The Risks of the Partition of Ukraine
Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, the former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested that Ukraine should make territorial concessions to Russia to prevent its invasion from turning into a full-scale conflict. Kissinger further warned against the dangers of the West seeking an “embarrassing defeat for Russia in Ukraine”, as this would have a negative impact on Europe’s long term stability. His ultimate conclusion was that the ideal dividing line would be “a return to the status quo ante”, implying that Ukraine give up most of the Donbas and Crimea.
This idea has also been put forward by a recent New York Times editorial arguing that Ukraine should accept the necessity to make territorial concessions to Russia for a peace deal. This view secretly resonates among some groups of senior policymakers of European governments and some researchers of American think tanks. According to this perspective, such concessions would allow the world to slowly resume relations with Russia and would leave Russia somewhat satisfied with its territorial gains, preventing an extension of the invasion.
The hypothesis of the partition of Ukraine has been rejected by several experts, Ukrainian policymakers, as well as politicians of other European governments. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy strongly criticized Kissinger’s suggestion, affirming that Kissinger seemed to be speaking to an audience in Munich in 1938, instead of one in Davos in 2022. A similar remark came from a Ukrainian MP, Oleksiy Goncharenko, who affirmed: “I think Mr. Kissinger still lives in the 20th century, and we are in the 21st century and we are not going to give up any inch of our territory.” Similarly, Lithuania’s foreign minister warned that Ukraine giving up territory to Russia would mean normalizing what Putin’s regime is doing.
Despite the option of partition not seeming to be concretely on the table, it is worth analyzing the risks that Ukraine, and more broadly the world order, could face in ceding land to Russia.
The first significant risk of ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia is that this acquisition would not stop Putin from persisting on the invasion. Russia’s de facto acquisition of Crimea since 2014 has not prevented Russia from invading Ukraine again, nor has it established a long term equilibrium despite the European hopes. Putin has carried out Ukraine’s invasion in spite of the Minsk agreements, hence the risk of a new peace deal based on territorial concessions is that there will be no guarantee that the invasion will cease. Furthermore, offering territorial concessions to a stronger party such as Russia while hoping that it will be satisfied is the same approach taken in Munich in 1938, when Hitler was given the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia: this approach did not established a more stable equilibrium nor it averted further invasions from Nazi Germany.
The second risk is that ceding land to Russia would strengthen Putin’s war propaganda, meaning that it would make it appear more legitimate to the Russian people to finish what he has started. Putin has so far relied on the false narrative of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as inherently inseparable from Russia, accusing NATO of threatening what is Russian by including the possibility of a potential NATO membership for Ukraine. Acquiring Ukrainian territory would allow Putin to build a new narrative for which his assumptions about the unity of Ukrainian and Russian people are accepted by Ukraine and backed up by the West in that some Western sources have supported partition. Precisely, the risk is that Putin would use these concessions as sources of external recognition by the West of the motives for the war.
Another risk is that territorial concessions to Russia could further damage the international norm of the inviolability of borders. The respect for this norm has already been damaged by the invasion itself and a practical risk of this would be that of other countries assuming they could get away with invading and acquiring land belonging to other sovereign states. China has been drawing some lessons from the Russian invasion of Ukraine for its potential invasion of Taiwan. While the many challenges of this invasion probably make a Chinese invasion of Taiwan less likely, the prospect of even a small acquisition of land could encourage China to carry out a short-term occupation of Taiwan.