By Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe, 10/4/24

As it reels from one battlefield defeat after another, Ukraine faces a fateful choice: sue for peace or fight to the bitter end.

Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists would prefer purifying blood sacrifice to a shameful defeat, while Western hardliners want to wear Russia down by fighting to the last Ukrainian. This yearning for Ukraine to re-enact a Nazi-style Götterdämmerung is shared by those Russian hardliners who believe in the pursuit of security through total victory.

The alternative to epochal destruction a la 1945 is a 1918-style armistice along the lines of President Putin’s June peace proposal: a ceasefire in exchange for Ukraine’s neutralisation and the complete withdrawal of its armed forces from the four provinces – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhe – formally incorporated by the Russian Federation in October 2022 – concessions that would then be followed by detailed peace negotiations.

No historical analogy is perfect, but Germany’s armistice with the Entente powers in November 1918 is an instructive example of a war ending in one side’s victory but on terms that fell far short of the unconditional surrenders of World War II.

When Germany ‘surrendered’ in 1918 it ceased all military operations and withdrew its armed forces from foreign occupied territories. Unlike in 1945, Germany remained unoccupied and was promised a negotiated peace treaty. There was also regime-change in the form of the Kaiserreich’s overthrow, but Wilhelm II was replaced by a democratic republic.

The promised peace negotiations took place at Versailles in 1919. German negotiators expected a discussion framed by President Woodrow Wilson’s 14-point peace plan of 1918 – which had signalled a relatively fair and equitable settlement – but they found themselves faced with a non-negotiable diktat.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany lost territory – notably to newly independent Poland – and was forced to demilitarise and pay billions of dollars in reparations. Germans complained the treaty was humiliation that heaped on them all the blame for the war, but it wasn’t a particularly punitive peace. Germany got off lightly compared to its allies, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, whose empires completely collapsed.

Germany’s people suffered greatly during the early postwar years but by the mid-1920s the country had recovered economically and was fully rehabilitated internationally, having been admitted to the League of Nations. Reparations were effectively null and void and Germany’s armed forces were surreptitiously being rebuilt with help from Soviet Russia, a revolutionary state that was seeking to de-stabilise the capitalist world through diplomacy as well as subversion. The Nazi nightmare of the 1930s wasn’t so much a consequence of Versailles as a result of the Wall Street Crash’s catalysation of a worldwide depression that devastated Germany.

Ukraine is in a much stronger position than was Germany in 1918. It has lost a lot of territory but it does not yet face imminent defeat and occupation and can still inflict heavy damage on Russia’s armed forces. Unlike Germany at Versailles, Ukraine wouldn’t be isolated at any peace conference. It would have powerful western backers and influential support from Putin’s well-wishers in the Global South who want him to make a genuine and durable deal with Kiev that will safeguard Ukraine’s future as an independent sovereign state.

So far, there is no sign Putin has any substantial territorial ambitions beyond those specified by his June peace proposal. Doubtless, he will demand a demilitarised zone, but that could suit Ukraine, too, especially if its results in the return to its sovereignty of territory currently occupied by Russia. Russia won’t pay reparations but nor will it demand them, except for the return by the West of its frozen bank assets. Indeed, there are many ways Russia could aid Ukraine’s postwar recovery, not least in relation to the country’s energy supplies. POWs could be released and children returned. Millions of Ukrainian refugees in Russia as well as Europe would be able to return home. Russia would demand protections for its remaining compatriots in Ukraine and Kiev the safeguarding of its citizens’ interests in Russian-occupied territories. Most important, would be the negotiation of an international security guarantee to protect Ukraine from future invasion by Russia. Such a peace settlement would in turn speed up Ukraine’s entry into the EU.

The 1918 armistice led to a bitter peace for Germany at Versailles, but it saved millions of lives and safeguarded the country’s future.

There is another 1918 historical analogy worth considering: the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty of March 1918.

Having seized power in Russia, at the end of 1917 the Bolsheviks sought a separate peace with Germany. A ceasefire was agreed and negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks, however, did not negotiate in good faith. For Bolshevik leader Lenin, the peace talks were a means to buy time to enable his party to consolidate its grip on power at home and promote revolution abroad. Bolshevik Foreign Commissar, Leon Trotsky, turned the Brest talks into a platform for revolutionary propaganda. But the Germans soon tired of Trotsky’s tactics and threatened to annul the negotiations and resume military operations.

By this time Lenin was losing faith in the imminence of world revolution and was prepared to do a peace deal on German terms, arguing that defence of the revolution in Russia was the prime goal. However, a majority of Bolsheviks – not wishing to dirty their hands by signing an onerous treaty that entailed significant territorial losses – opted for Trotsky’s alternative of ‘neither peace nor war’. Trotsky hoped the Germans would acquiesce in a unilateral declaration of demobilisation by Russia. That tactic backfired spectacularly when the Germans launched an offensive that quickly forced the Bolsheviks to sign a treaty conceding vast swathes of territory, payment of reparations and existence of a separate Ukraine. As Trotsky ruefully admitted, had the Bolsheviks been sincere about peace in the first place, they could have gotten a much better deal.

The Bolsheviks were saved from themselves by the failure of Germany’s Operation Michael – its final offensive on the Western Front – and the ensuing armistice, whose preconditions included the annulment of Brest-Litovsk. While the Bolsheviks were now able to repudiate the treaty’s terms, they couldn’t escape its consequences, which fed into the upheavals of Russia’s catastrophic civil war.

In 1918 the Bolsheviks got carried away by their revolutionary rhetoric, while the Germans faced up to the reality of their impending military defeat.

Peace with Putin will be repugnant, but surely preferable to the folly of continuing to fight an unwinnable war.