By Thomas Graham, The National Interest, 10/26/25

President Donald Trump’s proposed meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Budapest may never take place, and a final settlement of the Russia-Ukraine war may lie far in the future. Yet, it is not premature to consider how such a settlement should be framed to advance US interests in European security and in relations with Russia. Broadly speaking, two strategic approaches are available: containment, the preferred option of much of the foreign-policy establishment, and competitive coexistence. The choice between them depends on how the United States assesses Russia.

As during the Cold War, containment treats Russia as an implacable adversary with intolerable geopolitical ambitions in Europe and beyond. Echoing George Kennan’s logic, it assumes that thwarting Russian expansionist ambitions will eventually erode the foundations of the regime and yield a new Russia, a country more in tune with Western values and a potential partner for the United States. 

A strategy of competitive coexistence, by contrast, begins from the assumption that Russia is a permanent rival whose domestic system and strategic mindset the West cannot change through pressure or inducement. It sees the task of US foreign policy not as defeating or transforming Russia but rather as managing competition responsibly to prevent direct military confrontation, which could prove catastrophic for both sides.

Containment and competitive coexistence share the goal of preserving Ukraine’s sovereignty and preventing further Russian aggression against its neighbors. Where they diverge is in their understanding of how to address the two central issues of this conflict: security guarantees for Ukraine and the disposition of disputed territory.

Containment: Moral Clarity and Strategic Rigidity

Applied to the current war, containment would take a principled stand in support of Ukraine’s right to seek NATO membership, even if that prospect remains remote for the time being. It would place no limits on Ukraine’s security cooperation with NATO or individual allies. It would reject any restrictions on Kyiv’s military capabilities beyond its voluntary commitment not to acquire nuclear weapons. Any Russian objections would be dismissed out of hand.

Containment would also insist on Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its internationally recognized 1991 borders, refusing to accept any political settlement that legitimized Russian gains since 2014. De facto Russian control of occupied territories might be tolerated as a temporary reality. Still, the United States would support Ukraine diplomatically, politically, and economically in efforts to recover them over time.

Containment thus satisfies the moral and legal imperatives of defending sovereignty and resisting aggression. Yet it carries costs. By denying Russia any face-saving exit or security assurances, containment risks prolonging the war. It could entrench a new Cold War dynamic, destabilize Europe, and impose devastating long-term costs on Ukraine, the very nation it seeks to protect.

Competitive Coexistence: Managing Rivalry to Avoid Ruin

A strategy of competitive coexistence, by contrast, would urge Ukraine to adopt a posture of armed neutrality as a way to secure its sovereignty while addressing Russia’s security concerns. Kyiv would forswear NATO membership and agree not to host foreign forces, while still developing its defense-industrial base—with Western investment and technology—to build the weapons needed for self-defense. It would limit Ukraine’s military capabilities, but only as part of a reciprocal arrangement imposing comparable restrictions on Russian forces within a defined zone along Ukraine’s border with Russia and Belarus.

On territorial questions, competitive coexistence would accept de facto Russian control over seized Ukrainian territory without recognizing it de jure. Rather than pursuing the restoration of the 1991 borders, it would instead favor a resolution grounded in the principle of local self-determination, allowing populations in disputed areas to decide their political affiliation through an agreed, internationally supervised democratic process. The outcome would not legitimize conquest but would instead reinforce a fundamental political right. 

This strategy is pragmatic rather than principled. It recognizes that Ukraine’s security ultimately depends not on Western moral commitment but on a stable balance of power. It would enable Ukraine to survive, rebuild, and integrate with Europe without becoming a permanent flashpoint for confrontation between nuclear powers.

Pragmatism for a Multipolar World

Containment remains appealing because it expresses moral conviction and the confidence of a superpower that stands astride the global stage, as the United States did in the immediate post-Cold War years. But the world in which the United States could dictate outcomes has long since passed. A policy of competitive coexistence offers a more realistic framework for managing enduring competition with Russia in a multipolar system; the United States cannot dominate, as it faces a rival it cannot vanquish.

Competitive coexistence does not appease aggressors, as its critics claim, nor does it reward aggression. It contains it through balance, restraint, and diplomacy. It sees compromise—even with unsavory rivals—as an element of statecraft in an open-ended contest in which setbacks can be redressed and advantages accumulated over time. It seeks not decisive victory but durable stability, a peace of imperfect justice but one achievable in practice.

In the end, the United States must choose between a policy of moral clarity and one that works. Competitive coexistence, for all its ambiguities and imperfections, offers the surer path to a Europe at peace and a global order that advances US interests and values, if not as fully or as rapidly as some would hope.

By Mike Fredenburg, Responsible Statecraft, 10/27/25

The West likes to inflate the cost of Russian weapons as a way to suggest Moscow is in a financial bind and manipulate the narrative of a looming Ukraine victory — while also masking real inefficiencies in the U.S. defense industry.

By assuming Russian weapons have input costs similar to U.S. systems or conflating export prices with Russia’s internal costs, Western estimates produce misleading figures. These inflated costs bolster the narrative that the strain on Moscow is tremendous, while downplaying the increasing challenges for Ukraine and NATO to effectively counter Russia’s relatively inexpensive missiles and drones.

Moreover, these estimates obscure a stark reality: due to difficulties in expanding production of prohibitively costly Western missiles, combined with low real-world missile interception rates, even if the U.S. and Europe sent all their air defense missiles to Ukraine, they would fall far short of being able to stop most Russian missile and drone attacks.

Overstated costs, underestimated resilience

Western media and think tanks have consistently framed Russian missile expenditures to imply unsustainability. For example, Forbes Ukraine estimated Russia spent $7.5 billion on missiles in the war’s first two months — 8.7 percent of Russia’s 2022 defense budget. A Newsweek article, citing Forbes Ukraine, reported that an August 19, 2024 attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure cost Moscow $1.3 billion. In the same article, the Institute for the Study of War stated that Russia “is likely unable to sustain such large-scale missile and drone strikes with regularity.” Yet, Russia’s sustained high-tempo operations over the past six months cannot help but cast doubt on this assessment.

Many of the articles emphasizing the high cost of Russia’s massive missile and drone strikes rely on missile cost estimates from an October 2022 Forbes Ukraine article estimating some key Russian missile costs including the Kh-101 at $13 million, the Kalibr at $6.5 million, the Iskander at $3 million, the P-800 Oniks at $1.25 million, the Kh-22 at $1 million, and the Tochka-U at $0.3 million.

While some of the Forbes UA cost estimates seem reasonable, most of them seem to arrive at costs suspiciously close to what U.S. taxpayers would pay for a comparable missile. Finding such costs not credible, Defense Express Ukraine made a good faith effort to come up with more realistic missile cost estimates, including the Kh-101 at $1.2 million; the Kalibr, approximately $1 million; the Iskander R-500, $1 million; the Iskander 9M723 ballistic, $2 million; and the replacement for the legendary SS-N-22 “Sunburn, supersonic anti-ship cruise missile,” approximately $3 million.

While Defense UA does not give an estimate for the Kinzhal (Kh-47M2) hypersonic missile, given that it is essentially an air-launched variant of the Iskander 9M723, the cost should be similar, about $2 million.

Still to be fair, the Russian military budget’s lack of transparency means that in most cases one has to guesstimate. However, with input costs for weapons production and development being much lower than those for the United States, one would expect Russian missiles to be less expensive than the production of U.S. or Western European ones. Russian defense manufacturing labor costs average $1,200 per worker per month, compared to at least $4,000 for U.S. workers. Materials like steel, titanium, and composites are also less expensive in Russia. Russia’s defense industry prioritizes mass production and efficiency, unlike the U.S defense industry, where profitability and shareholder returns are of greater importance.

When it comes to weapon systems development, Russia typically adopts an evolutionary approach, incrementally improving existing systems, while the U.S. is far more likely to pursue revolutionary designs incorporating unproven technologies, inflating costs.

For example, Russia’s battle-tested Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic missile builds on proven platforms, while the United States has yet to field a hypersonic missile due to projects like the U.S. AGM-183 Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) program, which began in 2018. It took a much riskier approach and is now over budget, behind schedule, and in danger of being canceled after over $1 billion invested.

But even if it is not totally canceled and is eventually fielded, the ARRW, at $15 million to $18 million each, will be many times more expensive per missile than the Kinzhal, will have a similar range, and does not pack the same punch. Yes, its unpowered glide vehicle will be more maneuverable than the Kinzhal, but using that maneuverability can significantly impact its terminal impact velocity and range.

Another example is the American PAC-3 MSE Patriot interceptor and Russia’s S-400 9M96E2 interceptor. Both are highly agile short-range missiles with similar ranges of about 100 km and both use active radar to track and hit their targets. Both have interception speeds of about Mach 5. Yet the PAC 3 MSE missile costs $4 million-$6 million and the estimated cost of the 9M96E2 missile is between $500,000 and $1 million.

But how do they perform? An October 2, 2025 Financial Times article gives a big hint, reporting that the Patriot interceptor rate stood at 37% in August, was slashed in the month of September to just 6%. Of course it is standard operating procedure to overstate interception rates. But even if you buy the initial 37%, it was taking five interceptors to reach a 90 percent chance of intercepting one Kinzhal. At 6%, that goes up to 38 Patriot interceptors needed.

According to Military Watch magazine and other publications, on May 16, 2023, a Patriot System system/radar and at least one of its launchers were destroyed by a Kinzhal hypersonic missile despite launching 32 Patriot interceptors in an effort to protect itself. Unsurprisingly, this particular report has been contested, but given the long history of governments and vendors grossly overestimating air defense effectiveness, lack of transparency/veracity on actual Ukrainian losses, and the incredible interception rates regularly reported by Ukraine Air Force, the report cannot be dismissed out of hand.

We don’t have much objective information on the 9M96E2’s performance, but Russia also has a history of hyping the performance of its S-400 air defense systems. Still, even if the 9M96E2 is as ineffective as the Patriot interceptors, it costs a whole lot less.

By overstating Russian missile costs, Western analysts exaggerate Russia’s financial strain, while providing cover for exorbitant missile prices being charged by Western defense contractors. This distortion obscures the reality that Russia’s cost-effective missile production provides a big advantage in sustainability, while high Western missile costs, combined with U.S. difficulties in rapidly expanding missile production, is a huge disadvantage in any kind of sustained conflict, and could be a fatal disadvantage in going up against a peer competitor that can throw thousands of missiles at our ships and even attack U.S. based military facilities.

By Lev Golinkin, The Nation, 10/27/25

Graham Planter’s problem is that he lives just a tad too far south. If the Democratic Senate candidate from Maine wanted to make all the hubbub about his Nazi tattoo go away, all he’d have to do is move to Canada.

The furor over Planter’s Totenkopf, or Death’s Head, tattoo stands in striking contrast to Canada, where both Nazi symbols and a shameful history of aiding Nazis is hushed over or, quite simply, blurred out. 

The footage shows a burly Ukrainian military trainer discussing his country’s “shadow war” against Moscow. The interviewer is a veteran Western journalist. The video quality is excellent. The only problem is the giant red swastika tattoos emblazoned across the trainer’s arm. 

After social media users began circulating stills with the swastikas, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation—the country’s government-owned media outlet—responded by blurring out the tattoos, sparing the readers the inconvenient truth that the man being presented as a hero fighting for a Canadian-backed military is a neo-Nazi. (In addition to the swastikas, he also has a winged odal rune popular with white supremacists.)

When reached for comment, a CBC spokesperson said, “The military trainer was provided to the reporter to speak generally about Russian tactics in Ukraine; we did not platform him, nor did we present him as a hero,” and pointed out that the network added a disclaimer that “a tattoo of an offensive symbol has been blurred.” 

The CBC didn’t appear to be concerned that interviewing a man tattooed with neo-Nazi iconography is being legitimized—only that the “offensive” material is kept from the public.

This literally Orwellian action by Canada’s government media is indicative of the country’s relationship to both neo-Nazis and their World War II predecessors. The dark reality lurking beneath the placid demeanor of America’s northern neighbor is that Canada’s institutions have spent decades protecting fascists and sweeping evidence under the rug. Canada’s elites guard this blood-stained legacy to this day. 

The CBC winding up whitewashing a neo-Nazi isn’t a coincidence. The soldier being interviewed is in what the program describes as the “elite” 3rd Special Assault Brigade. What the narrator omits is that the formation is led by Andriy Biletsky, Ukraine’s preeminent neo-Nazi who now has tens of thousands of men under his command. These men are trained, armed, and funded by the West. The CBC’s fawning profile says nothing about the unit’s neo-Nazi ties. 

These omissions would be shameful in any country. But the situation is far more dire than this. Canada’s antisemitism is so ingrained, the nation is incapable of something as straightforward as condemning Nazis. 

To examine Canada’s track record with the Third Reich is to enter a twisted world where following orders is a legitimate legal defense for participating in the Holocaust and SS fighters are portrayed as war victims. It’s a land where a street named for a German slaver isn’t considered problematic by the authorities and whose history of declassifying documents about harboring Nazis is worse than Argentina’s. 

Canada’s history of going to bat for Holocaust perpetrators stretches back half a century. In 1967, Pierre Trudeau—a future prime minister as well as father of Prime Minster Justin Trudeau—successfully opposed stripping the citizenship of a death squad leader responsible for murdering over 5,000 Jews. Three decades later, a Canadian court acquitted Hungarian collaborator Imre Finta, who had deported over 8,000 Jews to their deaths. The court deemed Finta’s plea of following orders an acceptable defense; it’s the only known such case in a Western nation.  

Two years ago, Canada’s House of Comments shocked the world by giving a standing ovation to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the Nazi Party and one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust. 

Hunka fought in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (SS Galizien), a Ukrainian formation whose record of war crimes includes a 1943 massacre in which its subunits burned 500–1,000 Polish villagers alive. 

Hunka was one of 2,000 SS Galizien soldiers welcomed to Canada after the war. Unlike other collaborators who kept a low profile in the New World, SS Galizien veterans felt comfortable enough to celebrate themselves by erecting monuments with Third Reich insignia and establishing scholarships in their honor. The University of Alberta, one of Canada’s largest institutes, had nearly a dozen endowments memorializing Hunka and his fellow SS men. 

Images of Parliament enthusiastically applauding a Nazi soldier triggered international headlines and outraged the Canadian public. There were demands for UAlberta to eliminate its Nazi endowments. Then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered an inquiry into declassifying names of SS Galizien veterans admitted into Canada. For a moment, it seemed the country would face its dark past. 

But within weeks, a fierce backlash to the Hunka affair revealed the astonishing extent of the bonds between Canada’s institutions and the Nazi collaborators they had so long protected. 

Newspapers and even parliamentary testimony saw calls defending Hunka. The SS fighters were “in the wrong time at the wrong place,” averred a quote in one major outlet. All but one of UAlberta’s Nazi endowments remain. And after review, Ottawa refused to release the names of SS veterans welcomed into Canada, perversely citing privacy concerns: The same rationale used to protect children and sexual assault victims was invoked to hide names of Nazi collaborators. (By now, even Argentina has declassified its archives on sheltering Third Reich criminals.)

Canada’s elites have protected the original Nazis for the same reason Canadian media whitewashes their modern iteration in Ukraine: geopolitics. During the Cold War, Nazi collaborators were seen as a bulwark against Communism; as an additional benefit, the collaborators, eager for work and primed to hate anything that whiffed of socialism, were used to break the power of left-leaning unions. 

The latest example of Canada’s callous indifference to Holocaust victims took place this summer, when I broke the news of a London, Ontario, street named for German industrialist Max Brose, who had been awarded the title Wehrwirtschaftsführer, or industry leader, by the Third Reich. Brose’s company, a fixture of Hitler’s military apparatus, used slaves, including prisoners of war. 

London’s Max Brose Drive is the only known eponym to a Nazi Party member in the entire British Commonwealth, which includes Canada, Australia, and the UK, among other nations. Despite this and despite calls by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Canadian branch, a city representative confirmed that Brose’s street isn’t being considered for renaming. 

Whether it’s bloodstained fascists of last century or their modern iteration, Canada’s response is inaction, denial, and the occasional well-placed blur. It’s an insult to the over 45,000 Canadians who gave their lives to prevent Nazi tributes erected on Canadian soil and the latest indication of erosion of basic standards in Western media.

By Ian Proud, Responsible Statecraft, 11/4/25

“Busification” is a well-understood term in Ukraine and refers to the process in which young men are detained against their will, often involving a violent struggle, and bundled into a vehicle — often a minibus — for onward transit to an army recruitment center.

Until recently, Ukraine’s army recruiters picked easy targets. Yet, on October 26, the British Sun newspaper’s defense editor, Jerome Starkey, wrote a harrowing report about a recent trip to the front line in Ukraine, during which he claimed his Ukrainian colleague was “forcibly press-ganged into his country’s armed services.”

This case was striking for two reasons; first, that the forced mobilization of troops is rarely reported by Western mainstream media outlets. And second, that unlike most forced conscriptions, this event took place following the alleged commandeering of the Western journalists’ vehicle by three armed men, who insisted they drive to a recruitment center.

There, Starkey reported, “I saw at least [a] dozen glum men — mostly in their 40s and 50s — clutching sheafs of papers. They were called in and out of side rooms for rubber-stamp medicals to prove they were fit to fight.”

The process has drawn criticism after high-profile incidents where men have died even before they donned military uniforms. On October 23, Ukrainian Roman Sopin died from heavy blunt trauma to the head after he had been forcibly recruited. Ukrainian authorities claim that he fell, but his family is taking legal action. In August, a conscripted man, 36, died suddenly at a recruitment center in Rivne, although the authorities claim he died of natural causes. In June, 45-year-old Ukrainian-Hungarian Jozsef Sebestyen died after he was beaten with iron bars following his forced conscription; the Ukrainian military denies this version of events. In August, a conscript died from injuries sustained after he jumped out of a moving vehicle that was transporting him to the recruitment center.

Look online and you’ll find a trove of thousands of incidents, with most of them filmed this year alone. You can find videos of a recruitment officer chasing a man and shooting at him, a man being choked to death on the street with a recruiter’s knee on his neck. Many include family members or friends fighting desperately to prevent their loved one being taken against his will.

If videos of this nature, on this systemic scale, were shared in the United States or the United Kingdom, I believe that members of the public would express serious concerns. Yet the Western media remains largely silent, and I find it difficult to understand why.

In November 2024, Ukraine’s defense minister Rustem Umerov claimed that he would put an end to busification. It is true that Ukraine has been taking steps to modernize its army recruitment and make enlistment more appealing to men under the age of 25. Yet, there is little evidence that those efforts are having the desired effect. And after a year, busification only appears to be getting worse, yet remains widely ignored by the Western press.

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War often reports on Russian force mobilization efforts but not on the dark and desperate aspects that lead to busification. You won’t find reports on this in the New York Times, as it conflicts with the narrative that with support from the West, Ukraine can turn the war around. It leans in instead on stories like Ukraine’s points for drone-kills game or the designer who cut the all-black suit that Zelensky now wears. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is softly banging the drum to recruit 18-year-old Ukrainians, despite this being a toxic political issue in Ukraine.

This is because busification is the tip of the iceberg. If the Ukrainians are finding it difficult to encourage young men to join the army voluntarily, then it is proving even harder to make them stay without deserting.

In January 2025, it was reported that around 1,700 troops of the Anna of Kyiv 155th mechanized brigade, trained in France and equipped with French self-propelled howitzers, had gone AWOL — 50 of them while still in France. In June 2024, a Ukrainian deserter was shot dead by a border guard while trying to cross into Moldova.

In the first half of 2025, over 110,000 desertion cases were reported in Ukraine. In 2024, Ukrainian prosecutors initiated over 89,000 proceedings related to desertion and unauthorized abandonment of units, a figure three-and-a-half times greater than in 2023. More than 20% of Ukraine’s one million-strong army have jumped the fence in the past four years, and the numbers are rising all the time.

Desertions appear in part driven by ever-greater shortages of infantry troops at the front line, which means soldiers rarely get rest and recuperation breaks. A lack of sufficient equipment is often blamed. And of course, the widespread and rising desertion rates from Ukraine’s armed forces only seem to provoke more violent recruitment practices and then civilian protests. On October 30 in Odessa, a group of demonstrators against a man’s forced detention overturned the recruitment minibus.

The growth of busification and rising desertions also track with a growth in support among ordinary Ukrainians for the war to end. Support for a negotiated end to the war has risen from 27% in 2023 to 69% in 2025. Likewise, support for Ukraine to “keep fighting until it wins the war” — a wholly deluded proposition — has dropped from 63% to 24% over the same period, according to Gallup poll results.

President Zelensky often claims that Ukraine’s military predicament is linked to a lack of guns, not a lack of people. Hoping to secure Western support to fight on for another 2-3 years, he’s quiet on whether he will have the troops or the political support to do so. For now, the message seems to be, “Don’t mention the press-gangs, in-detention killings, deserters and waning public support: just give me more money.”

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 10/29/25

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

James Carden, former US State Department Russia Policy Adviser has faced criticism in certain circles over his otherwise underreported comments during a recent interview to Australian Sky News — especially for mentioning some hard truths about the ethnopolitics of Ukraine.

In that interview, Mr. Carden noted that, like HIMARS or F-16s, Tomahawks won’t be a gamechanger, and argued that Putin’s proposal — EU but not NATO membership — was a fair enough bargain. When the host replied that, in this case, that would involve land concessions as part of a land-for-peace deal, the former State Department Adviser argued that the land Kyiv would be ceding is a land that: “they themselves have been attacking since 2014. The Ukrainians are being a bit disingenuous here… They claim to want the land in the Donbass, Eastern Ukraine. But they don’t want the ethnic Russian citizens on that land. So they’ve been doing everything that they can to disenfranchise those people.”

These comments are not ill-informed or dishonest and they merit some attention. In fact, they are quite accurate.

For years, Kyiv’s policies have systematically sidelined a significant chunk of Ukraine’s population. According to the country’s last census in 2001 — the only one since independence in 1991 — “ethnic Russians” accounted for 17.3 percent of the populace, which is over 8 million people. The numbers don’t catch all the nuance here: Ukraine is, pure and simple, a deeply bilingual society, with Russian as the native language (in other surveys) for at least 29 percent nationwide, a percentage that gets far higher in the east and south.

It is true that a 2024 study by linguist Volodymyr Kulyk shows a decline in everyday Russian use in Ukraine since 2022, with streets renamed, statues of Russians taken down and “Russian literature taken off the shelves of bookshops”, as Lancaster University PhD researcher Oleksandra Osypenko puts it. While in 2012 only 44% Ukrainians primarily spoke Ukrainian and 34% Russian, by December 2022 Ukrainian had risen to 57.4% and Russian had fallen to 14.8%, with the remaining 27.8 percent reporting employing both. This means that 42.6% of Ukrainians (that is 14.8 plus 27.8) still use the Russian language routinely, even after three years of open war, with censored media, and all “pro-Russian” parties having been banned; and after at least 11 years of Ukrainization policies.

High rates of intermarriage blur the lines even further; and, from a social science perspective, many folks toggle between “Russian” and “Ukrainian” identities depending on the context, as I’ve noticed myself during fieldwork in 2019.

Yet, back in August 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky told Donbass residents who ‘feel russkiye [ethnic Russians]’ to move to Russia. At the time, I argued that this was one of the most russophobic statements from a high-ranking Ukrainian official since World War II; which is an ironic enough twist, considering the fact that in 2019 Zelensky (a Russian speaker himself) was widely described as a candidate courting the Russian and pro-Russian minority, and rode to power on promises to protect precisely these Russian-identifying folks in the east.

The 2014 ultranationalist Maidan revolution, backed by Washington (despite its far-right elements), has ushered in a surge of Ukrainian chauvinism that verges on negationism about the country’s pluri-ethnic realities. Language laws tell part of the tale. The 2017 education reform made Ukrainian the sole public-school language; by March 2023, Ukraine expanded media censorship and raised TV Ukrainian-language quotas to 90% by 2024, while banning non-Ukrainian languages in key areas.

Oleksiy Danilov, then secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, put it starkly in a 2023 interview: “The Russian language must completely disappear from our territory.” No wonder Ukrainian philosopher Sergei Datsyuk warned that such moves could spark an “internal civil war” worse than the external one, and even Oleksiy Arestovich, Zelensky’s former adviser, echoed the alarm.

The truth is that such “internal civil war” kicked off nearly a decade ago in Donbass, as scholar Serhiy Kudelia frames it, under artillery barrages that turned it into Europe’s “forgotten war” until 2022. Kyiv has been bombing Russians (in Donbass) for a decade, while disenfranchising them.

This is no hyperbole: experts like Nicolai N. Petro, a US Fulbright scholar in Ukraine in 2013-2014 and ex-State Department specialist on the Soviet Union, have documented how Ukrainian policies erode civil rights for ethnic minorities, especially Russian speakers.

The Venice Commission, Europe’s go-to body for democratic standards, criticized Ukraine’s 2022 Law on National Minorities for restricting publishing, media, and education in minority languages, urging revisions to meet international standards. Despite this, Deputy PM Olga Stefanishyna dismissed it all by claiming: “there is no Russian minority in Ukraine.”

Moreover, for many, Ukraine’s history is inextricably tied to Russia’s; a 2021 survey, taken six months before the full-scale escalation, found over 40 percent of Ukrainians nationwide — and nearly two-thirds in the east and south — agreeing with Putin that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”.

Yet Ukraine’s rigid unitary state, with its top-down nationalism, clashes hard against Russia’s matryoshka model of multinational autonomy — with 22 ethnic republics within the Russian Federation. Granting Donbass similar autonomy, for instance, could have eased tensions, but it would have demanded a constitutional overhaul.

In the broader post-Soviet mess, Ukraine’s woes look less unique. Frozen conflicts across the region — Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh — show how borders remain volatile. In this context, Crimea and Donbass have been hot topics for decades.

The hard truth is that if Kyiv won militarily (unlikely), more Donbass shelling and displacement would likely follow. Carden’s point stands: without addressing internal ethnopolitics, Ukraine cannot secure peace; for peace means embracing all its people, not just the land they stand on.