What will the end of the Russia-Ukraine War look like?

Paul Pillar recently published some reflections about what he sees as the form in which the current war of Ukraine against Russian invasion is likely to take.¹

There’s no guarantee on timing, of course. It will surely be a long time before matters reach this point²:

If you are older than, say, 30 - there’s a good chance we likely won’t be around when matters between Ukraine and Russia get to that point! But we can hope.

But this current war is being fought on Ukrainian territory and possibly soon in the Black Sea.³

And the longer it continues, the worse the damage to Ukraine and its people will be.

But for the war to stop, or to pause for any significant amount of time, both sides will have to become willing to at least take a real break from the fighting. As Pillar observes:

Belligerents will become willing to negotiate a peace agreement when they both have demonstrated, to themselves and to the enemy, the limits of what they are able and willing to do militarily, and there is little or no prospect for either side to change the situation on the battlefield appreciably with one more offensive effort. Another analyst, I. William Zartman, has called such a situation a “hurting stalemate.” [my emphasis]

It’s worth remembering that after Russia’s occupation of Crimea and parts of the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, the fighting never really stopped entirely. There was a set of agreements that led to what was called the Minsk Process that involved years of negotiations with a ceasefire theoretically in place.

Neither side seemed particularly interested in sticking to the ceasefire arrangements. Isobel Koshiw reported three week before Russia’s new invasion in February 2022:

“The key political provisions are incompatible, in my opinion, with Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign country,” said Duncan Allan, a fellow at Chatham House who specialises in the Minsk Agreements.

In his analysis, the Minsk plan for the political reintegration of Donbas was put together hastily and contains contradictory points, which has led to the two sides arguing for interpretations that are advantageous to them.

Indeed, other analysts suggest that if Kyiv was pressured into implementing Russia’s version of Minsk, there could be a severe backlash from ordinary Ukrainians that could destabilise the country internally.⁴ [my emphasis]

This internal political factor is important to keep in mind. Both authoritarian Russia and in more democratic Ukraine, the governments have pubic opinion pressures which they have to take into account.

Paul D’Anieri summarized the results of the Minsk process that had started in 2014. There was a 2014 agreement on a negotiating framework (Minsk-1) and another in 2015 (Minsk-2).

As in the case of Minsk-1, Minsk-2 served the immediate needs of the various parties, but established a roadmap for the future which could not actually be followed. The proposal for greater regional autonomy was seen as a “poison pill” for Ukraine. It would make Ukraine responsible for rebuilding the devastated regions, while giving the regions (and by extension, it appeared, Russia) a veto over Ukraine’s future reform and international orientation. Russia and the separatists had little interest in the withdrawal of Russian forces or in reestablishing Ukraine’s control over the border. Each side expected that the commitments it favored were nonnegotiable, while avoiding the commitments that it found unacceptable. The result was an agreement that could not be implemented, but also could not be abandoned. The good news was that fighting again ebbed; the bad news was that there was no path to ending the violence altogether. While the territorial lines of control stabilized …, a steady stream of casualties ensued. By 2021, total casualties had surpassed thirteen thousand and the threat of a reescalation to all-out fighting was constant.⁵ [my emphasis]

Paul Pillar, author of Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process (1983), notes that “It is rare in interstate conflicts for one belligerent to eradicate the other so that it has no need for any bargaining or compromise.” Things are different in civil wars, where one side normally winds up winning.

He gives us a reminder that is helpful in the summer of Oppenheimer: The Real Story:

Even a war that is said to end in a surrender does not involve totally imposing the will of one side on the other and involves a negotiated compromise. No surrender is unconditional if the side surrendering still has some ability to fight. The surrender of Japan in 1945 was a deal in which Japan agreed to stop fighting [in exchange for Allied agreement that the Emperor would remain] and thus spared the Allies what would have been an extremely costly military conquest of the main islands of Japan. [my emphasis]

Many Americans at the time and even today thought that the US dropped the magic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then the war just ended. It was more complicated than that. The Soviet Red Army was also advancing through Japanese-occupied Korea at a very rapid pace. And the US did abandon its unconditional surrender position.

Pillar reminds us that a big Ukrainian military breakthrough at the time looks quite unlikely. And, despite the discouraging history of the Minsk Process:

One other lesson, regarding the substance of any possible peace agreement, is already worth mentioning. Notwithstanding the value of a written peace agreement in lending precision and certainty to the postwar situation, sometimes some uncertainty can have value in helping the parties come to any agreement at all. [my emphasis]

His view of the practical possibilities of war termination is considerably more pessimistic than the New Cold Warriors would have us believe:

In Ukraine, the bargaining gap that must be bridged is between Ukraine’s disinclination to formally cede any of its territory and Putin’s need to show some gain from his costly military misadventure. Some political issues probably will have to be in effect punted, with their eventual outcome uncertain, if any peace agreement is to be reached, despite the future risk of misunderstandings and festering grievances. Mechanisms such as referenda that leave some future outcomes to chance may be part of a formula for ending this war.  

One further aspect of Ukraine future should be kept in mind. Even if the war stopped tomorrow, Ukrainian membership is the EU or NATO is years away. What Egbert Jahn wrote in 2017 is still valid:

The idea of Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova becoming members of NATO is unfeasible for the foreseeable future, because that would mean NATO was expanding to include an area that is militarily occupied by Russia and is burdened by unresolved national-territorial conflicts.⁶

Or, to put it more bluntly, it would mean essentially NATO declaring World War Three.

1. Pillar, Paul (2023): Negotiating an End to the Ukraine War. The National Interest 07/27/2023. <https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/negotiating-end-ukraine-war-206669> (Accessed: 2023-16-08).

2. The Corries - Strangest Dream. iMdReSSediNdEcAy YouTube channel 11/09/2006. (Accessed: 2023-16-08).

3. Who controls the Black Sea? DW News YouTube channel 04/16/2023. (Accessed: 2023-16-08).

4. Koshiw, Isobel (2022): Everyone is talking about Minsk but what does it mean for Ukraine? openDemocracy <https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-what-are-the-minsk-agreements/> (Accessed: 2023-16-08).

5. D’Anieri, Paul (2023): Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (2nd Edition), 240-241. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.

6. Jahn, Egbert (2017): Putin-Versteher und Putin-Kritiker. Heftige Kontroversen um die deutsche und westliche Russlandpolitik. In: Staack, Michael (Hrsg.): Der Ukraine-Konflikt, Russland und die europäische Sicherheitsordnung, 103. Opladen, Berlin & Toronto: Verlag Barbara Budrich. My translation from the German.