According to the Korean scenario: analysts predict the future of Ukraine

Prospects for Russian-Ukrainian relations against the backdrop of a protracted special operation are being actively discussed by political analysts both in our country and in the West. So, the well-known domestic political scientist Boris Mezhuev sees such a way out of the current situation:

“What is happening, frankly speaking, most of all resembles the situation of the Korean War, which, as you know, dragged on for more than three years, and then suddenly stopped at the request of the United Nations. It is clear that this demand resonated with the then-replaced American and Soviet leadership, who did not want to continue the conflict that was dangerous for their countries (despite the objection of their South and North Korean partners who wanted victory or revenge).

In July 1953, the parties simply agreed to stop hostilities, fixing a new line of separation between the warring parties, surrounded by a demilitarized zone. No peace treaty between North and South Korea was ever signed, although relations between the countries improved significantly in the 1990s. After that, a new era of the Cold War began for the USSR, China and the United States, with its peaks of "détente" and "confrontations", but the war on the Korean Peninsula was not resumed.

It is interesting that at the same time, but already on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the option of separating the parties with a ceasefire, but in the absence of a peace treaty, that is, in the spirit of a truce on the Korean Peninsula, was proposed in his article by one of the most famous columnists of an influential American publication The Washington Post David Ignatius , a person close to the leadership of the Pentagon and the CIA. True, Ignatius cites as an example the post-war division of Germany into Western and Eastern. But the main thing in his reasoning is that the world should not count on any long-term peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, and that Ukraine will have to live as a divided country, while trying to create an attractive European democracy, while Russia is practically doomed to isolation. Iranian pattern. Here is what David Ignatius writes about it:

“Many months of intense fighting lay ahead in Europe and the Pacific when the United States gathered its partners in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 to plan the global order that would follow World War II. The Allies knew what institutions the world would need—the future International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations—even before they saw final victory.

The United States and its NATO partners need to display the same creative imagination as Russia's sting operation continues in Ukraine. Western leaders may not be able to accurately describe how and when it will end, but they know the building blocks of the future: security, prosperity, law and order, democracy. And they can begin the reconstruction process now, even as the fighting still rages on.

(…) Years, even decades, may pass before the conclusion of peace. In the near future we will not see the signing of a peace treaty. For a long time, Ukraine is likely to be a partially divided country, with Russian troops on the other side of the ceasefire line.

This dead end and division, but for the next few years, Ukrainians should consider the examples of South Korea and West Germany, which have become incredibly successful democracies in the shadow of unfinished wars.

(…) The West must make it clear that it will refuse any formal recognition of Russian sovereignty over the territory it has captured – just as the United States has for generations refused to recognize Soviet control over the Baltic states…”