The deal with Russia that Ukrainians would support
Polls indicate what Ukrainians would give up - and what they won't.
Shortly after Russia’s war on Ukraine began, I texted a friend from Vinnitsya about what I thought the likely endgame would be:
There is no way [Putin] can hold onto the entire country, even in the medium term. Not even half of it. My belief has always been that he probably just wants to annex the SE, including the breakaway republics and all of the port cities in Kherson, creating a land bridge to Crimea…My theory is that Putin has deliberately bitten off more than he can chew so that when he ends up at the bargainin table and “just” annexes the SE (which he basically already has) the IC [international community] will see this as an acceptable outcome.
Two years later this seems to me basically correct. Contrary to the nightmare scenarios floated by hawks, Russia has never come close to controlling the entire country, and barring some radical new developments it never will. Instead, the map looks like this, with Russian-controlled regions in red:
Russia is still trying to press west and put cities like Kharkiv in jeopardy, but at this point I think their primary goal is clear: control of the route to Crimea. If so, this means that they are arguably overextended in the southeast in both Kherson (where their control extends past Crimea) and Zaporizhizhia (where they’ve advanced all the way to the Dnipro River). To keep the land bridge, all they really need (in theory) is to maintain control of the port cities along the Azov Sea — places like Mariupol and Berdiansk.
With that in mind, let’s look at some polling from the region conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology:
In both cases a significant majority of respondents who voiced an opinion on the matter were willing to concede territory in exchange for security guarantees. Crucially, however, a plurality-and-near-majority were willing to give up Donbas and Crimea without any security guarantees. To give up all currently occupied territories, meanwhile, a significant number of Ukrainians would expect security guarantees, including potential NATO membership.
Considering what a plausible deal would look like, then, I would like to make three points:
Hawk fantasies aside, NATO will almost certainly remain a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. This seems particularly true under incumbent President Trump given his ambivalent posture towards NATO.
Conceding all currently occupied territories would be a hard sell even with NATO membership; without it I simply don’t think it gets majoritarian support.
On the other hand, it seems fairly unlikely to me that Russia would at this point settle for control of Donbas and Crimea, even with security guarantees off the table. I doubt it will settle for anything short of the land bridge.
The solution, then — the plausible one, and the one that a majority of Ukrainians are likely to find acceptable — seems straightforward to me. US officials should be honest with Zelensky and let him know that NATO membership will not be on the table in negotiations. They should encourage him to sue for peace per the express wishes of Ukrainians and to offer Crimea and Donbas as an opening bid, with a seaside corridor connecting the two if necessary. This solution is a compromise between the two territorial concession options above, providing Russia with the access it covets while conceding as little of the south as possible, and in particularly taking cities like Kherson, Zaproizhia, and Kharkiv out of jeopardy. To sweeten the pot, US officials should propose basic security guarantees through the United Nations rather than through NATO.
The US should not force the Ukrainian government to accept any settlement it is unwilling to accept. By admitting that NATO membership is off the table while working through the UN to provide an alternative security solution, however, the US can still play a constructive role in bringing this war to an end.
Thanks for reading! My blog is supported entirely by readers like you. To receive new posts and support my work, why not subscribe?
Refer enough friends to this site and you can read paywalled content for free!
And if you liked this post, why not share it?