Why forcing Ukraine into a peace deal won’t work
In some Western countries, there is a growing sentiment that it's time to end the war in Ukraine by forcing the Ukrainians into a deal. In this video, I explain why that is not just a bad idea, but flat-out impossible.
Watch the video here or read the transcript below.
Best,
Anders
Transcript:
Recently, we've heard more voices in Western countries saying that it's time for Ukraine to make a deal. They argue that it's becoming unsustainable to keep supporting Ukraine in what they consider a hopeless war. And sometimes they also argue that it's actually in Ukraine's best interest to end the war now instead of getting a worse deal later.
This has been the logic we've heard from the American side in connection with the diesel deal and Trump's talk about easing sanctions on Russia. But it's also been voiced by strong politicians and pundits in European countries. The logic is built on the assumption that there is a deal on the table that Ukraine could take if it wanted to. So if we apply pressure on Ukraine, then maybe the Ukrainians will be motivated to do it.
Unfortunately, that is not the case. But to understand why, it's necessary to have a discussion about what the two sides' war aims are and where they stand on the issue of negotiations and making compromises. So let's talk about it.
Many people seem to think that Ukraine's position is that they will not stop the war until all the occupied territories are liberated and the 1991 borders are restored. And they also think that Putin's war aims are to take the rest of the Donbas region and then he'll be ready to make peace. This makes it sound as if Russia is really close to achieving its goals, whereas Ukraine is very far from achieving their goals. It also makes it sound as if the Russians are the reasonable ones here and the Ukrainians have unrealistic expectations.
The problem is that it's actually the other way around. When the full-scale invasion happened in 2022, Ukraine's position was indeed that the war could only end when the Russians were pushed out entirely. And that continued to be the ambition throughout 2023, when Ukraine had the big counteroffensive that didn't really work out. But then, in the aftermath of that failed counteroffensive, when the situation was being evaluated in 2024, there was a notable shift in rhetoric. And it culminated at the end of 2024, when Zelensky clearly stated that Ukraine was ready to accept a situation where the war could end while part of the country was still occupied.
Ukraine was not ready to accept that these territories are now formally a part of Russia. From a Ukrainian perspective, that's just an impossible proposition. But they could accept stopping the fighting while these territories remain under Russian control. And therefore, de facto, they would accept that Ukraine is not going to get these territories back.
And this has now been the Ukrainian position for the last two years. That's also why the Ukrainians were very quick to agree to Donald Trump's plan for a ceasefire along the current front line when he made that suggestion in 2025. Because this plays well into Ukraine's idea of freezing the front line and just starting negotiations from the point of departure that things are the way they are now.
This is also why it's kind of strange that again and again, journalists will ask Zelensky whether Ukraine would be willing to accept a deal that means that they won't get all the territory back. And then when he says yes, that gets reported as a major new development. But the reality is that this has been Ukraine's position for about two years now, and there's nothing new about it.
But the thing is that from the Ukrainian perspective, the question of accepting territorial loss is closely related to the question of security guarantees for the rest of Ukraine. They need to know that this will be the final war that they will have to fight with Russia and that the Russians won't come back in a few years. So that's why Ukraine wants ironclad security guarantees as part of this deal. And if the security guarantees are not there, then Ukraine cannot stop the war.
The Russian perspective is quite different. It is often assumed in the West that what Putin wants is the rest of the Donbas region and then he will be willing to make a peace deal. The thing is, Putin has never said that. What Putin has said is that if Ukraine gives Russia the remaining part of Donbas, then Russia will be willing to have a ceasefire while there are negotiations about the rest of Russia's demands for a peace deal. So getting the rest of the Donbas is just the first step. In order to turn the ceasefire into a permanent settlement, Ukraine will also have to give Russia a range of other things.
And the Russians have actually been quite consistent in their explanations about what these things are. Both Putin and Lavrov and other high-ranking Russian officials keep referring to a speech that Putin gave in June of 2024 at a session at Russia's Foreign Ministry. And there he outlined a list of demands, not only about the concessions that Ukraine needs to make, but also about the changes that need to happen in the broader security architecture in Europe and about NATO's role in Eastern Europe.
So these demands include that Ukraine needs to give up the rest of not just Donbas, but also the Zaporizhzhia region and the Kherson region, which Russia has also formally annexed according to its constitution. But also, Ukraine needs to be a neutral country with no security guarantees from abroad. Ukraine needs to go through a process of demilitarization and denazification. And these things in Russian terminology mean that there would be limits to the size of the Ukrainian military, and also that there would need to be a new pro-Russian government in Ukraine. That's what denazification means. It means regime change.
And when it comes to the question about the broader security architecture in Europe, that is what the Russians refer to when they're talking about addressing the root causes of the conflict. Essentially, what that means is that the great powers that rule over Europe, which the Russians see as themselves and the United States, need to make some kind of agreement about how they divide the continent and which parts of Europe belong in whose sphere of influence. So essentially, the Russians see some process of rolling back NATO to something that looks like what NATO looked like in the mid-1990s.
They explained the details of what that looks like all the way back in 2021, when they put out a list of demands that predates the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But it's that list of demands that they keep coming back to when they want to describe what they consider addressing the root causes of the conflict in Ukraine and what types of concessions Russia will need from NATO.
So just to summarize, this is the battlefield situation as it looks today. Ukraine's position is that we should freeze the front line, so nothing should change on the map. And then there needs to be a discussion about security guarantees for the rest of Ukraine, so Russia cannot restart the war in a couple of years.
Russia's position is that the current situation is unacceptable. Ukraine needs to give up the rest of Donbas and the rest of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. There should be a pro-Russian government in Ukraine, and the Eastern European countries need to be expelled from NATO.
Now, I'm sure that many people watching this will say that's crazy. That must be an exaggeration because surely Putin doesn't actually mean that. But no, this is not an exaggeration. These are quite loyal descriptions of what the two sides are saying that their conditions are for peace in Ukraine. Or maybe to put it differently, yes, it is crazy, but Putin actually is this crazy.
It's a great irony, actually. Many of those Ukraine skeptic voices in the West say that we should push Ukraine into being more reasonable. And they say that we also need to listen to the concerns that the Russians have. But these people have never actually spent two minutes listening to what the Russians are saying. It's not like Putin and the Russian leadership are trying to keep their war aims a secret. They actually want us to know why they're doing what they do. And they are very clear about the concessions that they want us to make.
So the Ukraine skeptics will say that we need to listen to Russia. But their whole argument is actually based on the assumption that we don't need to take seriously what the Russians say. Actually, it's quite a condescending, I'd say even infantilizing, attitude towards the Russians. Because the whole assumption is that we know better than the Russians what they actually mean.
So some people might say, well, it's not that bad. This is just a Russian negotiation tactic. They don't actually expect to get everything that they demand. It's just something they say, and then they can soften it up in the negotiations.
But let's play with that thought. Let's imagine that being the case. Then we need to have the discussion about which of these concessions we actually think that Ukraine and Europe should be willing to make. What would a 50-50 solution look like? And then in NATO, we can have a discussion about which countries get to stay in NATO and which Eastern European countries get expelled.
On the one hand, this is a crazy discussion. But on the other hand, it's also wildly hypothetical because a peace deal would also need to be accepted by Ukraine. It's not just up to NATO to make these decisions.
And that brings us to the core of the problem with the negotiations that are going on. Even if both sides, both Russia and Ukraine, come to these negotiations with a mindset that says, well, let's make some compromises, let's meet halfway, then their ideas about what halfway means are radically different. Because they don't even agree on the very basic questions of who is negotiating with whom and about what.
The Ukrainians would see the negotiations as being between them and Russia, and they would find a middle ground between what Russia says that it wants from Ukraine and what Ukraine says it wants. That would probably result in something that is pretty close to freezing the front line as it stands today, with Russia having occupied a part of Ukrainian territory, and then a discussion about security guarantees for the remaining part of Ukraine.
But the Russians don't see the negotiations as being between them and Ukraine. They see the negotiations as being between them and the Americans. So the middle ground that they are looking for would be between their position on Eastern Europe and the American position on Eastern Europe. And this would, of course, mean that, as a minimum, Russia gets to keep all of Ukraine, and then the real negotiation would be about what more they will get beyond just Ukraine.
And you might say, well, that sounds crazy, and I would agree with that. But we need to understand that this is actually how Putin sees it. This is what he keeps saying that he wants. This is why he keeps sending more soldiers into battle every day. It's not about Donbas. It's about half of Europe.
And he expects to get it at some point in negotiations because he doesn't expect the Western Europeans and the Americans to have sufficient determination and political will to keep supporting Ukraine in the long run. And he doesn't ultimately believe that the Europeans have any agency in this. So he believes that the deal that he needs to make is with the Americans and not the Europeans.
So any deal that Putin would accept would, at a minimum, require Ukrainian capitulation and then some more. That means that there is no deal on the table that Ukraine can take. And it also means that the Ukrainians will not stop fighting anytime soon.
The discussion we can have in the United States and in Western Europe is not whether we want the war to end or to continue, but how we want the war to continue. Are we going to keep supporting Ukraine in the war, or are we going to abandon them and let them fight the war alone?
But when we have that discussion, I think it's important that we remember what Putin's war aims are and that they go well beyond Ukraine. And it's probably in our interest to make sure that we help Ukraine so that when this war eventually ends, it will be on terms that look a lot more like what the Ukrainians are saying that they want than what Putin says.
All right, I will end it here. If you found the video helpful or informative, then please give it a like and remember to subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to get notified when I publish new videos. And if you want to support the channel and get access to some bonus videos, then you can subscribe to my website, www.logicofwar.com. Thank you very much for watching, and I will see you again next time.