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 seemingly endless Ukrainian war.
This from frontpagemag.com.
To wit:
– 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 [will] accept Ukraine will not have the military strength to retake Crimea and the Donbas. In 2014, both were absorbed by Russia during the Obama Regime. Neither that regime nor any since has advocated a military effort to reclaim them; and
– Loudly, the U.S. and, again, quietly, Europe [will] concede 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.
But how will the West deter Russian leader Vladimir 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, but how long before he will have repaired, replaced, and regrouped?
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 casualties on Putin’s forces—possibly five times the dead, wounded, and missing 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.
Yes, Trump has faced criticism for his volatile, art-of-the-deal approach to Ukrainian diplomacy over the last 10 weeks.
But, lost in such criticism is that The Obiden Regime 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 sending more arms, money, and Ukrainians into the cauldron would eventually break Russia. Fools’ play because Russia is:
– 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 the People know the likely course of negotiations to end the slaughter:
– As soon as Trump pressures Ukrainian President 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,
– [O]nce Trump sees that scolding Zelenskyy 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, and
– Zelenskyy [then] thinks he was had and wants a better mining deal or reconsideration of NATO or more sophisticated weapons—until Trump reminds him the despised U.S., not his beloved Europeans, is his only route to a shaky peace.
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.
