The Donetsk and Lugansk republics are now a fact. The meeting in Donetsk, to which President Poroshenko sent former President Kuchma to negotiate together with representatives of the OSCE and the Russian ambassador with the Donetsk and Lugansk envoys points to the fact that Moscow, Kiev, and the West have de facto recognized these regions as independent subjects in international relations. The status of the self-proclaimed republics is still unclear and we cannot predict the results of the negotiations, but the very fact that the negotiations are proceeding in the current format means that there is practical international recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics. This all happened without the intervention of the Russian military, which renders any accusations of expansionism and aggression towards Russia meaningless. The success of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics is due to the efforts of their own fighters, as well as those of volunteers from Russia and other countries. Here we must stress that it is largely the Donetsk and Lugansk populations who fight and die for their own rights and not on Moscow’s orders, but because they want to preserve their national, cultural, and language identity. This still allows for the possibility of a federated Ukraine, with Russian as second official language, and neutral status. In other words, everything falls back into place, only Kiev, Washington, and Brussels have lost a lot of their influence.

The losses incurred by both Ukraine and the West could have been avoided had realists prevailed in Washington and given up the zero sum game with Russia. In conclusion, I would like to cite the remark often attributed to Churchill, according to which you can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else. I would like to believe that everything else has already been tried. The uninterrupted sequence of mistakes from Clinton to Obama needs to stop, and apparently Ukraine is the place where Washington has met its match. There is still a hope that new, wiser politicians and strategists will appear in Washington, with a clearer view of the new realities and balance of power in the world, who would understand that it is time to end the zero sum game mentality with regard to Russia. I think it would be useful were Washington to convince the Kiev government that what is acceptable to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski (the three demands outlined above) should be fully acceptable to Petro Poroshenko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The Kiev authorities, after all, have to contend with serious economic challenges. The Ukrainian economy cannot be transformed without Russian participation, and the Ukrainian market cannot live without the Russian one and without Russian energy. It is obvious that soon, a social crisis will aggravate the political one and the economy will suffer. Many analysts predict the inevitability of social uprisings, and the worsening of chaos and ungovernability. If someone wants to turn Ukraine into Somalia, which is the direction in which the EU and Washington were pushing it, it can be done, but I do not believe that Ukrainians, Europeans, or the world would benefit from that. This is why, perhaps it is time for the Americans to do the right thing and make the right choice, and prove Churchill was right, and wasn’t just talking to compliment his American mother.

Andranik Migranyan is the director of the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation in New York, which works closely with the Russian Presidential administration.