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?
Russia is clearly unable to advance in any meaningful way and Ukraine, while performing admirably would be unlikely to be able to force Russia back to their borders. This conflict has been a stalemate for some time now so the question is who does the current situation favour?
Ukraine has a relatively small economy for a country of its size and as long as the EU keeps paying its bills could sustain the current rate for years.
Russia had a large globalised economy that has been sustained for years by cash injection from their national wealth fund which appears to have run dry. This war has also been financed by Russian bank debt to the MIC to keep the real cost off state books. This debt is a ticking time bomb and will likely be Russia’s limiting factor. Russia has already started selling off it’s gold reserves to cover their budget deficit which is sure sign they are running on fumes.
Ukraine just needs to stay the course and wait for Russia to do what it does once a generation, have a financial collapse. Imagine Putin had the sense to invest all of the money wasted on the war in improving Russia instead of destroying Ukraine. Even if Russia gets some land from the final settlement it will be a pile of rubble requiring money they don’t have to become useable. I find it hilarious that people once thought the Russian mob boss was some kind of genius.
Bang on mate. Couple of other things - Russia has already extracted the easiest-to-get-at oil. Everything else going forward will cost more to bring to market and erode their profit margin. And that’s IF they can get sanctions lifted for the machinery and more importantly technical expertise to rebuild their drilling and refining capacity. They won’t be back to 2022 levels, maybe…ever.
The 30 year war chest of Cold War grievances is spent, and getting it back will take far FAR longer than the years Putin has left to live. They pissed away their entire Soviet hardware inheritance. That itself is a staggering idea. The purpose of that stockpile was to roll from Poland to Portugal before the feckelss pussies in NATO could organize a response. It’s gone. Period. And so is that russian dream
To your last point - Putin was sometimes described as a 4D Chess player running circles around naive Western leaders. That’s only half true IMO. I’ve said this before, still holds: He’s not a chess player - he’s a poker player who always bluffs, punches down on enemies he doesn’t think will hit back, and counts on his fat chip stack scaring away the other players. Well - his bluff got called, hubris prevented him from making a smart correction when he should have, his chip stack is blown and now he is cornered by his own stupidity and greed.
Indeed - imagine if they had spent half as much time and money improving Russian society to be attractive to the world instead of creating a repulsive goon state with nothing to admire? Putin isn’t a statesman - he’s a gangster, full stop. And gangsters only understand fear and brutality.
Putin as a bluffing poker player with a fat stack is spot on. European leaders have for too long been cowardly in all dealings with Putin, fearing his presumed strength while forgetting all about the bigger stick they carried.
Thanks to Ukraine for showing us that the short bald chump in the Kremlin is just a busted flush.
I don’t see how Ukraine can trust Russia, ever. Ukraine had nuclear weapons and they gave them up for a supposedly iron-clad security guarantee from both Russia and the US, a guarantee that Russia has repeatedly and deliberately violated.
They can’t, and they wont. They will need to be a highly vigilant, highly militarized, highly mechanized society until the current malignant form of the Russian Federation collapses.
It’s all been terrible, but it was ALWAYS going to happen. Russia was ALWAYS going to try and steal the best former colony of the USSR again. This is a messy, but permanent divorce.
And despite that awfulness…there’s reason for optimism. Ukraine has been brutalized by Russia for 1,000 years. Here, in our lifetimes, is probably the final chapter. There is no re-integration of Ukraine into a Russian sphere again. They have shown that they would literally rather die than be part of the Russian world again.
There are only two competing visions for Russia. One stops at the Russian border, the other extends to the whole Soviet Union. The idea of a Russia whose borders extend to somewhere in Ukraine but no further exists only propaganda and in the minds of people who have not made an honest effort to understand this conflict.
Reparations are always paid by the losers. So a ceasefire at this point precludes that.
As for the post war security: if Ukraine gets EU security it means it won its sovereignty at a huge cost. If it has to be neutral it means Russians got a small win at a huge cost.
There is no win-win here.
Pragmatic. And probably exactly correct too.
While it’s easy to frame this as objectively good v. evil, people wishing for a complete ouster of the Russians from all Ukrainian territories are not looking seriously or soberly at the situation. This isn’t Star Wars where the emperor is going to get chucked down a shaft and the Death Star detonates signalling a clean and complete win for the good guys.
Ukraine surviving as sovreign, mostly intact, European aligned and economically viable state IS a victory for them, period. It feels terrible because of all the trauma russia has caused, and no doubt they’ll continue to be corrosive dicks as long as that country exists in its current form.
But - their society is dying. It’s less a society than a barbaric state of overlord raiders and cynical slaves. A mafia state run by the intelligence servies whose organizing principle is “Do As I Say Or I’ll Kill You”. Even the USSR for all it’s sclerotic behaviors had a thin philosophical veneer that attracted other power-hungry goons pretending to be governments during the 20th century.
21st century Russia is plainly a mafia state with no rules, only power. They only have 4th rate allies of limited diplomatic usefulness who only run on bribes. They are Capital-J Junior partner to China in the axis of authoritarian shit holes. Their country is a failing petrostate with terminal demographics. Their own people believe SO little in the future that they can’t ever even get their birth rates back to the replcement rate, much less be an attractive model to the rest of the world.
There’s way more ways that Russia collapses than any scenarios where they thrive going forward. Ukraine’s future template is like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria - align with the west, implement democracy, build institutions, minimize corruption and thrive. “Victory” for Ukraine starts with survival and ends with integration to Europe. But that takes time.
We’ve seen ceasefire before when OSCE mission wouldn’t ever see any breaches. Only hope I have that r*ssians start killing each other en masse soon-ish, or we would finally make a nuke (but with our toothless politicians this would never happen).
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.
