US and European officials are finally broaching the possibility of peace talks with Russia in conversations with the Ukrainian government, NBC News reported on Friday.
The position marks a notable shift in US policy toward the war as the US and its closest allies have discouraged the idea of peace talks since Russia invaded in February 2022. Before the invasion, the US refused to engage with Russia on its key security concern: the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO.
The NBC report, which cited unnamed US officials, said the conversations “have included very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal.” Some of the talks took place last month at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a grouping that’s held meetings since the Russian invasion and includes military representatives from about 50 countries.
The talks about negotiations with Russia started due to Western concerns about the situation on the battlefield and the fact that it’s becoming more difficult to keep funding the war.
Recent reports have revealed that Ukrainian officials don’t believe they can win the war, except for President Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Gen. Valery Zaluzhny described the war as a “stalemate” in comments to The Economist and said there will likely be no “beautiful breakthrough.”
A close aide to Zelensky told Time Magazine that Zelensky was “deluding himself” into believing Ukraine could win, adding, “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”
The Time report also quoted a Ukrainian official who said even if the West provides all the weapons Ukraine needs, they don’t have the soldiers to use them. A source told NBC that one of the Biden administration’s top concerns is the lack of “manpower,” saying that the West could provide Ukraine with the weaponry, “but if they don’t have competent forces to use them, it doesn’t do a lot of good.”
The Biden administration has failed so far to get new funding to continue the proxy war. The Pentagon has about $5 billion left made available by an “accounting error” to ship weapons, but other types of aid have dried up. The administration wants another $61 billion to fund the war for another entire year, but Republicans are prioritizing military aid to Israel.
The NBC report said the administration has no indication that Russia is ready to negotiate at this point as time is on Russia’s side, and President Vladimir Putin believes he can “wait out the West.” One idea being floated by US officials to incentivize Ukraine into negotiating is NATO offering security guarantees short of membership, but that would be a non-starter for Russia as one of its main motives for invading was Ukraine’s alignment with the alliance.
Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine only happened in the early days of the war, in March 2022 and April 2022. At the time, Russia’s main demand was Ukrainian neutrality. But since then, Russia has annexed the territory it controls in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk, and now says any peace deal must recognize those territories as Russian.
The US and its allies discouraged the 2022 peace talks, and there is significant evidence they worked to block a deal. According to Ukrainska Pravda, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Zelensky in April 2022 that even if Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Russia, the West was not.
Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder recently said that he was playing a mediating role in some of the 2022 peace talks and that he believed no deal was reached because of the US. “My impression: Nothing could happen because everything else was decided in Washington,” he said. “The Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed.”
Leave the U.S. and the U.K. out of it and things will be fine.
Without the U.S., this never would have started in the first place. The CIA takeover of the demonstrations in 2014, turning them into an illegitimate coup and deposing a democratically elected president, are what started all this.
Some people may go a bit further in time to NATO expansion but point well taken.
This.
Fully agree. NATO should have been disbanded as soon as the Soviet Union was. Instead, it was turned into an offensive military force, totally illegitimate.
After the disintegration of the U.S.S.R., NATO’s first ever legit mission was in the Bosnian war against Serbians. Laughable.
But then again, everything was laughable in the way the USA promoted and exerted their influence in the Balkan wars. Especially Kosovo.
Because of the US’s need for control/influence in Europe/Middle East/South Asia, NATO will always exist and members will serve as US proxies.
“Always” doesn’t exist in reality. As Siddhartha taught 2,500 years ago, all things are impermanent. Empires like the U.S. rise & fall, and the U.S. empire won’t exist forever. We have to fight for the right things. Even if we don’t live long enough to see our goals be accomplished, there’s no point in giving up and saying it will always be this way.
Good point and I agree. The Empire is definitely on the decline as the world shifts from a unipolar to a multi-polar model. Quite evident seeing how much the American economy is militarized. The Empire is quite desperate and is trying to reassert it’s dominance/influence world-wide; Europe, Middle East and the the Far East and preparing to drag everyone into the fray.
Militarily, NATO was irrelevant at the breakup of the Soviet Pact. My point was not to emphasize that NATO is here to stay, but more that NATO is inextricably tied to the Empire’s influence in Europe/Middle East. Only when we see more uniform power distribution on a global scale will we see NATO dissolve.
The Empire will have to learn that it has to share that loaf of bread, but we know that it will only do so kicking and screaming meanwhile promoting global conflict to feed its MIC.
We are living in very “interesting” times as they say.
Agree, but it may take longer than our lifetimes for the U.S. empire to fall. Or it could be tomorrow. As Chris Hedges, who has witnessed revolutions, said, there’s always a triggering event, and there’s no way to know what it will be or when it will happen. The current decline of the U.S. empire will make its fall possible after the triggering event, whatever and whenever that is.
Shouldn’t have discouraged the 2022 overtures then; It would have been FAR better for everyone to conduct discussions, in good faith, on Russia’s principal demands:
1. Recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea – a no brainer; done is done.
2. An end to the fighting in Donbas, and limited self rule for the separatists within a Ukrainian nation – another no brainer; fight the issues out in court, parliament and the voting booth and stop shooting
3. A declaration of Ukrainian neutrality, and an end to weapons assistance from the west – good for everyone; and it worked pretty well for Austria and Finland for 75 years
4. “Denazification” of the Ukrainian government – pretty vague, but a good start would be disbanding the Azov Battalion, at least to the extent of no longer including them in the national security forces.
In exchange, Russia could probably have been persuaded to give up some things, including supply of natural gas at below market rate, and security guarantees.
Instead, what do we have? Oh Yeah, we “taught Putin a lesson”. And, in exchange, Ukraine will likely lose the occupied provinces for good; much of Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed, near half of Ukraine’s population has left and will never come back, there are hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, Ukraine has lost access to any energy resources in the sea of Azov or the eastern black sea, lost the world’s largest nuclear power installation, lost a huge hydroelectric project, lost the manufacturing complex in Mariupol, lost huge swaths of fertile farmland, and the US is out over 100 billion dollars.
What. A. Waste.
Not for the racket.
The whole purpose of this U.S. proxy war, which is exactly what this is, is to weaken Russia. That’s why they didn’t do the fair & rational things that you propose.
Even General Milley (no wonder he got out while the getting was good) was thinking more clearly than the clearly senile Biden and the neocon scum he has surrounded himself with:
Top US general argues Ukraine may be in a position of strength to negotiate Russian withdrawal
Win win for the US
Even General Milley (no wonder he got out while the getting was good) was thinking more clearly than the openly senile Biden and the neocon scum he has surrounded himself with:
Top US general argues Ukraine may be in a position of strength to negotiate Russian withdrawal
This guy is full of it. Russia’s failures? What failures would those be exactly? They’ve taken eastern Ukraine and held off the “offensive” to try to take it back. Even last year, when this interview was conducted, only fools and liars said that Russia was being defeated or was being unsuccessful.
I suggest watching and/or reading former military people like Scott Ritter and retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor. Those people know what they’re talking about, and they don’t lie. You may not agree with their opinions, but at least you’ll get true facts from them instead of this nonsense.
CNN, along with all corporate/mainstream/establishment media is not a good source for anything except empire propaganda, whether geared toward the left or the right.
My point wasn’t to endorse everything that Milley said, but just to highlight the fact that there were at least some voices in the administration (ok, well military) who recognized that things were not going to get better for Ukraine.
MacGregor started saying the war was all but over — within a week or ten days — the week it began, and continued saying so for months. Did he ever change his story?
I agree with him, though that’s mainly an opinion (he clearly didn’t mean that it was literally, formally over). It was over before it started as far as I’m concerned. Ukraine never had a snowball’s chance in hell of beating Russia in a war. The U.S. was just trying to increase its global hegemony by weakening Russia, and I’m sure the people in charge always knew that Ukraine couldn’t win. That doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t lie about that in public.
I think in the fog of war MacGregor thought that Russia was going in with a lot more troops than 150,000 (Also as I am not a close follower of MacGregor’s work do you have any links to support this. Not saying you are full of it, but I would honestly like to see how his thinking evolved so as to gauge his reliability as an analyst). So his assumption seemed to have been that Russia was going for the shock and awe style war that the USA so inhumanely practices where we kill ’em all and let god sort them out. It just so happens that after almost 2 years of war ~9,700 civilians have been killed in the conflict. Israel managed that many in a month. The U.S. destruction of Iraq killed ~600,000 between 2003-2006 with many more to follow. Russia has actually shown restraint when compared to “western” war fighting practices. Either way, MacGregor wasn’t alone in overestimating Russian capability as many of the same MSM voices telling us that the Russian army is now degraded were singing a different tune in the lead up to and in the opening weeks of the war. They made Russia out to be a threat to all of Western Europe. It’s clear that Russia is not the juggernaut it was made out to be, but also it’s not the degraded incompetent force as now claimed by many.
No deal. That offer is no longer on the table. The blood spilled has drowned that.
Nothing will be given up by Russia. They won. They keep Donbas, and a lot more.
NATO must face up to what it must give. For example, it will need to pull out forward based forces from Poland and the Baltic States.
NATO in its current form might not survive. Its survival will be a “win” for it.
The most the Russians can likely hope for is that they eventually secure Donetsk and Luhansk and get to keep them and a land corridor connecting them to Crimea.
They didn’t even want that. Before all this started, Putin said in a discussion with other Russian government leaders that he didn’t want to annex anything. Russia felt that it was forced into this. While I certainly see their point and the U.S. is clearly the entire problem here (the U.S. includes its vassals and lackeys like NATO and Europe outside of Russia), I think Russia could have tried other things like an alliance with China and pressuring the U.S. to back the f*ck off before invading Ukraine.
My point is that Russia just wants to survive and not feel threatened. They never hoped to annex eastern Ukraine or any other territory after getting Crimea back, which Khrushchev should never have given to Ukraine in the first place.
Correct. Twice, Putin turned down applications to be annexed. Twice. Russia wanted to be a part of the Western Alliance after the Soviet Union dissolved. A part of a multi polar world. But of course, we said no.
I know. Points out who’s really the bad guy here. Russia tries to play nice multiple times, and the U.S. tells it to take a hike. But hey, no one ever said that empire was about sharing, so …
And you believe that? Wow, talk about gullible.
Yes, and I also believe that the Earth is round and that water is wet. Ya know, facts. Sorry you’re brainwashed and delusional, thinking Russia is particularly evil when it’s your country that is far more so.
Like I said, talk about gullible.
There will only surrender negotiations. After the lies at Minsk, Russia will trust not trust NATO with paper agreements.
Neither NATO nor any NATO regimes were signatories to the Minsk agreements.
France and Germany were key players and signed at Minsk. They are in NATO. Watch that video. They also ignored another signed agreement in 2019 called the Steinmeier Formula that Zelensky signed.
The signatories to Minsk were Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the seceded Donetsk and Luhansk republics.
And well before that, there were multiple U.S. lies to Russia that NATO wouldn’t expand “one inch” eastward beyond the newly unified Germany. Lies upon lies, and they brainwash people to think that Putin and Russia are evil. To be clear, I think that all large countries and their leaders are evil, but Putin’s and Russia’s evil pales in comparison to that of the U.S. and its vassals and lackeys.
Quarter of million young men and thousands more civilians in the ground later, now we’re open to talks? Not to mention the hundreds of billions of taxpayer money we thrown away for nothing other than worsen inflation. Literally nothing was gained by extending Ukraine for another year. Cede Crimea and the Donbass where the current battle lines are, declare neutrality for Ukraine, and everyone can finally move on from this neocon mess…
“Quarter of million young men and thousands more civilians…” Sorry to tell you, “THEY DON’T CARE!” “hundreds of billions of taxpayer money…” Again, “THEY DON’T CARE!” Here’s what they care about: https://youtube.com/shorts/_IGU_7alJ80?si=4UJwV2r4UOs54vmN
I bet there will be another major conflict pretty soon. Without war the American economy crashes.
How about supporting Israeli bombing of schools and hospitals? That might spark another major war.
The US and Israel are totally devoid of humanity and conscience. All they worship are money and power both ofc which they are going to lose. It could not happen to more deserving countries.
The US has Discouraged???
Wait a sec, I have to go revise my Oxford Dictionary to read: Discouraged — forbade, under threat of Sanctions.
Ok, done. Wait …..
Oh and Asked — demanded under threat of retaliation.
Ok, done – for now.
Yep, i remember the ceasefire with Chechnya in 1997 and subsequent “peace” negotiations that led to a full scale invasion of Chechnya 3 years later. The Chechens were had big time.
Negotiate with Putin and be prepared for a worst attack later to take more if not all once his Army gets rebuilt.
There aren’t any plausible circumstances under which the Ukrainians march to Moscow and replace Putin’s regime with a pro-Ukrainian regime.
A pretense of “negotiation” might end the war more quickly by saving face for Putin. Admitting you failed and knocking it off is hard for most people.
Take it up with the U.S. government. Even they now see the futility of continuing the slaughter. At some point someone is going to have to negotiate with the Russians however distasteful that may be to you personally.
“once his Army gets rebuilt”
Your detachment from reality continues apace.
Irrelevant. From the demise of the Soviet Union to the Ukrainian coup of 2014, Russia and Ukraine peacefully shared a naval base at Sevastopol. It would have been available to NATO if Ukraine had become a NATO country and the Russo-Ukrainian agreement had run out.
Why do you so consistently ignore facts of history.
There was precisely zero chance of Ukraine becoming a NATO member state.
And under the Kharkiv Pact, the agreement ran until 2042 with a five-year renewal option.
I would think Russia’s concerns were real regardless of whether Ukraine was officially in NATO or not.
Did I say otherwise?
No. I assumed an implication.
And yet you were still a Putin fanboy up until 2014.
The Chechen conflict is out of context.
I remember 2014, the Minsk Accords, “fuck the EU!”, the military buildup till 2022, the start of the SMO IN 2022, the USA/UK prohibition of peace talks shortly thereafter, and, the latest Team America “counteroffensive”………
We know how that all turned out.
Ukraine is FUBAR and they’ve been had since 2014.
Do you really think, that at the end of this, Crimea and the Donbas will go back to whatever is left of Ukraine? I’ve asked you this in the past and you evaded the question. Please let us know.
At this point, the only thing that will save Ukraine is getting rid of Zelensky and coming to the table to negotiate some form of settlement.
Team America will craft a clever story to spin it as a positive outcome. I can’t wait to see the faces of Blinken and Nuland.
Blinky and the cookie lady. What a pair.
The Chechens are not exactly the most trustworthy folks. Caused a lot of problems in Russia. A little bit of terrorism.
My goodness, Donald, this article must ENRAGE you. Look at NBC and Time magazine and a former German chancellor AND a Ukrainian news source ALL citing the same facts you claim are ‘Russian propaganda’ !
Why on Earth are you on here ? You should be e-mailing the lot of them with your Totally Convincing ™, and Entirely Evidence-Based ™, assertions on how you’re correct in your claims and no-one else is !
You could make it one of those “open letters” signed by the upwards-of-three antiwar.com Commenters whose alternate-reality summer houses (where they live year-round) neighbour yours and who agree with your ramblings in defiance of statistical probability.
Could be a Pulitzer in it for ya. Maybe a vaunted Nobel Peace Prize. IF you can convince the US government to keep Ukraine fighting a war you think they won years ago !
He’s a troll here.
It’s entirely possible. But there is something so consistent and almost…Andy-Kaufman-like…in his displacement from observable reality that a part of me suspects he genuinely believes what he says OR has constructed a masterpiece of a character.
And it’s this cognitive dissonance in his narrative that fascinates me on a psychological level.
Everything our administration can and may do is colored by the presidential elections of next year.
Truer words have seldom been spoken. Our Congress and politicians are a bunch of corporate hacks with no interest in making things better as compared to lining their own pockets.Just ask Schumer and Pelosi,Thomas and the others on the Court.
Yes, but the only real solution is to greatly lower our population and live in much less dense societies so that we eliminate the need or even desire for big government. This is a very long-term goal, and none of even our great grandchildren would be alive to see it. What you describe is just an end result of power corrupting, which it always does.
Modern societies are naturally tending toward a gradual decline in population.
Capitalism cannot exist with fewer and fewer people educated to Earth’s natural organic energy balance and consuming less and less per person.
Hence, Israeli death eaters bomb hospitals and schools and the US engineers an attack on Russia.
Capitalism is a cancer that must be removed, but it’s just a symptom, not a root cause of anything. Humans began overpopulating and living unnaturally and therefore harmfully thousands of years before capitalism.
Humans are one if Earth’s beautiful creatures. We disagree on what you assert.
Whether you think humans are “beautiful creatures” is just your opinion, and we couldn’t disagree more. The human race fits the medical definition of being a cancerous tumor on the Earth, and that’s not my mere opinion, it’s a fact. It doesn’t have to be this way, but when humans made the choice to use agriculture instead of living naturally as hunter-gatherers, they necessarily decided that they didn’t care about the Earth or the life here other than their own.
Do you know that by definition, “agriculture” means killing native plants, and the animals that depend on them? What’s your justification for killing any life that you don’t eat? Being a human supremacist is no justification, you’ll have to come up with something a lot better than that.
Agriculture is the foundation of human culture. Regenerative agriculture is the only known way to reverse global climate collapse and indiscriminate war against life from agricultural chemical poisons.
I understand your bitterness and do not personally believe humans can learn to overcome manipulation by college educated propagandists. We humans are a social animal that survived by reacting to warnings of imminent threat from large predators and minute bacteria. Universities continuously teach thousands of new graduates how to frighten people with imaginary threats by phantom enemies.
Humans will probably become extinct quite soon. There will be no more paintings, literature, concerts, or loving parents raising families the best they can. This does not have to happen but it will simply because humans are one of Earth’s animals and can be herded.
That’s false and totally ethnocentric. Hunter-gatherers not only have cultures, but are generally far more mentally and spiritually evolved than people in civilization. I challenge you to understand and explain some of their mythologies, for example. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization, not culture, and civilization is the problem.
Some people, mainly hunter-gatherers and ascetic monks, are on the right path and refrain from doing the wrong things and living harmfully on the planet. Unfortunately, those people are only a small fraction of 1% of humans, but my point is that humans don’t have to behave and live this way (I agree that the ruling class spends a lot and has become great at brainwashing). See this outline for more details: https://rewilding.org/fixing-humans-by-expanding-our-consciousness/
What a load of nonsense. By the way, love my new chainsaw. Got a few red maples growing in the crowns of some of my oaks. They will be cut down this winter. It has already gotten some work on the buckthorn and autumn olive invasives. Cut them down then hit the stumps with high concentration glyphosate so they don’t grow back. Oh, and the human race is no more a cancerous tumor than any other species that evolved on this planet.
Really? Name one other species that does any of the following:
1. Grossly overpopulates with no other species controlling it by predation;
2. Causes extinctions, and humans are causing a Great extinction even right now;
3. Unnaturally warms the atmosphere;
4. Unnaturally acidifies the oceans;
5. Unnaturally pollutes everything and everywhere, or for that matter, anywhere;
6. Adds substantial amounts of radioactivity to our biosphere.
And those are just off the top of my head!
Top of the chain, Jeff.
So the king of invasive species hates invasive species. How ironic
Putin and EVERYBODY knows exactly what US “negotiations” look like: https://youtu.be/KutUcln5CKk?si=F00wSV4Eqydw00Mo
They , the Americans and European officials, had a chance to do that a while ago but they did everything to derail the peace process then.
Somebody tell me why this did not happen a year ago before the defense contactors made Billions and Ukraine was turned inti an Iraq like state.
That’s a huge part of the reason, you answered your own question. The other issue here is that the U.S. fomented this proxy war in order to try to weaken Russia. That’s been an abject failure, so now they’re trying to find a way out through negotiation. However, I wouldn’t trust the U.S. in negotiations any farther than I can throw the planet, and I’m sure Russia doesn’t either.
Trump pulled us out of the INF treaty, and the Open Skies treaty. So, no, Russia does not trust us.
Agreed. So how do you negotiate considering that? Trusting the other side to do what it promises is the basis of negotiations.
I think the USA would have to make some unilateral moves to show its sincerity. Stuff that doesn’t demand or expect reciprocation from the Russian Federation (or DPRC, so long as we’re preventing World Wars).
If the USA left NATO, that’d be one. If the USA slashed its nuclear arsenal (down to, say, 500 warheads as a first step towards total nuclear disarmament and ratifying the 2021 U.N. TPNW), that’d be big.
Hells, if the President addressed the U.N. General Assembly and basically admitted to all the awful s**t the USA has done to the world’s nations, admitting you have a problem is the first step.
Taking a Noninterventionalist path for the USA, plus a lot of time adhering to the principles of “trade and friendship with all, alliances with none” and maybe not being the world’s arms-dealer, would be a start.
I agree that’s what the U.S. could do to try to gain some credibility for negotiations. The problem is that you’re asking empire to not act like empire. I’d love to see that happen, but the chances of it are almost zero.
Almost zero until nobody will loan the US any gas money.
You left out caging Israeli attack dogs.
The US is still imagining these talks as being about how much Russia will give up, how much will Ukraine get back over the table that it cannot win back on the battlefield.
The loser gives. That is the way of negotiations. The US and Ukraine are the losers. That means the question is how much MORE will they give up.
How much more territory will Russia get? Odessa? The whole coast?
Will Ukraine also give territory to Poland, Hungary, others?
So, how much of Ukraine will be left in the defeated rump state?
How will Ukraine be made truly and completely neutral? Disarmed?
How will Russian-speakers be protected from those who cheated and lied in the Minsk 2 Accords?
How will the Nazis in Ukraine be eliminated? (There really are some, the US Congress itself even said so in legislation before this war.)
Will NATO be forced to make “security architecture” arrangements for all of Europe in order to re-establish European peace? What will those be? A rollback of NATO forward forces?
If NATO won’t make such a peace, how much worse can it get, and how quickly?
“how much worse can it get, and how quickly?”
A lot, lot worse and in an instant. That’s why it’s imperative that we get someone in the Whitehouse who is open to negotiating. I am onboard for Kennedy, but at this point anyone is better than Biden.
Things can always get worse, and they can always get better. I remember a bunch of us saying that it couldn’t get worse than Nixon, then we got Reagan. I stopped saying it couldn’t get worse after that.
The problem with what you propose is that lesser evils, like Kennedy or anyone else, are just more evil. Sure, Kennedy may be against this war, but he’s been as bad on the Middle East situation as anyone, a hardcore Zionist who would defend Israel if they burned every Palestinian child alive. You’re going to support someone like that?
I fully understand the ultimate danger of nuclear war, and have been saying loud and clear since the U.S. reaction to the Russian invasion that our No. 1 goal here must be to prevent it. But putting another type of war monger in the White House doesn’t ultimately accomplish that, even if Kennedy would back down in the Ukraine situation.
I believe that Kennedy’s take on Israel is politically motivated after the gaffe about bioweapons, and that in practice, as president his policies would be bit more even handed. I only base that belief on hope and the fact that his rabid pro Israel stance doesn’t seem to line up with the rest of his worldview.
I would never support anyone based on a hope like that. But if he were to get elected, that hope would be all we have regarding the Middle East situation.
“”… Broach the Idea of Peace Talks …””
can’t even have actual peace talks, the effers can only “broach the idea”
Those words will hang around into 2024, as a talking point for Slow Joe during the campaign.
The USA has to approach this carefully and subtly in order to save face in the global theatre and to make it seem that this was their idea and that they are the ‘savior’ of what will remain of Ukraine.
Remember the US will have a lot of investment capital riding on the rebuild of Ukraine.
I wonder if Russia will be asking for kickbacks since they helped with the demolition phase of this ‘project’.
Yeah riiiight. We stopped peace prospects last year. Three times. “Broach the idea of peace talks in Ukraine”. Can’t stop laughing at that one……………………………
US, European Officials Broach the Idea of Peace Talks With Ukraine
Good luck losers from the NEOCON Uniparty. Russia will only accept unconditional surrender and half or more of Ukraine.
Too little too late and Russia will never trust the Western globalists again.
It is as if the American bully had his a$$ kicked and then said wait I will let you have something, as the other kid holds a handgun as backup.
Joey Biden did that, so FJB!
Why should any country trust us?
America now has a reputation of being a dishonest corrupt evil citadel where once stood a shining city on a hill.
Unless Putin has changed his mind, Russia doesn’t want Ukraine. It only reluctantly annexed eastern Ukraine. I’m sure that Russia would accept what it now controls, along with assurances that Ukraine will never be part of NATO. Don’t know how the west makes those assurances believable, but that’s what Russia has always wanted here.
Agree. The Russian Federation wanted a gap between itself and an expansion NATO. If that gap (Ukraine) could have been friendly, great – but a neutral zone is just fine, too.
As long as Russia gets Odessa I care not.
There were a number of objectives in this war. The Ukrainian preparation for war on Donbas was a deliberate provocation to put Russia in a no win situation. If Russia chose to back off, millions of refugees would have fled to Russia. Ukraine and NATO would have won. But Russia stepping to intervene was to bring another desireable outcome. Massive sanctions, world-wide condemnation, economic ruin, social tensions, military losses. Weakening Russia. The short term pain to European economy and global disruptions were seen as acceptable risks. However, what makes Ukrainian conflict and Gaza similar — is the very sinister nature of population engineering. Just as Israel wants Palestinians out of Gaza, the bizzare coalition in Kiev between hard core Russia-haters from West Ukraine and globalists represented by Zelenski — want Russians reduced to second class citizens in Ukraine unless they voluntariky lesve, But there is another layer of population reengineering going on, Kiev coalition is taking a decisive shot atvOrthodox Christian Ukraimians, . In the fog of war, their authentic church was shutvdown and their property transfered to a State created Orthodox Church. To make his point more forcefully, Christmas was to be shifted to Western calendar.
And is there a point to sending thousands to die for no particular purpose, fot places like Mariupol, Bakhmut or counteroffensive on Zaporozhie.
It is in my view not accidental. Whatever Ukraine remains in the end, itvshoukd be assured remaining Ukrainians are hating Russia for hundreds of thousands keft.
None of the plans are materializing. Thevworld did not sign up to condemn and sanction Russia. Multiple Russian majority regions will not be returning to Ukraine.
People who were used again and again in history are West Ukrainians. Zelenski used them again. Russia shouldvlm offer them independence, not to be again under somebody’s domination. If Slovakia can manage, so can Galicija . This would isolate Zelenskinand his globalists. People more interested in fullfilung Washingtom objectivves than the aspirations of Ukrainian people, With change of regim in Kiev and inndependent West Ukraine, Rusdia would have achieved its goals.
Look at a map and one can see that Moldova, Odessa, and Mykolaiv on the Black Sea could be successful independent countries similar to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia on the Baltic sea. There is no reason Galicia add Kharkiv can’t be independent good neighbors.
The Dnipro River is a natural boundary. Many strong Russian minds have probably made plans for after the US and Europe fall further into anti-cultural self destruction.
It’s the same BS that happened in the Balkan wars differing only in that Russia has more power to exert to secure and protect it’s own interests and that the USA was afraid to get into direct conflict with Russia.
Fortunately for Russia, the east and Crimea will be in their hands at the end of this.
This would make a great Naked Gun sequel: Naked Gun: The Final Betrayal