Raw power is back—if you want peace, prepare for war

The following is an edited transcript of a keynote address delivered by Dr. Greg Mills at the Lviv Media Forum on 15 May 2025. The forum’s theme this year was “Speak the unspoken: choices, decisions, responsibility.”

“Many people say, why does somebody from South Africa spend so much effort to travel to Ukraine? So much effort on the issue of Ukraine. 

The answer is – this is because your struggle is our struggle.

If Ukraine has to fail and Russia has to prevail, we are all going to be the losers.

Democracy is in trouble in the world and democracy is in trouble in Africa. It’s a theme I will return to.

If democracy had to fail – fear, repression and raw power were to prevail. In these circumstances, lots of authoritarianism would take support and encouragement from that. It would be a bad day for democrats and a great day for autocrats.

I do believe it’s absolutely necessary from a moral perspective to support Ukraine.

But I do think that enlightened self-interest carries on beyond charity or beyond good feeling. I wholeheartedly endorse whole-heartedly the words of the great Alexandra Matviychuk in saying you just have to be human if you are going to support Ukraine.

We have brought many African politicians to Ukraine over the last three years. We have visited very many corners of the country from Kyiv to Kherson, from Iziun to Odesa. All of them have been struck by the extraordinary fortitude of all Ukrainians but especially young Ukrainians.

The future is yours. We absolutely have to make these investments in the nature of the world that we live in, that we confront, and also the nature of the societies in which we operate.

A theory of victory and peace in Ukraine

This is a profound moment to be here because 80 years ago, the most costly war in human history ended. 

Some 75 million people died in that war, including about 25 million military personnel. Ukraine suffered an estimated eight million deaths, more than five million of which were civilians. This figure represented more than 40% of the total casualties of the Soviet Union. Ukraine lost more people in the Second World War than any other European country, adding to the estimated 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians who starved to death under Stalin during the Holodomor famine in the early 1930s.

Now, 35 years after the suggestion that we had reached the “end of history” with the culmination of the Cold War and the apparent victory of democratic capitalism over authoritarian communism, history is back and moving fast. The democratic world has been shaken as an arc of crisis has emerged, from Russia’s colonial war in Ukraine through the resurgent struggles of the Middle East and into the violent upheavals across the Sahel and in the Horn of Africa. 

The democratic world has been shaken by an arc of crisis which doesn’t only affect Ukraine, but is cutting across the Sahel region of Africa, into the Middle East as well, for example.

Three questions stand out at this 80th anniversary.  

• What are the lessons from the conflict starting in 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion?
• What are the options for peace, temporary or permanent?
• Is there a theory of victory imaginable for Ukraine?

Lessons from war

By 8 May 2025, in a war that many expected would last for just a week, but had been underway for 1170 days, Russia had sacrificed more than 700,000 of its people, killed and wounded, and had failed to achieve its strategic objective to turn Ukraine into an effective Russian colony. By that measure alone, Russia has lost and Ukraine has won. 

The strategic victory is, for now, Ukraine’s, though how the peace talks proceed and how Kyiv uses any pause in the conflict, will determine not only how the war ends but in what shape and condition Ukraine emerges.  

The overall lesson of the war since February 2022 is that raw power is back – ‘If you want peace prepare for war – in supplanting international law as the organising principle in the international system.

Even if the rules-based order is on its deathbed, it would be folly to expect anything constructive or indeed anything at all to replace it anytime soon. In these circumstances there is invariably a shift towards the local neighbourhood, to work with friends and isolate rivals, adjusting and integrating accordingly. 

The significant lesson for the West lies, however, in the strategic folly of not giving Ukraine enough to win. Western assistance to Ukraine has been equivalent to around 0.1% of GDP, where European members of NATO spend an average of 2% of GDP on defence, and the US 3.4%. 

Other strategic lessons include the folly of trusting Russia even when committing (remember the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, for instance, by which Russia undertook to respect Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Kyiv giving up on nuclear weapons) as much as it flights impossible conditions as a spoiling tactic in negotiations. For all of the rhetoric in support of Ukraine, and the evident self-interest in so doing, a healthy scepticism about Western promises is sensible, based as it is on a yawning delivery credibility gap, self-interest and the fickleness of democratic systems. 

Russia’s war in Ukraine has also reminded us that war on this scale is about economic as much as military power and health. And the strategic tools therefore include isolation and sanctions, even if this aspect has yet to be fully explored and applied, if ever it might be, since to be effective it would have to be applied on secondary markets including China and India, to be effective, and seeks the means to drive down the price of oil and gas which feeds Putin’s war machine. 

Ukraine’s message of human rights and liberal democracy (if less liberal governance) has lacked resonance among a world suspicious of the West and where the majority do not live in democracies.

A theory of peace

There is a presumption that Putin will accept a permanent peace on the grounds of the conquests that he has already made in the East and in Crimea. Still, “this is not a war about territory,” reminds Gregory Nemyria, the vice chair of the Rada’s Foreign Affairs Committee, “rather one about values, and questions and perceptions of security.”

Occupying over 17 million km2, Russia is nearly twice as the world’s next largest country, Canada, covering 11 time zones and with one of the lowest population densities, ranking 225 of 242 countries and territories, in the company of the Central African Republic and Kazakhstan. Russia’s theory of victory is not about territory, says former president Yushchenko, “but all about advancing the Russian world.”  

There do not seem to be the conditions for a permanent peace while Putin remains in place in Moscow, not for a man who has pinned his honour on the re-establishment of the Russian empire, centring this strategy on Ukraine.

Whatever might be agreed at talks will almost certainly be used as an opportunity for Russia to pause and reconstitute for another go. 

Given the high risks that any peace with Putin would be temporary, Ukraine has to, first, set the terms for a ceasefire or armistice as favourably as possible; and, second, use that period of peace, however long it may endure, better than Russia. In this environment, three scenarios are imaginable:   

Peace and division

There are two sub-options in this regard: 

First, the Korean model, which involves an armistice like that signed between South Korea/United Nations/US and North Korea/China in July 1953. Ukraine gets, under this option, to keep their territorial claims intact, focusing on long term economic, technological and military improvement. Much like South Korea, Ukraine would play the long game, and wait for a change in conditions, such as territorial negotiation with a post-Putin Russia to allow Ukraine to claim some land back. It would need backing, just as South Korea had the security of US nuclear weapons and a permanent American troop presence, as detailed below. This option of course presumes that Putin will stay put to allow this to happen, and not simply use the armistice to regroup, rearm and try again. If so, this reverts to the Israel Option, as below. 

Second, the German Option. This would involve a long period of division with the aim of eventual reunification, with multi-generational pressure being applied on the Russians through Ukraine’s and the West’s relative economic success along with rebuilding its defences. In both this and the Korea Option, there is a peacekeeping force (preferably including Chinese and Indian observers). Diplomatically, in this scenario, Ukraine pushes for big Western investment to offer a stake in security, and accession to the EU (which implies a formal guarantees automatically) but probably not NATO. Russia should accept that in the terms of ceasefire agreement. At the UN level, it would be necessary to keep alive the reality through General Assembly resolutions that these are occupied territories, that Russia is the occupying and administration power, that there has been population replacement and expulsion (which excludes sovereignty through self-determination referenda), and be ready to wait for decades. There is a major difference between Ukraine 2025 and Germany circa 1945, of course, in that Ukraine is the victim rather than the perpetrator. However, this option recognises the facts on the ground as they are rather than the political logic as to how they should be.   

The Israeli Option. A shorter-term affair, using the pause around a ceasefire to build Ukrainian defences, a long-range strike capability and retraining the army for the inevitable second round of the full-scale invasion. In all of this, there are shades of Israel, who have a few friends but ultimately take none of its defensive needs for granted. The risk of that parallel is it breeds an exceptionalism that starts to preclude mainstream membership of collective bodies, which Ukraine has to guard against. Just as Field Marshal Bill Slim drew in the Japanese 15th Army, and eventually destroyed it almost in its entirety, Ukraine would aim to do the same with reinvading Russians. While formal peace guarantees should be given by US (and Russia, of course, but those are worthless) and the EU, the mechanics of making this happen are complex requiring tireless diplomacy, as well as rebuilding of Ukraine’s defences and military. This would allow Ukraine to keep its claims, put the onus on Putin to stick to his bargain, and focus on Ukraine getting back on its feet economically. 

Thinking about time and narrative

At first glance, Vladimir Putin has the time advantage: faster production, deeper manpower sources and pockets, no need for consultation and agreement from allies, and no meddlesome domestic opposition. From this point of view, he would prefer to keep the conflict going. 

Conversely, Zelenskyy could and should move in the opposite direction and sue for peace. And as Ukraine can manage an asymmetric technological advantage in the integration of intelligence and drone hardware, Zelenskyy can deliver more options to his armed forces. 

Putin’s time advantage has limits. Diplomatically, he is never going to be in a better position than with Trump in Washington. As time goes by, that advantage erodes. Plus, the EU is slowly but surely gearing up.

Putin’s position can be worsened by adroit Ukrainian positioning. 

On the wider narrative, outside of Europe, justice and courage ultimately have little truck with governments. Sovereignty remains a strategic play and strength its bedfellow. There is a parallel again with the plight of Israel. It moved from being a weak state, with sympathy for the Zionist cause as a result of the Holocaust. “If we have to have a choice between dead and pitied,” the Israeli leader Golda Meir observed, “and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.” 

Putin’s worst nightmare, and that of authoritarians elsewhere, is to see a vibrant, free economy and society thriving in Ukraine. His appeal to authoritarians rests precisely on undoing the rules-based order and the alternative that his regime represents to democracy and its commitment to transparency and accountability. Ukraine’s narrative for the Global South has in this light to be driven by empathy and agency: that it is fighting a war against colonialism, is a force for good over evil, is a global bell-weather for democracy and aims to put people first in politics.”