The good folks at KIIS did an excellent job in very difficult circumstances — missile attacks, power failures, fear and stress — in completing the latest round of survey research in government controlled Ukraine for the joint NSF-ESRC project on geopolitical orientations in Russia’s neighboring states. Here’s the initial write up in The Conversation UK, featuring Dr Kristin Bakke, Dr John O’Loughlin and myself:
I’ve written on the question of attitudes toward territory in the Russia-Ukraine war from another angle in a recently published paper. It examines why there is a seeming ‘territorial taboo’ in this war, a refusal to consider territorial concessions despite the enormous material and human costs of the war. Ukraine’s territorial integrity, I suggest, is made sacred by three interlocking discourses. The essay is here (access is required):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/23996544241268335
Environment and Planning C solicited three commentaries on the article, all of which are critical of it, some in ways that seriously misrepresent the argument. My response to these should be online shortly.
One thing my response cites is Zelensky’s rationale for Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s territory, the possibility of trading territory with Russia in negotiations to end the war. This is an image from his September 3 2024 interview with Richard Engel of NBC News. He explains the rationale for Ukraine’s action, to capture Russian soldiers and territory to exchange them:
But what might seem like a desacralization of territory in rendering it an object for trading and exchange is not so for Zelensky is clear on Ukraine’s military goal: “Our operation aims to restore our territorial integrity.” Their territory is seized to be exchanged so we can reunify our territory.
Ukraine’s defensive war, and the deaths of so many of its soldiers, is changing how Ukrainians think about the territory. The superb recent article by Francesca Ebel and Serhii Korolchuk, ‘Sprinkled with our blood’: Why so many Ukrainians resist land for peace,” in the Washington Post captures this very well. It also underscores the crucial shift within Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 toward the Donbas. The article cites one respondent:
“It was the war in Donbas in 2014; now it is the war in Ukraine,” Firsov said. “If earlier there was a discussion about whether we need Donbas, whether we can give it up, now there is no such discussion. These are all our territories — and we claim them all.”
This attitude is why I believe that no long term peace will be ever be built between Ukraine and Russia based on territorial concessions. A short-term ceasefire may be negotiated and a de facto partition acknowledged. But there will be serious societal divisions over this and no stable peace.
Critical Geopolitics 