The Sense Of An Ending.

But right back where we started from.

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Over the last couple of years, I’ve written several essays about ways in which the crisis in Ukraine might develop. These are not predictions—I don’t do predictions here—but rather attempts to set out criteria and limits, to describe what might be possible, and what will not be possible. Reality and historical experience have suggested a few things: Ukraine could not win, in the sense of recovering its 1991 borders. No amount of western military equipment and training could make up for that. There was no chance of ever rebuilding Ukraine’s military forces for some hypothetical “round two.” NATO forces could not intervene usefully in the conflict, or for that matter at any reasonable time in the future. And talk of NATO rebuilding its defence capability, including the reintroduction of conscription, was simple fantasy.

With the passage of time and the contributions of others, these propositions are, I think, no longer really subject to much challenge or debate. So it’s unsurprising that people are now turning their attention to the most fundamental question of all: how will the war end? That’s what this essay is about, and as a true one-time scholar of literature and a veteran observer of the atrocities inflicted on words in negotiations and political declarations, I’m going to have something to say about the words in that apparently simple formulation. I’m not going to attempt prophecy here either: this essay is essentially an explication de texte on all of the difficulties and complexities contained within that simple question. Once more, the devil is hiding in the depths of the details, as history pretty much suggests it would.

The first thing is to take the phrase backwards, and ask what we mean by “end?” There are at least three separate but linked questions here. They are:

• at what point will the Russians decide that further offensive military operations are unnecessary?

• at what point will the Russians (successfully) insist on a cessation of hostilities, surrender and evacuation of Ukrainian forces and a ceasefire on their terms?

• at what point will there be a clear understanding, backed up by agreements but also by force, on the future of Ukraine and western involvement in the country?

(There are more moving parts than these of course, but these are the main ones, and we have to draw the line somewhere.)

You will see that the answer to the question “when will the war end?” has a different type of answer in each case. The first point does not relate to the “end” of the war in any real sense, but only of its immediate kinetic phase. It does not exclude a resumption of hostilities later. It reminds us of facile statements about “winning the war and losing the peace” in various conflicts, as though the two could somehow be separated, and as though the purpose of war was not to produce a situation where the kind of peace you wanted would follow. Superficial readers of Clausewitz can come away with the idea that the “purpose” of war is the defeat of the enemy’s Army. Whilst Clausewitz lived in an age when wars were often won (in the sense of the gaining the overall political objectives) as a result of this kind of defeat, he was careful not to assume that one was a sufficient precondition for the other. After all, as Clausewitz said, it takes two sides to make a war, and thus two sides to make a peace, and even a shattering defeat may not bring the resistance of the losing side to an end: Clausewitz would have been aware of Napoleon’s ultimate failure to pacify Spain, and his final defeat at the hands of the British in 1813, and would not have been surprised at the continued resistance of the French in 1870-71 after the defeat of the Imperial Army.

So the purely kinetic phase of the war will be paused when the Russians believe that they have achieved as much as they can by the use of military force. I say “paused” because it is clear that the Russians have neither the capacity nor the desire to try to occupy the entire country Since the Ukrainians have the ability to move their remaining forces into the West of the country away from Russian ground forces, and since there will no doubt still be a steady trickle of deliveries of aircraft from aviation museums and converted London taxis to bolster the UAF, it will be impossible to say at any point that Ukrainian forces have been completely “destroyed.” In addition, there will always be human beings and there will always be guns, so some kind of a sporadic resistance could continue for a while, at least nominally. There is thus the need for the Russians to make a judgement about when enough destruction is enough, and to pause the war at that point, hoping that the pause will be permanent.

Now, the situation is not quite as complex as that in practice. Military forces have to be organised, led and equipped, or they are of no military value. Thousands, or even tens of thousands, of Ukrainian troops wandering around in small groups may be a nuisance and even an internal  security problem, but they are not a threat. A UAF which has lost mobility and communications, even if it retains a few heavy weapons here and there, will have been defeated.

So, victory? Well remember Clausewitz’s other remark that war is “an act of violence to force our enemy to do our will.” Now in his day, the loss of a major battle would often force the losing side to sue for peace, at least for a few years. But war is a lot more complex than that these days, and it’s not obvious that there is an infallible transmission mechanism that will turn military victory into political victory. There are a number of ways in which this could go wrong.

The first way is if there is no agreed interlocutor, no recognised political authority to tell the Ukrainian troops to lay down their arms. This figure (or conceivably figures) will need both political legitimacy with the population, and the respect of the military. The Russians will also need to be convinced of both of these qualifications. (As things stand, the Russians are refusing to accept Zelensky as an interlocutor because, they argue, his term of office has expired. How far they will persist with this argument is not yet clear.) It’s quite likely that several different figures will emerge, including some military figures playing a political role, and that there will be no easy agreement to accept that the war is in fact lost. This is important because, as I explained in an earlier essay, there are a host of practical arrangements to make to ensure the tidy surrender of the UA, and someone has to give the order for them all to happen, and appoint those responsible.

And the orders have to be obeyed, which is the second way in which things could go wrong. It’s not clear that, even if the UA is still a coherent force, it will remain so for very much longer. Individual commanders at all levels may refuse to obey orders: units might actually wind up fighting each other. Paramilitary “resistance” forces might spring up, and their targets may be the Ukrainian political and military leadership, more than the Russians. It would not be surprising if there was something approaching World War 1 levels of bitterness among returning Ukrainian soldiers, and it may be assumed that “stab-in-the-back” legends will soon appear.

So the Russians will have to decide at a certain point that military combat has done as much as it can, and that it is time to demand surrender. (Note that the use of military power in its role of intimidation and enforcement will continue for some time yet.) The question, of course, is what this “surrender” would consist of. Now, a 1918-style demand for unconditional surrender of all UA forces seems unlikely to me. It would be more difficult to agree, and effectively impossible to implement. Unlike in 1945, the Russians will not be in control of all the terrain, so they cannot physically take surrenders of all units, and they would hardly want to send forces to, say, Lvov, to try to do so. In all probability, they will demand that the UA leave the territory that is now formally part of Russia, and withdraw to a defined geographical line, while leaving all heavy equipment behind. Ukrainian forces trapped in pockets from which there is no escape will probably have little choice but to actually surrender. It’s worth adding that sizeable numbers of prisoners are a political lever for the Russians, and one they will no doubt use, but they come with major administrative and political burdens as well, and it’s likely their main use will be as collateral for the return of Russian prisoners. In addition, a negotiated surrender which enabled Ukrainian soldiers to return home would be much less disruptive politically and easier to sell for whatever government is in power in Kiev.

These, to repeat, are the preconditions for a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. At this point, it is likely that the Russians will be keeping all, or at least the vast majority, of their forces in Ukraine. In part this is because there will be new towns and cities to be garrisoned and a new frontier to be protected. But it is also because it is much easier to return troops and demobilise them than it is to remobilise them and bring them back. We can also assume that, in principle, all western military personnel will have to leave Ukraine by a certain date, and all western military materiel will have to be destroyed under Russian supervision. On the other hand, defence attachés will probably be allowed to stay, and may indeed find themselves used as intermediaries by the Russians.

After this, there comes the question of the Final Status of Ukraine, and indeed the consequences for the wider relationship between Russia and the West. I’m not going to make predictions, because I’m not qualified to do so. (My personal knowledge of the area is limited, and I don’t speak Russian.) I want to concentrate, rather, on some of the generic issues that underlie all situations of this type, and some of the problems they bring, and some of the decisions, therefore that the Russian leadership is going to have to make.

Now the first of these decisions is about how to ensure stability, which it is reasonable to see as the principal Russian concern. Contrary to folk belief, nations seldom deliberately promote instability in important areas, since they risk rapidly losing control of the consequences, and the problem with uncertainty, of course, is that you can never tell what will happen. Empires did, certainly, seek to create trouble on each other’s peripheries (the famous Great Game between Britain and Russia is one case), and during the Cold War, East and West would provide military assistance to different sides on the peripheries. Sometimes this was in the form of actual combat troops (the Cubans in Angola, for example), but more often through arms and training. The Russians and Chinese flooded Africa with small arms and light weapons in the 1970s and 1980s, and the West provided the Afghan Mujahideen with some limited supplies of equipment. Under Gaddafi, Libya had a policy of creating instability in any country it believed was linked to the West (Chad was a particular example), although this policy died with The Guide himself. But all this was minor-league stuff.

In general, therefore, we can assume that both Russia and the West would have a common interest in a stable Ukraine, to the extent that that is possible. From the Russian perspective this is obvious, since instability on your borders is always a bad idea. For the Ukrainians, instability will be a constant invitation to the Russians to intervene, or at least be difficult. From the western perspective, Ukraine will be something to forget, like Vietnam but several orders of magnitude worse. The West will come to realise that it cannot any longer expect to influence events in that country very much, and it certainly has no possibility of ever restarting the conflict. The West has already been gravely weakened by the crisis, and will be worried about the possibility of being dragged back into some future iteration of it. Even if there is a civil war or mass political violence in the country—neither of which can be ruled out—the West will find itself being dragged in on one side or another or (which will be much worse) on several different sides at the same time. Of course, there will be diehard supporters of Kiev, just as there will be exiled Ukrainians hoping to return victorious one day. But this is not the Cold War, and such people will just be a nuisance to western governments. Invitations to join the EU and NATO will be put on hold “for the time being,” and Ukrainian nationals will be returned. For the West, all these will be measures of elementary prudence, faced with an angry, resentful and powerful Russia.

So how do we bring about stability? The first thing to say is that treaties and agreements do not do this by themselves. As I’ve said on previous occasions, treaties only work when they are a writing down of what the parties are prepared  to do anyway, and are actually capable of performing. The modern trend has been for outsiders (usually the West) to seek to use post-war treaties as a weapon, to enforce moral and normative rules, and to use pressure to oblige the parties to sign up to things they could never deliver. I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll touch again on the infamous 1993 Arusha Accords, intended to bring about peace between the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front, and the unstable coalition government in Kigali. The West imposed onto a classic socio-economic conflict an ethnic, racialist logic, and essentially forced the government to agree to things it could not perform, and which led ultimately to the reprise of the war and to terrifying levels of violence. If you think about it, the idea of trying to reach a peace agreement between an exiled faction of the Tutsi ruling class, which had traditionally kept power by violence, and the Hutu peasantry which had overthrown Tutsi power after independence, was actually insane, not least because it excluded most of the political forces in the country. I suppose it would be like a power-sharing agreement between White and Red Russian Forces in 1919, with Lenin as Prime Minister and the Tsar restored to power.

So whatever concessions are imposed on Ukraine will have to be politically and practically capable of implementation, as well, of course, as acceptable to Russian public opinion, which may be a difficult difference to split. (The fact that the West will have little if any influence on these conditions is actually a good thing.) Some untidiness will have to be tolerated: there will be sporadic acts of violence and even terrorism, there will be hidden arms depots discovered, and illegal military units found. But ultimately, stability is the only thing which will preserve Ukraine as any kind of political entity at all, and give it any hope for the future, and any sane Ukrainian government, no matter how much it resents and even fears Russia, will have to come to recognise this.

So without pretending to learnedly discuss a future that no-one can yet foresee, logic suggests that both sides have an interest in demands that are not impossibly difficult to meet. From the Russian point of view, whilst the results have to seem worth the blood and sacrifice involved, there is no point in forcing agreements that are so detailed and complex that huge numbers of Russian troops have to be stationed in the country for years, in an attempt to make sure they are enforced.

Likewise, there is no point in forcing promises from Ukraine that that nation may be unable to keep. This, I think, was the principal weakness of the near-agreement which emerged in April 2022, and which seems effectively to have involved the end of hostilities and the withdrawal of much of the Russian Army, in return for political undertakings, including about NATO membership. The problem with political undertakings is that they can be reversed or never even implemented, as history abundantly shows. Governments can and do denounce treaties all the time: indeed, many treaties have specific provisions about how that is to be done. Clearly, a treaty article promising never to join NATO would in itself be meaningless. Similarly, an undertaking to remove nationalists from positions of power might actually have been honoured, but could always have been reversed later. For that reason, the Russians would have been very reluctant to demobilise and withdraw their troops, and this reluctance in turn would have undermined the political position of the government in Kiev.

It comes back to my point about agreements reflecting reality, not creating it. In April 2022, the promise of massive western aid, combined with the universal view that the Russian economy and military effort could not last very much longer, made Kiev’s decision to fight on an entirely rational one, based on what was known and believed at the time. Any agreement would, from the Ukrainian side, be open to accusations of surrender when victory was a possibility. (We may never know exactly what Boris Johnson said, but in the circumstances it’s doubtful if it was decisive)

Now, of course, the situation has changed totally. For example, other than pure symbolism, there really is no advantage to Ukraine in being a NATO member, and many disadvantages. It would be subject to political pressure from its allies on various subjects, it would find itself signing communiqués and taking part in exercises which would annoy the Russians, and most of all it would be identifying with an alliance which had failed not only to facilitate the promised victory, but had brought the country to a crashing defeat. Political realism suggests, rather, that Ukraine should quietly give up the idea of NATO membership, and concentrate on building a cautiously stable relationship with Russia. As often, this would not be a relationship based on affection or warmth, but one based severely on cold political calculation. In the end, the West has nothing to offer Ukraine, whereas Russia has a number of sticks and carrots to deploy.

This kind of relationship makes the exact positioning of borders and the exact extent of formal Russian control secondary considerations. If the right political relationship exists, then these things can be managed, more or less. If it does not, then even the most elaborate delineation and monitoring scheme will fail. It also means that some people are going to be disappointed and even cry treason as the details of frontiers and areas of control are settled. The subject of frontiers and peoples is far too complex to go into in any detail here, and will require a separate essay, but it’s enough to say that the “right of peoples to self-determination” almost always leads to conflict and injustice, because people have an irritating habit of not being distributed according to potential national borders. Most often, self-determination of one group is at the expense of self-determination of others, and those groups who determine themselves most successfully tend to be the largest. So it’s not really worth looking for “fair” or “historical” borders for Ukraine, and areas of control for Russia. Even if they can theoretically be found, they would convince only one side, and be practically unenforceable. (On the other hand, there is little point in gratuitously creating problems by putting borders where they risk doing damage and causing further conflict)

So the Final Status of Ukraine will result from a combination of power politics and pragmatism. A sensible Ukrainian government will not seek to join NATO or continue close relationships with the West. It will seek close (though probably not warm) economic relations with Russia, and quietly support Moscow politically. For its part, a sensible Russian government will declare victory early on, and avoid getting drawn into endless bureaucratic complications about the observance of the fine print of Annexes to agreements. So long as the strategic situation is broadly stable, then the Russians would probably not object to Ukraine trying to join the EU: indeed, Moscow might well derive some grim amusement from the political convulsions that would follow.

Finally, there is the question of whether and how the Russians decide to address the question of future relationships with the West. (We can assume that they will not respond to western overtures to open negotiations on their terms) The difficulty, evidently, is that distrust between Russia and the West is now almost total (again, it scarcely matters who historians in a hundred years will decide was “right.”). As a result, it’s hard to see the present situation clarifying quickly. It will take some time for the West to digest its defeat, and will probably involve a number of changes of government.  So let’s take the situation in the West first .

The West will probably continue for some time to believe, or at least say, that discussions will have to be carried out according to its agenda and with a number of western preconditions. This is the natural consequence of the classic mismanagement of the crisis from the very beginning. After years of staking out ever more extreme positions, the West cannot simply shrug its shoulders and say “Oh, that was then. Things have changed” The jeremiads of western leaders, their demands for the total destruction of Russia and the punishment of its government are preserved for all to see, in all their noxious, spitting fury. They now find themselves positioned on the end of a very long branch with no obvious way back, and every chance of falling. Because there has been informal competition among western political leaders to see who can be the most rabid and extreme, no leader can now begin to sound even remotely realistic without bringing down the wrath of the others. Nobody wants to be the first to point out that there’s a hole in the side of the Titanic, and there is no politician in the West now in power who can even plausibly say “I told you so.” In any event, given the inherent complexity of the situation and the wildly different interests of the western states, it’s hard even to know where to start, if you want to develop a more realistic policy.

But in the end, this may be a less complex issue than it appears at first sight, because of realities on the ground. What usually happens in such cases is that, bit by bit, reality slips in to political thinking and discourse, and that discourse slowly starts to close the gap with real life. At best, this will take years, will require gut-wrenching compromise, and involve violent arguments. Policies generally change when it becomes clear that they no longer correspond, not simply to reality, but to any plausible direction reality might take off in. Thus, after twenty years of pretending that the capital of China was in Taipei, the West eventually had to concede that the Chinese Communist Party was firmly in the saddle, and that there was little point any more in pretending that it wasn’t. Likewise, most western governments have eventually come round to recognising the Islamist government in Iran.

At the least, any rethinking that might lead to an agreement will be against an unmistakably bleak background. No western leadership really now believes that the present government in Moscow will be overthrown and replaced by a more pro-western one in any reasonable timescale: indeed, western actions themselves have effectively disposed of that possibility. Rather, the West will have to accustom itself to living with an angry, powerful, resentful Russia which does not believe that it owes it any favours. Moreover, it will have nothing to threaten Russia with, and little to offer by way of placating its large neighbour. One shouldn’t underestimate the amount of time and mental distress it is going to take for western leaders to internalise these facts, nor the agony that will be caused by the need to respond to angry populations asking how national leaderships got them into this mess.

But the reality is that the West has already been gravely weakened, economically, politically and militarily by the crisis. There has been an attempt to argue that NATO is “stronger” and “more united” than it was, but this only applies at the level of performative gestures and words. Acquiring new members is only of value if they bring some net advantage. NATO has cleverly given itself new large territories and long borders to protect, at a time when it has never been so militarily weak. Likewise, there are no particular advantages in having dozens of national leaders all living united in the same collective fantasy. Europe has never been militarily weaker in modern history, and is wracked by political and economic crises. The United States, itself in decline, no longer has the ability to influence security issues in Europe in any important fashion, and the military capability it has, is of little relevance to the situation there.

If you think about it, ironically, we have been here before. In the late 1940s, Europe was exhausted and in ruins after World War 2. Its political systems were destroyed and its economies wrecked. To hasten the process of reconstruction, European states had rapidly demobilised their armies and returned industrial production to peacetime purposes. European governments came and went among recurrent political crises, there was the simmering potential of civil war in Italy and even France, and an actual civil war in Greece. Meanwhile, only a few hundred kilometres away, the Red Army was stationed in force, and political intimidation had brought Communist governments to power in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Whilst Soviet troops were low-grade and not really suited for offence, they were extremely numerous: as General Montgomery put it when asked how the Red Army might advance to Paris: “Walk.” In this state of nervous collapse, a European political class fearing its own weakness much more than Soviet strength, and led by the British, began to wonder if the power of the United States could not be used to somehow balance the potential intimidatory effect of the Soviet Union. (The realism of such fears will be debated endlessly by historians: the existence of the fear though is not in doubt.) The rest is, pretty much the history of the Cold War.

Of course, there are fundamental differences as well. The ideological element, whilst it exists, is not of the same type and intensity. Western Europe has not been devastated by fighting, and the political crises of today, although real enough, are not as severe as those of eighty years ago. European economies are in a bad way, but not as bad as they were then. There is more fundamental unity among western elites than was the case then, and more capacity for solving disputes between western nations. But not all of the differences are positive. Europe may have been in a state of moral collapse after 1945, but conscription was universal, and there were millions of men of fighting age with experience of combat in reserve, and massive stocks of equipment. Governments consisted overwhelmingly of people who had been through the War. Industry was being modernised, and, after the shock of the outbreak of the Korean War, was able to start producing military equipment rapidly. The United States, untouched and even strengthened by the War, still retained sizeable forces, and had nuclear weapons.

The weakness of Europe today is of a different order, and, unlike the 1940s, there is no prospect of rebuilding and strengthening the continent. Although Russia today certainly has no territorial designs on Western Europe, the two players have a much worse relationship than they had in the late 1940s, when at least they had recently been on the same side, as opposed to being near enemies today. Stalin was both cautious and paranoid, and it seems clear that he stayed out of conflict and crises in Greece, France and Italy not because he was a nice man but because he was not prepared to see the victory of leftist forces he did not control: a continuation of his policy in Spain. On the other hand, we can be fairly certain that the Russians today will use their relative strength against Europe’s relative weakness in an attempt to get what they want, and that the United States, this time, is not an actor that can be invoked to balance their superiority. Thus, European elites through their incompetence have managed to recreate the very situation that prompted the formation of NATO in 1949, except that this time Russia is not exhausted by war, and Europe is weaker than it has ever been. Clever, that.

But what might the Russians want?  It’s important once more to distinguish between documents and reality. The Russian tendency towards legalism suggests that Moscow can’t and won’t allow the situation to just evolve without some kind of treaty or agreement. But—especially given the now-poisonous level of distrust between the two sides—such a document could take a very long time, and not necessarily add very much. It’s not even clear that the two sides would have the same idea of what any negotiations would be about. Indeed, it’s not certain that the West would even be a “side” in the negotiations, because the various nations would be at odds with each other.

So let’s take a step back from the bureaucracy, and ask what situation, from the Russian point of view, the negotiation such an agreement would have to embody. Here, I think, the answer is relatively clear. The Russians want stability on their western flank for the foreseeable future. This goes well beyond the castration of Ukraine, and includes the end of forward deployments of forces outside their own countries, and the effective end of any important American military presence in Europe. But this is an essentially negative set of objectives. The idea of a New Security Order in Europe on paper, as opposed to on the ground, seems to me to be very ambitious, if not actually impossible, because western states are unlikely for a long time to agree to wording that actually reflects the weakness of their position. For their part, I wonder just how interested the Russians are, give, that the strategic turn away from Europe will not be revisited in anything less than a generation.

But perhaps this doesn’t really matter. Much of what a New Security Order might accomplish is already in place. NATO and the EU are hopelessly divided on any issue beyond anti-Russian hatred, and will become more so. European forces will remain weak and probably become steadily weaker. Russia will continue to have an effective monopoly of precision-strike hypersonic missiles and an overwhelming advantage in air defence, as well as a serious defence industry and large armed forces. The United States will not be able to reinforce its tiny combat forces in Europe  in any important way. In the end, NATO will be pretty much limited to Declarations, Action Plans and Powerpoint presentations which, to be fair, it is quite competent at. The situation on the ground may be such that the Russians can take their time waiting for the West eventually to come round to signing a document of some kind.

During the Cold War, we used to speak of “Finlandisation” as a risk for Europe. Finland, which had after all fought in tandem with Germany in World War 2, was obliged by its history and geography to conduct a delicate balancing act between formal neutrality and respect for its large neighbour. The idea was that a Europe intimidated by Soviet power might drift into the same configuration. Forty years later, we may have arrived exactly there. Not the least of the many exquisitely painful ironies of this ghastly tragic farce is that Finland’s accession to NATO may itself ultimately have been an important step towards the Finlandisation of NATO itself.