War or Peace in Ukraine: US Moves and European Choices

Francois Heisbourg

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Some three years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the fate of that beleaguered country remains in the balance. It is difficult to overstate the pivotal consequences that the outcome of the largest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War will have. The physical future, political freedom and economic well-being of Ukraine’s population is at stake, as is the existence, sovereignty and integrity of the Ukrainian state. At the European level, the outcome will either blunt or sharpen Russia’s pursuit of its broader aim to reverse the strategic effects of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 and to recreate a latter-day Russian empire by limiting the sovereignty of the states lying east of the Oder–Neisse line. This was the clear objective in the draft treaties that Russia proffered to the United States and NATO in December 2021, in the run-up to the February 2022 invasion. A Russian victory against Ukraine would entail massive increases in the burden borne by NATO’s current members to preclude the fulfilment of the objectives laid out in those treaties. Notwithstanding the costs of the war, Russia’s armed forces are larger than they were at its onset, and battle-tested in a way that NATO’s armies are not.

At the global level, a territorially diminished Ukraine would likely put an end to successful post-Second World War efforts to counter the unilateral annexation of territory in Europe recognised as belonging lawfully to a separate state. Before 2014, Russia had recognised the borders of Ukraine as delineated in their bilateral accords, notably the Russo-Ukrainian treaty of 28 January 2003, in line with the international order established by the victorious powers in the Second World War, including the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Russia’s unlawful annexation of Crimea in 2014 laid the groundwork for the order’s unravelling, but had gone unrecognised by all but Russia itself and ten outlier states that did not include China. Today, Russia includes in its constitutional territory close to a fifth of Ukraine, including some land it does not control.