Key Points and Summary – The Ukraine war is settling into a costly deadlock of drones, artillery, and infrastructure strikes—fertile ground for a Korea-style armistice that freezes lines and polices violations.
-A workable deal would pair a demilitarized belt, robust monitoring (ISR, counter-battery, drone rules), prisoner exchanges, humanitarian corridors, and strictly reversible sanctions relief.
Republic of Korea army soldiers assigned to 5th Engineer Brigade, pull security on the K1 tank while it moves across M3 bridge vehicle as part of Freedom Shield 25/Combined Wet Gap Crossing training March 20, 2025 in South Korea. This training was intended to boost combat readiness between the U.S. and ROK Army. (U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Wilfred Salters)
-Security hinges on Western guarantees: integrated air/missile defense, rapid resupply, deep intel sharing, and an industrial base that sustains deterrence.
-Politics will resist, but mutual exhaustion may shift aims from liberation to preservation. An “armed ceasefire” isn’t victory, but it can stop the daily killing and buy time while denying Moscow a decision.
The Korean War Ending Might be the Ukraine War Ending
Wars do not always end with a decisive victory. Sometimes they conclude by hardening into armed ceasefires, which can feel permanent even if the lawyers insist they are “temporary.” That is the uncomfortable future now looming over Ukraine.
The front has settled into a slog of drones, artillery, and long-range strikes on energy infrastructure. Russia keeps hammering power and gas facilities ahead of winter, and Ukraine retaliates with hits on refineries and logistics nodes deep inside Russia. Each side can impose costs, but neither can impose a decision. It is in that deadlock that the logic of a Korea-style armistice lies.
Lasting Freeze
Skeptics reach for Thucydides and the Peace of Nicias; the classic case of a truce that allows combatants to regroup and resume the killing. That holds true often enough. But not always. Sometimes ceasefires rise above their role as intermissions between the acts of a real-life tragedy.
The 1953 Korean Armistice, to take the most glaring example, has survived coups, missile tests, and other crises without maturing into a full-fledged treaty or reverting into open warfare. Seventy years on, guns and heavy artillery are mostly silent along a line that no one intended to become permanent.
That paradox — no peace, yet durable stability without the kinetics — repudiates Thucydidean fatalism. It also sketches the type of “peace” Ukraine is likeliest to get: an armed armistice that suspends the fighting, freezes the lines, and lasts for years.
The battlefield facts push in that direction. Moscow inches, Kyiv attrits, and both adapt tactically without breaking the stalemate strategically. Russian strike packages evolve to stress Ukrainian air defenses; Ukraine’s domestic and allied shell production rises, but rarely fast enough to recover decisive momentum. Europe has finally accelerated industrial output, and Czech-style ammunition pipelines have narrowed gaps.
This is important, but not transformative. Capacity is rising, but propellant shortages and supplier bottlenecks still slow true scale-up. The net result remains a long war with limited movement, high cost, and rising political fatigue in every capital that matters. That is the ripening ground for ceasefire talk, even when neither side can admit it publicly
First Things First
What would a workable armistice look like? Its architecture could include the lines as they fall when the guns go quiet. Wrap those lines in a demilitarized belt policed by a standing armistice commission with robust technical means: persistent ISR, counter-battery sensors, agreed drone no-fly rules, and clearly enumerated violations with automatic consequences. Build in a prisoner-exchange mechanism and protected humanitarian corridors.
(July 7, 2022) – U.S. Navy nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN72) and Republic of Korea Navy amphibious assault ship ROKS Marado (LPH 6112) moored at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickham, Hawaii, during Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2022. Twenty-six nations, 38 ships, four submarines, more than 170 aircraft and 25,000 personnel are participating in RIMPAC from June 29 to Aug 4 in and around Hawaiian Islands and Southern California. The world’s largest international maritime exercise, RIMPAC provides a unique training opportunity while fostering and sustaining cooperative relationships among participants critical to ensuring the safety of sea lanes and security on the world’s oceans. RIMPAC 2022 is the 28th exercise in the series that began in 1971. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Leon Vonguyen)
Periodic prisoner exchanges suggest the channels needed to police a ceasefire already exist in embryonic form. Layer on sanctions relief that is strictly phased and fully reversible — snapback tied to compliance metrics, not vibes.
Carve out separate tracks for Crimea and for long-range strike limits: practical de-escalation measures now, sovereignty questions later. None of this is romantic. All of it is doable if the parties accept that “pause without peace” can still be strategically rational. The Korean experience shows how an armistice can structure deterrence, reduce civilian harm, and channel competition without constant state-on-state artillery duels.
Security guarantees are the hinge. Absent credible Western assurances, any ceasefire is a prelude to another round. The workable model is not expeditionary NATO divisions on the line, but a coalition framework that fuses intelligence sharing, integrated air and missile defense, rapid ammunition resupply, and an explicit pledge to arm Ukraine to deter renewed assault.
Think less tripwire soldiers, more tripwire logistics and sensors that make any violation immediately visible and immediately costly. In parallel, Europe must lock in the industrial base it has belatedly rebuilt so that the armistice doesn’t become an excuse to decapitalize defense again. The point isn’t to re-fight 2022. It’s to make 2028 too hard and too uncertain for the Kremlin to chance.
Get Beyond the Rhetoric
Politics will resist. Kyiv will balk at any arrangement that freezes Russian gains; Moscow will treat any outside monitoring as encroachment; Washington and key European capitals will fear rewarding aggression.
Yet politics also tires. Russian demographics and sanctions pressure grind; Ukrainian mobilization and infrastructure attrition cut deep; Western budgets and attention face competing demands. That mutual exhaustion is not capitulation.
It is a recognition that the strategic focus has shifted from territorial liberation to national preservation — of Ukraine’s sovereignty, economy, and people — inside a defensible line backed by allied power. If an armistice anchors that preservation while keeping Ukraine in the West’s security and economic orbit, it is not a defeat. It is a reprieve that buys time, which matters more than rhetoric.
F-16 Fighting Falcons from both the 35th and 80th Fighter Squadrons of the 8th Fighter Wing, as well as from the 466th Fighter Squadron of the 419th Fighter Wing at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, demonstrate an elephant walk formation as they taxi down a runway during an exercise at Kunsan Air Base, Republic of Korea Dec. 2, 2011. The exercise showcased Kunsan AB aircrews’ capability to quickly and safely prepare an aircraft for a wartime mission. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Rasheen Douglas/Released)
None of this requires pretending the war’s moral ledger is balanced. It isn’t. Russia launched a war of aggression and has waged it with ruthless indifference to civilian life. An armistice does not launder that fact. It does, however, reduce the daily human burn rate while hardening a strategic situation that Russia has failed to convert into victory.
The Korean precedent again instructs: the armistice neither redeemed nor resolved the conflict, yet it created conditions in which one side modernized, integrated economically with allies, and ultimately outpaced its adversary without general war. That is a trajectory Ukraine could emulate.
Everybody Is Wrong Sometimes
Will we get there soon? Not while either side believes one more push might change the map, and not while great-power theatrics dangle illusions of a quick grand bargain. Expect more hard winters, more long-range duels, more probing attacks and incremental shifts, and episodic “talks about talks” that go nowhere — until they suddenly do.
When that moment comes, the only viable deal is likely the unglamorous one: freeze the line, police the peace, arm the victim, deter the aggressor, and leave final status to a later generation. It will offend maximalists and disappoint purists. It may also be the only arrangement with a chance to last.
Thucydides is almost never wrong. This is one of the rare occasions he is. A ceasefire is not always an intermission between two acts of conflict; sometimes a temporary armistice can petrify into an entrenched stalemate that lasts for generations.
What Korea Could Teach Ukraine
If the Koreas can turn a “temporary” stoppage of open warfare into a lasting, imperfect geopolitical modus vivendi, Russia and Ukraine can too. And if they do, the killing will cease, NATO’s eastern border will stabilize, and Washington will be free to attend to higher priorities.
This is not optimal for anyone, but nor is it disastrous for anyone. And in the tragic world of international relations, that’s probably going to have to be good enough.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities, and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for the National Security Journal.
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Swamplaw Yankee
October 5, 2025 at 2:43 am
Boy oh Boy – is this op-ed in huge error!
This is no Korea, or Vietnam or Iran. Yes, the Yankee structure caused the Korea “problem” with it’s careless inattention to details of this in a pre-conflict state.
The US conscripts did not join a monolithic racial ethnic group to attack Koreans to extirpate all Korean speakers! The US conscripts did not go to fight in Korea to extirpate Koreans just to later take over for free the Korean homes, farms and businesses.
Most importantly, the USA was not re-starting a centuries old industry of mass abduction of little Korean Children for a profitable sex- slave trade business with the muslim Ottoman empire.
The USA op-ed keyboarders are not Ukrainians. So, what are these pampered sheltered and uninformed op-ed generators so tired about? The unilateral, green lit re-start in 2014 by POTUS Obama + his Democrat Cabal of the ancient 1000 year Genocide of Ukrainians seems just to hard for their brains to process, comprehend and assign guilt to.
As these op-ed recalcitrants consistently refuse to examine the quota system the OTTOMAN Empire needed and the ruuzzkie ethnic families supplied with mass abducted little Ukrainian children, the bias to avoid the topic of selling Ukrainian children for Muslim gold is Obvious.
Just as Hitler wanted to revise racial reality in conquered Europe, his successor state partner, Ruuzzkie Muscovy, is actually implementing the revision of racial reality inside Ukraine. If it was wrong in WW2 why is it OK with Americans for the Ruuzzkie Putin to Genocide Ukrainian in 2015?
This is a genetic problem of the Ruuzzkie families who bred generations of muscovite children for the bi-annual “HARVEST” of “Lolita” Packages for sale to Muslim Ottoman slavers for the highest weight of gold.
This was a racial revision reality before the USA was created! The Ukrainians created/ penned the worlds first constitution in 1710 to facilitate the stop of orc ruuzzkie mass abductors from selling little Ukrainian children. Luckily, the future USA copied the concept.
There is no WAR in Ukraine. There is a re-start in 2014 of the 1000 years old ancient ruuzzkie business of Genocide of Ukrainians! There is a PRC CCP Xi regime supported meat grinder front trench GENOCIDE line killing Ukrainians in Ukraine.
Got it? Is it clear? If not, exactly why not? Let the peer readers hear the evasions in full. This understanding of Genocide in Ukraine is not at all like the op-ed writer touting the sale of USA F-35 air frames to Canadian tax payers. -30-
Jim
October 5, 2025 at 11:39 am
The author is late to the party!
That’s what Kellogg’s peace plan with a demarcation line and cease fire was all about. Imposing a Korean-style armistice on Ukraine where all territory West of the demarcation line would be incorporated into NATO’s defensive umbrella, short of outright membership, and NATO membership would be postponed for an “extended period” to incentivize Russia to negotiate.
Trump announced retired general Keith Kellogg would be his special envoy to Ukraine and Russia in late November of 2024 with the understanding Kellogg would propose his so-named “peace plan” to get the Russians and Ukrainians to stop fighting and negotiate in good faith.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 to stop NATO expanding into Ukraine which the Russians had stated was a Red Line for them as early as the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit where Putin gave a speech outlining Russian objections to NATO membership to Ukraine & Georgia.
And, Russia’s warnings only grew louder and more determined as the years passed since then.
The Russians explicitly rejected the Keith Kellogg peace plan in December 2024 and again explicitly rejected the idea in March 2025.
But Trump wouldn’t accept “Nyet!” for an answer and kept pushing for Kellogg’s plan through the Spring & Summer. Being told by Kellogg and others it was only a matter of time before Russia would accept it.
Russia is winning the war of attrition as former Ukraine general Valerii Zaluzhnyi has admitted in an interview in the Mirror of the Week and stated if it’s not stopped, could lead to complete “burn out” for Ukraine.
Sorry, a Korean-style armistice is not on the table.
But this article shows pro-war supporters can’t let go of the war, just like a hungry dog with a juicy bone.
I mean, come on! Kellogg has been selling his so-called “peace plan” for ten months and it’s been repeatedly rejected by the Russians in no uncertain terms as recently as Alaska where Trump made one last attempt to get the Russians to accept an immediate cease fire… just like the Kellogg plan, without the name, and again, they rejected it, forthwith.
When will the author take the Russian “No!” for an answer and move on to something realistic?
He can’t because his summary of the battlefield is wrong. Ukraine is beginning to buckle at the front running troops to and fro as manpower shortages become critical.
No, this is about what all the other so-called “peace” proposals, the Minsk accords, were about: calling a time out because Ukraine is “on the ropes” and about to be knocked out!
This time, no more time outs. The war will grind on to the end until Kiev is defeated and its Banderite ideology is in the ash heap of History (as it should be).
Get to know it.
We have to have intellectual honesty, here, or we will all die in a nuclear war… of our own making.
This article isn’t it.
Jim
October 5, 2025 at 11:42 am
The author is late to the party!
That’s what Kellogg’s peace plan with a demarcation line and cease fire was all about. Imposing a Korean-style armistice on Ukraine where all territory West of the demarcation line would be incorporated into NATO’s defensive umbrella, short of outright membership, and NATO membership would be postponed for an “extended period” to incentivize Russia to negotiate.
Trump announced retired general Keith Kellogg would be his special envoy to Ukraine and Russia in late November of 2024 with the understanding Kellogg would propose his so-named “peace plan” to get the Russians and Ukrainians to stop fighting and negotiate in good faith.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 to stop NATO expanding into Ukraine which the Russians had stated was a Red Line for them as early as the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit where Putin gave a speech outlining Russian objections to NATO membership to Ukraine & Georgia.
And, Russia’s warnings only grew louder and more determined as the years passed since then.
The Russians explicitly rejected the Keith Kellogg peace plan in December 2024 and again explicitly rejected the idea in March 2025.
But Trump wouldn’t accept “Nyet!” for an answer and kept pushing for Kellogg’s plan through the Spring & Summer. Being told by Kellogg and others it was only a matter of time before Russia would accept it.
Russia is winning the war of attrition as former Ukraine general Valerii Zaluzhnyi has admitted in an interview in the Mirror of the Week and stated if it’s not stopped, could lead to complete “burn out” for Ukraine.
Sorry, a Korean-style armistice is not on the table.
But this article shows pro-war supporters can’t let go of the war, just like a hungry dog with a juicy bone.
I mean, come on! Kellogg has been selling his so-called “peace plan” for ten months and it’s been repeatedly rejected by the Russians in no uncertain terms as recently as Alaska where Trump made one last attempt to get the Russians to accept an immediate cease fire… like the Kellogg plan, but without the name, and again, they rejected it, forthwith.
When will the author and others take the Russian “No!” for an answer and move on to something realistic?
He can’t because his summary of the battlefield is wrong. Ukraine is beginning to buckle at the front running troops to and fro as manpower shortages become critical.
No, this is about what all the other so-called “peace” proposals, the Minsk accords, were about: calling a time out because Ukraine is “on the ropes” and about to be knocked out!
This time, no more time outs. The war will grind on to the end until Kiev is defeated and its Banderite ideology is in the ash heap of History (as it should be).
Get to know it.
Jim
October 5, 2025 at 12:08 pm
Sorry, for the repost (something about being too fast??).
Neutrality for Ukraine. That’s the way to stop the war.
Neutrality for Ukraine (as a whole) is the only way to save so-called “Ukraine” from total destruction and possibly being erased from the map of Europe.
What’s wrong with neutrality if it saves the Ukrainian People from more death & destruction?
Do people supporting the war have any concern for the People of Ukraine? I haven’t seen any.
George
October 6, 2025 at 9:52 am
Ukraine was always supposed to be neutral. That’s why there’s a war.
George
October 6, 2025 at 9:51 am
“The Ukraine war is settling into a costly deadlock of drones, artillery, and infrastructure strikes…”
I have no idea what war you’re watching. The Russians are advancing daily in all directions, but please, tell us how this is a quagmire.
Tom aron
October 6, 2025 at 5:07 pm
The irony of this essay is that it basically resorts to what Russia demanded all along: a non aligned Ukraine. However, that horse has long left the barn. There will be zero NATO troops based in Ukraine now or ever. Western leaders aren’t that foolish. Ukraine was controlled by Moscow for several generations and the world did not collapse Ukraine only matters now because western leaders have given the issue a weight far beyond anything realistic and now can’t back down because of the over the top rhetoric. Just like Vietnam, Ukraine doesn’t matter to Americans. it has no impact on the price of bread, Monday Night Football or Saturday’s neighborhood BBQ.