Is negotiated peace round the corner in Ukraine?

The war will end when one side gives up on either nerves or materiel, and on terms relatively more favourable to the side that shows more staying power.

So, is the Ukrainian war coming to a swift end, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, United States President Joe Biden, and Russian President Vladimir Putin all stressing the need for a negotiated settlement to end the war? It might not be a good idea to hold your breath waiting for that happy denouement.

How is the war poised, 10 months after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, in what Putin called a special military operation on February 24th? It has plodded on through spring, summer, and autumn, and into a wintry test of nerves, and the ability to replenish depleted supplies — not just for Ukraine and Russia, but also, and even more significantly, Ukraine’s backers in Europe.

The war will end when one side gives up on either nerves or materiel, and on terms relatively more favourable to the side that shows more staying power.

All Wars End On A Settlement

Why are we leaving the US out of this equation? Before that, why do we not take the stated desire for a negotiated settlement on the part of the three leaders at face value?

All wars end on a settlement. Emperor Hirohito had to surrender for World War II to end in the Pacific theatre. The surrender followed the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in terms of temporal sequencing, but would have happened earlier, if the Americans had been willing to hold out some terms that would have helped the occupant of the Chrysanthemum Throne save face, at least a few percentage points of it. General Niazi surrendered to Lt General Arora to formally end the 1971 war that liberated East Pakistan from West Pakistan’s vassalage.

Clearly a diplomatic end to a war does not rule out total defeat of one party at the other’s hands preceding that formal closure. Since neither Ukraine nor Russia has indicated the terms on which they would be willing to end the war, the eagerness espoused by both parties to reach a negotiated settlement must be understood as posturing.

Swift Response

Putin’s sudden embrace of a negotiated settlement came in response to Biden and Zelensky’s statement in Washington DC averring a desire for a negotiated peace, where the Ukrainian President had forayed, to seek continued US support for — no prizes for guessing — world peace. Support for Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s aggression, explained Zelensky, is support for a rules-based world order, sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations, which are essential for peace in the world, for future generations of Americans and Europeans, apart from of Ukrainians.

Putin was not to be outdone by such pacific aggression. He swiftly responded by professing a similar desire for a negotiated end to the war. At one level, this is scoring points in the propaganda war. At another level, it is an offer designed to deepen schisms in the European polity, where people are increasingly restive over inflation, insufficient wage rises, strikes in support of higher wages, rising interest rates, and mortgage payments, rising discount rates on future earnings of pension pots that increase the degree to which these are under-funded, footing refugee bills, and sanctimonious calls by politicians to lower the thermostat on home heating, in order to save gas, whose shortage casts a dark shadow over 2023.

If Putin offers dialogue, it is easier for disgruntled Europeans to ask Ukraine to sue for peace than if the Russians looked simply bent on war.

If pressed to lay out the terms on which Moscow would be willing to end the war, Russia could, of course, always go back to the original terms set out at the beginning of the war: Ukraine swearing off NATO membership, Ukrainian acceptance of Crimea, which hosts the base of Russia’s warm water navy, as an integral part of Russia, and of the Russian affiliation of the people of the eastern Don Bas region. Russia might agree to an internationally supervised referendum in Donetsk and Luhansk to determine if these areas should stay annexed to Russia, or revert to autonomous regions in Ukraine, if that would help secure Ukrainian neutrality and Crimea’s accession to Russia.

Three Links

Why do we treat Ukraine’s biggest backer, the US, in a class of its own, separate from its NATO allies in Europe? Three interlinked factors compete with the Atlantic Ocean to separate the US from Europe.

One, the US does not face the shortage of gas and of other fuels that Europe suffers from; it has plenty of domestic supplies of gas, oil, and coal. This winter promises to be particularly severe, no one in the US is being asked to economise on home heating.

Two, the Ukraine war has created a huge new market for US companies. As Europe scurries for additional supplies of gas, oil, and coal to stand in for the Russian oil and gas they have boycotted as part of the sanctions imposed to punish Russia, US companies have bravely come forward to sell Europe gas, oil, and coal. Not just that. European governments have decided to step up their defence spending, and who but friendly US stands ready to supply them with modern weapons, avionics, cyber, and defence capabilities?

Three, Ukraine is fighting, essentially, a proxy war for the US. Yes, Russia began the shooting war. But that was in response to years of US military aid to Ukraine, arming that country to the teeth, and Ukraine’s proffered membership of the anti-Russian alliance NATO. Can anyone blame Russia for not seeing deployment of multinational forces and their deadly weapons right across its borders and just north of its naval base on the Black Sea as anything but an act of aggression? Former US President John F Kennedy had seen Soviet missiles in Cuba as an existential threat that made arguments of Cuban and Soviet sovereign rights to place those missiles where they liked little more than irritating prattle.

The Cost Of War

The US war aim is to degrade Russia’s military capability by making it expend its armoury and manpower — US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin had been candid enough to admit after a visit to Kiev. The longer the war continues, the more Russia would bleed. If Ukrainian lives are lost and ordinary Europeans face acute hardships in the process, too bad — haven’t they heard of collateral damage?

Yet, there are costs to the US from prolongation of the Ukraine conflict. A hunger crisis is gnawing at the fabric of national security in Africa and beyond. That crisis has its roots in the Ukraine war and the sanctions imposed by the West on Russia to punish it for the war.

“We must be crystal clear about what is at stake — nearly 828 million people are at grave risk of hunger and disease, with many at risk of outright starvation,” US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez said, at a full committee meeting. “While far more complex than a land war or terrorist attack, the global food security crisis represents the clearest threat to global peace and security we have seen in decades.” The US recently held a summit of African leaders in Washington DC.

While it is easy to blame Putin for the food shortage in front of an audience of full bellies, it is difficult to convince representatives of developing countries that feel the pinch of high fuel and food prices more than anyone else, that the US is doing what it can to end the crisis, even as it does its best to prolong the war by arming and egging on the Ukrainians.

This is why restoring Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is not an explicit war aim for the US. The US has committed to support Ukraine’s position, but can, on the quiet, determine what the Ukrainian position would be.

The Europeans are most vulnerable to the consequences of an avoidable energy shortage. That is the spot that Putin would be probing and pressing, to release the pressure on Ukraine to sue for peace, even if destroying Ukraine’s domestic energy infrastructure does not break its resolve to fight on.

So the vagaries of winter as experienced by Europeans are likely to be decisive in making Ukraine amenable to peace talks, rather than the stated readiness of leaders to negotiate a peace.