Anatol Lieven and Ted Snider
The latest peace initiative by the Trump administration deserves the support of Europe, and of Ukraine itself. Only if they are prepared to make a united offer of reasonable terms will be there a chance of Russia abandoning its unreasonable ones; for one reason for Moscow’s intransigence is the Russian belief that European governments are not interested in a peace settlement and will do everything possible to block one.
For a long time, Western advocates of indefinite war supported themselves with myths about Ukrainian victory. That is no longer possible. As Ukrainian opposition MP Oleksiy Honcharenko has stated,
"Right now the reality is this: we are losing the war; we are losing a huge number of people; we do not have our own money not just to pay for the war, but even to operate the country; we are losing business and the economy (for the first time in 100 years we have not smelted a single ton of steel in a week; and indeed, each time the conditions we receive are worse than the previous ones."
Russia’s air campaign against Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure is not only devastating Ukrainian industry (and therefore arms production) and facing the Ukrainian population with a bitterly hard winter; it is also undermining whatever chance Ukraine may have of eventually joining the European Union – something to which Moscow has in principle agreed.
The World Bank estimates the cost of Ukrainian reconstruction at $588 billion. If the war continues, by next Spring it will be even more. Given acute and growing budgetary constraints and public discontent, can European countries sincerely guarantee that they will come up with sums like this? Or go on supporting the Ukrainian war effort indefinitely, when the favorite to win the French presidential elections next summer, Marine Le Pen, has already declared that if elected, she will end France’s contribution?
There will not be the “just” peace demanded by Western governments – but then, has there ever been a completely just peace? The goal should not be pursuing the impossible at the cost of Ukraine’s destruction, but preserving the greater part of Ukraine as an independent state with a viable path to join the EU and defenses strong enough to deter future Russian attack. If a settlement can achieve this, then given the far greater aims with which Moscow launched the war, such a settlement should be seen not as a Ukrainian defeat, but a Ukrainian victory – a qualified victory, but still a victory.
And both when it comes to deterring future Russian attack and to “punishing” Russia, let us remember not only the failure to date of Russian maximalist aims, but the fact that sober and well-researched estimates put the number of Russian dead in this war at up to 350,000, including the almost complete destruction of the army that carried out the initial invasion. If that is not a deterrent, what is?
For a settlement to be reached and to hold, Ukraine must be denied NATO membership and given real grounds to expect EU membership (with a clause like Ireland’s guaranteeing military neutrality). Though it is painfully unfair to Ukraine that it was encouraged to fight a war for a promise of NATO accession that was never sincerely meant, we should remember that Russia’s desire to block NATO membership for Ukraine is not unreasonable.
Quite apart from the fact that this Russian desire corresponds exactly to the US Monroe Doctrine (now explicitly revived by Donald Trump), at the close of the cold war, Gorbachev was promised that Russia would receive the “firm security guarantee” that NATO would not expand east. In 1991, Russia recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine on the basis of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, adopted when it withdrew from the Soviet Union, which stated that Ukraine “solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs.”
Ukrainian acceptance of loss of the territory under Russian occupation is essential if the war is to end. Far better would have been implementation of the Minsk 2 agreement, by which Kyiv was supposed to guarantee autonomy to the Donbas within Ukraine; but the Ukrainian parliament repeatedly refused to do this, and the West failed to press them to do so. Ukraine will also have to guarantee the Russian language official minority status in Ukraine, along the lines of that enjoyed by the Swedish language in Finland, for example. This would be fully in accordance with the EU’s own rules and norms.
All of this will be extremely painful for Ukraine, and for Ukraine’s supporters in the West. But the question they should ask themselves is that raised by Mr Honcharenko: is it not now probable that in six months the possible terms of a settlement will be even worse for Ukraine? And that after another year of war, Ukraine may be wrecked completely? Is urging Ukraine on to probable destruction really what true friends of Ukraine should be doing?