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War Stories


WHY THE NIGHTMARISH STALEMATE IN UKRAINE WON’T END SOON

By Fred Kaplan
March 22, 20224:15 PM

A picture taken on Monday shows the damage at the Retroville shopping mall, a
day after it was shelled by Russian forces in a residential district in the
northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv . Fadel Senna/Getty Images
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The largest war in Europe since World War II has become a slugfest. Russia is
pulverizing Ukrainian cities with missiles and artillery; Ukraine is slamming
Russian tanks and supply lines with drones and small arms. Tens of thousands are
likely dead on both sides. But that doesn’t mean the fight is grinding to a
halt. To the contrary, the rubble and bloodshed are likely to thicken in the
coming days and weeks.

For here is the gruesome fact: The commanders and combatants on each side have
reason to believe that, if they hold out a little bit longer, the other side
will collapse—and thus they can gain a few more concessions, and tout something
resembling a victory, when they both tumble, exhausted, to negotiate the terms
of peace.

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Each side probably does have a breaking point. The Ukrainians figure that the
Russian forces—many of them marooned and thinly stretched—will eventually run
out of food, ammunition, and other supplies, without which they can no longer
fight. Meanwhile, the Russians figure that the Ukrainian resistance will
eventually run out of steam, cities will fold, and the besieged government in
Kyiv will surrender.


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This phase of the war is basically a race to see which side crumbles first.
Ukrainian generals guess that the Russian troops could run out of supplies by
the end of this week. A pending new round of arms deliveries for
Ukraine—including the $800 million worth of new weapons announced last week by
U.S. President Joe Biden—should refresh the resistance for some time.

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Yet the massive outflow of refugees, the savage killings of civilians, the
endless bombing and shelling, and the prospect of more troops moving from
Russia’s eastern regions toward the war zone must be taking their toll on
Ukrainian citizens too.

No one knows how many people—civilian and military—have been killed so far. On
Monday, the Moscow newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted the Russian ministry of
defense as saying that 9,861 Russian servicemen had been killed and 16,153
wounded in the three weeks that this war has been slogging on. By comparison,
Russia lost 15,000 troops in its decade-long war in Afghanistan.

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However, the newspaper swiftly issued a statement that this was false
information loaded on the news site by a hacker—an explanation that only raised
more questions. (For instance, if there really was a hacker, was the information
they inserted real, or disinformation designed to demoralize Russian readers?)
The Ukrainian government claims 15,000 Russians have been killed already. U.S.
intelligence puts the number around 7,000. Nobody really knows.

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Still, whatever the precise numbers, an abundance of verified data—photos,
iPhone footage, satellite imagery, and so forth—reveals, all too clearly, that
the level of death and destruction on both sides has been staggeringly high.

It’s unclear how long this can go on. Yet it’s still less clear who can stop it.
There is no overriding entity that can step in, knock heads together, enforce a
cease-fire, then impose or moderate a political settlement. The United Nations
was created to do this sort of thing, but even if it had sufficiently large
peacekeeping forces (which it doesn’t), Russia is one of the five permanent
members of the U.N. Security Council, so it couldn’t be a neutral party.

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Nor are there any countries with sufficient power and leverage to fill this role
in the same way that, say, President Jimmy Carter corralled the leaders of Egypt
and Israel into peace talks at Camp David in 1978. Maybe if President Biden and
China’s Xi Jinping jointly imposed a deal on Russia’s Vladimir Putin and
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, something would come of it—but first, Biden and Xi
would have to get on the same page, and that seems a long way from happening.

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Meanwhile, neither side is ready to surrender. Zelensky has said he is open to
direct talks with Putin. Earlier this week, Putin outlined a four-point peace
plan, but it wasn’t serious. It called for Ukraine to give up plans to join
NATO, acknowledge Russian ownership of Crimea, demilitarize, and denazify.
Zelensky has already offered to drop his dream of joining NATO (a significant
concession); Crimea might be an issue for realistic negotiation; but Putin’s two
other demands are nonstarters. Demilitarizing would mean removing all
Western-supplied weapons, which might have been an interesting item to discuss
before Putin’s invasion, but it’s a nonstarter now. And since Putin claims that
Kyiv is run by Nazis, denazification would mean the removal of Zelensky and his
government from power—and that isn’t happening either.

Maybe this war will come to a sudden halt if Russia’s troops run out of gas or
the Ukrainian resistance loses its will. For now, both sides seem to be settling
in for a long and violent grind.


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