Ukraine peace hopes rest on fragile foundations

Welcome back. On Tuesday, the Doomsday Clock was moved from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight.

The US Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the clock in 1947 as a symbolic measure of the threat to humanity’s survival, said the dial was now “the closest it has ever been to catastrophe”.

What caught my eye was one reason the scientists gave for their latest move of the dial: “In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world.”

Whether or not this assessment is well-founded, governments, military leaders, independent analysts and others connected to the war are all focusing on the same question. How promising or bleak are the prospects for achieving a ceasefire and a broader settlement of the Ukraine war? I’m at [email protected].

First, the results of last week’s poll. Asked if a far-right candidate would win France’s next presidential election, 55 per cent of you said yes, 20 per cent said no and 25 per cent were on the fence.

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Is Ukraine losing the war?

Despite an audacious incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August, Ukrainian forces have mostly been fighting a grim defensive war of attrition over the past year or so. But do Russia’s incremental territorial gains in eastern Ukraine mean that President Vladimir Putin is winning the war?

Opinions differ on this point, so crucial to the atmosphere and context in which any peace talks would take place.

As you might expect, many Ukrainian experts dispute the view that Russia is heading for victory. Alina Frolova, a former deputy defence minister, says in this commentary that there is too much focus on “visible land domain operations”, where Russia seems to have the upper hand.

In the air, at sea, in space and in cyber operations, Ukraine is at least holding its own, or even prevailing, she says.

General Christopher Cavoli, Nato’s supreme allied commander in Europe, takes a more nuanced view but isn’t downbeat about Ukraine’s prospects. He said in January:

I’m not worried that Ukraine could suddenly lose. I don’t see the potential for a massive [Russian] breakthrough …

After all, there is a reason why Russia brought thousands and thousands of soldiers from North Korea . . . I think we’re going to continue to see this tension between the desire to attack and the lack of manpower on the part of the Russians.

Battlefield losses

A relentless casualty toll and recruitment difficulties are serious problems for Ukraine, too, as set out in this report by Simon Schlegel for the International Crisis Group.

The Economist last month quoted Colonel Pavlo Fedosenko, commander of a Ukrainian tactical grouping in Donbas, as saying:

We struggle to replace our battlefield losses . . . [The Russians] might throw a battalion’s worth of soldiers at a position we’ve manned with four or five soldiers.

Although his forces are depleted, Putin still seems willing to accept much higher battlefield casualties than Ukraine. This appeared to be on the mind of Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, during his Senate confirmation hearing last month:

“There’s no way Ukraine is . . . going to push these people [Russian forces] all the way back to where they were on the eve of the invasion.”

For Putin, it’s not all about territory

In my view, however, it cannot be emphasised enough that territorial expansion is only one element, and not necessarily the most important, of Putin’s war goals.

For sure, he wants to control the four Ukrainian regions whose annexation he proclaimed in 2022, not to mention Crimea, seized in 2014. But those in or close to Putin’s inner circle make it perfectly clear that the war has never been only about grabbing Ukrainian land.

Sergey Mironov, a politician sanctioned by the US in 2014, says:

Russia is not fighting for territory . . . Ukraine cannot be a truly neutral state. The problem for the security of Russia . . . lies in the very fact of the existence of a state such as Ukraine.

Demolishing the European security order

Putin’s objectives are so ambitious that, although a temporary halt to the fighting might be possible, a lasting settlement of the conflict will, I think, be extremely difficult to reach.

In the past year, this is the best analysis I have read on Russia’s war aims. Fredrik Löjdquist for the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies lists what he sees as Putin’s underlying goals:

1. Survival of his regime in Russia

2. Restoration of Russia’s historical empire

3. Demolition of the rules-based international order and post-1945 European security order

4. Ending and reversing Nato enlargement and the US presence in Europe

Löjdquist adds:

“Russia’s war aims in Ukraine since 2014 have been to thwart Ukrainian sovereignty and take full political control of the country.”

Putin’s hostility to Ukrainian sovereignty — indeed, to a Ukrainian national identity separate from that of Russia — is of central importance.

Tatiana Stanovaya, an independent Russian political scientist, put it this way in a recent post on X:

If Putin were to halt the war now, Ukraine would likely accelerate efforts to join Nato and rebuild its military-industrial complex. Even if Nato membership remains a distant prospect, the alliance would solidify its presence in Ukraine, precisely what Putin sought to prevent by launching the war.

His goal was to end what he calls the “anti-Russia” project on Ukrainian territory. In his view, stopping now would lead to an even more radicalised “anti-Russia” project in the remainder of Ukraine.

Even more extreme than Putin

How much attention should we pay to recent comments from once-prominent Russian policymakers who have set out positions on Ukraine even more extreme than Putin’s?

Nikolai Patrushev, a former head of Russia’s Security Council and now a presidential aide, said in January:

“It is possible that in the coming year Ukraine will cease to exist altogether.”

In similar fashion, former president Dmitry Medvedev last year presented a map of Ukraine that showed almost all the country’s territory annexed to Russia, with some bits allocated to Hungary, Poland and Romania — leaving a tiny Ukrainian statelet in and around Kyiv.

I think the best way to interpret such outbursts is as a deliberate effort to pile pressure on the west and Ukraine, with the aim of painting Putin as a far-sighted, responsible statesman if, in the end, he settles for something less.

The size of Ukraine’s army

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Putin accepted a ceasefire that left Russia in control of the roughly 18 per cent of Ukraine’s territory that it presently holds.

Many areas of disagreement would remain — not least, the size of Ukraine’s future armed forces.

Early in the war, Russia floated a proposal under which Ukraine’s forces would be drastically cut to a mere 50,000 personnel, plus four warships, 55 helicopters and 300 tanks, according to the Meduza news site.

Speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine alluded to this proposal and made clear it would be no more acceptable now than it was in 2022.

Misreading Trump

What will happen if Putin and Trump meet for a summit? Would Trump sell out Ukraine, either deliberately or because Putin duped him?

In a perceptive article for the Sunday Times of London, Mark Galeotti, a British specialist on Russia, observed that Putin has been busy stroking Trump’s ego since his election victory in November. Putin even appeared to endorse the myth of the “stolen” 2020 US presidential contest:

“If his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, then maybe there would not have been the crisis in Ukraine that emerged in 2022.”

Permit me to say that this is pure KGB hokum, reflecting Putin’s career background as an intelligence officer whose job is to confuse, deceive and flatter his opponent so that he gains the upper hand.

Galeotti also says a US Republican official told him that Trump’s team contains many friends of Ukraine, “and they are lobbying hard that it is Zelenskyy who should be his closest ally”.

Perhaps Trump ought to treat the Ukraine war as Putin does — as part of a wider confrontation between the west and Russia.

Seen from this angle, the US has some strong cards to play, George Beebe, once director of the CIA’s Russia analysis unit, suggests here. In particular, Trump is president of a country that leads a 32-member alliance, Nato, “whose military and economic might far exceeds that of Russia”.

Because of this advantage, the US would have “leverage to end the war while protecting core western and Ukrainian interests — including a secure path towards Ukrainian membership in the EU”, Beebe says.

It sounds promising — but I fear the road to a stable settlement still looks strewn with obstacles.

More on this topic

Tensions in Moldova and its Russian-backed breakaway territory of Transnistria risk leading to the opening of a new front in the Russian-Ukrainian war, Dominick Sansone writes for The American Conservative

Tony’s picks of the week

• With Iran in its most vulnerable condition in many years, officials in Tehran hope they can avoid confrontation with Donald Trump and even strike a deal with the US president, the FT’s Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Andrew England report

• In the south Caucasus state of Georgia, economic stagnation, political repression and delays in the EU accession process have fuelled a significant wave of emigration among talented youth, Melita Phachulia writes for the Estonia-based International Centre for Defence and Security