By Gwynne Dyer
What’s hard to keep in mind, with all the hype that’s flying around, is that there’s no particular reason for either side in the Ukraine war to want a ceasefire right now, let alone a full peace settlement. The only one who’s in a hurry is U.S. President Donald Trump, and that’s just because he’s terminally impatient.
The war, which has just passed its third anniversary, is as deeply stuck in the mud as the First World War that it so closely resembles. The Russians use their huge numerical superiority to make small advances at great cost of Russian lives, but at their rate of advance during the past year they would only be nearing the outskirts of Kyiv sometime in early 2029.
That does not mean that the current war of attrition will last until 2029, but rather that nobody can confidently predict the winner now. A drastic change of circumstances on either side could come at any point: a mutiny in the army, a change of government at home or even some third party joining the fight.
In the meantime, each side hangs on, playing its allotted role in the attritional war — much higher Russian casualties but a very slow Ukrainian retreat — and waiting for the unforeseeable but eventually almost inevitable shift in circumstances. Things usually happen very fast after that, with a decisive outcome in a matter of months.
Most senior Ukrainian and Russian officers would have been educated in the old Soviet military tradition even if they are too young to have served in that defunct army. They have likely passed on this wisdom — if that’s what it is — to their respective civilian superiors. They will do what they can in the meantime, but they waiting for something to change.
And then along comes Trump with a completely different set of motivations and expectations. For him, the kind of peace deal he creates is irrelevant so long as it wins him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump was outraged when Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the first months of his presidency in 2009 (“for nothing,” as Trump rightly pointed out). There may be a racial element in this, but the perceived injustice of Obama getting the prize when Trump didn’t get one has been a frequent feature at his rallies ever since.
“They gave Obama the Nobel Prize,” Trump told a Las Vegas rally last October. “He didn’t even know why the hell he got it, right? He still doesn’t. He got elected and they announced he’s getting the Nobel Prize. I got elected in a much bigger, better crazier election, but they gave him the Nobel Prize.”
For whatever reason, Trump badly wants the Nobel Peace Prize, and he wants it now. Once inaugurated, he created an artificial deadline for a ceasefire, claiming that Ukraine had to agree because it had "no cards" and was doomed to lose the war. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy knew better but would have lost some Western sympathy if he said so.
Good, but naive, people will often take the position that any war must end as soon as possible – especially in faraway places they know little about — because then the dying will stop.
But people who seek to gain by war don’t want to stop until they get what they want, and the people they attacked don’t want to stop so long as there’s some chance of getting back what they lost.
Or would you rather have frozen World War II in mid-1942, with Germans in France and at the gates of Moscow, the Holocaust gearing up and most of East and Southeast Asia under Japanese occupation.
So Zelenskyy insisted on preconditions before entering peace talks, whereupon Trump lost it. He ruthlessly cut off the flow of American arms, aid and intelligence information to Ukraine, knowing that in the short run, Zelenskyy could not replace them fully with supplies from sympathetic European states. Zelenskyy caved, as he had to.
Why is Trump in such a tearing rush? Perhaps for the same reason that he is usually rude and insulting: to unbalance the other side. “It’s sort of like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose,” his special envoy on Russia and Ukraine General Keith Kellogg explained. “You got their attention.” Or maybe he was just born that way.
However, by the end of last week, a parade of Western diplomatic and Ukrainian advisers had convinced Zelenskyy that accepting Trump’s ceasefire proposal would probably do no harm. If Vladimir Putin is still on top of his game, he will agree to the thirty-day ceasefire, knowing full well that the subsequent negotiations will probably collapse quite fast.
And Trump can relax: the next Nobel Peace Prize will not be announced until October.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is "Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers." The previous book, "The Shortest History of War," is also still available.
English (United States) ·