Talk of peace deals in the Levant, Ukraine is for the birds

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe. 
The late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, broker of the 1995 Dayton Accords ending the Bosnian War, used to say that warring parties will only strike a peace deal when both are exhausted and really want one.
In short, it’s all in the timing. Unfortunately, both of the wars raging now — in Ukraine and in the Levant — run afoul of Holbrooke’s rule.
Let’s take the Middle East first, and spare a thought for the indefatigable U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who’s had the thankless task of trying to broker a cease-fire between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
So far, Blinken’s dashes to Israel and flurry of meetings across the region have been exercises in hope over experience — as well as jet-lag endurance. Except for a brief truce last November, his efforts to silence the guns of war have come to naught, underscoring the complexity and scale of the crisis. And after this weekend’s massive Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon and Hezbollah’s drone and rocket attack on Israel, peace prospects look even dimmer.
And yet, throughout the past few months, Blinken and his boss, U.S. President Joe Biden, have talked up the prospects of a deal that would see the remaining Israeli captives in Gaza released and Israeli forces withdrawn from the coastal enclave they’ve wrecked in efforts to crush Hamas. Back in February, Biden told reporters he was hopeful there would be a deal very soon: “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, close but not done yet,” he said.
But a deal is always “close.” In the end, it just proves unattainable.
In the run-up to last week’s Democratic convention, for example, according to U.S. officials, a hostages-for-ceasefire agreement was close at hand. At the end of two days of negotiations between Israeli, U.S., Qatari and Egyptian officials, mediators announced a draft of a “bridging proposal,” which would close the “remaining gaps” between Israel and Hamas “in the manner that allows for a swift implementation of the deal.”
Blinken was in Tel Aviv just a few hours later, and after talking for three hours, Netanyahu issued a clipped one-sentence statement pledging “commitment to the current American proposal.” It was now up to Sinwar to agree. But the truth is, there are no signs that either of Holbrooke’s preconditions — exhaustion or want — are present in the Levant at all. There’s simply too much to encourage recalcitrance from both key players.
Much of the negotiations so far have focused on the irksome differences between Israel and Hamas, such as who would control the Philadelphi Corridor running along the Gaza-Egypt border, or how many living Israeli captives Hamas would free in return for a larger number of Palestinians jailed in Israel during the first six-week phase of a two-step cease-fire. But these all miss the bigger picture.
Yes, the devil can be in the details. However, in this case, the differences flow from the central dilemma an exasperated Blinken has been confronting for months now: Hamas hasn’t shifted one iota from its initial bedrock demand — that there can be no cease-fire unless it’s permanent. And when it comes to Netanyahu, there’s no evidence he’s ready to shift from the overarching goal of fully destroying Hamas before reaching any sort of permanent cease-fire — and whether that’s actually possible is beside the point. 
Plus, both Netanyahu and Sinwar have their own survival at stake — for Bibi, it’s political; for the Hamas leader, it’s existential. As former Mossad intelligence officer David Meidan told POLITICO months ago: “Netanyahu wants to stay in power, but if he ditches his long-held skepticism of a two-state solution, or if he signs up to anything more than a brief cease-fire, his coalition government will fall apart.” And according to former Israeli intelligence chief Yaakov Peri, there’s little reason for Sinwar to agree to anything at all: “Giving up the hostages would be signing his own death warrant. In this sense, Bibi and Sinwar are alike — they’re both looking out for themselves,” he said.
Now let’s turn our gaze to Ukraine where, behind the scenes, there have again been mutterings among some Western allies that the time for negotiations has come — a consequence of being fed a months-long diet of Ukrainian setbacks in Donetsk, as Russian forces have pushed relentlessly on despite the high cost in combat casualties.
But such talk has been muted since Ukraine mounted its surprise cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region earlier this month, catching Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals unprepared. And that was the incursion’s ultimate purpose — to reinvigorate jaded allies, and tiring Ukrainians, by showing them the possibility of a path to victory.
And on Saturday, Ukraine’s Independence Day, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warmed to this theme, stressing how Ukrainian forces would soon be able to attack “any point” of the Russian Federation that’s a “source of danger” — music to the ears of allies like Britain, where ministers have been talking up the prospect of Kursk enfeebling Putin and possibly sparking his downfall. And even though that’s likely a wildly optimistic judgement, such opinions — and the assault itself — have helped Zelenskyy calm Western jitters and dispel fears that there’s no endgame in sight.
To assuage allies even more, Zelenskyy and his aides have also been talking up Kursk sparking negotiations, claiming the raid is strengthening Kyiv’s push for peace talks. Soon after the cross-border assault was launched, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, among others, was pressing this point: “In the Kursk region, we can clearly see how the military tool is being used objectively to persuade [Russia] to enter a fair negotiation process,”  he posted on X.
But is Ukraine really serious about this? Because much like in the Levant, the bigger picture says otherwise. Putin will undoubtedly insist on keeping the four oblasts he’s formally declared part of the Russian Federation, as well as annexed Crimea. And Zelenskyy and his top aides have insisted they won’t concede territory for peace. Again, it also comes down to the political survival of these leaders and how they want to go down in history — and in Putin’s case, his life may well be at stake too.
“I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls here asking me about why Zelenskyy and Yermak are talking about peace and talking about the Russians maybe going to the next peace summit,” said a U.S. consultant who advises Ukrainian officials. “I tell people it’s a reflection of two things: First, they don’t want to seem unreasonable to Trump World,” noted the consultant who asked for anonymity to speak freely.
“Second, even more importantly, if you look at public opinion polls in Ukraine, and again, you go there and you see where society is, things have shifted. Now, I know for a fact Zelenskyy is not willing to make any serious concessions — that he would rather just step away, quite frankly, than do that. He doesn’t want to be the person who goes down in Ukrainian history as giving up land. But he needs to acknowledge this change, at least implicitly, within Ukrainian society. He needs to convey to Ukrainian society that in theory, at least, he’s ready to talk,” he added.
So, yet again, exhaustion and want — the two key ingredients for successful peace talks — appear to be just as absent in Kyiv as they are in the Levant. And all this talk of negotiations, it seems, is for the birds.