How to solve a problem like Ukraine? Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought: one, what may be called the ‘absolutist’ position, held chiefly by the EU, which insists on no territorial compromise and a full defeat for Putin and the Russian state, and the other, more pessimistic perhaps but more pragmatic, which accepts the need for some kind of compromise.
Three-and-a-half years on, the need to end the most horrific war in Europe since 1945 is obvious. Based on the most recent and best US and UK calculations, the war has cost some one million Russian casualties including 250,000 dead, and 400,000 Ukrainian losses including up to 100,000 dead. By that estimate, Russia’s losses are fifteen times those suffered in Afghanistan in the 1980s and ten times higher than in Chechnya. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced, hundreds of billions of dollars of damage has been inflicted and, according to a UN estimate earlier this year, the reconstruction of Ukraine could cost half a trillion dollars. That is if the war ends tomorrow, which of course it won’t.
So how then can it end? The ‘absolutist’ position is that the West must continue to support President Zelensky who is insisting on full territorial withdrawal by Russia, including from Crimea which was annexed by Russia in 2014. The argument is that any compromise will only embolden Putin and lead to renewed aggression later, against the rest of Ukraine and perhaps even further west into Europe proper.
Historical analogies, always dubious at the best of times, have been raised: that Putin is an aggressive, nationalist tyrant hell-bent on restoring Russia to its Soviet glory, pomp and prestige; and that appeasement never works (shades of the 1930’s….etc). Claims have also been made that NATO and the EU will be left naked before a triumphant, energized and emboldened Russia.
There are many problems with this position. First, if the war is to be pursued with no end in sight, how much longer should it continue and at what cost?
Despite the pressure of war, Russia’s economy has proven to be remarkably resilient. There is no indication of an impending economic crisis, though there are warnings of growing deficits and declining oil and gas exports.
Despite massive casualties, the Russian army shows no signs of cracking. Indeed, it has made some progress in eastern Ukraine of late. Russia still holds about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea which was taken back in 2014. There is no indication that the Ukrainian army is going to drive the Russian army out of the eastern territories, let alone retake Crimea – which is sacred soil to every Russia as it was Russian since Catherine the Great.
At the current rate of ‘progress’ from a Western point of view, the war might have to last for many years more until, as Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens might say, “something will turn up” and the European fantasy of Putin being overthrown and Russia becoming a liberal democracy occurs. Until then, there will be the same pointless attrition in eastern Ukraine where the front lines have not shifted that much in years.
Second, a “forever war” in Ukraine will also mean EU states having to continue their escalation in military expenditure which has been ballooning since 2022 already.
The new NATO goal of member states devoting 5% of GDP to Defence means for many EU countries a trebling of military expenditure since 2022. European Union member states spent €325bn on defence in 2024 (1.8% of GDP). Pushing that to 5% implies EU defence spending of over €900bn. Quite simply, this is not sustainable.
The EU remains mired in permanent stagnation and growing debt and an endless ‘migrant’ crisis. The UK is actually worse off than its EU neighbours with debt to GDP at 100%. Besides, considering the woeful inexperience of every EU army and the pacifist instincts of a European populace saturated in comfort and complacency, apathy and avoidance, it is hard to see how a big increase in military spending will frighten Russia, especially since the lack of integrated military structures in the EU means much of the money will be wasted anyway.
Third, the historical analogies do not work. Ukraine is not Munich, and Putin is not Hitler.
Russia is not Nazi Germany, a dynamic economy and technologically advanced war machine which rolled over western Europe in six weeks in 1940. Russia is a clapped-out, post-industrial rust-belt with an economy based on oil, gas and corruption. Its army, though resilient, is hardly the Red Army in 1944-45 which swept across eastern Europe all the way to Berlin. It is a ramshackle rabble, incompetent and spendthrift in human life. In three and a half years of war it has occupied only a sliver of Ukraine beyond what had already been (easily) annexed in 2014.
Putin is no fool. For him, while Ukraine is part of the ancestral lands of ‘Great Russia’ since the Middle Ages, his original goal of annexing the whole country has been quietly abandoned but he cannot, for both personal pride and national self-respect, give up most of what he has taken, certainly not Crimea. He is not so foolish as to think he can grab the Baltic states (EU and NATO) territory next. Even if he wanted to he knows he cannot; the war showed a surprising resilience not just in Ukraine but the West more broadly, and the Russian army has been decimated.
Fourth, there is more here at stake than just Putin or his sclerotic regime. Although the war is hardly popular in Russia, it has general support.
This is not a foreign adventure like Afghanistan in the 1980s which the Soviet people never cared about. Russians genuinely feel that they cannot afford a historic humiliation by the West over Ukraine. Even if Putin died in the morning, his regime is still in place and has the enthusiastic or tacit support of most Russians.
There is no viable opposition worth talking about despite Western media’s fondness for talking with telegenic English speakers in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Indeed, a successor to Putin might be even more intransigent and ferocious.
Therefore, the only sane solution has to be some sort of compromise. Already, Russia is hinting at such, that Ukraine (less the largely ethnically Russian parts of it already held by Russia) can survive as an independent state as long as it does not join NATO.
Perhaps a solution could be an independent Ukraine outside NATO but (eventually) in the EU, with international pledges including by Russia, the EU, NATO and the UN to guarantee post-war Ukraine’s borders. It is important that both sides get some kind of win from this. Obviously Ukraine cannot be abandoned altogether and the West degraded and NATO subverted, but Russia cannot and will not accept total humiliation and defeat in what it regards as an existential struggle for Russian survival and assertion in an international community that treated Russia with disdain during the Cold War and with contempt after it.
Of course, the usual suspects will scream “appeasement” at a compromise, but if they do one can point out one historical fact to them: most wars end messily.
For example, Churchill opposed appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s but in order to destroy him he supported much greater appeasement of Stalin during the war. It is easy for European leaders to applaud Ukraine and shout solidarity, while Ukraine and Russia continue to bleed and the US does most of the military provision for Ukraine. But we need realism here, not virtue-signaling by an EU which continues to show the world on this, as on so many issues, it is not really serious.
Dr Derek O’Flynn