Peace initiatives through war in Ukraine

Russia and Ukraine have been expressing the desire to end the war, and they emphasised the importance of peace. But each side has intensified its war efforts. Ukraine has crossed over into Russia in the Kursk region, and it has intensified its bombing on the Russian side.

The latest attack resulted in an explosion with the intensity of an earthquake. On the other hand, Russia has been consistently bombarding the civilian energy facilities, including transmission lines, in Ukraine with the intent to leave parts of Ukraine without energy supply. The apparent logic behind the stepping up of hostilities is that each side wants to be in a stronger position when negotiations open.

This may seem a bizarre situation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced that his ‘victory plan” is ready. He does not mean that Ukraine has scored a military victory over Russia. What he means is that he has the peace plan, the negotiating points are ready from the Ukrainian side. He believes that Russia will have to accept the Ukrainian conditions for peace. He seems to believe that Russia cannot persist with the war it had started in February 2022.

This does not make much sense unless there is something that has been moving rapidly towards peace behind the scenes. While declaring their determination to fight, Ukraine and Russia are getting ready to lay down arms on some pretext or the other, and each side would like to claim that the peace is made on its own terms.

The facts are rather bare. Russia has attacked Ukraine in February 2024 because Ukraine was preparing to enter NATO, the West’s military alliance forged during the Cold War. Russia had been opposed to Ukraine gaining membership of NATO. The initial military move of Russia was to incorporate the smaller eastern Ukrainian republicans with a majority of Russian speakers into the Russian Federation.

Meanwhile, Russian troops had also tried to overrun the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and replace the Zelensky government. Moscow did not succeed in this plan. As a matter of fact, Russia faced a veritable military setback. Ever since, the war has become a stalemate. The fortunes have fluctuated quite wildly. From the point when Russia seemed a victor to Ukraine’s stubborn resistance to the latest development when Ukraine began to hit deep into Russia with the help of missiles supplied by the United States.

It is not the case that Ukraine would ever manage to succeed in invading Russia and impose a victor’s peace on Moscow. This was a mere show of strength, a dangerous and costly act of muscle-flexing. The Russians have been forced to defend the parts of Ukraine they have occupied. And they are still trying to wreck the Ukrainian ability to fight the war. They have not succeeded so far.

Surprisingly, the Zelensky ‘victory plan’ or peace plan envisages the Ukrainian territory in the post-Soviet phase of 1991, which would include Crimea that Russia had occupied in 2014. It would be a tough agenda to impose on Russia unless it has been decisively defeated on the war front. It does appear that Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin are waging a propaganda war in parallel to the military operations.

Ukraine and its friends in the West want to have a second Ukraine conference that Switzerland had convened a few months ago. Russia was not invited to the first conference. Ukraine said that it would have no objection to Russia attending the second peace conference in Switzerland. Even as the war rages on, the two sides are likely to attend peace conferences to arrive at an acceptable compromise. This is in some ways what had happened in the North Vietnam-United States peace talks which culminated in the unification of Vietnam and withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. This was in the 1970s. Can a similar process be re-enacted 50 years later is the question.