Page 48 - bne magazine September 2023

48 I Eastern Europe bne September 2023
more powerful weapons, remains controversial. The “fighter jet coalition” of Ukraine’s supporters like Poland,
have been pushing for the US to send F-16s to Ukraine, but a mere eight pilots (recently reduced to six) are still waiting for a six-month training programme to begin. Ukrainian military analyst Valery Romanenko said that even a squadron of 24 planes will not have a material impact on the outcome of the war.
After months of procrastinating, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been promised 42 US-made F-16 jet fighters by the Dutch government during an unannounced visit to the Netherlands on August 20. Denmark has promised to send 19 of its F-16 fighters as well, six of them before Christmas.
Washington gave Denmark and the Netherlands official “assurances” that the United States will “expedite approval” of the transfer requests for F-16s to go
to Ukraine, but only when the pilots have completed their training. That is not expected to happen for at least six months. There is still a strong possibility that Washington will delay granting
the re-export permission after the pilot training is completed.
“F-16s can be used both for air defence and in traditional engagements with enemy aircraft,” Romanenko said in an interview. “It is not at all clear to us how we can win without any aviation at all or without long-range weapons. This is just nonsense... It’s all political,” he added, speaking of the delays to the programme.
Peace deals
Bankova has said repeatedly that it will not cede land nor even start peace talks until Russian forces have been entirely expelled from Ukrainian territory. Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of the Ukrainian people are of the same opinion. That leaves the diplomatic process in a stalemate.
A deal that included territorial concessions, in that Zelenskiy suggested that he was prepared to kick the Crimea and Donbas issues down the road, was nearly done last April, as bne IntelliNews reported, but since then the positions of
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the two sides has moved so far apart as to be irreconcilable.
While it is widely assumed that the Western powers can bring the conflict
to a halt at a whim, simply by cutting off supplies of weapons and ammo, the White House has painted itself into a corner by repeatedly saying that the decision to start talks lies with Kyiv alone, which is also responsible for the tactics used in the war.
As for the Kremlin, it has indicated that it is open to talks, however, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it explicitly clear that Russia will not even discuss the return of the four regions it annexed last September, which include the Donbas, as they are now considered to be Russian sovereign territory. By extension, returning Crimea is also off the table, as that has been considered Russian since 2014.
For the Nato allies, the war goal so far has been clearly “don’t let Ukraine lose.” However, “Ukraine must win the war” is not a Western war goal, irrespective of what Stoltenberg, a hawk in the war, may say. At the end of the day, Nato is
a military alliance and it is the member countries that have the final say; the Nato body, headed by Stoltenberg, has no formal power to set any political agenda.
As bne IntelliNews has observed elsewhere, without sufficient guns and ammo, Ukraine has no hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield. And as Nato’s number one war goal is “don’t start WWIII by provoking Russia too far,” it
is highly unlikely the allies will change their policy and arm Ukraine to win, rather than just not lose.
A frozen conflict is the most likely outcome from the war in Ukraine, not
a Russian defeat. Indeed, the White House has said on multiple occasions that its plan is to deliver a crushing military blow so that Ukraine is “in the best possible position when it eventually goes to the negotiating table”.
In parallel to the military campaign has been the economic war being waged against Russia in the form of the extreme sanctions regime. But as bne IntelliNews
has extensively reported that campaign is also failing. While sanctions have certainly hobbled the Russian economy and caused considerable pain, the Fiscal Fortress that Putin has built has proven to be remarkably robust. For example, Russia’s economy is expected to grow by 2-2.5% this year, while Germany and the UK go into recession and the rest of the EU puts in anaemic growth. Sanctions will perma- nently reduce Russia’s growth potential so that it stagnates over the long-term, but in the short-term it has more than enough in reserves to continue the war for at least two more years before the Ministry of Finance has to begin to think about more radical measures like raising taxes.
Ceasefire talks can only begin when
the Western allies concede this war is unwinnable. Kyiv has clearly taken the line that the war must be won, at any cost, and will keep doggedly fighting until that happens, even if it never happens.
Several peace plans have already been put on the table: the Chinese 12-point peace plan that was released on the anniversary of the start of the war; South African president Cyril Ramaphosa offered another plan during a trip to Kyiv in June; and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) said that Ukraine’s sovereign integrity must be respected in any peace deal during an Arab-led peace summit in Jeddah in August that broke up without result. A third peace summit is scheduled for later this year.
However, with the counteroffensive still under way and several months
of summer and autumn left, it seems unlikely that any serious talks will start soon. Zelenskiy has politely rejected
all these plans out of hand, saying Kyiv has its own 10-point peace plan and is sticking to that, which starts with all the Russians must leave the country before anything else can happen.
But as winter settles in and the killed
in action roll call mounts, unless
the counteroffensive has delivered something more substantial in the way of progress than it has so far, it seems likely that the calls for an end to the war may grow louder. No one, not even the Russians, will relish the idea of another