“We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.”Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (Dec 2022):
"Our proposals for the demilitarization and denazification of the territories controlled by the regime, the elimination of threats to Russia's security emanating from there, including our new lands, are well known to the enemy," the state news agency [TASS] quoted Lavrov as saying late on Monday.An end to the Russia-Ukraine War isn’t in sight at the end of 2022.
"The point is simple: Fulfil them for your own good. Otherwise, the issue will be decided by the Russian army."
There have been negotiations and even deals between Ukraine and Russia during the war this year on grain exports and prisoner exchanges. The circumstances of the orderly retreat of Russian troops from Kherson during Ukraine’s November counter-offensive also suggest some kind of agreement on that particular withdrawal.
But there is no obvious prospect of a peace agreement right now. It’s pretty clear that Russia wants to see what happens to European unity during this winter with a squeeze on energy supplies and the politics of refugees. Russia’s Serbian friends backed off the most recent confrontation with Kosovo for the moment. But any serious discussion on a near-term peace agreement looks very unlikely before the spring.
DefSec Austin’s stated goal of seriously weakening Russia militarily would be served by a protracted war in Ukraine. The US foreign policy establishment loves the idea that the Russians’ war in Afghanistan and/or the large amounts the US forced the Soviets to spend on their military in the 1980s brought down the Soviet Union. (December 30, by the way, was the 100th anniversary of the formal founding of the USSR, that country that no longer exists.) Somehow, US military spending seems to be nothing but a benefit to the US economy, at least in respectable American opinion. And looking at the effect of the collapse in world oil prices in the 1980s on the petrostate the USSR had become doesn’t quite have the macho appeal of the favored narratives.
But in the protracted-war scenario, it really sucks to be Ukraine.
Even if the war ended in April 2023 with a Russian withdrawal from all of Ukraine’s legal territory including Crimea, Ukraine would be in much worse shape than it was a year ago. And much further away from meeting the requirements to join the EU or NATO than they were a year ago. And millions of Ukrainians have been driven out of the country, many of them very likely permanently.
Meanwhile, the post-Soviet order of 1991-2022 in Europe has permanently broken down. The EU has vastly expanded, as has NATO. NATO has clear defense commitments, including to the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. NATO is expanding to include Sweden and Finland, which were in practice already extensively integrated into the Western defense structure. And Russia for the moment is firmly aligned with China.
As Herfried Münkler noted earlier this year, The guiding notion of the 1991-2022 order in Europe “was the transformation of conflict into cooperation or, formulated in game-theory terms, the replacement of zero-sum games by win-win constellations.”
The win-win solution for Ukraine is hard to picture at the moment.
This is a worthwhile lecture in German from Albrecht von Lucke from December 19 describing how he sees the current situation of the security situation in Europe with particular reference to German policy:
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