Ukraine’s modified compromise formula

The old stance of Ukraine was there can be no peace deal with Russia unless every inch of Russian-occupied Ukraine is vacated. The new stance as articulated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to SkyNews is that NATO should invite Ukraine to join the military alliance because this would defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war goal of preventing Ukraine from joining the Western military alliance.

The twist in the Ukrainian position is that Russia will remain in control of the Ukrainian territory it now occupies and this can be resolved through diplomacy after the end of the war. There is indeed much strategic thinking behind the move. It is not however clear that it would work.

Russia should be satisfied with the fact that it will retain control over the eastern parts, including Crimea which it had occupied in 2014, and which has Russian-speaking people. Zelensky feels that the invitation to join NATO would be sufficient to end the war.

NATO foreign ministers who meet in Brussels on December 3 and 4 may not agree to the plan. It could lead to several changes in the balance of power between Europe and Russia. It would imply that NATO would be indirectly involved in the talks with Russia, and Ukraine is only a front.

This takes the confrontation to a different level, elevating it from one between Ukraine and Russia to one between NATO – potentially – and Russia. It is a risk that NATO may not want to take.

The trigger for the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was indeed the possibility of Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. It was only an option, and a possible one at that. Russia wanted to pre-empt it through its attack on Ukraine. And NATO was deterred.

The danger that NATO wanted to avoid was that if Ukraine became a member of NATO, then it would be a war between NATO and Russia, and all the members of the NATO, which includes most of the major European countries apart from the United States and Turkey, would have been dragged into the conflict. That is why NATO had deferred the idea of offering membership to Ukraine. Ukraine is on the waiting list as it were for the membership of the European Union (EU).

In his letter to NATO, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote, “The invitation should not be seen as an escalation. On the contrary, with a clear understanding that Ukraine’s membership in NATO is inevitable, Russia will lose one of its main arguments for continuing this unjustified war.” And he goes on to say, “I urge you to endorse the decision to invite Ukraine to join the Alliance as one of the outcomes of the NATO Foreign Ministerial Meeting on December 3-4, 2024.” There is both a sense of urgency and a sense of desperateness in the tone of the letter. It reflects the mood in the Ukrainian leadership as they seem to find to sustain the war with Russia.

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States could be a major factor in the calculation as well. There is speculation that Trump would like to make a peace deal with Russia and Putin, if necessary over the heads of Ukraine and European members of NATO. Many conservative presidents of the United States, including Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had felt that Europe should bear a greater financial burden for the upkeep of the military alliance. That is most likely to crop up once Trump officially takes over as president of the US on January 20, 2025. And it will have its impact on the Western support for Ukraine.