<Fair City Amsterdam> Vrede is een proces

[Natuurbescherming ZO]

"In Brüssel erwartet fast niemand mehr, dass die Ukraine ihre verlorenen Gebiete zurückgewinnen wird. Nur reden will darüber niemand – zumindest offiziell. WELT hat mit einer Reihe von Insidern gesprochen, die ihren düsteren Ausblick mit einer von Europa selbst verschuldeten Tatsache begründen.”

https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/plus252746254/Russlands-Krieg-Die-duestere-Ukraine-Realitaet-ueber-die-Nato-Insider-nur-anonym-sprechen-wollen.html

"There is a growing crescendo of chatter as to the possibility of peace in NATO’s proxy war against Russia over the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. These latter are also dying as they are shot by Ukrainian forces when trying in desperation to flee Ukraine, or to abandon indefensible positions, or to resist brutish military press-gangs.
Some Ukrainian and Western commentators are slowly coming around to the view that Zelenskiy’s insistence on a return to the 1991 borders is beginning to seem, and is, ridiculous. They are beginning to acknowledge that for the war to end there must be territorial concessions - perhaps the four oblasts that have been integrated already, plus Crimea, or perhaps - as Zalmay Khalilzad (that rotting corpse of the US occupation of Afghanistan) suggested the other day - UNSC protection for the four oblasts (subject to some kind of Ukrainian agreement to be nice, an idea that admittedly may invite giggles), or some kind of autonomy for the oblasts within the state of Ukraine. This latter is what Minsk was all about and which the West and Ukraine have long shown is repugnant to them. Not because there was anything remotely bad about it, but because it got in the way of Nazi ideas about pure Ukraine blood, and didn’t exactly promote the Western wet dream of a dismantling of the Russian Federation.

Conditions in Ukraine are close to desperate. If there is a Harris presidency after November, the probability of more robust financial and military aid to Ukraine is relatively high. Which is to say: good enough to keep the war going, to keep Ukrainians dying, to keep standing on the precipice of nuclear annihilation, to keep pushing the Ukraine economy into Noddy-land. Trump and Vance, on the other hand, make statements that suggest they would seek an early end to the War. But they cannot possibly know they can do this, because they are not talking to Putin and are not addressing Putin’s terms for peace. Instead, magical thinking informs them that if they threaten Kiev with total loss of support should it resist negotiations, or if they threaten Moscow with a “relentless” and perpetual flow of US military support for Ukraine should Russia fail to come to terms with Ukraine, that Putin will immediately jump in their desired direction.

The strengthening of Russia’s economy, even as Europe stagnates or, as in the case of Germany, continues to flirt with recession, together with Russian success in military and economic wars of attrition against both Ukraine and the collective West, in a context of stumbling if not downright inept leadership in the USA and in Europe, could have been expected, by now, to have motivated Ukraine to seek terms while it still can.

But this has not yet happened. And if it does not happen, Russia must and will press further westwards.

https://open.substack.com/pub/oliverboydbarrett/p/peace-is-a-process?r=9zg41&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Hetty