I recently listened to a long podcast with Mearsheimer. One of the hosts discusses Putin floating the principles of a possible peace deal.
I don’t see how it can happen. The US and Europe have admitted that they went into the Minsk agreements intending not to keep them, and that is after the US betrayed Russia over Libya, getting their vote based on telling them that it was not intended to be a regime change operation.
Putin is said to have spent a couple days watching the video of Gaddafi being raped with a knife, then killed. Focuses the mind on what happens if you trust the wrong people and what the West wants done to its enemies. (People wonder why Putin hates Hilary, this is why.)
So, there can be no deal, because Russia and Putin don’t believe that the West in general and the US in particular (they have contempt for EU leaders who the know simply follow US orders) can’t be trusted to keep it.
That means there’s really on one way to have a peace deal: hostages.
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It’s an old idea. If there’s no trust, in the old days you had people the other side cared about, usually family members, live with you. Break the deal and they get it in the neck.
So if there’s to be a deal with Ukraine, there have to be hostages, and they have to be given to Russia. Not people, in this age, but something the US cares about. Perhaps the contents of Fort Knox? Perhaps something else? (Suggest possibilities in the comments.)
I personally can’t think of anything that would be enough, so I can’t see a peace deal now.
The deal will happen when it’s a surrender deal. When the Ukrainians firmly admit they are losing and losing badly. And world war I style deal, where the victor sets the terms.
As such, I don’t see Ukraine keeping Odessa, for example. The deal will be ugly.
VietnamVet
WWIII started because the Western Economic System needs resources to exploit. Russia was worth a second try. Latin America and Africa are moving into China’s sphere.
North America can survive on its third of the world’s resources but this requires good government and sharing. An Armistice could have been signed in March 2022 but it was nixed by Boris Johnson.
If Russia’s war of attrition kills all of the opponents’ military age men and seizes Odessa and the Black Sea, a WWI type Armistice or a European nuclear war is inevitable. To get a peace where Ukraine survives requires an armistice now and a new DMZ along the line of contact before it is too late and Russia gains it goals. It is just that the Imperial Blob can’t. This means the end of their Empire – the hegemony and another 1970’s energy crisis. The US dollar will only be worth the labor and resources within the nation. They would destroy everything first. Instead Outsiders like the BRICS nations have to end the tribal Ukrainian Russian fight before it kills us all.
The USA needs youthful leadership and to regain sovereignty. Mike Johnson, second in line to the presidency, looks like a fraternity kid, yet he passed the House Bill to keep the government funded. He is the only DC politician who doesn’t look like a dead man walking.
2024 will be an inflection point, like 1991, 1945 or 1918, if any historians survive.
jo6pac
I agree with deal it will be ugly but Russia will only sigh on the off the original Minks 2. They will except nothing short of it. If don’t know what is looks like please look it up and it hasn’t change from day 1.
bruce wilder
I think Putin is patiently playing for time for a political realignment to take place.
We are so used to the blocs formed after WWII, we don’t recognize that that world is like a glacier, melting, moving, grinding the landscape with its inexorable weight but also breaking up, destined to diminish and fracture.
The fracturing of Europe is well underway. Poland is crazy hostile to Germany and Ukraine. Germany’s left and right are both rising as discontent with the centre seems destined to explode. Hungary’s dissent persists. The Serbs are restless.
I am sure Russian geopolitical strategists are thinking that a general partition of Ukraine with Hungary, Poland, Romania and Moldova claiming bits and pieces would help legitimate Russia’s annexation of historically Russian territories. Ukraine will have to undergo an internal revolution before it can make any kind of peace, but I do not imagine a rump state that is not a dependent of Russia will have any appeal to Russian interests.
Purple Library Guy
To various commenters: I don’t think Putin is playing for time. I think he plans to simply win the war and dictate terms. And no, it won’t look very much like Minsk 2, because that obviously did not work from a Russian perspective.
It will probably look more like Ukraine as a neutral country pledged to not join NATO, with strict and monitored limits on the size of its armed forces. Russia will take all the bits of Ukraine that were majority Russian and maybe one or two more smidges of territory that’s strategically useful and which may not have been majority Russian before everybody left, but which WILL BE majority Russian by the time some people return and others don’t and some ethnic Russians move there from the remainder of Ukraine and others move there from Russia.
Of course, to get that Russia will have to seriously cream Ukraine. And I gotta hand it to Ukraine, they keep on trying, and even pushing in some places. But . . . it’s a battle of attrition. And all their gutsy tactical moves involve big casualties. In the bigger picture, IMO we are just beginning to see Ukraine having difficulty covering the front, where every time they shift units to block a Russian offensive, they leave some other place a bit lightly defended. I think as the attrition continues to grind on this problem will gradually start to get more noticeable, and eventually they just won’t be able to defend the whole front effectively and Russian offensives will start seeping through the cracks. That will be the beginning of the end, because there will start to be a lot of retreat-or-get-cut-off situations. It may take a while yet to get to that situation, but Putin is a patient man.
GrimJim
My last estimate did not take into account the continued paralysis and complete dysfunction of the US Government thanks to the Kakistocrats plus the war in Palestine, along with the ever more imminent Trump victory in 2024.
Put in might indeed just keep up the line, pushing only as real opportunity permits, till Trump takes over in January 2025. His is the long game, anyway, why waste men and natural more than is needful?
Then, when Trump takes over, it is simply a matter of a nice, juicy bribe on the side to expedite matters, and Ukraine falls, and NATO ends… which is where the Kakustocrats want things, anyway…
So Putin will certainly take advantage of any real opportunity to break through, but it’s all essentially a holding campaign fir now. Maybe tweak Biden’s nose a bit here and there supporting more chaos, favors to help Trump win more bigly and thus lowering the final bribe (a bit)…
StewartM
I think Gaza is to Ukraine what the Suez Crises was to Hungary in 1956.
The US decided that action in the Middle East was more important and more doable than a foolish (and likely futile) intervention to aid the Hungarian rebels. Thus Ukraine will be left to its own resources, and negotiating a peace despite what the West demands of them is the smartest move..
Gaianne
I believe the ultimatum of December 2021 is still Russia’s guiding policy document. But US behavior since that time has completely altered the form of likely implementations. In short, since the West cannot make binding agreements, the Russians will move relentlessly to a military solution. This will happen slowly, both to reduce overall Russian losses and to allow disunity in the West to continue and develop. Avoiding nuclear war implies refraining from dramatic actions. The Ukraine will be slowly and steadily reduced until the ethnic regions can return to their homelands, Novorussia can return to the Russian Federation, and the remainder can be broken up and put under provincial puppet governments–more or less what Bruce is suggesting. The Russian military will not occupy the Ukraine. Rather, a special Russian police force will be created to work with the local police of the puppet governments. That is when denazification will actually happen.
The Ukraine was only one part of the December 2021 ultimatum. The other parts, involving NATO retreating westward, will be pursued on a separate, longer, time-frame,
–Gaianne
Eclair
We now have the US engaged on two fronts. Well, engaged behind the scenes, supplying weapons, special services, propaganda. I can see China opening a third front, in the South China Sea and Taiwan. It would be a delicate balancing act: Russia in Europe, China in Asia, and Iran/Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, all playing a coordinated game. Push the US too hard and we get nuclear holocaust; ease off too much, and the US has the time to recoup its losses. Just a slow, steady bleeding of money and weapons, while the population at home devolves into mutually-hating factions, screaming at each other, and the US Congress melts down into even more of a greedy clown-show that has no aptitude for or interest in governing.
John k
Imo Russia will take advantage of the ME distraction to switch from defense to offense when the ground freezes. Not too fast, still don’t want to startle the dc crazies, seems they’re already probing for weak spots now.
Avdeeka is nearly surrounded now, maybe they can be bypassed and starved as the rest of Donbas falls, after that no resistance to the dnieper. Imo Odessa/Kharkov is lightly defended at this point. Odessa is more important but must cross river. Not much defense after Odessa… Kiev can be bypassed and starved, no power means not habitable. Gov might move to Lviv, but imo more likely falls to military coup that surrenders. The other 4 russ-speaking oblasts will have plebiscites and then incorporated into Russia.
My guess is Kiev remains capitol of the rump. Can’t see why Russia would accept states taking chunks in the west, that moves nato east.
Curt Kastens
First Kiev, then Vienna, then Berlin
I just can not wait to become Moscow’s puppet in Germany so that I can earn the nickname among my enemies as the Butcher of Berlin. My enemies list is now longer than my arm.
First Berlin then London the Ottowa then Washington DC.
Hopefully I can live long enough to earn the nickname the Butcher of the Beast as well.
What is going to collapse first, my health or the health of the planet?
Ricardo2000
Saladin: “I warn you against shedding blood, indulging in it and making a habit of it, for blood never sleeps.”
The US, now and always, makes allies of the most corrupt, violent collaborators. Recently, US trained military yahoos have committed 9 coups in West Africa. Of course, military coups are cheaper than honestly negotiating Oil & Gas rights with responsible, democratically elected, popularly supported leadership. ‘Los Zetas’, Mexico’s worst narco gang were trained and armed by US ‘special forces’. Honduras, where democracy was recently restored after a US-OAS coup installed a president and family now facing decades in US prisons for drug trafficking. El Salvador, where ex-President Cristiani is facing murder charges for the executions of 6 Catholic priests, housekeeper and young daughter, that advocated for negotiations and peace. These are only the most recent Western Quisling criminals put in power to serve US greed.
John Kenneth Galbraith, “The modern Conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
Only the most savage, racist, drug-dealing monsters are embraced as worthy US-NAYOYO allies because they have NO LOCAL support. NAYOYO welcomes military coups and death squads everywhere so long as it favours corporate greed and human rights violations that terrify popular dissent. These collaborators know their lives and future depend on following CIA instructions.
John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873): “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally conservative.”
The world will be a better and safer place when Russia wins this war. Putin has heard all the promises, watched the treaties signed, and treacherously ignored. He knows of racist genocides committed and planned. It won’t be the vacuous excuses of White Western media cloaca and academics that define this war’s end. It will be blunt demands and brutal facts on the ground that outline Ukraine’s public defeat. This war will end with NATO’s humiliation, and the Global South ecstatically dancing in the streets. This war will end with Russian tanks shaking the ground at western borders.
Winston Churchill: ‘Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.’
Winston Churchill (1944): ”I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the [Nazi] army.”
Curt Kastens
Ricardo 2000,
Are you competing with me to be the Russian Quisling of Europe. Or you you vying for the position of Russian Quisling of South or Central America?
Forecasting Intelligence
Agree Ian.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/zelensky-must-be-honest-about-the-state-of-the-war/
“A split is emerging between the soldiers on the front line who know how desperate things are, and the civilians in the cities who believe that the 700,000 people who have been drafted since last February are sufficient to win in some meaningful sense. I spent time on both sides of the divide earlier this year, and saw this perception gap for myself. The soldiers I talked to in the Donetsk region told me their brigades were so understaffed that they were not allowed home: some had been in the battlefield for 18 or even 20 months; others had spent more time at war than at home since 2014.
Last week, families protested in a dozen cities across the country, calling for a rotation in the troops and for demobilisation after 18 months of service. One kid was holding a sign, which read: ‘It’s my turn to hug father every day.’
But Ukraine cannot afford such a luxury. According to British intelligence’s assessment, we are in a first world war-style standoff because most of Ukraine’s mobilised troops are needed simply to maintain a front line that is now 700 miles long. There are few replacements for the fallen and wounded: the days of people queuing at recruitment offices are long gone.
A growing sense that conscription is eventually going to take every man means that about 200 Ukrainians are caught attempting to leave the country illegally each week. Approximately 16,500 have been stopped at the border since the start of martial law, but there are no estimates of how many have successfully stowed away on boats or trucks. The sight of military officers grabbing men on the street and dragging them into conscription centres only makes others more determined to escape.”
The article essentially sums it up by this: “So the Ukrainian authorities have two choices: they can keep going with the boosterism and persist in trying to convince everyone that the fighting is going according to plan – or they can start an honest conversation about what’s actually happening.”
Given the spectator is a centre-right publication I find this quite remarkable.
Zero hedge has had articles showing leaked military briefings from the Ukrainian army saying that the majority of the troops on the frontline are incapable of fighting due to PTSD.
The poor blokes haven’t had a break in up to 18 months.
Greer has predicted that 2024 is quite likely to be the year the Ukrainian front collapses.
I certainly wouldn’t be shocked by that outcome.
Steve
There’s no way the US would ever agree to being perceived as caving to Russia in any meaningful sense. The Blob, i.e., the career foreign policy and foreign-facing intelligence apparatus in this country, would never allow Biden or his successor to even think about something like that.
I remember driving my octogenarian father to the local train station right after the war in Ukraine started. I asked him if he had ever heard of Victoria Nuland. He said no. I said that if this gets as ugly as I fear it might, then you should remember her name. If this situation goes nuclear, then Victoria Nuland and her cadre of depraved neocons will lead us there.
“If we’re lucky, Ukraine will be partitioned,” I said, and we moved on to other topics.