At the risk of starting it all again, I’m genuinely interested on how our ‘peace at all costs’ forum members feel those terms look
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I mean ultimately, it’ll probably take Russia another 4 years to rebuild their strength to pre-war levels, as well as learning from their mistakes in the first invasion. So what does Trump care? They’ll just invade in 4 years and he’ll claim it was all the fault of whoever is leader at the time.
The Europeans would have to spend the intervening time on training the Ukrainian forces on effective use of all the assets that will be stockpiled ready roll straight into Ukraine the second the Russians find their car keys.
Just provides temporary peace until Russia decides it’s time to attack again. Dumb.
The thing is, at this stage, the only thing that guarantees peace, would be a Russian loss and Ukraine entering NATO, both that are fairly unlikely at this stage. The other option would be for Europe to form their own military alliance and allow Ukraine full membership. If you had the UK, France, Germany, Poland, Baltics, Italy and Spain guaranteeing military intervention, it’d be absolutely huge for Ukraine and would ensure Russia doesn’t attack. Just need world leaders to pull their fingers out and realise that NATO is a mockery when you have populist leaders involved that don’t give a shit, or understand globalisation.
I’m against escalation but I’m also not dumb enough to think these terms do anything but buy Putin time and political capital to rearm and begin a new cycle of antagonism.
While it’s more focused on China, and also very right wing from my pov, I found Destined for War by Graham Allison helpful reading to understand this conflict.
I think the Russian oligarchs feel threatened, even anxious, at any rising powers undermining their profit making in the ex-Soviet sphere. Their whole version of gangster capitalism is predicted on running things into the ground and price-gouging without any competition keeping them honest. Continuing to arm Ukraine isn’t going to change that, only major economic reforms in Russia and a political revolution to go with can actually bring peace. Even getting rid of Putin won’t change things, he’s just the head of the snake.
US President Donald Trump’s phone call with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, didn’t take a tangible step towards ending the hostilities in Ukraine, let alone finding an enduring peace. Rather, it provided further evidence of Putin’s ability to string along and outsmart Trump.
For starters, Putin sent a signal by making Trump wait for more than an hour to talk.
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Looks like the front has generally stabilized across the board. The biggest theatres are Pokrovsk, Kursk, and Toretsk. Toretsk hasnt had much change for the past month, with both Ukraine and Russia occupying two salients in the town. Ukraine made some decent gains in Pokrovsk and managed to shift troops from the south. Kursk is now stabilized and Suprisingly enough, Russian telegram sources are indicating that Ukrainian troops have taken a town a bit further south more towards Belgorod.
So apparently there’s Russian-US talks on for a maritime ceasefire… what’s the logic there exactly, why does this benefit Russia?
Stops their oil refineries in the black sea from being targeted, will probably also allow their naval assets more freedom of movement. Also depends on the extent of the ceasefire. There may be pressure on Turkey to lift the embargo on naval asset passage as well.
Stop Ukraine sinking their ships?
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I dare say that’d be the least of their problems. They’re all docked out of reach at the moment. Letting them out in a naval ceasefire won’t do much as they’ll just sail around and not to anything. Ukraine has been steadily taking out and capturing their refineries. There’s some pretty ferocious battles around that area that aren’t heavily documented due to the high security nature of the rigs
Thanks, I hadn’t realised that was going on. It seems crazy our petrol prices aren’t higher with so much insecurity around production… I guess the markets are fine so long as it’s our allies taking out our enemies every infrastructure…
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Well. Colour me shocked. Didn’t see that coming.
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Petrol prices are low because they’ve also capped the cost of oil produced by Russia fairly low. Russia is selling most of their stuff to India now, who is on selling to the rest of the world.
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Update on the “wildly sucecssful” peace negotiations. So the US has apparently been negotiating on territorial integrity with the Russians. For some reason they’ve not included Ukraine in any stage of the process, despite the assumption that Ukraine will obviously be told to cede territory. On top of that, it’s come out that Putin wants territory to be given to him, that they’ve never actually held. Im saying from both a current war and also a historical context. Putin is claiming he wants 'Novorossia" to be back in Russia. A theoretical area in which Russia held centuries ago. The area never actually existed apart from a simple concept. On top of that, he wants areas that were never even part of the theoretical area. To put into context (I read this somewhere else) it’s equivalent to England turning around and making a claim to NSW, except for the fact that NSW actually exists…
US also agreed to lifting on some banking sanctions on Russia. This was to take place immediately. The only thing is they forgot that the sanctions are controlled by Europe. Europe told them to fuck off…
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I think we can figure out why that reason is.
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At this point it seems increasingly likely than not that Trump and Putin have hashed out a scheme to make a north atlantic/arctic ocean bloc with shared interests (greenland minerals perhaps). Shame canada is in the way eh?
Who wants to wager on trump shaking hands with kim jong un and pissing off South Korea in the next couple of years?