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Aside from the rhetoric, there is a growing consensus among Western diplomats, military analysts, military officers, heads of state, and even much of the media about how to end the endless Ukrainian war.
A proposed peace will see a DMZ established somewhere along an adjusted 1,200-mile Ukraine-Russia border. Tough negotiations will adjudicate how far east toward its original borders Russian forces will be leveraged to backstep.
Publicly in the U.S. and covertly in Europe, all accept that a depleted Ukraine will not have the military strength to retake Crimea and the Donbas.
In 2014, both were absorbed by Russia during the Obama administration. Neither that administration nor any since has advocated a military effort to reclaim them.
Loudly, the U.S. — and again quietly Europe — concedes that Ukraine will not be in NATO — a confirmation that Russia will use to justify to its people its disastrous invasion, and even many Ukrainians will accept.
How will the West deter Russian leader Vladimir Putin from his inevitable agenda of reclaiming lost Soviet territory and Russian-speaking peoples? For now, his army is exhausted, its arsenals depleted, and its reputation shattered.
In the future, a commercial corridor, anchored by concessions to American and international mining concerns, will supposedly serve as a tripwire to deter Putin from attacking in-the-way noncombatant Americans.
More practically, Ukrainian forces will be kept fully armed. They have already inflicted perhaps a million casualties on Putin’s forces — possibly five times the dead, wounded, and missing that the Russians lost to the Taliban over that entire decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan.
If Trump can coax even a ceasefire, the oddly bellicose left will still rail about “Munich” and Trump as “Putin’s puppet.”
But after perhaps 1.5 million total Ukrainian and Russian dead, wounded, sick, and missing, transatlantic leftists will quietly admit they never had any realistic plan to win by fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.
And they certainly were not willing — despite what they claimed in their spasms of braggadocio — to send U.S., U.K., European, or NATO ground troops into Eastern Ukraine.
Trump has faced criticism for his volatile, art-of-the-deal approach to Ukrainian diplomacy over the last 10 weeks.
Lost in such criticism is that the Biden administration did not even try to end the war. Instead, in the LBJ-style of “light at the end of the tunnel,” it parroted the great “spring offensive” to come. And when that gambit disastrously failed, it resorted to the banal blank check of “as long as it takes.”
Western leaders simplistically thought that sending more arms, money, and Ukrainians into the cauldron would eventually break Russia — 30 times larger than Ukraine, 10 times richer, over four times more populous, and far less bothered by the mounting toll of its greater losses.
In addition, we even know the likely course of negotiations to end the slaughter.
As soon as Trump pressures Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a ceasefire and a rare minerals mining concession, Putin smells an advantage. So, he digs in and orders his generals to double down on terror strikes for advantage.
And then, once Trump sees that scolding Zelenskyy empowers Putin to back off from a ceasefire, he turns on Putin and puts far greater pressure on him: a secondary embargo on all who buy Russian oil that even the “on to Moscow” crowd had never envisioned.
Once Putin seems to agree, then Zelenskyy thinks he was had and wants a better mining deal or reconsideration of NATO or more sophisticated weapons — until Trump reminds him that the despised U.S., not his beloved Europeans, is his only route to a shaky peace.
So, we know the negotiations will have a yin and yang until there is no solution other than a ceasefire leading to a Korean-peninsula-like hot peace.
Putin always preferred to exploit the Obamas and Bidens of the world. And he did so in 2014 and 2022, rather than the mercurial, unpredictable, and ultimately dangerous Trump, during whose tenure he stayed put within his borders.
He also knows that for all the talk of his puppet Trump, the latter killed hundreds of the Wagner group, pulled out of an asymmetrical missile deal, first sent offensive weapons to Ukraine, sanctioned Russian oil and oligarchs, warned the Germans not to deal with Putin on the Nord Stream II pipeline, and bombed into extinction ISIS of Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Qasem Soleimani.
So, Putin knows that India, China, and others who buy his oil will not if he reneges on his willingness for a ceasefire.
If and when peace comes, we can already foresee the misinformation that will follow: Trump deserves no credit. Zelenskyy remains the true hero. A now hollowed-out Russia was the real winner.
The only mystery?
Since when did the anti-war left prefer an endless and horrific war to a difficult, messy peace?
I am of the Left but I agree mostly with the author’s position. So we are NOT all for keeping fighting. And anyways it’s not the Radical Left that had that Biden position; they all were rooting indirectly for Putin and not NATO. It is the centre Left a la Biden that wanted this defensive war , and I agreed. But now there must be compromise. That will be difficult becuse even if Russia keeps Crimea and Donbas., they will just bide their time, and re attack later on. I can’t see them agreeing to a permanent peace at this stage, even if they can keep Donbas and Crimea.
Maybe someone will give us the date President Trump got the troops out of Afghanistan. Maybe not.
1. The war in Ukraine is a PROXY war created by the US.
2.In 2014 there was a CIA coup d’etat in Ukraine,installing a US puppet.
History has already condemned the US because it is responsible for the deaths of 1.2 million Ukrainian soldiers and 2 million Ukrianian soldiers permanently injured,handicapped.
American imperialism. The objective of the proxy war was to overthrow Putin,install a puppet who would let the US have cheap access to Russia’s natural resources.Because the US every 100 days acquires an extra 1 TRILLION dollars in debt.
Russia is way superior to the US militarily,it is not depleted,it has HYPERsonic missiles that no US missile can shoot down and can easily destroy the US with nuclear bombs. They US has no hypersonic missiles.
The HOUTHIS in Yemen have HYPERsonic missiles that regularly,many times,have hit Israel.The Israeli Iron Dome can not stop them and the Israeli claim of years ago that it had created its own hypersonic missiles is a lie,otherwise they would have shot down the Houthi missiles.
Here is my HYPERSONIC reply. Do you know what the word means? I have a hypersonic rifle. It was designed in the 1930’s. It works quite nicely for weeding out the genetically deficient game in the fields. Mach 1 is hypersonic. Many of our military jets are that fast. The Concorde (you have probably never heard of it) was a HYPERsonic passenger jet. I am sure you are a junior high school graduate much to the shame of your teachers.
Your rifle’s projectile is supersonic, not hypersonic.
The Concorde was supersonic, not hypersonic.
Many fighter aircraft are supersonic, not hypersonic
Hypersonic begins at Mach 5
What’s up, General Armchair? Do you think you fellated that Russian bear enough?
Facts are facts for example regarding the tarifs,say on JAPAN,the best ally of the US. A tarif of 24%.
Totally unfair and shows why Japan,South Korea and China are now talking to form a trade agreement among themselves:
1. Japan holds how much of US DEBT? 100 million of the 37 trillion? No. 500 billion?
No. It is 1 TRILLION. It used to be China,which had 1.3 trillion,now it is 750 billion. Wise move.
2. JAPANESE companies in the US itself employ how many Americans?
10,000? No. 100,000? No, 300,000? No.
It is 1 MILLION,of which 500,000 are manufacturing jobs.
Yet Trump treats Japan like a dog?
What is the tariff on imported US cars into Japan? How many cars do we ship there? Research is your friend.
Another example of facts being important:
Can CHINA exist if Trump were to 100% cut off trade with China? Would China crash?
MOST of what China imports from the US is what?
It is SOYBEANS. Then after that comes I believe corn and then other agricultural products.If Trump cuts off trade with China by 100% then China would just buy soybeans and corn from
BRAZIL.
And from other countries.
Yesterday Trump wrote in a long comment to the American people that he would impose a 50% extra tarif on CHINA if in ONE day (by April 9 ) it didn’t retire its reciprocal 34% tarif on the US.
The tarif on China was 20% then Trump imposed 34% making it 54%,plus the 50% extra would make it 104%.
The US buys mostly what from China?And the US buys more than it sells to China.A lot more. It is mostly CONSUMER goods and in the US 70% of the economy is private consumption.Consumer goods are smartphones,TVs,computers,batteries, etc.
That means Americans would have to pay DOUBLE.
A lot of people in the US will lose their jobs. Because many businesses will collapse,firing all their employees.
There are not that many soybeans. China imports about 20% of its’ foodstuffs from the US. They have already started a campaign to clean your plate and not waste food.
So why doesn’t China do that? Idiot.
The Left was never anti-war.
The American Left is anti-American.
Endless war is extremely profitable for the Left’s donor class …
and it’s a drain on American’s finances – and in some cases it’s a drain of our soldiers.
Endless war also kills lots of innocent people – regardless of which war or what the conflict is about.
Oh, and endless war’s we lose also brings the Left political benefits: Kickbacks for their politicians, money to spend on “refugees” to flood our streets with criminals who hate our guts, illegals to replace us, non-citizens to vote for them, and non-Westerners to count as their political ‘constituents’ …
So for the Left – it’s a win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win, and win.
And that’s just on the points I’ve listed.
Why would the Left want any war to stop – especially this one?
It is difficult for insane people to think straight. Maybe this is at least part of the answer to VDH’s closing question.
Victor needs better sources of information – he just parrots western propaganda
The “Left” has never actually been anti-war; they are just anti-American, and always have been.