Peace in Ukraine, Peace in Europe

Peace in Ukraine, Peace in Europe
Remarks to a Conference on Strategic Challenges and the Emerging New Order

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
By video, 24 May 2025

 In the West, this is a time of forever wars.  Forever wars have no defined or achievable objectives.  Therefore, they include no plan for their termination or the reconciliation of the parties to their results.  In forever wars, what passes for strategy is the fantasy that the will of the enemy will somehow evaporate, leading to its unconditional surrender.  But ‘we will win, they will lose’ is a pipe dream, not a program.  Even wars of attrition need steadfast purposes that both sides can, eventually, reluctantly agree to.

In the West, this is an era of fantasy foreign policy.  In it, governments and media oligopolies use addictive modern technologies to dictate fictional versions of trends and events.  This century has shown that determined propagandists can now fool most of the people most of the time.  But reality exists whether people believe in it or not.  Policies built on delusions cannot overcome it.  What has been lost on the ground can be denied at pep rallies, but it cannot be recovered at the negotiating table.

The war in Ukraine has not “weakened and isolated Russia.”  Far from it.  But it has devastated and depopulated Ukraine.  Ukraine’s ambition to ban the language and culture of its Russian and other minorities and to quell their resistance to forcible assimilation has failed.  The war has put paid to the West’s effort to incorporate Ukraine into an alliance hostile to Russia.  Europe’s need for post-Cold War security architecture to make it “whole and free” remains unfulfilled.

Peace is the restrained tolerance of a postwar status quo by those with the capability to alter it by violence.  The West is without any plan for peace.  And rather than a “Europe whole and free,” the Ukraine war has produced a Europe divided and in the process of abandoning free speech and liberal democracy.

Those who are in the process of losing wars can be forgiven for dreaming of ceasefires but not for failing to recognize that they cannot impose a ceasefire on an advancing enemy.  Nor can they credibly issue ultimatums.  An enemy that is unbowed will predictably insist on terms that serve its interests and the war aims it has set for itself.  As the Roman statesman Seneca observed, “it is expedient for the victor to wish for peace, [but] for the vanquished it is necessary.”  To imagine otherwise is to compound disaster.  Ukraine is not vanquished, but it is being broken.  If there is no peace, it risks further dismemberment as well as suffering and the possible loss of its access to the sea.

Any negotiating position that ignores realities because they are unpalatable is bound to fail.  A triumphant enemy has a veto over what is possible.  Basing peace talks on the attribution to Russia of nefarious objectives it has never professed guarantees impasse.  The West needs to get a grip on reality and cure itself of fears of Russian plans to conquer Europe for which there is no evidence.  In three years of warfare, Russia has not conquered Ukraine.  Both its ambitions and its capabilities fall well short of Europe’s hallucinatory view of them.

Over three decades, Russia consistently asked how to construct a peaceful order in Europe.  The West’s adamant refusal to address the issues of concern to Russia finally provoked it to go to war.  One of Russia’s questions has found a costly answer in that war.  The West now has no choice but to address those questions that remain.

Russian speakers in Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson are now under Russian protection.  They will not accept subjugation by Ukraine and Russia will not ask them to do so.  But the other questions that sparked the war have not changed.

Can Ukraine enjoy security by returning to the neutrality it proclaimed at its independence?  If so, with what assurances and under what guarantees from whom?

Can Europe, including Russia, replace division and confrontation with unity in diversity and cooperation among all its states?  What framework can be agreed to enable this?

If Americans and Europeans do not at last address these questions forthrightly, there will be no peace in Ukraine, in Europe, or with Russia.  A peace can yet arise from the ashes of war in Europe if Europeans pursue it with the realism and empathy that are the foundation of all sound statecraft.