Should Ukraine Negotiate with Russia?

Photo: Ukrainian presidential press service via Associated Press During his European tour last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted that “Ukraine can only negotiate from a strong position.”

Magdaline Boutros

Published at 14:50 Updated at 16:14

• Europe

Is it time to negotiate ? The question now follows Volodymyr Zelensky everywhere he goes. The pressure is increasing, but the Ukrainian president is adamant: the time has not yet come to sit down with Russia. Despite the weariness that is gaining ground in some Western capitals and the possibility of Donald Trump returning to power in the United States, the balance of power must first be reversed on the battlefield, he repeats.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz burst the boil a few weeks ago by suggesting that Ukraine find a negotiated solution with Russia “to achieve peace more quickly.” These remarks caused a stir and he has since qualified them by recalling, notably on Friday, that Germany’s support for Ukraine “will not weaken” and that “we will not accept a peace dictated by Russia.”

His statement nevertheless reflected the languor and internal divisions of several Western countries, which have been sinking billions into this war for nearly three years without a victory for Ukraine being within reach. Germany has also decided to reduce its aid to Ukraine by half, to 4 billion euros, by 2025.

Ivan Gomza, a professor of political science at the Kyiv School of Economics in the Ukrainian capital, points out that the war between Russia and Ukraine — like any other war — will inevitably end in negotiations. “But the exact terms of this negotiation are debated until the very end of the war,” he emphasizes. “What we are seeing now is the setting of the stage on which this negotiation will take place.” »

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During his European tour last week, President Zelensky insisted that “Ukraine can only negotiate from a strong position.” To do this, the Kiev strongman has been tirelessly demanding Western powers authorize him to strike deep into Russia with long-range missiles.

A green light that the West is reluctant to give him, but which could indeed change the situation on the battlefield, believes Mikhail Alexseev, professor of political science at San Diego State University in California. “This could be an important step, but it should be accompanied by sending Ukraine more fighter jets, munitions, missiles and long-range systems.”

Mr. Alexseev believes that this increase in military assistance to Ukraine is imperative to bring the country closer to eventual peace. “The only way to start peace negotiations is for the Kremlin to realize that Ukraine has acquired a military capability that Russia cannot counter or that will cause significant and absolutely irreparable damage.”

Russia inflexible

Since the first months of the war, Russia has remained inflexible in its demands. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that a halt to the fighting can only be achieved if Ukraine renounces its plans to join NATO and cedes to Russia the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, in addition to Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.

“No country would accept that,” says Dario Battistella, a professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Bordeaux, France. Especially since Russian troops have not yet fully conquered militarily the four regions that Moscow is demanding. These conditions nevertheless seem to resonate with Donald Trump, who could win the American presidential election in three weeks.

But where kyiv could bend its back is on Crimea, Battistella believes. “Historically speaking, Crimea was Russian from its conquest by Tsarina Catherine [in 1783] until it was ‘given’ to Ukraine by Khrushchev [in 1954]. There is no historical depth between Crimea and Ukraine. So if there is a negotiation, it can be played out on Crimea, but not on the Donbass.”

In the book The Russia-Ukraine War: A Realistic Analysisthat he has just published with the Presses de l’Université de Montréal, Dario Battistella predicts that Ukraine will emerge victorious from this “asymmetric war.” “[…] The refusal of defeat linked to the need for survival of the attacked party allows it to free up unsuspected resources […],” he writes. A victory that will probably come with “a change at the head of Russia,” he adds in an interview.

What a victory ?

But it remains to be defined what will be considered a victory for Ukraine, notes Professor Ivan Gomza, specifying that different visions clash. “For some people, Ukraine must find its borders as they were in 1991 [when it gained independence], which includes Crimea. For others, Ukraine wins if it gets back its territories as they were in 2014 [after the first Russian invasion]. And for still others, Ukraine wins if it survives as a sovereign entity.

But whatever the variations of this perception of victory, it is clear that it continues to mobilize a majority of Ukrainians. According to a public opinion poll conducted by Mikhail Alexseev in collaboration with the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (UNASIS), 88% of the 561 Ukrainians living in territories under kyiv’s control who were surveyed in May and June of this year still believed fully or partially in a victory for their country.

“While this is down from 96% last year, this figure remains incredibly high given the scale of the ongoing destruction in Ukraine, the chronic hardship and stress associated with the war, and the depressing delays in American military aid over the past year,” the professor analyzes.

Another survey of 4,000 Ukrainians conducted by UNASIS in June found that more than 83 percent of respondents rated their country’s independence as a 10 — on a scale of 1 to 10. And nearly 100 percent of respondents rated it above an 8, reports Mikhail Alexseev.

“So I think there is still a huge resilience of Ukrainians and a huge potential [for defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity].”