As the Russo-Ukrainian war’s third year drags on, peace seems to be the furthest thing from the minds of both belligerents. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made clear that he will not countenance any peace talks until all of Ukraine’s internationally recognized sovereign territory is back in Ukrainian hands—in other words, that victory is a prerequisite for peace. Russia, in the meantime, has stated that its preconditions for negotiations include a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO, as well as total control over the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, including the parts that Russia does not currently hold. These are, of course, the original goals of the “special military operation” announced in 2022, indicating that Russia also makes no distinction between victory and peace.
Typically, warring parties seek peace when they are losing and reject it when they are winning. The Russo-Ukrainian war, therefore, presents a true anomaly—both parties are rejecting peace as they are losing. Ukraine is hemorrhaging people, both on the battlefield and through emigration. Meanwhile, Russia’s economy is finally cracking under a stringent Western sanctions regime despite a remarkably spirited effort from the Russian Central Bank (RCB). Moreover, the spoils of victory are, for both sides, more abstract than tangible. The territory being contested—the Donbas region and parts of Kherson Oblast—is economically unproductive and will remain that way for decades. While Ukrainian national pride and the Russian desire to remake Ukraine in its own image are certainly powerful motivators, they are simply not worth the mounting costs of war. A treaty that codifies today’s battle lines can spare Russia’s nationalistic blushes while protecting Ukraine’s long-term security.
For Ukraine, the war has exacerbated the two core problems that threaten the state’s long-term prosperity: corruption and demographic collapse. Hopes that the war would bring Ukrainians together and drive a large-scale social realignment against corruption have failed to manifest. The Ukrainian war effort has been dogged by continuous scandals regarding draft dodging and the procurement of weapons and equipment. On the civilian side, some of Zelensky’s top aides have been ensnared in anti-corruption probes—including Andriy Yermak, his chief of staff, and Oleh Tatarov, the man tapped to lead a major anti-corruption reform in law enforcement. Since most countries would be credibly unable to wage an all-out war and conduct anti-corruption purges at the top of the state at the same time, the war has provided political elites with a convenient shield against Western demands for greater an ti-corruption action. The war’s end would therefore remove Ukraine’s excuses for tolerating corruption and likely improve the health of a postwar government. With respect to demographics, Ukraine’s prewar total fertility rate was already an anemic 1.2; since then, 6.5 million refugees have fled the country while 80,000 troops have died on the front and 400,000 more have been injured. Ukraine will not survive as a state if it retains its land but not the people required to populate or work it productively. Each day that the war drags on, more Ukrainian refugees acclimate to life in their host countries—perhaps well enough to remain even after the war ends. Thus, even a triumphant conclusion in the fight for territory may ultimately prove to be a pyrrhic victory in the larger war for state survival.
In Russia, the costs of war are less existential, but three years of punishing sanctions are beginning to bite. Russia’s central bank has flagged persistent inflation, slowing economic growth, and labor shortages as critical issues—all of which have been brought on by the war. The exodus of highly skilled workers, coupled with a partial military draft, has forced Russian businesses to raise wages to attract labor. The result has been an inflationary surge that will only worsen over time. Foreign currency reserves have begun dwindling, prompting private banks to beg the RCB to prop up foreign trade by selling them increasingly scarce Chinese yuan. As citizens begin to feel the pinch, Russia’s domestic front will destabilize, prompting yet another population outflow and the perpetuation of this vicious cycle.
A realistic pathway to peace requires only that leaders in both nations consider their situation soberly rather than chasing unattainable maximalist ambitions. Russia should be satisfied when Western sanctions are removed and the international community affirms its claim over the warm-water port of Sevastopol, while Ukraine can find solace in permanently exiting the Russian security orbit by joining NATO and the European Union. These goals are fundamentally compatible—Ukraine stands little chance of regaining the Crimean Peninsula, and Putin’s grandstanding regarding NATO is belied by the fact that he took little issue with the accession of the Baltic states to the alliance in the 2000s.
What remains to be disputed is the status of the portion of Eastern Ukraine occupied by Russia. The best solution from Ukraine’s vantage point is to treat the land as what it is—a poison pill, not a concession. Traditionally, more land is seen as an obvious asset for any state, providing expanded room for settlement, industry, and commerce. But this assumes that the land is functional, safe for human habitation and artifice. In Ukraine’s east, the opposite is true: Land mining operations conducted by both sides have left huge swathes of territory unusable for any purpose. Thirty percent of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory has been mined, implying that almost the entirety of the east is unsafe. More than 1,000 Ukrainian civilians have already lost limbs due to land mines, and if historical precedent is any guide, demining operations will take decades and carry astronomical costs. Earlier this year, the World Bank estimated that demining might cost as much as $37 billion––an impossibly large figure for a country recovering from war. Moreover, the heavy industry that has long been Donetsk’s calling card has either been bombed or transported to Russia. The country that ultimately wins control of the minefields that once represented Ukraine’s industrial heartland may well be able to put on a proud display of nationalistic chest-thumping, but the costs of revitalization will dwarf the benefits to national pride. Saddling Russia with the responsibility of demining an area the size of Florida will stunt another Russian military buildup more completely than any combination of Western sanctions ever could.
Ukraine will no doubt feel the loss of its sovereign territory keenly in a spiritual sense, and President Zelensky, who has staked his reputation on total victory, is unlikely to survive the political fallout. But, in the long term, Ukraine is threatened far more by continued population shrinkage and corruption than by the loss of unusable land that will not become viable for at least several decades. Less can be more. If Ukraine saddles its adversary with a costly land reclamation project while stopping its own bleeding, it will have struck an advantageous peace for its future prosperity.