Ukraine conflict must be resolved via diplomacy, not escalated

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has shifted his stance on how Ukraine's conflict with Russia can be ended. In his interviews with Fox News, Sky News and Kyodo news agency in the past weeks, Zelensky said he would agree to end the conflict with some kind of territorial concession with Russia but receive NATO's security guarantee for the rest of Ukraine's territory.

It is a major departure from the"10-point Peace Plan" he put forward in late 2022 and the "Victory Plan" he promoted in October but received no endorsement — not even from the United States or the European Union.

Most non-NATO member countries have been calling for a cease-fire and dialogue to resolve the conflict because they know no dispute or difference can be resolved on the battlefield. Unlike most NATO members, these countries have maintained good relations with both Russia and Ukraine and therefore their stance is less biased.

For such countries, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is like seeing two friends engaged in a fight. Hence, their natural response is to urge both sides to back off, instead of giving a knife to one to stab the other. The US and NATO, however, have been doing exactly that, literally turning the conflict into a prolonged proxy war against Russia.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte's remarks on Wednesday are the latest signal for a new round of escalation. After the NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels, he said "we must provide enough support to change the trajectory of the conflict".

The US and NATO have tried to change the trajectory on the battlefield over the past 33 months by providing weapons including tanks, ammunition, F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles, but the result has been more casualties and destruction and setbacks on the battlefield for Ukraine.

Ukrainian civilians have borne the brunt of the conflict. A Gallup poll released last month showed that more than half of the Ukrainians want their country to negotiate an end to the conflict as soon as possible. Also, Zelensky's approval ratings and people's confidence in his government both have been declining over the past year. And last week, the Associated Press reported that more than 100,000 soldiers have been charged under Ukraine's desertion law since 2022. These facts partly explain why Zelensky has changed his stance on the conflict.

For more than two years, I have been asking EU officials why they have not resorted to diplomacy to help end the conflict. Their answer has always been that Russia is not sincere about ending it. When I raised Russia's concern over NATO's eastward expansion, they simply dismissed it as Russian propaganda. In a word, there has been no real debate on the conflict, let alone how to help end it, in Brussels.

That's exactly what Charles Kupchan believes. Kupchan is a Georgetown University professor who served as senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council during former US president Barack Obama's administration. A brilliant scholar, Kupchan talked about his book, How Enemies Become Friends, when we first met in New York in 2010.

At a Quincy Institute seminar in late October, he asked, "Why can't we have a realistic debate about Ukraine?" The justification given by people about why Russia should not worry about NATO's expansion ever closer to its border, he said, flies in the face of "Geopolitics 101". He added that the US spent the 19th century trying to kick every European power out of the Western hemisphere. He also said that some in the US even use words such as "treason" to describe his stance on the Ukraine crisis.

The US and the United Kingdom sabotaged the peace talks that were progressing well between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022. If the past two and a half years have proved anything, it is that we should not let the US and NATO hijack the will of most of the Ukrainians, who want an end to the conflict as soon as possible.

The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.