Russia Ukraine war: battle to end conflict moves to negotiating table

The once unthinkable – ceding land to Russia – is being discussed quietly as the reality of Russia’s near three-year invasion takes its toll.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the European Political Community Summit in Budapest.

Dramatic developments on the battlefield in Ukraine this week reflect the start of a slow but potentially historic change of mood in Europe and the US about the war.

Many of these new conversations are still taking place behind closed doors because publicly, at least, the policy of the EU and the US remains that they want Ukraine to keep fighting until it repels every Russian invader.

But several factors are converging to make the once unthinkable – a peace deal that ends the war but cedes some Ukrainian territory to Russia in exchange for security guarantees – be considered as a viable, if still unsavoury, option.

The largest but not the only driver of this is the election of Donald Trump, who opposes more US military aid to Ukraine and who has promised to solve the conflict “within 24 hours” when he becomes president again on January 20.

While Trump’s 24-hour promise is not intended to be taken literally, it is widely interpreted as a determination by the incoming president to end the now 1000-day war by cutting a deal between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Yet there is no conceivable quick deal between the two leaders that would not see Putin keeping much or all of the roughly 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory his forces hold.

In Europe, the prospect of less US military aid to Ukraine under Trump has rattled EU members who would have to try to fill the void by dramatically lifting their own aid to Ukraine.

This is contributing to a new-found willingness of some European leaders to consider a negotiated solution where once they refused to countenance it. Last week German Chancellor Olaf Scholz angered Zelensky by speaking directly with Putin and urging him to consider negotiations with Ukraine to end the war.

This emerging willingness to consider a diplomatic solution also reflects the outlook on the battlefield and the dwindling prospects of further military gains by Ukraine.

Both Washington and the EU are concerned by the fact a better-resourced Russia has been joined on the battlefield by at least 10,000 troops from North Korea.

These forces are making slow but steady gains on a frontline that has been all but deadlocked for the past year. Even Zelensky now seems to accept that the war will end in a negotiated solution rather than a military outcome.

He says the war with Russia will “end sooner” with Trump as president and that he wants to see a “diplomatic” solution to the war next year.

The anticipation of Trump-driven negotiations between the two countries triggered a series of dramatic events on the battlefield this week that have raised the stakes for both Russia and Ukraine.

Ukrainian soldiers fire at Russian troops with a German Leopard tank.

The first was President Joe Biden’s belated decision to allow Ukraine to fire US-supplied long-range missiles behind the front lines into Russian territory.

The restrictions on the use of these missiles had infuriated Kyiv for months, forcing Ukraine effectively to fight with one hand behind its back by being unable to fire into Russia while Russian forces could lob missiles with impunity across all of Ukraine.

Within days of being released from these artificial constraints, Ukraine had fired the first of the US-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, into Russia.

While this move is widely considered too little, too late to alter the course of the war, it will create a new obstacle to the ability of Russian forces to move freely and safely behind their front lines.

This week Biden also authorised the provision of antipersonnel landmines to Ukraine, a step that will bolster Kyiv’s defences against advancing Russian troops.

Biden’s decision to remove the restraints on the use of the ATACMs was made amid fears that the war was slowly tilting in Russia’s favour with the arrival of the North Korean troops and the sheer exhaustion of the outnumbered Ukrainians.

The White House doesn’t fear the imminent collapse of Ukraine’s forces but it does fear that if those forces are in retreat when Trump becomes president, then Ukraine will have a poor hand to play when Trump inevitably pushes for ceasefire negotiations. In particular, Washington wants Ukraine to repel an expected Russian assault to retake the Kursk region of Russia that Kyiv took earlier this year – the only part of Russian territory that Ukraine holds.

If Ukraine can retain that slice of Russian territory when talks begin then it has an invaluable bargaining chip in any discussions over final land boundaries in peace negotiations.

But the road to any peace settlement remains cluttered with substantial obstacles, which is why there is still scepticism among strategic analysts about Trump’s ability to pull off his promised deal.

Biden’s removal of the restraints on the use of the ATACMS has put Putin in a dark mood, prompting Moscow to send a thinly veiled threat about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Russia responded to the ATACMS decision by formally announcing a new nuclear doctrine that broadened its potential use of nuclear weapons to include a state that was only conventionally armed (that is, Ukraine).

The new doctrine also authorised their use in response to an attack that posed a “critical threat” to its territorial integrity – a vague term that could be used to justify the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine.

While few people believe Putin would resort to the use of such weapons, the timing of the announcement was clearly meant as a warning to Zelensky and to Washington.

Trump has not elaborated on how he might seek to end the war. The prevailing assumption is that he believes he has a personal bond with Putin that he can exploit to at least bring the dictator to the negotiating table.

The second assumption is that Trump, the deal-maker, could suggest a deal that carves a new Ukraine-Russian border where the frontline of the conflict is and where it has largely remained, with small gains and losses by both sides, for more than a year. For Putin this would deliver a territorial win that falls well short of what he had hoped when he first invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But it would give Russia a permanent land corridor to Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.

And it would give Russia much of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. This is a largely Russian-speaking region, much of which was already effectively under Russian control before the war because of pro-Russian rebels who had fought Ukraine forces there in a separatist battle since 2014.

A negotiated solution based on the existing frontline would give Putin roughly 20 per cent of Ukraine. However, this is only 10 per cent more territory than Russia already effectively held before the war with its control of Crimea and the breakaway portions of Donbas.

Would Putin consider this settlement as a win? He has many reasons to end the war. The conflict is slowly crushing the Russian economy, with record levels of military spending leaving ordinary Russians poorer. There is growing discontent about Putin’s forced mobilisations of evermore young Russian men to the frontline where casualties figures have been horrendous.

But, despite this, Putin may be in no mood to reach a peace deal if he feels, by early next year, that his forces have the clear upper hand in the conflict.

Any territorial settlement based on the existing frontline also would require Putin to backtrack on his rash annexations in 2022 of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions because Russian forces still do not have control of all of those regions.

From Zelensky’s perspective, a peace deal is a more urgent prospect. With each passing month, he is struggling to replenish his exhausted forces, which are now vastly outnumbered by their Russia opponents.

Weaponry and ammunition remain in short supply with ongoing delays in the arrival of weapons pledged by Ukraine’s allies. Surveys show that more ordinary Ukrainians are losing their will to keep fighting at all costs as their country enters its third winter at war, with many towns in the east reduced to rubble, the threat of missile attacks ever-present across the country, and a largely destroyed energy grid making heating and electricity unreliable or non-existent.

A poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in October showed 32 per cent of respondents were ready to give up some territory in return for an end to the war and preservation of the country’s independence, up from just 14 per cent a year earlier.

Meanwhile a new Gallup survey has found that 52 per cent of Ukrainians want their country to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible, while the number of those who want to keep fighting until Ukraine wins has fallen from 63 per cent a year ago to just 38 per cent.

Trump’s looming presidency suggests the days of generous and endless US aid to Ukraine, which so far has topped $US52bn, are coming to an end. A significant drop in US military aid to Ukraine, if it was not replaced by greater EU aid, would ultimately doom Ukraine to defeat on the battlefield.

Yet Zelensky may still never agree to the carving up of his country based on the current frontline.

For the entire duration of this war Zelensky has insisted that Ukraine will never surrender any part of its territory. To do so now would be such a rhetorical U-turn for him that it may be personally impossible. He will not want to be remembered as the leader who signed away a part of Ukrainian territory.

But the sticking point in any peace negotiations may be less about territory and more about the security guarantees that would accompany any peace deal.

It seems inconceivable at this point that Zelensky would agree to any deal that cedes territory to Russia without also winning an iron-clad guarantee about Ukraine’s security against a future Russian invasion.

Rescuers look for survivors after Russia bombed a residential building in Kharkiv.

Zelensky would most likely demand NATO membership for what remains of Ukraine as the price for a peace deal that cedes territory. Yet it is equally inconceivable at this point that Putin would accept such an outcome. Having invaded Ukraine on the pretext that Ukraine was about to join NATO and therefore posed an unacceptable threat on Russia’s border, Putin could hardly accept a peace deal that delivered a fast-tracked NATO membership to Ukraine.

Among options now being informally canvassed in the West is an arrangement whereby Ukraine agrees not to seek NATO membership for 10 or 20 years. Instead Europe and the US pledge to arm Ukraine during that period and Russia pledges not to attack.

Critics say this is hardly an effective guarantee of Ukraine’s security because Putin’s word cannot be trusted and the West is already arming Ukraine.

As former head of the departments of defence and foreign affairs and trade Dennis Richardson says: “If you had a settlement based upon the existing front lines, that would then depend upon whether what remains of Ukraine is allowed to join the EU, is allowed to join NATO. If Ukraine has to give up 20 per cent of its territory, and what’s left of Ukraine is simply subject to a security guarantee of the kind that they got when they gave up their nuclear weapons in the 1990s, such a security guarantee will have no credibility, and it will have global implications.”

Richardson says that whatever remains of Ukraine in any deal needs to have a pathway eventually to join the EU and NATO.

“The credibility of any final settlement will be essential for the United States’ standing globally, Europe’s standing globally, and it will impact directly on our interests in East Asia,” he says.

For many strategic analysts, one of the key arguments against seeking a negotiated solution is simply that it sets a bad example for the Western world because the loss of any Ukrainian territory is a reward for Putin’s illegal invasion.

“It would be rewarding an upset of international norms,” John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point in the US, tells Inquirer. “There has to be leadership on what is the international order … and not rewards for upsetting that order.”

Yet all of these arguments, for and against a diplomatic solution, are about to be tested like never before when Trump takes office and declares war against the concept of never-ending war in Ukraine.