Will the Ukraine war end in a peace treaty? RT’s ‘Cross Talk’ of 29 November
The ‘Cross Talk’ program released today on the internet was dedicated to discussion of an essay recently published by University of Rhode Island professor of political science Nicolai Petro in which he and co-author Ted Snider set out their thinking on what a peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine might look like.
Alternative links to the RT show are here:
https://odysee.com/@RT:fd/crosstalk-possible-peace:2
https://rumble.com/v3yj5vn-crosstalk-possible-peace.html
The link to Nicolai Petro’s article as published in antiwar.com is here:
I was very pleased to be invited to be Nicolai’s debating partner on RT, because nearly a year and a half ago I had been his co-author in a similar exercise. Our article was posted on the website of The National Interest on 11 June 2022.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/building-lasting-settlement-ukraine-202920
June 2022 was just three months into the war and there were many unknowns other than the fact that the war was deadly, was already creating many widows and orphans on both sides, as well as enormous physical damage to civilian infrastructure. The effect of the ‘sanctions from hell’ unleashed against Russia by the United States and its European allies was still very preliminary and unclear. And it was just two months after the sides had seemingly come close to reaching agreement on an end to hostilities that had as its main principle Ukraine’s never joining NATO. We know now exactly that it was outside powers, namely the United States aided and abetted by the United Kingdom, which killed the initialed Russian-Ukrainian agreement, arguing for a war to liberate all the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia with the aid of the Western allies.
But that immovable obstacle was not known in June 2022 and in the situation of that moment, I enthusiastically joined Nicolai in calling for a peace agreement appropriate to a stalemate, an agreement that would protect us all from escalation to a much more dangerous war at the European if not global level. The essay assumed that Crimea would be recognized as Russian once and for all, but that the fate of Novorossiya, meaning the oblasts of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhiye and Kherson, would be put in suspension, remaining in Russian hands pending a referendum to be held in the distant future, 10 or 20 years down the road. That would give all sides time to calm down. Ukraine would join the European Union and its economy would grow, potentially making it attractive to the residents of Novorossiya at some future date. Meanwhile Russia might be expected to do its best to ensure the prosperity of these oblasts with a view to their voting to stay in the Federation when the vote eventually would be held.
I will not now pass judgment on the merits of our June 2022 proposal. But I can say without a moment’s hesitation that the basic concepts in that article are totally unrealistic today. Notwithstanding all the talk in Washington and in Brussels about the Ukraine war having come to an impasse, at its being a stalemate, that description relates only to the ground held by each side. Yes, the line of confrontation has barely moved over the last six months.
However, as some Western military experts have come to acknowledge, the Russians have been fighting a war of attrition not one of territorial expansion. Their strategy conforms to the teachings of Clausewitz, namely that if you destroy the enemy’s war fighting resources, human and material, then everything else comes to you of itself. In that sense, the Russian armed forces have nearly exhausted the human reserves at the disposal of Kiev and are ready to stage their own massive offensive.
Russian elites appreciate these facts and vehemently oppose ending the war in a truce that leaves the Kiev regime intact.
For all of these reasons, I was surprised to see that in his recent article Nicolai Petro persists in proposing an end to the conflict that leaves the fate of Novorossiya in limbo pending referendums to be supervised by the United Nations or some other international organization. Moreover, he goes even further in directions that Russians would find highly offensive, namely the use of Russian state assets currently frozen in the West to finance the redevelopment of Ukrainian provinces. This sounds very much like the demand for ‘reparations’ that we hear now coming out of Kiev, and as Russians remark, it is the losers who pay reparations, not the winners.
My position continues to evolve as the commanding position of the Russians on the ground becomes ever more clear, and as the faltering commitment of the West to continuing support for Ukraine is recognized more and more in mainstream. I believe that Russia will not halt hostilities at the convenience of Washington to suit the needs of the presidential electoral campaign or to allow for a temporary redirection of Washington’s military assets and attention to the Middle East. Russians want a definitive solution to the Ukraine problem, not some temporary patch that comes unstuck in five years time so that a still more vicious war can be initiated by a re-armed Kiev.
Russia has no need of a peace treaty if it succeeds in taking back Kharkov and Kherson, and, in a somewhat more distant time frame, captures Odessa and the Black Sea littoral all the way to Transnistria. This scenario is entirely possible. By pushing back Ukraine in this way, Russia will look after its own security needs sufficiently. Rump Ukraine will be a failed state that can be allowed to join the European Union, where it will be seeking vast financial support for decades. Rump Ukraine can even be allowed to join NATO, which from the Russian perspective, could provide some discipline and forestall attempts to implement insane revanchist provocations that Kiev, left to its own devices, might plan.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023