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?
Paywall here.
After all, Russia has so far failed to complete conquering all of the land in the four Ukrainian provinces that Putin announced he had annexed back in the fall of 2022, the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. But that hasn’t discouraged Russia from announcing it deserves to have conquered all these lands. The Russian government’s Tass reported on June 14, 2024:
MOSCOW, June 14. /TASS/. Russia today makes another true peace proposal to Kiev, which envisages the recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions as Russian territories …
Of course, Russia hasn’t yet gone through the formality of conquering all of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye provinces.
Russia currently occupies more or less all of Luhansk, but about only half of Donetsk, and is missing a significant chunk of Zaporizhzhia, and the crucial west bank of the Dnieper River in Kherson.
In June 2024, Putin announced his updated demands for peace: not only would Russia get to keep the land it had already conquered in its war of aggression, but Ukraine would also withdraw from the parts of its three oblasts that Russia purports to have annexed without conquering.
Putin fans would no doubt find this reasonable, and recommend simply giving to Russia at the negotiating table the Ukrainian territory it has been unable to win on the battlefield in its three years of war of conquest, and/or starving Ukraine of the weapons it needs to defend its territory. Their logic is much like that of the Woke’s rationalization of DEI racial preferences as based on nonwhites being Good and whites being Bad: to them, Russia is Good and Ukraine is Bad, so Russia deserves to be given special treats.
If Russia were handed back the strategic right bank of the Dnieper, which the Ukrainians drove them out of in November 2022 in a desperate counter-offensive, they would be within 200 kilometers by road of Odessa, the only harbor in Ukraine that can handle Panamax-class freighters, a port famous in Czarist and Soviet history:
Moscow likely doesn’t particularly want to take back Roman Catholic Lvov in Ukraine’s inland west, an obstreperous city whose residents recall more fondly when it was ruled by competent and sophisticated Vienna rather than by inept and brutal Moscow. But if in a future war, Russia could conquer Ukraine’s last big port, Odessa, and the rest of the remaining Ukrainian coastline, it could reduce what would be left of the Catholic regions of Ukraine to an impoverished inland rump state that it could easily dominate, the way it currently dominates inland Belarus.
One lesson of the Russia-Ukraine War of 2022-? is that it’s pretty easy to take some land from the other side in the the first few weeks of a war you start if you choose to attack at some random point that your enemy isn’t defending, as the Russians showed in the opening days of their war by seizing much of the border regions of eastern Ukraine.
And in August 2024, the Ukrainians invaded an arbitrary chunk of rural Russia and have held onto some of it ever since, although that may be in the process of finally getting shut down.
On the other hand, the Russians made very little headway in 2022 on the central front in the Donbas because the Ukrainian army had over the previous eight years dug fortifications there. In the three years since then, the Russians have pushed forward a little into Ukraine’s industrial heartland, but it’s still hard to see their gains on a map of the whole country.
So, what could make a ceasefire more long-lasting?
The West should promise to invest, say, $100 billion in building defensive lines and drones for Ukraine.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians wanted to enter normal relations with the Western nations and even join NATO, but were rebuffed. An enemy was needed to keep the grift going. While Russia was too weak to do anything about it, NATO, contrary to promises made to get Moscow to pull out of East Germany, expanded up to Russia's borders in the Baltics, but the subsequent threat of Ukraine in NATO, only 200 miles from Moscow was a step too far. Our senior statesmen including Kennan and Kissinger warned against this gross provocation, but neocon greed for "defense" grift prevailed, and the eventual result was the Russian invasion, which we were repeatedly told was "unprovoked." To paraphrase Bismarck, one can't believe anything until its opposite is asserted in the media. Whatever happened to the notion of national self-determination? I guess it has been superseded by Globalism and the laughably misnamed "rules based international order." Under self-determination, the Russian ethnic and speaking portions of Ukraine, including the Donbas and Odessa, would be a separate self-governing nation or might choose to join Russia. It is interesting to note that when the Soviet Union broke up, it was not under people asserting their individual rights, but rather their national identities. President Putin has said, and this is believable, that Russia doesn't want additional territory; they already have plenty. The idea that they want to occupy western Ukraine or even invade other countries is not credible, and their difficulties in Ukraine to date show this to be only a grifter fantasy.
Putin and Russia probably do not have the military/logistic/economic capability to conquer and hold the entirety of Ukraine. Robert Wright at Nonzero postulated that an eventual peace could see Russia holding the Russian speaking enclaves of Ukraine while the Ukrainian speaking districts formed a rump state.
For Russia trying to take and hold that rump state, even if it was achievable, could easily result in a prolonged campaign of guerilla warfare, targeted assassinations of Russian troops and Ukrainian collaborators, bombings in Russia proper, etc. Plus it's not really necessary for Putin's primary goal of securing Crimea.
I doubt that the West will commit boots on the ground to enforce a ceasefire given the long history of tit for tat provocations between Ukraine and Russia over the last few years--an artillery strike here, an armed skirmish there, some dam building thrown in for flavor. There is simply too much potential for something that escalates into direct conflict between Russian and NATO forces. The Ukrainian rump state will be an economic basket case anyway--one of my dinner partners likes to say that it will be a client state completely dependent on Western charity whose primary export back to its benefactors will be crime and instability. At that point the West will de facto be responsible for Ukraine's defense anyway in the form of military aid, training, and weapons shipments even if actual troops are verboten.