Update on Ukraine - Russia

Morning Report

From

The Stand Up America US Foundation

3.1.2023

Western Leaders Privately Admit Ukraine Can't Win the War

Western leaders privately told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine cannot win the war against Russia and should begin peace talks with Moscow this year in exchange for closer ties with NATO. 

Joe Lauria, Consortium News (leading US investigative news site), 25 Feb 2023

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/02/25/western-leaders-privately-say-ukraine-cant-win-the-war/

 The private communications are at odds with public statements from Western leaders who routinely say they will continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes until it achieves victory on the battlefield.  The Wall Street Journal, which reported on the private remarks to Zelenksy, said:

“The public rhetoric masks deepening private doubts among politicians in the U.K., France, and Germany that Ukraine will be able to expel the Russians from eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which Russia has controlled since 2014, and a belief that the West can only help sustain the war effort for so long, especially if the conflict settles into a stalemate, officials from the three countries say.

‘We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? IA senior French official said that Ukraine's losses would become unbearable if the war lasted long enough with this intensity.

‘And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.’

The Journal reported that French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Zelensky at an Élysée Palace dinner earlier this month that he must consider peace talks with Moscow.

According to its source, the newspaper quoted Macron as telling Zelensky, “even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II.” Macron told Zelensky “he had been a great war leader, but that he would eventually have to shift into political statesmanship and make difficult decisions,” the newspaper reported.   

 A Return to Realism

At the Munich Security Conference last week, Gen. Petr Pavel, the Czech Republic’s president-elect, and a former NATO commander, said: “We may end up in a situation where liberating some parts of Ukrainian territory may deliver more loss of lives than will be bearable by society. … There might be a point when Ukrainians can start thinking about another outcome.”

Even as a NATO commander, Pavel was a realist regarding Russia. During controversial NATO war games with 31,000 troops on Russia’s borders in 2016 — the first time in 75 years that German troops had retraced the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union — Pavel dismissed hype about a Russian threat to NATO. 

 Pavel, who was chairman of NATO’s military committee then, told a Brussels press conference, “It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad-scale Russian aggression because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing.”  

The German foreign minister at the time, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also embraced realism towards Russia, saying: “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering. Whoever believes a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”

 Instead of an aggressive NATO stance towards Russia that could backfire, Steinmeier called for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he said, saying it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”  Under U.S. leadership, NATO did not follow that advice, as it continued to deploy more troops to Eastern Europe and arm and train Ukraine (under cover of pretending to back the Minsk Accords).

Before it intervened in Ukraine, Russia cited NATO’s eastward expansion, the deployment of missiles in Romania and Poland, war games near its borders, and the arming of Ukraine as red lines that the West had crossed.  After a year of the war, Western leaders appear to be turning to a realist approach. For instance, Macron dismissed any talk of regime change in Moscow at the Munich Security Conference. 

 No US Reaction

Washington has not commented on the Journal ‘s story about the peace talks-for-arms proposal. Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed with The Washington Post arming Ukraine post-war, but he did not say that Ukraine should seek peace talks. “We have to be thinking — and we are — about what the postwar future looks like to ensure that we have security and stability for Ukrainians and security and stability in Europe,” Blinken told the conference in Munich.

The proposal to bring Ukraine even closer to NATO than it already is, with greater access to weapons after the war, should be on the agenda at NATO’s annual meeting in July, said Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, at the Munich conference. “The NATO summit must produce a clear offer to Ukraine, also to give Zelensky a political win that he can present at home as an incentive for negotiations,” a British official told the Journal.  The newspaper reported that the deal with NATO would not include membership with its Article 5 protection. “We would like to have security guarantees on the path to NATO,” Zelensky told a press conference on Friday.

 In the meantime, Macron, according to the WSJ report, said that Ukraine should press forward with a military offensive to regain territory to push Moscow to the peace table. 

There has yet to be a reaction from Moscow about the proposal. Political analyst Alexander Mercouris, in his video report on Saturday, said Russia would likely be incentivized to continue fighting rather than enter peace talks with the knowledge that NATO would heavily arm Ukraine after the war.   

“The Russians are never going to agree with something like this,” Mercouris said. 

“They must be saying to themselves that instead of agreeing to this plan, it makes more sense … to continue this war because one of [Russia’s] objectives is the total demilitarization of Ukraine.” What the Western powers are proposing is the opposite, he said. Given that Russia considers it is winning and “there seems to be a general acknowledgment amongst Western governments that Ukraine can’t win this war, …where is the incentive for … Russia to even consider this plan?”

For Moscow, Mercouris said, Ukraine’s demilitarization is an “absolute, existential matter.”  If Ukraine is going to get even more advanced weapons from NATO after the war as opposed to what it would get “while the war is still underway, then it makes even less sense” for Russia “to stop the war and agree to this plan.” Russia is facing a “weakening adversary now,” Mercouris said, and Moscow prefers to face a “strengthened adversary later.”  

 Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional work as a  The New York Times stringer.