Fig leafs and off-ramps: We can't give Putin an easy out

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Ruminating out loud at a fundraiser the other day, U.S. President Joe Biden expressed what's on many people's minds: "We're trying to figure out, what is Putin's off-ramp? Where, where does he get off? Where does he find a way out?"

This question about Russian President Vladimir Putin is echoing through halls of power across the Western alliance — and indeed across the whole world. Even Beijing and New Delhi don't want the Kremlin to go nuclear in its war against Ukraine. After all, even a so-called "limited" first strike by Putin could, as Biden warned, spin out of control and escalate to Armageddon.

The last time the world seriously contemplated this darkest of all scenarios was the Cuban Missile Crisis, six decades ago. At that time, the leaders in Washington and Moscow did find an off-ramp, in the form of a secret deal that only came to light much later. This crisis, however, is different. For starters, Biden and Putin — unlike John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev — appear not to be talking.

The assumption that motivates the Western search for an off-ramp is that Putin can no longer de-escalate by himself — by withdrawing from Ukraine or even conceding defeat — because he would lose power and maybe his life. Therefore he needs the West's help, a sort of trap door to another narrative in which he could declare victory to his Russian home audience and politically survive.

Some experts, such as Timothy Snyder at Yale University, regard this Western obsession with supplying off-ramps for Putin as "deeply perverse." Putin "does not need our help in the real world to craft reassuring fictions for Russians. He has been doing this for 20 years without our help" — by controlling Russian media and creating a virtual reality in which he always has an escape route. Whenever things don't go his way, he just declares victory and changes the subject. And Russians pretend to believe him.

The counterargument is that Putin may have lost control over the virtual reality he's created. His army has been routed too embarrassingly on too many Ukrainian battlefields for his propaganda fictions to remain plausible. As a result, he's come under pressure not so much from Russian moderates or doves, but from even more radical hawks.

Cornered like a rat, at home more than abroad, Putin therefore appears to see no options other than escalation. He mobilizes hundreds of thousands. He recklessly annexes four additional Ukrainian regions, then spreads his nuclear umbrella over them. He bombs Ukrainian civilians. He steps up sabotage and hybrid warfare inside NATO countries. The path he's on, the fear goes, will eventually lead him to nukes, unless we give him that off-ramp.

That reasoning however, highlights another difference between the Ukraine war and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962, the only antagonists that mattered were the two major nuclear powers, and the off-ramp consisted of a secret concession by one to the other. In return for the Soviet withdrawal of nukes from Cuba, the U.S. would also remove its warheads from Turkey. Today, by contrast, all conceivable off-ramps would involve things that are not America's to give.

The U.S.-led West would have to offer Putin something he's been demanding in his many otherworldly rantings over the past year. Most obviously, that would be Crimea or other Ukrainian territories he's seized.

But only Kyiv can make such deals. And after its heroic resistance, and its string of battlefield victories, it's understandably in no mood to do so. The West can hardly nudge Kyiv — by restraining arms shipments, for example — into a compromise that would amount to surrender. Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are not Biden's to trade.

Any such "off-ramp" would amount to granting Putin actual victory and setting a disastrous precedent. By defending itself, Ukraine is also fighting for the principles of sovereignty, legitimacy, self-determination and democracy that are the foundation of the Western and international orders. If the West forfeits these principles, it rewards aggression, and specifically nuclear blackmail. Putin would start planning his next invasion, as would dictators elsewhere.

By the same logic, the off-ramp Biden seeks cannot take the form of a pledge by NATO to shrink or limit itself. Putin wants the alliance to withdraw forces from countries that used to be in the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. But it is precisely these allies — especially Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland — that feel most threatened by Putin. They're demanding more and stronger fortifications along their eastern front. For the same reasons, the Finns and Swedes want to join the alliance.

Any concession by NATO in this context would again amount to rewarding, rather than deterring, Putin's aggression. Worse, it would cast doubt on NATO's premise — Article 5 — that an attack on one is an attack on all, and that the alliance will defend every square inch of its territory.

Are there other off-ramps the West could provide? It's hard so see any. Dropping sanctions erected since Feb. 24 isn't going to impress Putin or his domestic target audience. Even a "Finlandization" of Ukraine wouldn't work — the West would still need to arm the country in case Putin attacks again in two years, and Russians therefore wouldn't believe that Ukraine is actually neutral.

The depressing conclusion is that we may have no off-ramp to offer. Neither Biden nor anybody in the West deserves the blame for that. It's instead a consequence of Putin's many disastrous miscalculations. He's been burning his ships, one by one, forgetting that he's no Hernan Cortez and the Ukrainians aren't Aztecs.

It's always good to keep looking for off-ramps, in case we have overlooked any. But the reality is that we are back in the darkest scenarios of the Cold War, playing out game theory about prisoners' dilemmas and chicken, and signaling threats of mutual assured destruction. MAD it is. That is Putin's legacy.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. A former editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist, he is author of "Hannibal and Me."