Under this scenario Russia would have military and economic control of occupied Ukraine under its own governing body, imitating Israel’s de facto rule of Palestinian territory seized from Jordan in 1967.
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Witkoff, who is also tasked by Trump with bringing peace to the Middle East, is understood to support the idea, which the Americans believe circumvents barriers in the Ukrainian constitution to ceding territory without holding an “all-Ukraine” referendum.
It isn’t a question of stupidity. It’s a question of power.
Without Western arms and armor to hold territory, both Israel and Russia can just seize the land and kill anyone who objects.
Ukrainians can know it’s bullshit in the same way the Palestinians (or Armenians or Tutsis or Rohingra Muslims) can know they are getting a raw deal. But what are they going to do about it, except eat lead?
They’ve killed about a million Russians so far, and held the invasion a few hundred km from their border. I’d call that something they can do about it.
They have the luck (“luck”) of the entire first world funding them to defend against Russia, instead of Gaza where it’s 100% the opposite, so they’re not in the horrifying situation the Palestinians are in. Which I’m sure frustrates Russia to no end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controversy
Unlike in Vietnam, I’d say “they’re trying to kill us all and take our home, but we’re killing them instead” is a pretty good model of success for the Ukrainians.
It would be great if they had other options. Hanging Putin and demobilizing everyone, and rebuilding both countries, would be a great start.
When the bulk of the Russian active military remains untouched and the Ukrainians are mostly killing foreign mercenaries, prison conscripts, and the elderly surplus population?
Unfortunately, this moment in history was overdetermined. Westerners desperately wanted their new proxy war, with Afghanistan and Iraq drawing to a close. And Putin (not unlike Netanyahu) needed a national emergency to cling to power. So here we are.
I think there were ways out. But a lot of them started in 1991, when the USSR was cracking up. Bush aligning with Putin, Western Europe and the Middle East slaving itself to Russian natural gas, the global governments letting their private media get gobbled up by wealthy white nationalists… none of it helped. By the time we got to Maiden, it was pure Fash-on-Fash violence. Just two far-right governments screaming “Regime Change” at one another. Basically the same setup as Iraq-Iran in '88 and ending in the same grisly generational holocaust.
The Europeans will hang Putin and demobilize the Russian military the day before the Americans hang Trump and demobilize ICE.
Yeah! That’s in “The Art of War,” right? You’re supposed to send your “elderly” and other random dregs you can dig up first to fight a critical war. And then, once you’ve depended on all those “surplus” people for several years, you move on to your trained troops, the actual military. Obviously. It’s just part of the Russian mastery of military strategy that meant they
took over the country in three daysslowly pushed forward and got the mission accomplished and went home in a few monthsfought a Pyrrhic victory over the space of a year and a half and then negotiated a partition and then started rebuilding and preparing for next random invasion of some neighbor countrygot stuck at the border for years, ruined their economy and any respect their military or kit might have had on the world stage, and are now scrounging around for any possible military-age males they can lay hands on to keep feeding into the grinder, hoping that if they keep it up long enough, it’ll work.I have more to say about the rest of your ridiculous message, but I don’t think it’s really necessary.
I mean, you seem really invested in this conflict and unable to hear anything contrary to Ukraine cheerleading.
So… Good luck, I guess.
Yeah, I’m just coming in this thread and saying totally weird counterfactual nonsense, just kind of anything that serves the narrative I am trying to portray. It doesn’t even have to make sense.
The way to deal with a raw deal is to say “no deal”. Appeasement of tyrants and bullies just strengthens their position and encourages them to take more. They’ll never stop, because they’re never actually satisfied, there is no such thing as having “taken enough” and eventually they’re going to make up reasons they need more. It never ends. That’s why we must fight tyranny to the death, to the last man, never give in, and be willing to die for what we believe in. Maybe what we believe in is wrong, but it’s better than living in a world you can’t accept anymore. Vichy France is not a good place to be. We learned these lessons after WW2, we knew tyranny had taken refuge in the Soviet Union and called itself communism, but eventually they too fell, and we thought we had found the answer to it, because we had defeated the Soviet Union with trade and peace and prosperity, we thought we could kill tyranny itself with trade and peace and prosperity. The long peace throughout and afterwards made us lazy and apathetic to the inherent dangers of tyranny and fascism, but nope, it wasn’t gone at all, it was festering below the surface and now it’s come back, seemingly everywhere all at once. And we’re going to have to learn these lessons again and understand why people were willing to die for our freedom.
Obviously the folks in the West Bank are just too stupid to take this advise.
It’s not their fault the entire western world supports Israel’s genocidal zionist ideals. They have been put in a no-win situation. By us. We are sometimes the baddies. Just like we were when we genocided the peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africa. I am not trying to excuse whataboutisms going back centuries and millennia. We are not our ancestors, and I am not my government. But we have inherited and participated in the systems they put in place, and no matter how entrenched and complex those things we must continue trying to fix them. Giving up and accepting “the reality” is not an option.
Ukrainians are exceptionally innovative on the battlefield. The longer this drags on, the more likely Russia will lose. Putin needs a win for internal optics just as much as Ukraine needs arms and fighters.
Unfortunately, they’re outnumbered by more than an order of magnitude. They’re getting ground down as time goes on, and for all its stupidity the Russian military is not small or fragile. Basically, the Russians only have to win once to win, Ukraine has to survive every month that goes by, time after time.
The good guys don’t always win. Just ask the Palestinians.
Russian allies also don’t give a fuck about red lines.
Whereas Ukraine’s allies were so unwilling to commit, that the war that could’ve been finished in the first year is increasingly likely to transition into EU invasion.
Yeah. It’s a fucking disgrace.
Read “Sky Over Kharkiv” for some generally excellent picture of the war from the Ukraine perspective, with some occasional bitterness about the cowardice and apathy of all the Western allies about helping Ukraine to any pivotal extent.
Dan Ellsberg also had some great writing about how this all functions from the POV inside the Western military machine. He called it “the stalemate machine”: We’re motivated enough to help you not lose, but not motivated enough to let you win. And so, you just keep dying, month after month and year after year.
War is not about innovation, it is about money.