A partial ceasefire we can all support?
Oddly, it does not seem to be particularly popular in the peace movement
As missiles and drones rained down on Kyiv this winter, Ukrainian resilience impressed people around the world, who rallied in solidarity to fund humanitarian efforts and pressure their governments to provide air defense. At the same time, a common refrain on both the far left and right was that Ukrainians needed to come to the negotiating table and that the US should pressure them to agree to a ceasefire. Many, like Codepink’s Medea Benjamin, framed this in humanitarian terms - as a way to cease Ukrainian suffering. Others insisted the US needed to cut back aid because the cause was hopeless, or because Russia is the real victim of the war it started. Some called for a full scale ceasefire, others, a holiday truce - hearkening back to the heartwarming but ultimately unimpactful Christmas truce of 1914 (which was, notably, not repeated. Instead, the war ending blow came only after Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points came to demand complete evacuation of territory occupied by Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Today, those calls are generally the same, and still face the same basic problem: they are not reciprocal. All would protect the Russian army in Ukraine, obligating Ukraine to accept losing territory while Russia gains. In doing so, they violate the principle of state sovereignty and equality between states that undergirds any liberal understanding of international relations, and rewards the crime - agreed upon by the US and USSR - of aggressive war. However, recently the situation has changed to make a partial ceasefire possible without betraying those principles. Kyiv is still being hit with cruise missiles, but the are no longer a threat to the energy grid as a whole, as only a few missiles get through improved air defense, causing sporadic civilian casualties. Strikes on other cities are more effective at killing civilians but do not seem to accomplish a strategic purpose. And on the other side, Ukrainian drones are now regularly hitting Russian target and even occasionally penetrating as far as Moscow.
These air strikes create the greatest danger for escalation - after all, Russian ballistic missiles pummeling Kyiv are also nuclear capable, and Ukrainian drones hitting Moscow have provoked Russia’s most severe condemnations. At the same time, these kind of attacks are much more likely to cause civilian casualties.
This opens the door to a ceasefire. Start, first, with each country’s capital city - announce Kyiv and Moscow as humanitarian zones that are not to be attacked with missiles, drones, bombs, or any other munitions. Much of Western and Central Ukraine, as well as Northern and Central Russia, are also far enough away from the fighting that an agreement to stop bombarding them could be reached without dramatically curtailing either side’s war effort. This can then be further expanded - Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts in Ukraine have seen cross border shelling throughout the war, and Bryansk and Kursk oblasts in Russia are potentially subject to it as well. An agreement to end this cross-border firing on towns and border checkpoints could help civilians in each region while having relatively little military impact on the war.
A broader agreement - one that included oblasts like Kharkiv and Dnipro in Ukraine, or Belgorad and Krasnodar Krai in Russia - would be difficult to reach at this time, since both sides see those regions as militarily essential to the war effort. But creating certain safe zones for civilians to allow for civilian rebuilding and remove the burden of regular air raids would be a laudable humanitarian goal. And it could be a precursor to further humanitarian negotiations.
Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to have been floated by any major peace activist group. Many who wanted the US to unilaterally end its air strikes in support of the Yemeni or Somali government - irrespective of what is happening on the ground in those countries - do not seem to support putting the same pressure on Russia.
There is an obvious rejoinder to this proposal, of course - it will benefit Ukraine more than Russia. Ukraine is under far heavier bombardment than Russia, and cannot hope to match that level missile strikes in the near future. This is true - but what does it say about Codepink and its peers that they only support a resolution to the conflict that allows Russian troops to stay in Ukraine, not one that focuses on minimizing civilian casualties?