The Imminent NATO-Ukrainian Defeat’s Implications for the Fate of the Ukrainian State

It is the U.S. and West that drove NATO expansion despite the Ukrainian constitution’s now former clause stipulating the country’s non-bloc, neutral status but repealed by Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s predecessor in Ukraine’s Office of the President, Petro Poroshenko, and despite the Ukrainian population’s divided, if not majority opposition opinion to Ukraine’s membership in NATO. 

It is the U.S. and the West that refused to negotiate NATO expansion and a general European security architecture and instead push Ukraine forward to the frontline in NATO’s confrontation with ‘Putin’s Russia’, despite the West’s own claims that Putin and his Russia were dangerous and expansionist. 

It is the U.S. and the West that conned Zelenskiy into continuing the war with Russia that Moscow escalated after losing all hope in January 2022 for any negotiations with the West over these issues. Putin opted to engage in coercive diplomacy by initiating the ‘special military operation’ and invading Ukraine and almost simultaneously offering peace talks to Ukraine in February 2022 in order to achieve with Kiev the kind of security agreement that eluded Moscow in relations with the West. The Minsk, then Istanbul talks that resulted reached a preliminary agreement only to see the West scuttle the agreement by refusing to provide the security guarantees envisaged in it any by dispatching then British Premier Boris Johnson to issue the NATO message that Kiev should fight and Washington and Brussels would provide everything Ukraine needed ‘for as long as it takes.’ The Western-Ukrainian relationship that has developed in the course of the war is reminiscent of that of a vassalage—Ukraine being the vassal with little to no sovereignty.

It is the U.S. and the West that have refused to begin peace talks with Moscow or pressure Kiev to do so and instead continuously escalated a war that is attritting Ukraine both in terms of its population and its territory even as Russian forces’ drive westward accelerates with each passing month (as I predicted in January 2024; see  https://youtu.be/P_MJi5H6HKU?si=rxRiaE0EglSgbclw at the 1:00:45 mark), despite Putin’s and other top Russian officials’ repeated statements that they are open to any negotiations.   

Now the Ukrainian state’s control over its territories is being whittled away by Russia’s mounting, if cautious offensive. It has been stated by Zelenskiy and Western leaders that Ukrainian forces’ ill-advised, costly, and failed incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in July 2024 provides Kiev with collateral to trade for its Russian-occupied regions. But Russia has stated that no talks with Kiev are possible so long as Ukrainian troops remain on Russian territory, and Russia’s advancing troops in Ukraine are moving deeper into regions beyond the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhia regions Russia has laid claim to and annexed. Thus, rather than Ukraine being able to trade Kursk for one or more of those regions in any future talks, it will be Russia that will be able to demand concessions for the return of regions or parts thereof such as Kharkiv (Kharkov), Sumy, Dnipro (Dnepropetrovsk), Mikolaev, and even eastern Kiev. 

Moreover, the danger of Russian forces crossing the Dnieper River into western Ukraine is just over the horizon. So it now is becoming more in NATO’s perceived self-interest in its pursuit of encroachment on Russia’s borders and encircling her to destroy what is Russia’s Ukrainian buffer than it is to preserve any Ukraine that is a non-bloc, neutral state. Russia has repeatedly declared that it is in its self-interestthat Ukraine be a non-bloc, neutral state and never become a member of NATO. This is because Russia prefers a buffer be situated between it and the Western alliance for all the obvious and not so obvious (to many) reasons. Therefore, the party in the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War that is most interested in destroying Ukraine as a state is not Russia but NATO. 

The elimination of Ukraine will achieve the key goal that NATO’s expansion to Ukraine has been intended to achieve: NATO’s acquisition of members along all of Russia’s western and southwestern borders (the Transcaucasus). In comparison with having Ukraine as a member-state, Ukraine’s absorption by Russia has only two downsides for Washington and Brussels. First, they will have to forego the control over the Black Sea they coveted as the second goal of NATO expansion, though perhaps Georgia remains an option, however less liable in the wake of the recent elections and failed attempt to repeat the color of ‘rose’ revolution there. Second, there will be a blow to Western prestige in light of its failure to save Ukraine and deal a strategic defeat to Russia.

There are numerous ways in which the West or elements therein can facilitate or bring about Ukraine’s demise. The most likely is another scuttling of peace talks – this time those being worked on by the Trump Administration – forcing Ukraine to continue fighting a losing war of attrition with Russian advancing forces right up to the Polish, Hungarian, and Rumanian borders. This is precisely what hardline former Russian Security Council Secretary and FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev was warning in his much discussed Moskovskii Komsomolets interview. For Trump this will be a soon forgotten political defeat. But many in DC and Brussels will rejoice at the prospect of a long war for Russia that lasts until Putin’s physical or political health fails, sparking a power struggle that might offer the prospect of a Russian collapse on the Soviet model. 

A less likely scenario would be the previous one with annexations of Transcarpathian and western provinces of Ukraine by Hungary, Rumania, and Poland added in. Elements in all three of these countries are pushing for returns of traditional national territories given to the USSR’s Ukraine SSR by Joseph Stalin after World War Two. Midwives of Ukraine’s dissolution could also emerge as a result of NATO’s insertion of troops into Ukraine west of the Dnieper, as was proposed by some earlier in the war. Recent talk of British and French ‘peacekeepers’ in Ukraine could perform the same function. Although this variation is unlikely, such a ‘protectorate Ukraine’ could eventually be dissolved and its parts incorporated by its neighbors as noted above. 

With Ukraine’s disappearance, the Beltway and Brussels can and will assuage themselves with the knowledge that NATO has reached Russia’s borders in yet another sector and has the option of fomenting Ukrainian separatists inside Russia.

The one thing that would likely trump or delay the abovementioned scenarios, besides Trump and any innovative schemes his team might conjure up, is some form of direct Western intervention in the war on the ground. In this case, there is still no guarantee of Ukraine’s survival as Western and Russian troops rampage through the country in the long war over NATO expansion.