Wars and conflicts, if not resulting in outright victory for one side or the other, tend to extend over a long period of time (say years rather than weeks or months) and have three stages. The first is an initial stage of aggression, in which territory is seized by the attacking side. The second is a state of stalemate, when a front line is established and the parties dig into their positions. This period can extend for a long time, depending on the war. The third phase is when a peace agreement or armistice is anticipated, typically due to some change in the attitude towards the war of an outside potential intervening power. Seeing the likely change in attitude, and the parties realising that the outside power is likely to intervene in some way to bring the war to an end, they start pushing and fighting as hard as they can to seize every last piece of territory, knowing that some sort of ceasefire line will broadly reflect the lines of control. This is one way to understand the massive efforts the Russian Armed Forces have put into capturing tiny slivers of Ukrainian territory over the month of October, at enormous cost in terms of human life: the fighting season is about to end (temperatures on the front are shortly to drop below zero and the wet freezing weather will begin), and the Americans were about to have a general election.
The President-elect voted into office by the American people on 5 November 2024 has already it seems been forming Ukrainian policy to end the war which he famously promised on the campaign trail to be able to stop straight away. And he may well be able to; the United States has both the financial and military resources to stop the parties fighting. One of his first telephone calls was with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, about whom President-elect Trump has been notoriously critical in the past; by all accounts the call was warm and supportive of Ukraine and President Zelenskiy was satisfied with it. Then a leak emerged that Mr Trump had telephoned Vladimir Putin, something it was inevitable he would do, and warned him not to escalate the war before Mr Trump arrives in office on 20 January 2025, reminding him that the United States has a huge military capacity in Europe ready to intervene under his Presidency if the war is not brought to an immediate end.
I have long predicted that the one certainty in this war is that the Russians will never fire on US soldiers, because the Russian Armed Forces, while large, are vastly inferior in quality and equipment from the American conventional forces; obviously nobody is going to use nuclear weapons (even if we knew that the Russian nuclear arsenal functioned, which we don’t) because it hasn’t been despite all the threats; therefore the Russians must do everything to avoid a direct confrontation with the Americans. And that is what Mr Trump was implicitly threatening Mr Putin with, if he escalated the war in the intervening period: Mr Trump was doing everything possible to negate the effects of a “lame duck presidency” in which President Biden is hamstrung by domestic political considerations into being unable to make significant decisions in the final period before he leaves office in favour of a new President of opposing political colours.
Nevertheless Mr Putin’s armed forces are not exactly known for their lightning attacks and manoeuvres and he will plough away, to the extent the winter fighting season permits (everything depends on just how cold it gets), until Mr Trump arrives in office and then they will see what he does. He certainly intends to end the war immediately, because he has other priorities and he does not want to use his limited resources dealing with a war in European theatre. That has to be ended so he can concentrate on China.
What will the end of the war look like? It will be an armistice, not a peace deal; nobody can accept Russia’s wanton annexation of Ukrainian territory in international law. Russia controls 20% of Ukrainian territory; but in February 2022, just before the beginning of the war, she held some 15% of Ukrainian territory. Given the massive expenditures, sanctions, and loss of manpower on the part of the Russian Armed Forces, requiring Russia to go to such extremes as purchasing North Korean troops and ammunition, as well as ammunition and drones from Iran (a regime even Russia does not truthfully consider very savoury), the outcome of the war has not proven particularly successful for Russia. So there must be an armistice without a ceasefire, along the line of control, as with Korea in 1953; and there must be peacekeepers, some of whom must be American but President Trump will push his NATO allies into providing the greater bulk of them, in accordance with their North Atlantic Treaty obligations in respect of which Trump considers many of his allies to be delinquent.
This unusual kind of peace along a 1,000 kilometre front line will have to carry with it provisions of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration on the Ukrainian side (known in the literature as “DDR”; the Russians will have to make their own provisions) and, undoubtedly, for free Ukraine to move towards NATO membership as and when its armed forces are improved to NATO standards and particularly when the rampant corruption in the armed forces is stamped out. These are large tasks; Ukraine’s army is vast as a proportion of its population and reintegrating so many enlisted men back into society, many of whom have suffered life-altering injuries, will be no straightforward task.
Then the two sides will face off against one another along a demilitarised zone, the location of which will have to be negotiated through shuttle diplomacy. This is why the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk oblast is so important, of course: it gives the Ukrainians something to negotiate with when otherwise they would have relatively little other than the fact that they have defended their principal positions in the Donbas so effectively which is why Russia has only obtained an extra 5% of Ukrainian territory, principally along the south bank of the Dnipro river. Special provisions will have to be made for a demilitarised zone around Kherson, because the very city itself is on the Zero Line; de-mining will have to be undertaken; restrictions of the use of drones on the front line will need to be imposed; the occupying power and her allies enforcing this armistice (which will inevitably be the United States, using her troops in Europe) will need to set out a series of clear principles about how this war will come to an end. The Russians will have limited power for negotiations but not much; President Trump wants the war to stop and he knows that an overwhelming show of force may be the only thing President Putin will respect. So he will apply it, if necessary. President Putin is probably wise enough not to push him that far.
Then there will need to be practical provisions for passage of people through the de-militarised zone so that families are not indefinitely cut off from one-another. This status quo could, as in Korea, last for another 70 years or until the next Russian Revolution. We just cannot stay but some provision for Ukrainians to pass over the front line in the future is surely important out of humanitarian considerations. Alternatively they can take the long trek through Belarus or there are other ways out of Russian-occupied Ukraine; but some more or less informal direct routes will probably be established and even exist now.
This then is my not entirely rosey but I hope hard-headedly realistic assessment of how the Russian invasion of Ukraine will end, and if I were to guess it will end soon: it will be a priority of the Trump Presidency that it ends promptly, so that he can move onto other things, and that is why he as already spoken to the leaders of the two belligerent countries so quickly after winning the General Election. In the meantime he has asked his European allies to sit on their hands, which is why President Zelenskiy of Ukraine is getting so frustrated with them. Let it be; for now at least the United States is the leader of the free world, and we need to give the President-elect the space to end this war because there is no other practical option on the table to bring the war to a conclusion soon.