Ernie Regehr: Getting ready for the inevitable negotiations on Ukraine

Posted on June 23, 2023editor


By Ernie Regehr

Though their land is devastated by war, what many Ukrainians fear is an early ceasefire. As deep as the desire to silence the guns may run, it is hard to get past the understandable suspicion that a ceasefire now would launch a settlement process that would reward aggression and ignore the full sovereign rights of Ukraine. Would the front lines of the fighting simply be converted into de facto boundaries – enshrining injustice, rather than restoring peace?

That fear defines the central challenge facing advocates of an early ceasefire, but those doubling down on the war effort  – whatever-is-needed-for-as-long-as-it takes –  also face a challenge. They have to get past the prospects of thousands more dying, more homes and infrastructure destroyed, and recovery indefinitely deferred. And to that ongoing carnage must be added the risks of escalation to the unparalleled horror of nuclear attack and the growing possibility of war spreading to neighbouring countries.

It’s a devil’s choice, and Ukrainians, not those of us who watch from afar, are fated to make it. But while the international community must respect their choice, it also has a duty to be as vigorous and determined in pursuit of a just peace as it has been in support of the right to self-defence.

The likelihood of either side in this brutal war ever being in a position to dictate settlement terms to the other is remote, and that means negotiations are inevitable. And it is a dereliction of duty not to be getting ready for the inevitable. Readiness is as important to negotiating peace as to fighting a war. Middle power states like Canada, while overtly supporting Ukraine, or like Brazil, a BRICS partner to Russia that has remained neutral on the war and supports negotiations, should proactively be launching a peace commission or forum dedicated to doing groundwork for a peace process for when the conflicting parties finally reach that point.

Experts and representatives from the parties to the conflict, joined by experts in peace processes and diplomacy, could through such a forum be in permanent session investigating the possibilities – for example, assessing the parties’ openness to exploratory dialogue, developing settlement options, testing their viability, making an inventory of credible negotiating ideas and proposals available to the parties. If the warring parties were not yet ready to participate through official representatives, informal representation in a Track 2 diplomacy model would still be an important start for addressing questions that won’t be resolved on the battlefield.

Even substantial battlefield success for Ukraine would not settle the governance and sovereignty questions that so infected it in the years before the overt invasion. Are the Minsk proposals for semi-autonomous self-governing regions under the Ukrainian constitution in rebel areas still relevant? On the eventual status of Crimea, could a participatory process be devised to explore long-term settlement possibilities?

The battlefield is also unlikely to yield any insights into how apost-war Ukraine might effectively navigate its position on the strategic fault line between Russia and NATO. While the neutrality commonly proposed before the 2022 invasion has been rendered passé by a war that has clearly driven Ukraine to the western side of that fault line, Ukraine cannot escape its neighbourhood and the need for stable relations with next door Russia. Redefining and restructuring the Ukraine-Russia relationship would thus be another issue to be usefully explored by a peace commission or forum.

And there is broad acknowledgement that the international strategic order will not be stabilized after the war without a new modus operandi among the United States, NATO, Russia, and ultimately China. Russia came to the present disastrous war with genuine security grievances. None of those in any way justified invading Ukraine, but future stability requires that they too be addressed.

The current response of most Western states to the aggression on Ukraine is essentially to send weapons to the battlefield and then sit back to see what war brings – and what it brings is ongoing death and destruction and the promise of more of the same, along with little hope for a decisive, never mind just, outcome. But it’s not too late for the international community to get focused on trying to understand the conditions for an early, just,and durable peace. Peace is not a byproduct of war, it has to be deliberately constructed.

Ernie Regehr is author of Disarming Conflict: Why peace cannot be won on the battlefield (Between the Lines) and co-founder of Project Ploughshares. He recently moderated an international panel sponsored by the Canadian Pugwash Group, which included Russian and Ukrainian speakers/participants.

Roche: At 100 years old, Kissinger pushes back against demonizing China

Posted on June 21, 2023editor

OPINION

https://www.hilltimes.com/story/2023/06/19/kissinger-pushes-back-against-demonizing-china/390116/


BY DOUGLAS ROCHE

EDMONTON—Henry Kissinger turned 100 years old recently and, to mark the occasion, The Economist magazine interviewed him for eight hours over two days. Since I have long been critical of Kissinger’s realpolitik diplomacy, I searched the text of the interview to see whether he is mellowing in old age—or perhaps I am.

For many years, I reviled Kissinger for his part in the carpet bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war, his belief that tactical nuclear weapons could be used, and his overthrow of the reformist Salvador Allende in Chile. Yet, he prepared the way for U.S. president Richard Nixon to recognize the People’s Republic of China.

The Economist asked Kissinger what he thought of China’s global role today. Here he pushed back against current political thinking in the West, which wants to demonize China and wall it off politically. Instead, Kissinger wants a permanent dialogue to start between the American and Chinese presidents. Kissinger would have the American president say to his counterpart: “Mr. President, the two greatest dangers to peace right now are us two. In the sense that we have the capacity to destroy humanity. I think we should agree between ourselves to try to avoid such a situation.”

In Kissinger’s view, the fate of humanity depends on whether the U.S. and China can get along.He does not think China seeks global military domination. Rather, he sees the Chinese system as more Confucian than Marxist. Confucianism teaches a sort of cosmic harmony, and Kissinger thinks the only dominance today’s Chinese leaders seek is economic. “A war over Taiwan would set back China’s internal evolution substantially,” he said.

As for the prospects of today’s big countries finding a route to co-existence even though they are arming for war, Kissinger surprisingly said: “I think it’s possible that you can create a world order on the basis of rules that Europe, China and India could join, and that’s already a good slice of humanity. So if you look at the practicality of it, it can end well—or at least it can end without catastrophe and we can make progress through it. But it will require vision and dedication.”

I found it revelatory that Kissinger, the man who always put power over morality, is now talking in ways that—while he doesn’t say so explicitly—point to a common security agenda as the only way to ensure common survival. However, the rules for a “world order” cannot be written just by the U.S. Kissinger did recognize this in the interview, but he did not go on to make the necessary conclusion that no one state can maintain military dominance in such a world order.

The former U.S. national security adviser is now advocating for “human understanding” and “reason” to prevail. That’s certainly a step forward, but the cheer I felt on reading this was quickly dashed by reading a speech, given June 2, by the current U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.

Sullivan asserted that the U.S., through its nuclear weapons modernization program, will “sustain our military advantage for decades to come.” He added: “These modernization efforts will ensure our deterrent capabilities remain secure and strong as we head into the 2030s—when the United States will need to deter two near-peer nuclear powers for the first time in its history.”

Kissinger is calling for “reason” to prevail in producing a world order out of the present chaos. Sullivan clings to American military dominance. Apparently, Kissinger, though lofty in vision, will not contradict current U.S. policy, still mired in the past.

What has military dominance ever produced but war? The whole message of the modern world is that everyone is vulnerable to problems that sweep across borders—pandemics, climate change, food security—and that only cooperation, not more confrontation, among countries will save humanity.

Kissinger is still backing the insidious military doctrine of nuclear deterrence while professing to want a world order. It can’t be done. One cancels out the other. He admits that Artificial Intelligence may take weapons of mass destruction out of control. So why can’t he advocate to abolish them?

Although The Economist treated Kissinger as a sage, he couldn’t say the words “common security.” This was the sage advice I was looking for. True, this centenarian has mellowed, but not enough for me.

 

Former Senator Douglas Roche’s new book, Keep Hope Alive: Essays for a War-free World, will be published in the fall.   

Price/Collins: A Counterintuitive climate defence: Harvesting forests to combat emissions

Posted on June 16, 2023editor

Published in the Globe and Mail on June 5, 2023 as:
A counterintuitive climate defence: Harvesting forests to combat emissions  (Primary author) David T. Price is a retired forest scientist. Robin Collins is a board member of the Canadian Pugwash Group.

If humans stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow and let nature take its course, it could take a million years for the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to return to pre-industrial levels. Halting our emissions will be hard, but rapidly bringing CO2 levels back down will be stupendously challenging and costly. Canada’s forests could be an opportunity to help meet this global challenge.

We should not overestimate how trees act as natural CO2 absorbers, or “carbon sinks.” Young forests are generally stronger C sinks because they contain younger and smaller trees, and have less organic material that’s actively decomposing. As trees grow and forest biodiversity increases, the processes of respiration (how organisms obtain energy to grow and reproduce) and decomposition both release progressively more CO2 each year, gradually decreasing the effectiveness of a forest’s C sink toward zero. Wildfires accelerate this process.

As Canada’s climate warms, our forests and their C-sink capacities will become increasingly threatened. Environmentalists often claim that Canada’s remaining old-growth forests must be preserved to mitigate climate change, but for all their natural magnificence, and their value in supporting biodiversity, traditional culture, and recreation, old forests are weak and often vulnerable C sinks. Instead, we should consider harvesting some older forests before they are killed by drought, insects or fires.

According to the federal government, between 2011 and 2020, wildfires destroyed more than 26 million hectares of Canada’s forests, while insects defoliated or killed about 155 million hectares, releasing approximately 400 megatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. In the same period, only 7.6 million hectares were logged (four per cent of the area affected by wildfires and insects). When trees are logged and then used to make construction materials, the carbon in their wood remains trapped. Recent studies estimate that about half that carbon will remain in wood-framed buildings for 100 years. This keeps carbon out of the atmosphere for much longer than if the wood was left uncut in forests to die, burn, or rot.

Today’s engineered wood products can match steel and concrete in strength, but use only a fraction of the energy to manufacture. With sustainable practices, and by shifting more of our manufacturing practices to the production of “long-lived wood products” (LLWP), logging can help to lock in carbon for decades or even centuries. Using government data, we estimate that the LLWP obtained from logged areas between 2011 and 2020 stopped some 200 megatonnes of carbon from being released into the atmosphere.

B.C.’s coastal forests receive abundant rainfall, which should keep them alive (preserving their carbon) for many decades, even as the climate warms. But not all forests can survive impending climate change. Alberta receives the lowest annual precipitation of all 10 provinces. Higher temperatures will drive more frequent and intense droughts, triggering increasingly severe wildfires. Several recent studies agree that “worst-case” climate scenarios would cause most of Alberta’s upland boreal conifer forests to disappear by the year 2100.

An urgent priority is to triage Canada’s threatened forests. Field ecologists and ecosystem modellers across the country must collaborate to map our forests into three classes of “climatic injury,” and suggest how each category might be managed. Forests in the “protectable” class will survive for the foreseeable future without much human help. We should target these for preservation, with minimal commercial exploitation. Old-growth forests able to live another century or longer will generally retain much of their carbon, even though they are weak C sinks.

“Manageable forests” will suffer damage but can survive with human interventions. These should become our primary sources of LLWP. Some burned areas which fail to regrow naturally could be replanted. Between 2011 and 2020, Canadian forestry companies planted more than 5 billion nursery-grown seedlings on slightly more than half the area they logged, with the remaining area reliant on natural seeding. Burned and harvested areas that are replanted and protected will create younger, stronger C sinks than the older forests they replace.

The third class, “disappearing forests,” will likely disintegrate before 2100, due to cumulative climatic stresses. Where they disappear, we should plan other land uses, such as dryland agriculture, renewable energy infrastructure, mining for minerals, and water conservation.

Using our forests to support global CO2-removal efforts will succeed only if we first identify which forests can be saved. Then we must make a multi-century commitment to protect and manage them as the climate (hopefully) stabilizes. Canada’s forestry industry can play a critical role in this process by accepting constraints on its activities, while maximizing the manufacturing of LLWP. Regardless, using forests as a C sink will not solve the overarching problem: The world must still transition rapidly from fossil-fuel energy sources.

Published in the Globe and Mail June 5, 2023 as: A counterintuitive climate defence: Harvesting forests to combat emissions https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-counterintuitive-climate-defence-harvesting-forests-to-combat/

John Polanyi: We owe a debt to scientists who are willing to warn us

Posted on May 25, 2023editor

It was inspiring when Professor Geoffrey Hinton declared his intention earlier this month to interrupt his work on the development of AI in order to warn the world of the danger of falsehoods, at a time when the future of mankind could be threatened by new developments in science.“I’m just a scientist,” he said.

We owe a debt to those who, like him, give timely warning of danger. A previous generation will hear in him an echo of June, 1945, three-quarters of a century ago, when seven scientists with links to the then top-secret A-bomb project dared to declare, “we found ourselves … in the position of a small group of citizens cognizant of a grave danger.” That danger has waxed and waned ever since.

Our future depends on the willingness of the informed among us to share their concerns. My own instruction in such matters began in one peak of danger when, in the winter of 1960, the Kremlin hosted an international discussion by scientists in Moscow to explore the possibility of a stable peace in a world transformed. It was to be based on “minimal deterrence.”

Participation in this discussion was by politically aware scientists from around the globe. In the dauntless imagination of a leading participant, Leo Szilard (who had donated his pioneering patent on atomic power to the British navy), bilateral disarmament should proceed, without delay, to the point at which peace was guaranteed by only a single A-bomb buried under Moscow, rendered unusable by the presence of a second under Washington.

But how would this vital standoff be verified? Surely by intrusive inspection – something new in the world.

My friend and colleague, the Academician Nicolai Semenov, rose to protest, in high dudgeon. “Did you come to Moscow in order to insult us?” he asked.

The debate ground to a halt. In the silence, Leo Szilard told the story of two army officers at the close of the past war, approaching one another on horseback with pistols drawn. Was the other aware that an armistice had been signed? The more daring lowered his pistol. The other blamed himself for his failure to do so.

The Moscow gathering resumed.The fever chart of war has gone through several near-death crises since then. In one, in 1962, I found myself insisting, in a national broadcast, that Canada disavow any intention of a pre-emptive attack on what had suddenly become a nuclear-armed Cuba. Nothing, it seemed to me, could justify the risk of a general war in a nuclear-armed world. This was not, in the heat of that moment, a popular view.

However, with the passage of time, the principle of restraint was sufficiently accepted to permit the unprecedented bilateral renunciation of defences, legislated in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) Treaty.

The reasoning was simple. In the face of the devastating threat of modern weaponry, no defence would be adjudged sufficient. Instead, an arms race with missiles would shortly be replaced by one with anti-missiles, followed thereafter by their negation by anti-anti-missiles. The ABM Treaty stopped this futile and provocative progression for 30 years (with support from Canada) until, in 2002, a careless U.S. president withdrew his country from the ABM Treaty, allowing the dam to break.

Mindless competition today has the name of “modernization.” It has unleashed a tidal wave of weaponry previously subject to restraint.

Five years after the demise of the ABM Treaty, Russia suspended the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. NATO naturally followed suit. Then it was the United States’ turn to wield the wrecking ball. It did so in 2019 against the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This had the distinction of being the first treaty to limit an entire category of nuclear-capable missiles. Of course, Russia followed suit.

Today, the last remaining constraint on Russian and U.S. intercontinental ballistic weaponry, the New START Treaty, is in the process of being rendered moot, as the two parties barely speak.

My colleague Geoffrey Hinton’s claim – “I’m just a scientist” – brings a new ally. There will be others. What he suggests is that the thinking called AI could now be mature enough to contribute to the central question of the age: can reason be made to block the path to war? The answer has to be in the affirmative. No other can be contemplated.

 

John Polanyi is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and is a member of Canadian Pugwash Group.

Originally published in the Globe and Mail, May 22, 2023:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-we-owe-a-debt-to-scientists-who-are-willing-to-warn-us/

 

Paul Meyer: Nuclear Threats and Canada’s Disarmament Diplomacy

Posted on May 15, 2023editor

The Journal of Peace and Nuclear Disarmament has published Paul Meyer’s lecture at the November 2022 Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention/Centre for International Policy Studies event in Ottawa:
Nuclear Threats and Canada’s Disarmament Diplomacy

Nuclear weapons and the existential threat they pose to humanity have assumed a new and disturbing saliency in the last few months. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, accompanied as it is by persistent nuclear “sabre-rattling” and the blatant use of these weapons as instruments of intimidation and coercion has rudely reminded global society that huge arsenals of these weapons of mass destruction remain. But it could be worse. Humankind could face the actual detonation of a nuclear weapon, demolishing a 77-year-long taboo against their use.

Peace Table for Ukraine and Russia

Posted on May 2, 2023editor
Sergio Duarte, Mariia Levchenko, Sergey Batsanov, Wolfgang Sporrer

The intent of the Canadian Pugwash Group Peace Table was to fulfill one of the actions recommended during the November 29, 2022 Special Meeting of Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (CNANW): To reduce the nuclear weapons risks in the Ukraine conflict, “Civil society can establish an international forum to coordinate an exchange of views towards a peaceful outcome.”

As a community of peace, we felt deeply concerned about the continuing deaths, as well as the physical and environmental destruction occurring due to the Ukraine crisis, and most critically, by the heightened risk of the use of nuclear weapons. We therefore sought to create an opportunity for discussion of a path to a ceasefire and peace negotiations. One ambitious goal is to inspire Presidents Zelensky and Putin, and indeed, all the involved governments as well as civil society.

The Peace Table for Ukraine and Russia was hosted via Zoom on 27 April 2023. Ernie Regehr (a CPG member and author of Disarming Conflict: Why Peace Cannot Be Won on the Battlefield)  was the moderator. Sylvie Lemieux (CPG member and co-chairperson CNANW) was the facilitator of the discussion.

The four guest speakers were:
1. Wolfgang Sporrer, Adjunct Professor- Conflict Management, The Hertie School, Berlin/German (OSCE, Minsk Accords),
2. Sergio Duarte, former UN High Representative for Disarmament,
3. Sergey Batsanov, Russian diplomatic service from 1975 to 1993, former Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, currently Director of the Geneva Office of Pugwash Conferences, and
4. Mariia Levchenko, Peacebuilding Officer with Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania (PATRIR).

Peace Table Working Group members: Dr. Sylvie Lemieux, Bev Delong and Robin Collins. With support from Ernie Regehr, Cesar Jaramillo and Adele Buckley.

 

Restoring a Strained Global Security Architecture: CPG’s Recommended policy options for the Government of Canada

Posted on April 30, 2023editor

“Restoring a Strained Global Security Architecture”
Recommended policy options for the Government of Canada

We are living through an exceptionally challenging international security situation for maintaining peace and the primacy of international law. We believe Canada has both an opportunity and an obligation to contribute to efforts to protect human security and strengthen global governance.

See: CPG policy recommendations – 1Nov2022

Video recording of event

Conference outline and speaker biographies

Roche: Trudeau is right to resist defence lobby’s call for more military spending

Posted on April 29, 2023editor

NATO doesn’t do holistic peace. Always demanding more money for arms, it intimidates its own members.
OPINION
By Douglas Roche

EDMONTON—Credit Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is a politician, with telling the truth. A leaked Pentagon document, bearing the seal of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Trudeau told NATO officials privately that Canada will never reach the military spending target of two per cent of GDP agreed to by members of the alliance. Asked about this, Trudeau pointedly did not deny saying it.

The prime minister did say: “I continue to say, and will always say, that Canada is a reliable partner to NATO, [a] reliable partner around the world.”

Canada currently spends 1.29 per cent of its GDP on NATO, which this year, translated to $29-billion. This makes Canada the 13th largest military spender in the world, and the sixth largest in NATO. The government plans to spend $553-billion over the next 20 years to buy new weapons systems like fighter jets, armed drones, and warships.

To move to a full two per cent would require the government to starve already under-funded health and housing needs. The public would never stand for it.

The two-percent target is one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on a gullible public by the military-industrial complex, which drives American policy, which, in turn, drives NATO. Trudeau deserves credit for challenging it.

It’s not easy for Trudeau to do this, for he is surrounded by military hawks for whom no amount of military spending is ever enough. The Conference of Defence Associations Institute released an open letter, signed by dozens of political and military luminaries, calling on Ottawa to stop backsliding on national defence.

The institute wants “a major reassessment of our defence posture” and more money for NATO. This is the defence lobby speaking, and they have big voices (Richard Fadden, Andrew Leslie, and Rick Hillier are among the signatories). They drown out another set of equally distinguished Canadians (including Margaret MacMillan, John Polanyi, and Veronica Tennant) who have pleaded with the government to understand that peace doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun.

Thanks to the Ukraine war, the militarists today are beating a very loud drum. Russia’s ruthless invasion of Ukraine has unleashed a demand for more arms, and world military expenditures this year will climb well over $2-trillion.

Public attention in the West is fixated on defeating Russia at all costs. So it is easy for the war planners (who command the headlines) to proclaim that the government must “make significant additional funding available to address the long-standing deficiencies in military capabilities and readiness.”

NATO is driving the new clamour in Canada for more military spending. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg doesn’t hide his displeasure with us for not meeting the two per cent target. What Stoltenberg doesn’t say out loud is that NATO policy is driven by the United States, which undertakes excessive military spending beyond belief.

America’s planned $842-billion military budget for 2024 is greater than the next 10 greatest military spenders combined.

All this is commanded by the military-industrial complex, led by five powerful defence contractors in the U.S., who virtually control the proceedings of the armed services committees in Congress. The military-industrial complex (warnings about it go back as far as the Eisenhower administration) operates on the assumption that future “strategic competition” with Russia and China is inevitable. There’s no cap for research on artificial intelligence weaponry.

Canada is caught up in this headlong dash for rearmament. NATO is now an express train roaring through a dark tunnel. No one knows what’s on the other side of the tunnel, but the fear-mongers tell us it must be bad. Once again, fear overcomes good judgement. Thankfully, Trudeau has—at last—issued a red flag to NATO.

Pierre Trudeau, the father of the present prime minister, told me in 1984, when I was named Canada’s ambassador for Disarmament, that NATO’s obsolete policies were one of the biggest thorns he had had to endure as prime minister. George Kennan, the famous U.S. diplomat who first proposed the policy of containment of the Soviet Union, called NATO expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” Still, the expansion goes on (Finland has just been taken in) and the false belief that bigger and better weaponry will bring peace continues to bamboozle the public.

The fallout from Justin Trudeau’s reluctance to keep paying obeisance to NATO is just getting started. The peace movement in Canada, hitherto cowed by the spurious charges that calls for negotiations to end the Ukraine war amount to appeasement of Russia is awakening.

The Canadian Pugwash Group is now mobilizing its members to advocate for international leaders to bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table.

Trudeau has opened up the issue of just how much money is required for adequate Canadian defence. Just look at the faces of his cabinet as they surround him in Question Period: a group split between those who’ve been swayed by the NATO machine; the others fearful that NATO will lead them into perpetual militarism. Public opinion on NATO’s efficacy will be an important factor in how Trudeau responds to the brow-beating he is now taking from his military alliance “allies.”

The issue of peace in the world is far larger than the Russia-Ukraine disputes. Peace is a global issue. Thus, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is now preparing “A New Agenda for Peace,” which will address a myriad of challenges the international community faces today. Guterres says that in order to protect and manage the global public good of peace, we need a peace continuum based on a better understanding of the underlying drivers of conflict, a renewed effort to agree on more effective collective security responses, and a meaningful set of steps to manage emerging risks. This is a holistic approach to peace.

NATO doesn’t do holistic peace. Always demanding more money for arms, it intimidates its own members. How else can you explain Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s cut, in the recent budget, of $1.3-billion from Canada’s already meagre international assistance program? NATO bloats; the poor suffer.

Douglas Roche is a former Canadian senator and author. His new book, Keep Hope Alive: Essays for a War-free World, will be published in the fall.
The Hill Times
April 21, 2023

Doug Roche: Pope Francis focuses on Ukraine battlefield

Posted on March 13, 2023editor

The Hill Times
Pope Francis focuses his remaining energies on Ukraine battlefield
Seldom in the modern history of the Catholic Church has a pope been plunged into both external and internal crises at the same time.
OPINION | BY DOUGLAS ROCHE | March 13, 2023

“Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador proposed that Francis be part of an international commission to mediate an end to the conflict. Moscow is unlikely to be agreed to that because Francis views President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “senseless, repugnant, and sacrilegious.”

Read further: 031323_HT_1RochePope

Jaramillo: A negotiated settlement is the only path to peace in Ukraine

Posted on February 27, 2023editor

A negotiated settlement is the only path to peace in Ukraine

CESAR JARAMILLO

Cesar Jaramillo is executive director of Project Ploughshares and chairperson of the Canadian Pugwash Group.

With Ukraine’s successes in beating back Russia’s invasion thus far, the call for a decisive military win has permeated society, including governments, prominent media outlets and academia. In some sectors, calling for a peaceful settlement has become a fringe position, while support for further militarization hardens. But while it may be a hard pill to swallow for some, the most realistic endgame involves a negotiated settlement. The dogged pursuit of an ill-defined “win” for either Russia or Ukraine will not only prolong the war and increase human suffering – it will heighten the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.

Russia has made well-documented threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. While such threats are unacceptable and demand global condemnation, their being spoken did not create the risk. The risk exists because the weapons exist, justified by a perilous doctrine of nuclear deterrence. This doctrine has been sustained and perpetuated by all states with nuclear weapons, including those now denouncing Russia’s nuclear bravado.

Indeed, key stakeholders in the conflict – including Russia, the United States and other nuclear-armed NATO members – possess more than 95 per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons. Despite differences in policy and ideology, all states with nuclear weapons ultimately share the belief that, under certain circumstances, they would be justified in considering their use.

A crushing defeat in its most ambitious military operation in more than seven decades would very likely be viewed by Russia as a threat to its vital interests, and by President Vladimir Putin – who has explicitly framed the war as an existential struggle with the West – as a fatal blemish on his legacy. Such circumstances would be dangerously consistent with known Russian policy around its use of nuclear weapons.

So the question is not just whether Mr. Putin would succumb to a humiliating defeat with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal – it’s also whether this is a gamble the world is willing to take.

While the provision of military aid by the West – NATO in particular – has been critical in bolstering Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian aggression, and may strengthen its hand at eventual peace negotiations, the increasing deployment of arms will neither win the war nor resolve its underlying causes. Further militarization could significantly undermine the prospects for a negotiated settlement and continue the cycle of violence and destruction, with no end in sight. Tens of thousands have already perished; how many more could die if this happens? And how much higher would the risk of nuclear escalation be?

A negotiated settlement would not be capitulation, nor a sign of weakness, and agreeing to negotiations would not bind any party to a particular outcome. Rather, negotiations would be a first step in finding common ground and possible solutions.

Points of disagreement include the status of the regions claimed and illegally annexed by Russia – both Crimea in 2014 and the Donbas region in the latest incursion – and Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership. Other thorny issues have arisen from the armed conflict itself, including questions of accountability, breaches of international law and war crimes. Unilateral concessions will not be on the table, so compromise will be required.

The nature of the NATO-Russia security relationship will be a key factor in any negotiated settlement. Since 1999, more than a dozen Eastern European states, including former Soviet republics, have joined NATO. And while NATO expansion does not justify Russia’s illegal and destabilizing aggression in Ukraine, it is impossible to deny that it has been a known irritant for Moscow. Security assurances that minimize Russia’s real or perceived vulnerability to NATO forces in the region would need to be part of a negotiation. Central to this issue is Ukraine’s prospective membership in the alliance, which is a known red line for the Kremlin.

Critically, for a negotiated settlement to become a viable alternative, there must first be broad recognition, at high political levels, that this is the desired goal. Thus far, however, that is not the case.

A negotiated settlement is a sensible and realistic approach to ending the war. Efforts to stop the carnage would not constitute a surrendering of principles, but a triumph for humanity, diplomacy and pragmatism. It is high time to end the war in Ukraine.

EN / FR