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September 27, 2024 - 7:00am
War is the overriding focus of the UN General Assembly in New York, and Western momentum behind Ukraine hangs in the balance. President Joe Biden used his farewell speech to the UN to urge allies not to “let up on our support” until “Ukraine wins a just and durable peace”. Yet with the US still blocking the use of long-range missiles to strike deep within Russia, despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appeal to Biden yesterday, Western focus appears, instead, to be shifting to the need for serious peace negotiations with Russia.
The growing consensus behind a realist approach was exemplified by Czech President Petr Pavel in a New York Times interview published this week. Pavel, a former Nato Military Committee Chairman, said “the most probable outcome of the war will be that a part of Ukrainian territory will be under Russian occupation, temporarily.” Both sides will need to make compromises; Pavel added that “to talk about a defeat of Ukraine or a defeat of Russia — it simply will not happen.”
Calls from a president known in his country as an anti-Russian Nato hawk for Kyiv to be “realistic” are an indication of how Western opinion is shifting. In the Czech Republic, as elsewhere in Europe, those calling for Ukrainian compromise and a negotiated end to the war were long dismissed by politicians as Putin sympathisers. Now, though, the weight of popular opinion behind peace cannot be ignored. Two-thirds of Czechs would support a quick end to the war even if that means Russia keeping Ukrainian territory, while research shows a preference for Ukraine to be pushed into a peace deal over being supported to regain its land among the EU’s three great powers — France, Germany and Italy.
Like Pavel, leaders from those nations are espousing a more realist approach. Earlier this month, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for “getting out of this war situation faster”, urging a Ukraine peace conference “with Russia present”. Speaking to Ukrainian journalists prior to his US visit this week, Zelensky described unanimous Western support for Scholz’s position: “All our allies, including the closest ones who are on our side and always against Russian aggression, said that Russia should be present.”
Even French President Emmanuel Macron, whose stance against Moscow has hardened significantly, is now talking about the need to “rethink our relationship to Russia” within a “new international order”. Such statements imply that some form of relationship with Russia must of necessity exist after the war — foreshadowing a diplomatic solution and contrasting with Macron’s previous contempt for the “camp of pacifists” with a “spirit of defeat” on Ukraine.
In this international context, the apparently unsuccessful presentation of Zelensky’s “Victory Plan” to US lawmakers yesterday takes on even greater significance. Zelensky characterised this plan as aiming not for absolute victory and the total defeat of Russia, but for “a bridge to a diplomatic way out”. Yet if Washington remains unmoved in refusing to expand the scope of its military support, Western momentum may swing more firmly in the opposite direction. If it does, Zelensky will have to consider the compromises he is prepared to make as part of a peace deal.
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SubscribeRealism is always welcome but it would have been more welcome prior to the deaths and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of young men, and the devastation of Ukraine.
Meanwhile those in the West promoting the war have become very wealthy, the dead merely dead.
As Kissinger said “to be an enemy of the United States can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal”.
As usual that Kissinger quote is taken out of context. It is like claiming that the Bible is an atheist book because the sentence “there is no God” is in it.
What’s the context you refer to?
Yes, unfortunately everyone will just turn away from this as if it never happened. But you’re right, someone made a lot of money.
If Trump wins the election a peace ‘deal’ will come about in 2025, with Russia winning land from Ukraine.
The hypocrisy and recklessness of the ‘West’ in pursuing this war,since 2022, by arming Ukraine but not providing them with the weapons they need to win, is confirmation of how weak and unreliable the ‘West’ has become.
Not to be trusted and mired in $Trillions of debt.
I agree from one perspective. The West should have gone “all in” with the weapons and support.
Pavel, a former Nato Military Committee Chairman, said “the most probable outcome of the war will be that a part of Ukrainian territory will be under Russian occupation, temporarily.” Both sides will need to make compromises; Pavel added that “to talk about a defeat of Ukraine or a defeat of Russia — it simply will not happen.”
Realistic and pragmatic.
Diplomacy now?
If the rest of the world lets Russia out of this situation without completely breaking it both militarily and economically, it is making a rod for its own back. We will just be back were we are now in a few years time, when Russia invades another country (which it inevitably will). Even if some sort of “peace deal” is reached, whatever is left of Ukraine must be “fast tracked” into both the EU and NATO. The Russians simply cannot be trusted.
By “the rest of the world” you must mean the West, a minority, because the majority ie the “developing world” are either generally supportive of Russia or wisely staying well clear.
Whether or not Russia can be trusted it is plain that the West can only be trusted to eventually “scuttle”, leaving its former “eternal friends” to deal with the mess, whilst having itself profited handsomely.
Ok. I would like to think “the rest of the world” would be sensible in this, but I accept that “the West” is as good as it could get. You are right in saying “the West” has not done what is needed, but I suspect it has provided a lot of support that is not visible. Those strikes on the Russian ammunition dumps look a little too precise and effective to have been done by Ukraine acting alone. I only hope the West isn’t idiot enough to ever again but Russian hydrocarbons.
‘Breaking’ Russia completely. As Imperial Germany was broken in 1918? What eventually came out of that? If the Russians are to ‘be present’ at such peace talks, is this in the way that the Germans were present at Versailles? Would that augur well?
What is this war seeding? If the war is ended, what have Ukraine’s ‘partners’ in mind for her reconstruction? Ukraine’s invasion of Russia only underlines what the Russian autocrat has been alleging, that Ukraine is a potential threat to Russia, especially when associated with NATO.
Given the coverage of this war by some British media outlets, especially jingoistic and gloating online, with Russia’s aircraft carrier rusting at anchor, her conscripts dying in prodigious numbers, and the Russian autocrat ‘humiliated’ daily (though without looking like the physical, spiritual and mental wreck that Hitler became), the ‘breaking’ must have been largely successful. The South African War soon came to be called the Bore War by the British public.
There are those who believe that history teaches. If Churchill thought it politically acceptable in a democracy and not an offence to civilised morality to agree transfer of territory (from Poland – the original victim of aggression – to Russia, one of the aggressors in 1939) and population transfer (what would now be condemned as ethnic cleansing) as a price for peace in Europe after 1945, why not in 1939. Or in 2024?
Well, pupils of history, what learnest thou?
Ukraine must be “fast tracked” into both the EU and NATO.
Isn’t that how it all began?