La paix et l'épée
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Peace and the sword
War is all about the balance of power. For the Ukrainians at war, the only prospect of obtaining a ‘better situation in the end’ is to change the balance of military forces in 2025 so as to resume the offensive at the end of the year and liberate as much occupied territory as possible. If this balance of power cannot be changed, Kiev will probably have no other strategic option than to limit the damage by negotiating the least bad peace possible.
A declared supporter of a rapid settlement to the conflict, or at least a prolonged halt to the fighting, Donald Trump has clearly indicated his intention to force the Ukrainian executive to favour the immediate bad peace over a possible distant victory. As the United States provides around half of all the equipment and munitions used by Ukrainian soldiers, all he has to do is reduce this aid to make victory impossible for them. The European states, which together provide only around 30% of Ukraine's military aid, and with little possibility of increasing the volume, are more or less obliged to go along with whatever happens. While always giving the image of firm support for Ukraine in its continuing struggle, they are already anticipating having to play a role in the implementation of a possible form of peace.
From several statements made by his entourage, the form of peace envisaged by the new President of the United States seems to be an armistice on the current positions in Ukraine. It is not at all clear that Vladimir Putin would accept this idea, given that his troops have the initiative in operations and nothing really obliges him to stop there, but Volodymyr Zelensky has already begun to prepare public opinion for this by mentioning the possible end of the ‘hot phase’ of the war, postponing the liberation of the occupied territories to a ‘diplomatic’ (i.e. ‘hypothetical’) phase.
While continuing to fight in order at least to halt the Russian advance, the Ukrainian President is now trying to obtain genuine security guarantees against Russia in exchange for a possible halt to the fighting, whereas Donald Trump and his entourage are only considering guarantees that the armistice will be respected, without American participation. We have seen in retrospect the value of the purely theoretical security guarantees given to Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. There can be no real security guarantees without soldiers on the ground. Even though negotiations have not yet begun, the possibility of deploying forces in Ukraine immediately after the fighting has stopped is already being explored, and the serious limitations of the exercise are already clear to see.
The first problem is the volume of forces required, bearing in mind that here again the United States, which has provided 80% of the resources of the coalitions under its leadership since 1990, does not want to be involved. Donald Trump's entourage mentioned 200,000 troops deployed along the front line in Ukraine and the border with Russia. This is obviously unrealistic, but a force of around 40,000 to 50,000 troops will undoubtedly be needed, given the vastness of the area to be covered, which will require the creation of a joint force, either a UN force to bring in contingents from all over the world, or a European force with broad participation from EU members and perhaps a few outside states. The most important thing, however, is not to bring these men together, but to know what they will be used for.
The first idea would be to ‘keep the peace’ by interposing themselves between the belligerents, in the manner of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) since 1978. A UN mission would necessarily be of this type, with the formation, for example, of a United Nations Mission in Ukraine (UNMIKR), but it could also be European, the common denominator being in any case that it would be useless, like all the other missions operating within the framework of Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter. When you don't have the right to fight except in self-defence, you protect nothing but yourself (at best) and such a force would no more prevent the Russians from entering Ukraine than UNIFIL would prevent the Israelis from entering Lebanon.
This useless force could therefore receive Russia's backing, and in any case we cannot imagine the deployment of a force in Ukraine without the agreement of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, including Russia. This would also satisfy the United States, which never participates in this kind of force anyway, as well as European states such as Germany and Italy, which like to participate when they want to show that they are doing something ‘for peace’ but without taking any risks, even though any prolonged military deployment, even the most inoffensive - in every sense of the word - involves losses. On the other hand, setting up such a force would be of no interest to the Ukrainians. It is therefore hard to see why they would accept it.
The Ukrainians would much prefer a protection force, in other words one that would fight in the event of a Russian attack, like the battalions deployed as part of NATO's reinforced forward presence on its eastern flank. In this case, it should be noted that the number of volunteer countries would be much smaller. These would be more or less the same countries that were recently considering sending soldiers to support the rear of the Ukrainian forces. So we would probably have a French brigade of a few thousand soldiers, perhaps a British one and multinational brigades with Baltic, Scandinavian, Polish and possibly Canadian battalions.
There probably wouldn't be enough to muster 40,000 men, but that wouldn't really matter, because it would mean that the supplier states would be committing themselves to going to war with Russia if it attacked and killed their soldiers. This would be a very strong deterrent indeed, and the Ukrainians would be quick to point out that such a deployment before February 2022 would probably have prevented war. However, one can imagine the hard internal debates in European countries before committing to what would be Ukraine's de facto, if not de jure, entry into NATO. Needless to say, while Ukraine would no doubt be very happy with this solution, Russia would not be, and it is hard to see how Vladimir Putin would accept it.
In conclusion, we are still a long way from any kind of armistice in Ukraine and even further from the deployment of foreign forces to enforce it.
