THE REAL RUSSO-UKRAINE CONFLICT: ACCORDING TO ACADEMIA

by Ben Winnemore

NATO is at a turning point, a situation that it has seldom found itself in before. Cut out from current negotiations in Ukraine, Europe has a thin rope with which it must walk over a valley of military abyss. At the beginning of last week, the continent was hopeful that it would be included in trilateral peace talks between NATO, Ukraine, and Russia, with the Trump administration reaching out to European states in preparation for negotiations. However, such talks now appear unlikely, as the US has unfortunately pivoted towards a strategy of direct discussions with Russia, leaving out Europe, with Keith Kellogg, the American President’s Special Envoy for Ukraine, allegedly suggesting that a committee, in reference to the European Union’s structure and lack of key decisionmakers, can never achieve successful outcomes in high-stakes negotiations.

The phone call between Trump and Putin, alongside the extension of an invitation, is of profound significance. The new American strategy even triggered a firm response from the usually level-headed Germans, with the Defence Minister Boris Pistorius labelling it as “regrettable” and expressing the view that “it would have been better to speak about a possible NATO membership for Ukraine or possible losses of territory at the negotiating table” rather than ruling out NATO membership and making concessions to Putin prior to the initiation of formal talks. Sébastien Lecornu perhaps captured the mood best, warning that the US must not cultivate a “peace through weakness” mentality, which runs contrary to Trump’s supposed philosophy. Whilst I agree with these statements and strongly support a long-term plan for NATO membership for Ukraine, we must remain pragmatic if we are truly invested in peace, recognizing that the currently occupied territory is irretrievable, with Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia all likely to be ceded in talks. Given this constraint, a buffer zone must be created, preferably a DMZ including Ukraine-proper and Russo-annexed territory, with a 10 year established vision for Ukraine’s deeper integration with NATO and the EU, during which the continent can prop up the Ukrainian state, fighting corruption that currently prevents it from joining the EU and hinders its economic growth, and decisively aid in its rebuild, potentially using the 300 billion USD in frozen Russian assets to do so.

Make no mistake, Ukraine is purely European, and so is Russia, but one cannot lose sight of the strategic realities at play, which are key in understanding the current basis for talks, and the potential trajectory of future talks. Here I will attempt to break down different international relations theories and how each affects the current negotiations.

Theory

Military aggression against a fellow European state inevitably alienates the rest of Europe, despite the deep cultural ties between the European peoples. To better illuminate the nature of military conflict, one should examine international relations theory under the lens of its major schools. In general, the global order functions as anarchy, which can be described as a fluid environment, especially when conflict arises, since there exists no legal monopoly of force. For defensive realists, fluidity gives rise to the need for mitigation. For offensive realists, on the other hand, the anarchic nature of the international system induces strategic calculation to maximise gains. This antithesis sets the stage for the disparities in the outlook between NATO and Russia. However, the difference is not binary, as strategists and autocrats would like to believe, and should not be treated as such when concerning morality and influence surrounding conflict, which often go hand in hand as states may utilise a façade of moral virtue to hide material aspirations often via propaganda and coercion of the media. Despite material aspirations, the façade produces concrete outcomes as moral principles unite different parties upon confrontation, establishing equivalent security umbrellas.

To further explicate this phenomenon, one is led to the study of history. The History of the Peloponnesian War and the notion of the Thucydidean Trap present compelling similarities to the current situation in Ukraine. Thucydides shows war to be an unpredictable and self-perpetuating cycle, with the regional dispute between Corinth and Corcyra escalating into a decades-long war between Athens and Sparta. Similarly, Russia likely underestimated the war’s duration and consequences, especially surrounding sanctions, supply side and demand side inflationary pressures, and energy prices.

Thucydides looks to internal versus external developments, especially surrounding the notion of justice, as justice exists primarily in the domestic sphere to advance specific political interests. Whereas state interests can in abstracto exist in the absence of intellectual considerations of justice within the anarchical system of the interaction, in reality, moral principles often colour countries’ perceptions of their geostrategic goals.

The above serves as the foundation of the constructivist understanding of conflict, according to which such struggles are shaped by norms, identities, and social constructs. Constructivists argue that wars do not merely amount to fightsover the distribution of hard power, but they also revolve around competing narratives of justice, sovereignty, and international legitimacy. Constructivists would argue that the identities consolidated after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, with the subsequent Ukrainian swing towards the West following the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych, make a negotiated peace based on territorial concessions quite untenable, as Ukraine increasingly sees itself as a European, sovereign nation rather than part of Russia’s historical sphere of influence. This has already led Ukraine to take a more pro-European approach to defence policy, encompassing strategic autonomy and defensive realism, reflecting a belief in diplomacy and economic interdependence as stabilizing forces, hence the push towards EU and NATO membership under Poroshenko who also styled the constructivist approach as he founded the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, thus separating Ukrainian churches from the Moscow Patriarchate. These actions ultimately alienated Ukraine from Moscow, despite eastern Ukrainians and western Russians being one of the same people.

To move back to the case of the US, by exerting influence over Europe during the cold war, the US established common axioms of ethics which enabled the founding of the UN, WTO and other key international entities, each with the presumptive aim of exerting egoistic, offensive western influence. Be that as it may, international bodies have now evolved a greater altruistic scope with the UN, ICC and WTO often acting contrary to US objectives.

Outcome

The invasion of Ukraine unambiguously constitutes a travesty of justice. At its core, it is a realist struggle where power and interest dictate state behaviour in an anarchic international system. Thucydides’ notion that justice is primarily internal, while interest dominates external affairs, aligns with Putin’s current strategic calculus, driven by autocratic egoism and a zero-sum perception of NATO’s eastward expansion, reinforcing the idea that interest can exist in the absence of justice. It is therefore safe to say that it is this friction between constructivist justice and realist justice that will determine the outcome of peace talks. Realist justice exclusively depends upon material interests, those based on military realities with territorial concessions, thus mirroring historical peace settlements, such as the Peace of Nicias during the Peloponnesian War, which temporarily halted conflict but failed to resolve underlying constructivist tensions. A constructivist perspective implies that identity and culture will also shape negotiations. Ukraine, having solidified its national identity through collective resistance alongside European states, may reject any settlement perceived as unjust, especially if Western institutions – such as the UN, NATO, EU or ICC - continue to frame the war as a moral struggle. On top of this, Russia’s narrative of reclaiming historical territory makes significant compromise extremely unlikely unless its autocratic leadership change. Thus Europe is again forced to walk the fine line of constructivist and realist justice, as both will determine the outcome of the war and its future.