Time for a peace deal in Ukraine before it’s too late

“This month marks the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine,” some commentators have been chorusing over the past week. In the phraseology of rebuttal favoured in the recently ended pantomime season: “Oh, no, it doesn’t!” We have just been noting the second anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, not of the war there, which dates from 2014. We shall mark (or, more likely, ignore) its tenth anniversary in April.

The lazy Western media narrative is of a free and democratic Ukraine brutally invaded out of the blue by its giant, predatory neighbour, the Russian Federation. The invasion is true, as is the brutality; but the representation of the events of February 2022 as the initiation of hostilities is an affront to historical accuracy.

Between 6 April 2014 and 31 December 2021, before so much as a Russian military canteen had crossed the Ukrainian border, at least 14,304 people died in fighting in the Donbas, comprising 6,500 pro-Russian separatist fighters, 4,400 Ukrainian fighters and 3,404 civilians. If a fatality rate at that level, excluding those wounded and maimed, does not constitute war, what level of hostilities does?

Those severe casualty figures have since been dwarfed by the more intensive fighting following the invasion. Russia put itself in the wrong in 2022, by invading the territory of a sovereign state. In international law, it is an outlaw, having committed an act of aggressive war. But until that date, the moral reprehensibility of the situation was ambiguous. 

In 2013, Ukraine was governed by a pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was actually fairly sceptical of Moscow. But he refused to sign the preliminary Association Agreement for admission to the EU because of the damage Russian-imposed sanctions were inflicting on Ukraine’s economy. Kyiv was at that time a hotbed of EU agents of influence, CIA operatives and other international agencies. Despite Yanukovych offering substantial constitutional concessions and early elections, he was overthrown in a coup during which 120 people lost their lives. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea led to a raft of EU sanctions which Kyiv duly imposed on Moscow after it signed an EU free trade deal. Russia then hit back with further trade sanctions on Ukraine in 2015.

It is notable that the core issue was EU membership, promoted by Brussels propagandists, anathema to Moscow, for whom EU membership was a gateway to NATO membership. The illegal overthrow of the Yanukovych government and the separatist uprisings in the Donbas and Luhansk provisional “republics”, coupled with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, set the stage for the present conflict. 

The loss of the Donbas, Luhansk and Crimea had the ironic effect of giving the anti-Russian factions a majority of the electorate. Previously, the electoral majority had been narrowly pro-Russian, giving Yanukovych his majority, in a free and fair election, as certified by OECD observers. The violent overthrow of that legitimately elected government cannot be condoned by anybody condemning the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

The political order to which Volodymyr Zelensky is heir is just as questionable as that of Vladimir Putin. Nor, in 2014, in moral terms, was there much to choose between the antagonists: Russia was ranked at 136 on the Corruption Perception Index, Ukraine was 142. The seemingly ineradicable peculation that has seen millions of pounds in Western aid stolen by functionaries has played a part in Western disenchantment with continuing aid to Ukraine.

But the origins of this war go much further back than 2014, to the liquidation by Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. There are few instances in history of a more dramatic opportunity for a radical readjustment of relations between the former Cold War East and West, a great reset, in today’s jargon. The West, and America in particular, was guilty of a massive failure of imagination in its response to the so-called “End of History”.

Boris Yeltsin was the man who offered the best chance of transforming Russia into a functioning democracy. His great problem was the bankruptcy of the state he ran. On more than one occasion, as revealed by telephone transcripts, he had to plead with President Bill Clinton for loans to enable him to pay state salaries and pensions. There was opposition to giving money to Russia, because of the chronic corruption infesting its institutions. The rise of the oligarchs, centred on former KGB personnel and the funds they commanded, laid the foundations for a gangster state, which was what the Soviet Union had been, but in a more disciplined style.

In some American circles, there was a hubristic desire to rub the Commies’ noses in their defeat in the Cold War. The majority in government took a more helpful attitude, initially. On 13 February 1990, the US State Department notified American embassies that “we supported a unified Germany within NATO, but that we were prepared to ensure that NATO’s military presence would not extend further eastward”. In March 1991, Soviet defence minister Marshal Yazov asked Prime Minister John Major about eastern European countries’ interest in joining NATO and was assured “nothing of that sort will ever happen”. 

By 1996, Yeltsin privately expressed acceptance of Poland and the Czech Republic joining the Alliance, but Russian public opinion was strongly opposed. Since then, 10 post-Soviet nations have joined NATO. Long before he left office, Boris Yeltsin had become disillusioned with Western inconsistency, as had the Russian people. The bombing of Belgrade was the point of no return, in terms of Russian popular perception of NATO and the West. Centuries-old Russian paranoia about neighbouring states, encirclement, a world power being denied its sphere of influence, all that is easy for Vladimir Putin to stoke, when NATO is right up against Russia’s garden fence.

There was a compromise solution given serious consideration: a so-called Partnership for Peace would have offered ex-Soviet states an ill-defined link with NATO, but not the guarantee of support guaranteed to full members by Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty. On mature consideration, it was feared that, if a more aggressive Russian government were to succeed Yeltsin (as indeed happened), such second-tier states might have been regarded as susceptible to attack, without significant NATO retaliation.

The Yeltsin era was a tragically missed opportunity. Yeltsin was operating under appalling constraints, running the biggest country on earth in a state of bankruptcy, disruption, post-imperial humiliation – the West should have come to a closer accommodation with him, to set in stone the new democracy and welcome Russia into the community of nations. In the event, the West’s approach was too half-hearted and we are paying the price today.

Meanwhile, on the battlefield, Russia has at last taken Avdiivka, at enormous cost, as it did Bakhmut, though Avdiivka is of some strategic significance, which Bakhmut was not. The signs are that Putin is prepared to continue his First World War tactics of throwing troops into combat, regardless of casualties, as if on the crude demographic calculation that there are more Russians than Ukrainians, so that the latter must eventually lose. Things are not going well for Ukraine, with the plans for its next counter-offensive leaked to the Russians.

Although the possible advent of a Trump presidency is also seen as unfavourable to Ukraine, it could be a catalyst. If Donald Trump, in his first days in office, insisted on negotiations, he could conceivably end the war by persuading Ukraine to cede Crimea and parts of Donbas and Luhansk to Russia. But that would be rewarding aggression, object the hawks, and would embolden Putin to further adventures. That ignores one salient fact: Donbas and Luhansk are situated on the Russian border, while Crimea is a peninsula; the populations of all three are significantly Russian and, although trustworthy polling data is difficult to come by, have at different times expressed the desire to live under Moscow rule.

How could the West be regarded as supporting democracy, by forcing those Russians to live under Ukrainian rule? Their secession, so far, is illegal; that could be put right by United Nations-supervised referenda in all three territories, to establish the popular will. Putin would be unlikely to object since he would probably win all three votes. The Ukrainian population would resent the loss of territory, but war weariness might make it an acceptable solution. It would hardly benefit Kyiv to restore a pro-Russian majority electorate and face the risk of Russian-supported insurgencies in those territories for the indefinite future.

Any such solution would pose the huge risk of apparent appeasement of Putin and encouragement of future adventures. The answer is for NATO to put its house in order and create a security architecture for Europe that would make aggression insane. That means, first of all, NATO member states paying their dues: of NATO’s 32 members, apart from America, only six are meeting the requirement to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence: Britain, Poland, Greece and the Baltic States. No wonder Donald Trump wants to end passengers piggy-backing on the American taxpayer.

In Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson, he made one stipulation that sounded absurd: he insisted on the “de-Nazification” of the Ukrainian government (headed by a Jew). That was clearly leaving an opening, if Russian forces were to gain significant traction on the battlefield, to resume his original strategy of trying to take Kyiv, effect regime change and install a puppet government. 

To forestall that, the West has to pursue a policy of setting up negotiations at the earliest opportunity, offering Putin an opportunity to conserve his forces, end the loss of Russian lives and present his domestic audience with territory regained by a successful “special military operation”. Galling, yes; but NATO needs time to recalibrate its strategy for containment of Russia and, under this scenario, no Ukrainian would have to live under Russian occupation, or vice-versa.

The Ukrainian situation is highly dangerous and made more so by the incompetence and indecision of European leaders. Emmanuel Macron, a lame-duck president with a record of abject failure, has just reasserted his idiocy by threatening to put troops (of NATO member states) on the ground in Ukraine – a certain recipe for World War Three. It is reminiscent of his predecessor François Mitterand, who accepted the Russian military coup of 1991, intended to restore the Soviet Union, just before Boris Yeltsin succeeded in quashing it.

Such fruitcake behaviour by Macron makes even more undesirable UK participation in the Franco-British Combined Joint Expeditionary Force (CJEF), designed for joint operations on behalf of NATO (why not leave that, on an ad hoc basis, to NATO commanders?), the United Nations or even the European Union, of which Britain is not a member. Britain has enough defence challenges without wasting time indulging Macron’s folie de grandeur and the determination of civil servants to draw this country back into the orbit of Brussels.

Diverse currents are flowing in concert against the prospects of Ukrainian victory. NATO and the West must shore up the defensive war and then make preparations for negotiations. Anything else would be an abdication of responsibility and the perpetuation of an unconscionable blood bath.

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