UKRAINE’S President Volodymyr Zelensky is approaching the most dangerous moments in his political career.
He has suggested that the war with Russia might end with a diplomatic settlement that included membership of Nato. Implicit in this is a recognition that his previous position — that the war’s end could only come about with the recovery of the territories that Russia reincorporated, the Donbass and Crimea — is impossible.
He holds out the prospect that an end to hostilities could follow if Nato offered security guarantees for the parts of Ukraine over which Kiev currently exercises control.
In abandoning his earlier position, he is responding both to the deteriorating battlefield situation, to Ukrainian public opinion and the changing strategies of his so-called “allies.”
Polling organisation Gallup’s latest surveys in Ukraine — excluding the Russian-occupied and largely Russian-speaking eastern provinces — show Ukrainians, by a small majority, want to see a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible.
While 52 per cent want this, a substantial minority — 38 per cent — want the war to continue “until victory.”
Ukraine’s population has declined from 43 million to 35 million, with an entire generation of young men sacrificed on the battlefield and fleeing both to Russia and the West. Its human capacity to sustain a war is declining — the average age of Ukrainian combatants is reported to be 45 — and its allies are deeply divided over strategy.
No-one believes an incoming president Trump will give Ukraine the military and diplomatic sustenance that underpinned Joe Biden’s devotion more to bleeding Russia of blood and treasure rather than a decisive military defeat.
Originally elected on a programme of rapprochement with the contending elements within his own nation and with Russia, Zelensky has been increasingly entangled with domestic and foreign forces that were and are diametrically opposed to the perspective he then offered the Ukrainian nation.
This is a nation and state that was forged in war, revolution and counter-revolution.
As part of the tsarist empire, it was largely agrarian. Under the early years of Soviet rule, it was gifted the eastern Russian-speaking territories that — then and now — contain much of its mineral wealth and industrial economy.
As a consequence of the victory over fascism, before which millions of Ukrainians died under Nazi occupation, and many more were martyred as Red Army combatants and anti-Nazi partisans, the western territories, which formerly were Polish, were added to Ukraine’s territory.
And after the war, in a further, and not locally uncontested, act of the Soviet government, Crimea was added to a Ukrainian Soviet state, which had its own representation at the UN.
Reactionary ideas of an ethnically pure Ukrainian nation, which trace their origins to the violently anti-semitic and anti-Polish elements that collaborated with the Nazis, cannot be reconciled either with history or reality.
Although the Soviet security forces took until the mid-1950s to finally eliminate the military challenge that Ukrainian fascism threatened, these ideas were driven underground in Soviet times only to re-emerge under Nato sponsorship in recent years.
Generations of life in a highly integrated Soviet state mean that many citizens of Ukraine enjoy a mixed linguistic heritage and belong to families in which Ukrainians are related to citizens of both Russia and other former Soviet states.
A negotiated peace that recognises reality would end the bloodbath. Britain’s diplomatic effort should be devoted to this end rather than squandered on cold war posturing and military supplies that benefit only the arms industry oligarchs of the military-industrial complex on both sides or devoted to a Nato strategy that could get us all killed.
