The territories occupied by Russia are irretrievably lost to Ukraine, Time writes. No matter how painful the peace agreement is today, it will become much more painful if the conflict continues and Kiev suffers a final defeat, the author of the article believes.
Anatole Lieven
The advertised last year's counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine failed. Russia recaptured Avdiivka, which was its biggest military achievement in nine months. President Vladimir Zelensky was forced to admit the new military reality through his teeth. The Biden administration's strategy now is to maintain Ukraine's defense until after the U.S. presidential election in the hope of weakening the Russian armed forces in a long conflict of attrition.
This strategy seems reasonable enough, but it carries one major consequence and contains one catastrophic flaw that has not yet been seriously discussed in public debates in the West or in Ukraine. The consequence is that if Ukraine is constantly on the defensive (even if it does it successfully), it means that the territories currently occupied by Russia will be lost. At the negotiating table, Russia will not agree to give up the lands that it managed to keep on the battlefield.
This does not mean that Ukraine should be offered to formally give up these lands, since this would be impossible for any Ukrainian government. But this means that — as Zelensky suggested at the beginning of the conflict regarding Crimea and eastern Donbass — the territorial issue will have to be postponed until future negotiations.
As we know from the example of Cyprus, which has been divided between the internationally recognized Greek Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus since 1974, such negotiations can last for decades without resolving or resuming the conflict. The situation in which Ukraine retains its independence, its freedom to develop as a Western democracy and 82% of its legitimate territory (including all its main historical lands) would have been regarded by previous generations of Ukrainians as a real victory, although not complete.
As I discovered in Ukraine last year, many Ukrainians were privately willing to accept the loss of some territories as the price of peace if Ukraine failed to bring them back to the battlefield and if the alternative was years of bloody war with little prospect of success. The Biden administration needs to involve America in such approaches.
Nevertheless, our supporters of Ukraine's complete victory have hopes that range from overly optimistic to fantastic. It is at the fantastic end of the spectrum that the idea, expressed among others by retired US Army General Ben Hodges, is that Russia can be defeated and even ousted from Crimea with long-range missile strikes.
This is complete nonsense. The Ukrainians have achieved some success in operations against the Russian Black Sea Fleet, but in order to retake Crimea, they will need to be able to carry out a massive amphibious assault — an extremely complex operation far exceeding their capabilities in terms of the availability of warships and naval personnel. And attacks on Russian infrastructure are pinpricks, given Russia's size and resources.
More realistic is the idea that by going on the defensive this year, the Ukrainians can inflict such losses on the Russians that if they are provided with more Western weapons, they will be able to successfully counterattack in 2025. However, it depends on how the Russians will play the game in response to the patterns that Kiev and Washington want to play.
The Russian strategy currently looks completely different than before. The Russians have dragged Ukrainians into prolonged battles for small territories such as Avdiivka, where the Russian army confidently relies on its superiority in artillery and ammunition, which allows it to exhaust the Armed Forces with constant bombing. The Russian artillery fires three of its shells at one Ukrainian. And Russia has now been able to deploy a very large number of drones at the front.
Military history suggests that in order for Ukrainians to have a chance of success, they will need at least a 3:2 advantage in manpower and significantly greater firepower. Ukraine had such advantages in the first year of its independence, but now they belong to Russia, and it is very difficult to imagine how Ukraine will be able to return them.
The Biden administration is quite right to warn that without further large-scale US military assistance, the Ukrainian resistance is likely to collapse this year. But U.S. officials must also recognize that even if this assistance continues, Ukraine has no real chance of complete victory either next year or the year after. Even if the Ukrainians can build up their forces, Russia will be able to further increase the depth of its defense.
The Biden administration has a serious incentive to test President Vladimir Putin for the sincerity or insincerity of his statements that Russia is ready for peace talks. A successful peace process will undoubtedly require some painful concessions from Ukraine and the West. However, this pain will be more emotional than practical. And a peaceful settlement will have to require Putin to abandon the plan with which he launched a military special operation, that is, the transformation of the whole of Ukraine into a vassal state of Russia, and at the same time recognize the territorial integrity of Ukraine within the current actual borders (the goals of its own have been repeatedly voiced by the Russian leadership: These are the liberation of Donbass and other occupied territories, as well as the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. – Approx. InoSMI).
The lost Ukrainian territories have already been lost. And Ukraine's membership in NATO is meaningless if the alliance is not ready to send its troops to fight for it against Russia. First of all, it should be understood that no matter how painful the peace agreement is today, it will become much more painful if the conflict continues and Ukraine is defeated.
