Conventional wisdom holds that a negotiated end to the Ukraine war is neither possible nor desirable. This belief is false.
It is also extremely dangerous for Ukraine’s future. The war is not trending toward a stable stalemate, but toward Ukraine’s eventual collapse. Russia has corrected many of the problems that plagued its forces during the first year of fighting and adopted an attrition strategy that is gradually exhausting Ukraine’s forces, draining American military stocks, and sapping the West’s political resolve. Sanctions have not crippled Russia’s war effort, and the West cannot fix Ukraine’s acute manpower problems absent direct intervention in the war. Ukraine’s best hope lies in a negotiated settlement that protects its security, minimizes the risks of renewed attacks or escalation, and promotes broader stability in Europe and the world.
This war is going to end in a negotiation like almost all wars inevitably do and all the extra months of fighting will have been pointless.
The fighting is to provide ammunition at the negotiating table. Currently, Russia isn’t going to accept any negotiated settlement that requires them to leave Ukrainian territory or return kidnapped Ukranian children, for example. But once Russia’s on the ropes there’s a better chance of them doing that.
The NATO alliance will never provide enough aid to put Russia on the ropes. They want the war to continue for as long as possible to hurt Russia.
So you think Russia intends to keep on fighting until it conquers Ukraine?
I think Russia intends on conquering the Donbas region and keeping Crimea, as they have been saying the entire time. How much more of Ukraine they take depends on how negotiations go.
If this war drags on long enough, yeah, they might try to take the whole country.
Russia has passed laws annexing Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts. They invaded Kharkiv and made a run for Keiv and Odessa. Their politicians rant about how Poland and the Baltics are next. You really think anyone’s going to believe that they did all that to keep some territory that they had already occupied?
I just said that as the war drags on Russia is going to conquer more territory - they want their money’s worth.
I think if there had been a negotiation in the beginning for the “Russian speaking regions” that Russia would have stopped. Now that it’s clear there will never be negotiations they have no incentive to stop, and since its clear the West is getting bored with this war they might as well take as much land as they can. The longer the war drags on the more likely it is they’ll just take the whole country.
How many Minsk Agreements did Russia go through, again?
Have a listen to that rambling interview Putin gave Tucker the other day. He thinks all of eastern Europe is “Russian speaking.”
…cause I’m the king of wishful thinking
Russia has consistently signaled that they have no intention of accepting even the current frontline as a negotiating point, as far as recently passed Russian laws are concerned, large areas of currently Ukraininan controlled territory like the city of Kerson are part of the Russian Federation and any agreement that gave them up would be illegal under Russian law.
Moreover, given how well appeasement worked for them in 2014, there is little public support for such a strategy in Ukraine, even if Russia’s stated core goal wasn’t to prevent the possibility of Ukraine joining any defensive agreement that would make a further invasion difficult.
If Russia comes to the negotiating table, it will either be because a large scale collapse is inevitable on either side, or because they’ve run out of North Korean shells at a time where their opponent is gaining access to increasingly more modern weapon systems. The Soviet Stockpile is massive, but you can only empty it once.
Very well-reasoned article, though the political constraints might end up making implementing its recommendations impossible. Hard to see how the US and EU could make the rhetorical shifts it would take. If events continue as they are now, the military realities may preclude it. While it seems advantageous to reach a negotiated settlement for all sides at the moment, this will not remain the case forever.
Just look at the rhetorical narratives in both the government and the media over the last 2 years and you’ll the narrative has been shifting this way for many months, and the foundation for that shift was the completely inconsistent and illogical political theater of the Rs vs the Ds
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Inb4 shitlibs tell me the Quincy Institute is Russian agitprop
Putin is so far past giving the tiniest shit about diplomacy that it will only ever be a stop gap. Crimea was responded to with a whole bunch of wishy washy “diplomatic solutions” and oh look, it happened again. This sort of fake-moderate response of diplomacy and restrain only feeds further into Putin’s war chest.
You cannot reason with empire-building dictators that ignore all such restraints. Russia is no longer a free country, frankly never has been, and should be treated harshly as the territory-hungry, human rights abusing, tyrannical neo-USSR that it is.
You cannot reason with empire-building dictators that ignore all such restraints.
This is correct, which is why Russia ultimately invaded Ukraine, because after 30 years of trying, it was deemed impossible to reason with empire-building dictators in the West that ignore all restraint.
- 600+ global military bases
- pulling out of the intermediate nuclear missile treaty
- killing state and military officials via executive order anywhere in the world
- spending more on military than the next 10 countries COMBINED
- imprisoning 5 times the number of people they represent in world population, and the most per capita than any other nation
- wire tapping their entire citizenry, every single embassy, and accountable to no one
- dozens of black site in countries around the world for torture, medical experimentation, and illegal operations
- dropping more bombs on Korea than all forces combined dropped bombs in WW2
- transferring nuclear technology to Israel
- training hundreds of dictators and death squads throughout Latin America to kill indigenous, black, and left-leaning innocents
- training terrorists all over the world, supplying them with arms and intelligence
- protecting their oligarchs, making the richest people capitalism has ever produced, while life expectancy drops precipitously, maternal mortality grows past the worst in the developed world, homeless increases, and food insecurity spreads
- withholding life saving medicines from the world’s majority to ensure profit margins for their oligarchs
- launching wars for oil
- being the only country to use a nuke against humans, doing it twice, and doing it against civilian population centers
- enforcing collective punishment regimes for multiple generations to cause immense suffering and death in multiple countries
- creating a transnational nuclear military without democratic accountability, staffing it with Nazis, protecting Nazis by distributing them all over the world, creating underground Nazi militias all over Europe, then vetoing and voting against every attempt at the UN to condemn the glorification of Nazis
You are 100% right that you cannot reason with empire-building psychotics, but you have the finger pointed in the wrong direction.
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They literally just murdered Putin’s most prominent political rival. Just yesterday.
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“He was a Nazi,” Russian propagandist’s favorite excuse for killing people.
Most sane lemmy.ml mod
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oh no, I used to use a popular website until it fell apart and I left. That clearly invalidates my entire opinion.
edit: wow, your replies make it obvious you are way down the russian rabbit hole. I’d rather not. See ya.
