It is an epic tragedy that the Ukraine-Russia war could have ended within a couple of months but the U.S. and Britain stymied peace negotiations. From Ted Snider at libertarianinstitute.org:
David Arakhamiya’s recent interview enhances our understanding of the diplomatic course of the war in Ukraine in two crucial ways. Despite the political West’s insistence that Vladimir Putin had more expansive goals for invading Ukraine, Arakhamiya says that Moscow would have traded peace for a Ukrainian promise not to join NATO. He also twice states that the West intervened and discouraged that trade and a diplomatic settlement to the war.
Arakhamiya is the head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. He led the Ukrainian negotiating team in both the Belarus and Istanbul talks. He says that Russia was “prepared to end the war if we agreed to,—as Finland once did,—neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.” He importantly adds that the NATO promise was the “key point” for Russia and that “Everything else was simply rhetoric and political ‘seasoning’.”
Arakhamiya is the third well placed official to make the claim that Russia’s primary reason for invading Ukraine was to stop NATO expansion east to its borders and, particularly, Ukraine’s NATO aspirations. While acting as mediator in the March 2022 talks between Russia and Ukraine, then-Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin asked him to pass the message to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “Tell me you’re not joining NATO, I won’t invade.”
Disco Zelensky should be able to squeeze another billion out of the Uncle Sugar printing presses?
You can count on the best government that money can buy to put the interests of foreigners first.
Saw earlier that Odessa and Lviv are the keys to the Russian campaign.