Reports coming out of the Minsk peace talks, which are continuing late into the night, claim a tentative deal has been reached by negotiators and a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine is imminent.
Despite that, the fighting in Ukraine doesn’t seem to be slowing down yet, and was if anything accelerating on Tuesday, with rockets hitting Kramatorsk, a former rebel town now under military control.
Many are seeing the fighting as a bad sign for the ceasefire bid, though that may not necessarily be the case, and everyone seems increasingly interested in resolving the matter one way or another.
The big obstacle is opposition from the US and Britain, who have complained that after the last ceasefire collapsed, a new one would put the rebels in an even better bargaining position, as they’ve regained territory in weeks of fighting.
So, the US/UK have proven that they're not really interested in a cessation of hostilities. This is all about Russia. Hopefully, Germany and France succeed despite the pressure from D.C.. That does not mean that the US will just go home afterward. They'll stick around and continue to whisper in Poros ears – causing more neoconish trouble.
During WWII the Germans labeled the Jews as undesirable and rounded them up. The American people need to label neocons and Israeli-Firsters and their media sycophants as undesirables and weed them out of polite society. Work camps are not necessary because there are plenty of empty beds at GITMO that could be put to appropriate use.
The introspection that did not occur after 9/11 needs to be done now, while there is still a chance to avoid serious consequences, known and unintended.
It's not all about Russia, it's all about Israel, or more correctly, the harebrained neocon concept of how Israel should be defended. The whole problem started when arch-neocon Nuland tried to use Putin as a "useful idiot" to influence the European Parliament election. The neocons seem to think that by breaking up the EU and re-constituting the Soviet Union, Europe will be under the US (= neocon/Israeli) jackboot. The problem is that those two situations are incompatible. The EU was a product of the cold war and it was the end of the cold war that led some people to ask if we really needed it anymore. Putin has answered that with a resounding "YES"! What the Israelis think of all this is quite another matter. To me, the big loser in all this is Israel. Yet another neocon scheme has blown up in their faces!
The problem with Putin is not getting a deal with him, it's getting him to live up to the deals he makes. If he continues his Israeli tactics, it will sooner or later be accepted that negotiations with him are a waste of time and force will have to be employed.