What Is the Endgame for Ukraine?
Levan Ramishvili
What Is the Endgame for Ukraine?
History offers a range of precedents for what an agreement with Russia could look like—and how bad the consequences might be.
President Trump is pushing to end the war that has been raging in Ukraine for more than three years. While Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has accepted the U.S. proposal for an unconditional 30-day cease-fire to pave the way for peace negotiations, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin hasn’t agreed so far. Talks between the U.S. and Russia are set to continue in the Middle East. Zelensky’s European allies, who are determined to prevent Kyiv’s capitulation, will also play a major role in shaping the outcome.
It is far from clear what a Russia-Ukraine agreement would look like. But a look at key precedents from the 20th century suggests a range of possible outcomes. A cease-fire deal could lead to another, more successful Russian invasion; the establishment of a Ukrainian puppet government under Russian influence; a hostile but relatively peaceful coexistence; or maybe even a Ukrainian comeback. It all depends on which lessons from history turn out to be the right ones.
The Baltic States. In 1939, just before World War II began, the Soviet Union signed a treaty with Nazi Germany dividing Eastern Europe between them. The U.S.S.R. did not invade Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia immediately when the war started. Rather, it forced them to accept “mutual assistance” agreements, in which Moscow promised to respect their sovereignty in exchange for military bases and pledges of neutrality.
But the Soviets had no intention of honoring the bargain. In June 1940, Moscow accused the Baltic states of violating the neutrality pledge by cooperating with each other and occupied the small countries nearly overnight, with little resistance. They were annexed into the U.S.S.R. weeks later. Hundreds of thousands of Balts were deported to Siberia in following years, and much of the bureaucratic and intellectual elite exterminated.
Today, Baltic officials and analysts openly compare Trump’s embrace of Putin’s Russia to the Nazi-Soviet pact—a betrayal that would come at the expense of Ukraine’s independence, and perhaps their own. “That’s the lesson for Ukraine today: you will be slaughtered, so don’t give up. It’s better to die on the front lines than to be executed afterward,” said Artis Pabriks, Latvia’s former minister of defense and foreign affairs.
Vichy France. When France’s military collapsed in 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain, a World War I hero, took charge of the government and asked Germany for an armistice. More than half of the country—the north and west, including Paris—was placed under direct German military occupation, a sliver was annexed outright, and the southeast remained unoccupied and nominally independent, with a temporary capital in the spa town of Vichy. While technically neutral, Vichy France collaborated with Nazi policies, including the deportation of Jews to death camps.
A division of Ukraine could follow a similar pattern if Russia succeeds. “Much like Hitler occupied militarily only part of France yet politically controlled the entire country, Putin seeks to establish a Vichy regime in Kyiv,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome.
Historian Thomas Gomart believes Putin would go much further than that, pointing out that it was the elected French parliament rather than the Nazis who installed Pétain: “The Russians seek the destruction of the Ukrainian state, and therefore they want to punish the political elites who fought against them—which wasn’t the case with Germany and Vichy.”
The other big difference, of course, is that while France’s military collapsed in six weeks, Ukraine’s is still fighting Russia after three years. “To get to Vichy, you first need to lose the war—which, for Ukraine, isn’t the case,” said former French diplomat François Heisbourg.
Finlandization. Unlike the Baltic states, Finland rejected Soviet ultimatums in 1939. The Red Army invaded, but after several months of fierce Finnish resistance Stalin agreed to sign a peace treaty, in which Finland ceded key territory but retained its independence. War resumed the following year, and a new “friendship and mutual assistance” treaty was signed in 1948. During the Cold War, Moscow allowed the country to develop a market economy but wielded a veto over its government by regularly hinting at military intervention, a policy known as “Finlandization.” President Urho Kekkonen, who held office for 26 years, could sideline potential rivals simply by arranging an editorial in Pravda.
Putin’s Russia has already tried a version of this approach in Ukraine, supporting authoritarian President Viktor Yanukovych as he steered the country away from the West. After Yanukovych was ousted by popular protests in 2014, Russia moved toward asserting direct control of Ukraine by annexing Crimea and invading the Donbas region.
Finlandization, often misunderstood as prosperous neutrality, was proposed as a model for Ukraine by Henry Kissinger in 2014, though he later changed his mind. Finland’s current President, Alexander Stubb, considers the very term “an insult,” adding, “It’s a period in our history which I feel personally very uncomfortable with. We had to compromise some of our values, but not our independence.” Today Finland is a member of the European Union and NATO—and one of the European nations most hostile to Russia.
The Korean Armistice. In the Korean War, American forces fought for the government of President Syngman Rhee in the south of the country against the Communist north and its Chinese and Soviet allies. In 1953, after three years of fighting, an armistice divided the country roughly along the 38th parallel. Rhee opposed the agreement, considering it a sellout, but was pressured to fall in line by President Eisenhower’s threat to cut off American military support.
President Trump’s special adviser David Sacks invoked this precedent when he hailed the recent cutoff in American assistance to Ukraine. But there is a key difference: Trump has ruled out any security guarantees to Ukraine in case Russia re-invades. In Korea, by contrast, tens of thousands of U.S. troops and a bilateral security treaty are ensuring the peace, said Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “The treaty is the teeth behind the armistice that forced deterrence.”
Trump’s return to the White House has raised fears in South Korea about the reliability of that American support. “More and more people are starting to question the validity of the security guarantees from the U.S.,” said Eric Ballbach, Korea fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “It leads to a situation where we now have strong support for South Korea developing its own nuclear weapons, a debate that is no longer on the fringe anymore.”
Cyprus. Russia justified its invasions of Ukraine since 2014 by the need to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Turkey offered a similar rationale for its invasion of Cyprus in 1974, saying it needed to protect the well-being of the ethnic Turkish minority after a Greek-inspired coup on the island. Unlike Ukraine, Cyprus did have a history of communal bloodshed. Half a century later, Turkey continues to occupy the northern third of the island, while virtually all Greek Cypriots fled to the south, which remains internationally recognized as the Republic of Cyprus. Peace talks over the past half-century have proved fruitless, and Nicosia is the world’s only divided capital city.
The Republic of Cyprus has long treated direct trips to and from northern Cyprus as illegal, and forbidden travelers from visiting the Turkish-occupied area without first going through official Cypriot immigration. Ukraine adopted a similar policy after Russia occupied Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014. Yet despite its contested borders, Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, which is also Ukraine’s aspiration.
“Turkey thought what we have is fine, we don’t need the entire place, we don’t need to deal with resistance, and everything that flows from that,” said Stathis Kalyvas, a professor of government at Oxford University. “But my concern is that Russia in Ukraine would not be satisfied with that kind of outcome, and would seek to essentially control the entire country.”
Croatia. Croatia’s declaration of independence in 1991 triggered a war with the Serbian-led remainder of Yugoslavia. In December 1991, former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance negotiated a halt to the fighting and U.N. forces were deployed to maintain the peace. More than a quarter of Croatia’s territory, however, remained under the control of the Republic of Serbian Krajina, a proxy statelet sponsored by Belgrade—not unlike the Russian-controlled enclaves in Donbas after 2014.
The cease-fire allowed the battered Croatian army to recover, while Serbian proxy forces in Krajina decayed. In 1995 Croatia broke the cease-fire, launching two offensives that succeeded in reclaiming most of its territory; the rest was won in negotiations in 1998.
Retired Croatian Lt. Col. Goran Redžepović, now a military commentator, warns that Ukraine would not have an easy time replicating the Croatian success. “The [Krajina] Serbs had a lot of weapons, a lot of tanks, but it was a peasant army that didn’t have the manpower—and at the end it didn’t receive support from Serbia,” recalled “It’s not the same conditions as in Ukraine.”
Still, the Croatian precedent is one of the reasons why Russia insists on limiting the Ukrainian military to as little as one-tenth of current levels and curtailing Kyiv’s access to modern weapons. “Another Vance plan is what both Russia and Ukraine fear,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who heads the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “They both fear that the cease-fire will provide time for the other side to rebuild and restart the war.”