Is Conflict 'Freezing' the Answer for Ukraine?

Ever since President Vladimir Putin sent the Russian military crashing across the Ukraine border in March 2022, both Ukraine and Russia have been engaged in a bloody struggle that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and caused millions of Ukrainians to flee their country.

What the so-called “experts” blithely expected would be a swift takeover of Ukraine followed by the installation of a puppet government has instead degenerated into a stalemate on the eastern frontier in which little land has changed hands over the past two years.

At the current time, Putin’s troops occupy both Crimea (which Russia took over in 2014) and an eastern band of Ukrainian territory consisting of parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces — all of which total about 60,000 square miles. All told, these territories constitute almost 26% percent of Ukraine’s 233,100 square miles.

Never one to get caught up in the formalities of international law, Russia announced in September 2022 that it had annexed these four provinces—even though it only controls portions of these lands. This blatant disregard for the sovereignty of Ukraine was so appalling that it even roused the largely comatose U.N. General Assembly to pass a resolution rejecting this annexation as illegal and demanding that Russia respect the integrity of Ukraine’s borders.

The stalemate on the ground has also been mirrored in the diplomatic world as Russia and Ukraine have offered mutually exclusive proposals for ending the conflict. Russia, not surprisingly, wants to be permitted to keep the lands that it has occupied and be given those remaining lands in the four provinces that it does not occupy as a bonus gift.

Moreover, Russia wants Ukraine to give up its plans to join NATO because Russia seems to believe that Ukraine wants to lead the warriors of Belgium and Albania into battle against Moscow.

Ukraine’s objectives are straightforward: It wants all territories occupied by Russia to be returned to Ukraine. However, Newsweek has reported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has modified his position to say that he is open to negotiating a ceasefire to end the “hot war” for the time being.

Such a ceasefire would be, in Zelenksyy’s eyes, a holding action so that the occupied territories could later be recovered by diplomatic means. Zelensky argues that any such ceasefire would have to be anchored by some sort of security guarantee such as membership in NATO.

Also unaddressed is the fate of the $300 billion in Russian assets being held abroad by Western governments, at least two-thirds of which, according to NPR, is being held in European financial institutions.

The United States, which holds only a few billion dollars of Russian assets, has encouraged the EU nations to seize the assets and use them to fund Ukrainian military operations against Russia. However, the Europeans have been slow to jump on the seizure bandwagon, fearing that their own business interests in Russia could be adversely affected.

Most of these nations agree that these funds should, at the very least, be made available for reconstructing Ukraine after the war ends. Indeed, it is unlikely that much of these frozen assets will ever be returned to Russia due to the devastation it has inflicted on Ukraine.

So how does the bloodshed in Ukraine end? Assuming that Russia cannot defeat Ukraine and Ukraine cannot expel Russia, then it seems the only option is to freeze the conflict.

This is not a theoretical argument as frozen conflicts exist throughout the world — most notably on the Korean Peninsula. A ceasefire ended the Korean War in 1953 but a formal peace treaty was never signed.

Both North Korea and South Korea continue to claim the entire Korean landmass, but their respective territorial boundaries are essentially delineated by the demilitarized zone (DMZ) which cuts through the middle of the peninsula.

As such, the two Koreas are essentially in a state of war that has been frozen, aside from a few skirmishes, for more than 70 years. Either Korea could restart hostilities at any time but both have apparently been deterred from doing so due to the massive damage that would result from a full-scale conflict between the two countries.

Both countries are recognized by nearly every other country in the world but they refuse to recognize each other.

If the war in Ukraine were to be frozen like the Korean conflict, hostilities would cease and Russia would continue to occupy the lands in the eastern provinces for the time being. As both countries are already recognized throughout the global community, Ukraine would insist that the cease-fire would not involve a permanent cessation of territory to Russia.

Instead, it would amount to an acknowledgment that the Russians will continue to occupy a part of Ukraine but that the occupation will not be sanctioned or legitimized by the international community.

Russia, for its part, will want the Ukrainian government to formally cede the occupied lands. Ukraine will also insist on security guarantees such as some sort of affiliation with NATO or at least membership in the EU.

Finally, there is the question as to how the Russian assets being held by foreign banks will be released with Ukraine wanting to use these assets to fund its reconstruction and Russia demanding that they be returned.

In any event, it seems that a frozen conflict may be the only alternative to a continuing bloodbath that has already resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians as well as the displacement of millions of Ukrainians and the destruction of hundreds of billions of dollars of property.