[Salon] What fate awaits Ukraine? More war, partitioned land and internal strife

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

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What fate awaits Ukraine? More war, partitioned land and internal strife

Just because Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, experts don't see the war in Ukraine ending soon. Instead, the new year likely will bring more destruction, discord and division in Ukraine.

Cain Burdeau / December 27, 2024

Military chaplain Yurii of the 24th Mechanized Brigade holds a church service for an infantry unit during Christmas near the frontline town of Chasiv Yar, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Wednesday Dec. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

(CN) — A great uncertainty hangs over the great war in Europe, but one grim reality seems certain: The guns aren't going quiet anytime soon.

After 1,038 days of destruction and potentially 1 million dead and wounded soldiers, is the Ukraine war in an endgame, at some midway point or even years away from being over?

Experts who spoke with Courthouse News see two safe bets: The fighting isn't going to end just because President-elect Donald Trump is taking over in Washington, and Ukrainian territory is going to be divided between Kyiv and Moscow for the foreseeable future.

“I think it would be premature to say we are entering an endgame,” said Michael Leigh, a Europe expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy, speaking by telephone. “The war aims of the two sides still are very far apart.”

Nicolai Petro, a Russia and Ukraine expert at the University of Rhode Island, said ceasefire and peace negotiations will begin in earnest only once the tide of the war turns decisively to one side and “the writing is on the wall.”

“Until then, it's all posturing,” he said in an interview. “I'm not sure where we are right now, but we seem to be inching, slowly, toward Ukraine proposing ideas.”

The posturing has burst out since Trump won in November after campaigning with the grandiose promise to end the war “in 24 hours” if elected.

His pending return to the Oval Office opened the floor for a sprawling debate about what comes next in a war where each party keeps upping the stakes and shows no inclination of backing down. His win also seems to have prompted the start of tentative and secretive diplomatic negotiations involving Russian, Ukrainian, European and American officials ahead of possible talks between Trump and Putin.

Some predict Trump in his eagerness to rebalance American power and focus on China will tell Kyiv to surrender territory and its ambitions to join NATO. In this scenario, he chokes off weapons supplies to Ukraine, tells European leaders to deal with their own backyard and cozies up to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Others foresee an ego-driven and chastised Trump forced into delivering a knock-out punch to Putin after the Kremlin shows it's in no mood to stop short of its goals — Ukraine out of NATO for good and Kyiv giving up chunks of land Putin calls “Novorossiya,” invoking Russia's old imperial name for a province that once covered eastern and southern Ukraine. The word translates to "New Russia."

Leigh said, “nobody knows for the time being what the position of the Trump administration will be.”

“But it seems to me, without any inside knowledge, unlikely that Trump — who's said he'd end the war in one day — would seek to do so by capitulating entirely to Russia,” he said. “That is not in line with what we know about Trump and his approach, and his self-esteem, and his idea of what it is to 'make America great again.'”

Inside Ukraine, the will to fight on — regardless of what action Trump takes — remains fierce. Despite significant Russian advances along the front lines, Ukrainian officials and experts say the country has the capacity to keep up the war and even go on the offensive to recapture lost territory.

“In Ukraine, in general, there are no expectations of a collapse at the front,” said Petro Sukhorolskyi, a politics professor at the Lviv Polytechnic National University in western Ukraine.

He said a cutoff of U.S. support would be a “worst-case scenario,” but even so “this will not necessarily mean an uncontrolled situation at the front.”

“Ukrainians will still defend themselves, but the losses will be much greater, and Russia will capture Ukrainian territory at a much faster pace,” he said in an email, hypothesizing about the end of U.S. support.

As long as the West keeps supplying weapons, “Ukraine can wage war against Russia for a long time,” Sukhorolskyi said.

Ukrainian servicemen of 117th Separate Heavy Mechanized Brigade pray before a Christmas dinner on Pokrovsk direction, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Since Trump's win, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has floated the possibility of a ceasefire and “temporarily ceding” territory to Russia, though only if Ukraine receives NATO membership.

But the Kremlin is not about to agree to Kyiv joining NATO. Besides, some NATO members — among them Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey and even France and the United States — would be hesitant about bringing Ukraine into the military alliance.

“There's strong support among some NATO members and equally strong reluctance among other NATO members,” Petro said. “What I expect is invitational wording that never leads to an invitation. I expect [Ukraine to be] the interminable bridesmaid.”

Putin, meanwhile, has set his conditions for a ceasefire: Besides recognition of Russia's annexations in Ukraine, he wants NATO to withdraw its forces and missiles from Russia's borders, and for the West to sign onto a new European security framework that respects Russia's interests. Such demands are hardly palatable for European Union and NATO leaders.

Over the past year, the war hasn't gone the way Ukraine would like. Its troops are getting pushed back from villages and small cities across the front lines. Since August, Russian troops have captured more than 450 square miles, a huge amount of territory in the context of a grinding war where advances often have been measured in yards rather than miles.

But Russia, too, is showing weakness with huge losses in both equipment and personnel. On the Ukrainian and Western side, there's a calculation among many officials and experts that Russia is far weaker than it may appear and they remain convinced Putin's regime can be brought down like a house of cards.

In recent weeks, Western media have repeatedly echoed this reasoning by highlighting Moscow's mounting problems: a weakened ruble currency, high inflation, worker shortages, the accumulating toll of battlefield losses and the fall of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria.

“As for a larger-scale retaking of the territories, the Ukrainians believe that this is also possible, similar to what happened in Syria,” Sukhorolskyi said.

He said the West just needs to show “greater courage” by giving Kyiv the ability to hit Russia even harder on its own territory and supplying Ukraine with advanced weapons.

Many Ukrainians argue lasting peace in Europe depends on driving Russian troops out of Ukraine, toppling Putin's regime and declawing the Russian Federation as a military power.

“Surely, Ukrainians want this scenario,” said Anton Grushetskyi, the executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, speaking by telephone. “They want to see Putin in The Hague and they want the destruction of the Russian terrorist regime like the Assad regime in Syria.”

However, with the West appearing to lack the will “to push this scenario,” he said Ukrainians are willing to “postpone it for the future” as long as they can come under NATO's protection.

He said Ukrainians won't stop fighting until their country is firmly protected by the West.

“It should be either NATO membership or European forces [on Ukrainian soil] or 300 F-16s to support Ukraine's military,” he said. Only then would Ukraine “accept freezing the current front line and postpone the liberation” of its territories, he said.

People stand next to buildings destroyed by recent Russian attacks in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Petro was skeptical about how much more the West and Ukraine can do to turn the tide of the war decisively as weapons stockpiles dwindle.

“Our [American military] analysts keep saying, 'we don't have those weapons, we're running out of weapons to give.' The Europeans don't have them either,” he said.

Recent U.S. weapons packages for Ukraine authorize new munitions that will take months and years to manufacture, he noted.

“In two years from now, they'll get them,” Petro said. “But is Ukraine going to survive two years? I don't know. Probably not militarily.”

Considering all this uncertainty, the war could get even more intense in the weeks and months ahead.

Already, North Korean troops are reportedly fighting — and dying in large numbers — against Ukrainian forces who invaded Russia's Kursk region. Meanwhile, European countries are considering sending troops to the front lines to serve as peacekeepers, even though the Kremlin has said it would treat them as combatants.

Ukraine is pushing to mobilize more men into the war and, under pressure from the U.S., looking at lowering the age of conscription from 25 to 18. Russia, meanwhile, appears ready to unleash an even bigger force to capture more chunks of Ukraine and drive the Zelenskyy government out of Kyiv.

“Putin’s elites in Russia are not interested in ending the war without achieving a significant victory,” Sukhorolskyi said.

He said the Putin government likely considers it less risky to continue fighting than agree to an armistice or unfavorable peace deal that might weaken its “status as a great power” and further erode Russia.

Many analysts and politicians in the West view Russia as a desperate and dying imperial state undergoing an inevitable collapse, hoping to stop its decline by waging war against Ukraine.

“The position of the current ruling political elites in Russia is unambiguous,” Sukhorolskyi said. “A complete victory over Ukraine and the destruction of its statehood must be ensured in order to further advance Russian influence in Europe.”

Leigh said, “Putin senses Ukraine's weakness and will want to continue to try and obtain his objectives.”

Inside the Kremlin, Putin is under pressure too from those who feel he has allowed the war to drag on too long.

Petro said, “The very fact that the war is not resolved tends to lend credence for the public to the argument that Russia should be acting more decisively to end the war. There are two scenarios for that: Acting decisively to force probably a new Ukrainian leadership to the table, or to eliminate Ukraine and occupy all of it.”

“The war party [in Russia] says: 'Well, it's better than bleeding to death, bleeding each other to death, which only serves the Americans,'” Petro said, echoing the kind of reasoning Russian war hawks display in calling for a more forceful strategy.

The fighting, then, looks set to rage on through the winter and into the warmer months despite Trump's efforts to broker a deal. Although a full peace deal appears highly unlikely anytime soon, the chances of a ceasefire or armistice over the coming year seem much greater.

“It's not that this is a solution that anyone is advocating, it's a kind of fallback in the absence of a political settlement,” Leigh said.

In such a scenario, Ukraine would be partitioned in a fashion similar to what happened to the Korean Peninsula after an armistice was signed on July 23, 1953, to end the Korean War.

Petro said parts of Ukraine under Russian control would become “an unresolved territorial dispute” that would not necessarily escalate into fighting. “There can be peaceful conflict,” he said.

If the fighting stops and Ukraine is partitioned, Petro said all sides would attempt to declare victory.

Putin would try to sell the war as a win because it stopped the expansion of NATO and protected Russia's interests in Ukraine.

In the West, leaders would proclaim their support saved Ukraine from falling entirely under Russian control and that the war strengthened NATO and showed why its further expansion is so necessary.

“And Russia can basically argue the same thing,” Petro said.

He said the Kremlin would argue a “cold peace” with the West is acceptable because Russia in the meantime is increasing its influence in Asia, Africa and elsewhere.

The Kremlin could say, “What's not to like? We won in the short term and the long term too,” he said.

He also believes Russia might accept Ukraine's entry into the EU on condition it gives up its bid to join NATO. “If the Urkainians accept that trade-off, they can get it with Russia's blessing,” Petro surmised.

For the sake of Europe's future, Petro said he would like to see negotiations lead to a broader and more durable peace deal that creates a new pan-European security structure that includes Russia and Ukraine. Since World War II, he said many European experts and leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, have advocated such a pan-European security arrangement.

“The question is: Can we achieve security by isolating Russia from Europe?” Petro said. “I don't think many people would answer that question with a 'yes.'”

Eventually, the fighting will end. But will that translate into harmony in Ukraine and among Ukrainians?

That's unlikely, Petro said, especially given the likelihood that Ukraine will end up ceding territory in a war that has left the country devastated.

He expects Ukraine will be riven by internal conflict once the guns fall quiet, with varying factions — hard-core right-wing nationalists, pro-Europe liberals, the Russian minority, the hard-core left — accusing each other of responsibility for their country's plight.

“All the people in whatever rump Ukraine we have, whatever those borders will be, will be at each other's throats, blaming the other side for betrayal, essentially,” Petro said.

The millions of Ukrainians who left the country may be accused of abandoning their homeland at its time of need. Zelenskyy may be blamed for not negotiating with Russia, provoking Putin and playing into Moscow's stronger hand. Ukrainian leaders may be ridiculed for ever believing the West would live up to its promises of standing by “for as long as it takes.”

Petro believes Ukraine will need to do a lot of soul-searching. To overcome its internal strife and heal, he said the country should be encouraged to establish a truth and reconciliation commission.

“The short-term future — one, two, three years after the war — are going to be vicious, like they were in France after World War II, like they were in Italy after World War II,” Petro said. “Partisans versus fascists; who did what to whom; and should you have collaborated, and all of that. It's going to be messy and unattractive.”

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.