For The Global Proxy War In Ukraine To End, The US Must First Want It To End

US President Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine just days before the anniversary of the war, Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Russia cannot be defeated in the battlefield no matter what the West does, and the likelihood that China’s Xi Jinping may visit Russia soon tell us one simple thing: this war is not going to end anytime soon. 

Far from ending, these signals of more US support to Ukraine, and China’s overt and covert support to Russia against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), tell us another thing: this is actually a world proxy war, even though technically there are only two countries fighting.

When so many countries in Europe are backing the Ukrainian war effort, and China and Iran, among others, are silently backing Russia, we cannot but call this anything other than a global proxy war.

Let’s also be clear about one thing: this war can end only if the US wills it. As long as it keeps supporting Ukraine to the hilt, this war cannot end.

There is no meeting ground between the minimum terms Russia will accept to end the war, and which is also acceptable on the Ukrainian and NATO side.

Europe is tiring of the war, but cannot say so for fear of US disapproval.

This is why only the US can end the war, just as it was the only power that could have prevented the war.

The US could have prevented the war if it had negotiated a deal with Putin to avoid extending NATO to Ukraine in return for guarantees that the country won’t be invaded or forced to cede territories to Russia.

There is no way Russia would have resisted actual US pressure to avoid an attack on Ukraine if backed by credible guarantees from the West that there would be hell to pay if it did.

But the US, and its military-industrial complex, clearly did not want that and encouraged a maximalist position from Ukraine, which made the war inevitable. 

The gulf thus seems unbridgeable.

The US wants this war to continue — as long as it does not spill over to other regions — for reasons other than that this helps its own arms merchants.

Here are three other reasons why it wants the war to continue.

First, as long as Russia is seen as the major threat, and not China, Europe will remain firmly in the US camp.

This would change once both Germany and Japan start remilitarising themselves, and seek to include Russia as part of a larger European security architecture.

It is significant that France wants India to help end the war, indirectly suggesting that its ally across the Atlantic may not want an early peace. 

Second, if Europe seeks its own type of peace with Russia, the US cannot count on it to back its longer-term strategic containment of China.

Currently, the US gets its way primarily because the Russian invasion has forced smaller countries like Sweden and even Finland to join NATO.

The loudest voices in favour of the war are those small Baltic countries like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that feel threatened by Russia.

These smaller countries can be counted on to counter a future German and French bid to become more independent of the US in foreign policy.

Third, over the longer term, the US probably sees a further splintering of the Russian Federation — as had happened in the west under Boris Yeltsin — as vital to its plans to counter China from the north as well.

A Russian Federation broken up into smaller bits will give the US ample opportunities for a military build-up to the north and west of China. 

This may be the reasoning, but it is seriously flawed.

While Putin may be disliked in Russia for starting a painful and costly war, if the West threatens its own sense of empire, the Russians will back Putin.

Remember, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1942, Stalin mass executions and purges did not exactly make him very popular in his own country.

But he could rally his people to sacrifice lives and save the motherland, which finally turned the war in his favour.

Just as Ukrainians are fighting tooth-and-nail to defend their country, it would be foolish to pretend that Russians won’t do the same if the war comes to their own country.

As Putin told his federal assembly yesterday (21 February): “The elites of the West do not hide their aim to make Russia, as they say outright, suffer a ‘strategic defeat.’ What does this mean? What is it for us? It means that they wish to do away with us once and for all. In other words, to send a local conflict into the phase of a global confrontation… This is precisely how we understand it all, and we will react accordingly. In this case the existence of our country is on the agenda.”

This may be a bid to hold on to his support at home, but one should not doubt that Russians will see a humiliating defeat in Ukraine as unacceptable too.

If the West really wants to see the back of Putin, it should seek a peace with Russia.

This will force Putin to face his own people who will ask why they had to pay such a high economic price for so little gain.

The broad contours for ending the Russia-Ukraine war are not difficult to conceive, provided the US is part of the deal.

First, Russia can be given a guarantee that NATO won’t spread to Ukraine in return for counter-guarantees that Russia will respect Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Second, Russia must vacate all areas outside the Donbas region, and the future of Donbas, which has an ethnic Russian population, can be decided through an internationally-supervised referendum after peace returns.

Third, Russia must allow a part of its frozen assets to be used for Ukraine’s reconstruction.

This burden should not be so overwhelming, like the kind of reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War which inevitably led to the second, for Russia to reject the deal.

Fourth, the West must tacitly agree to let Crimea remain with Russia, provided it makes no further incursions in places like Georgia or other neighbouring countries.

The argument that Russia started the war and thus must vacate the territories it grabbed in order to end it sounds reasonable.

But just as wars do not start for sound reasons, they do not end on the same basis.

Peace sometimes means accepting losses for both the victim and the aggressor.

Turkiye grabbed a piece of Cyprus, but peace reigns without Turkiye ending its occupation of the Turkish parts of Cyprus.

Pakistan started a war in Kashmir in 1948, and China against India in 1962, but in both cases, neither country has withdrawn from occupied territories — but peace still largely prevails.

Unsettled wars can break out into full-fledged wars in future, but it is possible to make peace even while we wait for later generations to sort out territorial and other issues.

Peace is not impossible, but for that to happen, the US must want it badly enough.