The war in Ukraine: diplomacy beyond revenge
- Editorial Team
- Mar 31
- 6 min read
Philip McDonagh, 27 March 2025, The Tablet
A former senior Irish diplomat reflects on the current negotiations to bring an end to the war in Ukraine in light of the gospels and the experience of the Northern Ireland peace process
“What king,” asks Jesus in the gospels, “going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with 10,000 to oppose the one who comes against him with 20,000? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace” (Luke 14:31-2). When he visited the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Pope Francis reminded its members, “Conflict cannot be ignored or concealed; it has to be faced. But if it paralyses us, we lose perspective, our horizons shrink and we grasp only a part of reality.”
As the European Union, the UK, and others seek to respond to changing US policy towards the war in Ukraine, are there general rules about how the “terms of peace” should be sought, if we are not to be paralysed? Even in the middle of conflict, “talks about talks” and “shuttle diplomacy” can set parameters for a ceasefire and negotiations. It may prove worthwhile to “reframe” the problem; in the Northern Ireland peace process, for example, an intractable territorial dispute became easier to address when it was one item in a broader agenda focused on all the key relationships.
Any worthwhile transition to peace must bring good news to the peoples of the world and in particular to the poor. Two further principles we acquire with direct help from Jesus: we should love our enemies and practise mercy. “When you stand in prayer, forgive whatever you have against anybody, so that your Father in heaven may forgive your failings too” (Mark 11:25). This guidance from Jesus is not compatible with dehumanising the Other. As Pope Francis said in Strasbourg: “The royal road to peace – and to avoiding a repetition of what occurred in the two world wars of the last century – is to see others not as enemies to be opposed but as brothers and sisters to be embraced. This entails an ongoing process which may never be considered fully completed.”
In the current crisis, a severe military confrontation was, perhaps, inevitable. But Europe should have on the horizon a new all-European process aiming at recognition of the EU as the anchor of a wider European zone of peace and economic cooperation. Something more imaginative is needed than the current economic and cultural “zero-sum game” in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. There must be a renewed commitment to cooperative economic relationships as a core value in international relations. Over the coming years, the customs union, the single market, the free movement of workers, the euro, agricultural policy, budgetary supports, and other aspects of shared sovereignty in the EU will be applied gradually and in a differentiated way in different countries across Europe, including post-Brexit UK. The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 allowed Ukraine to join the EU while retaining economic links to Russia. President Putin even wrote articles in 2012 and 2013 floating the idea that the Eurasian Economic Union should gradually adopt EU standards.
The argument against considering a creative peace strategy comes down to the fate of the territories in eastern Ukraine claimed by Russia and the related radical mistrust of the future intentions of the Russian Federation. As desk officer for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in what is now the EU’s External Action Service, I witnessed the negotiations that led to the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War. In 1991, the CSCE principle of the territorial integrity of states was interpreted in a particular way when western countries recognised each part of the Soviet and Yugoslav federations as an independent state. There were potential sources of conflict and obvious areas of interdependence among the new states that ought to have been acknowledged and addressed at the time. Germany has a particular responsibility to remember this – quite apart from the war of annihilation in Russia which so overlapped with the Shoah.
In 2025, is Russia embarked on an imperialist project? Or is there a narrower goal, whether well-conceived or not, of compensating for the broken promises of 1989-1991? Just as Ukraine has historical connections with Poland, Romania, and other member states of the European Union, it has connections with Russia, including family connections, that go back hundreds of years. Russia can reasonably aspire to a reconciled relationship with its nearest neighbours much as the members of the European Union aspire to reconciled relationships among themselves. Radical mistrust goes both ways. To some Western European eyes, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is indicative of expansionist ambitions; to Russian eyes, the British and EU strategy is to collapse the economy of the Russian Federation, place a massive bet on new forms of tech-based warfare, and instrumentalise domestic Ukrainian law and international law so as to make negotiations impossible. A simmering source of mistrust is the “civilisational” question. In the West, the war is framed as a defence of democracy and an open society against authoritarianism; in Russia, the war is framed as a defence of traditional values from an adversary which seeks to destroy them.
George Kennan, the American diplomat and historian famous for the Marshall Plan and for his later opposition to Nato expansion, wrote in The Nuclear Delusion: “It is the ingrained habits and assumptions of men, and above all of men in government, which alone can guarantee any enduring state of peaceful relations among nations.” In the 1990s, ignoring Kennan, the United States and its allies sought to blur the distinction between Nato, a military alliance, and regional arrangements under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter. The vogue term was “interlocking institutions”. Nato, as a “security provider”, was argued to be analogous to the UN. But comprehensive security based on a functioning OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) is not the same as a security order based on deterrence. Finding a new balance between differing paradigms of security is required by the UN Charter and the Helsinki Final Act.
How are we to evaluate the current rush to arms in Europe? No metric connects the world’s $3 trillion in military expenditure with the needs of 800 million fellow human beings who live close to starvation. No innate sense of the sacred inhibits our investment in weapons of mass destruction, long-distance surveillance-based killing, and cyber weapons implanted in the infrastructure of other societies. When the Prime Minister of the UK, the President of France, and the Chancellor-elect of Germany speak of defence, commentators see the weapons industry as an epoch-making economic opportunity. In a recent joint contribution to the Financial Times, three respected commentators wrote as follows: “The prospect of huge investments in defence has also fuelled hopes Germany could halt its industrial and technological decline by helping manufacturers and engineers find a new purpose and new markets – with positive effects rippling through the Eurozone” (Chassany et al., 8 March). Have we elected for our habitation a bleak world, based on a self-referential morality?
The “royal road to peace” requires that the cancellation of all things Russian in parts of our continent should give way to pluralism, as pioneered by Ireland and the UK in the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. Ukraine’s aspiration to territorial reunification, legitimate in terms of CSCE/OSCE principles, is more likely to bear fruit in a Europe moving towards rapprochement and reconciliation.
In the passage from Luke’s gospel with which we began, Jesus continues: “Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” In Mark, too, Jesus speaks of salt: “Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another” (Mark 9:50). Julian of Norwich has a vision of sin as the absence of Love. The metaphor of the salt tells us that the entrenchment of enmity involves a loss of meaning. The “missing ingredient” in contemporary diplomacy is precisely the salt, a patient commitment to interpersonal, intercultural listening and dialogue. As Christians, our political task is to “uncover the sources of creation and keep them unsullied” (Spe Salvi, 35).
“Blessed are those times and places where people sit around the same table and place their trust in the power of reason and con- science,” Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States, said in his homily at a special Mass for ambassadors to the Holy See on 20 March to pray for the recovery of Pope Francis. Europe owes it to the world to seek a pathway to dialogue with the Other, even a pathway that is not currently visible. We should hope, work, pray, and suffer, in Seamus Heaney’s words, “for a great sea- change on the far side of revenge”.
Philip McDonagh served as Ireland’s ambassador to India, Russia and the Holy See. He is now adjunct professor and director of the Centre for Religion, Human Values and International Relations at Dublin City University and global fellow at the Princeton-based Centre of Theological Inquiry.
Comments