Ukraine war will end in surrender

The Ukraine war will end in a surrender, not in a negotiated deal. That is my sense of where the war is headed and why the parties cannot negotiate a settlement.

The latest wrinkle in the missing negotiating saga is a declaration in the form of an interview given by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In the interview, Zelensky said there can’t be direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia but there could be indirect negotiations through a third party. In Zelensky’s proposed scenario, the third party will serve as an intermediary and any deal will only be with the intermediary, not between Russia or Ukraine. Zelensky suggested the UN could act in this role.

However, the Zelensky proposal is a non-starter for many reasons, but the biggest one is that warring states need to directly agree on ending a conflict.

There is no hope of a third party implementing any deal, as the failed Minsk agreements (2014, 2015) proved. Minsk was a hybrid case where the deal was signed by Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Ukraine refused to implement the deal and the OSCE proved toothless and unwilling to try and enforce the Minsk accords. The deal had political backing from Germany and France, although neither was a signatory nor legally obliged in any manner to support the resulting deal.

Zelensky’s “proposal” really is just another smokescreen to deflect criticism of Ukraine for not wanting a settlement with Russia. Three strong forces are keeping Zelensky from the negotiating table.

The most important is that the main Anglo-Saxon players in NATO, namely the US and the UK, strongly oppose any negotiations with Russia. The US has done everything it