The 24 hours within which Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine have turned into more than six months of desultory negotiations, and there is still no sign of even a temporary halt to the fighting. This is a blow for the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’, the loose affiliation of 31 countries assembled by Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron to help implement the terms of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. There had first been informal discussions between the UK and France about creating some kind of alliance as early as November 2024, but the Prime Minister formalised the idea in March this year when he hosted a summit in London and committed the coalition to supporting ‘a strong, lasting deal that delivers a permanent peace in Ukraine’.
A peacekeeping or ‘reassurance’ force is simply not a realistic proposition
There is currently no prospect of any kind of peace agreement, and Russia continues to adhere to its maximalist pre-war goals of annexing large parts of Ukraine and reducing it to a kind of client state or vassal. Despite this, Western politicians have developed more and more detailed plans for what might happen in the event of such a peace agreement being reached. In doing so, they have diverged further and further from an acceptance of geopolitical reality. Now, their preparations have reportedly become even more elaborate.
The latest hypothesis is the establishment of a 25-mile buffer zone between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines to force the combatants apart and impose a cessation of the conflict. This impractical proposal, which makes the back of the proverbial fag packet look like a realistic and diligent planning process, is a worrying signal that Western leaders are plunging deeper into an imaginary world; if they are frustrated by the lack of progress towards an agreement in real life, it seems they are seeking the comfort of a concocted future over which they have absolute agency.
The idea of creating – then imposing and maintaining – some kind of demilitarised zone between Russian and Ukrainian forces falls apart from almost every perspective. There is a fundamental obstacle in that Russia has maintained clear and determined opposition to any presence of military personnel from Nato countries in Ukraine. Earlier this week, President Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told the media:
It was the advancement of Nato military infrastructure and the infiltration of this military infrastructure into Ukraine that could probably be named among the root causes of the conflict situation that arose… so we have a negative attitude towards these discussions.
Even if Russia magically relented on this key obstacle, there are also wildly varying estimates of how many troops would be required to enforce the kind of buffer zone suggested. The lowest suggestions of around 4,000 are manifestly inadequate, as the border between Russia and Ukraine is nearly 1,500 miles long. Even the upper end of the scale being discussed, around 60,000 troops, appears excessively optimistic, given that, to make a simplistic comparison, Russia has half a million soldiers deployed in and around Ukraine.
Where would these 60,000 troops come from? The United States has made it clear it will not contribute ground forces; Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, has been publicly sceptical that the Bundeswehr would have any capacity to deploy units to Ukraine; Poland and Finland have both made clear that their priority is their own territorial defence.
That leaves the United Kingdom and France, perhaps Canada and Australia, and a handful of smaller countries like Lithuania, Estonia and Belgium. The UK simply does not have the personnel or resources to deploy more than a small force – 1,000? 2,000 at most? – while the French government may well fall when it faces a confidence vote in the National Assembly on 8 September and has been unable to agree on a sustainable defence budget.
It is an analogy which members of the coalition of the willing are desperate to avoid, but an armistice was agreed during the Korean War by setting up a demilitarised zone between North Korea and South Korea. We should be aware of the comparison: 72 years later, the buffer is still there and the war has never formally ended. Moreover, what is called the ‘Demilitarised Zone’ is in fact one of the most intensely militarised and fortified areas in the world. There are hundreds of thousands of landmines placed along the border, and between them, the opposing sides have something like 1.2 million soldiers within 60 miles of the dividing line.
A peacekeeping or ‘reassurance’ force is simply not a realistic proposition. None of the necessary circumstances exist. Yet the more that Europe’s leaders talk about it, and the more elaborate their vision, the more we have to face a very worrying question: are they trying to fool us, or have they already fooled themselves?
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