When Ukraine Is Over … How will they turn out the lights?
When Ukraine Is Over … How will they turn out the lights?
By Aurelien – January, 2025
Over the last eighteen months, I have produced a couple of essays on the question of how the war in Ukraine might “end.” I’ve talked about negotiations and their difficulties, and I’ve talked about how the very concept of “ending” a war is always fluid, and subject to interpretation. If you haven’t read those essays, and you have time to spare, you may want to glance through them now. The present essay inevitably covers some of the same ground, since the problems are ones of principle that don’t change much over time, but this week I’m trying to bring the argument up to date, and expand it by reference to other examples.
The “debate” in the West has crawled painfully forward recently, in the general direction of reality. But the expectation in the West still seems to be of a truce of some kind in the war and a deferral of Ukraine’s entry into NATO while their forces are rebuilt, whereas the Russians are clear that such objectives are excluded even from their minimum conditions for starting negotiations. I’m not going to go too deeply into statements made by This Person and That Person, because much of it is for show only at this stage, and, on the western side, few of those who pontificate seem even to have grasped the basic realities of the situation. What I’m going to do instead is to set out the basic realities of how wars “end” (if they do) and the different ways in which this happens, and the various mechanisms that exist to make that possible. I’m going to make a number of distinctions, both in concepts and in terminology, which might seem a bit nerdish and detailed to some. All I can say is that professional diplomats or experts on international law would probably accuse me of over-simplification.
The first thing to do is to distinguish between four potential types of events. Although these may look sequential they aren’t, necessarily, nor do all conflicts go through all stages. We’ll distinguish between:
-
Organised surrenders of sizeable units (battalion and above.)
-
Agreements to stop hostilities and separate forces, whether permanent or temporary.
-
Agreements to end hostilities definitively, so usually intended to be permanent, or at least long-lasting..
-
Agreements to address the underlying causes of the conflict.
Continue reading from the PDF below. Read carefully and do so several times, because we are not that clever to absorb all that is required to digest the gems of wisdom.