The Nation October 28, 2025 The Risk of a Radical Escalation Leading to Actual Conflict Between NATO and Russia Grows
Verdun in the Donbas.
By Anatol Lieven Anatol Lieven is a coauthor, with George Beebe and Mark Episkopos, of the policy brief, Peace Through Strength in Ukraine, published by the Quincy Institute for International Peace. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ukraine-russia-war-nato-putin/
The future of Ukraine and Russia, of European security, and of US-Russian relations now all hang on a few small half-ruined towns in the northwestern part of Donetsk province. Indeed, given the continued risk of a radical escalation leading to actual conflict between NATO and Russia, the stakes may be higher even than that.
The Russian government continues to demand that Ukraine withdraw from this territory as part of a peace settlement, and during a visit to Russia this month, very nearly everyone I talked with said that it is politically impossible for President Putin to give up this demand, even if the Trump administration were to offer major concessions on wider security issues. Equally, every Ukrainian I have talked to in recent months has said that it is politically impossible for the Ukrainian government to accede to this. Almost all the other key issues can be resolved by the Trump administration in direct negotiation with Russia if Trump can come up with a concrete set of proposals. Not this one.
How on earth did we get to this point? If during the Cold War you had said that European security depended on who controlled the northwestern Donbas, even the very greatest hawks would have called you a lunatic. At that time, let us remember, Soviet armies stood in the “Fulda Gap” in the middle of what is now a united Germany, barely a hundred miles from the French border. The Donbas is more than 1,200 miles east of Fulda. That is a measure of the West’s victory at the end of the Cold War.
Key to an understanding of this grotesque situation is that since the end of the Cold War, two different issues have become horribly entangled, and to achieve a peace settlement requires disentangling them. On the one hand, there is the wider geopolitical issue: the way in which the expansion of NATO and the European Union expelled Russia from the European security order, leading to Russia’s attempt to force its way back in again. On the other, there is a rather typical postcolonial struggle over borders, territory, minorities and identity between Russia and Ukraine. The fall of every empire in modern times has led to such conflicts, and the fall of the Soviet Union was no exception.
As to the part of Donetsk province in question, it would be hard to exaggerate its intrinsic unimportance. As a journalist and then a researcher, I must have driven through or past Kramatorsk and Pokrovsk (previously Krasnoarmeyisk) a dozen times on my way to and from Donetsk. I cannot honestly say that I noticed or can remember them. Their economic importance has been hugely exaggerated. Only a small proportion of Ukraine’s mineral wealth is situated in this small area (only around 1 percent of the whole of Ukraine), and it can hardly be developed if the war continues.
Even today, its military importance has been greatly exaggerated by both sides. Russians sometimes say that it is important to push the Ukrainian army further from the city of Donetsk; and from 2014 to 2024, when the front line ran virtually through the city’s western suburbs and Donetsk was under bombardment by short-range Ukrainian artillery, that was actually true. Over the past two years, however, the Ukrainian army has been pushed 25 miles to the west, and the additional few miles to the provincial border will make no significant difference to the safety of Donetsk city.
The Ukrainians say with more reason that Pokrovsk and the line of towns to its north (Konstaninovka, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk) have been heavily fortified, and that if the Russian army takes them, it would be far better placed to advance further west toward Kharkiv and the Dnieper river. This is only true, though, if Russia seizes them during the war. If they were ceded as part of a peace settlement, it would be open to Ukraine (with European help) to build a new and formidable defensive line slightly further west. As the Ukraine war has demonstrated, contemporary military technology gives huge advantages to the defensive. After all, the northern border between Russia and Ukraine stretches for more than 600 miles and runs through overwhelmingly rural territory; yet, despite years of effort, the Russian army has been able to make only tiny advances along this front.
In truth, like Verdun or Ypres in the First World War, the importance of northwestern Donetsk for both sides has become overwhelmingly political. Ukraine can hardly voluntarily surrender around 250,000 of its citizens to Russian rule, especially after engaging in almost four years of (largely but not wholly exaggerated) propaganda about the horrors of that rule. And after sacrificing tens of thousands of lives to defend the Ukrainian-held Donbas, for the Ukrainian Army voluntarily to surrender what they still hold would be morally impossible. Even if Zelensky could be brought to give the order, my Ukrainian sources tell me that the army would almost certainly refuse to obey, leading to a deep political crisis—and Trump does not want to be seen as responsible for the collapse of the Ukrainian regime and a repeat of the US debacle in Afghanistan on a far larger scale.
As to Putin’s insistence on taking the whole of the Donbas even though the Russian advance is proceeding with agonizing slowness (after 15 months of bloody effort, the Russian army has still not taken Pokrovsk), the main point is that this is about the very minimum in terms of territorial gains that will allow him to portray any eventual peace settlement as a victory. One must be aware—and there can be no doubt that Putin is well aware of it himself—that so far all the sacrifices of this war have brought results extremely far short not only of his initial aims but also of the achievements of his imperial predecessors. Ukraine has not been subjugated; the great cities of southern Ukraine remain in Ukrainian hands; and there seems no realistic chance that Russia can now achieve these goals. I was struck by the number of Russians—including ones who would never have launched this war and would happily end it tomorrow—who still feel the loss of the Russian-founded city of Odessa, and the Ukrainian state’s attacks on Russian language and heritage there, as a deep cultural wound.
In these circumstances, it is all the more important for Putin to stick to Russia’s central stated goal in launching the “Special Military Operation”: the “liberation” of the whole of the Donbas from Ukrainian rule and the protection of its people from Ukrainian bombardment. This is all the more important because it was a public promise made to the separatist governments of Donetsk and Lugansk provinces.
Given the limited scale of Russian mobilization, their forces are playing a quite disproportionately large role in the army fighting in Ukraine, and, as I observed on Russian television, they also play a huge role in the Russian state’s domestic propaganda about the war. They can be expected to protest bitterly—and for Putin, very embarrassingly—if Russia ends the war while any significant part of their region remains in Ukrainian hands. As for Russian hard-liners with whom I talked, they are demanding that Putin escalate radically against NATO to terrify Western leaders into forcing Ukraine to surrender.
If the fight for these 2,500 or so square miles of territory continues, it is certain that tens of thousands more people will die on both sides. It is possible that eventually either the Ukrainian war effort will collapse, or that European support for it will do so. On the other hand, fearing this, it is also possible that European governments will seek radically to escalate their actions against Russia, by seizing Russian cargoes on the high seas or shooting down Russian planes that enter NATO airspace. If this happens, every single person with whom I spoke in Russia said that given the faltering Russian advance on the ground and the pressure on him from nationalist hawks, Putin will have no choice but to respond militarily, shooting down NATO planes and sinking NATO ships. Then we really would be staring into the abyss.
Is there any way out of this atrocious and tragic impasse? As far as I can see, the only possible compromise solution is to demilitarize the area and place it under the control of a United Nations peacekeeping force, while retaining Ukrainian civil control. Some leading members of the Russian foreign policy establishment with whom I spoke said that they thought it just possible that Putin might agree to this, if Trump offered major compromises in terms of wider security issues. Some Ukrainians with whom I have spoken have said that they also think that this might be just possible for Ukraine, especially if the Russian army finally manages to take Pokrovsk. As to the legal status of the Donbas, like Northern Cyprus, that will have to be left for (probably indefinite) future negotiation.
Failing a compromise on this issue, the war will continue and quite possibly grow more dangerous—and all we can hope is that it does not spread to engulf us all. |