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In Ukraine war, neither side is winning. Is it time to negotiate?

Russia and Ukraine both reluctant to cede territory, but some Western allies are losing patience
Ukrainian soldiers on a Swedish CV90 infantry fighting vehicle near Bakhmut, Donetsk region. Ukrainian platoons continue to chip away at Russia’s northern and southern flanks, but the advance has been slow. (Roman Chop/The Associated Press)

Ukrainian soldiers on a Swedish CV90 infantry fighting vehicle near Bakhmut, Donetsk region. Ukrainian platoons continue to chip away at Russia’s northern and southern flanks, but the advance has been slow. (Roman Chop/The Associated Press)

A month in, Ukraine's spring counteroffensive is struggling against entrenched Russian forces and appears to have entered a near-frozen state, where neither side is making significant ground gains. That's renewing debate about whether now is the time to negotiate an end to the conflict.

The idea of an armistice is controversial because many experts don't believe Russian President Vladimir Putin will ever give up his ambition to control all of Ukraine and could never be trusted.

"Russia will break any agreement that it makes," said Ian Garner, an  adjunct assistant professor of political studies  at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., who has analyzed Russian war propaganda.

"The history of negotiating with Vladimir Putin for the past 22 years has been a history of broken promises. The Russian state is brutally corrupt, increasingly attached to militarism and increasingly untrustworthy."

Still, the argument fills the pages of the respected Foreign Policy magazine, where dueling headlines proclaim the conflict in Ukraine is an "Unwinnable War" and negotiations are the only realistic endgame, countered by the claim that "Russia Can Only Be Stopped On The Battlefield."
 

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a televised meeting with officials to assess the consequences of an attack on the Crimean Bridge in Moscow, Russia July 17, 2023.
Some observers of the war in Ukraine think it might be time to force the two sides to the negotiating table but others fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin, pictured in Moscow this week, is unlikely to adhere to any negotiated armstice. (Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik/Kremlin/Reuters)


Talk now or hold out for more gains

Wars are nearly always ended at a negotiating table, so the debate is really about timing: Should the two sides enter into talks now or wait, each gambling on the belief that they can take more ground and be in a stronger position to negotiate later?

"This is not an either-or situation," said retired U.S. colonel Mark F. Cancian. "A negotiated settlement will reflect the situation on the battlefield. Even if one side achieves a decisive win, the negotiations will codify that situation."

Russia's military campaign is going nowhere, but Putin may well believe he can wait out the West's support of Ukraine in a war of attrition. 

Republicans in the U.S. Congress have grown impatient with the expensive transfers of weapons. Donald Trump, who has shown friendliness toward Russia in the past and is again running for president in 2024 shares similar views. 
 

President Joe Biden, walks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy ahead of a working session on Ukraine during the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, Sunday, May 21, 2023
U.S. President Joe Biden walks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, in May. Biden is facing increasing pressure from Republicans to scale back support for Ukraine. (Susan Walsh/Reuters)


Next year's presidential and congressional elections in the U.S. could fundamentally alter the West's support for Ukraine's defence.

Some Western European politicians have also quietly nudged Ukrainian officials toward talks this year, especially since neither side has gained much ground in the last nine months, and Ukraine's current action is sputtering.

 

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, right, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meet Ukrainian troops being trained to command Challenger 2 tanks at a military facility in Lulworth, Dorset, England, Wednesday Feb. 8, 2023.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, right, and Zelenskyy meet Ukrainian troops being trained at a military facility in Lulworth, England, in February. Some European allies would like to see Zelenskyy negotiate an end to the war. (Andrew Matthews/The Associated Press)





"We will know in about another month when the results of the Ukrainian counteroffensive become clear," said Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. "So far, progress has been disappointing, steady but slow."

Kilometres of trenches have staved off counteroffensive

Warning: This section contains an image of a dead body

Of course, Russia's army is hardly in great shape.

Its spring offensive cost tens of thousands of Russian lives, with little to show for it beyond the symbolic win at Bakhmut – which Ukrainian forces have since successfully chipped away at with their own counteroffensive. 

Russian forces are exhausted, senior commanders are being replaced for insubordination, following a mutiny by the head of the Wagner mercenary group
 

Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu inspects troops at a shooting range in an unknown location in the country's Southern Military District, in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict, in this image released July 8, 2023.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu inspects troops at a shooting range in an unknown location in the country's Southern Military District, in this image released July 8, 2023. (Handout/Russian Defence Ministry/Reuters)


Western assessments suggest the Kremlin has lost so many soldiers and equipment, it would be unable to launch another offensive this year. But Russia did use the winter to build hundreds of kilometres of trenches, tank ditches and other defences, which have so far kept Ukraine from finding a weak spot in the Russian frontline through which to pour thousands of their own Western-equipped soldiers.

"They have extensive entrenchments," said Michael Kofman, one of the top U.S. analysts on Russia's armed forces, on his War on the Rocks podcast.

"They're digging fresh trenches every day and putting down more mines … the challenge is significant, to put it mildly."
 

A satellite image showing the system of trenches and obstacles meant to thwart the advance of Ukrainian forces around Novoferovika in Zaporizhzhia district.
A satellite image from April 11, 2023, showing Russia's system of defensive trenches and obstacles meant to thwart the advance of Ukrainian tanks and troops around Novofedorivka in Zaporizhzhia district. (Capella Space/ Middlebury Institue of International Studies at Monterey)


 

A Ukrainian soldier goes in a recently captured Russian trench with dead Russian soldiers, on the frontline near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Tuesday, July 4 2023. Ukrainian forces are making steady progress along the northern and southern flanks of Bakhmut, in a semi-encirclement of the wrecked city that Russian forces have been occupying since May.
A Ukrainian soldier walks in a recently captured Russian trench with dead Russian soldiers, on the frontline near Bakhmut. (Libkos/The Associated Press)


There is no question Ukraine has also lost significant equipment and personnel. Accurate figures are a closely guarded secret, but certainly thousands of soldiers have been killed while tanks, artillery guns and infantry fighting vehicles have been destroyed.

"War is not like it is in the movies," Kofman said. "War is messy. It's ugly. And you aren't going to see images of hundreds of [Ukrainian] tanks crossing Russian lines."
 

Ukrainian servicemen ride atop on an APC at the frontline near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Thursday, June 29, 2023. Ukrainian forces are making steady progress along the northern and southern flanks of Bakhmut, in a semi-encirclement of the wrecked city that Russian forces have been occupying since May.
Ukrainian servicemen ride atop on an APC at the frontline near Bakhmut. Ukraine keeps its casualty numbers close to its chest but has suffered significant losses of equipment and personnel in the year and a half since the Russian invasion. (Alex Babenko/The Associated Press)


Could Korean War type ceasefire work in Ukraine?

In short, it's a stalemate.

And the world has seen one like it before.

Between 1950 and 1953, on the Korean peninsula, South Korea (backed by the United States) and North Korea (backed by China and the Soviet Union) saw horrific battles that cost an estimated three million lives.
 

Ukrainian army Grad multiple rocket launcher fires rockets at Russian positions in the frontline near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Wednesday, July 12, 2023. Ukrainian forces are making steady progress along the northern and southern flanks of Bakhmut, in a semi-encirclement of the wrecked city that Russian forces have been occupying since May.
A Ukrainian army Grad multiple rocket launcher fires rockets at Russian positions on the frontline. (Roman Chop/The Associated Press)


That conflict began when the North invaded and seized the capital of the south, Seoul.

In the months that followed, foreign nations inserted weapons and provided training. Land was fought over, in an ever-looping sequence of winning and losing.

Then, as now, neither side was particularly interested in a negotiated end, in spite of the military stalemate.

"It was only with Stalin's death in March 1953 that Soviet leaders reconsidered the whole misadventure and prodded their allies toward an agreement," Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko wrote in the New York Times on the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

While an armistice was struck that year, the war itself has never officially ended. The fighting has just been suspended for seven decades.
 

In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018, file photo provided by South Korea Defense Ministry, South Korean army Col. Yun Myung-shick, right, shakes hands with North Korean army Lt. Col. Ri Jong Su before crossing the Military Demarcation Line inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to inspect the dismantled North Korean guard post in the central section of the inter-Korean border in Cheorwon. President Donald Trump is inviting North Korea's Kim Jong Un to shake hands during a visit to the demilitarized zone with South Korea. Trump is scheduled to visit South Korea later Saturday after meetings at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan.
A South Korean soldier, right, shakes hands with his North Korean counterpart before crossing the military demarcation line inside the so-called demilitarized zone in December 2018 . Some have suggested that a tense, open-ended ceasefire of the kind reached after the Korean War could be how the conflict ends in Ukraine. (South Korea Defence Ministry/The Associated Press)


It's far from peace. North Korea today is a menace to its neighbour and the world but now is armed with nuclear weapons.

Its leader, Kim Jong Un, is grandson to Kim Il Sung, who led North Korea when the ceasefire was signed in 1953. 

And that, says Walter Dorn, professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, is where comparisons to Russia take a different path.

"Vladimir Putin does not have a line of succession like Kim Il Sung had," he said. "His eventual replacement as Russian president won't have a family dynasty to continue."

An aerial view of Bakhmut, the site of the heaviest battles with Russian troops in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Thursday, June 22, 2023. Ukraine's June 10 recapture of the small village of Neskuchne in the eastern Donetsk region encapsulates the progress of its much-anticipated counteroffensive: small platoon-sized operations banking on the element of surprise and, when successful, notching incremental territorial gains.
An aerial view of Bakhmut, one of the areas in the east that neither side is likely to want to give up. (Libkos/The Associated Press)


Neither side showing signs of backing down on borders

Dorn predicts the Ukraine war to end by negotiation, with a heavily militarized border. The issue is where that border will be.

Ukraine wants Russia to relinquish all land that it invaded as far back as 2014, including Crimea. Russia would want to keep at least what it now controls to be able to claim some kind of victory.

Those are vastly different starting positions – reflecting thousands of square kilometres of territory.


"The two sides are so far apart," said Garner. "The Ukrainians are not tiring of the war and [not] willing to compromise just to get it over with … On the Russian side, there is no sign that they will back down."

Put simply, neither side wants to negotiate.

That may change in the last half of this year when the Ukrainian offensive concludes, and both sides will assess their likelihood of future success.

If some kind of deal could be struck – or at least an agreement to stop fighting – who would want to commit troops to keep the two sides apart?

One suggestion is a peacekeeping force. Dorn expects that job would fall to India. With some political alignment to Russia (it buys the largest amount of Russia gas now), India could be palatable to Putin and is already the largest contributor of forces to peacekeeping missions, so may be acceptable to the West.
 

Indian female soldiers belonging to the 103 Battalion of the Rapid Action Force, attend a function before their departure to Liberia as a part of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007. The group is the first all women team from India to undertake a United Nations peacekeeping assignment.
Indian peacekeepers, pictured above in New Delhi, could play a part in enforcing a negotiated border, a solution thought to be palatable to both Putin and the West. (Mustafa Quraishi/The Associated Press)


Still, Ukraine would want to defend its own borders.

The G7 recently made significant financial and military commitments to keep Ukraine armed and able to defend itself even after the conflict ends, however it may end.


 

Author: Editors Desk

Source: CBC News:

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