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There is no evidence that either side in the Russia-Ukraine war wants to end the fighting and plenty of evidence that they don’t. As the war goes on, so does the propaganda making it difficult to see through the ‘fog of war’, but the ongoing fog of negotiations are more about posturing and blaming the other side for the negotiations going nowhere.
Beyond the propaganda though, it is obvious that both sides want to keep on fighting.
Wars end when someone wins. No one has won and the likelihood of anyone winning remains debatable, but the Russians and Ukrainians hate each other enough (as I’ve been saying since Day 1) to go on slogging it out. It’s not WWIII (as I’ve also been saying since Day 1) it’s more like WWI with drones and GoPros.
President Trump may be able to force a temporary ceasefire, but even that is uncertain. The Israelis wanted to please Trump and Hamas wanted to rearm and prepare for the next round of fighting. And that ‘ceasefire’ didn’t last very long either. Neither Ukraine nor Russia seem especially keen to do likewise. But that’s not an end to the war, it’s an end to a round of fighting. The war is, as anti-war types like to say, endless because the identity of both sides is intimately tied to mutual hostility. Russia needs Ukraine to regain its sense of greatness. Ukraine needs to fight Russia because that is what a nice chunk of its history is about. In between are various ‘mixed’ populations playing odd-man out in the fighting much as they do in Iraq.
Is there any answer to this? Not really. We can force a ceasefire, but the fighting will eventually resume.
The good news is that the Western Europeans are arming up (the Eastern Europeans are an easier sell) and taking some of the burden off our shoulders. That’s good for us. It’s good for them.
With out American money and bidens constant war drumming the killing would have been over years ago.
It was Biden’s appeasement and greenlighting Putin’s “incursion” that led to this invasion in the first place. We forget that Biden and the West did nothing after Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Ditto for Putin’s invasion of Georgia and the two wars in Chechnya.
When you keep appeasing a dictator who has made it clear his ambition is to restore control over former Soviet territories and has been working for many yrs to rehabilitate Stalin’s image, nobody should be surprised by another invasion. The Europeans need to step up and take charge of their own security instead of relying so heavily on the U.S. “umbrella” for security. There is a reason Finland, Sweden, the Baltic states, Poland and others joined NATO. They are responding to the reality of the threat in their own neighborhood.
And the Russians would have taken over the Ukraine.
Youtube certainly provides differing takes on this whole tragic mess, from intelligent people who have actually been there, and that show how this has made for very odd political bedfellows. Elvira Bary is an expat author (“Russian Treasures”–a Dr. Zhivago like scenario, beautifully written) who now lives in the states and offers her take on things like Putin’s mental state and insecurity, and the neo feudal condition of Russia’s class system. After watching many of her videos, one begins to despair of the possibility of Russia and the West ever seeing eye to eye about anything. The “Caspian Report” gives brief but cogent history lessons about why Russia is so paranoid about invasions, given their history, but is critical of Trump’s attempts to reach a ceasefire. Yet it offers (from what I have so far seen) no practical solution. And then one has Tucker Carlson’s interviews with critics like Douglas MacGregor and Jeffrey Sachs, who come close to sympathizing with Russia and blaming NATO for everything (Sachs is just strange). After viewing all of this, I feel more learned about history but still torn about who to side with. Zelensky seems like kind of a corrupt sleazebag at times, but Putin is a wholly unsympathetic character, and the propaganda they feed their own people is so bloody heavy handed. Then again, maybe we do the same thing.
Great analysis, and so true.
Obviously the Russians and Ukrainians will draw their shit out as long as possible until Principal Trump slaps their knuckles with yardsticks hard enough to make them stop but they’re going to have to sit their asses down eventually.
I don’t pay dick in taxes but I want to see the nonsense end. Other Americans DO pay a shit load of taxes and they shouldn’t have to pay for a foreign war. As usual, Trumpy is on the side of ordinary Americans.
In 2023, Trump said he’d end the war in one day. He repeated that. Maybe he meant to say “some day.”
Maybe your mom meant to have an abortion but you lived to curse the world with your execrable presence.
Nobody wins a war, what happens is the ability of one side to continue the war ends.
Russia is the 4th biggest exporter of oil. With oil prices down to about $60 a gallon, it will become more painful for Russia to devote resources to the war. Unfortunately, like the leader of China, Putin is unlikely to care enough about his own people to end the fighting.
Interested readers can see the article “How Trump’s Trade War Is Cutting Russia’s Economic Lifeline: Oil Prices” by Jim Geraghty in the most recent edition of The Economist.
“The Economist” sucks and so do you. I don’t know if “The Economist” swallows though but I bet you do.
Like the song asks, “What side are you on?” Is it Russia or Ukraine? I know you are on the side of the Jews, the Israelis and the Americans but what about these? The only Zelenskyy’s that survived had fled to Russia. The Russians are antisemitic but the Ukrainians are genocidal. Worse than the Poles, worse than the Lithuanians. The killed their ONE MILLION of their neighbors by shooting then in pits. personally (like Babi Yar) for what? the Jews possessions, some vodka and good housing. The Germans killed 5% of the two and a half million Ukrainian Jews, just to teach the Ukrainians how it’s done. They did the rest. If you want to forgive, fine, but don’t say “They did the work” like that Arab beast Bernard Henri-Levy.
If you want to read the truth, read https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/rovno2/files/Rovno_Burds.pdf
endorsed even by Timothy Snyder who loves the Ukranians and absolves them of all their murderous hatreds. That Timothy is a bizarre creature with a Jewish wife. Pounce on him for a change. Instead of Jew Hating Jews. You can denounce Goyyim love/hating Jews. There are plenty. John Leguizamo for one.