Does the West have a way to back out of Ukraine, gracefully or otherwise? From Yves Smith at nakedcapitalism.com:
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Many analysts and commentators have been speculating about how the US and NATO will find their way to an endgame in the Ukraine conflict. Some focus, for humanitarian or pragmatic reasons, on a negotiated settlement between the US and Russia. Even though as a matter of form Ukraine would be party to such a deal, with Ukraine now fully dependent on Western arms and funding, there’s no pretending who is really driving this train.
We described earlier how the various factions in the US/NATO side would spend huge amounts of time arguing among themselves to come up with ideas for how exit the conflict that they’d developed in a vacuum, with no substantive exchange with Russia and not even any real consideration of repeated statements by Russian officials, including draft treaties presented in December 2021 and in the aborted peace talks in Marcy 2022.
The new peace chatter seems to amount to:
Ceasefire > *Magic* > Russia goes away with its tail enough between its legs that we and Ukraine can declare victory
At first we thought this dynamic was the result of splits among various key parties. After all, multiparty negotiations are messy.
they will back out like in Afghanistan and blame the Ukrainians for everything that went wrong. never will those in charge admit they were wrong in EVERYTHING they thought about Russia.