“Sacrificing young lives for the defense of a strategically irrelevant cesspool of decay and corruption makes absolutely no sense,” Motyl writes of the Russian-occupied territory, and the almost daily losses of Ukrainian soldiers on the war front in the east.
While that’s certainly correct, Motyl’s overall case is built on a faulty premise; that Ukrainian soldiers are dying in order to recover the occupied territories. They’re not. Ukraine is in no position to recover these territories militarily at this time.
Ukrainian soldiers are dying because they’re under near constant, low-level attack from an enemy that has declared many times that it intends to expand its area of control.
The armed groups of the Donbas would certainly take more ground if the Ukrainian armed forces were not vigilantly holding the front line with as much strength as they can muster. While in the current situation there are some exchanges of territory, these are due to both sides straightening out the front line and bolstering their defensive positions, not because they’re mounting a major offensive.
As for Ukraine abandoning the Russian-controlled part of the Donbas – it already has, to a certain extent. There is no prospect of a military operation to recover control of the area, and the Minsk II peace process is stalled. The Ukrainians in the parts of the country now controlled by Russian-backed armed gangs, those who do not support the occupiers, may have reason to feel betrayed by Ukraine for failing to protect them.
But, officially at least, the Ukrainian government has no intention of abandoning these territories, and nor should it. The Donbas can be recovered – not by military means, but by a peaceful process, either under Minsk or under a new agreement that is more practical and fairer to Ukraine. The West could help by threatening tougher sanctions if Russia continues to flout the Minsk agreements
Letting Russia get away with seizing part of the Donbas, no matter how decayed and corrupt that part might be, would be the ultimate betrayal by Ukraine, of itself, of the principles of the post-war security order, and of the people of the Donbas.
