A WAR THE GENERALS WANT TO END

Though talks continue, a peace in Ukraine is no nearer than when Trump took office

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky holds a press conference in Kyiv on May 13, urging the United States to levy its most hard-hitting package of sanctions on Moscow if Russian President Vladimir Putin rejects a call to meet in Turkey this week. / Photo by Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images.

One constant in the war between Russia and Ukraine that Vladimir Putin started more than three years ago has been the willingness of the generals on both sides to say: “No more.”

I was told more than a year ago that the stunning interview Ukrainian General Valerii Zaluzhnyi gave to the Economist in the autumn of 2023—the Ukraine commander famously said then that the war had become “a stalemate”—was planned with the knowledge of General Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian Armed Forces.

An involved American official told me recently that it is not the generals but the politicians—he was referring to Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, his counterpart in Kiev—who are keeping the war going in still contested areas of Ukraine. One major battleground is in Donetsk oblast in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces are continuing to take physical and political control of Ukrainian territory amid talk of peace. Bitter fighting is going on now—ignored by the US press—thirty-five miles outside of Donetsk City, in and around the towns of Pokrovsk and Toretsk. Last week Russian forces captured three settlements in Donetsk that allow them to block critical supply routes for Ukrainian forces and to threaten two nearby Ukrainian provinces. Putin is clearly intent on controlling as much Ukrainian territory as possible before he submits, if he ever does, to serious peace talks.