A FEW weeks after the start of the Ukraine war in February 2022, negotiation to end the war started at the behest of Ukraine to which Russia agreed.

During the final round of talks in Istanbul in May, an agreement was hammered and signed, which met the satisfaction of both parties.

But the unexpected happened as former British prime minister Boris Johnson torpedoed the peace deal by promising President Volodymyr Zelensky the West’s unlimited financial and military assistance to Ukraine “for as long as it takes”.

This caused the war to prolong, leading to untold misery for Ukraine. Its casualties to date have exceeded 383,000 soldiers killed and wounded, and a big chunk of its military hardware supplied by the West destroyed.

Zelensky even went to the extent of passing a law in parliament prohibiting himself from negotiating with Russia as long as Vladimir Putin is the president of Russia.

Due to this, Russia hardened its stance not to negotiate with Kiev and instead will only negotiate with Washington, as it sees Zelensky as a mere puppet of the US.

The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court should explicitly introduce a new category of war crime that will convict individuals who are not directly involved but play a pivotal role in sabotaging a peace deal that prolongs the war so that Johnson could be put on trial.

The Ukraine war did not start for no rhyme or reason. It actually started nine years ago in February 2014 when a democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was brought down by a colour revolution – the Maidan Revolution – instigated by the US.

Shortly after his overthrow, Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions erupted with pro-Russia unrest, with leaders of the Russian-speaking eastern regions declaring their continued loyalty to Yanukovych. 

Whereas western Ukraine is primarily inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians, the southern and eastern regions comprising the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk (collectively known as the Donbas), Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are heavily populated with Russian-speaking people and Ukrainians of Russian descent.

While there is a strong affinity between the people of southern and eastern Ukraine with Russia, making them in general pro-Russia, the people in western Ukraine on the other hand, exhibit a strong affinity with the eastern European countries, making them pro-West. 

While this divide was already there during the Soviet rule, perhaps going back even to ancient times, it did not pose a big problem then.

With the break-up of the Soviet Union, which was anchored on Russian leadership although some Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev among others were Ukrainians, Ukraine became an independent state in 1991.

Again this is not a big problem as the Russian Federation being the successor of Soviet Union had accepted the changing reality on the ground as a fait accompli of the break-up of an empire.

After all they are both united by virtue of being the descendants of the East Slav people.

The only problem being that historically people in western Ukraine around Lviv and the surrounding areas trace their ancestry to the Western Slav people, which explains the dichotomy in their affiliation with Russia vis-à-vis Europe.

This is the basis for the further hardening of Russia’s recent position that with or without negotiation, it will ensure Ukraine as a state will collapse because it sees that as the only way for it to achieve the objectives of its special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine.

In one of his recent speeches, Putin sees the Russians, Belarussians and Ukrainians as three distinct people from the same stock that make up a triune of the collective, known as the Russian civilisation.

And that was why Putin was wondering why when the Bolshevik Lenin drew up the boundary of Russia in the aftermath of World War I, he included western Ukraine as part of Russia when the people there traced their ancestry to the West Slavs.

This implies that a minimalist condition on the part of Russia – if all the objectives of the SMO are met – is for a smaller independent Ukraine (the western part) to exist as a buffer state.

The US seems agreeable to this provided the “smaller” Ukraine is allowed to join Nato or EU but since this contradicts the SMO’s objectives of neutrality and demilitarisation, the Russians are expected to disagree with it. 

But judging from the recent statements of the political leadership of Russia, it seems that the die has been cast.

Because of the collective West’s support for Ukraine that has prolonged the war, which has also caused the death of Russian soldiers, though relatively not as many as the Ukrainian soldiers, Russia has hardened its position to a maximalist one.

The collective West has always recognised this dichotomy between eastern and western Ukraine and exploited it to the hilt when they rejected Yanukovych’s stance of maintaining economic cooperation with both Russia and the EU.

It was when the EU gave its ultimatum to him which was in the nature of “you’re either with us or against us” that the former president of Ukraine stood firm for an economic cooperation with Russia.

This cost him the presidency when the plan to depose him via the Maidan Revolution was put into action by the neo-cons in the event of Ukraine joining the EU is rejected. 

In response to all these developments, Russia sent its army to Ukraine in February 2014 to protect the Russian-speaking people in the Donbas region from the brutal suppression which it saw as genocide. 

This intervention was expected by the US and its Western allies but in its arrogance the collective West thought it wouldn’t make a difference because the regime change that had happened cannot be undone.

Moreover the West had committed a fatal flaw in perceiving that the Russian army had been weak since the demise of the Soviet Union, such that it went on a binge of Nato “rampage” by co-opting many Eastern European countries that were formally part of the Soviet Union into its fold. 

This has created a European security architecture that Russia sees as an existential threat.

But in a classic maskirovka (deception) move, Russia dealt an unexpected blow to Western ego when its intervention resulted in the capture of Crimea, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet is headquartered.

To this day, the arrogant West never forgave Russia for that and that’s why in the current war, the recapture of Crimea have featured prominently in their battle plans and strategies to the point of becoming an obsession.

The Ukraine war is about to reach its endgame in a just a few more months, with the unanimous verdict of almost all analysts, this time even those from the West, that Ukraine is going to lose.

Some even say it could be sooner than expected as the phase of the “beginning of the end” of the war ever since the failure of the Ukrainian offensive in June is now fast approaching the stage of the “end of the beginning”.

The former refers to the realisation that things are coming to an inevitable conclusion and are unlikely to end well, while the latter is likely to be accompanied with a great sense of anticipation for a new, dynamic phase that is just emerging.

The phrase “end of the beginning” is reputedly coined by the pro-Zionist former prime minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, when on November 10, 1942 in a speech concerning the Second Battle of El Alamein, he said:

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The speech was made a little over three years into WWII, and a year and a half after the end of the Blitz (the bombing of England by the Nazi), where the “end of the beginning” was the first major victory for the Allies in the war.

This is where Ukraine is heading today. Nobody knows when the end would be, but the situation on the ground is heralding the “end of the beginning” for sure. – December 23, 2023.

* Jamari Mohtar reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.