WHAT ARE THE EXIT CONDITIONS?

Early in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I asked, "Might there still be a compromise in the Tom Clancy style available?"  A year into the trench warfare, the Tom Clancy outcome still looked better than what the peaceniks were contemplating.  "In Command Authority, the Russians gained Crimea and everything east of Mariupol, with relatively little loss of life.  The territorial outcome Mr Gerson advocates is similar, only with the puppet oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk picked over and destitute."

Here is the correlation of forces as of this week, according to Belmont Club.

It's been two years since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and the big news is that there has been no battlefield decision, something few would have predicted in 2022. It's hard to say who is even winning. Putin wants victory more than Biden, a fact reflected by Russia's huge war production of arty ammo and manpower mobilization, but the Kremlin is paying for it by starving its economy and military of innovation investment.

The Ukrainian soldiers are getting fewer, and Russia's military equipment is getting older by the day. Both things are occurring simultaneously. Each is weakening and gaining strength in his own way. On some time spans, it means disadvantage Kyiv. On other time scales, it spells game over Moscow as a world capital. The analyst must reckon which effect is dominant.

One of the challenges in understanding the situation is drawing the right map. The terrain map measures how much land Russia has acquired in exchange for its loss and suggests how much more it must spend in men and treasure to win completely—or in Kyiv's case, regain completely. For the moment, it seems unlikely Russia has the power to seize all of Ukraine to its Western borders, just as it is hard to imagine Ukraine retaking all its Eastern losses. Absent a collapse on either side, the division line may settle in between.

But you can draw another map that depicts the gains Kyiv and Moscow have made in the world in terms of supporters. The war is being fought on a geopolitical scale, too. Winning and losing are measured in terms of the world's balance of power. Here, the picture is more definite. The global, rule-based world has been shattered. People have described our current state as "the era of competition." But those are weasel words. It is more direct to say that we're in the middle of Cold War 2.

The optimism that some people held last fall, as summarized by Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, has long since passed.

Ukraine’s war aim has always been maximalist: not simply pushing Russian troops to the pre-2022 invasion status quo but retaking Crimea. I’m still not sure that’s possible without substantially more Western participation but they’re certainly making it very costly for Russia to hold the territory.

NATO countries, and the United States in particular, have very slowly ratcheted up the deadliness and range of weapons they are willing to supply Ukraine. They’ve just taken possession of US M-1 Abrams tanks and President Biden has promised ATACMS missiles, which have a range upwards of 200 miles. While maddeningly slow from the Ukrainian perspective, it makes sense given Western fears of escalation. It’s not clear what Putin’s “red line” is and at what point he’ll go into desperation mode.

Despite his War College background, he shied away from "the only winning move is not to play," which subsequent events have suggested is where we find ourselves as the spring mud season approaches.  "Ukraine Faces Growing Calls From US to Cede Land to Russia."

Palestinians doing what Palestinians do pushed Ukraine out of the center ring, and the war of attrition Lionel Shriver documented wasn't compelling any more.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive last summer was a damp squib. For months on end, every inch of liberated territory has been gained through huge loss of life and munitions. The Russians are dug in, their confiscated eastern regions heavily fortified. The battle lines having barely moved for months, the conflict’s visuals now recollect the meat-grinding Western Front of World War One. Our plot has stalled. This is the middle bit of a novel where if nothing appreciable happens for long enough the reader is apt to put the book down.

For us observers, this is supposed to be a David and Goliath story. But David and Goliath is a crap story if the giant wins. The big man pummels the little man? Predictable, a bit disheartening and not really a story at all, just the way the world works. Besides, a western audience wants to see the good guy win, both to mete out justice and to enjoy victory by proxy. Sophisticated literature often resolves with more complexity — with bitterness, irony or tragedy — but that’s one reason literary fiction is less popular than the commercial kind. Most people prefer happy endings. Any bestselling thriller writer would subject the Ukrainians to plenty of nail-biting adversity, but Zelensky would finally triumph, reclaiming all his nation’s occupied territory, including Crimea.

Leave the Creative Writing stuff aside, even stuff in the school of Tom Clancy continues to sell well, and the ending in eastern Ukraine, if not happy, was not as messy as what is now transpiring.  Mr Shriver continues,

I say this with a heavy heart: if the writing is on the wall — if a negotiated settlement that cedes captured territory to Putin looks inevitable — maybe it’s time to urge the Zelensky government to enter talks to bring this depressing war to its depressing conclusion. Dragging out an entrenched stalemate merely racks up a higher body count and destroys more Ukrainian homes and infrastructure to no purpose. Sitting back and giving Ukrainians just enough weaponry to keep fighting to the last man and woman, only for the country to finally end up where we always knew it would, is not just immoral. It’s murder.

Two years in, and now the Russians hoisting their flags over what's left of Avdiivka smells like victory?  "In 2024, Ukraine will become a de facto partitioned country as the bloody stalemate drags on and the relatively static front line calcifies."  When you consider that the Tom Clancy solution looks positively utopian compared with all the machinations, from the Obama era color revolution to whatever influence peddling either Donald Trump or the Biden family or both engaged in, what will the partition be?  Pajamas Media's Athena Thorne would like something resembling an end to the trench warfare.

I confess that the idea of that horrific war finally ending — even if it means someone "lost" — is thrilling to me. And in truth, Ukraine began to lose its eastern region to Russia under Obama's presidency. Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 and no one did anything about it. So when the weakest president in U.S. history took office in January 2021, Putin naturally began teeing up his next move. Who wouldn't?

He couldn't have been any more obvious about what he was doing, mobilizing and stationing troops along the border — and once again, no one did anything about it. Looking back, it seems eastern Ukraine was already lost at that point. The subsequent fighting has been but a gory formality. In the end, Russia is bigger and has more resources to throw at this thing.

That was the premise of Command Authority as well, wasn't it?

No one wants to lose a war, but history happens. If bigger nations won't join the Ukrainian War (and let's pray they don't, because world wars are the pits), then the world owes it to them to negotiate an end to the bloodshed. Eastern Ukraine has been part of Russia before, and Russia will no doubt continue to entrench itself and "normalize" its conquered lands to date. Maybe it's time to call it a draw and cut everyone's losses. Let's call on both sides to stop the damned fighting. An uneasy Russia-Ukraine fault line is nothing new.

Anatol Lieven, a foreign policy maven who is often at odds with the National Greatness conservatives, is thinking along similar lines, with Ukrainians wondering whether staying the course is worth it, no matter who holds the ruins of Avdiivka or Voroshilovgrad, er, Luhansk.

[F]or Ukraine to stand on the defensive — even if it does so successfully — implies something that Western analysts and many Ukrainians are beginning to recognize, though few have as yet been willing to state this publicly: that if Ukraine remains indefinitely on the defensive, then the areas of Ukraine occupied by Russia will remain in Russian hands — not legally, of course, but de facto.

As I found while visiting Ukraine, even before the failure of last year’s offensive, a sizeable minority of Ukrainians were prepared in private to say that Ukraine should compromise with Russia and accept the loss of these territories, if the alternative was years of war and hundreds of thousands more deaths with no realistic prospect that these sacrifices would bring success. According to opinion polls, the defeat of the Ukrainian offensive has led to a significant increase in this sentiment.

The Ukrainian government and much of the establishment has however nailed itself to the principle that the only acceptable outcome is complete Russian withdrawal. Changing this position will be exceptionally painful and difficult; and one way of understanding the present political turmoil in Kyiv is that all the different figures and groups are trying to position themselves so as to throw the blame for eventual compromise with Russia on someone else.

The danger for Ukraine is that given the fraying of U.S. aid, the growing military odds in favor of Russia and the tensions reflected by Zaluzhny’s dismissal, if Kyiv waits too long to seek a compromise it may have nothing left to bargain with — not just because of developments on the battlefield, but because of the collapse of political unity within Ukraine.

That's true whether or not politicians in Europe and the United States are being taken to task for caring more about the borderlands' borders than they are about their own borders.

The struggle in the U.S. Congress — and particularly the role of former President Trump and his supporters in blocking a compromise — of course reflects political maneuvering as part of the U.S. presidential election campaign. However, the Republican stance also reflects a genuine feeling that extends across much of Europe and helps power the rise of the populist Right there: that the real threat to the security and stability of Western societies comes from domestic dysfunction driven in part by illegal migration; and that what happens in Ukraine is irrelevant to these issues.

Whether the western, more Catholic bits of Ukraine west of the Dnieper will eventually become a separate state, part of the European Union, and potentially part of a future Atlantic Alliance remains to be seen.