If Ukraine’s next steps are talks, more arms must accompany

Ukraine’s summer offensive has stalled in the autumn mud, reaching a stalemate that won’t easily be broken. We know this because it has become evident on the ground and the top commander of the armed forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, has said it. So what next?

The temptation will be to call for a ceasefire and launch peace talks, ending needless Ukrainian suffering and allowing allies to reduce the burdens of financial and military aid. Why, after all, continue with a war when victory no longer appears feasible? That, however, is a false choice. A new strategy for Ukraine built around achieving a settlement rather than victory is indeed needed. But to be successful it will have to run in parallel with continued pressure on the battlefield and an uninterrupted flow of financial and military aid to Kyiv.

To explain why demands resolving an otherwise sterile debate about the causes of the war. For if, as many believe, Russia invaded Ukraine to prevent it joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — a hostile, U.S.-dominated alliance that threatens Russian security — then the way forward is simple: End the fighting and remove the threat, by trading Ukraine’s neutrality for Russian withdrawal.

Russia has been angered by NATO’s acceptance of ex-Soviet bloc nations since the 1990s. NATO’s expansion, and so too that of the European Union, posed genuine threats — but to Russia’s ambitions. Even the possibility of NATO and EU integration was emboldening Ukraine to refuse Putin’s drive to re-establish a sphere of control across the territories of the former Soviet and Russian empires. He also wanted a tight union of what he saw as a single Russian nation that included the motherland, Belarus and Ukraine. Kyiv remains critical to both projects.

Again, we know all this because Putin has said so in multiple speeches and essays, and because it is supported by facts on the ground. It matters because if Putin’s goal is to expand Russian power, then getting to a durable settlement will be a lot harder. It is imperative for that greatpower project that, at a minimum, any settlement with Ukraine demonstrates the folly of resistance, while at the same time leaving open a path for Moscow to secure Ukrainian markets and resources in the future. For the same reason, it is imperative for Ukraine that the war’s end produces a framework that definitively ends the fighting, and allows it to ensure its own security and prosperity. These aims conflict.

Russia, for example, will resist to the last accepting security guarantees for Ukraine that amount to a reduced NATO offering Article 5 mutual defense protections. So Ukraine will need fleets of tanks, missiles and jets to deter Russia even after the fighting stops. And while the land war may be stuck, the air war will continue apace, with Russian missiles attacking Ukrainian infrastructure through the winter, to make its point about the futility of resistance.

Ukraine, unlike earlier in the war, now has the capacity to respond and will need to inflict sufficient pain on Russian assets and forces in Crimea, occupied Ukraine and Russia itself that Putin has incentive to stop the war, and this time for good.

As gloomy as all this sounds, it’s worth remembering what Ukraine and allied support have already achieved. Putin’s primary invasion goal of capturing Kyiv and “de-Nazifying” and “demilitarizing” Ukraine, has been defeated, a project that would have rolled on at least to Moldova.

Zaluzhnyi and his forces also humbled what most saw as the world’s second-strongest military. They liberated first the northern regions around the capital, followed by some 14,000 square kilometers of land around Ukraine’s second city, Kharkhiv, and Kherson to the south. They have sunk enough of the Black Sea Fleet to marginalize it, and forged a national identity that, until Russia first attacked in 2014, was felt only in parts of the country.

Any eventual settlement will be much more than a cease-fire. It will represent the culmination of Ukraine’s multi-century struggle for nationhood and independence from a domineering eastern neighbor.

It must also achieve the first necessary step for Russia, like so many fallen empires before it: to come to terms with its loss. Getting there will be neither easy nor cheap, nor peaceful.