Conflict Cartography

At what point do you exchange your sword for a pen and draw a new line on the map?

“…War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means [and] must always be regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, War is the means, and the means must always include the object...”

-On War, General Carl von Clausewitz

In the Friday meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, and President Zelenskyy, just as the acridity between the parties burned away the hope of ever making it to the East Room, the Ukrainian thrust an incredulous question at the Ohioan,

“Have you ever been to Ukraine that you say what problems we have?”

The Vice President had, just several seconds before, sat upright and shifted his body toward Zelensky, orienting himself for the verbal spar that was underway. He was scolding the Ukrainian for not being more grateful and respectful, and the Veep would have been forgiven if he had quipped back to the former comedic actor now battered and tragic President,

“Sir, have you?”

Just 48 hours prior to the most infamous Oval Office donniebrook this country has ever witnessed in real time, a historic deal, reportedly “done,” and already being critized as "bad," was set for a ceremonial signing.

What in the world happened?

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Resources

With all the criticism President Trump has received over recent weeks for proposing a deal—a simple framework really—for future investment in and development of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, reportedly giving the United States a 50% cut, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t his idea to begin with—it was Zelenskyy’s.

On the 16th of October, 2024, President Zelenskyy published his “Victory Plan,” and the fourth point of that plan features Ukraine offering a “special agreement” to its “strategic partners” for the “joint protection of the country’s critical resources,” plus “joint investment and use of this economic potential.” A secret annex to the plan provides more details to said partners.

The United Kingdom actually beat the United States to the table on this when they inked a 100 Year Partnership earlier this year, securing their spot as a “preferred partner for Ukraine’s energy sector [and] critical minerals strategy.”

I wonder if the U.K. would still be the “preferred partner” if the deal with the U.S. is ever revived.

Indeed, Ukraine has been shopping for “partners” to help them develop these resources for years. Four years ago, Ukraine got the European Union to sign a similar agreement to develop their mineral deposits.

At the same time, Ukraine signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on a Strategic Partnership on Critical Raw Materials and Batteries and joined the European Raw Materials Alliance as part of this “roadmap” to develop “joint venture projects and business opportunities.”

And before the 2021 partnership was drafted, there was this 2020 agreement.

That strategic partnership can be traced back to this March 2019 meeting in Brussells.

There may well be more agreements, memoranda, and plans out there, all basically shopping the same setup: invest in Ukraine, develop resources, and share profits.

Just how many RSVPs has Ukraine accepted for their reported ~$15 trillion worth of minerals? Who knows.

A more important inquiry, and in fact this is the most important question to ask if you want to understand why Trump has zeroed in on the rare mineral deal specifically:

Has Ukraine taken any RSVPs on these sites from China?

To me, this deal is a shrewd long term anti-access and area denial (A2/D2) strategic play, the kind an experienced businessman, developer, and leader makes.

In the short term, it is a small, but cooperative, meaningful move away from conflict and towards an end to the war.

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Rude Delays

So, with the above as preamble, on February 12, in Kyiv, when Treasury Secretary Bessent presented, after some rude delays, to President Zelenskyy a draft of an agreement for United States investment and joint development of Ukraine’s critical resources, he was offering something that a) Zelenskyy had named as a “key point” of his Victory Plan and b) something in line with other agreements he or his predecessors had already signed.

That same day, Secretary of Defense Hegseth spoke in Brussels to the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. Those remarks are worth reading, but the short of it is no admission of Ukraine to NATO, no Article 5 covered NATO-troops in Ukraine, no U.S. troops in Ukraine, and no redrawing Ukraine's borders as they were pre-2014 or pre 2022. That’s at least two points of Zelenskyy’s five point Victory Plan declined.

Two days later, at the Munich Security Conference, Zelenskyy meets with Vance and Rubio. He tells them he doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally approve the deal without parliament, and excuse to be sure, but he also makes a post on X that signals his intention to “work on the document," seek “further meetings,” and “move as quickly as possible towards a real and guaranteed peace.” That’s a good sign, could even be seen as a small gesture of cooperative play.

However, the next day Zelenskky rejects the deal outright. Reasons were provided, such as lack of firm security guarantees and legal concerns about enforceability and jurisdictions, but Zelenskky also said to reporters, “I have had different dialogues,” and this current draft of the deal was “not in our interests today.”

Ukrainian officials remarked to the media that they were looking “to negotiate a better deal.” (Can’t blame them for the desire to make it as sweet as possible for Ukraine, but… typically with Trump, the first deal he offers you is the best one you’re going to get from him. Just sayin.’)

Zelenskyy’s about-face skid continued when three days later, upon being first informed, by media, of American, Russian, and Saudi officials meeting in Riyadh to discuss a peaceful end to the conflict, he made the following comments:

"Ukraine will not accept. Ukraine knew nothing about this. And Ukraine regards any negotiations about Ukraine without Ukraine as having no results."

Zelensky added: "We cannot recognize any things or agreements about us without us. And we will not recognize such agreements. Surely, there is a bilateral track there. And the U.S. has the right to do so if they have bilateral issues. To be honest, they talked about it before. Only now have they started talking publicly. Back then, it was like bad manners—to talk to an aggressor during wartime."

Zelenskyy then cancelled a planned trip to Saudi Arabia, which was unrelated to these talks he had only just learned of, so there would not be "a false impression of negotiations."

Obviously, this is not a man oriented towards peace.

It’s why he didn’t make a deal earlier when he could have, and it’s why he didn’t make a deal in Washington last Friday, and it’s why, in his view, the end of the war really is “very, very far away.”

Contrast such behaviors and comments with what Trump had to say about the Riyadh meeting, the first high-level meetings between the United States and Russia in three years.

"They were very good."

"Russia wants to do something. They want to stop the savage barbarianism."

“I can tell you, we’re doing very well with Russia. We’re going to do something with Russia that he was unable to do. We could make a deal with Russia to stop the killing of potentially additional millions of people.”

Regardless of whether or not this deal, or any deal, is “good” or "bad” according to the usual critics, it is a “good” play—a cooperative play—that breaks from the cycle of conflict and presents all sides with an opportunity to respond with a cooperative play of their own.

President Trump and his team are employing the Generous Tit for Tat Game Theory strategy, and if they can get two cooperative plays in a row from Russia and from Ukraine, they will save thousands, if not millions, of lives.

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War is a means, not an end.

What we saw play out in the Oval Office meeting is a conflict of objectives and the unthreading of the drafted entanglements waiting for the signatures of these men just steps away.

For the Trump Administration, the objective is peace, as our President stated over and over, and the means to achieving that peace are small, sometimes soft, steps away from conflict and towards cooperative agreements.

The rare earth mineral deal, even if it’s superficial, mostly performative, and one of a dozen RSVPs for those minerals that Ukraine has shoved in a Soviet filing cabinet somewhere in a Kyiv bunker, is such a step.

For President Zelenskyy, the objective seems to be war, and the means also war. He has allowed the means to take the place of the ends and cannot see the destructive loop he has himself, his country, and, to an extent, the world, locked into.

If he and others who have allowed such a self-deception to manifest in themselves could adjust their vision to see war as only the means, not an end, but just a “political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means,” he would at once recognize that the logic for this war is flawed.

Until he can bring himself to grasp that, he will continue to speak the “grammar of war” as if that alone contains the “logic for it” to continue.

“[War] is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means. …that this political intercourse does not cease by the war itself, is not changed into something quite different, but that, in its essence, it continues to exist, whatever may be the form of the means which it uses, and that the chief lines on which the events of the war progress, and to which they are attached, are only the general features of policy which run all through the war until peace takes place. And how can we conceive it to be otherwise? Does the cessation of diplomatic notes stop the political relations between different nations and Governments? Is not war merely another kind of writing and language for political thoughts? It has certainly a grammar of its own, but its logic is not peculiar to itself.

Accordingly, war can never be separated from political intercourse, and if, in the consideration of the matter, this is done in any way, all the threads of the different relations are, to a certain extent, broken, and we have before us a senseless thing without an object.”

-On War, General Carl von Clausewitz

Senseless. The word that best describes any urge to continue this war even a day more is senseless.

Yet it does continue, a relentless horror, and will go on because, on some level, it does have some logic to it. That is, the crude logic of a disagreement between parties being resolved via the application of quantifiable forces subtracting from one another until one side yields or is depleted.

War is a numbers game: number of monies, of men, of equipment, of supplies, of moves, of opportunities, etc. And as you do the sums, you have to ask at what point you exchange your sword for a pen and draw a new line on the map?

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Lines

Consider the lines on the following maps.

Gas lines.

Electric lines.

Grain lines.

Battle lines.

The lines in the first few maps are very literally the threads that tie what happens in Ukraine to the rest of Europe.

The battlelines in final map and in the hyperlinked maps, have for seven straight months, moved steadily closer to Ukraine’s energy stations, reactors, dams, transmission lines, gas lines, and Kyiv. Since the current war began in February 2022, the country has lost over 10% of its territory and continues losing hundreds of square kilometers per month. Over 4,000 sq km were lost to Russia in 2024 alone.

And there’s no indication of these gains letting up, especially as tangible, actually useful support for Ukraine and its war effort, both internally and externally, continues to rapidly collapse. As of writing, the U.S. has just put a “pause” on aid to Ukraine.

The conflict cartography is what it is. The lines have been drawn by the dead and by the destruction of neighborhood after neighborhood. They are drawn in blood and in debris. There is no need to trace their outlines over and over.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...

…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring[].

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: Is there no other way the world may live?”

-President Eisenhower, Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1953

Pray for peace.

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