It has been a thousand and one days since Russia invaded Ukraine, and the conflict seems to have reached a critical turning point.
Not necessarily on the field of battle. There, the war has evolved into a sequence of small victories and minor defeats for both sides. With no clear winners or losers.
The Russians have failed to take Ukraine’s main cities, to cause the Ukrainian leadership to collapse, or to carve their neighboring up territorially.
The Ukrainians have withstood the Russian advance, but have been unable to retake the Ukrainian territory occupied previously by the Russians.
Both sides have paid dearly (and continue to pay…), in terms of lives and economically, for a campaign as senseless as it is seemingly endless.
But is an end now in sight? A cessation of hostilities would be good thing for humanity as a whole, and especially for all those directly involved.
But any attempt at negotiation runs up against an inability on both sides to make painful compromises.
Ukraine (where public opinion is showing signs of fatigue) risks losing territory, and no country can accept losses of that sort easily.
Russia (which started the war) has been unable to prevail over a weak neighbor and has now had to resort militarily to Chechen guerillas and North Korean mercenaries. It’s hard to call this “great power”.
For the West, things are more complicated, since the Ukrainian issue has now been incorporated into the Euro-American tug-of-war in the wake of Trump’s re-election.
Nobody knows what the next American President wants to do in Ukraine, and it’s far from sure he’ll do anything good.
What is certain (as President Zelenskyy has said) is that, without Western assistance, Ukraine will collapse.
So will negotiations of some sort emerge before Trump returns to the White House? This is the aim of the reinforcements the Western world is sending Ukraine, along with new weapons systems.
But the outcome is far from certain. Especially since these reinforcements have been so long in coming.
Putin, for his part, seems to favor a Russian-American understanding, which is likely to appeal to Trump’s narcissism.
But the victim of a division of that sort would be Ukraine.
And it’s anything from certain such a move would uphold the values espoused by the West.
