I mean, this is true that the offramp was always going to be Russia keeping Crimea and the Donbas, and Ukraine getting some kind of security guarantees that fall short of NATO membership. Unfortunately we took the stupidest, most deadly, most costly way to get to this conclusion.
this is true that the offramp was always going to be Russia keeping Crimea and the Donbas, and Ukraine getting some kind of security guarantees that fall short of NATO membership
That was the offramp back in 2022. It’s not anymore. Ukraine and its Western handlers rejected that deal when they walked out of the Istanbul negotiations, reneging on a deal which the Ukrainians themselves had proposed which would have gotten them everything back except Crimea and the Donbass. Now the reality on the ground has changed significantly and that deal is not being offered anymore by Russia. The new terms are quite a bit harsher:
Russia will be keeping Crimea, Donbass and the other two new regions in their entirety. Either Ukraine surrenders the rest of these regions in a deal or Russia keeps going until they have them. And if this conflict goes on for another year or so even more regions may end up being lost. The longer this goes on the worse the peace terms will be for Ukraine.
Then there is the business of demilitarization and denazification, which will also happen one way or another. Either Ukraine voluntarily reduces its military or Russia does it for them by continuing to grind it down.
And as for the second part of that equation… a regime change is coming anyway. Zelensky is a dead man walking, whether the US forces him to hold elections which he will inevitably lose, after which he will be of no further use and an inconvenient loose end, or whether his own Nazi buddies turn on him and take him out if it looks like he’s trying to make a deal.
As for “security guarantees” the only country that can give that is Russia. The US will never give Ukraine any security guarantees that would risk drawing the US into a direct war with Russia, whereas the Europeans are completely impotent and their “guarantees” meaningless.
There will be no Ukraine in NATO or NATO in Ukraine. Russia will simply never allow that, seeing how this is one of the main reasons why this conflict started to begin with.
The terms didn’t need to be this harsh, nor did this awful conflict need to drag on this long, or even begin at all. Ukraine could simply have abided by the Minsk agreements and it could have kept the entire Donbass and everything else it wanted short of Crimea itself and NATO membership. It could have not walked out of the Istanbul negotiations. It could have continued to negotiate with the Russians instead of passing a law literally making negotiations with Russia illegal.
Every time they chose violence instead of peace they just made things worse and worse for themselves.
I mean, this is true that the offramp was always going to be Russia keeping Crimea and the Donbas, and Ukraine getting some kind of security guarantees that fall short of NATO membership. Unfortunately we took the stupidest, most deadly, most costly way to get to this conclusion.
That was the offramp back in 2022. It’s not anymore. Ukraine and its Western handlers rejected that deal when they walked out of the Istanbul negotiations, reneging on a deal which the Ukrainians themselves had proposed which would have gotten them everything back except Crimea and the Donbass. Now the reality on the ground has changed significantly and that deal is not being offered anymore by Russia. The new terms are quite a bit harsher:
Russia will be keeping Crimea, Donbass and the other two new regions in their entirety. Either Ukraine surrenders the rest of these regions in a deal or Russia keeps going until they have them. And if this conflict goes on for another year or so even more regions may end up being lost. The longer this goes on the worse the peace terms will be for Ukraine.
Then there is the business of demilitarization and denazification, which will also happen one way or another. Either Ukraine voluntarily reduces its military or Russia does it for them by continuing to grind it down.
And as for the second part of that equation… a regime change is coming anyway. Zelensky is a dead man walking, whether the US forces him to hold elections which he will inevitably lose, after which he will be of no further use and an inconvenient loose end, or whether his own Nazi buddies turn on him and take him out if it looks like he’s trying to make a deal.
As for “security guarantees” the only country that can give that is Russia. The US will never give Ukraine any security guarantees that would risk drawing the US into a direct war with Russia, whereas the Europeans are completely impotent and their “guarantees” meaningless.
There will be no Ukraine in NATO or NATO in Ukraine. Russia will simply never allow that, seeing how this is one of the main reasons why this conflict started to begin with.
The terms didn’t need to be this harsh, nor did this awful conflict need to drag on this long, or even begin at all. Ukraine could simply have abided by the Minsk agreements and it could have kept the entire Donbass and everything else it wanted short of Crimea itself and NATO membership. It could have not walked out of the Istanbul negotiations. It could have continued to negotiate with the Russians instead of passing a law literally making negotiations with Russia illegal.
Every time they chose violence instead of peace they just made things worse and worse for themselves.