Seeking an End to a Catastrophic War: The Ukraine War after Three Years

Posted on February 18, 2025 By Rachel MacNair

by John Whitehead

The Ukraine-Russia war will soon enter its fourth year. The war has become, in one sense, a relatively static conflict, with neither the Ukrainian nor Russian forces advancing dramatically and battles being fought over very small pieces of territory. However, in another sense, the war has changed significantly over time by becoming ever more costly and dangerous as it continues to claim lives, cause suffering, and escalate to greater levels of violence. The need for a ceasefire is greater than ever today.

The State of the War

Following Ukraine’s 2023 counter-offensive, the initiative in the war shifted to the Russians. From late 2023 to the present, Russian forces in eastern Ukraine have been advancing very slowly. Russia also still occupies a small part of northern Ukraine, close to the city Kharkiv. In August 2024, the Ukrainians responded to Russian advances in the east with an incursion from northern Ukraine into Russia’s Kursk region. The Russians were subsequently able to regain some territory but have not pushed the Ukrainians out of Russia altogether.

While the situation on the ground may well change, at present the war is set in a pattern reminiscent of western Europe in World War I: the two sides face each other along an over 1,000-kilometer front that shifts only marginally over time.

The War’s Toll

Precisely how many people have been killed in the war to date is unknown. Both Russia and Ukraine likely exaggerate the other side’s losses while playing down their own. A rough sense of the scale of the war’s losses can be discerned, though.

In December, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the war began in February 2022. An estimate by the Russian media website Mediazona, based on open-source data such as obituaries, placed the number of Russian soldiers killed in 2024 alone as at least 31,481. The total number of Russian military personnel killed since the war began is presumably much higher.

In January, United Nations deputy human rights chief Nada Al-Nashif reported that more than 12,300 civilians, including 650 children, have been killed in Ukraine during the war—and these numbers are likely underestimates. Civilians have been killed both close to the frontlines and far from it, with Russian bombing being a significant cause of death. Almost 7 million Ukrainians have been forced by the war to flee their country.

Ukrainian civilians are also suffering from repeated Russian attacks on their country’s energy infrastructure. Russia has attacked Ukraine’s power grid over 1,000 times since the war began and these attacks escalated in 2024. A major attack in late November 2024, for example, left millions of Ukrainians without power. The attack left the city of Kherson without electricity and the city of Zhytomyr without power or water.

Because of the assaults on its energy infrastructure, Ukraine is in a precarious position. Since the war began, Ukraine has gone from a net exporter of electricity to Europe to a net importer, and it is currently struggling to pay for these imports. In the middle of winter, Ukraine is currently unable to supply the country’s full energy needs, with residential blackouts being frequent. Household electricity was out almost 40 percent of the time in December. Continued attacks on the energy infrastructure will likely only worsen this severe deprivation.

scene of wartime devastation in Ukraine

The war has also involved the use of weapons that are not only lethal in the current conflict but have longer-term consequences. Both sides have used cluster bombs and land mines. These weapons have already caused harm—over 1,000 people in Ukraine have been killed or injured by cluster bombs since the war began—and will continue to cause harm for years, even after the war ends.

Both cluster bombs and land mines can remain active and unexploded in the ground for years, posing a continuing threat to people’s lives long after the wars that originally put them in place have ended. Because of these weapons’ long-term dangers, much of Ukraine’s land has been effectively blighted. Almost a quarter of Ukrainian land may be contaminated with explosives, including perhaps 10 percent of arable land

This contamination of land seriously damages Ukrainian agriculture, one of the country’s most important economic activities. Further, the effects of the damage to agriculture go beyond Ukraine. The disruptions wrought by the war have strained global food supplies, as both Ukraine and Russia are major grain exporters. Prior to the current war, nearly 90 percent of Ukrainian wheat exports went to food-insecure countries in Africa and Asia. With so much Ukrainian farmland contaminated by explosives that it may take decades and tens of billions of dollars to clean up, global food supplies will likely be affected for a long time even if the war ends today.

The most dangerous weapons connected to the Ukraine war, though, are ones that have not yet been used, namely nuclear weapons. Because the war has pitted nuclear-armed Russia against the nuclear-armed United States and NATO, Ukraine’s leading supporters, the threat of possible nuclear war has hung over the Ukraine conflict from the beginning.

The nuclear threat moved closer to becoming reality this past November. That month, the United States and United Kingdom gave Ukraine authorization to use long-range American- and British-made missiles to strike targets within Russia, which the Ukrainians did.

Russia responded to the Ukrainian missile strikes by striking a Ukrainian city with a longer-range missile that, although it carried conventional explosives, could be armed with a nuclear warhead. The choice of weapon was clearly meant to be a demonstration of what the Russians could potentially do to retaliate.

Seeking a Ceasefire

These extraordinary costs and dangers make ending the war imperative. US President Donald Trump has expressed an interest in trying to negotiate an end to the war and apparently has already spoken by phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Zelenskyy.

We shall have to see what becomes of future negotiations. At present, though, how to end the war diplomatically is far from clear. The Institute for Peace & Diplomacy recently sponsored a symposium in which various experts offered ideas on this topic. Informed partly by that symposium, I will offer a few tentative ideas of my own.

The central challenge to negotiating an end to the war is that, because Russia is currently in a stronger position than Ukraine, Putin’s government has little incentive to withdraw from the Ukrainian territory Russia has already occupied. Fighting has manifestly not gained back this land, and negotiations are not likely to either. Nevertheless, because of how costly the war has been to Russia, Putin at least has an incentive to stop the fighting.

Given this situation, a plausible ceasefire deal would involve Ukraine withdrawing its forces from Russia’s Kursk region in return for Russian withdrawal from around Kharkiv and freezing the conflict along its present lines. The ceasefire could be followed by a gradual reduction in both Ukrainian and Russian military forces along the current frontline and the two countries’ borders, with the frontline eventually becoming an internationally monitored demilitarized zone. To provide Russia an additional incentive, this demilitarization process could be accompanied by gradual relief of international sanctions.

If the demilitarization process is successful, the United States and NATO can then provide what Russia has been seeking throughout this conflict: a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO.

Such a resolution would hardly be satisfactory since it means responding to Russia’s invasion with concessions. Nevertheless, I don’t see a realistic alternative. This resolution would at least stop the killing and suffering and offer an opportunity for the Ukrainians to begin to rebuild their country.

Those of us who wish to support the Ukrainian people can consider donating to humanitarian groups working in Ukraine, such as Catholic Relief Services and Mennonite Central Committee. People can also donate to the Halo Trust, which works to clear explosives from Ukrainian land.

We should also all mourn the tremendous suffering and loss of life caused by three years of this catastrophic war.