Posted on 09/04/2022 6:21:44 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Ultimately, that is probably why Zelensky declined. Russia will learn from their mistakes and launch from their bases in Crimea and Donbass again.
Russia won’t go back to the February 24 line of control.
Russia must secure the Crimean water supply from the Dnipro River. So Luhansk, Donetsk and most of Kherson are the minimum.
And to connect Donetsk and Kherson, they will keep most of Zaporizhia.
I posted a thread on a daily update here. What may be telling, is that Ukraine really pounded the area with HIMARS attacks on bridges and depots. That should have been a clear signal they were going to try to take Kherson back. Ignoring Russian propaganda, Russian forces have not shown they were well prepared for what they knew was coming. Ukraine has made important footholds in a week, and Russia had time to get ready for this.
For now, this is only wishful thinking (🤞🙏😇). The lack of a clearly strong Russian response hints that their ability to sustain the war has really degraded.
Then Z thought, oh hell, I can milk Biden for another 30 mil, at least!
He did not create them. We did. Keep being ignorant.
They’re irreconcilable differences.
In the noughties, Ukraine wanted to be the middle man benefiting from Russian oil and gas, but benefiting also from the EU market. It was broke. It needed good relationships with boyh the east and the west.
EU integration required a massive clean-up of corporate standards, modernisation, and transparent government.
Russia was having none of that. It operates through gangsterism, bribery and corruption... And brutally oppressed all opposition to the kleptocracy. One Russian magnate who proposed that Russia ditch its oligarchy and corruption had his entire business empire stolen off of him, got a spell in prison, and is now living in exile.
On Putin’s orders, Azarov and Yanukovych (classic Russian gangsterists) put a torch to the EU deal and locked Ukraine into a toxic contract that gave Russia effective control over its economy. It fatally undermined the Budapest Memorandum. They didn’t care. Both men walked away into exile in Russia, clutching a fortune.
All of that happened before any western meddling.
Noe, Putin has clarified that he cannot tolerate ANY “Europeanisation” of Ukraine. He will only allow it to be Russian. Since he couldn’t get his own way through assassination attempts, provoking separatists, using proxies like Wagner, he launched the invasion....
But Putin said explicitly at the time he only wanted the Donbas. Now he wants the whole south. Putin’s Duma can’t make it’s mind up what they’re fighting for either!
They’ve said: Denazification, promotion of the Russian language, nostalgia for the USSR, Russkyi Mir, repopulation of western Russia because of the middle class brain drain and plummeting birth rate, reconquering the Baltics as well as Ukraine, sticking it to the USA, driving the European Union economy of a cliff, they need the coast, they want Russua to connect to Transnistria... And let’s not forget “all our hopes are with the famine”.
Ukraine therefore has no incentive to discuss peace with Russia. Working out a deal that Russia would stick to for more than a week, that doesn’t involve giving Russia the whole smorgasbord of its bullshit wants AND GETTING NOTHING OUT OF IT THEMSELVES is like nailing Jello to a teflon wall.
If Ukraine thought for one minute that a peace deal with Putin would NOT be like taking an even bigger red hot poker up the arse than the Special Military Operation is delivering currently, they’d have done it already.
“They’re irreconcilable differences.”
Agree they are now...but not in April.
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