Once it became clear that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, I’ve continuously asked the question: How does this all end? It has seemed clear for months that there was no face-saving way out for Vladimir Putin and that nothing short of the total removal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory would be acceptable to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Not much has changed.
NYT (“Hard-Line Positions by Russia and Ukraine Dim Hope for Peace Talks“):
As the battle for Ukraine turns into a bloody, mile-by-mile fight in numbing cold, Ukrainian and Russian officials have insisted that they are willing to discuss making peace.
But with a drumbeat of statements in recent days making clear that each side’s demands are flatly unacceptable to the other, there appears to be little hope for serious negotiations in the near future.
Ukraine this week proposed a “peace” summit by the end of February, but said Russia could participate only if it first faces a war-crimes tribunal. That drew a frosty response from the Kremlin, with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov saying that Kyiv must accept all of Russia’s demands, including that it give up four Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims to have annexed.
“Otherwise,” he said, “the Russian Army will deal with this issue.”
Russia does not fully control any of those regions, and has even lost territory there in recent months as Ukrainian forces fight to reclaim all the land seized by Moscow. But on Wednesday, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said it was impossible to accept a peace plan that did not recognize those four Ukrainian regions as part of Russia.
“Any plan that does not take into account these circumstances cannot claim to be a peace plan,” Mr. Peskov said, according to the state-run Tass news agency.
The hard-line positions suggest that both sides believe they have more to gain on the battlefield, analysts say.
Well . . . yes. That’s true by definition.
If anything, positions have hardened. Ukraine is now, not unreasonably, demanding more than the status quo antebellum but justice. Russia has inflected unspeakable damage on their country and simply letting them walk away is unacceptable. Meanwhile, Putin is humiliated and has to get something pretty significant to show for the tens of thousands of dead Russian soldiers lost in his adventure.
Ukraine holds the momentum, having retaken much of the land that Russia captured early in the war. But Moscow’s forces still occupy large chunks of the east and south, and Russia is readying more troops and launching aerial attacks on infrastructure, deepening Ukrainians’ misery even as Russian soldiers struggle on the ground.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian military said that Russia had launched a barrage of strikes at the southern city of Kherson, including one that damaged a maternity ward, as officials continued to urge on residents to evacuate. Images shared by one Ukrainian official after the strike showed blown-out windows, a hole in the roof and piles of rubble in one of the rooms.
Kherson has been battered by shelling since Ukraine retook the city last month, with Russian forces using new positions on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River to launch near daily barrages at the city.
The war has now passed its 300th day. There have been no peace talks between Ukraine and Russia since the early weeks of the conflict, which began when Russia launched a full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, and both sides have signaled a determination to keep fighting.
Visiting Washington last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that weapons and aid from the United States and allies would help Ukraine sustain its resistance well into 2023, emphasizing that “we have to defeat the Kremlin on the battlefield.”
And President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in a brief televised interview over the weekend, said that he was prepared to negotiate over “acceptable outcomes,” but insisted that “99.9 percent of our citizens” are “ready to sacrifice everything for the interests of the Motherland.”
Western officials have dismissed Mr. Putin’s periodic offers to negotiate as empty gestures. In calling for talks without hinting that he is prepared to abandon his onslaught — and repeating a propaganda line that Russia is fighting a defensive war for its own survival — Mr. Putin is trying to send the message that Russia will eventually win, and that the sooner Ukraine capitulates, the fewer people will die.
Despite Zelenskyy’s bold leadership and the tremendous resolve of his people, Russia would almost have certainly won by now absent massive assistance from the West, the United States in particular. We are therefore, by definition, helping to prolong the fight and increase the body count.
Given that we’re both on the side of right and weakening the biggest threat to the security of Europe, I absolutely support those efforts. There is a certain cynicism to being “willing to fight to the last Ukrainian” in a war we’re not willing to send American forces to fight. But, while the Ukrainians are in a sense our proxies in a war against a country we have labeled an “acute threat” in our national security strategy, it’s very much their fight. They’re begging for more resources and, within reason, we should give them what they’re asking for.
But, again, it means that the killing and destruction is going to continue for a very long time.
While Russia’s losses are believed to be enormous — more than 100,000 killed and injured, American officials have said — Mr. Putin has signaled recently that he is prepared to accept many more. He told senior military officials in a televised meeting last week that of the 300,000 reserves called up this fall, half were still at training bases and represented a “strategic reserve” for future fighting.
On Wednesday, Russia’s prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, said that his country’s economy had contracted by 2 percent over the past 11 months. That is a smaller decline than many experts had predicted at the start of the war, and suggests that Moscow has so far managed to weather the effects of Western sanctions.
This month, Mr. Putin emphasized that there were “no limits” to Russia’s military spending.
But as the evidence of Russian military atrocities has multiplied — and with Ukraine’s continued battlefield success — Kyiv’s negotiating position has hardened.
In late March, weeks after the invasion and with Russian troops still threatening to seize the capital, Ukrainian negotiators at a meeting in Istanbul proposed adopting neutral status — in effect abandoning a bid to join NATO, which Russia has long opposed — in exchange for security guarantees from other nations.
They also suggested separate talks on the status of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula seized by Russia in 2014, and of Donbas, the eastern area claimed by Moscow.
Those terms are now off the table.
“The emotional background in Ukraine has changed very, very much,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Mr. Zelensky, told the BBC in August. “We have seen too many war crimes.”
Meanwhile, WaPo weighs in with a disturbing update: “Putin, unaccustomed to losing, is increasingly isolated as war falters.”
As Putin approaches New Year’s Eve, the 23d anniversary of his appointment in 1999 as acting Russian president, he appears more isolated than ever.
More than 300 days of brutal war against Ukraine have blown up decades of Russia’s carefully cultivated economic relations with the West, turning the country into a pariah, while Kremlin efforts to replace those ties with closer cooperation with India and China appear to be faltering the longer the war grinds on.
Putin, who started his career as a Soviet KGB agent, has always kept his own counsel, relying on a close inner circle of old friends and confidants while seeming to never fully trust or confide in anyone. But now a new gulf is emerging between Putin and much of the country’s elite, according to interviews with Russian business leaders, officials and analysts.
Putin “feels the loss of his friends,” said one Russian state official with close ties to diplomatic circles, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Lukashenko is the only one he can pay a serious visit to. All the rest see him only when necessary.”
Even though Putin gathered leaders of former Soviet republics for an informal summit in St. Petersburg this week, across the region the Kremlin’s authority is weakening. Putin spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping over video conference on Friday morning in Moscow in an effort to showcase the two countries’ ties. Although Xi said he was ready to improve strategic cooperation, he acknowledged the “complicated and quite controversial international situation.” In September, he’d made clear his “concerns” over the war.
India’s Narendra Modi this month wrote an article for Russia’s influential Kommersant daily calling for an end to “the epoch of war.” “We read all this and understand, and I think he [Putin] reads and understands too,” the state official said.
Even the Pope, who at the beginning of the war appeared to take care to accommodate Kremlin views, this month compared the war in Ukraine to the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
Among Russia’s elite, questions are growing over Putin’s tactics heading into 2023 following humiliating military retreats this autumn. A divide is emerging between those in the elite who want Putin to stop the military onslaught and those who believe he must escalate further, according to the state official and Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Putin, quite simply, has no way out. He’s not going to win his war but he can’t stop fighting it, either. He’s an international pariah and his war crimes have made that irreversible. His attempt to show strength not only demonstrated that he is much weaker than anyone realized but simultaneously forced his neighbors to get stronger.
