1998
-
20
23
Now is not the time for Ukraine to negotiate by Ian Bond
There are good reasons to want the war in Ukraine to end as soon as possible. “War is Hell”, as the US general William Tecumseh Sherman said after the American Civil War. Ukraine has suffered terrible civilian and military casualties and catastrophic damage to its infrastructure; an end to the fighting would spare the country further harm. But negotiations at this stage would benefit Russia more than Ukraine. A range of Western politicians, analysts and military figures have begun to argue that Ukraine should start peace talks with Russia. Some fear escalation leading to nuclear war. Some are concerned at the human costs to Ukraine of continued fighting. Some worry about the economic costs to the West of supporting Ukraine and sanctioning Russia. Some fear that the West may jeopardise its own defence by transferring too many weapons to Ukraine. But whatever their motivations, when Western commentators write of the need “to moderate [Ukrainian] public expectations of a decisive victory”, they are implying that Ukraine should be prepared to leave Putin in possession of at least some of the territory that, prior to 2014, Russia itself had accepted as Ukrainian. There are at least six reasons why Western advice to negotiate now is misplaced. First, it ignores the agency of the Ukrainians themselves. They are the ones under attack from Russia; they alone can say whether the victory they seek is worth the suffering involved
in achieving it. Polling by Gallup in September showed that 70 per cent of Ukrainians wanted to fight on until victory, and 91 per cent of Ukrainians defined victory as recovering control of all Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea. If the Ukrainians themselves decided that recapturing Crimea – the toughest military challenge ahead – was not worth the expected number of casualties, that would be a different matter; but there is currently no sign that they will. Second, unless talking and fighting continued in parallel, Ukraine would find itself divided along a ceasefire line for as long as negotiations continued (as it was following the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015). That would leave a significant part of the Ukrainian population under Russian occupation. Evidence from every area liberated by Ukrainian troops shows what that means: torture; disappearances, sexual violence, Russification of the education system and the forced adoption of Ukrainian children with a view to wiping away their Ukrainian identity. The US