Review of World Affairs

Ukraine War: Ceasefire Within Grasp?

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

The emerging military realities indicate that this is exactly the right time to negotiate a ceasefire. This is the opinion of the noted New York Times columnist and Iraq veteran David French (Nov. 28).

However, he questions whether Russia and, sadly, the United States are willing to agree to a just peace one that keeps Ukraine free and sovereign.

Facts on the Ground

Ukraine is under intense pressure.

Russia is attacking relentlessly along the front in eastern Ukraine, and Ukraine is on the verge of losing an important battle – the city of Pokrovsk is in imminent danger of falling, and there is real concern that Ukrainian troops could get surrounded and trapped if Russia is able to take the city.

Russia has revamped its drone tactics and now might even be outpacing Ukraine in tactical innovation.

Ukrainian cities are being battered.

The Ukrainian energy sector is under siege.

At the same time, American financial support has almost dried up, although the U.S. is still selling weapons purchased by Europe for use in Ukraine.

And President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government is mired in a corruption scandal in which several Zelensky’s close allies have been accused of receiving kickbacks from a nuclear power company that’s weakened his political standing, arguably to its lowest point since the war began.

Russia also under immense pressure

By any fair measure, Russia’s summer offensive – which had continued into autumn – has been a costly disappointment.

It has gained ground, but at a staggering cost.

Russia has almost certainly suffered more than a million total casualties in the war so far, and as Edward Carr explained in The Economist – at the present rate of Russian advance it would take five more years for Russia to take the four oblasts (provinces) it’s seeking to conquer and cost a total of almost four million casualties.

In fact, as Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who is one of the foremost Western analysts of the war, has reported, Russia’s unrecoverable casualties are approaching its rate of recruitment.

In other words, it is focussed on replacing losses rather than expanding the force.

Its newer recruits are lower in quality, and rampant desertion is an acute problem.

And while Russia has innovated tactically, there are no immediate prospects for a breakthrough.

At the same time, Ukraine has improved its long-range attack capabilities, both with Western-supplied weapons and its own home-built drones and missiles.

Ukraine has systematically targeted Russian energy infrastructure and oil refineries.

Impasse on the Eastern Front

Putting all this together, the overall picture is one where neither side seems to have any real hope of changing the underlying dynamics of the war (French).

“The Russians push forward inch by inch .  .  .

“The Ukrainians make them bleed for every advance. .  . 

“and each side looks to the other to finally crack under pressure, collapse, and finally field.

That’s the immediate backdrop to the peace negotiations that kicked off in Geneva and continued elsewhere.

Core Problem of Any Peace Agreement

Any peace agreement now has to be evaluated based on a single key question – can Ukraine remain free after the shooting stops? (French).

That’s the core problem with the leaked 28-point peace plan that the Trump administration tried to impose on Ukraine earlier this month.

Even if one assumes that Ukraine might be willing to trade some land for peace – a ceasefire on current lines for example – it still must retain the means for preserving its political independence, or any peace agreement is little more than a surrender document.

Trump’s initial plan yielded al of the Donbas to Russia – including the parts that Russia had not been able to seize yet – and also tried to force Ukraine to accept a cap of 600,000 military personnel, a number substantially smaller than the current force.

There is absolutely no chance that a mere 600,000 men and women could hold the long border against a vastly larger Russian force.

The US/Russian plan contains no corresponding limitations on Russia’s much larger force.

Russia has more than 1.3 million active-duty troops, and it’s planning to expand the military to a total of 1.5 million.

In other words, Trump’s plan would shrink the Ukrainian military at the same time that Putin is increasing the size of Russia’s force.

The resulting power imbalance would be extreme.

At the same time, Ukraine would have to give up the prospect of joining NATO, and NATO troops could not be stationed on Ukrainian soil.

As a result, any security guarantee in the agreement would be paper guarantees only, and Ukraine knows from bitter experience that a mere paper guarantee is no guarantee at all.

It is, therefore, understandable that Zelensky had an immediate negative reaction – casting the plan as a choice between losing Ukrainian dignity and losing American support.

But given the battlefield situation, combined with the possibility of losing American aid, it’d also no wonder that Ukraine feels intense pressure to strike a deal of some kind.

The only way that Ukraine can stay in the fight over the long term is to rely on the United States and Europe to function as arsenals of democracy, matching Russian industrial might with their own production and their own weapons.

If Ukraine loses American aid – as Zelensky plainly fears – it’s unclear that Europe can pick up the slack over the long term, especially as the European rush to rearm their own militaries.

Without steadfast American support, Ukraine could well face two terrible choices – accept the Russian/American deal and live as Moscow’s vassal or reject the deal and face a doomed struggle against a superior force.

And thus, Ukraine has no choice but to negotiate.

Last Monday, The Financial Times reported that a U.S. delegation led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with their Ukrainian counterparts and hammered out a Ukrainian/American counter-proposal to the Russian/American initial plan, including a potential increase of the Ukrainian troop upper limit to 800,000 – a number much closer to its present strength.

But the very elements that make a deal acceptable to Ukraine – such as Ukraine has the ability to protect itself against renewed Russian aggression – are the same things that make it unacceptable to Russia.

Russia’s true aims have never been solely about territory.

Obviously, it does seek to exercise sovereignty over the Donbas, but it also wants Ukraine to be a rump state, a larger version of Belarus, a nation that is entirely in thrall to Putin’s Russia.

[What Putin wants to achieve is that of the international situation of Soviet times when both Belarus and Ukraine were completely under the thumb of Moscow, although being ‘independent’ members of the United Nations].

Putin does not even view Ukraine as a legitimate country.

He refuses to see Ukraine as a distinct nation with a distinct culture and history [just like many prominent Indians considered and still consider Nepal as part and parcel of greater Bharat].

For Putin, the only satisfactory conclusions to the war involve either the extinction of Ukraine or the total domination by Russia [as in Soviet times].

Ukraine’s options

Ukraine might be too weak to retake the Donbas, but more than three years of war have demonstrated that Russia isn’t strong enough to conquer Ukraine (French).

And since Ukraine understands that it also can’t recapture the Donbas, the true path to peace lies in convincing Putin that he can’t seize control of Ukraine.

When Putin initiated large scale hostilities, it was predicted that Ukraine would collapse in hours or days, but it has stood strong, inflicting devastating losses on one of the world’s most powerful nations.

U.S. National Interests

The fundamental objective of American diplomacy and the fundamental aim of American aid should be to deny Putin control of Ukraine.

Trump and his administration is not willing or able to understand this basic tenet of U.S. foreign policy.

French speaks for much of the progressive section of the American punditry when he writes that if Trump uses the considerable economic, military and diplomatic power of the United States to coerce Ukraine into risking its independence, a ceasefire wouldn’t be a diplomatic achievement – it would be a national shame.

French considers that it would be even worse than that.

It would be a strategic disaster:

• the U.S. would teach its NATO allies that America is an unreliable partner
• Vladimir Putin and other despots around the world would realize that brute military force is still potent in international affairs
• the U.S. as the principal member, instead of defending and deterring Russia, would have paced NATO’s eastern flank at profound, immediate risk
• worst of all, the U.S. would have increased the chances of a wider war.

The Trump administration has thus introduced total fiasco in its foreign policy. It is unprecedented in the annals of US history. And Trump is a bumbler and no statesman.

“It would be an intolerable and catastrophic failure if the Trump administration delivers Putin a victory through diplomacy that he could not achieve in war” (French).

Latest developments

Top Trump administration officials met with Ukrainian negotiators in Florida on Sunday, pushing to broker an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine and setting the stage for key talks planned this week in Moscow with Russian leader Vladimir Putin (AP/Associated Press, Nov. 30).

The writer can be reached at: shashimalla125@gmail.com