You kind of get the feeling that Europe’s elites don’t want the Ukraine-Russia war to ever end. From Simplicius at simplicius76.substack.com:
The news surrounding the Ukrainian conflict has been slow owing to a kind of ‘planning’ doldrums phase where all sides have retreated to strategize on the next novel idea on how to politically out-maneuver the other. That is because the entire ‘ceasefire’ charade has in fact turned into nothing more than political posturing given that all the involved sides are much too far apart to tangibly come together in any significant way. So in absence of that, only the political side remains as potential harvest for some kind of advantageous position.
Europe has been again retreading the ‘security guarantees’ and ‘boots-on-ground’ red herrings, but this is old, beaten laundry with too much mileage on it to come to any real use anymore. That doesn’t stop them from trying, though—Le Monde, for instance, proposes a novel idea: that European troops should be injected into Ukraine before the signing of a ceasefire not after, in order to “pressure” Putin into that very truce:
‘Research fellow’ at the French Institute of International Relations—an establishment cutout—Elie Tenenbaum makes the argument that talking about a potential European “peacekeeping force” has the effect of hardening Putin to continue the conflict, so as to not have NATO troops on his border—a reasonably competent assessment.
However, this prospect remains completely out of the question for the Kremlin, one of whose primary motivations was to prevent any Western troops from entering an area it considers its own. Worse still, the more the Europeans show their willingness to deploy forces after a ceasefire, the less Vladimir Putin will be inclined to sign it.
I throw a hypothetical dildo at their armies on paper.
Ivan is having a WAR revolution in 404 that will be studied in years to come.