Based on the early indications, it appears that the war in Ukraine will come to an end in 2025, and probably sooner than later. All sides—Russia, Ukraine, and Ukraine’s western backers—are exhausted with this conflict.
It would also appear that Russia will get most of what it wanted in 2022: the Crimea, the oblasts to the east, and a long-term deferment of Ukraine’s admittance to NATO.
This raises the question: wouldn’t it have been better to end the war by negotiation in 2022, and thereby spare the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians who, in the final analysis, will likely have died for nothing?
There are two realities that must be acknowledged here:
- Ukraine was never capable of beating Russia on its own
- The collective West was never willing to come through with the one measure that might have defeated Russia: Western (NATO) troops on the ground in combat.
And number 2 above was always the big sticking point. We cared about the cause of Ukrainian nationalism so long as Ukrainians were doing all the fighting and dying.
Almost no one in the West (including all those posers with Ukrainian flags on their social media profiles) is willing to risk nuclear war for Ukraine. Nor are many westerners willing to see their children die in order to reestablish Ukraine’s 1991 borders.
A callous viewpoint? Perhaps. But we live in an imperfect world, with imperfect outcomes. The end of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2025 is going to be a textbook example of a very imperfect outcome. A negotiated peace in 2022 would have been considerably better, with many more people left alive and unmaimed.
-ET