In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda, left, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attend a welcoming ceremony in Presidential Courtyard, Vilnius, Lithuania on Wednesday.
Negotiated peace talks only realistic option for Ukraine to end war with Russia
Ukraine simply cannot win a grinding war of attrition— especially if winning requires the liberation of all of the territory conquered by Russia since 2014.
In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda, left, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attend a welcoming ceremony in Presidential Courtyard, Vilnius, Lithuania on Wednesday.
Despite the hopes, dreams and — it must be said — delusions of many armchair generals in the West, the war is going very poorly for Ukraine. So poorly, in fact, that the prospects of Kyiv achieving even a partial victory — let alone a total victory that would include the liberation of Crimea — are rapidly approaching nil.
How do I know this? Well, I have simply reviewed the established facts.
First, there’s the failed Ukrainian summer counteroffensive. Despite all the NATO training, the provision of the West’s much ballyhooed “wonder weapons,” and the mass mobilization of Ukrainian manpower, the offensive achieved nothing at the operational and strategic levels. Ukrainian forces did have a few minor tactical successes, but they failed to achieve their operational or strategic goals on either the southern or eastern fronts.
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Then there’s the crumbling political support for total victory within both the Ukrainian political elite and among various significant grassroots constituencies. Among the elite, the most dangerous fault line is that between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valery Zaluzhny, with the latter explicitly questioning the former’s vision of total victory.
At the grassroots level, women are mobilizing to demand the demobilization of their fathers, sons and husbands. Taken together, these developments reflect a very real fracturing of the once-united front in support for the war and the strategic goal of total victory at any price.
Beyond that, there’s the worsening geopolitical situation. Simply put, the support of a number of key Western geopolitical players is faltering, especially in the United States and European Union. This is largely a function of the rise of the nationalist right, which wants more attention paid to the needs of domestic constituencies in their respective countries, but has been exacerbated by the fact that in many Western countries popular and political attention has been refocused on the war in Gaza.
Finally, there’s the non-trivial factor of Russian resilience.
At the tactical level, the Russian military has adapted to what initially appeared to be Ukrainian advantages. For example, it has developed the capacity to jam the wireless signals that connected Ukrainian drones to the satellites they relied on for navigation, leading the machines to lose their way and plummet to earth.
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At the operational level, Russia has adopted a defence-in-depth approach — extensive minefields, multiple lines of trenches, etc. — that has proven remarkably effective against Ukrainian forces.
At the strategic level, Russia’s economy has also proven remarkably resilient, allowing Moscow to mobilize the nation’s industrial base in support of the war in ways that few outside the country anticipated.
When viewed as a totality, these intersecting realities add up to one thing: a grinding war of attrition that Ukraine simply cannot win — especially if winning requires the liberation of all of the territory conquered by Russia since 2014. And that in turn leaves only one rational way forward for Kyiv: a negotiated settlement — one that accepts that neither side is going to achieve total victory as they define it and that some kind of compromise is necessary.
Would such a compromise be the end of conflict between Ukraine and Russia? No — no more than the Minsk agreements of 2104 and 2015. The conflict of interests between the two countries would not be definitively resolved and the prospects for renewed warfare in the future would remain a possibility.
But it would at least mean a temporary end to what has now become truly pointless killing and dying. And that’s something.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.
