ហេតុអ្វីបានជាគ្មាននរណាម្នាក់អាចបញ្ចប់សង្គ្រាមនៅអ៊ុយក្រែនបាន?
It’s in everyone’s interest to stop the fighting. That’s still not enough.
It’s been over a year since I wrote anything lengthy about the war in Ukraine, and I regret the omission. Other events have captured my attention, alas, even though the conflict is a continuing tragedy and is still casting a significant shadow over events elsewhere. Our fearless leader Ravi Agrawal’s recent account of his visit brought my attention back and led me to reflect on where the conflict is today and what might be done to bring it to an end after nearly five years.
Anyone who approaches this topic should do so with humility, for no one has gotten everything right. I didn’t think Russian President Vladimir Putin would invade in 2022, for example, because I thought such a step would be a blunder and leave Russia worse off in the long run. I still think I was right about that, but obviously wrong about Putin’s calculations. Since then, legions of policymakers and pundits have repeatedly failed to see where things were going, ping-ponging between unrealistic optimism and doom-and-gloom defeatism. And the people in charge are no better: Putin miscalculated in thinking the war would be over in a few days, the Biden administration misjudged the effectiveness of sanctions, and Ukraine’s leaders erred when they launched a disastrous counteroffensive in the summer of 2023. U.S. President Donald Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he didn’t “have the cards” and pressed him to cut an unfavorable deal, only to be surprised when a combination of European support and Ukrainian innovation and heroism turned the tide back temporarily. But as Ravi noted, the fortunes of war seem to be shifting back toward Moscow as winter approaches. Wise readers will therefore take everyone’s analysis and advice with a degree of skepticism—including mine.
Ukraine and Russia remain in a “hurting stalemate,” where neither side can impose its will on the other and both continue to suffer significant losses. That’s especially tough for Ukraine given its smaller size, population, and military-industrial base, but external support and the heightened resolve that comes from defending one’s own soil have kept Kyiv in the fight for longer than many observers expected. The conflict also illustrates the classic tendency for long wars to escalate both vertically and horizontally, as each side has developed new and more lethal weapons, gradually expanded their target sets, and brought third parties into the fight both directly (e.g., the North Korean troops fighting with Russia) and indirectly (e.g., the financial and intelligence support provided to Ukraine by the United States and EU). Russia’s gray-zone attacks on Europe, a not-very-subtle effort to convince it to end support for Ukraine, are yet another form of escalation.
At this point, however, it is in nearly everyone’s interest to end the war. The longer it continues, the more damage Ukraine will suffer and the worse its long-term prospects (including any hopes of someday regaining its lost territory) will be. Russia is suffering mightily as well and will end the war weaker and more dependent on China. The cost of supporting Ukraine is weighing down European economies at a time when they can ill afford it and giving hard-right parties like Germany’s Alternative for Germany another club with which to bash the establishment. And as Trump’s demands that Ukraine cease attacking Russia’s refining capacity reveal, the war is also exacerbating fuel shortages around the world and imposing economic and political costs on the United States. The only actors I can see who may be benefiting from prolonging the war are China (because the conflict distracts Europe and the United States and keeps them at odds with Russia) and those far-right populists who would lose a talking point if the conflict ended.
Yet the war grinds on, and no one has been able to establish an effective process to resolve the conflicting interests that led to the war, help fashion terms that both sides would accept, or assemble the combination of carrots and sticks that might nudge them toward a deal. The key questions, therefore, are 1) who might be able to mediate effectively, and 2) what sort of settlement is feasible at this point?
In theory, the United States is the major power with the greatest potential leverage and capacity to mediate the process. It can offer economic carrots of various kinds (such as reconstruction aid for Ukraine and the lifting of sanctions on Russia) and could either provide or withhold military assistance to Ukraine as necessary to advance a bargain. Unfortunately, it has repeatedly failed to use its position effectively. Instead of acting like a responsible third party and pushing both sides to resolve the conflict, it has alternatively favored one side or the other and never pushed both sides simultaneously in an effort to secure a deal. In short, the United States has never behaved like a serious great power that understood what its primary interest—which is ending the war—was.
Like his predecessors, former President Joe Biden failed to realize that open-ended NATO expansion was eventually going to provoke a major clash with Russia. Even after the Maidan uprising, Russia’s seizure of Crimea, and the prolonged low-level war in the Donbas, he kept approaching what former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Bill Burns called “the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” That red line was Ukrainian membership in NATO. By accelerating efforts to bring Ukraine into the Western security orbit (even if formal NATO membership remained years away), Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, unwittingly created the conditions that would eventually lead Putin to authorize an illegal invasion. One can argue that Russia should not have a veto on what other sovereign countries do and that any country should be free to align with whomever it wants, but exercising that freedom is not always wise.
Once Russia launched its preventive war, Biden and company were correct to use U.S. power—in the form of sanctions and extensive military aid—to help Ukraine defend itself, while at the same time trying to avoid undesirable escalation. But they failed to support third-party efforts to end the conflict, never took Ukraine’s eventual entry into NATO off the table, and openly backed Ukraine’s maximalist war aims, such as Kyiv’s understandable but almost certainly unachievable goal of regaining all its lost territory, including Crimea. Again, the issue was not one of right or wrong—which was on Ukraine’s side—but whether such goals could be achieved at acceptable cost and risk.
Since regaining the presidency in 2025, Trump has made the opposite error, putting pressure on Kyiv to cut a deal and for the most part giving Russia a free pass. That error was compounded by the diplomatic incompetence of amateur envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who seemed to think that dangling a few business deals in front of Putin was enough to get him to end the war. By giving Russia every reason to believe that its superior size would eventually prevail, Trump’s approach never had the slightest chance of leading to peace, let alone within “24 hours,” as he repeatedly claimed in the 2024 campaign.
Is there a third way? Yes, at least in theory. Instead of alternatively favoring one side or the other, the United States could act like a true third-party mediator and use its good offices and leverage to press both sides to settle. To put pressure on Russia, Washington should renew military support for Ukraine and help it defend itself against Russia’s increasingly damaging missile attacks. But it also needs to push Ukraine to accept less than it wants, and that means renewed U.S. support should be conditional on Kyiv reducing its own demands.
As for the broad terms, I continue to believe that Ukraine will not be able to regain Crimea or most of the Donbas either on the battlefield or at the conference table, and that future membership in NATO must be taken off the table permanently. EU membership should still be permissible, and Ukraine must be permitted military forces adequate to deter any future Russian attempt to alter the status quo. The precise line of new borders remains to be negotiated, and Russia would have to accept Ukraine’s ability to trade with others, to attract foreign investment from any source, and to acquire weapons from outside powers if it wishes, provided that such measures do not amount to it becoming a de facto ally of another country or military pact.
Mind you, I’m not pleased by this prospect, and I’m not optimistic it can be achieved. The previous paragraph is no more than a sketch of the outlines of a possible deal, and there are other details that would have to be worked out for this to succeed. For a thoughtful and well-informed discussion of how such an effort might be structured and conducted, I recommend the recent Foreign Affairs article by Matt Waldman and Samuel Charap.
Unfortunately, I see no sign that anyone in the Trump administration is capable of handling a serious peace discussion, and the Potemkin “peace deals” reached in Gaza, with Iran, or in some other conflicts do not inspire confidence. U.S. leverage has been reduced by the war in Iran, the shortage of U.S. interceptors and other key weapons, and the growing federal deficit. Even if Trump genuinely wanted to broker a peace and assigned competent people to the task, it’s not clear he has the cards.
If that is the case, then Ravi’s worrisome conclusion is likely correct. The war will continue, Ukraine’s population will continue to suffer, nobody is going to step up and push them to make peace, and both countries are going to end up worse off in the long run. Like most wars, each would be better off today if it had never been fought.
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