Endless War?

As one administration hands over control to another administration in Washington, I analyze the prospects for a peace agreement in Ukraine

When Vladimir Putin ordered his military into Ukraine, a nation he has repeatedly claimed is no more than a rogue Russian province, he did so with the clear intent to change the world. And he most certainly has, though not in the manner he expected. Instead of immediately dismantling what he calls American “hegemony” and cementing Russia’s status as an equal the United States and China, he has instead accelerated the process of global fragmentation. While Putin expected to become the new Master of Europe, he has instead pushed Europe, albeit at the enormous cost to the continent’s economies, into even deeper dependency on the United States in both the defense and energy sectors- the exact opposite outcome. Russia, rather than becoming one of the three leading superpowers, has been reduced to its own state of dependency- on China. When US and European sanctions cut Russia off from Western technology, Putin had little choice than to turn to China for replacements in exchange for more Chinese purchases of the Russian energy that once powered Europe.

Now, however, there is hope in the West that Putin’s Ukrainian adventure may end soon- thanks to the arrival of a highly unconventional American President. Despite the many controversies of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, the American public decided on November 5, 2024 that his return to our most famous residence was preferable to four more years of continuity from an administration led by a man lost in his own thoughts and lost in the dense jungles of the Amazon. During his campaign, Trump made many promises. Today, I choose to focus on the one most interesting to me- his vow to end the war between Russia and Ukraine in “24 hours.” So, what exactly would such a peace plan look like, and is it realistic?

The Costs of Appeasement

If one were to listen to the so-called expert class, that group proven wrong by the Covid Pandemic, the meltdown at the US-Mexico border, and outrageous wokery, the answer to the second part of the above question would not only be a mere no, but instead a no, and don’t even be stupid enough to attempt it. According to the Washington Post, “an abandonment of Ukraine- or a deal that leaves Ukraine untenably territorially diminished- would signal to dictators around the world that Western resolve comes with an expiration date. Imagine how Chinese President Xi Jinping would take a Western retreat from Ukraine as he contemplates taking Taiwan or the atolls and shoals in the oil-rich South China Sea. It’s not too soon to wonder — and worry — whether North Korea’s Kim Jong Un regards his army’s mission against Ukraine as preparation for a military move of his own on the Korean Peninsula.”

Despite my general eye-rolling attitude toward that once balanced but now partisan outlet, this argument is not one we can easily dismiss. History has shown the cost of retreating and simply kicking the can down the road when faced by a hostile regime determined to expand its territory. When Neville Chamberlain proclaimed “peace in our time” by agreeing to give Nazi Germany a chunk of Czechoslovakia with the 1938 Munich agreement, Adolf Hitler responded by brazenly violating the agreement and seizing all of Czechoslovakia just six months later. For Western policymakers, the lesson of their Munich debacle has been a strong preference to overreact, rather than underreact or look the other way, when faced with violations of sovereignty or territorial integrity lest the problem snowball out of control as when Hitler launched his bloody march across Europe.

Ukraine’s Severe Challenges

For any peace deal in Ukraine to work, there needs to be some concessions on all sides, no matter how painful they are to Ukraine- the victim of an unjust war launched under a false pretext. And Vladimir Putin’s demands are certainly painful. In order for Putin to greenlight any ceasefire, Ukraine must withdraw its military from the four Oblasts that Russia has annexed (but lacks complete territorial control over) as well as a chunk of Russia’s Kursk Oblast Ukraine currently occupies, give up any notions of ever seeing Crimea, annexed back in 2014, returning to Ukrainian jurisdiction, amend its constitution disavowing any intentions for NATO membership, including prohibitions on the stationing of troops from NATO countries, and ensure protections for Ukraine’s Russian minority.

While the last demand will be somewhat tricky, considering how historically the Russian and Ukrainian languages and ethnicities have formed more of a continuum than distinct concepts, the other demands are nothing less than brutal blackmail tactics ensuring that Moscow will forever have a veto policy over a nation it considers nothing more than a wayward province.

As for Ukraine, its leverage in any negotiation with its far more powerful neighbor is minimal. While exact measurements are challenging in a time of war, the British magazine The Economist has estimated that anywhere between 60,000 to 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the large-scale war began nearly three years ago, with a staggering additional 400,000 suffering from such severe wounds that a return to the front lines is medically impossible. So, what do these tragedies, each with a unique and heartbreaking story, mean in practice? To be blunt- approximately 0.5% of Ukraine’s male population pre-war has been killed, and another 2-4% have been maimed. While Russian casualties are indeed higher, the Russian federation has more than 4 times the population of Ukraine (35 million to 140+ million), not including reserves of soldiers from North Korea, migrants from the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia, and a global band of mercenaries paid by the notorious Wagner Group.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is having to resort to desperate measures, sometimes forcibly grabbing young men off the street, to make up for the dire shortage of manpower on the front lines. These front lines are where these losses have become the most dire. In November 2024 alone, the Russian military captured 667 square kilometers (257 square miles) of Ukrainian territory, the largest seizure since the early days of the war in 2022. These realities have proven, at least to me, that the claims of the expert class of a Ukrainian victory being within our grasp if we just give the Ukrainians a few more weapons are about as solid as Swiss Cheese.

A New Administration Prepares

So, with Ukraine’s well-intentioned hopes of restoring its complete territorial integrity within the 1991 borders crumbling, the only alternative appears to be some kind of ceasefire we hope can eventually transform into some form of long-term settlement. Enter Keith Kellogg. Recently, President-elect Trump appointed Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general and former acting national security advisor as the United States Special Envoy to Ukraine and Russia. Because Kellogg has been loyal to Donald Trump, many of Trump’s critics from the pundit class will naturally write him off as someone who will merely bend to Trump’s wishes. However, Kellogg appears to occupy the sweet spot as someone who has both been loyal to the unorthodox president-elect as well as one whose previous writings about the conflict in Ukraine have been in line with the views of Trump’s critics.

In a paper for the America First Policy Institute published last April, Kellogg and another official from the first Trump Administration, Fred Fleitz, criticized the Biden Administration for missing the opportunity in the early stages of the Russian invasion to use all available methods to end the war as quickly as possible. On top of diplomatic and economic pressure, Kellogg states “President Biden should have provided Ukraine with the weapons it needed to expel Russian forces early in the war.” Furthermore, Kellogg made clear that along with weakening Russia to free up American resources to counter China, “it was also in America’s best interests to ensure that Russia lost this war because, due to Putin’s decision to make Russia an aggressor state, a defeated and diminished Russia was the best outcome for US and global security.” These words do not sound like a man ready to give away Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and his cronies just to please his boss. Thus, while Kellogg is a credible negotiator, serious doubts remain of the credibility of Russian so-called ‘diplomacy’.

Moscow’s Calculus

So, will the Russians even bother listening to Keith Kellogg? After all, Russian forces are advancing forwards, albeit with massive casualties. This worldview is reflected in the brash words of the hardline Russian ideologue Konstantin Malofeyev in an interview with the Financial Times: “Kellogg comes to Moscow with his plan, we take it and then tell him to screw himself, because we don’t like any of it. That’d be the whole negotiation… for the talks to be constructive, we need to talk not about the future of Ukraine, but the future of Europe and the world.” For a nuclear power who once made sweeping demands of an imperial buffer zone in Eastern Europe, shattering the right to self-determination of dozens of countries, such hubris is merely par for the course. For Russian forces to stop firing weapons against Ukrainian targets, it will take more than a few diplomatic pleasantries. In other words, peace will only come if the United States demonstrates strength and establishes real deterrence.

On top of the imperial arrogance of the Russian elite, we must also recognize that Vladimir Putin has built a system that depends on permanent war to survive. And this system will most likely outlive him. According to another article in The Economist, the war in Ukraine has fueled an economic boom in Russia’s chronically underdeveloped hinterlands. Once notorious for lacking indoor plumbing, these regions have been the focus of large-scale investments in Russia’s defense industrial base by both the Russian state and Russian businesses. In turn, not only have these investments led to a major economic revival in these insular regions where popular support for the war is strong, they have also produced a new entrepreneurial class whose entire business model is keeping the Russian war machine running- just as the old oligarchs keep falling out of windows. If Vladimir Putin were to stop the war tomorrow, he would risk the wrath of millions of Russians whose livelihoods are directly tied to death and destruction.

Besides, there is little evidence Putin even wants to stop. While originally the decision to launch what Putin termed his Special Military Operation to overthrow the Ukrainian government was made by the Russian president and a small clique of his closest associates, most of the Russian elite and Russian society at large is now in agreement with their leader’s paranoid belief that the United States and NATO seek Russia’s dissolution and collapse. Simply allowing Ukraine, a hostile state sharing a 2000-kilometer border with Russia, to govern itself is simply intolerable. Not only is such an arrangement a threat to Putin’s regime, but in the minds of Putin and millions of Russians, it is an existential threat to Russia itself. Unlike Zelensky, neither Putin nor any of the men around him have any incentive for a sustainable peace.

Enforcing a Ceasefire

With all these incentives to keep the war going, I can only envision one circumstance under which Vladimir Putin submits to any Trump peace agreement- to regroup his forces to attack Ukraine yet again with a far more crushing blow than the disastrous opening weeks of the 2022 invasion.

I originally wrote this article with the prediction that the Trump Administration, thanks to considerable personnel losses on both sides, could secure a quick ceasefire. After receiving suggestions from a credible source in Warsaw, I now have come to a more sobering conclusion- even with massive military casualties, Vladimir Putin is not interested in any form of a ceasefire, even a short-term one. With Russia currently winning what many Russians believe is a war of self-defense, Ukraine badly bleeding, the United States more concerned with domestic matters, and Europe unable to mount a cohesive response, no one in the Kremlin seriously envisions the end of the fighting anytime soon.

Even if Vladimir Putin were to agree to even a short-term ceasefire, who will enforce it? It likely will not be Donald Trump, who has long expressed skepticism of the idea of the United States committing to war with another nuclear-armed power to uphold the sovereignty of Eastern European countries, instead promoting his own negotiating skills as key to peace in the region. However, all it takes is a quick review of the pervasive narratives of hatred in Russian state media, where calls to exterminate all Ukrainians and seize Berlin and other European capitals are a daily ritual, and we quickly see that clever diplomacy alone is not enough. While the official Kremlin narrative does not promote such extreme solutions, Russian Foreign Ministry claims of a Neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv do not give much hope for a purely diplomatic solution to the war.

So, with support from the world’s most powerful military off the table and Moscow’s non-negotiable demand to revoke the possibility of Ukrainian NATO membership, who else could fill the void?

Without America, a Lack of Alternatives

Let’s start with Turkey- a middle power who has sought to maintain good relations with both Russia and Ukraine. While Turkey was heavily involved in mediation at the beginning of the invasion, the recent capture of the Syrian capital of Damascus and the fall of the Russian-backed Assad regime at the hands of Turkish-backed militants will derail any revival of Turkish mediation, let alone serious peacekeeping efforts. As for China, Beijing’s ideological alignment with the Kremlin the shared shared belief in Beijing and Moscow that Ukraine is merely a proxy to destroy Russia and ultimately China, seriously undermine China’s credibility as a successful mediator. While China has proposed a detailed peace formula, this plan is widely perceived by both Ukraine and Ukraine’s backers as more of a propaganda tool than a credible path to peace. Furthermore, The Chinese People’s Liberation Army seems more occupied with bullying China’s neighbors than becoming a responsible force dedicated to upholding world peace.

That leaves us with only one candidate- Europe. And this is exactly the plan Donald Trump wants. In Trump’s America First worldview, opposed by the Washington establishment, The United States has been forced to subsidize Europe’s economy and security for far too long, and must instead look after its own problems closer to home. When Trump (who now appears to be the de facto president) traveled to Paris for the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral, he gave, according to the Wall Street Journal several conditions for his own incoming administration’s plan to end the war quickly. First, Ukraine must remain a “strong and well-armed state.” Second, Ukraine must continue to be blocked from seeking formal NATO membership- a provocative step that would dramatically escalate tensions in Eastern Europe. Finally, and most importantly, Europe would be tasked as the primary guarantor of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity- through the presence of European peacekeepers- a formal military presence- on the ground to deter Russian ceasefire violations.

As one would expect, this proposal is not popular anywhere in Europe- including in France, despite Macron’s reported openness to the idea. And just look at Poland. High-ranking Polish officials, including Prime Minister Donald Tusk, have expressed extreme caution toward Trump’s proposal. The Speaker of the Polish Sejm, Szymon Hołownia, who like Donald Trump rose to fame as an entertainment host on Polish television, said such an intervention would only be approved in Warsaw under the NATO security umbrella. In Polish diplospeak, Hołownia means under the security protection provided by the United States Armed Forces. Due to Poland’s history of betrayal at the hands of European powers, Warsaw sees the United States as its one-and-only insurance policy from Russian revanchism. Without backing from the United States, Poland would be extremely hesitant to expose itself to Russian retaliation. My contacts in Warsaw have privately expressed the same message to me as well.

Even if such a proposal were to be implemented against the wishes of the economically dislocated European public, we also must be clear-eyed of the Russian reaction. Remember those demands about removing any semblance of NATO from Ukraine? Thus, the hypothetical presence of French or Polish troops crosses as bright red of a line for Moscow as would American troops. In the Putin’s worldview, which yearns for the era when Moscow and Washington met as equals and negotiated the fate of the world, Russia does not hold the same kind of respect for Europe that it holds for the United States. Based on the legacy of the First Cold War, Moscow arrogantly dismisses the sovereignty and agency of European countries, regularly labeling them American satellites with ruling elites under the complete control of the US government. Therefore, not only are European troops patrolling the ceasefire lines unacceptable to the Kremlin, but they would also be seen as mere extensions of Washington’s “hegemonic” ambitions.

Conclusion

The incoming Trump Administration’s goal of peace in Ukraine is certainly admirable. Nearly three years after the initial onslaught against Kyiv, it is quite clear to me that the Biden Administration’s failure to supply Ukraine enough weapons at the beginning of the war to successfully drive out Putin’s forces at their most vulnerable times was a catastrophic mistake. Now this goal is far beyond Ukraine’s capabilities, turning any further American military assistance into yet another proxy war scenario. While pursing an admirable goal, the incoming administration still lacks a fundamental understanding as to why Putin and the clique of KGB veterans around him went into Ukraine in the first place, as well as the countless disincentives the regime in Moscow has against ending a war they believe is an existential fight for Russia’s future.

Without an explicit backing from the United States military, whose firepower dwarfs Russia plus all of Europe combined, the prospect of European peacekeepers maintaining any semblance of a ceasefire is neither worthwhile nor feasible- these peacekeepers would be sitting ducks. According to Chatham House Fellow James Sherr’s written commentary for the Estonian think tank International Centre for Defense and Security, “Putin has every reason to test” the Trump Administration, “and he will” (Sherr). If the United States does not live up to the challenge posed by Putin and his network of KGB operatives, Europe’s limited resources and political divisions bode poorly for any prospect of peace in Ukraine, whether long or short-term. In summary, the fate of Ukraine, or whatever is left of the country, is entirely in the hands of the world’s third and first superpowers- Russia and the United States of America.