Why is it, that nobody has been talking for at least a cease fire openly. A year ago from this past spring Biden actually sent Johnson over to put an end to any cease fire agreement and to continue to have the Ukrainians fight.
Why is that?
To slightly adapt a line from Babylon 5:
This avalanche is hundreds of years in the making. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
I’ll get back to that.
Now, not to support Biden, but in fact, Israel’s Bennet, who was THE guy in the middle of the negotiations, clearly stated the US was indecisive and then mostly following the Brits on this one, not the other way around.
Further, Bennet clearly stated that after the mass graves of civilians were found in Ukraine, the die was cast. (My close summary of his words - I’d have to try to hunt up in the vid his exact statement.) Not to mention a host of other complications he was not up to speed on, going in, which he freely admitted.
I don’t know that Bennet’s view about the graves was quite correct — I think the die was already “cast”. The mass graves were just the super glue that locked it in place.
I’ve been, well, “curious” about Ukraine for a very long time - since my mid-teens, and then that expanded after Chernobyl due to professional interest in nuclear power. I’m seeing something now both understandable, given the last few generations’ history, and a bit scary. It is as if Putin hit a button on a guitar amp, said button labelled “repressed anger”, flipped the “never again” switch on, and turned the master gain to “10”. So many FReepers don’t understand this: You’d think being champions of freedom and individualism, etc., they’d comprehend that many things are not “top down”, and in fact many powerful political or economic movements are mostly ground up, even if it takes a particular individual to focus, lead, and express that movement’s desires publicly. Sort of like Trump...
The inability of most FReepers to think in more than one or two dimensions is also thoroughly disappointing. As this applies to NATO it is almost mind-boggling. NATO is about a lot more than Russia... (A very long but unfortunately mostly OT discussion. Plus I’m 3 hrs overdue to sleep.)
The Ukrainians are not cut from the same cloth as the radical Muslims. They are not driven by religious fervor, even though most Ukies are quite religious, conservative, civilized people. But, they are deeply angry, and deeply of that “never again” mindset. Anyone who underestimates that anger, or how the forces that shape history work, and thinks the real players at work here are Biden or Johnson or Putin or Zelenskyy or even the US “Deep State”, is a damn fool.