[E-rundbrief] Info 2172 - US Could Help Bring Peace to Ukraine ?

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief Info 2172 - Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. 
Davies,(Commondreams.org, USA): This Is How the United States Could Help 
Bring Peace to Ukraine. 
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/04/28/how-united-states-could-help-bring-peace-ukraine

Bad Ischl, 29.4.2021

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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This Is How the United States Could Help Bring Peace to Ukraine
Decisions by the U.S. will have a critical impact on whether there will 
soon be peace in Ukraine, or only a much longer and bloodier war.

Medea Benjamin,  Nicolas J.S. Davies

April 28, 2022,

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/04/28/how-united-states-could-help-bring-peace-ukraine

On April 21st, President Biden announced new shipments of weapons to 
Ukraine, at a cost of $800 million to U.S. taxpayers. On April 25th, 
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin 
announced over $300 million more military aid. The United States has now 
spent $3.7 billion on weapons for Ukraine since the Russian invasion, 
bringing total U.S. military aid to Ukraine since 2014 to about $6.4 
billion.

The top priority of Russian airstrikes in Ukraine has been to destroy as 
many of these weapons as possible before they reach the front lines of 
the war, so it is not clear how militarily effective these massive arms 
shipments really are. The other leg of U.S. "support" for Ukraine is its 
economic and financial sanctions against Russia, whose effectiveness is 
also highly uncertain.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is visiting Moscow and Kyiv to try 
to kick start negotiations for a ceasefire and a peace agreement. Since 
hopes for earlier peace negotiations in Belarus and Turkey have been 
washed away in a tide of military escalation, hostile rhetoric and 
politicized war crimes accusations, Secretary General Guterres' mission 
may now be the best hope for peace in Ukraine.

The first month of a war offers the best chance for a negotiated peace 
agreement. That window has now passed for Ukraine.

This pattern of early hopes for a diplomatic resolution that are quickly 
dashed by a war psychosis is not unusual. Data on how wars end from the 
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) make it clear that the first month 
of a war offers the best chance for a negotiated peace agreement. That 
window has now passed for Ukraine.

An analysis of the UCDP data by the Center for Strategic and 
International Studies (CSIS) found that 44% of wars that end within a 
month end in a ceasefire and peace agreement rather than the decisive 
defeat of either side, while that decreases to 24% in wars that last 
between a month and a year. Once wars rage on into a second year, they 
become even more intractable and usually last more than ten years.

CSIS fellow Benjamin Jensen, who analyzed the UCDP data, concluded, "The 
time for diplomacy is now. The longer a war lasts absent concessions by 
both parties, the more likely it is to escalate into a protracted 
conflict… In addition to punishment, Russian officials need a viable 
diplomatic off-ramp that addresses the concerns of all parties."

To be successful, diplomacy leading to a peace agreement must meet five 
basic conditions:

First, all sides must gain benefits from the peace agreement that 
outweigh what they think they can gain by war.

U.S. and allied officials are waging an information war to promote the 
idea that Russia is losing the war and that Ukraine can militarily 
defeat Russia, even as some officials admit that that could take several 
years.

In reality, neither side will benefit from a protracted war that lasts 
for many months or years. The lives of millions of Ukrainians will be 
lost and ruined, while Russia will be mired in the kind of military 
quagmire that both the U.S.S.R. and the United States already 
experienced in Afghanistan, and that most recent U.S. wars have turned into.

In Ukraine, the basic outlines of a peace agreement already exist. They 
are: withdrawal of Russian forces; Ukrainian neutrality between NATO and 
Russia; self-determination for all Ukrainians (including in Crimea and 
Donbas); and a regional security agreement that protects everyone and 
prevents new wars.

Both sides are essentially fighting to strengthen their hand in an 
eventual agreement along those lines. So how many people must die before 
the details can be worked out across a negotiating table instead of over 
the rubble of Ukrainian towns and cities?

Second, mediators must be impartial and trusted by both sides.

The United States has monopolized the role of mediator in the 
Israeli-Palestinian crisis for decades, even as it openly backs and arms 
one side and abuses its UN veto to prevent international action. This 
has been a transparent model for endless war.

Turkey has so far acted as the principal mediator between Russia and 
Ukraine, but it is a NATO member that has supplied drones, weapons and 
military training to Ukraine. Both sides have accepted Turkey's 
mediation, but can Turkey really be an honest broker?

The UN could play a legitimate role, as it is doing in Yemen, where the 
two sides are finally observing a two-month ceasefire. But even with the 
UN's best efforts, it has taken years to negotiate this fragile pause in 
the war.

How many people must die before the details can be worked out across a 
negotiating table instead of over the rubble of Ukrainian towns and cities?

Third, the agreement must address the main concerns of all parties to 
the war.

In 2014, the U.S.-backed coup and the massacre of anti-coup protesters 
in Odessa led to declarations of independence by the Donetsk and Luhansk 
People's Republics. The first Minsk Protocol agreement in September 2014 
failed to end the ensuing civil war in Eastern Ukraine. A critical 
difference in the Minsk II agreement in February 2015 was that DPR and 
LPR representatives were included in the negotiations, and it succeeded 
in ending the worst fighting and preventing a major new outbreak of war 
for 7 years.

There is another party that was largely absent from the negotiations in 
Belarus and Turkey, people who make up half the population of Russia and 
Ukraine: the women of both countries. While some of them are fighting, 
many more can speak as victims, civilian casualties, and refugees from a 
war unleashed mainly by men. The voices of women at the table would be a 
constant reminder of the human costs of war and the lives of women and 
children that are at stake.

Even when one side militarily wins a war, the grievances of the losers 
and unresolved political and strategic issues often sow the seeds of new 
outbreaks of war in the future. As Benjamin Jensen of CSIS suggested, 
the desires of U.S. and Western politicians to punish and gain strategic 
advantage over Russia must not be allowed to prevent a comprehensive 
resolution that addresses the concerns of all sides and ensures a 
lasting peace.

Fourth, there must be a step-by-step roadmap to a stable and lasting 
peace that all sides are committed to.

The Minsk II agreement led to a fragile ceasefire and established a 
roadmap to a political solution. But the Ukrainian government and 
parliament, under Presidents Poroshenko and then Zelensky, failed to 
take the next steps that Poroshenko agreed to in Minsk in 2015: to pass 
laws and constitutional changes to permit independent, 
internationally-supervised elections in the DPR and LPR, and to grant 
them autonomy within a federalized Ukrainian state.

Now that these failures have led to Russian recognition of the DPR and 
LPR's independence, a new peace agreement must revisit and resolve their 
status, and that of Crimea, in ways that all sides will be committed to, 
whether that is through the autonomy promised in Minsk II or formal, 
recognized independence from Ukraine.

A sticking point in the peace negotiations in Turkey was Ukraine's need 
for solid security guarantees to ensure that Russia won't invade it 
again. The UN Charter formally protects all countries from international 
aggression, but it has repeatedly failed to do so when the aggressor, 
usually the United States, wields a Security Council veto. So how can a 
neutral Ukraine be reassured that it will be safe from attack in the 
future? And how can all parties be sure that the others will stick to 
the agreement this time?

Fifth, outside powers must not undermine the negotiation or 
implementation of a peace agreement.

Although the United States and its NATO allies are not active warring 
parties in Ukraine, their role in provoking this crisis through NATO 
expansion and the 2014 coup, then supporting Kyiv's abandonment of the 
Minsk II agreement and flooding Ukraine with weapons, make them an 
"elephant in the room" that will cast a long shadow over the negotiating 
table, wherever that is.

In April 2012, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan drew up a 
six-point plan for a UN-monitored ceasefire and political transition in 
Syria. But at the very moment that the Annan plan took effect and UN 
ceasefire monitors were in place, the United States, NATO, and their 
Arab monarchist allies held three "Friends of Syria" conferences, where 
they pledged virtually unlimited financial and military aid to the Al 
Qaeda-linked rebels they were backing to overthrow the Syrian 
government. This encouraged the rebels to ignore the ceasefire, and led 
to another decade of war for the people of Syria.

How the U.S. and its NATO allies act... will be crucial in determining 
whether Ukraine is destroyed by years of war, like Afghanistan, Iraq, 
Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.

The fragile nature of peace negotiations over Ukraine makes success 
highly vulnerable to such powerful external influences. The United 
States backed Ukraine in a confrontational approach to the civil war in 
Donbas instead of supporting the terms of the Minsk II agreement, and 
this has led to war with Russia. Now Turkey's Foreign Minister, Mevlut 
Cavosoglu, has told CNN Turk that unnamed NATO members "want the war to 
continue," in order to keep weakening Russia.

Conclusion

How the United States and its NATO allies act now and in the coming 
months will be crucial in determining whether Ukraine is destroyed by 
years of war, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and 
Yemen—or whether this war ends quickly through a diplomatic process that 
brings peace, security, and stability to the people of Russia, Ukraine, 
and their neighbors.

If the United States wants to help restore peace in Ukraine, it must 
diplomatically support peace negotiations and make it clear to its ally, 
Ukraine, that it will support any concessions that Ukrainian negotiators 
believe are necessary to clinch a peace agreement with Russia.

Whatever mediator Russia and Ukraine agree to work with to try to 
resolve this crisis, the United States must give the diplomatic process 
its full, unreserved support, both in public and behind closed doors. It 
must also ensure that its own actions do not undermine the peace process 
in Ukraine as they did the 2012 Annan plan in Syria.

One of the most critical steps that U.S. and NATO leaders can take to 
provide an incentive for Russia to agree to a negotiated peace is to 
commit to lifting their sanctions if and when Russia complies with a 
withdrawal agreement. Without such a commitment, the sanctions will 
quickly lose any moral or practical value as leverage over Russia and 
will be only an arbitrary form of collective punishment against its 
people, and against poor people everywhere who can no longer afford food 
to feed their families. As the de facto leader of the NATO military 
alliance, the U.S. position on this question will be crucial.

So policy decisions by the United States will have a critical impact on 
whether there will soon be peace in Ukraine, or only a much longer and 
bloodier war. The test for U.S. policymakers, and for Americans who care 
about the people of Ukraine, must be to ask which of these outcomes U.S. 
policy choices are likely to lead to.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free 
to republish and share widely.

Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for 
Peace, is the author of the 2018 book, "Inside Iran: The Real History 
and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran." Her previous books 
include: "Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection" 
(2016); "Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control" (2013); "Don’t Be 
Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart" (1989), and (with 
Jodie Evans) "Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide)" (2005).

Nicolas J.S. Davies

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with 
CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and 
Destruction of Iraq.

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