All the pressure is on Zelensky after ceasefire offer

Don’t believe the British spin

I assess that Russia will agree with the US on a proposed ceasefire in Ukraine. This would put the ball back in Zelensky’s court to sign a peace deal that could destroy him politically and may give President Putin the security assurances he has sought for over seventeen years.

In a quite remarkable turn of events, the BBC announced that Britain had helped the US and Ukraine agree on the need for a 30-day ceasefire. This is spin of the most disingenuous kind.

The real story is that Britain has done everything in its power to prevent the possibility of ‘forcing’ Ukraine into negotiations on ending the three-year war. Indeed, just last week, a prominent UK broadsheet reinforced this point in a searing editorial. The British narrative for three years has been that, with sufficient support and strategic patience, Ukraine could impose a defeat on Russia. To use a British military phrase, that plan ‘didn’t survive contact with the enemy’.

Ukraine’s sudden collapse in Kursk, after Russian troops crawled ten kilometres through a gas pipeline that President Zelensky had, with much fanfare, shut down in January, was an astonishing defeat. It was astonishing because it revealed what many western commentators had said since August 2024, that seizing a small patch of land in Russia would turn out to be a strategic blunder for Ukraine. Since the Kursk offensive was launched, Russia has occupied large tracts of land in southern Donetsk, including several important mines and one of Ukraine’s largest power stations. The basic maths show a significant net loss to Zelensky over the past six months. The bigger picture proves that the overall direction of the war has been moving in Russia’s direction since the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023.

In Ukraine itself, the vultures are already circling in the sky as the body of Zelensky’s now six year Presidential term approaches its final breath. Arestovich was quick to call for Zelensky to resign after the damaging shoot-out at the Oval Office. Poroshenko has come out to say Ukraine has no choice but to cut a deal. Even Zelensky’s former press spokeswoman has called for peace and implied that the Ukrainian government tries to limit free speech on the subject of a truce. Team Trump is apparently talking to the egregiously corrupt former Prime Minster Yulia Tymoshenko about the future, heaven help us. The domestic political space for Zelensky to keep holding out with meaningless slogans like ‘peace through strength’, and ‘forcing Russia to make peace’ is rapidly closing around him.

That Ukraine has come to the negotiating table at all is a sign that it has been given no choice, since America paused the military and intelligence gravy train. There is nothing in the Jeddah meeting that suggests any change in the US position towards Ukraine.

All that the ceasefire does, if Russia agrees to it, is pauses the fighting. Indeed, it goes further than the unworkable Franco-Ukrainian idea to pause the fighting only in the air and sea, allowing Ukraine to keep fighting on the ground. Ironically, the Jeddah formulation favours Russia, as a partial ceasefire would have provided succour to the Ukrainian army which does not enjoy strategic air superiority, despite its mass drone attack on Moscow and other parts of Russia.

The joint US-Ukraine statement calls for Ukraine and others to ‘immediately begin negotiations toward an enduring peace that provides for Ukraine’s long-term security’.

If Russia agrees to a ceasefire, the clock will start on 30-days of intensive talks aimed at delivering a durable peace. Russia has said consistently that it will not agree to a ceasefire only; it wants the big questions addressed front and centre. These include Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO, the status of the four oblasts annexed by Russia since the start of the war and the protection of the Russian language in Ukraine.

The latter should be easier to tick off, at least in theory, although it will face resistance from ultranationalists in Ukraine. The second will be harder, as there is no military route for Ukraine to reclaim occupied lands, so may require some diplomatic finesse in allowing for a freezing of the line. By far the most bitter pill for Ukraine and its European sponsors will be the NATO issue.

Just moments after US Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth said at the Munich Security Conference that Ukraine’s NATO aspiration was unrealistic, Keir Starmer told Zelensky that it was irreversible. There is simply no way in which Britain will be able to finesse the point that a core plank of its strategy on Ukraine will be shattered, at US and Russian insistence. Nor is it likely that Russia will agree to any UK proposal for a NATO-lite peacekeeping force in Ukraine, even if it is in Lviv or some place hundreds of kilometres from the line of contact.

Moreover, Russia will expect some movement in any peace talks on the issue of economic sanctions. Before arriving in Jeddah, the Guardian newspaper published an OpEd from Andriy Yermak calling for more sanctions on Russia as part of any peace plan. This is beyond idiotic. What person with an ounce of political savvy thinks that Russia will sign up a peace process that punishes it for ending a war that it is winning on the battlefield?

While I doubt that Russia expects to achieve a complete lifting of all 20,000 sanctions, they will want many to fall away immediately as part of a longer-term plan. This will also force a reckoning with the issue of the $300bn in seized Russian sovereign reserves, most of which are held in Brussels. Ignoring the issue or hoping that western nations can simply give the money to Ukraine, simply won’t work; detailed thinking needed here too, as I have said several times before.

From my perspective, Ukraine’s readiness to go for a ceasefire illustrates how weak its hand of cards has become. Many on the western side are crowing that Russia will be forced to accept a ceasefire on Ukrainian terms, but this is nonsense. I predict President Putin will see this as an opportunity for NATO to provide him with the longer-term security reassurances on NATO enlargement that he has sought for the past seventeen years, without heed.