Forcing Ukraine to trade its independent and undisputed territory for a peace settlement would set a terrible precedent in post-1945 international relations.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds into its second year, with signs Ukraine will soon mount a major counter-offensive, some world leaders are calling for peace talks rather than helping arm Ukraine.
Which leaves only two possibilities for negotiation: either Ukraine ceding territory permanently – effectively a negotiated capitulation – or some kind of frozen conflict.
However, only a couple of annexations been widely accepted and these were of colonial territory, the last being India’s takeover of the Portuguese enclave of Goa in 1962. Other unilateral annexations have been broadly rejected sooner or later, such as by Morocco of Western Sahara; Israel of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor; and Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait in 1990.territory.
The record of the Russian military and security forces in captured territory – an area the size of Bulgaria or South Korea, where ethnic Ukrainians comprised nearly 70 percent of the population before 2014 – also bodes ill for Ukrainians left behind in a frozen conflict.