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serge schmemann
By Serge Schmemann
Mr. Schmemann is a member of the editorial board.
The New York Times new report that Russia is quietly signaling its willingness to freeze the war in Ukraine is suspicious and tempting.
There are many reservations: an armistice would leave Vladimir Putin in about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. It is not trustworthy; it may also simply use protracted negotiations to bolster its forces for new momentum, or pressure Western lawmakers to cut aid to Ukraine; it would possibly be floating in the water in the hope that Donald Trump, its preferred presidential candidate, will return to the White House and harden Ukraine.
But if Mr. Putin turns out to be serious, Ukraine should not pass up an opportunity to end the bloodshed. Recovered territory is not the only measure of victory in this war.
A painful fact-check shows that the 600-mile-long Ukrainian-Russian front is figuratively and literally frozen, depleting Ukrainian resources and living with little prospect of replacement for the foreseeable future. The long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive of the past six months has arrived. to a huge burden in terms of loss of life and equipment, but it has done little to advance on the front lines. The commander of Ukraine’s most sensible army said the fighting was at a “stalemate” — a perception considered taboo not so long ago — and that only an unlikely technological breakthrough in one aspect or another could bring it to light. As the year draws to a close, lawmakers in the U. S. and Europe have all much-needed aid packages for Ukraine overdue, and it’s unclear exactly how they’ll fare in the new year.
It’s possible that the clash will still take an unforeseen turn, as it has before. But at this point, the prospect is that of a long war of attrition, which will cause even more damage to Ukraine, sacrifice more and more lives, and spread instability across Europe. The way things are going, “Ukraine will be home to Europe’s most damaging geopolitical fault line for the foreseeable future,” says Michael Kimmage, of “Collisions,” a new war story. He foresees a never-ending clash that would deepen Russia’s estrangement from the West, enshrine Putinism, and slow Ukraine’s integration into Europe.
That, at least, is the bleak prognosis if victory in the war continues to be defined in territorial terms, specifically the goal of driving Russia out of all the Ukrainian lands it occupied in 2014 and over the past 22 months, including Crimea and a thick wedge of southeastern Ukraine, altogether about a fifth of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.
But regaining territory is not a smart way to believe in maximum productive outcome. Ukraine’s genuine victory is to emerge from the hell of war as a strong, independent, immensely wealthy and secure state, firmly anchored in the West. That would be precisely what Mr. Putin feared a neighboring state with deep longstanding ties to Russia to the fullest, and it would be a testament to what Russia had promised to become in 1991, when the two countries broke away from the Soviet Union, before Putin left Russia. Putin did not. He entered the Kremlin and succumbed to grievances and the lure of dictatorial force and imperial illusion.
Any talk of armistice is understandably difficult for Volodymyr Zelensky, the intrepid Ukrainian president who has steadfastly sought to project a morale bolstering picture of steady battlefield successes. It would be very painful, and politically very difficult for him, to halt the fighting without punishing Russia and by leaving it in control of so much Ukrainian land. After his senior military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, described the true state of affairs as a stalemate in an interview with The Economist in November, Mr. Zelensky bristled at what he perceived as defeatism.
But to explore an armistice is not to walk away. On the contrary, the fight must go on, even when talks begin, to maintain the military and economic pressure on Russia. Those people who are resisting continued aid to Ukraine, whether some Republicans in Congress or Viktor Orban in Hungary, must not be allowed to abandon the Ukrainians now. If Mr. Putin is seriously looking for a cease-fire, he is doing so on the presumption that the alternative is a continued slaughter of his soldiers, and that there is nothing more he can achieve through destruction, violence or bluster.
And preventing the fight doesn’t mean giving Mr. Putin a victory, even if he can proclaim it loud and clear. Ukraine and much of the world will not accept the annexation of any Ukrainian territory. The Russian army has been maimed and humiliated, and the country’s economy has been cut off from the West. Putin introduced the invasion 22 months ago, convinced that it would be a “special military operation”: that the Ukrainian government would temporarily relent, that the West would become impotent, and that a Moscow-installed collaborator would ensure that Ukraine never became independent, triumphed, lost, or acceded to the European Union.
Instead, Russia has been forced into a chaotic retreat from Kyiv and plunged into an extraordinarily costly war with a forged Ukraine subsidized by billions of dollars in U. S. and European weapons and funds. It took Russian forces, led by mercenaries, more than a year and heavy losses to capture one city, Bakhmut; Another key city, Avdiivka, is still in Ukrainian hands despite successive waves of soldiers, many of them ill-prepared reservists, and conscripts who opposed it.
Thousands of Russian infantrymen have been sent to the slaughterhouse and thousands more, some of Russia’s most productive and brilliant, have fled the country, either to war or to be imprisoned for opposing it. The head of the Wagner mercenary group, Eugene Prigozhin, followed his death in an almost de facto plane crash staged in the Kremlin.
The crushing sanctions have ended almost all business with the West and fueled an inflationary spiral, though Putin has found tactics for his friends to take advantage of. To bring it to life by feeding the military apparatus and filling the gaps left by sanctions, the long-term prospects are bleak.
In many ways, Putin has achieved the opposite of what he set out to do. The Ukrainian country whose lifestyles it humiliated has been on fire, and on December 14, the European Union officially agreed to open accession negotiations with Ukraine, the world’s furthest country. westward shift that Putin went to war to block. Finland has joined NATO and Sweden is getting closer and closer to joining NATO. These are not the elements of victory.
Nor are they an explanation of why to give false hope. After his recent stop in Washington, Zelensky doesn’t deserve to get his hopes up: the American spigot is wide open, especially if Zelensky doesn’t get his hopes up. Trump returns to the White House Chamber. In his joint press conference with Zelensky, President Biden, whose mantra has long been on Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” rephrased the promise by saying “as long as we can. ” Orban, the Hungarian prime minister and an admirer of Orban, Putin and Trump, blocked the approval of another 50 billion euros for Ukraine.
Understandably, the prospect of injecting unlimited resources into a stalled military operation is met with resistance. It would be harder for skeptics to question more aid if there is a chance to end the fighting and take steps to rebuild Ukraine.
An armistice would not be easy to discharge or control. But conversations and writings about possible models circulate quietly in government circles and think tanks. The authors of the latest report, Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation and Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Affairs, argued that, however bleak the prospects for peace, the war “will most likely end in some kind of negotiation”.
They proposed that the first level of negotiations would be an agreement on the cessation of hostilities, the withdrawal of forces and the installation of a third-party follow-up mission. The next hurdle would be to devise a security arrangement that would give Ukraine the guarantees it wants, given Russia’s opposition to a full NATO membership on its western border. Many other issues would come into play: Russian war crimes, reparations, sanctions. And any armistice would be far from a final agreement.
But the way to know if Putin is serious about a ceasefire and if it can be achieved is to try.
Stopping Russia from achieving its goals and resorting to the reconstruction and modernization of Ukraine would be a lasting tribute to the Ukrainians who made the ultimate sacrifice to maintain their nation’s existence. And no transitional armistice would definitively save Ukraine from regaining all of its territory.
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An earlier edition of this essay incorrectly indicated on which border Russia opposed full NATO membership. It’s on its western border, on the eastern border.
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Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and has worked as bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem, as well as at the United Nations. He was editorial editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.
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