Doesn’t say much, but what this does at least signal is that both sides seem to understand how this war ends - with both sides unhappy.
This is Zelensky stating their likely starting postion: Unconditional ceasefire along current lines. Followed by diplomacy and security guarantees. The first part is easier. The second part, less so. Doesn’t seem like much, but it IS the first time that they have said even that much.
Russia has spent too much to be content in the long term keeping only what they have now - and the heavy emphasis being on NOW. Including the exorbitant reconstruction costs they would have to pay. And I mean just internally within Russia to repair their oil & gas infrastructure to some new baseline level. But they ARE sort of, kind of, in the traditional bad-faith Russian way, acknowledging that their original war aims of total regime change and Belarus-ization of Ukraine aren’t going to happen. Yet.
Unconditional ceasefire means exactly that - no conditions, including no reparations intially. That’s what the diplomacy and security guarantees are for. But - who’s going to provide security? Not the current U.S. administration, that’s for sure. So what would that look like? For sake of argument, let’s say a Euoprean NATO ground monitoring force and no-fly zone 100km from Ukraine’s borders with Russia and Belarus. Total guess, but not that hard to imagine.
And what about reparations? Ukraine will want and deserves them in any world where justice matters. Russia will never, ever, EVER pay reparations willingly unless they are actively collapsing, like in WW1 with the treaty of brest-litovsk. BTW - the Russians paid only $6 billion marks then - like $160m dollars, or $3.5B dollars today. Seems like a bargain, but that’s another story. The important part is there’s no way Russia willingly pays out of pocket. Period. Too much pride and ego and nothing would get Putin killed faster than obliging oligarchs to pay a tax on their future earnings to get out of the war he started.
Ukraine might be assessing that an unconditional ceasefire is acceptable, because the future post-putin instability might present new opportunities to regain territory without having to do the bloody business of fighting for it today.
As for reparations - Ukraine COULD probably succesfully seek a portion of the seized assets post-war. Russia will lose their minds, and threaten to restart the war. This often happens in negotiations, but…rarely actually does. Let’s assume that they aren’t ready to resume fighting midway through peace talks. There would be signals like mobilizations if they were.
But, it’s not crazy to think they might accept losing SOME of the $300 billion that Belgium is currently sitting on if it meant getting the rest back. They’ve lived without it for nearly 5 years, and they absolutely need it for their own post-war reconstruction costs. And it is not quite the political humiliation of outlaying new money. There’s probably a way to do it quietly enough that even if the average russian muggle understands that it’s reparations by other means, that it comes from already-stolen money that was never going to come to them anyways.
That settlement will be done during the Diplomacy phase. The glass-half full view is that IF the fighting stops per the initial Unconditional Ceasefire, it is hard to restart the war at the same intensity. There’s so many issues of logistics, momentum, economic re-configuration and morale. Nobody on either side really wants to be the last person to die while diplomats quibble over semantics far away. Battlefield conditions rarely change much DURING negotiations - that’s why they’re really significnat even if it seems pointless. We’re only JUST at the initial stages where they talk about their opening positions. You don’t do even THAT when you think your position will be stronger tomorrow.
All this to say - both sides are going to end up unhappy, at least at first. But - in what seemed hopeless until pretty recently, both sides are publicly stating their positions. That’s SOME kind of good news.
Thoughts?
That’s inevitable, mate. Russia is a mafia state run by the intelligence services. Even Putin himself is an actor. But the brittle kleptocracy that reflexively oppresses any intenral dissent also prevents the development of competent future leadership.
The Russian political tradition has ALWAYS been strongman rule followed by a period of factional fighting. The prior Tsar is always blamed for eveyrthing, his history gets re-written - They LITERALLY change City names like Stalingrad and Leningrad!, then competing ethno-corporate warlords fight for the throne. There are winners and losers and everything gets worse for a while til the winning faction emerges, and then the cycle repeats itself.
That ineivtable power struggle and internal fighting is Ukraine’s chance to reclaim portions of the occupied territories. But it wil take time. And that’s okay.
I do get it, really, but everything has a breaking point and Ukraine as a nation is as close to it as it is possible (arguably we are long past it and just moving by inertia) cities are dying and I mean big cities far behind the frontline, a lot if not all vital infrastructure is at least damaged if not destroyed (and it takes years to rebuild), society is long past the unity we had in '22 or even '24. We see the same old people being shuffled between positions, without meaningful change in operation. Bad actors adapted and even worse systems are still in place 5 years into big war. And every citizen and politician likes to make this business as usual posture, where we are projecting strong stance and calling their bluff.
As someone recently very well observed at the start of invasion we all adopted roles: soldiers are strong and silent about political issues, families and society supports army with everything they have, political leadership is genuine in their desire for our victory and does everything possible internationally and domestically.
Well it wasn’t ever true and now even less so. Fuck if know where everything is going but surely it’s not going to get better for a looong time, even in case of “victory”.
Dunno maybe I’m just too much of a doomer and from outside of it things are clearer and look better, personally I’m just tired of seeing dead people on the streets (even if I don’t like them at all, don’t know how can you be this blind and dumb, one time in occupation was enough for me) and idea of ever seeing my mother alive again or visiting home never really leaves me.