Let's be realists: let's demand the impossible – opinion

There will be no decisive battle in this war and no parade of the Ukrainian army on Red Square. Not because there will be no Ukrainian victory, but because there will be no victory of the Sec-ond World War model.

Last autumn, friends from the front turned to us with a request to formulate clearly what we are fighting for - conditions that can be considered a victory for Ukraine. The answer was the "Manifesto of Sustainable Peace: The World After Our Victory" - a document prepared by about twenty Ukrainian experts from various fields of law, politics, and economics.

The "Manifesto" was presented at the Munich Security Conference. The reactions to it varied from very positive to rather critical. The latter mostly come from the West. To reduce the criticism to a few words: the document is unrealistic. One commentator even advised stopping talking about the Manifesto, saying that it compromises Ukraine and proves that Ukrainians cannot be dealt with because they live in the clouds.

We need to consider the realities - who would argue about that? But the old realities ceased to exist on February 24, and there are no new ones yet - they change daily. So how do we deal with what is not there?

From the first days of the war, we see the compromise of all those politicians, ideologists, and experts who called themselves realists. Their credibility is easy to check: listen to or read their statements from the end of February to the beginning of March 2022. How many days did they give Ukraine before it fell under Russia's attack?

New realities are being formed every day, and are being formed in Ukraine. Looking back at the past century, the most insightful historians came to conclusions that were not obvious then but are now apparent: the fate of the First and Second World Wars depended to a large extent on what was happening in and around Ukraine.

Fortunately, the present war did not become the Third World War, although it still can. But there are other differences. Then, Great Powers decided the fate of the world without Ukraine and Ukrainians. Now, Ukrainians - first and foremost those on the front lines - determine the contours of the future. Therefore, Ukraine has the moral right and even obligation to formulate victory on its own terms.

Recall how Margaret Thatcher and George H.W. Bush advised Kyiv not to leave the USSR, while Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin insisted that Ukraine get rid of its nuclear arms. From publicly available documents of then-secret diplomacy, we can see that in the 1980s, Western leaders did not want the victory of the anti-communist opposition in communist Poland. They feared that this victory would undermine international stability. The leaders of Solidarity then repeated the well-known slogan, "Be realists - demand the impossible!". Thirty years later, we see whose approach was realistic.

Poland in the 1980s is Ukraine in 2020: a country from which a new world order is growing. We did not choose such a role. But when circumstances dictate, we must be realists and demand the impossible.

Several "realistic" scenarios can already be buried.

Firstly, Ukraine will not disappear from the world map, as Putin hoped.

Secondly, Putin is unlikely to dare use nuclear weapons. But even if so - in principle, all conversations about the future lose meaning.

There will be no decisive final battle or victory parade of the Ukrainian army on Red Square in this war. Not because there will be no Ukrainian victory, but because there will be no victory in the model of the Second World War. The current war is more similar to the First World War. A long war of attrition, in which the one who first could not bear its burden lost - in 1917, the Russian Empire, and then at the end of 1918, the German Empire.

The end of such a war comes from one side's collapse. Therefore, the main goal is to bring Putin's regime to such a collapse through a combination of Ukrainian successes on the battlefield, Western assistance to Ukraine, Western sanctions against the Russian Federation, and a mixture of devastated Russian refrigerators, Russian mobilization, and Russian funerals.

The rest of the scenarios will fluctuate between the worst for Ukraine and the worst for Russia, including its eventual disintegration. The question is not choosing between the first and second as a binary, but how to move as far away from the first and as close to the second as possible.

In such cases, the archer rule applies: one should aim higher when shooting longer distances and wanting to hit the target. Military experts argue: returning to the borders on February 24th will be very difficult; what can we say about the borders of 1991? We, the authors of the "Manifesto," believe that even reaching the borders of 1991 will not solve the problem. This will be a victory, but not a sustainable peace. It will be a more or less lasting truce.

Russian history demonstrates a clear tendency: every attempt by Russia to modernize and become a normal country ends in failure. As Russians boast: every crisis in Russia ends with expanding its borders. In modern Ukrainian terms: if Russia does not change even after a new peace, in 20-30 years, a new Putin will appear there, and there will be another war. Therefore, a plan for sustainable peace for Ukraine continues after the return to the borders of 1991. It is a necessary but insufficient condition. Sustainable peace involves a plan to transform a defeated Russia under pressure from the West and with the participation of Ukraine. Our Manifesto is a list of "must-have" conditions for such a plan. For example, we demand the punishment of Putin - with the decision of the Hague Tribunal, this demand has become a new reality. Of course, over time, the Manifesto will have to be revised. After the Ukrainian counteroffensive, a new reality will emerge, and new demands will have to be applied to it. But no matter what changes occur, the principle remains the same: there can be no sustainable peace without fair and far-sighted peace. Crimes must be punished, borders restored, Russia or whatever remains after it transformed into a normal country or countries. Therefore, let us be realists - let us demand the impossible.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine