Ukraine: framing an end-game
It's hard to foresee how the conflict in Ukraine can be brought to a sustainable and lasting end, but there are opposite imperatives which need to be confronted
I haven’t written a great deal about the conflict in Ukraine, except in passing when talking about UK defence policy, and it’s not because I’m not interested or that I don’t have views. But I am acutely aware of the volume of content out there—variable in quality but there is a lot of good writing and good analysis—and there’s no point in my making it worse if I also get lost in the white noise. So I try to weigh in on subjects where I think I have something interesting and, hopefully, distinctive to say, either specialist knowledge or experience or an unexplored perspective. (I realise I’m setting this essay up to fail.)
One of the most difficult aspects of the war in Ukraine is to see how it might come to a conclusion which is lasting and enforceable. At one end of the spectrum, the tide could turn decisively against Ukraine and the Russian armed forces could complete a territorial conquest and occupation; but that seems unlikely on the record of the Kremlin’s war machine so far, which has used brute force and illegal weapons and tactics, but has displayed little or no tactical sophistication or individual initiative (the echo of the early months of Operation Barbarossa is striking). The other end of the spectrum is so implausible as to be effectively impossible, a Ukrainian surge so victorious and dramatic that the Russians are not only driven out of Ukraine but deep back into Russian territory and even towards Moscow (less than 500 miles but still surely unfathomable).
The inescapable conclusion is that, whatever the terms may be, whomever they favour, and whatever we end up calling it, there will be some kind of negotiated peace. This shouldn’t surprise us: the Second World War was relatively unusual in ending in comprehensive military and political defeat and physical occupation. Even the Great War ended in the east in a peace settlement (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), and in the west in an armistice which fell short of a total victory (though the German armed forces were exhausted and in some cases mutinous) and was agreed without a single Allied soldier setting foot on German soil. Yet the First World War had clear winners and losers, so we should not automatically imagine that a negotiated peace will be a stalemate or somehow disadvantageous to Ukraine (which did not, after all, initiate the conflict).
There have already been attempts to achieve peace. Indeed, there were talks in Belarus only four days into the invasion in February 2022, but five rounds, over several weeks, did nothing to bring the parties closer; there was a suspicion, not unreasonably, on the Ukrainian side that the Russians might simply be playing for time because the initial phase of the operation had been more sluggish than expected. Since then, every notable international figure (including Dr Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, who turned 100 last month) has made some kind of appeal for a solution to the conflict or spoken to one or other side. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, visited Moscow in April 2022, while President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine addressed the UN General Assembly in September.
It seems to me, though, that before one even approaches details of a settlement, there is a fundamental issue which must be addressed, an apparently unsquareable circle which is a first-order priority. If we accept that there must be a negotiated peace, then it follows that there will be give and take. That is the nature of negotiation. However, one point of principle has been raised which is understandable and has practical weight to it: in terms of setting a precedent and assuring future regional security, Vladimir Putin cannot be judged to have gained from illegal, unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. Considered in theory, this seems quite right. If a settlement were to be reached which left parts of Ukraine under Russian control, the lesson would be drawn that military action was a successful way to conduct territorial expansion. Worse, amid the celebrations which would inevitably follow the end of the war, that principle would have been baked into the international order.
So much for the principle. What would that mean in practice? It would certainly have to mean a Russian withdrawal to the borders of February 2022, relinquishing the (relatively modest) territorial gains which have been made since then, north of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and sweeping east and south in an arc through Kharkhiv, Bakhmut and Donetsk. That in itself would be a daunting pill for Putin to swallow. After all, he would have to reconcile himself to losses of around 65,000 military deaths and 230,000 casualties, with an unknown number of prisoners of war. The reputation of the Russian military has also more or less shattered by its poor performance: the joke going round last year was that we used to think Russian had the second-best army in the world, but now we find it has the second-best army in Ukraine.
Would that be enough? There is an argument that this high-intensity conflict which has been happening since February 2022 is simply the latest and most violent phase of a struggle which dates back at least to February 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimea and gave support to pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass, an eastern coal-mining region of Ukraine which formed the historical border between the Zaporizhian Sich and the Don Cossack Host. Putin then assisted the establishment of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic as nominally independent states in the Donbass. These were widely regarded as acts of aggression on Russia’s part, so would Putin “not gaining” from his actions also require their restitution to Ukraine?
A word on the Crimean Peninsula, which is in this narrative sui generis. Crimea was a state of Sunni Muslim Tatars which was conquered by Russia in 1783, and it was the last stand of anti-communist leaders in the Russian Revolution. It was eventually defeated in 1921 and became an autonomous Soviet socialist republic, before being downgraded to an oblast, or province, in June 1945. This followed the ethnic cleansing of the peninsula in 1944, in which around 230,000 people, mainly Tatars, were deported from Crimea on grounds of political unreliability. As many as 100,000 of those may have died during and after the brutal resettlement. It was only in 1954 that Crimea was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR because of “the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimea Province and the Ukrainian SSR”. So there is an argument that Crimea is not historically an integral part of Ukraine, although possession for 70 years might be thought to count for something. The demography in 2014 was 67.9 per cent Russian and only 15.7 per cent Ukrainian, though of course those two labels, before the conflict, had very soft borders.
Purely hypothetically, then, one could sketch out a negotiated settlement in which Russia withdrew from the pre-2022 borders of Ukraine and ceded the Donbass—which would still leave Ukraine with a problematic insurgency in that south-eastern corner—but held on to Crimea. That is still not easy, because Crimea has substantial natural gas field onshore and offshore and two oil fields which would represent a major economic prize. In addition, the largest city in Crimea, Sevastopol, with 527,000 inhabitants, is an important port and naval base. Formerly the base of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, it is the only true warm-water port available to Russia (although Vladivostok, in the far east, can be kept open with ice-breakers). There had been an agreement between Russia and Ukraine for both navies to have facilities there, with Russia paying a lease of $98 million a year, but in 2009, the government of President Viktor Yushchenko asserted Ukraine’s rights to the whole of Sevastopol and told Russia that its forces would have to leave the port by 2017. Control of the city, or at least of naval facilities there, would be a very difficult issue to settle in any peace negotiation.
There are many other obstacles to any kind of peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia. Not least of them is the growing evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed apparently as a matter of routine by Russian forces: these have been graphically and ruthlessly pursued by veteran journalist John Sweeney, in his Byline TV-produced film The Eastern Front, which you should watch (and which I reviewed for CulturAll, the digital arts and culture journal I co-founded). This evidence has been submitted to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which in March issued an arrest warrant for Putin. These represent more impediments to a peaceful conclusion to the war.
It is a depressing outlook that, if military victory on either side seems very remote, the only alternative, a negotiated peace settlement, seems almost insuperably difficult to imagine. What else can happen? Unfortunately, the only other outcome would be a grimly frozen conflict, perhaps fiercer and more violent than the kind in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, or Transnistria in Moldova. A more accurate comparison might be with the on-off conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed border area of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has erupted into full-scale warfare in 1994-98 and 2020, with low-level fighting crackling in between those periods. That would be a result which suited no-one, except perhaps Putin, as it would keep his hopes of annexation alive and allow him to regroup, but the Russian president is 70 years old and there are persistent rumours about his state of health.
The Ukrainian armed forces are currently engaged in a counter-offensive over 600 miles of front line which began on 8 June, preceded by a brutal but stunning video on social media by the Ukrainian armed forces. President Zelenskyy has reported that progress has been “slower than expected”, though one should not overlook his brilliant management of the media; the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoiku, claims that Russia has lost no territory, but this is easily disprovable. The latest information from the Ukrainian defence ministry says that there has been more progress in the south than in the east, but again plays down expectations and reveals relatively little in terms of geographical detail. There is an excellent and detailed assessment of the counter-offensive hot off the press by Mick Ryan, a former senior officer in the Australian Army who ended his career as commander of the Australian Defence College.
There will be no swift results from this counter-offensive, but there will equally be no swift resolution to this war, unless something dramatic changes. Planning for post-conflict Ukraine continues, but for the moment it is largely hypothetical.