How can the Ukraine war be ended? Some intellectuals around the philosopher Richard David Precht are calling for negotiations – immediately. Security experts around Munich professor Carlo Marsala reject this. What speaks for and against immediate negotiations.
Shooting or negotiating, diplomacy or the military – that’s the current debate. Even that is blurred, because the war simply does not stand still. Roughly speaking, the Ukraine war is going like this: the Russians shoot a lot, but inaccurately.
The Ukrainians shoot much less, but much more accurately. The high-tech weapons from the west are turning things around – but only for the moment. With the Western systems, Ukraine can destroy Russian arms depots behind the front lines. This slows down the Russian advance. Point for Ukraine.
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But the rocket launchers with the precision ammunition are not offensive weapons, and they won’t help with the recapture of Donbass, which is largely occupied by the Russians, or Crimea, as promised by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Ukraine would need western tanks for that. Which it doesn’t have because the West doesn’t supply them – neither do the Americans. Point for Putin. Plus: Western hopes that Putin will limit himself to the Donbass are probably losing the reality test.
Apparently, trainloads of battle tanks are being shipped from the Crimea to the southern front. War aim: Odessa, the important port. Putin still wants to cut off Ukraine from the Black Sea. Without the Donbass and the Black Sea, Ukraine would hardly be able to survive.
One of the most important questions of the war is still unanswered: How long can the Russians hold out, how long can the West? Is Putin stronger because he doesn’t care about his people, or is the West stronger because he mustn’t care about his people?
In any case, there is now this Politbarometer survey: 70 percent of Germans are in favor of continuing to help the Ukrainians – despite high energy prices. Only 22 percent are against it.
The figure for the supporters of the Greens is breathtaking: 95 to 5. Which only allows one conclusion: Apparently the Greens are not breaking any taboos, rather they are doing what their supporters expect of them. Should the Greens sympathizers really have overcome the party’s basic pacifist idea?
Sure, polls are flying sand, and in January, when the utility bills come, the mood could change. But for now, poll numbers suggest the federal government could do more for Ukraine without losing popular support.
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Whether and how the western sanctions will work is also not exactly known. In any case, the British BBC evaluated Russian newspapers. Accordingly, the sanctions plunge the Russian auto industry into a “deep hole”. And Russia’s announcement that the media can now simply be shut down without a court order is not a signal of strength and sovereignty.
Negotiate now – as the appeal by Richard David Precht and Co. in “Zeit” demands – or only negotiate when it is worthwhile, i.e. later, as proven security experts around Munich professor Carlo Marsala demand in the “FAZ”?
Precht formulates the crucial question as follows: Do German (and Western) arms deliveries put Ukraine in a better negotiating position or do they lead to greater destruction and suffering in Ukraine?
Since Precht assumes that Ukraine cannot win the war because of the roughly 10-fold superiority of Russian artillery, the answer is clear to him – negotiate immediately to prevent further suffering.
Peace and conflict researchers are often positioned on the political left, but in fact they are concerned with the point at which negotiations are worthwhile at all. Not now, anyway, is the most common answer they give.
Putin would prevent negotiations from achieving his war goal of erasing Ukraine’s identity. And Zelenskyy would prevent negotiations from achieving his war goal of maintaining Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Another thing that speaks against negotiations, as the Giessen conflict researcher Andrea Gawrich and her Marburg colleague Thorsten Bonacker point out in the “FAZ”: Putin cannot be trusted to respect a result he negotiated himself. Which leaves little choice but to wait for a stalemate – or create it with the help of western weapons.
To which Precht, for example, objects: How many tanks would the West actually have to supply to enable a “stalemate” in Ukraine? Which at the same time raises the question: who decides about the end of the war anyway? The Chancellor said: There will be no peace that Ukraine does not agree with. That was also the line of the G-7 countries.
A left-wing social democrat answers this question a bit more honestly: “Western societies decide,” says Ralf Stegner. In other words, if the West stops delivering arms, Ukraine will have to capitulate because of Russia’s numerical military superiority.
It is correct that not only Ukraine and Russia are responsible for this war, but also the West. He cannot wriggle out or hide behind the sophistical phrase used by Olaf Scholz: Ukraine must not lose and Russia must not win.
The “negotiations-immediate” line has an inner premise. It reads: If there is peace in Ukraine, whatever it is, Putin’s imperialist hunger will be satisfied. The “first-once-further-war” line contrasts this sentence: “Putin must be stopped in the Ukraine.” The “negotiators” say: The next target would be NATO, and Putin will not attack it.
To this the “fighting” reply: If the West surrenders Ukraine, it will use this signal of weakness to provoke Putin’s next attack. This, in turn, is supported by the strong ideology of restoring the former Soviet power, with which Putin has justified every move he has made.
Plus the post-Soviet Russian tradition of using brute force to achieve any goal. Imperial fixation on violence, that’s what connects the three apparatchiks Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin. Mikhail Gorbachev, who wanted to prevent Lithuania from becoming a West with the “Bloody Sunday of Vilnius”.
Boris Yeltsin, who was responsible for the first Chechen war. And Vladimir Putin, who launched the second Chechen campaign, launched military attacks on Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
In other words, the Western narrative that Putin strayed from the path of virtue at some point and was actually a “flawless democrat” was never true. This path of peace never existed. Like his immediate predecessors, Putin has always been a warlord.
