Ukraine: Peace Through Victory

With $50 billion in American military and humanitarian aid now in the pipeline for Ukraine, some worry that the power equation in the war will drastically change this summer. Henry Kissinger tells Davos that talks should start. President Macron worries that President Putin will be “humiliated.” The Times editorializes that Ukraine’s government should “not chase after an illusory ‘win.’”

Ukrainians, though, have bitter experience with two decades of deals with Russia. Their accords were not worth the paper on which they were written. In the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances of 1994, Ukraine, then the world’s third largest nuclear power, agreed to deliver its entire nuclear arsenal to Russia — 1,700 warheads — in return for “assurances” that Russia, Britain, and America would guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Ten years later, Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and started a war in the Donbas region. Since then, Russia and its proxies signed with Ukraine at Minsk two agreements and a series of ceasefires. These truces never ceased the firing.

Some Western leaders think it would be a victory if Russia agrees to renew talks. Ukrainian officials say a ceasefire would simply buy the Kremlin time to consolidate its gains, dig defenses, and regroup for new attacks. One adviser to President Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted: “Any concession to Russia is not a path to peace, but a war postponed for several years.”

Russia’s modern day foreign ministry seems to follow the old Soviet negotiating precept: What is mine is mine, what is yours is up for negotiation. “Brazen dishonesty is now a normal part of Russian foreign policy as well as domestic propaganda,” Anne Applebaum writes in an Atlantic essay: “The War Won’t End Until Putin Loses”:  “No future promises made by the Russian state, so long as it is controlled by Putin, can be believed.”

Ukrainians say they do not want to trade land for peace. In a poll conducted last week by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 82 percent of respondents said they do not support territorial concessions — even if it prolonged the war and increased the threat to Ukraine’s independence. After almost three months of war, only 10 percent of the 2,000 people surveyed found it acceptable for Ukraine to concede territory to Russia to achieve peace.

American officials have long underestimated Ukrainians’ national will. In August 1991, President George H.W. Bush traveled to Soviet Ukraine, where he gave what New York Times columnist William Safire later called the “Chicken Kiev speech.” Bush warned Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, of the perils of leaving the Soviet Union.

Rada members politely applauded the visiting American leader. Then, three weeks later, they voted — 321 to 2 — for independence. Four months later, this declaration of independence was put to a national vote. It won the approval of 92.3 percent of Ukrainian voters.

Today, Ukrainians believe they have the Russians on the back foot. This spring, with minimal Western aid, Ukraine defeated Russia’s two big offensives — the attempt on Kyiv and the siege laid against Kharkiv. With Western aid coming this summer, Ukraine’s government believes it can hold the Donbas line and start to liberate Kherson.

Ukraine is strengthened by mounting concern around the world that Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports is forcing up food prices and spreading hunger through the developing world. With more than 20 million tons of grain trapped in the ports, Ukraine and NATO could cooperate this summer to sink more Russian warships and break the blockade.

Last week, Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Major General  Kyrylo Budanov, told the Wall Street Journal that Kyiv’s goal is to return sovereignty to Ukraine’s 1991 borders. This would mean returning Crimea and Russia-controlled Donbas to Ukraine.

This would be problematic on several levels. Crimea now is a garrison state with 50,000 Russian troops. In the 1991 referendum on independence, Crimea gave the lowest approval rating, 54 percent. Eight years after annexation, the majority of Crimea’s population has Russian passports. Their world views have been shaped by almost a decade of Russian propaganda. If a free and fair vote were ever held, a majority of Crimeans could  vote against joining Ukraine.

The same dynamics are at work in the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk controlled by Russia since 2014. In the last two years, 700,000 Russian passports have been issued. Reflecting tight thought controls, the rare visitors who crossed the de facto borders last year reported that they were greeted on arrival by large portraits of Stalin — who between 1932 and 1933 designed and, in the most fertile farmlands in Europe, carried out a famine that killed 4 million Ukrainians, or 13 percent of the population.

Today, after almost a decade of Moscow’s rule, an estimated 40 percent of the population of the two separatist areas have decamped — half to Russia, half to Ukraine proper. Officially, Ukraine demands the full return of these two separatist areas.

Over the years, Russia stripped much of the industry, sending machinery east on flatbed railroad cars. Today, Russia-controlled Donbas is a rust belt region living on subsidies from Moscow. The remaining economy is centered on coal.

This spring, the 10-week siege and bombardment of the Azovstal complex destroyed one of Ukraine’s largest integrated steel companies. Without this steel plant, Mariupol, Ukraine’s largest port on the Sea of Azov, lost its raison d’etre.

Attempting to re-conquer these wayward regions is a bridge too far for Ukraine’s Western backers. If Ukraine can push Russian troops back to the February 24 lines of control, that would represent a stunning defeat for Mr. Putin and his brand of Russian expansionism.

Mr. Kissinger brokered at Paris to halt the fighting in the battle of Vietnam. The agreement was struck over the strenuous objection of our Free Vietnamese allies. Mr. Kissinger and the North Vietnamese leader who signed the pact, Le Duc Tho, won the Nobel Prize. Tho refused to go to Oslo to receive the award. Instead, he devoted 1973 to using bulldozers newly acquired from Moscow to pave the Ho Chi Minh trail into South Vietnam.

On April 30, 1975, barely two years after signing the Peace Agreement, Tho entered Saigon at the head of a North Vietnamese army. As the Ukrainians look to the summer, they think: Why negotiate with Moscow when we are winning?

Mr. Brooke is a Russia/Ukraine Fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. A lifelong foreign correspondent, he reported for the New York Times for 24 years — from West Africa, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Russia. After the Times, he was the Moscow bureau chief for Bloomberg and then the Moscow-based correspondent for Voice of America. Working for six years in Kiev, he founded internet-based newsletters on Ukraine’s business and investment opportunities. Last fall, he moved with his family from Kiev to his native Berkshires, in western Massachusetts. Follow him on Twitter @JimBrookeUKR. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.