Ukraine’s next steps demand talks to go with more arms
Ukraine’s summer offensive has stalled in the autumn mud, reaching a stalemate that won’t easily be broken. We know this because it has become evident on the ground and the top commander of the armed forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, has said it. So what next?
The temptation will be to call for a cease-fire and launch peace talks, ending needless Ukrainian suffering and allowing allies to reduce the burdens of financial and military aid. Why, after all, continue with a war when victory no longer appears feasible? That, however, is a false choice. A new strategy for Ukraine built around achieving a settlement rather than victory is indeed needed. But to be successful it will have to run in parallel with continued pressure on the battlefield and an uninterrupted flow of financial and military aid to Kyiv.
It is now clear that Ukraine is unlikely to again secure the kind of front-line breakthroughs it achieved around Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson last year, each of which dramatically changed the terms of any eventual peace talks in its favor. Yet it is equally clear that to get a deal that Ukraine and its allies can accept — and just as important that Russia will respect — is going to require fighting, arming and talking at the same time.
To explain why demands resolving an otherwise sterile debate about the causes of the war. For if, as many believe, Russia invaded Ukraine to prevent it joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — a hostile, US-dominated alliance that threatens Russian security — then the way forward is simple: End the fighting and remove the threat, by trading Ukraine’s neutrality for Russian withdrawal.
But while there’s no doubt Russia has been angered by NATO’s acceptance of ex-Soviet bloc nations since the 1990s, the important question is why. The answer isn’t that Russia thought the alliance might invade, or that NATO had plans to locate offensive missiles and bases in Ukraine, threatening Russia’s security.
NATO’s expansion, and so too that of the European Union, posed genuine threats — but to Russia’s ambitions. Even the possibility of NATO and EU integration was emboldening Ukraine to refuse Putin’s drive to re-establish a sphere of control across the territories of the former Soviet and Russian empires. He also wanted a tight union of what he saw as a single Russian nation that included the motherland, Belarus and Ukraine. Kyiv remains critical to both projects.
Again, we know all this because Putin has said so in multiple speeches and essays, and because it is supported by facts on the ground. It matters because if Putin’s goal is – like those of his role models Peter the Great and Catherine the Great – to expand Russian power, then getting to a durable settlement will be a lot harder. It is imperative for that great power project that, at a minimum, any settlement with Ukraine demonstrates the folly of resistance, while at the same time leaving open a path for Moscow to secure Ukrainian markets and resources in the future. For the same reason, it is imperative for Ukraine that the war’s end produces a framework that definitively ends the fighting, and allows it to ensure its own security and prosperity. These aims conflict.
Russia, for example, will resist to the last accepting security guarantees for Ukraine that amount to a reduced NATO offering Article 5 mutual defense protections, an arrangement Kyiv has in the past proposed. So Ukraine will need fleets of Leopard tanks, ATACMS missiles and F-16 combat jets to deter Russia even after the fighting stops. And while the land war may be stuck, the air war will continue apace, with Russian missiles attacking Ukrainian infrastructure through the winter, to make its point about the futility of resistance.
Ukraine, unlike earlier in the war, now has the capacity to respond and will need to inflict sufficient pain on Russian assets and forces in Crimea, occupied Ukraine and Russia itself that Putin has incentive to stop the war, and this time for good.
As gloomy as all this sounds, it’s worth remembering what Ukraine and allied support, have already achieved. Putin’s primary invasion goal of capturing Kyiv and “de-Nazifying” and “demilitarizing” Ukraine, has been defeated, a project that would have rolled on at least to Moldova.
Zaluzhnyi and his forces also humbled what most saw as the world’s second-strongest military. They liberated first the northern regions around the capital, followed by some 14,000 square kilometers of land around Ukraine’s second city, Kharkhiv, and Kherson to the south. They have sunk enough of the Black Sea Fleet to marginalize it, and forged a national identity that, until Russia first attacked in 2014, was felt only in parts of the country.
Any eventual settlement will be much more than a cease-fire. It will represent the culmination of Ukraine’s multi-century struggle for nationhood and independence from a domineering eastern neighbor, an effort that spanned multiple wars and genocides long before NATO was even imagined.
It must also achieve the first necessary step for Russia – like so many fallen empires before it – to come to terms with its loss. Getting there will be neither easy, cheap nor peaceful.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.
