The Observer view: there can be no end to the war without Ukraine

The war is at a stalemate and has been for months. On isolated sections of a 1,000km front line Russia is making slow progress but at terrible cost. Reliable casualty numbers do not exist, but an estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in June put Russian war deaths since February 2022 at 250,000 compared with between 60,000 and 100,000 killed on the Ukrainian side (and 15,000 Russian soldiers killed in the Soviet Union’s 10-year occupation of Afghanistan).

Putin now controls about 18% of Ukraine. Considering his initial aim of total conquest, and a huge imbalance of troops and weapons in his favour, he has presided over a stunning military failure. At this point it is hard to say which side is losing but it is clear nobody is winning. This appears to be Trump’s analysis as well. He has said many times he wants to end the senseless killing of Ukrainian civilians and the use of US arms and money to contain a European war. If it was unfolding in isolation, these would be reasonable aims, but they fail to take account of the true stakes. A rushed deal in Alaska without Ukrainian and European buy-in would undermine the international rule of law, the principle of sovereignty and the architecture of global security.

Any land-for-peace deal that hands parts of Ukraine to Russia would reward unprovoked aggression and serve as an invitation to autocrats everywhere to settle territorial disputes – or simply grab resources that they covet – by force. A move by Xi Jinping on Taiwan might be the next but it would not be the last.

The most important tactical lesson of this war so far is that efforts to accommodate Putin’s concerns as if they were legitimate backfire, while steadfast support for Ukraine forces him to retreat and recalibrate. Assured by Germany, the US and the UK that Ukraine would not be allowed to use western-supplied long-range weapons against Russian targets, Putin took full advantage, launching nightly attacks on civilian targets including hospitals, shops and Ukraine’s power grid. Confronted with the help of western anti-tank weapons in March 2022, he withdrew. Surprised by Ukraine’s counterattack later that year, he withdrew again, and when fierce Ukrainian resistance in Bakhmut brought his army to a standstill, he faced a motorised insurrection that came within a few hours’ drive of Moscow.

The Biden administration’s caution in its support for Ukraine was based on a fear of nuclear escalation. But there is little sign that Putin ever seriously considered irradiating the territory he wanted to conquer at untold risk to his own troops. The Trump administration’s race now to force ceasefire terms on Ukraine looks even more misguided. If these terms involve ceding land, they would not be constitutionally acceptable to Kyiv without a referendum. They might deliver the sugar high of headlines about peace, but they would make renewed conflict more likely, not less, in the long term.

In principle, Russia has been a staunch advocate of world peace since ratifying the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1929. In practice, it has violated the pact’s ban on wars of aggression at will, and sometimes nothing less than military defeat can bring a course correction. Two years after its withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed. Putin’s regime deserves nothing less. Trump cannot see this because he has put himself in the middle of the argument. The west is not in the middle of this argument. It is on the side of Ukraine.

Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty