Because a (lasting) lasting peace in Ukraine is (almost) impossible

By Leonid Bershidsky

One of the most striking issues surrounding the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 is the variety of outcomes that both sides could declare victory – and the rarity of outcomes that could lead to lasting peace.

What will determine the success of any declaration of “victory” is the audience to which it will be addressed. What matters in the real world, however, is whether the outcome will create a balance of power and interests between the warring forces, so that further armed conflict makes no sense or even becomes impossible.

Objectives

The stated goals of both sides in the war are relatively ambitious, although Russia has seemed to limit its own over time. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s vision for victory includes the return of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk to Ukraine.

Russia intends to extend its control over Ukrainian territory to the entire Donetsk and Luhansk regions to the east and to a section of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast to the south, turning Ukraine into a landlocked country. The occupied territories can even be claimed as purely Russian territory and not as allied, unrecognized states.

This does not mean, however, that either side has a “win” option somewhere in between or that even if one side achieves its maximum goal in the coming months, the violence will end in the long run.

For Ukraine, a Russian retreat on the contact lines that existed before February 24 would be a clear victory, at least in the eyes of the rest of the world. Zelensky could even sell it at home – as a compromise that would save the lives of Ukrainians and restore the status quo to which the country was generally accustomed – even if an electorate outraged by Russian war crimes was likely to he accepted it. More than 80 percent of Ukrainians oppose recognizing any Russian occupation, including Crimea, and nearly three-quarters believe Ukraine is capable of repelling Russian aggression. These percentages do not favor any kind of compromise.

And yet, even if Ukraine sees the war getting worse on the ground and Russia’s withdrawal to the pre-February 24 positions becomes unrealistic, any outcome that would give Ukraine access to the Black Sea and lift Russia’s blockade would be unrealistic. The rest of its ports would again be a victory – at least in moral terms, similar to Finland’s victory in the Winter War of 1939-1940 against the Soviet Union, despite the fact that it lost 9% of its territory. Ukraine would thus continue to thwart Putin’s ambitions for regime change and maintain its independence and national identity.

Victory and defeat

Ukraine could only be considered a loser if Putin had ousted Zelensky and installed a puppet government in the first weeks of the invasion. Since even the Kremlin has abandoned this dream, Ukraine, in a sense, has already won.

Russia, for its part, has already lost this war – its reputation as a military power has been undermined, its global image has been tarnished for decades by the barbarity of its invading troops, its sense of security has been diminished by forthcoming NATO expansion in Finland and Sweden. Its territorial gains in Ukraine – especially given the devastation it has caused in the occupied territories – can not offset the loss of international companies that have left its territory and the frozen reserves of the Russian Central Bank.

However, a declaration of victory is virtually possible for Russia any day, given that it has more territory than the day it invaded Ukraine – and especially since it occupies the coast of the Azov Sea between Crimea and Russia. borders.

This land provides uninterrupted water supply and a route from mainland Russia to occupied Ukrainian Crimea. Without this peninsula and without the Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson regions, the territory of Ukraine would have shrunk by about 18% – much more, both in absolute and relative terms, than Stalin managed to extract from Finland. Russia will add to its territory an area comparable in size to Colorado, Nevada or Bulgaria.

Pretexts

Putin also has far more room to “pass” these relative gains as a victory to his domestic audience than Zelensky has to sell any incomplete triumph to his constituents. Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale and author of “Bloodlands,” a book on the tragic history of Eastern Europe that is a frequent point of reference, highlighted the issue in a recent modular Twitter post.

“If he’s really defeated, Putin will simply declare victory on television and the Russians will believe him or even pretend to believe him,” Snyder wrote. Zelensky, on the other hand, “can not just change the subject. He must have the people of his nation with him in any important decision.” From this point on, Snyder concludes that Putin can not be found crammed into Ukraine, like the famous rat of the Russian president’s childhood memories, and that no effort is needed to save the pretexts, while Zelensky needs help so much to to win the war as well as to convincingly explain to the Ukrainians the post-war future of their country.

Snyder is right, at least in the short term. The war continues because Putin seems to believe he can gain more in return for all that Russia has already lost – and because the Ukrainians believe they can defeat him and oust him so that he has less in the end. had when attacked earlier in the year in their country.

If Putin can be convinced that further gains are impossible, and if the Ukrainian public can “buy” a partial Russian retreat, the fighting will be over, at least for now. This is a goal that can best be achieved through more military assistance to Ukraine – and by celebrating its victories on the battlefield, which give Ukrainians much to be proud of, even if they fail to do so. a complete, final victory.

The war of the future

In the long run, however, any outcome of the current war – even the best results desired by either side today – may well be as unbearable as the 2014-2015 situation, which has fully incubated the current conflict.

If Russia stops its offensive and consolidates its relatively modest gains, or retreats maintaining its previous conquests in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, both sides will be tempted to resume hostilities at some point in the future.

Ukraine has recovered from the defeats suffered by the Russian army in 2014 and 2015. Its troops have tasted success on the battlefield and do not feel awe at their opponent: the recovery of lost ground is now on the ball. of the possible. The head of the Ukrainian military intelligence service Kirill Budanov has predicted that Ukraine will take back its territories by Christmas – and even if this forecast turns out to be too rosy, many in Ukraine will consider it worth trying later. This means that no Russian “victory” other than the collapse of the Ukrainian state can be final.

On the other hand, Putin – who is likely to remain in power even if the “victory” he ends up proclaiming is of moderate “height” – may not be able to resist the urge to invade again once the lessons are internalized. of his current attack and those responsible for today’s failures be punished.

The danger of a new Russian attack will remain even if Putin’s failure is completed and he must withdraw from all annexed and occupied territories in the coming months. His position at the top of the Russian hierarchy will then be precarious: he will not be able to declare victory for television either, and Russia is not a country that treats losers politely, nor easily forgets defeats.

For those interested in what to expect from a particular type of Putin’s successor, Igor Girkin’s Telegram account, also known as Strelkov, one of the key figures in the 2014 uprising in eastern Ukraine, presents a budding version of Dolchstoßlegende, according to in which Putin’s insufficiently nationalist clique betrays Russian interests for selfish purposes.

Guide

Even if a weakened Russia emerges from the conflict – and even if it collapses, as some Ukrainian and Western intellectuals hope – the experience of interwar Germany, or rather post-Soviet Russia itself, should be a good “guide”. Dissatisfaction can lead to both financial mobilization and re-equipment. A Russia that would be forced to withdraw within its borders and lick its wounds would continue to pose a real threat even to a Ukraine protected from joining the Western bloc, the European Union and NATO.

There are not many options for lasting peace in the Ukrainian “bloody soils” and those that exist today seem utopian. A quarter of a century after the end of the Yugoslav wars, the former Yugoslavia is still not free of tensions, and an armed conflict involving the successors of the states is still possible, although Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Montenegro are now NATO member countries.

Tensions would eventually disappear if Serbia, a candidate for membership of the European Union, eventually joined the EU along with other former Yugoslav states. In the same way, any long-term harmonious solution to the existential conflict between an imperialist Russia and a stubbornly independent Ukraine is possible only if both countries end up part of a united Europe – a completely distant prospect today and a possibility that requires a degree of Russian exclusion. unthinkable not only under Putin, but under almost every possible successor.

If lasting peace, however, is what the West is seeking, that – and not just a weakened Russia – should be its long-term goal.