Is it time for Ukraine to accept the loss of part of its territory and to settle for peace with Russia before the rest of the country is destroyed?

Partition, peace and prosperity. Or try to recover the lost provinces in the east and south while Russia pulverises the remainder. That is the grim choice Ukraine faces as it reaches one year of brutal aggression by Russia, according to one of America’s foremost Russia scholars, Stephen Kotkin of Stanford University.

Ukraine under its inspirational President Volodymyr Zelensky has performed miracles of resistance to Russia’s military might. Just about everyone feared it would fall to Moscow within days. Instead it repulsed an assault on its capital Kyiv and over the past year recovered about half the territory Russia had seized in the first weeks of the war. 

Why Putin is still winning

Despite this brave resistance, historian Kotkin, author of an esteemed biography of Stalin and also an expert on the collapse of the Soviet Union, believes that Russia is still winning the war because President Vladimir Putin has no compunction about tossing tens of thousands more untrained conscripts into the “meat grinder” of the frontline. And because Putin equally has no conscience about destroying the unoccupied part of Ukraine with artillery.

An aerial view taken with a drone of damage at site of an overnight missile strike on a residential district in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, on 2 February 2023. Russian troops entered Ukrainian territory on 24 February 2022, starting a conflict that has provoked destruction and a humanitarian crisis. One year on, fighting continues in many parts of the country. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Yevgen Honcharenko)

Kotkin told the New Yorker he believed the West should also accept that Ukraine will be unable to expel Russia completely and should start to prepare to accept a partitioned Ukraine into the European Union. It should also offer this portioned Ukraine membership of Nato or some other security guarantee. He said he believed that a portioned and protected Ukraine, embraced by the EU, could grow and prosper as West Germany had prospered in Nato and the EU after World War 2. And as South Korea has prospered under US protection after the partitioning of the Korean Peninsula after the Korean War.   

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Putin’s attack on Ukraine had been a strategic failure. Ukraine’s military performance had been superior. Putin had hurt Russia’s reputation, consolidated the Ukraine nation and also unified the West. Instead of pushing Nato’s borders back as he had hoped, Putin had expanded it by prompting Sweden and Finland to join.

“The problem is that he’s in power,” Kotkin said, adding that he saw no chance of Putin being toppled. Those who opposed him had been forced to flee the country.

And Russia had many more people and many more bombs to throw at Ukraine. “Putin’s strategy could be described as ‘I can’t have it? Nobody can have it!’ Sadly, that’s where the tragedy is right now,” said Kotkin.

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Vladimir Putin’s grand illusions crumble into ashes in brutal theatre of real war”

Kotkin’s Stanford colleague, Steve Pifer, a former US ambassador and former senior State Department official in charge of Russia and Ukraine, disagrees with Kotkin on some important points. 

“I do not believe Russia is winning the war. The last four months of 2022 saw Ukrainian counteroffensives that liberated substantial territory in Kharkiv and Kherson,” he told Daily Maverick.

“While the Russians have recently been on the offensive around Bakhmut, they have made limited progress. Actually, they have been fighting – and failing – to take that town for eight months now.”

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Ukraine defends frontline, Putin talks up nuclear arsenal on eve of war anniversary”

Sanctions bypassed

Kotkin, though, believes it is ominous that despite all the Western sanctions, the Russian economy hasn’t shrunk, let alone shrunk massively, in part because some countries – notably Turkey – have helped it bypass sanctions.

So, Ukraine and the West would have to win the war on the battlefield. Though the Russian army had done badly, soldier for soldier, it had not disintegrated completely on the battlefield. And it had many more soldiers to call on. 

“The Russian leadership doesn’t really care about its people,” Kotkin said. So, if Putin’s government throws 20,000 untrained recruits “into the meat grinder” and three-quarters of them die, “they just do it again”. Like Stalin did in World War 2.

A picture taken during a visit to Mariupol organised by the Russian military shows destruction inside the destroyed Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine, on 12 April 2022. Russian troops entered Ukrainian territory on 24 February 2022, starting a conflict that has provoked destruction and a humanitarian crisis. One year on, fighting continues in many parts of the country. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Yevgen Honcharenko)

There was also no evidence of another hoped-for shortcut to victory, an internal toppling of Putin. “Authoritarian regimes can fail at everything – they can even launch self-defeating wars – so long as they succeed at one thing, which is the suppression of political alternatives,” Kotkin said. “He’s very good at that.”

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Kotkin also saw no hope of China exerting pressure on Russia to climb down. Since he spoke, the Biden administration has warned that it believes Beijing is planning to help arm Russia.

What defines victory?

The lack of shortcuts had left Ukraine and the West no alternative but to win on the battlefield. But here, Kotkin suggested, Ukraine’s definition of victory was too ambitious. Zelensky wanted to regain every inch of territory, to exact reparations from Russia and to hold war crimes tribunals. 

To do all of that Ukraine would have to take Moscow, yet Ukraine was not that close to regaining every inch of its own territory, let alone the other aims.

By contrast, the American definition of what victory might look like had been very hesitant, he said. The Biden administration had been saying Ukraine had to decide what it wanted. But the US had also effectively defined victory as “Russia can’t take all of Ukraine and occupy Ukraine, and disappear Ukraine as a state, as a nation”.

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The US had gradually and grudgingly escalated its military support for Ukraine and was now sending medium-range rocket systems and tanks.

“And so we’ve given enough so that Ukraine doesn’t lose, so that they can maybe push a little more on the battlefield, regain a little bit more territory, and be in a better place to negotiate.”

To win what had become a war of attrition against Russia, Ukraine and its allies would have to ramp up production of weaponry tremendously. Yet Kotkin said the US was only supplying Ukraine with about 15,000 artillery shells a month and the other Nato countries a further 15,000, while Ukraine was firing up to 90,000. The US was not producing new shells for Ukraine. It was drawing on stockpiles, which were running out.

At the same time, sanctions were not destroying Russia’s ability to produce weapons. It could still produce about 60 missiles a month under sanctions, enough to do terrible damage to Ukraine. That didn’t include the ammunition it was getting from Iran and North Korea or buying back from African countries, he said.

Since Kotkin spoke Nato has announced an increase in the production of artillery for Ukraine, though it was not clear whether it would be enough. 

Residents of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic board a bus to enter Russia at the Matveev Kurgan customs post in Rostov region, Russia, on 19 February 2022. Russian troops entered Ukrainian territory on 24 February 2022, starting a conflict that has provoked destruction and a humanitarian crisis. One year on, fighting continues in many parts of the country. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Arkady Budnitsky)

For a total victory, Ukraine would also have to destroy Russia’s weapons factories inside Russia, as the Allies had bombed Germany’s weapons factories in World War 2. But this would not happen because Nato feared giving Ukraine the ability to strike into Russia lest this provoke a direct Nato-Russia confrontation. 

Ukraine and EU membership

Kotkin said a better definition of victory in the war than ejecting Russia from all of Ukraine would be “Ukraine gets into the European Union”.

“If Ukraine regains all of its territory and doesn’t get into the EU, is that a victory? As opposed to: If Ukraine regains as much of its territory as it physically can on the battlefield, not all of it, potentially, but does get EU accession – would that be a definition of victory? Of course it would be.”

If Ukraine insisted on fighting on for total victory, “your country, your people, continue to die, your infrastructure continues to get ruined. Your schools, your hospitals, your cultural artefacts get bombed or stolen. Your children get taken away as orphans. That’s where we are right now.”

Even if Ukraine got every inch of its territory back, “we still need an EU accession process. Ukraine will need a demilitarised zone, no matter how much territory it gets back, including if it somehow gets Crimea back. It’s got the problem that, next year, the year after, the year after next, this could happen again.”

Kotkin dismissed a scenario by Ukraine intelligence that it would regain Crimea this year. They had to be optimistic, he said.

“The problem is, we have to live in the circumstances we’ve got. If you look at the North Korea-South Korea outcome, it’s a terrible outcome. At the same time, it was an outcome that enabled South Korea to flourish under American security guarantees and protection. And, if there were a Ukraine, however much of it – 80%, 90% – which could flourish as a member of the European Union and which could have some type of security guarantee – whether that were full Nato accession, whether that were bilateral with the US, whether it were multilateral to include the US and Poland and Baltic countries and Scandinavian countries, potentially – that would be a victory in the war.”

Rebuilding

Kotkin said Ukraine would need to become part of the EU and the West not only to get security guarantees but also to help it build the institutions it would now need to properly spend the estimated $350-billion (twice its pre-war GDP) that it already required to rebuild its shattered country. That number would grow as the war continued.

Pifer said: “There may come a time for negotiation. However, there must first be some indication – and there are none to date – that Moscow is prepared to negotiate seriously, which means dropping a number of its over-the-top demands.

“Then the Ukrainian government must decide whether it could compromise any of its positions (full Russian withdrawal, reparations and bringing war criminals to account).

“That could be tough, as Putin’s war has hardened the attitude of the leadership and the Ukrainian population, with polls showing a large majority supporting continued fighting and opposing negotiations.

“Putin has forged a deep Ukrainian national identity and has imbued it with a strong anti-Russian sentiment.” DM