Is the Ukrainian army on the verge of collapse, depriving the Zelensky government of the only tool still capable of resisting the Russian offensive? Read the long report published on Saturday January 4 in the pages of Washington Postwe would be tempted to answer in the affirmative. At the same time, this army has had many surprises in store since the Russian intervention three years ago.
This time, however, Ukrainian military power is close to catastrophe. The dozens of soldiers and officers interviewed by journalists paint a very dark picture of the situation. The army is at the end of its rope and it is retreating on several fronts; desertions are numerous, and resistance to conscription is increasing; the weapons are arriving in dribs and drabs, but, even more serious, it is the fighters who are missing. Voices are being raised to criticize the government’s policies and to demand negotiation with Russia.
We are still far from the mutinies of Allied soldiers in 1917 in the trenches of northern France, but despair is setting in in the face of the Russian mass. “We kill a Russian, and it’s as if two others appeared in his place,” said a soldier. “Let’s be honest: the current situation has gotten worse since the large-scale invasion began,” said another. Some soldiers said they had also accepted the reality of declining Western weapons aid, and that decline was likely to continue, wrote journalists who surveyed several major military units.
Under these conditions, the objective of ensuring that Ukraine arrives at the negotiating table in a “position of strength”, as kyiv and the West proclaim, seems trivial. And if the reality principle applies to the battlefield, it must also apply to diplomacy. On this side, Ukraine also loses.
After maintaining a hard line on the return of all territories conquered since 2014, President Volodymyr Zelensky is now talking about an agreement for immediate peace and a diplomatic process to recover the occupied territories. The model closely resembles the situation in Cyprus, where the Turks have illegally occupied the north of the island since… 1974, while pretending to discuss, without this shocking NATO members.
In return, the Ukrainian president is asking for security guarantees in the form of NATO membership or, failing that, a deployment of Western troops on Ukrainian territory. In both cases, kyiv faces opposition from both Moscow and Washington. Just like Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin before him, Vladimir Putin opposes any membership in NATO. He even rejects Donald Trump’s informal proposal for a 20-year moratorium on this integration. He wants a neutral Ukraine. In Washington, under Biden, and in Europe, minds are still divided on this membership. As for deploying peacekeeping troops on the ground, there still needs to be peace and, above all, countries ready to embark on this adventure. There are no crowds knocking at the door.
-And the arrival of Donald Trump at the White House on January 20 will change the situation in one way or another. Either he maintains the current position of the Biden government, which would be surprising, or he launches an initiative whose effect will have nothing to please the Ukrainians. It is partly contained in a document of around twenty pages published last April by General Keith Kellogg on behalf of a think tank American. Now Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, the general places the conflict in context and offers some ideas for finding a settlement.
Kellogg doesn’t beat around the bush. The war between Russia and Ukraine has taken on a complex dimension over time, and the Biden government bears a heavy responsibility. “The fact that Biden prefers to use the Ukrainian conflict as a proxy war to harm Russia rather than helping Ukraine win the war explains […] why the United States has done nothing to promote a ceasefire or peace agreement, he writes. In some cases, the United States and some of its European allies have blocked attempts to end the war or pause hostilities. »
From then on, the Trump government will have to untangle this tangle and will have to repair relations with Russia in order to try to bring the two parties to the negotiating table. If the Kellogg plan requires significant concessions from the Ukrainians, it does not spare the Russians and increases the pressure on Moscow by playing on its economic, commercial and diplomatic vulnerabilities.
The big difference from the current Western position is that this plan recognizes that the war cannot be won by Ukraine and that negotiation is the only possible outcome. Admitting reality is already taking a step towards a solution.
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