Two Final Choices for Ukraine

We can accept Vladimir Putin's latest offer of peace talks; or we can declare ourselves offended by the very idea of it

Here are the options the world faces in Ukraine:

We can call urgently for real peace talks … 

Russian President Putin has expressed readiness. His only conditions for peace talks are that Ukraine withdraw troops from the Donbas fronts and renounce NATO membership:

As reported by nice-and-neutral CNBC on June 14.

Putin’s opening negotiating position reflects the reality on the ground: After more than two years of war, and at immense cost in death and destruction, Russia is firmly entrenched in the Donbas, and has been doing far better militarily than Ukraine. We don’t have to like this fact in order to act like grownups and recognize this fact.

What we have now.

That Russia would win any war against far smaller Ukraine was always predictable. As U.S. President Barack Obama noted ten years ago, we will never match the Kremlin’s appetite for a fight on Russia’s national border — and were we ever foolish enough to try, the result would be a wrecked Ukraine.

For context: Left map, blue voted for the pro-Russian candidate in 2010. Right map, red speaks Russian at home and orange a Russian-Ukrainian creole.

The pro-war contingent in Washington is clearly alarmed, and scrambling to discredit the idea of real peace talks. To that end, they just held a competing, fake “peace conference” in Switzerland involving dozens of countries — but not Russia!

“They aren’t inviting us there,” Putin observed, and it was hard not to agree with his withering assessment of this idiocy: “They think there is nothing for us to do there [at the peace conference], but at the same time they say that it’s impossible to decide anything without us. It would have been funny if it weren’t so sad.”

Switzerland recognizes the International Criminal Court, which about a year ago indicted Putin for kidnapping. This means that if the Russian president had crashed the party in the resort town of Obbürgen last week, the Swiss would have been expected to arrest him. Odd how hardly anyone mentions this.

Another sign of cracks in the Washington-dictated war facade: The New York Times this weekend finally, helpfully, published lots of draft documents of earlier peace agreements. The Times subhead about those earlier peace negotiations says: “They fizzled.” Wrong. That’s Washington-sponsored spin. The peace talks — favored by both Kyiv and Moscow — were repeatedly shut down at American government insistence. This has been testified to now by many participants and insiders, including top Ukrainian officials involved, U.S. foreign policy scholars, former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder, and former Israeli prime minister Neftali Bennet, to name but a few.

Apparently it was more fun for us to continue the war. To quote South Carolina’s lunatic senator Lindsey Graham, the Russians were “dying,” the Ukrainians were “fighting to the last person”, and it was “the best money we’ve ever spent!”

Why stop at all?

… Or we can defiantly reject peace talks, as offensive to our sensibilities

If Option One is peace talks, Option Two would be to declare Putin’s opening position so upsetting that we refuse to even acknowledge it.

That’s another way of saying we prefer that the war continue indefinitely.

If that’s what the U.S. government world decides, then this summer, Russia will move to take more territory — Putin may be ready to stop, but hardliners in Russia want Odesa. The horrific levels of death and destruction will rise. And the best-case scenario after all that will be some future peace deal in which Russia will still hold Donbas and Crimea! I defy anyone to explain a war-fighting scenario (as opposed to a peace negotiation) that avoids that doleful outcome.

The worst-case scenarios include:

• Ukraine losing Odesa;

• Ukraine losing Odesa and also Kyiv;

• Ukraine reduced to a Galician rump state (this is what a post-Putin president of Russia might seek, by the way — so, be careful what you wish for);

• Russia using tactical nukes, if it ever finds itself being pushed out of the Donbas (which is why, despite all of our bluster, we never do push back very hard);

• U.S. and Russian forces fighting toe-to-toe;

• All-out nuclear war.

What might end up left of Ukraine, if we ignore this window for peace talks.

True friends of Ukraine (I count myself one) might favor a peace conference in which Russia withdraws from Donbas and even Crimea — but in return for talks on the dissolution of NATO itself. (What!? Get rid of NATO? But — who would coordinate our response to the next crisis created by NATO?)