Quote:
Originally Posted by Pierre
The major problem with this conflict as I understand, it is that there is no longer a willingness for a negotiated settlement. There was at the very beginning but now only victory for Ukraine and retaking of all Russian gains is acceptable. I assume excluding Crimea. Any talk of negotiation gets you branded a Putin apologist.
The issue being that Putin to lose is unacceptable to him.
So we have the issue of the irresistible force meets the immovable object, only the irresistible force has nukes.
Putin will not back down, and he will continue to destroy Ukraines power infrastructure as Winter approaches.
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If you regained control of parts of your territory, and discovered mass graves and credible evidence of torture, rape and mass kidnap of children, what incentive would you have to negotiate a settlement that leaves any of your citizens under Russian control?
If you had accepted a prior ‘peace’ agreement that left parts of your territory under Russian control only to see Russia use that territory 8 years later as a marshalling ground for further invasion, what incentive would you have to negotiate a settlement that leaves Russia controlling territory significantly closer to your capital city?
The so-called pragmatic approach is well meaning, but it misreads Putin’s intentions. It assumes he sees the world and plans much as we do. He does not. If this war ends with him controlling an inch more than he did at the start of this year, he will spend the next 5 or 10 years regrouping and then he will try again.
He has to be stopped, as surely as Hitler had to be stopped. Obviously that’s not going to look like Germany 1945; Putin has a nuclear arsenal. But he must be pushed out of Ukraine in its entirety, and yes, that does include Crimea, because at present Crimea has not been formally ceded by Ukraine nor recognised internationally as Russian. Even an outcome that achieves nothing more than the formalisation of Russian possession of Crimea would be spinnable in Moscow, shore up Putin’s reputation and set the scene for the next invasion.