Negotiations are looking better and better to many of Ukraine’s allies. From Ted Snider at libertarianinstitute.org:
The West is being increasingly confronted with the cold realization that Ukraine cannot win this war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has set as a threshold for victory, not only the recapture of territory up to his country’s prewar borders, but the reclamation of all of its territory to the 2014 border, including the Donbas and Crimea. There are few among Ukraine’s Western backers who subscribe any longer to that illusion.
But Western governments and the Western media delude their public into believing that the war is a stalemate that Russia also cannot win. This assessment is based on the unsubstantiated claim that the threshold for Russia winning is, as a start, the subjugation of Ukraine in its entirety.
But that has never been Russia’s stated goal. Just as listening to Zelensky’s stated definition of victory leads to the realization that it cannot be attained, so listening to Vladimir Putin’s leads to the conclusion that it can. Russia cannot subjugate all of Ukraine. But it has also never claimed that as its goal. Putin has consistently said that “this conflict is not about territory…[it] is about the principles underlying the new international order.” He has said that Russia never intended to conquer Kiev and that the early advance toward the capital was intended to force Ukraine into the negotiations that the United States declined.
Putin’s stated goals have always been a written assurance that Ukraine will not join NATO and protection of ethnic Russians in the Donbas. His June peace proposal contains those very points. The proposal states that Ukraine must guarantee that it will be a non-nuclear, non-aligned neutral nation that will not join NATO. It states that Ukraine must completely withdraw from Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, that they must agree to limits on the size of their armed forces, and that they must ensure the rights of the Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine.
