Can peace in Ukraine arise from a territorial compromise? If we are to believe the statements of several Western personalities over the past month, Ukraine will have to put up with it.
To date, no winner appears in the short term in this war between Ukraine and Russia. However, it is the Ukrainians who suffer from daily Russian bombings. Moscow is determined to destroy the country’s vital infrastructure, including electricity-producing centers. The situation is so serious that some in Europe are worried about the possible surge of a new wave of Ukrainian refugees on the continent during the winter.
The Zelensky plan
On a military level, the Ukrainians are in failure and are retreating everywhere in the face of the slow but painful erosion of their territory by Russian forces. This forced President Volodymyr Zelensky to concoct “a plan for victory.” He was in Washington recently to present it to President Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and even Donald Trump. No details have leaked about this plan, but everything indicates that it contains nothing revolutionary.
With this in mind, Ukraine’s allies have begun to push for talks that would lead to an end to the fighting. Because, it must be admitted, European public opinion is starting to get tired of this war. The first blow came from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for whom the time had come “to discuss how we can get out of this war situation and achieve peace more quickly”.
Czech President and former general Petr Pavel went further in an interview with New York Times. The former chairman of the NATO Military Committee and staunch supporter of Zelensky called on Ukraine “to be realistic about its goals of recovering the territories occupied by Russia.” At the head of a country where two-thirds of the population favor a peace agreement, even at the cost of keeping certain territories under Russian control, Pavel fears a long war if no compromise is found. For him, the most likely outcome of the war “will be that part of Ukrainian territory will be temporarily under Russian occupation.”
Stoltenberg’s idea
The team of the Republican candidate for the American presidential election is on the same wavelength. This summer, aspiring vice president JD Vance redrew Ukraine’s borders along the current dividing lines between kyiv and Moscow, which would leave about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory in Moscow’s hands. Russia would obtain assurances of “neutral status for Ukraine, which does not join NATO,” he suggested.
Finally, in a column published a few weeks ago, the son of the former president, Donald Trump junior, even invited the Biden government to go over the head of the Ukrainian president and directly open negotiations with Moscow to put an end to the conflict. A way of warning Zelensky of what awaits him in the event of his father’s victory.
This idea of territorial compromise is also mentioned by former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Last weekend, in the pages of Financial TimesStoltenberg indirectly recognized the very precarious situation in which the country finds itself. But he sees hope for a solution appearing in the aftermath of the American presidential election. “There will be a kind of new momentum […] to try to make things happen, he said in an interview. This may include means to achieve change on the battlefield combined with diplomatic initiative. »
Obviously, the former NATO leader gave the journalist the fruit of long discussions with the members of the Alliance. Of course, he continues, “Ukraine still has to decide whether it wants to negotiate, but we have to create the conditions that allow it to sit down with the Russians and get something that is acceptable. […] Something where the country survives as an independent nation.” To which the journalist asked him what he would offer to Zelensky if he were still at the head of NATO. Stoltenberg did not respond directly, but he recalled Finland’s particular experience with Soviet aggression in 1939. The small country imposed a very high cost on the Red Army. In the end, Finland lost and had to cede 10% of its territory and accept neutrality status. In return, she obtained respect for her border and her independence.
Zelensky and his government are not in that mindset, even though the number of Ukrainians willing to accept territorial concessions to achieve peace has increased from 8% in 2022 to 32% this year. Unless, of course, public speeches do not represent the private thinking of Ukrainian leaders.
The territorial compromise has become the obligatory step towards the start of a solution to the conflict between the two countries. Ultimately, what Stoltenberg and others are telling the Ukrainians is that the time has come to make tough decisions in order to save what can still be saved.