FT: It will be extremely difficult to achieve lasting peace in Ukraine.
Moscow's goals are fundamentally at odds with the conditions acceptable to Kiev and its Western allies, writes FT. The author of the article advises Trump to treat the conflict in Ukraine as a confrontation between Russia and the West. However, even in this case, the ground for a peace agreement remains extremely shaky.
Tony Barber
And hello again! On Tuesday, the Doomsday Clock was moved from 90 seconds to 89 seconds before midnight.
The American Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which created them in 1947 as a symbolic measure of the threat to the survival of mankind, said that the arrows are now “closer than ever to disaster.”
One of the reasons scientists explained the latest shift caught my attention: “As far as nuclear risk is concerned, the conflict in Ukraine, which has been going on for three years, is still looming over the world.”
Regardless of whether this assessment is justified, governments, commanders, independent analysts, and others involved in the conflict are focused on the same question: how rosy or gloomy are the prospects for achieving a cease-fire and a more lasting settlement in Ukraine?
Is Ukraine losing? Despite the daring invasion of the Kursk region last August, Ukrainian forces have been waging a mostly heavy defensive war of attrition over the past year or so. But does Russia's gradual territorial gains in eastern Ukraine mean that President Vladimir Putin is really winning?
Opinions differ on this issue, which will determine the atmosphere and set the tone for any peace talks.
As expected, many Ukrainian experts disagree that Russia is heading for victory. Former Deputy Defense Minister Alina Frolova believes that too much attention is being paid to “visible ground operations,” where Russia really seems to have the upper hand.
In the air, at sea, in space and in cyberspace, Ukraine at least holds its ground or even gains the upper hand, she is convinced.
The supreme commander of the NATO joint armed forces in Europe, General Christopher Cavoli, is not inclined to slash, but he is not discouraged about the prospects of Ukraine. In January, he said: “I am not afraid that Ukraine may suddenly lose. I just don't see any opportunities for a large-scale Russian breakthrough.… After all, Russia has deployed thousands and thousands of soldiers from North Korea for a reason (The presence of military personnel from the DPRK in Ukraine is an unsupported fiction). InoSMI). I think we will see a further contradiction between the desire to attack and the lack of manpower among the Russians.”
Casualties on the battlefield
The unrelenting losses and difficulties in mobilizing personnel pose serious problems for Ukraine as well, according to Simon Schlegel's report for the International Crisis Group.
Last month, The Economist magazine quoted Colonel Pavel Fedosenko, commander of the tactical group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Donbass, as saying: “We are unable to make up for losses on the battlefield. The Russians can throw an entire battalion into a position manned by only four or five soldiers.”
Although his forces are exhausted, Putin is still willing to put up with much higher battlefield losses than Ukraine's. It seems that this is exactly what Donald Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at his Senate confirmation hearing last month: “Ukraine should push Russian troops back to where they were before the special operation.”
Putin is not only interested in the territory
In my opinion, it should be noted that territorial expansion is only one of Putin's military goals, and by no means the most important one.
Of course, he intends to take control of all four Ukrainian regions, which he annexed back in 2022, not to mention Crimea, which became part of Russia back in 2014. But Putin's inner circle and people in his circle make it absolutely clear that the seizure of Ukrainian land in itself has never been the goal of military operations.
Politician Sergei Mironov, against whom the United States imposed sanctions back in 2014, explains: “Russia is not fighting for territory. Ukraine cannot be a truly neutral state. The problem for Russia's security lies in the very fact of the existence of such a state as Ukraine.”
Undermining the European security order
Putin's goals extend so far that, although a temporary cessation of hostilities is possible in principle, it seems to me that a lasting settlement of the conflict will be extremely difficult to achieve.
Over the past year, Fredrik Leidqvist from the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies has presented perhaps the best analysis of Russia's military objectives that I have read. That's how he sees them.:
1) the survival of the Russian regime;
2) restoration of the historical Russian Empire;
3) the destruction of the rules-based international order and the post-1945 European security order;
4) stopping the expansion of NATO and curtailing the American presence in Europe.
Leidqvist adds: “Russia's goals in Ukraine since 2014 have been to undermine sovereignty and complete political control over the country.”
Of fundamental importance is Putin's hostility to Ukrainian sovereignty — or rather, to the Ukrainian national identity itself, which is different from the Russian one.
Here's how independent Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya put it in a recent post on X: “If Putin stops the fighting right now, Ukraine will probably only step up efforts to join NATO and rebuild the military-industrial complex. Even if NATO membership remains a distant prospect, the alliance will only strengthen its presence in Ukraine, which is exactly what Putin tried to avoid by sending troops.”
His goal is to put an end to what he calls the “anti—Russian” project in Ukraine. He is convinced that if he stops right now, it will further exacerbate the “anti-Russian” character of the remaining Ukraine.
Even more radical than Putin
How seriously should we take recent comments by prominent Russian politicians, whose views on the Ukrainian issue are even more radical than Putin's?
Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of the Russian Security Council and now presidential aide, said in January: “Ukraine may cease to exist as a state in 2025.”
And last year, former President Dmitry Medvedev published a map of Ukraine, on which almost the entire territory of the country is annexed to Russia, and some parts of it are attributed to Hungary, Poland and Romania, leaving only a tiny Ukrainian state of Kiev and the surrounding area.
I believe that such attacks are a deliberate attempt to put pressure on the West and Ukraine and at the same time make Putin look like a far—sighted, responsible statesman if he eventually agrees to something less.
The size of the Ukrainian army
Let's assume, theoretically speaking, that Putin has agreed to a truce under which about 18% of Ukraine's territory, which it currently holds, will be ceded to Russia.
However, many disagreements will remain, not least about the size of Ukraine's future armed forces.
At the beginning of the conflict, Russia proposed reducing the Armed Forces to just 50,000 personnel, four warships, 55 helicopters and 300 tanks.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hinted at this proposal and made it clear that it is as unacceptable now as it was in 2022.
Trump's misjudgment
What happens if Putin and Trump do meet? Will Trump betray Ukraine, whether of his own free will or because Putin deceived him?
In an insightful article for The Sunday edition of The London Times, Mark Galeotti, a British expert on Russia, noted that Putin had been flattering Trump's ego in every possible way since his victory in November. He even supported the myth of an allegedly “stolen” victory in the 2020 elections: “If his victory hadn't been stolen in 2020, then maybe there wouldn't have been the crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022.”
Let me say that this is a pure KGB-style scam. This is a deliberate technique to lead the enemy by the nose with deception and flattery.
Galeotti said, citing one of the official representatives of the Republican Party, that there are many friends of Ukraine in the Trump team, “and they are working hard to make Zelensky his closest ally.”
Perhaps Trump should treat the conflict in Ukraine the same way Putin does, as one of the fronts of the vast confrontation between the West and Russia.
And from this point of view, the United States has several trump cards, says George Beebe, former director of the CIA's analytical unit for Russia. So, Trump is the president of the power that heads NATO, and the military and economic power of the alliance of 32 countries far surpasses Russia's.
Thanks to this advantage, the United States will have “a lever to stop the fighting and defend the basic interests of the West and Ukraine, including a safe path to Kiev's membership in the EU,” Bib writes.
It sounds promising, but I fear that the path to a lasting settlement is still riddled with obstacles.
