A Far More Serious Bid

Patrick Cockburn writes:

On 21 February 1916, the chief of the German general staff Erich von Falkenhayn launched an offensive against the French army at Verdun aiming to force the French “to throw in every man they have. If they do so, the forces of France will bleed to death.”

The German plan was to use their advantage in artillery to fight an attritional war in which their purpose was not to conquer territory, but to inflict unbearable losses on the French. By the end of this terrible battle on 15 December 1916, some 370,000 French and 330,00 German soldiers were dead or wounded, but Von Falkenhayn had failed to break the stalemate on the Western Front.

Over a century later, Russian strategy in the Ukraine war is much the same as Germany’s at Verdun, fighting a meat-grinder battle not to over-run but to bleed Ukraine, whose population is only a fifth of Russia’s. Many Ukrainian units are understrength, exhausted and demoralised as press gangs scour Ukrainian cities for unwilling conscripts. Yet the Russians have not broken through the over-stretched Ukrainian line, while their own casualties are horrendous.

The advantage in modern war has shifted to the defence. The heavy machine gun favoured the defence at Verdun as does the remotely-controlled drone in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Supplying front line soldiers and even rescuing the wounded has become an uncertain and dangerous task. Neither side has as yet broken the stalemate on the battlefield, but the military balance has tipped significantly, though not yet decisively, towards Russia.

President Vladimir Putin lost his chance of fully conquering Ukraine when the surprise Russian invasion on 24 February 2022 suffered humiliating defeat. The Western-backed Ukrainian counter-attack failed in 2023, since then hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have been killed and wounded. The frontline has moved little, though the military, diplomatic and domestic Ukrainian political situation has shifted in Russia’s favour.

The success or failure of the new 28-point US-Russian peace plan, details of which have now been published, depends on how far both sides are convinced that they can never win a complete victory on the battlefield. The proposals mark a far more serious bid to end the war than President Donald Trump’s previous efforts, aiming as they do at a comprehensive peace agreement rather than a ceasefire, something which Russia was never going to accept because Moscow’s main leverage is its ongoing slow-motion military offensive.

US envoys presented the plan to President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday and have asked for a response by Thanksgiving on 27 November in order to present a finalised peace plan to Moscow in early December. Denounced by at least one European leader as a capitulation, the proposed deal looks like a realistic basis for a settlement to end the war. As with Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal, it contains proposals that both sides will find it hard to swallow but will also find difficult to reject because of intense American pressure.

Sticking points for the Ukrainians include the withdrawal of their forces from parts of Donetsk region that they still control, as well as the future reduction of the Ukrainian army to 600,000 personnel from its current level of about one million. Ukraine will not be able to join Nato and Nato troops cannot be stationed in Ukraine, but it will be eligible for EU membership.

The US will guarantee any peace agreement, with punitive measures itemised for any breach in its terms. A joint Russian-American commission will be established to resolve security issues. Ukraine will give up weapons like longer range missiles and there will be reduced US military aid. Overall, the deal appears to envisaged an independent but militarily neutralised Ukraine.

Whatever the precise outcome of diplomatic manoeuvres in the coming weeks, a final peace agreement – and the 28 points should be read in full to be properly understood – will probably look something like this plan as it roughly reflects the balance of power between the combatants. Neither the Europeans not the Ukrainians dare flatly reject the peace terms, fearful as they are of the wrath of Trump, but they will be keen to make sure to get the strongest possible guarantees for Ukraine’s sovereignty.

The plan has less of a shambolic and amateur feel to it than Trump’s earlier efforts to end the war. European powers may complain that they and Ukraine have once again been bypassed by the US and Russia, they have only themselves to blame. It is extraordinary that, nearly four years into the most devastating war in Europe since 1945, they have yet to come up with feasible peace proposals of their own.

Throughout the war, the European powers have consistently punched far below their weight. They mask absence of policy with bellicose rhetoric. Crude Russophobia – leave aside for a moment how far this is justified by Russian misdeeds – has smothered serious debate or discussion in Europe about the war.

Serious European politicians and diplomats, and not only fire-breathing armchair generals and other television talking heads, comically adopt two entirely contrary views of the Russian threat in the course of a single interview. At one moment, we are facing a rerun of 1944/45 with Stalin gobbling up Ukraine and his tanks sweeping on into Central and Western Europe. Yet, only a few sentences later, the same person is arguing that Putin is so militarily weak that he will cave in and admit defeat if we slap on a few more economic sanctions or provide Ukraine with some war-winning long-range missiles able to reach deep inside Russia.

As for the possibility of Russia using its arsenal of nuclear weapons, self-declared experts portray Putin as power-mad and demonic, but somehow he is also comfortingly cautious and rational enough never to consider using them. In reality, the CIA reportedly believed that there was a 50 per cent chance of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons to stem a potential Ukrainian breakthrough in the early years of the war.

Demonisation of all things Russian – far exceeding the animosity towards the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War – has extinguished rational decision making at the highest level. The EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen rather pathetically surrendered to the US on tariffs without a fight because the EU gave absolute priority to keeping Trump supportive of Europe against Putin’s Russia. But the same Russian army that the EU leadership see as a mortal threat has failed to take the city of Kharkiv, 30 kilometres from the Russian frontier, in nearly almost four years of effort.

Given this lack of basic realism, European leaders should not complain too much about them being once again marginalised by the latest US-Russian peace plan. Appreciating rather late in the day that it is serious and they are being left behind, panicky leaders of UK, France, Germany and Italy are to meet today in Johannesburg where they are attending a G-20 summit.

The US-Russian plan will be modified but it establishes a direction of travel towards a final peace agreement because it is rooted in political and military reality that may be unpalatable, but is inescapable if there is to be a peace.

Further Thoughts

For the last couple of years, I have written periodically about corruption in Ukraine without anybody paying much attention. Though stories of Ukrainian leaders raking in a hefty percentage on all contracts have long been rife among foreign diplomats and businessmen, this talk has seldom surfaced in the mainline media – and then only in a truncated form.

A chief reason for this silence was probably that anybody who stressed the corruption issue was likely to be denounced as a proxy of Vladimir Putin, smearing the freedom-loving Ukrainian leadership in their hour of need. But the storm was always likely to burst and this month it did so with a crash when the Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies, over which President Volodymyr Zelensky had tried to gain control in July, revealed that they had uncovered a large-scale corruption scheme in which contractors to the state-owned nuclear energy company had been forced to pay $100 million in kickbacks to get the business from government insiders.

Emboldened by escaping effective closure, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Special Anticorruption Prosecutor bugged the offices of over-confident suspects who freely discussed their crooked money-making schemes on 1,000 hours of tapes. Detailed accounts of this are being published in the Ukrainian and international media for the first time, giving the opposition in parliament a cause to rally around. Zelensky can survive, but only by throwing overboard his close associates.

A big question is what effect this will have on the war, the bloody attritional conflict in which all sides are suffering terrible losses, but Ukraine has a far smaller population from which to draw recruits.

The fear of Ukraine’s Western allies has been that their own public will be less willing to see financial and other aid sent to Ukraine if they believe a high proportion is being stolen. Another possible outcome of the scandal is that Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the front line will desert if they feel that they are risking their lives for highly placed thieves back in Kyiv.

Cockburn is also right that most refugees have no concept of the Welfare State (to which one might add that if they did, then they would stay on the Continent), and that a century of Partition has created three distinct national groups in Ireland: the Unionists, the people of the Republic, and the very different Northern Nationalists.