Stop the Ukrainian meat grinder?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, and U.S. President Joe Biden hold a joint news conference June 13, 2024 in Savelletri, Italy. (Valéria Ferraro/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Nearly eleven months ago, in August 2023, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials estimated that about 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed, wounded or missing in the then 18-month-old Ukrainian war.

Russia and Ukraine underestimate their losses. Hundreds of thousands more casualties followed during the 28 months of fighting.

In the West, the mere mention of a negotiated settlement is seen as a dangerous appeasement of Russia’s blatant aggression. In Russia, anything less than victory would mean the collapse of the Putin regime.

Yet as the war approaches two and a half years this summer, some facts are no longer really in dispute.

Controversy still rages around the circumstances of the overthrow of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

Russia accuses the West of orchestrating the “Revolution of Dignity,” an attempt to Westernize the former Soviet republic, expand Europe’s borders to Russia’s doorstep and, ultimately, fully arm Ukraine as a NATO member.

The West counters that most Ukrainians wanted to be part of Europe and independent of Russian harassment – ​​and that they had every right to ask to join either NATO or the EU, or both, despite the anticipated escalation of tensions.

After Ukraine’s heroic defeat of Russia’s attempt to take kyiv in 2022, both sides have made few significant territorial gains.

Like the seesawing bloodbath on the Western Front of World War I, neither side developed the momentum to force the other to negotiate or grant concessions.

As Russian nuclear threats to Europe intensify, NATO is seeking to regain its deterrent capabilities by increasing defense budgets, integrating frontline nations like Sweden and Finland, and uniting around shared concerns about Russian aggression.

Many in the United States hail the conflict as a proxy war necessary to curb Russian aggression and strengthen NATO resistance.

But unlike the wars waged by third parties during the Cold War, the Western client, Ukraine, is now fighting directly against the main antagonist of NATO’s European members.

Arming a proxy in a war against a nuclear adversary’s country is a new and dangerous phenomenon.

The West expects to supply Ukraine with more and better weapons than a richer, larger and more populous Russia.

But Ukraine’s problem is not so much weapons as manpower. Nearly a quarter of Ukraine’s population has fled the country.

Ukraine may have suffered some 300,000 casualties. The average age of its soldiers is over 40. It already does not have enough forces to repeat the failed counteroffensive of 2023. Russia’s attrition plan aims to exhaust and bleed the Ukrainian people.

From a geostrategic perspective, the new alignment of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea is beginning to benefit from opportunistic support from illiberal regimes in the Middle East, Turkey and the Islamic world in general.

The Biden administration’s respective approaches to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza continue to be completely inconsistent.

He lectures our greatest ally, Israel, on the need for a ceasefire, proportionality, a wartime coalition cabinet and avoiding collateral damage. The administration views the Hamas terrorist group as a near-legitimate state.

However, President Joe Biden and American diplomacy are urging Ukraine to continue the fight without negotiations. They urge kyiv to seek critical disproportion by using superior weapons, including striking strategic targets in Russia.

The United States turned a blind eye to the Zelensky administration’s cancellation of Ukrainian political parties and elections. America does not seem to care about the collateral damage caused by Ukraine in the border regions. And she considers the Russian government to be a quasi-terrorist state.

No one in the West, at least before the Russian invasion of February 2022 – neither the current Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, nor the Ukrainian government itself – had considered it possible to reconquer by force Crimea and Donbass absorbed by the Russian invasion of 2014.

Adding all these realities together, the only possible way to avoid nearly a million deaths and injuries would be a settlement, however unpopular it may be.

This would involve the formalization of the Russian absorption of Crimea and Donbass in 2014.

Russia would then agree to withdraw all its forces to its borders by 2022. Ukraine would be fully armed but without NATO membership.

Both sides would agree to a demilitarized zone on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Russia would boast of having prevented its former province from joining NATO while finally institutionalizing its prior incorporation of Donbass and Crimea.

Ukraine would be proud to have, like the heroic Finland of 1940, miraculously stopped Russian aggression. It would remain much better armed than at any time in its history and would soon enjoy a status similar to that of Austria or Switzerland, non-NATO countries.

The deal would anger all parties. But it would make public what most privately concede and end the ongoing destruction of Ukraine and the slaughter of an entire generation of young Ukrainians and Russians.

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