Ukraine peace negotiations don’t look promising

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Vladimir Putin

It will soon be three years since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine began. A lot has happened in more than 1,000 days of bitter fighting between the two combatants. But despite that casualties have exceeded the one-million mark, peace negotiations seem unrealistic because of the positions advanced by Russia.

Speaking on the prospect of negotiations for the cessation of hostilities, Putin expressed the same demands as before. The Russian leader insisted that any negotiations with Ukraine have to be based on Kyiv recognizing Russian control over large swaths of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, southern Ukraine, and, of course, the valuable Crimean Peninsula.

Under those demands, Ukraine would lose five main provinces (Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, and Crimea) and a big portion of its industrial capacity as these provinces are located in the resources-rich Donbas. In addition to handing over these provinces to Russia, Ukraine would have to accept the role of a permanently neutral state without the ability to join NATO and limit its military forces to only 85,000 troops. Reminiscent of the restrictions the Allies imposed on Germany after World War I with the Treaty of Versailles, these restrictions would essentially make Ukraine a puppet state for Russia.

Clearly, Putin believes that his current approach to the fighting – attritional warfare that seeks to bend the Ukrainian will and defenses by throwing massive amounts of troops and resources into the meatgrinder – is working. On the tactical level, this approach is indeed working. Over the past several months, Russian forces have been making slow but steady progress in certain parts of the contact line, capturing key points on the battlefield.

Related: Ukraine says it busted a Russian spy ring that was gathering information about its F-16s

However, the cost has been sky-high. Since May, the Russian military has lost 200,000 men killed and wounded, and thousands of Russian heavy weapon systems have been destroyed. Although there is no sign that the Kremlin is running out of men, it remains to be seen how long the Russian military will be able to keep at it.

“Kremlin officials have repeatedly invoked the concept of the ‘realities on the ground’ in reference to Russian gains on the battleground, but realities on the ground reflect Ukraine’s demonstrated ability to stop Russian advances and reverse them,” the Institute for the Study of War stated about the Russian positions.

Ukraine has maintained that it won’t negotiate the sovereignty of its territory and that it is seeking to liberate all territories currently under Russian occupation, including the Crimean Peninsula.

Meanwhile, Putin continues to be unremorseful for the full-scale invasion of his neighboring country and the millions killed and wounded. During his annual end-of-the-year televised press conference, Putin said that he should have violated the ceasefire in place between the two countries since 2014 and ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine before 2022.

As a reminder, the war in Ukraine didn’t begin in 2022 but in 2014, when Russian special operations and paramilitary forces illegally invaded and annexed Crimea. Soon after, pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk started an insurgency with the direct and indirect support of Moscow. By 2022, that low-intensity conflict had been going on for eight years.

Now the fighting in Ukraine is over a decade old, but there doesn’t seem to be an immediate end in sight.

Feature Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin during a working meeting with the head of the Ministry of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov. (Kremlin)

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Stavros Atlamazoglou

Greek Army veteran (National service with 575th Marines Battalion and Army HQ). Johns Hopkins University. You will usually find him on the top of a mountain admiring the view and wondering how he got there.

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