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.

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.

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1815·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        10·
        5 months ago

        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.