War fatigue has settled on Ukraine. The sheer exhaustion of re-ordering lives around sirens, curfews, urban bombardment and the scramble to find food and pills for elderly relatives has encouraged hope in the West that some kind of formalised lull will emerge in the fighting and perhaps, just perhaps, a window opening for diplomacy.
Think again. True, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, is suggesting that a deal might be close on the future neutrality of Ukraine. And President Zelensky has declared “any war ends with an agreement”. But both are simply trying to soothe their backers — Russia nodding to its uneasy ally China, Zelensky with an eye on Nato, which needs to see some way of connecting its military aid to an ultimately peaceful outcome. The West wants to hear that Zelensky is not just a shrewd war commander but a politician who can navigate his country out of the conflict without handing Vladimir Putin a glittering prize.
Moscow is laying a false scent by suggesting that a Swedish or Austrian model of neutrality might be conceded for Ukraine. It wants the West to get excited about a possible quick fix to Europe’s worst war in decades and thus put pressure on Kyiv to settle for flimsy security guarantees. That’s nothing more than a smokescreen. Ukraine, which in 1994 traded in its nuclear arsenal for what turned out to be worthless security pledges from Russia, the US and Britain, won’t fall for a similar ruse cooked up in the Kremlin kitchens.
Neither an immediate ceasefire, nor the more substantial gain of a stable coexistence deal between Russia and Ukraine, is within grasp. On ceasefires, it is worth remembering — in a week that marks the 11th anniversary of the Syrian uprising — how Moscow and its client dictator Bashar al-Assad manipulated breaks in battle. So-called humanitarian pauses lasted a matter of hours. Many ceasefires were not so much broken as ineffective from the very start. They were concocted to string along the West. Assad, an ardent student of Russian coercive diplomacy, understood that breaking a ceasefire allowed him to impose a new reality on all parties.
A ceasefire in Ukraine may give breathing space to civilians. Chiefly though it buys Russia time to replenish its forces on the ground. By some counts Russia, in the first three weeks of battle, lost 13,800 men. That’s as many as were killed in the two long, bloody Chechen wars. Add to that casualties, desertions, prisoners and soldiers who have been left without their destroyed vehicles, and it is clear that the Russian fighting machine in Ukraine has to slow down while new troops are brought in. Because of the Russian military conscription cycle — the spring intake of 130,000 was supposed to start on April 1 but has been brought forward — its reinforcements will be fresh-faced and perhaps even less competent than the current troops.
Advertisement
For the Ukrainians, a ceasefire is a chance to bring in more Nato anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to gird themselves before the second phase of the war. They too have to train up new recruits for the front line.
Russia is plainly using sham diplomacy to win what it hasn’t achieved on the battlefield. Not so much neutrality, as a kind of subservience to Moscow. The fight so far indicates that this is the last thing that Ukrainians want. They may be exhausted by the frenzy of the past three weeks, they certainly want a kind of peace, but they want peace with honour. And that is currently not available at the negotiating table.
