Calls for a Negotiated Ceasefire in Ukraine Are a Trap

I t’s surely just a coincidence that calls for a Western-led negotiated ceasefire in Ukraine amid Russia’s war of conquest are ramping up just as Ukrainian forces are breaking through Moscow’s defensive lines. There’s probably nothing of significance to the fact that Russia’s most reliable cat’s-paws are the loudest voices calling for peace now, before it’s too late. Suddenly, pacifism is breaking out all over.

It may be tempting to entertain these overtures as though they were made in good faith. But they’re not. To pursue a settlement now would be to hand Moscow one of its favorite geopolitical tools: a frozen conflict.

It is absurd to even entertain the notion that mutually acceptable terms for a negotiated ceasefire presently exist. Those terms would be determined by conditions on the battlefield, and conditions on the battlefield are too fluid for either side of the war to trade away its perceived advantages. What Moscow’s allies are retailing is a talking point aimed at naïve, peace-loving Westerners. If the past is prologue, the Kremlin will find a, let’s say, useful audience for this message. But the consequences for the West if the conflict was frozen today would be more undesirable than the war itself.

Indeed, the ongoing war in Ukraine is what the frozen-conflict model is designed to produce. In the wake of Russia’s overt invasion of Crimea and its concomitant proxy campaign in Donbas in 2014, the West conceded to the farcical Minsk process establishing a frozen conflict in Ukraine. The original Minsk accord wasn’t worth the paper it was written on; it was repeatedly violated and was functionally defunct roughly a month after it was established. A successor accord — Minsk II — was no better; it, too, was never closely observed. If it had any value, that value was exclusive to Moscow, which used the agreement as a diplomatic fig leaf to establish itself as an ostensibly neutral observer of the conflict in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the fighting never stopped. The war remained simmering, with constant fire exchanged across the so-called “line of contact” between Kyiv’s forces and Russia’s “little green men” in Donbas.

More useful to Moscow was the time it was afforded by the illusory ceasefire agreement. Russia used these years to periodically menace Europe with a variety of major buildups on Ukraine’s borders — a threat the Kremlin wielded to extract diplomatic and economic concessions from Ukraine’s Western patrons. The West’s apparent lack of resolve to match its own rhetoric with action emboldened the Kremlin to expand its malign influence into Asia and Africa — both directly and through quasi-private military contractors. Russia’s free hand in Europe swiftly turned to places like Syria, where it oversaw the bombing of hospitals and the execution of starvation campaigns targeting whole cities — to say nothing of engaging in extremely dangerous military interactions with NATO assets.

The frozen conflict that was established in Ukraine in 2014 is akin to conflicts in which Russia is directly or peripherally engaged in places like Transnistria, Nagorno–Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. The pattern is quite clear: Moscow or Russian-led proxies create a pretext, invade from without or erupt in insurrectionary revolt from within, establish a semi-autonomous zone of influence, and regroup until Moscow believes it is politically or strategically valuable to thaw the conflict out. The settlements that produce frozen conflicts merely buy the Kremlin time, which it reliably uses to its advantage. To seek a settlement to the Ukraine war now would be to establish the largest frozen conflict on the planet — a ticking time bomb that would command the West’s attention.

Those few Westerners who support a temporary resolution to Russia’s war in Ukraine in good faith do so because they mistakenly believe that it would allow Western states to see to their more immediate interests elsewhere. But nothing of the sort would follow such an ill-conceived concession to the Kremlin. Shorn of its industrialized East, the Ukraine that such a settlement would produce would reduce Kyiv to a dependency — one that would be consistently menaced by regular Russian buildups and maneuvers in the lands it has consigned to occupation. The scale of that menace would focus the minds of NATO member states on the alliance’s frontier, and likely necessitate a large, forward presence of NATO troops on the borders of both Ukraine and Russia. That would only complicate the aims of those who would subordinate the war in Ukraine to other urgent imperatives in the Indo-Pacific — imperatives that must be seen to by America and its allies. A premature settlement that spooks America’s partners on the frontlines of a conflict with China while simultaneously consuming the resources of its allies in Europe would suit both Moscow’s interests and Beijing’s.

Unless we imagine that Kyiv’s surrender or the dissolution of the regime in Moscow is imminent, we can safely bet that the current phase of Russia’s long war with Ukraine will end in a ceasefire at some point. The terms of such a settlement are unknowable because they do not yet exist — there’s more fighting to be done before the logjam is broken. But it is telling that the international actors who are investing in diplomatic overtures at this premature stage are friendly to the Kremlin: The Chinese Communist Party, Brazil’s left-wing Lula government, and Moscow’s fellow-travelers in alternative-media outlets. It’s even more revealing that their anxiety crescendos in concert with Ukraine’s battlefield victories.

As calls for capitulation grow louder, Russia’s historically duplicitous management of the frozen conflicts it oversees, and the growing anxiety among its supporters, should inform the approach Western policy-makers take toward diplomacy with Moscow. To secure a victory for Russia that it could not win for itself on the battlefields of Ukraine wouldn’t advance anyone’s interests but Vladimir Putin’s.