Everyone is fed up with the war in Ukraine, and starting to finally admit is unwinnable. But that has been clear for more than a year now, since the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 summer offensive. 

It’s looking increasingly likely that ceasefire talks could happen soon, but what would that look like? Firstly, it’s a given that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will have to give up some land, and has already floated the idea of areferendum to get a mandate from the people for that. 

But there is also increasing talk about a “West German” solution, where after unification Nato membership covered the western half of the country, but not the eastern. A similar deal could be in store of Ukraine: where the western half of the country is pulled into the Western brotherhood, but the eastern half remains in Russian hands, and disputed. 

That was followed by mounting Ukraine fatigue coupled with the shocking Western reluctance to invest into its arm production industry while Putin put Russia on a war footing. Then there was the failed Swiss peace summit held on June 16-17 and most recently, Zelenskiy failed victory plan trip to New York, where he got none of the main things he asked for.

Hope is not entirely dead, as there is a Ramstein format meeting of Nato members later this month, but it is highly unlikely he will be given what he wants most there – lots of missiles and permission to hit targets inside Russia. Indeed, as our columnist Leonid Ragozin pointed out, the whole misnamed “victory” plan could easily be seen as a Plan B posturing to prepare the ground for starting ceasefire talks as it was clear from the start that US President Joe Biden would never sign off on Zelenskiy shopping list (despite signing off on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s similar list a few weeks earlier). By saying “no” to Zelenskiy’s demands, the Ukrainian president can now blame the West for selling Ukraine out and forcing his hand in talks with Russia. Notably Zelenskiy has already floated the idea of holding a referendum to get permission to give away land in any talks and said he wants the war to end this year.

In the meantime, the constant calls for the West to beef up its support of Ukraine with more weapons are increasingly risible. It has been going on for more than two years and is simply not happening - and won’t, because of the “some, but not enough” supply policy that has been in place since the start of the war. As I wrote the other day, this is because Russia has nukes so Nato won’t let Ukraine win in case, backed into a corner, Putin uses one.

The Financial Times summed up both of these ideas in an op-ed yesterday, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said it out loud in a speech yesterday, “Ukraine can’t win on the battlefield.”

But we have known this from about week three of the war, when there was, to be fair, a brief glimmer of hope that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) would surprise everyone and the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) would implode in a welter of incompetence and corruption. But the Russian army did what it always does: picked itself up, threw more boys into the fight, and started its steamroller tactics, with a dash of increasing competence and low-tech innovation.

And the strategy has never been “victory.” This is one of those words that get bandied about today in international politics, but has become as meaningless as “freedom” and “terrorism.” They are vague catch-alls that allow governments to do what they want and completely ignore the very rules based international order they profess to hold up. Terrorism is a particularly nasty one, as Israel has employed it to justify bombing, strafing and using snipers against women and children in Gaza. But Putin has used it for the same purpose to murder civilians in Ukraine, with the twist that they are “fascists” not “terrorists”, at least at the start of the war. These days even for the Russians the two terms are interchangeable.

Everyone has an anti-terrorist law these days that allows them to suspend all the rights that are supposed to be at the heart of the system and enshrined in the Helsinki Protocols, or Washington Consensus. At least the Moscow consensus is more flexible (but unwritten) and puts the well-being of the state over individual rights that is at the heart of the Washington consensus, which makes killing and beating your own people “justifiable,” if you get what I mean.

But as we have been writing for more than a year, the plan was never to deliver a “victory” in Ukraine. The White House has said over and over again, in its more serious moments in press conferences and not in front of big crowds that the goal is to “put Ukraine in the strongest possible position when the inevitable negotiations start.” The FT uses this construction in its op-ed yesterday too.

If you are following this closely, then Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) was also inching towards a ceasefire deal until the Kursk incursion. Over the last months the use of “victory” has faded somewhat and the new term is of “a just peace.”

What does that mean? It means admitting defeat and giving up land to Russia. The “just” bit means giving up as little as possible.

Crimea is gone. I think everyone accepts that. Even my liberal westernised Russian friends, who were shocked by the annexation in 2014 and are anti-war, said at the time, no, Krim nash (but, the Crimea is ours.) The Donbas is also probably gone, but in the Istanbul peace deal in April 2022, it was suggested that the Donbas could become an autonomous region, but remain nominally part of Ukraine. It will be hard to revive that now, but two years ago the Kremlin reportedly accepted that formula. The real haggling will be over the remaining two of the four regions that Russia annexed last year: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. No one I know in Russia sees these as historically Russian lands. Kherson is on the wrong side of the Dnipro, apart from anything else. They are a pure land grab, so giving them back should, in theory, be possible.

So, if a deal happens what will it look like? There are two key elements here.

Security deals

The first is the easier one: Ukraine will need Western security deals – real security deals, not the fluffed “security assurances” that UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak offered, deals that say the West will come to Ukraine’s *military* defence if Russia attacks again.

This will be very hard to do. In Istanbul, Bankova agreed to give up its Nato ambitions as long as it got bilateral deals from its western partners. And again the Kremlin reportedly accepted this. The deal failed as former UK PM Boris Johnson refused to sign off on even bilateral security deals, which killed the deal.

Personally I think the West will never offer Kyiv bilateral deals, let alone Nato membership. The problem is if Ukraine is in Nato, or a bilateral deal, it will always be tempted to attack, say, Crimea to get it back. While we love and trust Zelenskiy, Ukraine remains a young and unstable democracy and things could change.

Georgia is the classic example. Former President Mikheil Saakashvili stood up to Putin in the week-long war in 2008 and became the poster boy for post-Soviet reform and liberalism in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). But look at Georgia now: it's owned by the increasingly pro-Russia and authoritarian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who has made it crystal clear he does not want to give up power in the October general elections where his Georgian Dream only has 30% support of the voters. We are expecting Minsk-style protests and large-scale street fighting following the October 26 elections.

No one in the West is ready to guarantee the security of a country in transition. And Ukraine has plenty of pretty nasty oligarchs who would love to be in Ivanishvili’s shoes. Indeed, even the war hero Zelenskiy was brought to power thanks to the backing of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, one of Ukraine’s very nastiest oligarchs (who Zelenskiy has since thrown in jail).

Article 5 borders

Another thing that makes me think talks are around the corner is the introduction of the “Article 5 lines” into the conversation. Former Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg just gave a “lunch with the FT” interview, who is only the latest to bring this up, mentioning both Finland and West Germany.

Nato membership, and security deals in Finland’s case until recently, doesn’t necessarily include protecting the whole country. In Germany’s case, when it joined Nato, the Article 5 clause did not cover East Germany. Stoltenberg also pointed out that Finland lost 10% of its territory in its war with the Soviet Union but “gained a stable border.”

The story is similar to Japan, which is not a Nato member, but does have formal security deals (real ones) with the US, UK, Australia, France and Canada, as well as being a “global partner” with Nato. However, these deals do not cover, what the Russians call the Kuril Islands, that the Soviet Union captured in WWII and refuse to give back. Technically Japan and Russia are still at war, no peace treaty was ever signed between them. Japan’s “Article 5 borders” are not the same as its national boundaries and do not include the Kuril Islands.

In theory countries can’t join Nato if they have a disputed border, as obviously as soon as Ukraine signed up it could declare war on Russia the next day and drag all of Nato into the fray thanks to Article 5. Stoltenberg hinted in his interview very heavily that some sort of fudged Article 5 border was being discussed now that would allow the war to end.

Let Russia occupy its captured territory, but refuse to recognise sovereignty? Draw the Article 5 boundary down the Dnipro that cuts the country in two and take everything to the West into Nato, but Article 5 wouldn’t cover anything to the east? It looks like something along these lines is now the plan.

Would Putin go for this deal? There are rumours circulating that the Kremlin and the West are currently in secret talks to try and work out a security deal that Putin will accept. However, if Ukraine gave up its Nato aspiration and accepted bilateral real security deals with an Article 5 line in the middle of the country, I could see Putin going for that.

Consider that this whole war started because Russia was insisting on “legally ironclad guarantees” that Ukraine never join Nato. People are reluctantly coming around to that, despite the pro-Ukraine lobby continuing to argue that Putin’s goal is to completely destroy Ukraine as part of their efforts to get the West to send more weapons. Stoltenberg admitted this last year and (mutedly) admitted it again in his lunch with the FT last week.

And Putin has been hinting heavily all summer that he wants to end the war – but on his terms. As we have been reporting, the Russian economy is flourishing but as we have also been reporting that is about to come to an end as the Russian economy is cooling. The high inflation is starting to be a serious problem and growth in 2025 is set to come to a crashing halt. Of course, Russia still has plenty of money and can keep the war going for several more years, whereas Zelenskiy is quickly running out of men, money and materiel and can’t.

But apart from the Ukraine in Nato security goal, Putin has also already achieved his wider foreign policy goal of switching the world from a unipolar set up dominated by the US hegemony, to his multipolar world where the emerging markets have a lot more say. Israel choosing to totally ignore US pressure on its attacks on Iran is one example. The total ineffectualness of US attempts to pressure Central Asia is another. And the rapid rise and popularity of all the new clubs like BRICS+, G20, the defiance of and growing importance of Africa, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), MERCOSUR and so on is exactly what he wanted.

Now Russia wants to shed the costs of war, lift as many sanctions as it can and get down to the business of building up new trade and security deals with all the friendly countries, many of which agree with his world view. From this point of view, backing Ukraine in the war with Russia has been a geopolitical strategic disaster for America. Just driving Russia into the arms of China has to be a huge strategic blunder and that alone has gone a long way towards ending the post-WWII Pax Americana. For Europe, things are even worse.