Will the US elections bring an end to the war in Ukraine?

Journalist Mark Urban tells The News Agents why an end could be in sight after more than two and a half years of bloody war in Ukraine.

In brief…

• The US presidential election is expected to have a major impact on the course of the Ukraine/Russia war.
• Journalist Mark Urban tells The News Agents Putin may be waiting until then before deciding how to proceed.
• If Donald Trump wins, Urban says Putin might stick it out. But if he loses, could we see the formation of a peace treaty?

What’s the story?

It has been over two and a half years since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

As the conflict rages on, with both sides suffering heavy losses and setbacks, could an end point be in sight?

It is a question author and journalist Mark Urban, former diplomatic editor for the BBC’s Newsnight, raises on The News Agents. He wonders whether it could be, following the results of the upcoming US election.

He says: “Are we reaching a point, perhaps in the immediate aftermath of the US election, where Putin will have to make a judgment to stop that pain?”

Russia may have started the war and made gains in certain areas, but according to estimates it lost 65,000 men between July and August alone.

With losses like this continuing to persist, perhaps Putin may be gearing up for an exit strategy.

But according to Urban, there is a reason why he may be waiting until November before deciding how to proceed.

Why could the presidential elections be a turning point?

It is no secret that Ukraine is worried about a potential Donald Trump presidency. The Republican has repeatedly taken aim at the Democrats for funding what he calls an open-ended war.

In fact, the Biden administration has given more than $55.7 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the start of the war. Trump has made clear he will not be as generous.

This is why, Urban says, Putin might be thinking that “another few months of this and we'll have them if America effectively throws in the towel and leaves Ukraine isolated”.

Trump has claimed instead that if he were president, he would be able to end the war “in 24 hours”.

Speaking in his TV debate against Harris in early September, Trump said: "What I'll do is I'll speak to one, I'll speak to the other, I'll get them together.”

In reality, it is not that simple.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this month that Trump’s line of thinking falls within “the realm of fantasy”.

He told reporters: "The name Putin is used, let's say, as one of the tools in the domestic political struggle of the United States.

"We really, really don't like this and we still hope they will leave our president alone."

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is seen by some to be “tougher” when it comes to Ukraine even than Joe Biden, Urban says.

For instance, she has come down hard on Trump for his stance on Putin.

In the pair’s TV debate on ABC, she claimed "Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now" if the Republican had been in power when the war broke out.

Harris added: "Understand why the European allies and our NATO allies are so thankful that you are no longer president.

“We understand the importance of the greatest military alliance the world has ever known and what we have done to preserve the ability of Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians to fight for their independence."

With this in mind, Putin may think America will vow to keep supporting Ukraine until the bitter end under a Democrat presidency.

And that is why, should Kamala Harris win rather than Trump, Urban argues Putin may seek a peace deal.

The US may also be more than open to this suggestion, Urban argues.

Should the Democrats prove successful in November, then during the brief period where Joe Biden is still the president before the transfer of power to Harris, Urban says he may see brokering a Ukraine/Russia peace deal as his defining legacy.

What would a peace deal look like?

Urban says it will be a challenge to get both sides on board.

“For Putin, having laid down hundreds of thousands of lives in Ukraine and and in effect, ransacked and had to reconfigure the Russian economy, I think it's quite hard for them to agree on what you might call a peace treaty in which everything is settled”, he says.

Ukraine will have a list of serious demands too.

Urban adds: “They can't just accept locking everything down and freezing in all of Putin's gains . That's clearly unacceptable, even in a ceasefire formulation, to the Ukrainians.

“But if you start to say, there’s got to be disengagement, the Russians have got to pull back in places, we'll pull back from Kursk and we’ll have disengagement zones in order to buttress a ceasefire, then you start to get into what we might call ‘ceasefire plus’.

“It doesn't solve the fundamental problems of the crisis. It's not peace, but it is the beginning of an end game.”

Listen to the full discussion on The News Agents

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