I hope I’m wrong. I hope we are coming closer to an agreement about settling the conflict in Ukraine. I hope we can grit our teeth and accept the transactional and sometimes mercurial way the Trump Administration has gone about knocking heads together in pursuit of the end of the war.
If and when the President is successful, I assume he will be rewarded with the next available Nobel Peace Prize. As was said of one early American explorer, “A better man might have done worse.” Other candidates who have done far less in the interest of peace have walked off with the honor.
But I worry that we have landed the middle of a farcical Woody Allen short story, “The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers.” It describes a misguided game of chess by mail in the days before the internet made all communication instantaneous. Gossage and Vardebedian can’t agree about whether Gossage really avoided checkmate, some time earlier, by inadvertently failing to address the envelope containing his twenty-second move correctly—or actually, at all! In a series of increasingly heated missives, the game continues with an exchange of disconnected, self-interested moves accompanied by a barrage of lame excuses, insults, and misunderstandings until the competitors are playing two entirely different games.
In the board game between Ukraine and Russia, this is like saying Russia’s invasion in 2022 violated security assurances given in the Budapest Memorandum 28 years earlier, forgetting that these had been been implicitly premised on Ukraine maintaining itself as a non-aligned, neutral neighbor of Russia and not becoming a NATO-armed, CIA-cooperating geopolitical spearhead aimed at weakening Russia’s growing ability to counter the unipolar dominance of the United States.
More recently, President Zelensky posted a video of himself giving an address in front of the city of Kupyansk, contradicting Russia’s claim to have captured it. Russia responded that the expedient selfie had been taken weeks before, and that, anyway, the site was a kilometer outside the city limits. Other divergent assessments of the war’s progress have to do with enemy kills and casualties, the effectiveness of international sanctions, the potential of competing armaments, the motivation of recruited troops, and the sustainability of the each country’s finances and politics, among many such issues. As with the game between Gossage and Vardebedian, we are in a Through the Looking-Glass world with conflicting understandings of what is real or possible.
If you are aware of the chess-like moves that led up to the conflict in Ukraine, it’s easy to understand why the combatants now choose to talk at cross purposes to argue for increasingly improbable solutions. Who is responsible for the ravages of the war? Russia, when its massed troops entered Ukraine in 2022 to force the government’s collapse? Or NATO, when it decided in the late 1990s to expand eastward toward Russia’s borders? Or USAID, when it supported a number of “color” revolutions in Eastern Europe and helped underwrite the Maidan protests in 2014 that overthrew Ukraine’s elected president? Or Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, when it repealed protections for Russian as a minority language? Or Ukraine, when its forces prosecuted a civil war against the separatists in the Donbas? Or the Western leaders who signed the Minsk Accords knowing they were only buying time to prepare Ukraine for a proxy war against Russia? Or the US, when its State Department refused to negotiate with Russia in the days before the invasion? Or the UK, when its prime minister offered “as long as it takes” support for Ukraine to fight on during the first weeks of the conflict?
The games of chess grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca are known for his positional play, for his having laid down the “root causes” of his opponent’s predicament long before they became generally apparent. In this way, one can see how one move led to another in the years leading up to Russia’s Special Military Operation. Rightly or wrongly, Russia invaded because its leaders viewed increasing NATO and CIA involvement in Ukraine as an existential threat, just as the US would react if faced with an existential threat from Mexico or Canada. (Remember: the US entered WWI in part because the Zimmermann Telegram proposed a similarly threatening alliance against us between Germany and Mexico.) The Russians were not mistaken in this assessment, since a range of confrontational moves aimed at weakening Russia had been clearly outlined in the RAND Corporation’s 2019 brief, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options.” In consummate think-tankese, the authors warned of the negative possibilities associated with each assertive recommendation, and most of these have come true.
The challenge now is to devise, as part of a peace settlement, a workable territorial allocation and security structure. One suggestion to break the impasse is to divide the country into two countries, Ukraine and East Ukraine (see “Making the Case for East Ukraine”), so that neither Russia nor Ukraine is ceding land to the other. This idea has been overlooked while negotiators have dealt with a series of misapprehensions and recriminations not too unlike those trotted out in the “Gossage-Vardebedian Papers,” but the points in its favor are that it 1) requires sacrifice from both Ukraine and Russia, 2) is supported by the region’s history, 3) preserves the distinction of the name Ukraine for the entire territory, 4) satisfies the need for a buffer state to isolate the warring parties, and 5) offers the various populations the best chance to use their most familiar language and follow their own cultural and religious practices.
After the creation of East Ukraine (yes, no easy feat!), history suggests that people would be able, with some difficulty, to sort themselves out, voting with their feet to live in the kind of Ukraine they choose. In addition to the Russian speakers who might have adopted a Ukrainian stance for their own safety and might naturally revert to their cultural roots, there is also a sizable group that emigrated to Russia when the civil war started after the Maidan coup and might want to come home to a country called East Ukraine.
To overcome the current stand-off, a settlement will have to deal with years of accumulated destruction, which is most severe in the eastern areas that Russia controls. If the frozen Russian assets are going to be used for war restoration, they would have to be available for both Ukraine and East Ukraine as a result of negotiation. Also, to guarantee a sustainable peace, both countries would need assurance of future geopolitical forbearance. An important aspect of the East Ukraine proposal is that anti-Russia ultra-nationalists would be isolated in the rump Ukraine, where any continuing efforts by them to undermine and sabotage East Ukraine would be seen as an illegal attack on the sovereignty of an independent country (to be clear, as was Russia’s incursion into Ukraine) and not as a patriotic effort to regain rightful territory. The government in Kyiv would be able to deal with its neo-Nazi Banderite elements as needed.
In any case, the real purpose of proposing the idea of “East Ukraine” is to get all the parties to recognize the underlying situation and stop “playing games,” holding out for unattainable goals—as Gossage and Vardebedian did—at the cost of sacrificing countless lives. If both countries are willing to withdraw to age-old historical boundaries, the country of East Ukraine would quite naturally be able to fill the gap.
Without realizing it, President Zelensky may have indirectly opened the door for East Ukraine with his recent comment:
“It is probably fair to ask: if one side withdraws from somewhere, as [the US] wants from Ukraine, then why does the other side in the war not withdraw the same distance in the other direction?… It is not a given that we as Ukraine will accept this, but when you talk to us about a compromise, you have to offer a fair compromise.”
The next step would be to get President Putin to say something similar!
Let’s call it the East Ukraine Gambit. If a checkmate is not possible, the world will have to be happy with a stalemate. In chess, the word stalemate signals, not continuing enmity, but rather an end to the conflict.
Copyright © December 2025 Benjamin S. Dunham. The author is a retired arts administrator and journalist who writes occasionally on subjects of music, history, and politics.