By John Ross
The military situation in the war in Ukraine continues to unfold in an entirely predictable way, which in essence corresponds to the political, linguistic and national reality in Ukraine. The military line of divide in essentials corresponds to the division between the Russian speaking east and south of Ukraine, including Crimea, and the Ukrainian speaking west. The Ukrainian/NATO side has been losing ground in the east and does not have the military capacity to push Russia out of the Donbass. Militarily the slowness of the advance by the Russian side confirms clearly that it does not have the military capacity to conquer the west of Ukraine – regardless of whether it ever wished to or not. The military dynamic is therefore clearly to a situation whereby Russia secures the Russian speaking eastern and southeastern Ukraine and NATO/Kyiv controls the Ukrainian speaking Western Ukraine.
Given this situation, for the first time since near the beginning of the war, when NATO, in a message delivered by Boris Johnson, sabotaged negotiations, serious discussion of the possibility of peace talks is taking place. The most important of these is the call by German Chancellor Scholz for a peace conference including Russia. In a joint article, unlikely to have been issued if Trump had wished to block it, Donald Trump Jr and Robert F Kennedy Jr also wrote: “We need to demand, right now, that Harris and President Biden reverse their insane war agenda and open direct negotiations with Moscow.” But ideas of peace talks are also being openly discussed in the U.S. media and in various European countries.
Politically the population of Europe now increasingly supports negotiations to end the war. The Institute for Global Affairs, part of the US pro-American political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, found that in a survey published in June this year of public opinion in Germany, France and Britain, 88% favoured a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. It found “Americans and Western Europeans want their countries to avoid escalation and prevent further Ukrainian suffering significantly more than they want to restore Ukraine’s borders.” In the three European countries, asked which goal their country should prioritise, and able to chose more than one answer, 47% said “avoiding escalation to a wider regional war,” 45% said “avoiding direct war between nuclear armed powers,” compared to only 22% who said “fully restoring the pre-2022 invasion borders of Ukraine” and only 17% who said “weakening Russian to punish it for its aggression”.
In the US there were similar results, except that “avoiding direct war between nuclear armed powers” was cited as the top priority, with 43%, and only 17% said the priority was “fully restoring the pre-2022 invasion borders of Ukraine”. In some parts of Europe opposition to U.S./NATO policy on Ukraine has become a dominant issue – in recent local elections in the eastern provinces of Germany right and left-wing parties opposing German government support to Ukraine won overwhelming victories.
A slow dynamic to peace talks
Although the military situation is well-defined, and support for U.S./NATO priorities in Ukraine has sharply eroded, it is necessary to be clear that this does not necessarily mean the rapid opening of peace talks. To take a comparison, many years before the end of the Vietnam war the U.S. military command knew that it could not win – as was revealed at the time in the Pentagon Papers. But simultaneously the U.S. political leadership also understood that this outcome would lead to a huge defeat for the United States geopolitical position – as indeed it did. The conclusion the U.S. leadership drew from that was therefore that it was necessary to manoeuvre to minimise the consequences of this setback to their interests. This was carried out not only in the early 1970s policies of détente with China and the USSR but in sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Indochinese lives, and those of thousands of American troops, while the U.S. leadership carried out manoeuvres intended to attempt to minimise the consequences of its inability to win the war. Indeed, some of the biggest U.S. atrocities, the invasions of Cambodia and Laos, the most intense bombing of North Vietnam, took place when the U.S. leadership was fully aware that it could not win the war but with the aim of trying to minimise overall damage to the U.S. geopolitical position.
Similarly, if the U.S. policy of expansion of NATO into Ukraine is defeated, and/or Ukraine loses all or most of its four Eastern Russian speaking provinces of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, plus Crimea, this will be a huge geopolitical defeat for the U.S. the consequences of which will be felt worldwide. The U.S. leadership, regardless of its judgement of whether it can win the war in Ukraine or not, will therefore try to avoid consequences of any such defeat by prolonging the war and ensuring that the maximum price is paid by Russia.
Similarly, while public opinion in Europe is shifting against the war and its consequences, the European political leaderships are attempting to double down on military support for Ukraine. The recent resolution of the European Parliament, passed with a 425 -131 vote, calls for “support in every possible way until Ukraine’s victory”, which it defines as “allowing Ukraine to liberate all its people, re-establish full control within internationally recognised borders.”
As Arnaud Bertrand rightly put it: “The resolution just passed by the EU Parliament on Ukraine is a sad illustration of how undemocratic and dangerously deluded it’s become.
“Undemocratic because it acts against the will of the people. Deluded because it asks for things everyone knows are impossible…
“In other words, it supports the exact contrary of pushing for a negotiated settlement: it supports a victory of Ukraine until it re-establishes “full control within internationally recognized borders”, which by the way include Crimea which Ukraine hasn’t controlled in 10 years…
“For this purpose the resolution “calls on Member States to immediately lift restrictions on the use of Western weapons systems delivered to Ukraine against legitimate military targets on Russian territory”.
“In other words, a dramatic expansion of the war: no limits anymore…
“But what shall we do with the European people who don’t want all that?
“Not to worry, the resolution has this covered too: it ‘calls on the European Commission to engage in strategic communication’ (a codeword for propaganda) to explain to the people what they ought to think. This is, of course, completely deluded. There is no expert worth his salt who honestly believes that Ukraine can win and regain all its territory. The public is correct in thinking that the only possible prospect here is a negotiated settlement that puts an end to the suffering.
“then this is even less what Europeans want and even more deluded: a direct conflict between 2 nuclear powers is potentially a civilization-ending event. Even at the height of the cold war rulers weren’t this irresponsible.”
In summary, while public opinion is moving strongly against the path being pursued by NATO, the political leadership of Europe and the U.S. is intent on continuing/escalating the war.
Therefore, given the present state of fighting, at least public peace talks probably will not take place imminently – it is still at the stage of talks about talks, or possibly talks about talks about talks. But there is nevertheless a clear momentum, and preliminary manoeuvring, towards discussions of what would be the outcome of the end of the war. Therefore, to deal with this, the left needs a clear position on any peace negotiations and proposals.
Politics of the Ukraine war
The most famous definition of war, because it is the most accurate, was put forward by the bourgeois theorist Clausewitz: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” So precisely was this formulated that on their side socialism/Marxism has the same position – Lenin writing: “Marxists have always rightly regarded this thesis as the theoretical basis of views concerning the significance of every given war.”[1] To understand what would be the basis of peace in Ukraine, it is therefore necessary to understand the politics involved in the war.
The politics of the Ukraine war are clear. At the time of German reunification in 1989-1991, and then during the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the U.S., to ensure that the least obstacles would be put up to its aims, promised Gorbachev that NATO would advance “not an inch” to the East. But to anyone seriously analysing the situation it was clear that the U.S. had no intention of sticking to this – as events have confirmed.
The reasons were clear. The end of the Cold War posed the possibility of Europe overcoming its strategic economic weakness compared to the U.S. The United States economic advantage compared to Europe, despite their being units of approximately equal size, is that the U.S. contains within its borders a relatively “balanced” economy including all major elements necessary for its development – including advanced manufacturing, raw materials, developed agriculture and an advanced service sector. To put it in popular geographical terms, the U.S. contains the high tech of California, the service sector of New York, the agriculture of the mid-West and the raw materials and energy of Texas. Similarly Europe, if it includes Russia, also contains an all-round economy – the highly developed manufacturing of Germany, the service sector of France, Germany and Britain, the agriculture of France, Germany and Spain, and the energy and raw materials of Russia, with the most powerful core of this being the relation of German manufacturing and Russia’s energy and raw materials. But if Russia is separated from the rest of Europe, then Europe cannot be a balanced economy – Western Europe has advanced manufacturing, services and agriculture but no source of raw materials or energy equivalent to Texas. Even more threatening to the U.S. is the fact that to the East of Russia lay socialist China – and any good relations between Western Europe, Russia and China means this combination is more economically powerful than the U.S.
For the U.S. an ASEAN type East/Southeast Asian situation in Europe – that is acceptance of different political systems but a common focus on economic development – is therefore deeply threatening. However, if the U.S. can ensure the economic separation of Western Europe from Russia then the U.S. is much stronger than either separately. For this reason, even at the height of “détente” during the Cold War, the U.S. opposed the building of energy pipelines connecting Russia and Europe – a position so blatantly against European capitalism’s interests that even Thatcher refused to go along with it. Similarly, after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. opposed the Nordstream gas pipelines from Russia to Germany – and today, anyone with any realistic analysis knows that it was the U.S. (not the absurd story of six people in a yacht!) which was behind the blowing up of those pipelines when the Ukraine war broke out.
The U.S., therefore, paid particular strategic attention to:
- snuffing out any signs of political independence in Western Europe from U.S. policy – for example U.S. drives to get rid of Chirac and Schroeder governments in France and Germany after these had opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
- Working to weaken relations between Germany and Russia.
- Working to try to create bad relations between Europe and China.
The military aspect of this policy was the expansion of NATO, as this ensured the military subordination to the U.S. of Europe outside Russia, which the U.S, embarked on in direct violation of its pledges to Gorbachev.
Opposition to U.S. aggressive policy in Europe
While socialists opposed East European states joining NATO in most of them the combination of the U.S. and local capitalists could gain majority support for membership. But in the Ukraine the U.S. faced a quite different and intractable problem.
Any state even resembling the post-1991 borders of Ukraine only came into existence after World Wars I & II. Previously, for centuries, what became the Ukrainian state had been divided between an East, which was part of Russia, and a West which had been, at various times, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland. Crimea, since 1783, had been part of Russia until Khruschev transferred it to Ukraine in 1954 by administrative means – in a change which was practically meaningless in the context of the centralised USSR. Therefore, the East and West of Ukraine were separated by language, religion, and history – it short, there was a national question within the Ukraine between a nearly 30% Russian speaking minority, as found by the 2001 census, and a Ukrainian speaking majority.
Bilingual/binational states, that is ones with very large minorities, can be kept together – within Europe Belgium is an example of such a small state, and in North America Canada is an example of a big one. But the precondition for their unity is acknowledgement of the national/linguistic rights of the large minority. For example, in Canada unity was maintained only by a strict bilingual policy under which even in parts of the country where there are almost no French speakers, or English speakers, all signage must be bilingual, both French and English may be use in the legal system, in commercial transactions, in government etc. Even with these conditions Canadian unity has only been held together by a very narrow margin – in the 1995 referendum Quebec voted against independence by only 45,000 votes, and with a vote of only 50.6% against. If there had not been a bilingual policy, or policies unacceptable to the French speaking minority had been embarked on, Quebec would certainly have voted in favour of independence.
The crisis of the Ukrainian state
After Ukrainian independence, at the end of 1991, the unity of the Ukrainian state was maintained by an essentially bilingual policy and by no policies completely unacceptable to the Russian speaking minority being embarked on. In that framework sometimes more “pro-Western”, sometimes more “pro-Russian”, governments were elected. But bilingual language rights were accepted and no policies unacceptable to Russia and the Russian speaking minority, for example NATO membership, were embarked on.
But this situation was ended with the 2014 Maidan coup d’etat in Kyiv. The elected government was overthrown and a systematic policy of elimination of Russian language rights was embarked on, and a policy of orientation to NATO membership was begun. The policies of the Ukrainian government after 2014, which included suppressing the official use of the Russian language in numerous spheres, were therefore bound to lead to an explosive crisis within the Ukrainian state. As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which certainly cannot be accused of being pro-Russian, stated: “the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019”. The inevitable result of this was to destroy the basis of the unity of the bilingual/binational Ukrainian state.
In addition to the legal/administrative actions systematic violence was carried out against the large Russian speaking minority. The most famous and notorious of these was the May 2014 Odesa massacre, in which 46 pro-Russian protestors were burnt to death in the city’s Trade Union House, but most serious was the shelling by Ukrainian forces of areas of the Donbass. Fascist organisations, such as Azov, were formally incorporated into the Kyiv government’s armed forces and Nazi-collaborators, such as Stepan Bandera, were hailed as national heroes by the Kyiv administration.
Ukraine and NATO membership
Overlaying this linguistic/national division in Ukraine was the issue of NATO membership. Russia repeatedly stated that Ukraine’s membership of NATO was a red line it was not willing to accept. For the U.S. it should have been easy to understand why. At the time of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis the U.S. had made clear that it would not accept the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and would go to any lengths, if necessary a nuclear war, to stop this. The reason was obvious – the distance from Havana to Washington is only 1,100 miles/1,800 kilometres, the flight time for a missile is so short that military defence is impossible. But the distance from Kyiv to Moscow is only 470 miles/750 kilometres, less than half the distance of Havana to Washington. Furthermore, Ukraine is a traditional route of conventional military attack on Russia – as seen both in the 1941 Nazi invasion in “Operation Barbarossa” and in the 1942 campaign that culminated in Stalingrad. The U.S. was therefore demanding that Russia accept military conditions which the U.S. made clear it would use any means to stop it is applied to itself.
Numerous U.S. experts on Eastern Europe and Russia strongly and repeatedly advised against expansion of NATO, in particular into Ukraine. Most famously, George Kennan, the original architect of US Cold War policy, predicted in 1997 that, “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”. But these positions were ignored by U.S. administrations which insisted on systematic expansion of NATO membership.
The outbreak of war
These overlapping issues of Ukraine’s membership of NATO and the rights of the large Russian speaking minority in the east of Ukraine therefore came together to create the crisis. There were only two ways to resolve the situation of the Ukraine: maintenance of the full linguistic and other rights of the Russian-speaking minority within the borders of the old Ukrainian state, which the Kyiv regime refused after 2014, or the break-up of the Ukrainian state. The latter already partially occurred in 2014 and led to continued intermittent localised warfare in the Donbass. The West never had any intention of carrying out the September 2014 and February 2015 Minsk agreements which attempted to end this military situation – as Angela Merkel later admitted. In February 2022 full scale war, with open Russia military intervention, occurred leading to the military situation described at the beginning of this article – Russia controlling most of the Russian speaking east of Ukraine and Kyiv/NATO the west of Ukraine.
The current military situation
The recent military developments are simply details within that overall framework. The open assessment of large sections of the Western media is that Ukraine is losing the war – as is the more guarded, but clear, statements of the ex- and some current military top brass as well as official, off-the-record briefings.
To try to reverse this the Ukraine is asking for use of its long-range missile to strike deep inside Russia. Apart from the fundamental military fact that the number of such weapons would be quite insufficient to reverse the outcome of the war the US Administration knows full well that this major escalation is recklessly aggressive and threatens the most dangerous international conflict since the Cuban missile crisis.
But the bedrock of US imperial strategy is the military defeat of Russia to then encircle China. The U.S. is therefore unwilling to simply accept defeat in Ukraine. The war is not yet lost but the early optimism, even triumphalism, has completely disappeared. It is possible, as already noted, that NATO will attempt to continue the conflict for years to come, less in the hope of defeating Russia but still with the aim of sapping it economically, militarily and in terms of morale.
But this new pessimism is now the evaluation among Western media, informed by the military types for whom they act as stenographers. The BBC now says Ukraine could face defeat this year. The Economist poses the question What happens if the Ukraine loses? The LA Times says Ukrainians must contemplate the unthinkable: Losing the war to Russia – a view echoed by USA Today. Even in the leading pro-war circles, there is a tacit admission that the war is not necessarily going to their advantage – the New York Times admits Russia remains focused on winning control over Eastern Ukraine.
On 19 September Washington Post gave a particularly clear view in a long article with the self-explanatory title of “The losing strategy of underestimating Russia”. Its conclusion was: “the longer the war in Ukraine grinds on, the more credence the West should give his bedrock assumption — that Moscow can outlast Washington and its allies through the sheer mass of Russian forces and resources… Putin’s strategy seems increasingly sound, as public support for Ukraine has softened in the United States and parts of Europe. There, hopes have receded that Russia can be defeated on the battlefield, or that its economy will crumble under the weight of U.S.-led sanctions. The wishful view of Russia as a paper tiger has been discredited by the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year.”
These pieces are replete with commentary from former or current Western military leaders to back up their case. Even if some of this is motivated by lobbying for more arms for Ukraine, the change of mood among NATO’s backers is clear.
The position of the left
Turning to the left, at the beginning of the war various forces raised the slogan for the unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops – that is placing no conditions on this. If such an unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops had taken place there is no doubt what would have been the result. Ukraine would have joined NATO, the Russian speaking minority in the east of Ukraine would have lost its linguistic and other rights, a regime of military terror would have been unleashed against the Russian speaking population of the east of Ukraine, and the U.S. would have taken a huge step forward in its policies against China. In short, to demand unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops was objectively to support the side of the U.S. and NATO.
But instead of a U.S. NATO victory, as already noted, Russia fought. The military lines now largely, although not completely, correspond to the linguistic/national divide in Ukraine. What position, therefore, should the left take?
A number of forces, including those who previously called for unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops, now call for an immediate ceasefire. This is good, but there should be no doubt as to what an immediate ceasefire would mean. It would mean Russia in control of most of the east of Ukraine and Crimea. But what then should follow the ceasefire – presumably to be discussed in peace negotiations? Three fundamental possibilities exist.
The outcome of the war
The first military outcome, which can already be discounted, is a Russian takeover of the west of Ukraine. This would have to be imposed by purely military means, there is not the slightest indication that this is what the population of the West of Ukraine wants, and history indicates why it does not want it – the West of Ukraine has a different language and different history from the east and was only united with it recently. In short any Russian military takeover of the west of Ukraine would be reactionary. Putin is a bitter critic of Lenin for not simply having treated the whole of the USSR as “Russian”. But even if he had the illusion that the west of Ukraine would welcome Russian rule it has been clearly shown that this is not the case and is militarily impossible to achieve.
The second military solution is advance of NATO into East Ukraine and installation of the present Kyiv government policies which deny the rights of the very large Russian speaking minority – that is the goal of NATO and the Kyiv government. This could only be achieved by military means, which as already seen is improbable, and would mean installation of a regime of national oppression – probably by direct military terror. In addition to its international geopolitical consequences, the expansion of NATO, no socialist should support such a regime. It would be entirely reactionary.
The third is a ceasefire and a non-military solution – that is neither the military advance of Russia into West Ukraine nor NATO into East Ukraine. This would be a ceasefire and then the opening of peace negotiations without conditions. There are two fundamental outcomes of the latter.
The first would be restoration of a united Ukrainian state – that is a type of return to the pre-2014 situation. This has no possibility to be achieved without: (i) restoration of the rights of the Russian speaking population of the East of Ukraine which have been taken away – which the Kyiv government has shown no sign of doing, (ii) abandonment of policies unacceptable to the Russian speaking population of the East of Ukraine – which includes abandoning the goal of NATO membership. This was clearly a workable/the best solution prior to 2014 – as at that time no major force in Ukraine called for overturning the unity of the then Ukrainian state. But, given the events and wars since then, to anyone outside it appears extremely unlikely that this could be achieved.
The second possibility is secession of the eastern Russian speaking provinces from the Ukrainian state – that is along, or close to, the existing military boundary. This could either be by a formal peace treaty or by a “Korean variant” – that is no formal peace agreement but an end to the fighting and de facto peace along military lines of divide. In the present circumstances this appears more likely from the outside.
But there is no necessity for progressive forces outside to become involved in deciding which of these two latter variants it prefers. It should simply:
- call for a ceasefire.
- call for the opening of peace negotiations without preconditions.
- Oppose Ukrainian membership of NATO.
- Demand recognition of the rights of the large Russian speaking minority in the east of Ukraine.
The outcome of the war will have immense implications – for the population of the east of Ukraine, for the population of the west of Ukraine, and for world politics. Given the military and political situation the above is almost certainly what will be the outcome of the war. But innumerable lives, immense suffering, and great damage to the situation in Europe may occur before this occurs if the war is prolonged. Therefore, it is imperative for the anti-war movement to press for such an outcome as rapidly as possible.
These four positions do not include the slogan for the unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops. But realisation of that latter slogan, as already seen, would mean the expansion of NATO, denial of the rights of the Russian speaking population of east Ukraine, and to impose this military terror. Precisely because of this it could be attempted to be imposed only by continuation of the war – and, for the reasons also given, is unlikely to be successful. The only realistic way to end the war is on the basis of the four positions above. This should, therefore, be the position of the anti-war movement.
[1]Lenin, V. I. (1915). Socialism and War. Retrieved from Marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/ch01.htm
Image: Peace flag with English word, produced by Peace Flag Project, Japan, 2004; Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported CC BY 3.0.