A devil’s bargain with Putin will only bring another war: Ukraine must make him pay

All tricks aside, Russia doesn’t possess the pure military capability to defeat Kyiv

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A reported Russian proposal for swapping territory as a means of ending the war in Ukraine gained world attention on the eve of the Trump-Putin summit. But Moscow later clarified that it wants Kyiv to unilaterally withdraw from the 30 per cent of the Donetsk region that it still controls without any major land exchange.

What we are seeing is a classic Russian tactic of issuing a vague statement that casts itself as ready for compromise, setting the stage for a blame game against Ukraine, while demanding unreciprocated concessions.

No one should be fooled. There is a lot of dust to be cleared off this devil’s bargain.

No Ukrainian authority is empowered – no matter the president – to trade Ukrainian territories during negotiations. Under the constitution, only a referendum can settle a question of the country’s borders. In this case, the Russians have created a dilemma for Volodymyr Zelensky – either accept Moscow’s terms and lose legitimacy in Ukraine, or face another blast from Donald Trump for disrupting his peace process.

Russian strategic culture is all about making such dilemmas for opponents. Ukrainian society is ready for compromise but not for the surrender of territory, sovereignty, and security.

Ukraine has has also learned bitter lessons that territory-for-ceasefire deals don’t work with its neighbour. The Minsk agreements of 2014-15 were premised on the hopes of Ukraine, Europe, and the US, that the Kremlin could limit its aggression to eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Those hopes were in vain.

Ukraine is now being sold the same failed formula – to buy itself and partners a sense of normalcy at the expense of its people and territories with no working mechanism that would prevent the next round of Russian aggression. Unilateral concessions would make the next cycle of violence more likely. Meaningful security commitments and a deterrence package from the US and Europe could stop it.

Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, is set to host the Putin-Trump summit (Photo: Jae C Hong/AP)

We can also learn from other countries’ experience. In 1939, the Soviet Union demanded unilateral withdrawal of the Finnish army from the Karelia isthmus to provide security for Leningrad across the border.

The trick was that Finland’s main defensive belt was situated on the isthmus – just as Ukraine’s major fortifications are now situated around the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk belt in the part of Donetsk that Russia is seeking to claim.

Helsinki decided to fight instead. Eventually Soviet forces managed to pierce the defensive belt on the isthmus. But in the process, Soviet forces paid a steep price with hundreds of thousands dead and wounded. Fierce resistance did not ultimately prevent Soviet occupation of the territory. But it resulted in a bloody nose for the Kremlin, which in turn made a final political settlement more durable, as Moscow learned the cost of aggression.

Finland’s example provides a good template for how Ukraine should respond to Russian demands. There could be a case when Ukrainian forces are eventually pushed out of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk belt – forced to trade space for time while inflicting losses on the enemy. But such a scenario at least offers some deterrence while unilateral withdrawal would only encourage Russia’s appetite for further land grabs.

Another land grab would mean more Russian persecution against Ukrainian civilians who are unable to evacuate. Guerilla resistance will form as occurred in Kherson and Zaporizhzia in the first year of the war. But such movements would face ferocious Russian repression through security services that succeeded in stamping out much of the grassroots oppostion.

Further, Russian aggression against Ukraine is not really about territory. Vladimir Putin’s ultimate end goal is to impose full control over Ukraine, with the goal of securing recognition of recent territorial conquests only part of a larger play. Ultimately, Russia wants to destroy Ukrainian unity, using negotiations as an opening to pit different parts of Ukrainian society against each other while encouraging anti-Western sentiment when Ukraine’s transatlantic allies falter. The case of Georgia showed us how the trauma of war can be used by the Kremlin to recover lost influence.

All tricks aside, despite recent local military successes in Donetsk, and some Ukrainian setbacks, Russia doesn’t possess the pure military capability to defeat Ukraine and impose its draconian, imperialist terms by force as long as Kyiv and its international partners preserve unity, and the consensus of spring 2022 that “Ukraine shall not lose and Russia shall not win”.

Europeans and Americans should be mindful of Russian attempts to find and exploit any cracks in that consensus. The Kremlin’s demands for Ukraine’s unilateral withdrawal from Donetsk is just the latest example. Hopefully, Donald Trump will stick to his promise not to grant major territorial changes that would favour Russia. And hopefully, the major result of the Alaska summit will be that Trump concludes that the major obstacle to compromise is Russia’s maximalist demands, with all due consequences for the Kremlin.