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 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 causalities 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 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 Zelensky 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?
The final outcome was known back in February 2022. A million or so lives have been lost and barrels of ink have been used up. To what avail?
It’s pretty hard to imagine how leaders could do so much damage by attempting to do good things. Dead bodies in multiple continents are being blamed not on those who stole the election but on the one they stole it from. Lies upon lies are sutured together in a never ending patch quilt of deceptions. What happens when their mischief is discovered and their fabrications are outed? Do they apologize? No, not at all. Instead they change the conversation and move on to the next lie.
And so it will continue to go until the individuals behind this horror are tried and, I would prefer to see, sentenced to death.
Until something “happens” to them - that will make them realize there is a price to be paid for causing millions of young men and countless others to die horribly and pointlessly to satisfy their agendas?
They will - simply continue to continue - knowing that? They are impervious, immune to censure or punishment.
Imminent death has always, as Samuel Johnson said, had an amazingly clarifying effect on the mind.
Yes, but it probably will not happen. Emperor Hirohito died in bed, still Emperor, not because MacArthur was convinced he was just a pawn in the Japanese program of imperial conquest but because his death would have fatally destabilized Japan.
I understand that rational; however, I don’t think that if some of the lesser luminaries - like those in the Biden cabinet were deleted - that anyone would get too upset. I suppose some fools might miss Biden but, I, for one, would not. Just think of the horrors, the suffering - the tortured - that he and his malevolent, vile cabal have caused - in America, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere.
If we had deliberately orchestrated - the deaths of millions - think Covid too - you and I would have been sentenced to the worst prison in the world but the true monsters - like the aforementioned as well as the countless unmentioned - will likely die peacefully congratulating themselves on a job well done and having gotten away with it - without punishment.
Oh well, ain’t gonna happen - even if they and almost countless others - richly deserve that fate.
Best we can hope is that there is a hell and it has prepared some “special” experiences for them all.