As the Ukraine war drags on, a grain export deal could be a sign of hope

Six months ago, Poland's air force included large numbers of obsolete Soviet-era planes. But it is now furiously re-arming and has just signed a major arms deal with South Korea.

The US$14.5bn deal with Poland includes 1,000 K2 main battle tanks, nearly 700 self-propelled howitzers and 48 FA-50 combat aircraft. It's just one example of the rapid expansion of re-arming now under way across Europe. As Sean Howard put it recently, making a killing is a lot easier than making peace. It is certainly far more profitable, at least in the short term, even if almost everyone will lose in the long term.

The war in Ukraine, meanwhile, drags on with no end in sight as it approaches six months of killing and destruction. A violent stalemate has persisted for five of those six months, sometimes with Russia appearing in the ascendant but more recently Ukraine edging ahead. Neither can win and neither can lose. NATO will ensure that Ukraine is sufficiently well-armed to resist sudden Russian advances, but if Russia faces defeat it can threaten nuclear escalation.

Even so, while Volodymyr Zelenskyi is now speaking openly of Ukraine reclaiming the whole of the Crimea from Russia, seasoned diplomats see this as principally for home consumption. If a deal was possible, then Ukraine would almost certainly be prepared to negotiate over territory, post-war governance and many other issues, and there is plenty of expert advice around on how to approach a negotiated settlement.

There are, though, many obstacles to a negotiated peace, three of which stand out.

One is Putin and his power group, which remains fixated on victory. They may no longer see much prospect of an immediate takeover of the Kyiv government, even if that remains the ultimate aim, but controlling much of Russian-speaking Ukraine in Crimea and Donbas is still the intention.

There is also little doubt that Putin himself remains committed to the grand vision of a greater Eurasia with Russia at the head. This exercise in ethno-nationalism with decided neo-Fascist and Tsarist undertones is his counter to Western hegemony, especially the global power of the United States.

Then there is the second obstacle. The hawks in the West, and especially in the United States, see the war as an extraordinary opportunity to cripple the Russian economy for a generation, freeing Washington to face up to its real enemy – China.

There are shades here of the hawkish attitudes of the influential John Birch Society and other right-wing groups in the US back at the height of the Cold War era in the early 1980s. Spending the Soviets into an early grave was the mantra, and it came close to becoming the reality with the economic collapse of the early 1990s.