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When the cost matters: why a peace treaty is possible on Gaza but not Ukraine
Yuriy Matsarsky
In recent months, the topic of peace talks has increasingly been in the headlines, both in relation to the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. But while Israel has seen street protests demanding a ceasefire, nothing of the sort is happening in Ukraine. Nearly half of all Israelis support the Biden plan for ending their conflict with Hamas terrorists. Ukrainians meanwhile, despite suffering through a longer war that has claimed far more innocent lives, remain unwilling to surrender five of their country’s regions — and those regions’ inhabitants — to life under Vladimir Putin’s rule.
Ukraine and Russia
When Russian occupiers broke into Serhii's rural home, he was at his neighbors’ house helping them pack their belongings to evacuate from the rapidly approaching invaders. Serhii thought he had a couple more days to spare, but he was wrong: his village in the Zaporizhzhia region was occupied on the third day of the full-scale invasion. When he returned home, two Russian officers were searching his garage. They were not the least bit embarrassed to see Serhii, demanding food and vodka and asking if the garage’s proprietor had dollars or euros. Serhii led them into the kitchen, sat them down at the table, gave them a bottle of vodka, glasses, some food from the fridge, and said he was going to get the money. The Russians took off their helmets, put their assault rifles in the corner, and began to help themselves.
Meanwhile, the host went into the next room, took a double-barrel hunting shotgun from the closet, and returned to check on his occupants. Point-blank shots blew both of their heads off before they even realized what had happened. Serhii dragged the bodies to the compost pit, took the assault rifles and the loaded magazine cases, and was on his way. He traveled on foot for about a week, mostly at night so as to avoid Russian patrols. During the day, he hid on farms or in the woods, which are scarce in the steppe region. It was still winter, and he was freezing and soaking in the snow and rain, but eventually escaped from the occupied territory. He realized he had succeeded only when he saw a distant roadblock with a Ukrainian flag waving above it. Approaching, he shouted in Ukrainian to the soldiers that he was one of them, put the assault rifles on the road, raised his hands, and asked if he could volunteer for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
When I met Serhii in the fall of 2023, he had already been in the army for over a year and was determined to fight until he liberated his home village. He has nowhere else to go: his children have long since grown up and live in Europe, his wife died a few years before the outbreak of the big war, and all he has left is a house and a few hectares of land in the occupied territory. He had lived there all his life — from birth to the arrival of the occupiers.
Serhii, who managed to escape his native village after the occupation began, is determined to fight until it is liberated
Serhii's case is not unique. There are thousands like him in the Ukrainian army. Entire battalions in the armed forces are formed from residents of the captured cities of the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions. There is even an assault battalion comprised mostly of Crimean Tatars who were forced out of their native peninsula following the Russian annexation way back in 2014. A great many of these fighters still have family in the occupied territories — at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, many believed that the war would not last long and that the Russian presence could be endured relatively painlessly. As a result, millions of Ukrainians remain in the seized lands, facing deportation, seizure of property, illegal imprisonment, abuse, torture, and the threat of forced mobilization into the occupier’s army.
“The Russian Federation has created a stifling climate of fear in occupied areas of Ukraine, committing widespread violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in an effort to consolidate its control over the population living there”, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote in a March 2024 report.
People are fleeing the occupation any way they can. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, around 3.5 million Ukrainians have moved to the free part of the country. If we count those forced to leave Crimea and the Donbas after 2014, the tally reaches 5 million. And that's just according to official statistics.
To end the war without freeing the seized Ukrainian lands means not only to leave Ukrainian citizens hostage to the occupiers but also to deprive those five million Ukrainians — many of whom are fighting as we speak — of the opportunity to return home. Such a move would not only be immoral but also illegal, since the Constitution of Ukraine guarantees all law-abiding citizens the right to freedom and inviolability, which cannot be ensured under Russian occupation.
To stop the war without freeing the seized Ukrainian lands means to leave Ukrainian citizens hostage to the occupiers
Even in exchange for peace with Russia, the Ukrainian government could not give up on the millions of its citizens who remain under occupation or have risked their lives to escape from it. But given the nature of the party sitting across the table, such a choice is not even on offer. Putin demands the entire territory of four Ukrainian regions — Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk, and Donetsk — that are not even fully under Russian forces’ physical control. For the Ukrainian army to withdraw from these areas would mean leaving behind fortified positions and deeply echeloned defenses, breaking up well-established logistics routes, allowing the enemy to gain a foothold on the currently inaccessible right bank of the Dnieper River, and paving the way for Russian attacks on Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih, Mykolaiv, and Odesa. Presented with the opportunity to gobble up so much more, Putin’s appetite will hardly be sated by the four regions. The proposal to exchange five regions (the four listed by Putin plus the Crimean peninsula, occupied since 2014) for an unenforceable peace agreement is a sham.
At best, this arrangement will provide a brief truce — and only those lucky enough to be in free territory will experience its benefits. The suspension of hostilities is unlikely to alleviate the plight of those who remain in occupation, as their war will continue in any case.
For Ukrainians, there can never be a satisfactory answer to the question: “Why on earth should Ukraine give up its territories in the first place?” Opinion polls provide excellent evidence of that. While the number of Ukrainians open to peace talks with Moscow is noticeably growing, the share of those willing to consider the formula “peace in exchange for territories” remains minuscule. More than 80% of Ukrainians are averse to even discussing this formula. The attitude is understandable: the invaders burst in, imposed their order, killed and tortured untold numbers, and caused millions to become refugees. Now they want Ukraine to recognize all of this as legitimate while simultaneously giving the occupiers time to regroup, mobilize reserves, and prepare a new offensive.
For Ukrainians, there can never be a satisfactory answer to the question: “Why on earth should Ukraine give up its territories in the first place?”
Israel and Hamas
For all its similarities to the current Russian regime, Hamas nevertheless appears ready for a real (rather than simulated) truce with Israel — this despite the fact that the group's ultimate goal has always been the destruction of the Jewish state. In this respect, Hamas turned out to be more honest than Putin's Russia. Hamas, after all speaks openly about its plans, while Putin limits himself to some weird half-hints, quoting Ukrainian national hero Bohdan Khmelnytskyi's letters and telling tales about the absence of Ukraine on ancient maps in an attempt to disguise his blatantly obvious thirst to eliminate the neighboring country once and for all.
Without abandoning its long-term goal, the Hamas leadership has stated its willingness to make concessions in exchange for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Palestinian group is ready to follow the plan proposed by U.S. President Joe Biden in May 2024. Biden's plan consists of three phases. The first involves the withdrawal of Israeli army units from residential neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from jails, and the simultaneous release by Hamas of some of the Israeli hostages taken on Oct. 7. The second phase provides for the release of all remaining hostages immediately after the Israeli army withdraws from the populated part of Gaza. During the third phase, the warring sides are supposed to exchange the bodies of the dead and prepare a post-war reconstruction program for Gaza.
In Israel, there is neither unequivocal support for the plan nor widespread adamant objection. Opinion polls are highly controversial: whereas some suggest that just over half of Israelis support Biden's peace initiatives, others reveal that about the same percentage are reluctant to agree to them. Israeli society is roughly equally divided on the issue of possible agreements with Hamas, and the number of those open to the possibility of concessions is similar to the number of those convinced that agreements are out of the question and that the war must go on until the group’s ultimate defeat.
Israeli society is evenly divided on possible agreements with Hamas
Those calling for the terrorists’ destruction on the battlefield would likely be far more numerous had Hamas not been holding more than 100 Israeli hostages. These people are the group's main leverage against Israel, as cynical as that sounds. And they are also one of the main reasons for the schism within Israel. Supporters of the deal with Hamas insist that the life of every Israeli is priceless and that everything possible must be done to save even a single one.
While not denying the sanctity of human life, their opponents believe the deal would make it impossible to end Hamas once and for all — and thereby create peace for the current and future generations of Israelis. By their logic, halting Israel’s Gaza operation, releasing accused terrorists from prisons, and withdrawing troops from residential neighborhoods means giving Hamas a chance to revive, regroup, gain new strength, and, sooner or later, stage a new October 7. This reasoning takes the hostages’ lives out of the equation: it is implicitly assumed that people may die, but in doing so, they will save countless new potential Hamas victims.
Admittedly, the state of affairs in Ukraine is much less ambiguous: everyone understands perfectly well what the aggressor is doing on the seized lands, everyone hears the aggressor’s mouthpieces calling for the destruction of Ukraine even if an agreement is signed, and therefore, no one is ready for the kind of settlement Moscow is pushing for. The case of Israel is far more complicated. At this point, no one can tell whether Hamas is strong or weak, or how much the group has been emaciated by a year of hostilities, or how close to its October 2023 form the terrorist group might get if given the chance to recover.
Israelis are plagued by doubts — often fueled by their “hawkish” government: what if Hamas is truly on the brink of defeat? What if the ceasefire is the only thing that can save the terrorist group from extinction?
At the other end of the scale are the lives of the hostages — and god knows what horrors they are going through in Gaza’s underground tunnels. Hamas proposes to hand them over immediately after the ceasefire. However, this raises further questions: what is happening to the hostages now? Do they stand a chance of survival if there is no deal with Hamas? Should Israel put off plans of defeating the group completely and make rescuing the hostages its sole focus?
Since there are no straightforward answers to these questions, the Israeli public’s attitude toward a possible ceasefire remains equally ambiguous. Ukrainians, on the other hand, are not faced with a choice of War v. Peace, but of War v. Bucha. When one’s only options are between resistance and death, the choice is much easier to make.