What Was Gained by the Ukraine War?

It was April 2022, and the diplomatic delegations from Ukraine and Russia were meeting in Istanbul just weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun. Although there were details—especially on the size of the Ukrainian armed forces after the war and on the nature of security guarantees for Ukraine—to be worked out, a draft agreement had been signed by both sides. 

According to the Ukrainian delegation, Putin “demonstrated a genuine effort to find a realistic compromise and achieve peace.” Oleksandr Chalyi, a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team, said, “We managed to find a very real compromise. We were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.”

Another member of the team, Oleksiy Arestovych, says that negotiations could have worked and that they were “90 percent prepared.” The Istanbul Communiqué, a Ukrainian summary of the negotiated deal, states that “the parties consider it possible to hold a meeting on… 2022 between the presidents of Ukraine and Russia with the aim of signing an agreement and/or making political decisions regarding the reing unresolved issues.” 

“We opened the champagne bottle,” Arestovych said.

That draft treaty stipulated that Ukraine could pursue European Union membership but would provide a written guarantee that they would not join NATO. This was the key point. It provided protection for ethnic Russians in Ukraine, security guarantees for Ukraine and limits on the Ukrainian armed forces. The Donbas would be autonomous, Crimea would be Russian. The Kherson and Zaporozhye regions that Russia has now incorporated were, at that time, still part of Ukraine.

But instead of encouraging and nurturing the promising talks, the United States and Britain discouraged them. Davyd Arakhamiia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team, has confirmed that “when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.” In December 2022, Ukrainska Pravda reported that on April 9, 2022, Johnson hurried to Kiev to tell Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, “the West was not.”

Rather than encourage Ukraine to pursue negotiations that would have satisfied their goals and potentially ended the war, the U.S. promised Ukraine whatever it needs for as long as it takes in the pursuit of “core principles” that made the war “bigger than Russia” and “bigger than Ukraine,” namely “the principle that each and every country has a sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy, has a sovereign right to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances, its partnerships, and what orientation it wishes to direct its gaze.” Instead of nurturing diplomacy, “the West ramped up military aid to Kyiv and increased the pressure on Russia,” according to a former U.S. official “who worked on Ukraine policy at the time.”

There is now a convincing body of testimony from those who played intermediary roles or were present at the talks that shows that the West discouraged a diplomatic solution to the war. 

Turkey played host to the talks. Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu says that the talks were on course to end the war, but that “there are countries within NATO who want the war to continue.” The deputy chairman of Turkey’s governing party, Numan Kurtulmus, reports the same thing: “In certain matters, progress was made, reaching the final point, then suddenly we see that the war is accelerating…. Someone is trying not to end the war. The United States sees the prolongation of the war as its interest…. There are those who want this war to continue…. Putin-Zelensky [were] going to sign, but someone didn’t want to.”

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder both acted as intermediaries to the talks at the request of Ukraine. Bennet says that “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire,” but the West “blocked it.” Schröder agrees: “Nothing could happen because everything else was decided in Washington… The Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed.”

The New York Times has recently reported that “American officials were alarmed at the terms” and patronizingly asked the Ukrainians whether they “understand this is unilateral disarmament.” The Times report adds for the first time that Polish President Andrzej Duda “feared that Germany or France might try to persuade the Ukrainians to accept Russia’s terms” and joined the U.S. and Britain in discouraging the promising diplomacy.

And now, the former undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, has become the first American official to imply that the West played a role in blocking the peace talks. In a September 5 interview, Nuland said that when “the Ukrainians began asking for advice on where this thing was going…. people inside Ukraine and people outside Ukraine started asking questions about whether this was a good deal and it was at that point that it fell apart.”

Two and a half years ago, in April 2022, a diplomatic end to the war was possible until the West “blocked it.” At that time, most of the devastation, loss of life and loss of land had not begun. Since then, autonomy for Donbas has turned into annexation and two more territories have been added. 

Already by January 2024, Yuriy Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general and ex-head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, said that 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded. A number of 400,000-500,000 is consistent with internal Ukrainian communications and reports from the battlefield that 20,000 soldiers a month would be necessary to replace the dead and wounded. That number also accords with the 450,000-500,000 number Zelensky requested in a new mobilization.

Reliable estimates of the dead and seriously wounded are hard to come by. But in the nine months since, that number may have swollen even more. By some accounting, Ukraine is losing more troops per day than at any time during the war. Commanders in the Ukrainian armed forces estimate that “50 to 70 per cent of new infantry troops were killed or wounded within days of starting their first rotation.” Ex-Rada MP and Aidar Deputy Commander Ihor Mosiychuk has recently put the number of dead or seriously wounded at 500,000. Some analysts have suggested that could translate into about 320,000 dead and 180,000 seriously wounded. One analysis says that the number of dead could be as high as 600,000.

And the loss of land is now catching up to the loss of life. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and his commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, hoped that crossing the Russian border and invading Kursk would relieve pressure on the Donbas front by diverting Russian forces from Ukrainian territory to Russian territory. It didn’t. Instead, Russian forces exploited the weakness caused by the diversion of Ukraine’s best trained and equipped troops away from the Donbas front into Russia. 

There are indications that the Ukrainian front is crumbling. The Washington Post reported on October 2 that “Ukrainian forces have been retreating along dozens of miles of a front line being pushed to its breaking point.” The city of Pokrovsk is being threatened. Its fall would challenge Ukraine’s ability to supply its troops in the Donbas by rail or road and open fields to the west of the city over which Russian troops can pour into the rest of Donbas, advancing Russia’s goal of annexing the region.

But while attention was focussed on Pokrovsk, Vuhledar (Ugledar), the other key logistical hub that the Ukrainian armed forces depend on to supply their forces in the east and defend territory to the west, has fallen. On October 2, the Ukrainian armed forces announced that its troops were withdrawing from the city. 

The loss of Vuhledar will change the war in four ways. Like Pokrovsk, it will threaten Ukraine’s ability to supply its troops in the east and it will expose difficult to defend land to the west. It will also protect Russian supply lines that were shelled form Vuhledar. And the loss of the fortified city would “allow the Russians to step up attacks in the direction of Pokrovsk.”

The failure of the Kursk offensive, the crumbling of the Donbas front, and the seeming death of Zelensky’s hail Mary “Ukrainian Victory Plan” may be giving birth to a dawning realization in both Washington and Kiev that a retreat to the treaty negotiated in Istanbul may be the strategically soundest move.

Russia has frequently said that the Istanbul agreement could still be “the basis for starting negotiations.” Putin has recently set out a peace proposal based on the Istanbul agreement, but adjusted for the new territorial realities. 

And that is the tragedy of Ukraine. In April 2022, Ukraine was on the threshold of a diplomatic end to the war with Russia that satisfied its goals. But they were encouraged by the West to fight on in pursuit of Western goals. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died since then. Many more have been wounded: many irreparably. Over six million Ukrainians have fled the country. Infrastructure has been demolished and the environment devastated. And after all that, Ukraine has arrived again at the same settlement that was in their grasp in April 2022. 

The time may be coming when Zelensky, U.S. President Joe Biden, Johnson, and a large supporting cast, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, will have to answer the question of what was gained by going to war.