Will "peace" be the pause that refreshes Russia?

The Ukraine and Gaza wars suggest aggressors currently have a brief initial window to run amok. How do we stop that?

Every technological era swings the balance in warfare toward either offense or defense. The 2020s, the age of flying death robots, seem inclined toward defense … unless you can get the drop on your enemy and rush over the border unexpectedly, like Russia in 2022 or Hamas in 2023.

So how do you negotiate a peace in Ukraine that isn’t just the pause that refreshes in the corridors of power?

Both aggressions enjoyed a lot of initial success.

For instance, here are stills from an 8 minute video of who held what for the first 34 months of the war in Ukraine.

On Day Zero in February 2022, Russia more or less held since 2014-2015 (in pink) Crimea in the south and a chunk of the Donbas industrial region in the southern east border region:

But in the first four weeks of their 2022 invasion, Russians advanced into Ukraine from multiple directions, surrounding Kiev in north-central Ukraine, menacing Kharkov in the northeast, grabbing a “land bridge” to Crimea, and crossing (perhaps due to treason) to the right bank of the Dnieper River, putting them within striking distance of Odessa, the fall of which would have reduced western Ukraine to an inland rump state with no access to the Black Sea.

The main place where Russia did not advance in early 2022 was on the central front since 2014 in the Donbas, because that’s where the Ukrainian Army had dug in.

But when the Ukrainian leadership chose to fight rather than, as expected, to flee, and Russian paratroopers were defeated at the Kiev airport, the Russian “special military operation’s” attack on Kiev turned into a fiasco. So the invading columns were pulled back and Russia instead consolidated its gains in the northeast and surrounded the port of Mariupol in the southeast, which finally surrendered on May 20, 2022:

In the second half of 2022, Ukraine regained some minor land in the northeast, lessening pressure on Kharkov. More importantly, the Ukrainians kicked the Russian out of Kherson on the west bank of the Dnieper River in the south. That big river is the single most important natural line of defense in this flattish country:

A Ukraine in which Russia doesn’t hold any land west of the Dnieper River is, conceivably, defensible in the long term. But give the Russians a bridgehead on the European side of the river …

Then, nothing much happened in 2023 as the Ukrainian counteroffensive proved a bust, in part because the Russians had invested a lot in battlefield fortifications to help them hold on to their conquests. In contrast, the Ukrainians, being both poorer and the victims of aggression, invested more in retaking their losses, which proved the wrong decision.

Meanwhile in 2023, the Russians made some barely visible gains in the Donbas:

In 2024, the Russians made larger gains in the Donbas, but they are still hard to see when looking at a map of the whole country:

January 1, 2025 is the end of this video (best to watch on fast speed with the sound off unless you enjoy hearing angry Slavs shouting):

What’s happened since then? Here are the Institute for the Study of War maps for January 2, 2025:

and March 8, 2025:

As far as I can tell, not much has happened lately (not that you’d expect it to in the dead of winter), although it seems likely the chances for the Ukrainian troops who made that minor incursion into Russia in the north are running out of time to retreat without being captured.

A huge question about demands for peace in Ukraine is: What would bring lasting peace rather than merely a pause until Russia is rested up enough to attack again as it did in February 2022?

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