OPINION: Peace? Not Yet. And Here’s Why

Peace initiatives involving the United States, Russia, and Ukraine now seem to be tied to geopolitical haggling and the control of Ukraine’s rare earth elements and mineral resources. In pursuit of the deal, some of Washington’s most highly ranked players wish to re-write and deliberately misunderstand history.

To set the record straight: Ukraine did not provoke Russia. Ukraine did not threaten Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine – and one of the principal reasons Russia did so was to steal Ukraine’s natural resources. Embarrassingly, it now seems the United States wants a piece of Ukraine as well as peace.

In exchange for desperately needed military and financial support, Donald Trump is now demanding access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. Washington’s greed is frankly disgraceful. As might be expected, tensions between Kyiv and Washington have escalated.

In February, initial draft agreements with the US demanded an extortionate 50% of Ukraine’s natural resource revenues: this was rejected by Ukraine. A later draft remains largely unchanged. Adding insult to American avarice, Washington’s demands were made, again, while offering flimsy and wholly inadequate US security commitments. Plenty for Washington – and not enough for Ukraine.

Perhaps urging Mr. Trump’s advisors to consult a map would be instructive. Russia continues to occupy vast areas in Kupyansk, Luhansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia – precisely the areas where the President’s precious minerals lay. To put it succinctly – Russia will have to withdraw from most of occupied Ukraine for Donald Trump to get his hands on Kyiv’s goodies. 

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Kremlin Says Zelensky Needs to Be Forced to Make Peace

Putin’s spokesman called Friday’s angry encounter between Trump and Zelensky “quite an unprecedented event,” blaming Zelensky, who he said “demonstrated a complete lack of diplomatic abilities.”

And there lies the rub. Russia is unlikely to walk away from its conquests; it will have to be forced out. The type of force referred to is military force. Not negotiations. Russian defeat.

To take a brief aside, followers of Ukrainian history might remember that the US is already party to a comprehensive set of security guarantees for Kyiv. Now almost forgotten, the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was signed on Dec. 5, 1994, by the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine. America’s just departed secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, oversaw the agreement’s ratification while serving as Ambassador to Hungary. How soon he forgot.

The Budapest memorandum was predicated on Ukraine’s agreement to give up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, inherited from the Soviet Union, and accede to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear-weapon state. In exchange for Ukraine’s complete nuclear disarmament, the US, UK, and Russia pledged to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and existing borders, refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine and avoid economic coercion to influence Ukraine’s sovereignty. The last bit is especially interesting at this juncture: economic coercion.

In 2014, after a decade of calculation and military preparation, Putin set out to violate every provision of the Budapest Memorandum. First, using hybrid-political means, notably Russia’s unlawful 2014 annexation of Crimea, Putin’s machinations would soon edge toward the kinetic. 

A slow-moving invasion of Ukraine’s eastern most provinces then followed. As this incursion unfolded, Russia would outright deny it was occupying Ukrainian the districts of Donetsk, Luhansk and other places, claiming the “little green men” taking over Ukrainian towns were not Russian soldiers, but fantastical nazi-hunting ethnic Russian Ukrainians. But the invasions, expropriations, rapes, murders and disappearances were real. While the world looked the other way, Ukraine was at war.

Can Russia be trusted at the negotiation table? In February 2022, mere hours after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told UK Minister Liz Truss that Russia had no plans for military action, Putin lunched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Some observers were shocked. Negotiations involving Sergey Lavrov will be a waste of breath.

The effectiveness of security guarantees to restrain Russian aggression has been nil. As Russia steadily encroached, invaded, murdered and stole, Ukraine made numerous failed attempts to convene consultations with its EU partners based on the agreed obligations. No one was listening. Ukraine discovered, to its peril, that the Budapest Memorandum might well have been signed by Neville Chamberlin.

If peace talks are to proceed, they must do so based on the facts of the war. Misinformed statements by US officials have served only to cloud the water around still nescient peace talks. Some of these pronouncements have been perilously close to Russian talking points. To rebut some of the more outrageous lies, Russia is not winning the war in Ukraine. It is losing – badly. Russian daily casualty rates are in the vicinity of 1,500 troops per day – roughly one entire battalion of Russian troops is lost every 24 hours.   

During Putin’s 72-hour Special Military Operation, Russia has lost more than 866,000 troops, 10,000 tanks, 23,528 artillery systems, and 21,139 armored vehicles.

Bottom line? Putin’s military adventure has turned into a quagmire as deadly and futile as Vietnam or Afghanistan. In 2024, a year the world’s press warned Ukraine would fall, Russia lost 480,000 troops and captured an area of Ukraine the size of Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs. So far, Russia has lost eight times the total number of NATO forces stationed in Europe. Eight times. This is not winning. It is Russia, not Ukraine, who desperately need peace talks.

European leaders, understandably alarmed by negotiations excluding Ukraine, are pushing for a stronger role. Anticipating potential US policy shifts (or even outright reversals), NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has urged increased European funding for Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron has called for Europe to assert its stance against Russian aggression, emphasizing the continent’s reliance on Ukrainian minerals for economic security.

These rational suggestions, incredibly, were met by social media sniping from the President of the United States – who seems to have lost the thread that Russia is no friend to Europe, and cannot be, and will never be, a friend to the people or interests of the United States.

The US seeks Ukraine’s resources to reduce dependence on China, the world’s leading rare earth producer. Russia aims to retain control over occupied Ukrainian territories, and launched its full-scale invasion, in largest part, to seize these rich assets for themselves. Haggling over stolen merchandise makes the US an accessory after the fact to Russia’s crimes.  

Washington needs to clearly see that Russia is approaching the point of military exhaustion. With all its losses counted, Moscow is weaker now, militarily, than it has been since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. There will be no massive Russian summer offensive to take Kyiv. Nor was there one last summer, or the summer before – there will never be one. Russia lacks the resources, military expertise, tactics and materiel required to prosecute large scale combined arms maneuver warfare. Russia is bogged down in a war it cannot win.

Peace in Ukraine will only be achieved when Russia is defeated militarily. And Ukraine will only be secure when all its sovereign territory is returned to its control. Right now, Putin needs a peace deal, not Kyiv, and not the Ukrainian people.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.