In Ukraine, a Bad Peace Is Better Than a Good War

A negotiated end to the war in Ukraine is imperative, and the sooner the better. However, it will require Ukraine to make certain concessions to the warmongers who invaded their country. Doing so will be a bitter pill for Ukraine to swallow. These concessions are mostly symbolic. It will be distasteful, and morally unsatisfying. But prolonging the war in the hope of a decisive victory over Russia is a strategy fraught with peril and has few if any benefits.

There is no guarantee Ukraine can defeat Russia, and losing on the battlefield will undermine Ukraine’s position. Plus, victory promises scant tangible rewards. Crimea and Donbass will not be recovered. And while the odds of a NATO-Russia war are slim, the potential consequences are terrifying. This war has to stop, with a negotiated settlement, before it spirals out of control, and before more people die needlessly.

It is impossible not to greatly admire Ukraine’s heroic resistance to unprovoked Russian aggression. But the United States has no vital national security interest truly at stake in Ukraine. Ukraine is not a treaty ally of the United States. We have no responsibility to defend Ukraine, and there is no loss of credibility if we do not.

I am skeptical Ukraine can win. They’ve put up a heroic fight so far, absolutely inspiring. But favor is usually on the side of the big battalions. Putin has staked his prestige and political survival on some sort of victory. Starting this war was a huge strategic mistake for Putin. Having begun a war, however, he can’t face the disgrace of defeat.

And there is a real risk of a nuclear World War III. Maybe Russian rhetoric about nuclear war is just empty saber rattling. However, I have had Duma members tell me they would be willing to die in a nuclear war, if it also meant the destruction of the United States.

So, what does Putin want? His core demands are that Ukraine adopt a constitutional amendment to remain neutral in perpetuity, that Ukraine recognize Russia’s (illegal) annexation of Crimea, and also recognize the so-called people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should accede to these demands. Ukraine was unlikely to join the alliance anytime in the foreseeable future. Likewise, there is no prospect of Ukraine recovering Crimea or the Donbass. Agreeing to these demands, Zelenskyy surrenders nothing that is not already lost.

It would be difficult for the Ukrainians to agree to these terms. But it might be better to accept Putin’s minimalist program while such an agreement can be reached than risk military setbacks and Putin’s imposition of his maximalist objectives. These aims may include annexation of Ukraine’s entire Black Sea coast, including the major cities of Odessa, Mykolaiv, and Kherson, as well as the demilitarization of Ukraine.

And what’s the alternative? Maybe with continuing arms supplies, Ukraine can stay in the fight indefinitely. But to what purpose? I see few possibilities for a decisive Ukrainian military victory, only to maybe halt further Russian military advances. There will be no reconquest of Crimea and Donbass.

And let’s dispense with pieties about “a global struggle between democracy and autocracy.” Let's also set aside daydreams of a coup in Moscow. This is a moment to confront hard choices and draw rational conclusions.

It’s a lousy situation, and just like you, I’d love to see Vladimir Putin go down. But as much as that might be emotionally satisfying, it doesn’t resolve the very real dilemma Ukraine faces. Every day this war drags on, people will keep dying. Continuing the war and staying the course offers a) very scant possibilities of genuine gains, and b) runs very real risks of much worse outcomes, even global disaster. What I propose here is perhaps hard to stomach. Nobody much enjoys giving in to bullies or gangsters. But are we really, really willing to die for Kramatorsk?

And what does America really stand to gain from more war on Ukrainian soil? For Washington, the bloodier the war, the more Russia suffers militarily. That is not an unreasonable desire. But it is the Ukrainians who will die to achieve it. A negotiated peace now stops the war. It puts an end to the bombings and shelling of Ukrainian cities and the deaths of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers. Bad peace, in this case, really is preferable to a good war.

A lot of the warmongers seem to think it’s 1982 and NATO and the USA are under threat of imminent attack. It’s the wrong war and the wrong place and time, CHINA is our mortal enemy now and we have people stuck in 1982 mentality, the world has changed and only Trump tried to change with it, but the deep state and warmongers were not having that change.

The Cold War is over and we are foolishly trying to restart it with Russia and China at the same time. CHINA is the real threat here people not Russia unless we insanely make them one. We are ignoring Washington’s advice on entanglements. We are trying to ally ourselves with a corrupt country which is not in NATO and never should be considered in NATO.

These same warmongers seem to think that Reagan is still in the White House and that Eisenhower is still in charge in the Pentagon. We have a bunch of demented, woke, incompetent idiots in charge in Washington and they are eagerly wailing for war with Russia. We have watched these same idiots win in Iraq and throw it away, foolishly destroy Libya and Syria and spend twenty years in Afghanistan with nary a clue how to win and to withdraw in the most asininely stupid way possible and the warmongers are like yeah-yeah we got this!

It’s the Ukraine and Russia’s problem let them deal with it and not hand our troops another stupid and needless war they have to fight and die in, unless of course the warmongers miss calculate and Putin doesn’t back down in a nuclear showdown. It’s the wrong war and the wrong place and time, CHINA is our mortal enemy now and we have people stuck in 1982 mentality, the world has changed and only Trump tried to change with it, but the deep state and warmongers were not having that change. What could possibly go wrong with BiteMe and Milley in charge?

Irrelevant. Totally, utterly irrelevant. Actually, your point is not just irrelevant - it is retarded beyond belief.

Russia, in the 1990s, dismantled the Soviet Union. It recognised multiple ex-SSRs as independent, self governing, sovereign nation states. It did so formally through the UN. It FURTHER signed guarantees like the Budapest Memorandum.

Until very recently it maintained the bullshit story that this invasion had nothing to do with an ambition based on Novorussiya. We now know everything BUT Novorussiya was just convenient bullshit to divide and erode opposition to its actions.

This week its planned strategy for Kherson was blown wide open. No, they’re not having a free or fair referendum. Instead they bussed in thousands of Russians for the victory day parade, and those new arrivals are doing a hostile takeover with the approval of the puppet administration that was installed by the Kremlin.

Ukrainians are being driven out.

This all means the guy who didn’t even get 2% of the popular vote in 2020, but who’s been appointed by the Kremlin to run Kherson, doesn’t see the need for a referendum (that even now with Russia flooding the city with spivs, could STILL vote no.) He’s petitioned Russia on behalf of only himself to turn Kherson into a Russian province.

If you eant yo play stupid games about who was born where, I’m pretty sure many Rusdians over the years have defected to Ukraine and been successful in politics there. And Kiev was Russia’s Capitol before Moscow was a town. And Kiev was a cultural treasure while Moscow was a mafia-like infested jerkwater. So on that basis Ukraine has the moral authority to rule Russia and string every last member of Putin’s gangster klepto elite up from every tree.

But the Ukrainians don’t resort to something as desperate as using Ancient History to justify 21st century Going Full Retard.

Irrelevant. Totally, utterly irrelevant. Actually, your point is not just irrelevant - it is retarded beyond belief.

Retarded? You are off to a good start. Failing to understand the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine and ignoring Putin's July 2021 exposition on the subject are not irrelevant. This war could have been avoided if our "leaders" understood how Russia perceives Ukraine.

Jack Matlock, a career diplomat and former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote a cogent article on Ukraine and the Russian perspective in December 2021, Ukraine: Tragedy of a Nation Divided It is well-worth the read if you are truly interested in understanding the dynamics at work in this war. Matlock discusses the origin of Ukraine's independence and the seminal impact of the illegal 2014 coup that set off the separatist movement in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea by Russia. An excerpt:

In February 2015 an agreement was reached (“Minsk agreement”) to bring the Donbas back under Kiev’s control by allowing a degree of autonomy, including election of local officials, and amnesty for the secessionists. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian legislature (Verkhovna Rada) has refused to amend the constitution to provide for a federal system or to proclaim an amnesty for the secessionists.

Separate sets of U.S. and EU economic sanctions against Russia have been declared in respect to the Crimea and the Donbas, but most have seemed to stimulate hostile emotions rather than encourage solution of the problems. What needs to be understood is that Russia perceives these issues as matters of vital national security.

Russia is extremely sensitive about foreign military activity adjacent to its borders, as any other country would be and the United States always has been. It has signaled repeatedly that it will stop at nothing to prevent NATO membership for Ukraine. Nevertheless, eventual Ukrainian membership in NATO has been an avowed objective of U.S. and NATO policy since the Bush-Cheney administration. This makes absolutely no sense. It is also dangerous to confront a nuclear-armed power with military threats on its border.

When I hear comments now such as, “Russia has no right to claim a ‘sphere of influence,’” I am puzzled. It is not a question of legal “rights” but of probable consequences. It is as if someone announces, “We never passed a law of gravity so we can ignore it.” No one is saying that Ukraine does not have a “right” to apply for NATO membership. Of course it does. The question is whether the members of the alliance would serve their own interest if they agreed. In fact they would assume a very dangerous liability.

I point this out as a veteran of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. At that time I was assigned to the American embassy in Moscow and it fell to my lot to translate some of Khrushchev’s messages to President John Kennedy. Why is it relevant? Just this: in terms of international law, the Soviet Union had a “right” to place nuclear weapons on Cuba when the Cuban government requested them, the more so since the United States had deployed nuclear missiles of comparable range that could strike the USSR from Turkey. But it was an exceedingly dangerous move since the United States had total military dominance of the Caribbean and under no circumstances would tolerate the deployment of nuclear missiles in its backyard. Fortunately for both countries and the rest of the world, Kennedy and Khrushchev were able to defuse the situation. Only later did we learn how close we came to a nuclear exchange.

As for the future, the only thing that will convince Moscow to withdraw its military support from the separatist regimes in the Donbas will be Kyiv’s willingness to implement the Minsk agreement. As for the Crimea, it is likely to be a de facto part of Russia for the foreseeable future, whether or not the West recognizes that as “legal.” For decades, the U.S. and most of its Western allies refused to recognize the incorporation of the three Baltic countries in the Soviet Union. This eventually was an important factor in their liberation. However, the Crimea is quite different in one key respect: most of its people, being Russian, prefer to be in Russia. In fact, one can argue that it is in the political interest of Ukrainian nationalists to have Crimea in Russia. Without the votes from Crimea, Viktor Yanukovich would never have been elected president.

One persistent U.S. demand is that Ukraine’s territorial integrity be restored. Indeed, the U.S. is party to the Budapest Memorandum in which Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in return for Ukraine’s transfer of Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia for destruction in accord with U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements. What the U.S. demand ignores is that, under traditional international law, agreements remain valid rebus sic stantibus (things remaining the same).

When the Budapest memorandum was signed in 1994 there was no plan to expand NATO to the east and Gorbachev had been assured in 1990 that the alliance would not expand. When in fact it did expand right up to Russia’s borders, Russia was confronted with a radically different strategic situation than existed when the Budapest agreement was signed.

NATO expansion was a major mistake. George Kennan, a former Ambassador to the Soviet Union, author of the "Long Telegram", and architect of the containment policy, stated in 1997 at age 92 that expanding NATO to the east “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” He has been proven right.

But the Ukrainians don’t resort to something as desperate as using Ancient History to justify 21st century Going Full Retard.

As Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I lived a total of 19 years in 6 different countries in Europe. Ancient history is alive and well in Europe. The past happened only yesterday for the Greeks who recall the sins of the Turks. I lived two years in Warsaw (1981-83) during the days of Solidarnosc'. The Poles had a litany of historical grievances against the Germans, Russians, and others. My four years in West Berlin (1983-87) before the Wall came down revealed the many fissures created by "ancient history."

You are from the UK. Scotland almost seceded from the UK. Sinn Fein's victory in Northern Ireland raises the the eternal quest for a United Ireland. Ancient history is not so ancient.

Ukraine shares a 1,500 mile border with Russia. Nothing is going to change that. I'll leave you with Jack Matlock's summation:

Ultimately, all these legal arguments and appeals to abstract concepts are beside the point. So far as Ukraine is concerned, it can never be a united, prosperous country unless it has reasonably close and civil relations with Russia. That means, inter alia, giving its Russian speaking citizens equal rights to their language and culture. That is a fact determined by geography and history. Ukraine’s friends in Europe and North America should help them understand that rather than pursuing what could easily turn out to be a suicidal course.

“Failing to understand the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine and ignoring Putin’s July 2021 exposition on the subject are not irrelevant.”

As Thatcher would’ve said, “No, no, NO!”

I do understand their history but even so it is irrelevant. Russia needs to come to terms with the utter futility of looking backward. They are past overdue a reality check.

This is not the nineteenth century. The old battle tactics don’t work. They can’t hide atrocities by shredding paper when people are live streaming it from their smartphones. They can’t fool the proles that Russia is more technically advanced than Ukraine when their sons are finding washing machines, 50 inch flat screen TVs and jars of Nutella in houses, with modern cars outside. Kit that maybe only the richest town officials back home have access to.

No more of this “don’t poke the bear” nonsense; it’s time they got with the program and the best way to convince them they’re completely on the wrong path is through their own eyes. With a dose of tough love.

We are where we are because nobody had the balls to tell it like it is. Putin has had 20 years of the West telling him that his “Novorussiya” fantasy is a bit farfetched but mmm’kay, keep on truckin’.

The irony is, twice he’s had good relationships with reformers who saw the opportunities that would come with cleaning up Russia’s business climate and promoting modernisation. As long as they didn’t actively attempt to replace him at the top of the tree, he was fine with it.

But we didn’t support those guys, and we stood silent as the dinosaur hardliners fought to keep the Soviet era kleptocracy going.

Where do you think Putin’s antipathy towards the oligarchs comes from? He knows they all robbed far too much. If anything the repeat failures and embarrassments of the Ukraine invasion show what happens when the military budget is being creamed off by bungs and bribes, and vehicles that should be well maintained are breaking down.

At the same time he knows that the elites are sending their kids to schools in the west, and people with professional qualifications are fleeing Russia to avoid the draft if he declares proper war. If the brain drain carries on he’ll be left with only the Gomer Pyle class and a pensioner army to fight his battles.

If he launch a nuke, how could he be sure it won’t blow up on take-off? Half the silos from the Cold War are rusted up and the other half are reliant on a dwindling number of people who know how to maintain it. His hypersonic nuke program is the only real success Russia’s had in 30 years but Russia still can’t build a working jumbo jet.

The Minsk Agreement is another example of the West giving Putin latitude he simply doesn’t deserve, and shooting its foot in the process. It’s the diplomatic solutions equivalent of rewarding bad behavior.

Gorbachev received the NATO expansion assurances before the Berlin Wall came down. It pledged no expansion into East Germany WHILE THE USSR REMAINED. As soon as the USSR split up and Russia recognised nations at the UN it was morally obliged to accept that who they do business with is nothing to do with Moscow anymore. We should’ve put Putin in his place the first time he and Zhirinovsky started spouting crap about restoring the Russian empire.

None of this is incompatible with Ukraine having a healthy relationship with Russia.

What is incompatible with that aspiration is twenty years of everyone taking Russia’s side no matter how demented it got.

Russia’s dumbass invasion for dumbass reasons is the result. Putin thinks he can win simply by firing the failing generals and throwing thousands of Russian looters into Kherson while shipping its Ukes off to gulags to distort the demographics before faking a referendum result.

That’s not going to win hearts and minds. It’ll just create more dead Russians and decades of visceral hatred against Russia. But the worst parr is, a lot of those Russian fighters are going to go home knowing they just saw a small taste of the world outside Russia... That was better than their home yowns and villages, until they bombed it to dust.

I do understand their history but even so it is irrelevant. Russia needs to come to terms with the utter futility of looking backward. They are past overdue a reality check.

LOL. You seem to have missed the point, maybe intentionally. It may be irrelevant to you but not to the Russians. That is where reality intrudes on your fantasy. Russian troops invaded Ukraine a second time after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. There is a real war going on in Ukraine because Russia believes its national security interests are involved. Putin listed his four demands to end the war He doesn't accept your "utter futility of looking backward," i.e., Putin has a say in the matter. In terms of negotiating an end to the war, it is imperative that we understand his perspective.

How many Ukrainians must be sacrificed and what level of destruction is acceptable in Ukraine to administer this "tough love?" Fighting a proxy war is cynical and criminal.

We had an opportunity to include Russia into Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. George Kennan, whom I consider as one of our greatest diplomats, wrote the following letter that was posted in the 1998 Congressional Record:

I read your article [Owen Harries, ``The Dangers of Expansive Realism'', Winter 1997/98] with strong approval. It was in some respects a surprise because certain of your major arguments were ones I myself had made, or had wanted to make, but had not expected to see them so well expressed by the pen of anyone else. I can perhaps make this clear by commenting specifically on certain of your points.

First, your reference to the implicit understanding that the West would not take advantage of the Russian strategic and political withdrawal from Eastern Europe is not only warranted, but could have been strengthened. It is my understanding that Gorbachev on more than one occasion was given to understand, in informal talks with senior American and other Western personalities, that if the USSR would accept a united Germany remaining in NATO, the jurisdiction of that alliance would not be moved further eastward. We did not, I am sure, intend to trick the Russians; but the actual determinants of our later behavior--lack of coordination of political with military policy, and the amateurism of later White House diplomacy--would scarcely have been more creditable on our part than a real intention to deceive.

Secondly, I could not associate myself more strongly with what you write about the realist case that sees Russia as an inherently and incorrigibly expansionist country, and suggest that this tendency marks the present Russian regime no less than it did the Russian regimes of the past. We have seen this view reflected time and again, occasionally in even more violent forms, in efforts to justify the recent expansion of NATO's boundaries and further possible expansions of that name. So numerous and extensive have the distortions and misunderstandings on which this view is based been that it would be hard even to list them in a letter of this sort. It grossly oversimplifies and misconstrues must of the history of Russian diplomacy of the czarist period. It ignores the whole great complexity of Russia's part in World War II. It allows and encourages one to forget that the Soviet military advances into Western Europe during the last war took place with our enthusiastic approval, and the political ones of the ensuing period at least wit hour initial consent and support. It usually avoids mention of the Communist period, and attributes to ``the Russians'' generally all the excesses of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in the Cold War period.

Worst of all, it tends to equate, at least by implication, the Russian-Communist dictatorship of recent memory with the present Russian republic--a republic, the product of an amazingly bloodless revolution, which has, for all its many faults, succeeded in carrying on for several years with an elected government, a largely free press and media, without concentration camps or executions, and with a minimum of police brutality. This curious present Russia, we are asked to believe, is obsessed by the same dreams of conquest and oppression of others as were the worst examples, real or imaginative, of its predecessors.

You, I think, were among the first, if not indeed the first, to bring some of the above to the attention of your readers; and this, in my opinion, was an important and valuable service.

NATO expansion created a window of opportunity for the rise of Putin. Not to carry an analogy too far, but it is similar to the conditions created by the peace settlement at the end of WWI that spawned Hitler. With the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO became an organization without a mission. It should have been dissolved or the Russians should have been invited to join.

Russia today does not represent a conventional threat to Europe except for its nuclear arsenal. It is not the military threat that I recall in the late 1960s as a naval officer attached to AFSOUTH Naples, a NATO command. There were over 500,000 US military personnel in Europe, not counting dependents. The EU dwarfs Russia economically and demographically. Russia's conventional military forces are a mere shadow of those of the Soviet Union. China is the real threat.

Such bravado. How many of the 6,000 warheads of the Russian nuclear force would have to work to cause unthinkable damage to us and Europe? I remember the days of the Cold War and the fear and appreciation of the damage a nuclear weapon could cause. The general population at the time did not hold the cavalier attitude you seem to have re the use of nuclear weapons. I visited Nagasaki and the museum they have showing some of the gruesome human and material damage. Have you ever read John Hersey's Hiroshima?

Russia was and is a richer country than Ukraine. Russia has a real GDP per capita of $26,500 compared to Ukraine's $12,400, which is just $100 more than Cuba's $12,300.

Russia is also a slightly younger country than Ukraine, with a median age of 40.3 versus Ukraine at 41.2. Both have declining, aging populations with less than replacement fertility rates. Ukraine has 1.56 and Russia 1.60 total fertility rate (TFR).

We are now in a new Cold War with Russia and China as partners. India, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc. are not signed up to our sanctions. The coalition against Russia is limited. The US will be contributing $60 billion to the Ukraine war and counting, money we have to borrow/print. Uncle Sap continues to pay for Europe's defense and guarantee its sovereignty up to and including nuclear war. No wonder Finland and Sweden want to join.

You get a lot of your information from Western interpretations that fit your preferred narrative and seem to accept their conclusions without attempting to apply a critical eye. They’re saddled with generations of confirmation bias.

No different to the MSM really. Or Russia. Relying on fixed opinions formed during the Cold War while ignoring what’s happened since.

“How many Ukrainians must be sacrificed and what level of destruction is acceptable in Ukraine to administer this “tough love?”

Russia is going to destroy whatever it wants, however it works, until it chooses to stop. There are no “objectives” beyond the semi-religious belief that Russian Might is Russian Right. Everything else is a shifting sand of manufactured argument, full of half truths and outright falsehoods. Russia doesn’t equate “truth” with “objective fact”; politically its definition of “truth” is more like “expedient narrative”. Anyone who’s actually studied Russia dispassionately understands that. It’ll say whatever sounds plausible enough to muddy the waters, and gets offended if you point out that the statement is counter to established facts.

Hence the pro Russian and defeatist fallacy, “don’t poke the bear because if it bites us it’s our fault”, and you’ve fallen for it.

If a person threatens to kill hostages unless you pay the ransom, and you pay, great... Until they take more hostages. In that instance you are complicit in rewarding hostage-taking if you pay again.

If you don’t do anything at all, you’re indirectly complicit in the deaths of the hostages.

The only way to not be complicit is to accept, if the hostage takers kill the hostages while you were trying to negotiate their release or attempt a rescue the blood is on the hostage takers’ hands far more than it is on yours.

Hence the maxim “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”.

And Russia is run by a terrorist regime.

“Fighting a proxy war is cynical and criminal.”

It’s only a proxy war if we simply arm Ukraine from a distance and refuse to go further than that. It’s only a proxy war if Finland is atracked and NATO arms them without mobilising an offensive force. We are where we are though. It’s a proxy war NOW because nowhere near enough was done to talk Russia out of its insane crusade to restore a bygone empire.

Instead, Ametica in particular did the exact bloody opposite. Biden and Obama sent mulitiple signals to Moscow to say Ukraine was fair game, Trump told Putin in not so many words that Biden and Zelenskyy were both corrupt and both needed sorting out, and Tucker Carlson inhabits a world where Putin was offended enough by (Pfizer today, Nazis yesterday, the Ukrainian language last week, NATO only after America’s apologists for Putin brought it up) to be morally in the right no matter how far he goes in pursuit of his Restoration mission.

How does that get interpreted in the Kremlin? Green light after green light.

The four demands to end the war were a disingenuous crock.

So much so, in fact, that te Kremlin has officially dropped denazification from everything - when Putin says “Nazi” he means anyone and anything that opposes Russification... and even they realised the Russian people originally thought he was ONLY talking about Azov nazis. They night approve of Novorossiya, or eliminating the Waffen SS, but there’s no translating that into a lust to conquer half of Europe like the German Nazis did.

As for the neutrality... Good luck with that. When even Finland and Sweden are saying in effect “we can’t afford to stay neutral anymore, you’re just too insane a neighbor to sit in the fence any longer” and the Republic of Ireland AND EVEN SWITZERLAND are rethinking its position, that ain’t Deep State Interference.

It’s because where we are TODAY is like being in the spring of 1940 where European countries could either choose to be in the pro Naxi Axis orbit or be a target of the Nazis. Nazi Germany mightve respected neutrality, Putin’s Russia won’t.

Because some people still believe that Putin will listen to reason and de-escalate, therefore Zelenskyy should surrender and save us a lot of money.

This is a rational position when it’s not related to an intransigent bully with a Great Mission 30 years in the making; he was more pragmatic until he realised he’s now a dying man woth only one chance to realise his Great Mission before he croaks. So, no holds barred. Putin would rather see all of Ukraine in flames than surrender his vision.

Zelenskyy was properly backed into a corner by both his predecessor and the Kremlin AND the West, so his “fight to the last Ukrainian” position is not entirely of his own making. By contrast Putin is entirely stuck in his own self-made, self-built bunker.

Every general who tells him something he doesn’t want to hear gets fired or worse. Every politician who suggested a different attitude to the West has been arrested on trumped up charges for challenging his authority. Putin REALLY hates sycophants like Viktor Lukashenko, if they start having any ideas of their own. He only wants blind obedience to his vision.

It won’t be long before even Lavrov and the loyal TV presenters go off script enough to trigger a holiday on house arrest.

This is not a war against Russia, unless we keep enabling the people in Russia who control the narrative. Only 6 months ago it was still possible for Russians to keep an open mind... Just because Putin turned the internet off doesn’t mean they don’t remember.

If Putin wins, Russia’s only narrative for years to come will be, “we took on NATO and the other Nazis and won a spectacular victory, and we were totally justified” and fifty years from now we’ll have a massive empire between Europe and America that is convinced that it can do no wrong, never has to compromise, can legitimately commit genocide and incite famines and turn the heating iff to an entire continent...

“Scotland almost seceded from the UK.”

Via a mostly legitimate referendum without active, aggressive coercion. The biggest isdue with that referendum, and Brexit, was exclusion of people with a constitutional right to vote - Brits living or working in Europe temporarily who couldn’t vote on Brexit, Scots temporarily stuck in England who couldn’t vote on independence.

Both are not on the scale of separatists forcing Ukrainian nationals out of Kherson and giving their apartments to Russian visitors eho came in dor the victory parade and who aren’t going home if a fully furnished stolen apartment is being offered to them for free.

“Sinn Fein’s victory in Northern Ireland raises the the eternal quest for a United Ireland”

Like Scotland it’ll be settled via the ballot box not the bullet. I have an Irish Protestant dad from Ian Paisley’s home town of Ballymena and my mum’s a Belfast Catholic. They’d both rather have peace than war; their whole family on both sides is united on that. Boris’ botched Brexit border has induced even the unionist community to think there are worse things in the world than having closer ties to Dublin while remaining in an independent UK.

In fact, that’s almost the same opinion a lot of Donbass Russians had. They wanted the best of both worlds with a post Poroshenko era government cleaning house of Nazis, not a Kremlin Anschluss and three months of bombardment.

Ancient history persists only until the paradigm shifts.

What kind of woke gibberish is that? Be specific.

No different to the MSM really. Or Russia. Relying on fixed opinions formed during the Cold War while ignoring what’s happened since.

The Cold Warriors are the ones who missed a golden opportunity after the fall of the Soviet Union to offer Russia a place in Europe. Instead, Russia was treated as an enemy and NATO expansion exacerbated the situation. Our Intel Community and political elites (read neocons) are still living in the Cold War era. US/NATO meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine that resulted in a coup d'état in 2014 lit the fuse for what is going on today. The children of Biden, Kerry, Pelosi, and Romney have made money in Ukraine, one of the four most corrupt countries in the world.

Now we have restarted the Cold War on steroids. The US and the EU have declared economic war on Russia to destroy the Russian economy and currency in the hope that the pain of the Russian people will fuel the removal of Putin. The objective has been to make Russia a pariah. Russian tennis players, musicians, athletes, etc. are being banned along with Russian literature, music, and culture. We are burning all bridges with Russia, which will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to walk back no matter what happens when Putin departs the scene.

The West has made Ukraine the hill to die on, which risks an unintended escalation of the war. Russia will retaliate at a time of its choosing thru asymmetric rather than kinetic warfare. And the US risks the dollar as the world's reserve currency. We have triggered a new political global alignment that can boomerang against us. Biden is already blaming Putin's war for inflation and increased energy costs. A food crisis looms on the horizon as two of the world's largest exporters of wheat and fertilizer are at war. If the war has already caused this much disruption after just 2 1/2 months, imagine how a prolonged war will impact the world.

Hence the pro Russian and defeatist fallacy, “don’t poke the bear because if it bites us it’s our fault”, and you’ve fallen for it.

I am a realist. Forget the blame game and deal with the reality of an ongoing war that can spread beyond Ukraine's borders. With Sweden and Finland joining NATO, the stakes have been raised, especially for the US, which is the only country that can guarantee their sovereignty. NATO is a paper tiger without the blood and treasure of the US. We have invested $60 billion so far in this rat hole with no end in sight. We have drawn down our own stocks of weapons to send arms to Ukraine. All of this for a country we have no obligation to defend. Contrast that with our reaction to the CCP seizing Hong Kong.

Using that analogy, then it is incumbent on us to send our forces into Ukraine to confront the Russians and kill them. Will this precipitate a nuclear war? So what seems to be your response. It is worth the risk. Enough of this proxy war, let's get it on. Personally, Ukraine is not worth one American life and certainly not risking a nuclear war over. Let the Europeans resolve it.

Hence the maxim “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”.

LOL. Oh, yes we do. Many times.

And Russia is run by a terrorist regime.

So are Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism and China.

Why should we go further than that? Instead of sending more weapons, we should be using a diplomatic full court press to arrive at a negotiated solution. Bragging about supplying real time intelligence to kill Russian generals and taking out Russian warships just adds fuel on the fire.

Why doesn't the UK send troops into Ukraine? You have nuclear weapons. It would be a good test to see if Putin would resort to tactical nuclear weapons if he is losing the war or if he is bluffing. NATO did nothing of significance about the annexation of Crimea. Blaming the US is always the fall back position for Europe

What is your source for the Trump reference? Trump is correct that Biden and Zelensky are corrupt. Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle

The four demands to end the war were a disingenuous crock.

I bet that Zelensky will eventually agree to them with some security guarantees. He has already said that he has no desire to join NATO and it is doubtful Ukraine could qualify for the EU.

Ukraine won't be part of NATO. Of course Finland and Sweden and maybe others want to join NATO. Essentially the US becomes the guarantor of their sovereignty up to and including nuclear war. Good deal for them, not so much for us. Only 5 NATO countries have met their 2% of GDP on defense obligation. Uncle Sap picks up the tab again. And bears the brunt of the sacrifice in blood and treasure.

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