Biden Must Call for a Cease Fire to Save Ukraine From Being Overrun by Russia

Russia is reportedly mobilizing 1.2 million army reservists to completely overwhelm Ukrainian defenses this winter while threatening Russian nuclear escalation if Ukraine resumes its counteroffensive

(Author’s note: In response to my publication of this article someone shared an article that former President Donald J. Trump offered to mediate peace talks to end the war in Ukraine today out of concern that yesterday’s sabotage attacks on Russia’s Nord Stream natural gas pipelines which a former Polish Minister of Defense credited to the U.S. might spark the outbreak of World War Three with Russia. If only he were President, he would likely implement my peace proposal below. Given that Ukraine is entirely dependent on US economic and military aid to fund and supply its war effort, all President Biden would have to do to end the war would be to call a cease fire and suspend aide to Ukraine to get them to negotiate a compromise peace agreement with Russia as it has been seeking for the past six and a half months.)

On September 21st, Russian President Vladmir Putin gave a televised address announcing support for Russian annexation of all four Russian-occupied Ukrainian oblasts and a massive Russian military mobilization, not seen since the Second World War, while warning Russia was not bluffing in threatening to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia’s territorial integrity. Following his remarks, former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev clarified that Putin’s nuclear threat applied to any attempt by Ukraine to recapture parts of the soon to be annexed Ukrainian territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia and stated that he did not believe NATO would respond militarily to such a limited Russian nuclear escalation in Ukraine.

After the completion of rigged popular referendums conducted by Russian-appointed leaders earlier this week in which an overwhelming majority of the votes counted were in support of joining Russia, the formal Russian annexation of all Ukrainian territory under its control is likely to occur on September 30th when Putin is scheduled to address both houses of the Russian Parliament. This annexation will increase Russia’s population from approximately 146 to 151 million people and reduce Ukraine’s population from approximately 41 to 36 million including the over 7.5 million refugees who have left the country since the war began. It will mark the effective end of Russia’s so-called “special military operation” which has been a limited war with very limited objectives, and the start of a full-scale war against Ukraine which is likely to be fought much more aggressively by Moscow, potentially including some of Russia’s powerful but not yet utilized unconventional weapons, with the objective of Ukraine’s total capitulation.

Following the successful Ukrainian Kharkiv counteroffensive which succeeded in liberating nearly six percent of Russian occupied Ukrainian territory earlier this month, Western leaders continue to greatly overestimate Ukraine’s chances of winning the war even though Russia remains in control of nineteen percent of Ukrainian territory including Crimea. However, reports indicate Putin’s partial mobilization of Russia’s military reservists is not merely 300,000 troops as the Russian government has misleadingly claimed but rather 1.2 million Russian reservists, in order to overrun Ukraine in a planned Russian winter offensive that could bring an end to Ukrainian independence early next year.

Even after Putin’s dramatic escalation of the war, the Russian government has declared it continues to remain open to peace negotiations with Ukraine, but the Ukrainian government continues to refuse to meet with Russian diplomatic representatives to negotiate an end to the war, no doubt due to massive, uninterrupted Western military support for Ukraine. Unfortunately, following this unfortunate development, the chances of further Ukrainian territorial gains are minimal and even if more were achieved it could result in a Russian nuclear response against Ukraine.  It is likely that no increase in Western weapons shipments to Ukraine will be sufficient to prevent it from being overwhelmed by what could end up being a 600% increase in the number of Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. Accordingly, the momentum in the war is going to shift very much in Russia’s favor. Now is the time to lock in Ukraine’s battlefield gains with four out of eight Russian occupied Ukrainian regions having been freed of Russian occupation forces before a massive surge in Russian reinforcements overwhelms Ukraine’s resolute defenders as Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis (USA Ret.), Senior Fellow with Defense Priorities recently warned.

There is only one way the West can prevent Ukraine from being decisively defeated on the battlefield over the next several months, short of fighting a Third World War against Russia that would be all but certain to escalate to the nuclear level, and that is through a return to diplomacy. President Biden needs to call for an immediate cease fire and armistice agreement modeled on the Korean war armistice which has kept the peace on the Korean peninsula for nearly seven decades in order to save Ukraine, ensure its security and preserve its continued political and economic independence with control of at least 81 percent of its territory. It is in the US national security interest to incentivize both Russia and Ukraine to negotiate a permanent cease fire as soon as possible to avoid a potential Russian escalation to the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and/or against one or more frontline NATO states where US military forces are based, with catastrophic consequences.

The administration could do so by offering to suspend the implementation of all new economic sanctions against Russia, U.S. troop reinforcements to Eastern Europe, and lethal military assistance to Ukraine in exchange for an immediate and sustained Russian ceasefire. A relaxation of sanctions following a peace deal would likely provide badly needed economic relief, including significantly lower fuel, food, and energy prices, to tens of millions of financially distressed Americans just as the economy appears to be entering a recession with record high inflation. It would also serve to significantly lessen the severity of the worsening global food crisis, which threatens to cause the deaths by starvation of millions of people in the Third World.

The terms of the armistice agreement would be as follows:

1.      All hostilities between the Russian Federation and Ukraine shall immediately cease.

2.      All Western lethal military assistance to Ukraine shall be suspended and U.S. will guarantee Ukraine will not join NATO as long as Russia honors the terms of the armistice agreement.

3.      Russia will immediately suspend its partial Black Sea blockade of Ukraine.

4.      The United States, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand will lift their bans on Russian food and fuel exports.

5.      All prisoners of war shall be returned to their home country. (This provision would greatly favor Ukraine as Russia has captured many times more Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) than Ukraine has captured Russian POWs).

6.      U.N. peacekeepers from neutral countries shall be deployed as soon as practicable along the armistice line of control where fighting has continued in recent weeks. (Optionally, a four kilometer wide Demilitarized Zone could be created along the borders of the four Russian annexed Ukrainian regions similar to the one that separates North and South Korea).

7.      Delegations from the Russian and Ukrainian governments shall convene an immediate peace conference in Istanbul to resume negotiations for a permanent compromise peace agreement where both parties left off when Ukraine withdrew from peace negotiations in April 2022.

While writing this proposal, one of the provisions of the proposed armistice agreement I included was that, Russia would resume natural gas shipments to the European Union via the Nord Stream 1 or Nord Stream 2 pipelines but on September 27th, both of them were severely damaged by acts of sabotage in what appear to be an act of retaliation against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. As of the date of this writing, it is unclear what group or nation-state is responsible for the attacks on these Russian gas pipelines which have provided energy security to Europe for decades, the reopening of which might have saved thousands of Europeans from freezing to death this winter. However, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski tweeted his thanks to the U.S. for knocking it out of commission.

An armistice agreement would not only serve to end the war in Ukraine and its ensuing death and destruction, but it would allow over fifteen million Ukrainian refugees to return home and fifty percent of Ukrainian businesses to re-open and begin the long process of Ukrainian reconstruction and economic recovery, it would also serve to bring Russia, Ukraine and NATO back from the brink of nuclear war.  In the event of any Russian military attacks on Ukraine in violation of the armistice agreement, the US and NATO would resume economic sanctions against Russia and weapon shipments to Ukraine. If Ukraine resumed hostilities with Russia, the West would cut off all economic support for Kyiv including funding for reconstruction. As part of the agreement, the West would agree to lift only those economic sanctions on Russia which have been harming its own citizens namely bans on Russian food and fuel exports to help fight inflation and end the recession that has gripped most Western countries following the enactment of their economic sanctions on Russia. The objective of such an agreement would not be a frozen conflict as was achieved by the Minsk Agreement but a genuine end to the conflict while inviting Russia to return Kherson and Zaporizhia to Ukraine with a promise of Ukrainian neutrality outside of NATO and other concessions they have long been seeking spelled out in my proposed peace agreement including lifting of most if not all Western economic sanctions.

Negotiation of a final peace agreement would undoubtedly be a long and arduous undertaking, particularly given how adamantly opposed the Ukrainian government has been to agree to any territorial concessions to Russia in order to end the war, which is why it is important to include as many mutually agreeable elements of such a peace agreement in the armistice agreement as possible. Under such a peace agreement, Russia would agree to an expansion of NATO to include Sweden and Finland in exchange for written guarantees that NATO will never expand eastward into additional former Soviet republics and that it will never station or deploy its armed forces in Finland or Sweden except in the event of a direct military attack against NATO. As part of the peace agreement, there would be a general amnesty for all Ukrainian citizens accused of collaboration or advocating peace with Russia, which the Ukrainian government has designated as war crimes and treasonable offenses. The U.S. would not recognize any Russian annexations of Ukrainian territory unless and until such a peace agreement was signed and implemented.

My fifteen-point peace proposal, which is the most comprehensive peace plan which has been published in the West thus far, might serve as a useful basis for negotiations with a few major  changes including allowing Ukraine to keep all of its weapons except for ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and strategic surface-to-air missiles. The number of Ukrainian troops permitted under the agreement would be revised to 100,000 active and 600,000 reserve troops matching the maximum total troops which Ukraine is believed to have mobilized for the war. Proposed peace terms would include permanent Ukrainian neutrality with security guarantees by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and some kind of de facto Ukrainian recognition of Russian annexation of Crimea and the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk it currently occupies with Ukraine, renouncing any future attempts to retake these territories by force, in exchange for a full Russian military withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory with the exception of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts. As part of this proposal, Russia would return control of Kherson and Zaporizhia to Ukraine in exchange for the transfer of the rest of Donetsk province to Russian control since Russia only controls sixty percent of Donetsk right now. Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov recently stated its special military operation must continue until its forces occupy all of Donetsk oblast so it is unclear that it would accept a cease fire at this point but it very well could if it remained willing to trade control of the two southern Ukrainian provinces in exchange for forty percent of Donetsk and permanent Ukrainian neutrality, enabling Ukraine to achieve through peaceful negotiation what it could not achieve on the battlefield.

While Ukraine stands the most to gain from an armistice agreement, every nation involved in the conflict could legitimately claim victory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could declare victory by asserting that he forced the Russians to stop fighting and accept a cease fire with successful counteroffensives that expelled invading Russian forces from four Ukrainian oblasts. Meanwhile, Western leaders could claim victory by stating their military assistance to Ukraine helped them force Russia to declare an end to the war and Putin could claim “mission accomplished” for Russia’s special military operation. Ending the war as quickly as possible could potentially save the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives if this tragic and unnecessary war were to be allowed to continue until most of Ukraine has been overrun by Russian forces. Economically speaking, the benefits of Ukraine negotiating such an agreement sparing its cities from further destruction and allowing for the reconstruction of thousands of its roads, bridges, schools and hospitals, which has been estimated might cost as much as $600 billion, would be profound. The war has forced half of Ukraine’s businesses to close while a peace deal could allow them to re-open, allowing millions of its unemployed citizens to return to work while ending Russia’s devastating Black Sea naval blockade, restoring its ability to engage in international trade via the Black Sea and enabling most of its nearly thirteen million refugees to return home. Furthermore, ending the war would greatly lessen the sixty percent reduction in Ukraine’s GDP projected by experts if the war continues until the end of the year.

Finally, the U.S. should come to an agreement with Russia that if it remains neutral in the event of the outbreak of a potential conflict with Communist China over Taiwan, which the U.S. would nevertheless do everything it could do to avoid by implementing a new strategy to counter China through entirely peaceful means, the U.S. would rescind all remaining economic sanctions on Russia and provide a written guarantee that Ukraine would never join the NATO alliance. Furthermore, if Russia remained neutral until the end of such a conflict, the U.S. and NATO would agree to a Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) II Treaty in which western NATO countries would withdraw all of its troops from eastern Europe in exchange for a Russian military withdrawal from Belarus and Ukraine. Such a mutual security agreement would have the potential of ending hostilities between NATO and Russia long-term by recognizing Russia’s legitimate security concerns in Europe, thereby ending the specter of a nuclear Third World War between NATO and Russia, which today is greater than it was even during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

© David T. Pyne 2022

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is a contributor to Dr. Peter Pry’s book “Blackout Warfare” as well as the upcoming book “Will America Be Protected?” which is due to be released later this year. He also serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.