Volodymyr Zelensky Official Portrait licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license courtesy of Wikimedia 

Tim Judah at The New York Review of Books provides a sobering view of the mutually lethal stalemate between Putin’s forces and Ukraine’s. Excerpt:

In the past, and especially after Ukraine triumphantly drove back the Russians from Kyiv, Kherson, and the Kharkiv region in 2022, most Ukrainians, taking their cue from Zelensky, were very clear: the war would end with victory, and victory meant the expulsion of the Russians from every square inch of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. According to opinion polls, that is still the case, although there is growing support for a freezing of the front lines. In my experience, Ukrainians overwhelmingly believe that an armistice along the current lines would not end the war, only pause it. This is what happened in 2015 after Russia grabbed Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, only to come back in 2022 to try to finish the job of destroying Ukraine as a state.

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When the war began in 2014 and Russia seized most of the Donbas region, Ukraine lost 80 percent of its coal deposits. In October the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, estimated that 6.75 million Ukrainian refugees had fled the country, while more than five million were believed to live under Russian occupation. So Ukraine is losing people while Russia is carving off or destroying parts of its economy and energy system.

Back in Kyiv I met Sergiy Shtepa, a sociology professor. He fought on the front for fifteen months, was … “Maybe half or more of Ukrainians don’t want to fight and think it is not their war.” But how to stop it? “I know why Russia should stop the war,” he said, “but I don’t know why Putin should. He is motivated and for him it is a colonial war and the main objective of his life is the conquest of Ukraine.”

The next day I left for Lviv in western Ukraine. I wanted to see Yevhen Hlibovytsky, who runs the Frontier Institute, a think tank aimed at helping Ukraine plan for the future. As he was on the way to Kyiv we met halfway at a shop that had a couple of tables for coffee behind a curtain. “This is how gangsters used to meet in the 1990s,” he joked. We talked about the idea of freezing the line and how this was sometimes described as a German or Korean solution, in the sense of dividing a country that might eventually be reunited. He scoffed. The difference is that East Germans and North Koreans remained and remain Germans and Koreans. The flight of pro-Ukrainians and the Russification of the remainder of the population in the occupied territories means that there will be no Ukrainians left there, he said, because “anything Ukrainian is wiped out.”

An armistice along the current lines (which Putin has shown no inclination to agree to) in exchange for NATO membership for Ukraine (which he says is out of the question) would also be a “risky offer,” Hlibovytsky said. On the one hand just a promise of membership in the alliance was not enough, because that could be blocked by Putin-friendly governments like those of Hungary or Slovakia, quite apart from the fact that many other countries are far from keen on it. On the other hand, it would mean that Ukraine would not be able to militarily retake its lost territories if it chose to do so, or rather that if it did try, NATO’s security guarantee would not apply. Therefore “we have to think out of the box,” Hlibovytsky said, or Ukraine will either lose the war or achieve a peace that would “cost us tremendously.” His argument was that the world is changing and many Westerners do not understand how tough things are going to get. Western countries have not given Ukraine either enough weaponry or the permission to use it to its full effect, and now, if they try to force Ukraine into accepting a deal with a loss of territory but no full guarantee that they would come to the defense of what remained, this would result in an embittered Ukraine whose people and politicians, or at least those who want to continue to fight, blame the West for everything the country had lost, and “that’s not a good recipe” for a stable and prosperous future.

Putin has started something he has been unable to finish, but Russia has staying power, at least for the foreseeable future. Western leaders do not know how to convince Ukraine to agree to freeze the lines without committing their own troops to defending it, and anti-Ukrainian politicians are gaining ground from Germany to the US. Zelensky wants to force Putin to the negotiating table from a position of strength, but now Ukraine is on the defensive. In the meantime, many Ukrainians no longer wish to fight. As things stand, though, if the fighting stopped tomorrow, both Ukrainians and Russians would immediately begin to prepare for the next round.

Slava Ukraine!