James Sharkey: All avenues for a peaceful end to war in Ukraine must be explored

Mykola Volenshak checks his house that was destroyed by a Russian rocket as he tries to find documents under the rubble in Maxymilianivka village in Ukraine on Tuesday. Picture: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

 'All we are saying is give peace a chance.’

This plaintive chant by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969 became the rallying cry for a generation protesting the horrors of the Vietnam War.

This same call is important in Ukraine today where continuing war threatens dangerous escalation and ever greater death and destruction.

China has now cried halt. The EU should follow suit and explore whether realistic opportunities exist for a peace initiative which would not involve surrender or betray Ukraine’s heroic resistance.

Vietnam was the first televised war and its fearful carnage became unavoidable nightly viewing. The result was outrage and revulsion at the excesses of a war which had lost all moral purpose.

Since then, governments have taken great care to counter this “Vietnam syndrome” and ensure that their decisions to go to war, however questionable, are seen as morally and politically unchallengeable.

George W Bush’s “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq is a recent telling example. Truth is often the first casualty of war.

The war in Ukraine shares some of these same features of message and media manipulation. In Russia, the invasion is presented as an overdue pushback against hostile Nato encirclement and as a legitimate response to attacks against Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minorities.

On our side, the war is portrayed not alone as an unjustified invasion but as an intervention without explanation other than Russian president Vladimir Putin’s demonic determination to subdue Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

Both narratives contain elements of truth but separately they are distortions of the whole truth and curtail meaningful debate.

The fundamental truth is that Ukraine has an absolute right to independence. No one can now dispute this. Not even in Russia, where there is confusion about a separate Ukrainian national identity because of the similar origins and close intertwining of the two peoples.

Paradoxically, Russian excesses have strengthened Ukrainian nation-building. However, Ukraine emerged from its long history of partition and subjection by different European neighbours with a range of sensitive fault lines — religious, linguistic, and ethnic. These are ignored only at great peril.

Ukraine’s inherited divisions were in plain sight during the heady days of the Maidan revolt in February 2014. Unrealistic expectations of Nato and EU membership were part and parcel of the fervour and western diplomats in Kyiv were unable or reluctant to dampen things down.

Ukrainian emergency workers clear the rubble on the roof of a residential building that was hit by a Russian rocket in Kharkiv.

Russian-leaning, democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovich was unceremoniously ousted and ultra-nationalist right-wing agitators set alight the flammable tinder of eastern Ukraine.

For Putin, this was deliberate provocation with a real danger of losing Sevastopol, Russia’s major Black Sea naval base.

The outcome was the unlawful annexation of Crimea, fragmentation, and contestation along Ukraine’s eastern borders, and eventual slippage to invasion and outright war. The war has persisted now for a year.

How much longer will it continue? Ukrainians are its primary victims, in lives lost, families sundered, and wholesale economic collapse.

Those in the West who call for peace have been branded as Putin apologists, in denial of Ukraine’s right to resist. But endless war serves little purpose other than the lucrative arms trade.

Above all, diplomacy must be given every chance when the balance of interest and advantage shifts against extended conflict. Arguably, this is now the case in Ukraine.

Moscow may have the wherewithal to win a protracted war but at what terrible cost? 

#A move from the current targeted intervention to total war and “shock and awe” would involve the laying waste of a once-friendly state and the permanent alienation of a kindred Slavic population.

Mounting fatalities would face diminishing tolerance in Russia. Ever-widening offensives carry the unbearable risk of accidental entanglement by Nato and the danger of a Third World War.

For the US and Nato, their support for Ukrainian resistance has already served its purpose. Putin has been taught a hard lesson for his strategic miscalculation; Ukraine was no easy conquest and the Russians have not been welcomed as liberators.

James Sharkey is a former Irish ambassador to Russia.

The recent visit to Kyiv by president Biden with its promise of further assistance is a timely boost for Ukrainian morale and reminds Russia that any victory will be hard fought.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for his part, has done everything humanly possible to assert Ukraine’s right to independence. Peace talks, carefully prepared, could give him the chance to have this reaffirmed internationally with guarantees by Russia, the US, Nato, and the EU.

Ukrainians could also benefit from massive internationally assisted reconstruction which would revitalise their broken economy and facilitate early refugee return. The EU could accelerate the implementation of the new association agreement.

Naturally compromise is required on all sides: Movement away from rhetorical posturing, impossible preconditions, and calls for regime change.

 Talks could allow reprioritisation of the Minsk accords and the exploration of a new federal constitution to safeguard minorities and assist reincorporation of ruptured and contested borderlands.

An undoubted bitter pill would be acceptance of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea even if the peninsula has only in the recent past become a Ukrainian possession. The illegalities and anomalies arising could be regularised through an internationally supervised referendum. Controversial Nato membership would be put on hold.

The fact that China, a major power and close Russian sympathiser, has flagged the option of a peace initiative is significant. The task is to test Russia’s flexibility and readiness to cede territorial gains in the interests of peace.

The EU should now publically encourage and prioritise this search for peace and explore whether real openings exist. Together with China, France and Germany can play a balancing role in mediation, helpful in getting the two sides to the table.

The alternative to diplomacy — deepening war with ever more elaborate and destructive weapon system — is too frightful to contemplate.

Peace must now be given a chance.

Jim Sharkey is a former Irish ambassador to Russia