The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
Footage of a Russian Iskander missile with a cluster warhead hitting Ukrainian drone operators. The video was filmed near the village of Iverskoye in Donetsk Oblast. The site was being used to prepare for the launch of UJ-22 and Palyanitsa long-range drones. According to media reports, the missile strike killed about 40 soldiers, damaged 16 trucks and a large number of drones. The video shows explosions of ammunition near the drones.
The problem — aside from Trump's propensity for erratic behavior — is that shuttle diplomacy often translates into a telephone game, especially in this instance given the number of parties involved (i.e. Ukraine, Russia, US, EU, UK, etc), and the complexities of the issues in contention (i.e. territories, sanctions, security guarantees, NATO expansion, etc).
While a backroom deal might already exist, the term sheet almost certainly looks materially different from the Russian and Ukrainian perspectives. So even if some sort of ceasefire is reached on the basis of said backroom deal, it's highly unlikely to be sustainable.
Both Putin and Zelensky need a peace deal that they can sell to their respective constituents without jeopardizing their own (political) survival, and that is perhaps the most challenging aspect of the conundrum.
While this may sound unpleasant, the fastest and easiest path to peace is for Zelensky to be removed from the equation: the price of peace will be bitter for the Ukrainian public to swallow, and they'll need his political career and legacy — if not his head — as chaser.
Until that happens, anything more than a temporary ceasefire will likely remain elusive.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
The fundamental problem with all of the above analysis is that it assumes that the Russians want a deal badly enough to make significant compromises to achieve it.
But by all indications, Putin doesn’t need a peace deal. In fact, his entire current war strategy isn’t set up to force a favourable negotiation position. He didn’t even bother to mount any new major offensive operations in the lead up to the Alaskan meeting to generate more chips for making a deal.
There is much lamenting Putin’s decision to slow burn the war, that many many opportunities to achieve rapid and significant and spectacular battlefield gains have been squandered by the Russians because of their low manpower and overly cautious and haphazard approach. While much of that criticism is true, it also shows that Russia’s objective isn’t to achieve stunning and sweeping victories. They are content with slow and steady if it keeps the costs (in lives and treasure) low enough to allow them to basically fight at the current rate indefinitely.
It’s not hard to see that Putin’s strategy is primarily focused on bleeding Ukraine’s backers and suppliers in America and Europe of money and supplies. Once those backers loose the will and/or ability to continue propping Zelensky’a regime up, there’s little reason to expect them to be able to hold on much longer than the old Afghan National Army after the Americans cut and ran.
The failsafe is bleeding Ukraine of all fighting age males, and females too if Zelensky wants to throw them into the meat grinder as well.
So either the west gives up or runs out of arms and ammo to keep the Ukrainians fighting, or Zelensky effectively genocides the Ukrainian adult population via Russian guns. Whichever outcome materialises first, the end result is the same, total Russian victory.
All of Putin’s overtures to a peace deal is just gamesmanship aimed to sowing division within the NATO alliance between the die hards and the pragmatists, while also undermining Ukrainian troop moral at the front. Who wants to throw their lives away to keep every last inch of ground if foreign politicians, especially someone as crude as Trump, can just casually write vast areas off on a whim?
The Russians are in this for the long haul. They have to be as it’s literally on their doorstep. This is where they live, they cannot afford to loose as they will literally have to live with the consequences. They will take all of Ukraine, and use the western parts of it as a bulwark against NATO. That is why no deal NATO can ever realistically offer Russia will be good enough. NATO as an organisation is founded to be against the Russians. It’s literally the sole purpose of its existence. And until and unless NATO stops treating Russia as their enemy and take irreversible steps to pull back and stop posing a direct military threat to Russia, Russia will always need its own buffer states/zones against NATO.
To be frank, the priority for NATO right now shouldn’t be about whether they can still salvage any part of Ukraine from being ruled over by Moscow, it should be about how to preserve enough Ukrainians and Ukrainian fighting spirit that it makes the occupation an unbearable burden for the Russians, indeed, that should have been the strategy since a long time ago. In fact, that ship has already sailed at this point, with the devastating loss of life on the frontline for the Ukrainians that they have been paying the blood price for to keep the conventional war going this long, and that blood debt is now too huge for them to be able to change cause and give up on that loosing strategy now.
The only way NATO could have turned the tables on the Russians in Ukraine is if they had orchestrated a rapid conventional military collapse on the Ukrainian side to allow the Russians to rapidly seize vast tracts of Ukrainian territory with a hostile local population ready and willing to engage in widespread armed resistance activities.
They should have locked the front lines far to the west of Ukraine, beyond the Dnieper to use the river as bottlenecks to stretch Russian logistics first, and ultimately as a backstop to trap vast Russian numbers when the time for the major counterattack comes. That would have vastly shortened Ukrainian supply lines while lengthening Russian ones. It would have also allowed the Ukrainians to bleed the Russians behind the lines with partisan attacks to force them to either further thin their ranks at the front to spare the men power to police the newly captured territories, or go into general mobilisation, which would have added massive economic and social pressures on Putin to end the war quickly.
The play should have been to actively force feed the Russians so much Ukrainian territory that they choked on it, while preserving as much Ukrainian fighting strength as possible to save for the right time for the counter attack after they have been thinned out and weakened by local resistance trying to keep all that territory. That’s why it has almost always proven to be preferable to loose ground to save the men, and while loosing men to delay loosing ground has almost always been the loosing strategy (as in general strategy in principle, and not tactical holding actions to buy time for your forces to pull back or achieve other key tactical objectives etc).
It is massively ironic how things turned out since the Ukrainians themselves saw first hand how effective that strategy of baiting the Russians into overstretching was in the opening weeks and months of the war, when the Russians massively miscalculated and overextended and suffered their worst looses of the whole war.
Indeed, the almost deliberately feet dragging advance of the Russians might actually be intentional to prevent just such an occurrence happening, even if localised and accidental.
The Ukrainians stumbled upon the winning strategy on how to defeating the Russians, but then the NATO strategists, generals and politicians injected themselves into the war planning and decided to fight the Russians their way since they always knows best, and here we are three years later and the Russians are basically in an unbeatable position now.
if you read the latest reports from CNN or BBC at this moment, nothing you said is agreed by anybody, not Trump, not Putin. At best it is wishfull thinking of Europe. Trump even hinted cease fire is unnecessary for an end agreement, that means that the LOC will keep moving, nothing to be frozen.
you quickly jump to conclusion from a baseless report, seems that you are so eager to paint the picture of Russian defeat? wish is not reality and not necessarily turn to either.
Last edited:
If the Russians did agree to it then Trump wouldn’t be threatening Russia with an “rough situation” if they don’t cooperate with the peace deal. Why issue another ultimatum if they already agreed to said ultimatum? This is just the hundredth time they negotiated among themselves on the terms they are willing to accept and demanding the Russians accept it unconditionally.
Residents of Kremenchuk have published footage of Russian Kh-101 missiles and Geran-2 drones striking the Kremenchuk oil refinery. The strike also hit the Ukrainian gas compressor station of the Lubensky linear production department of main gas pipelines in the Poltava region. It is worth noting that this is a repeat strike on the largest oil refining enterprise in Ukraine. The Ukrainian plant processes Azeri Light oil from Azerbaijan. Daytime footage from Kremenchuk residents resembles some kind of apocalyptic spectacle.
I actually almost completely agree with your post!
However, I'm afraid you may have misread mine: at no point did I say or imply Putin or the Russians to be desperate for or otherwise in need of an (immediate) peace deal.
It's why I wrote:
I'm open to the scenario that a "backroom deal" might nominally exist, but that doesn't mean the Russians and Ukrainians are effectively looking at identical parameters, or that what might exist is meaningfully implementable.
That's a part of it, but more broadly speaking, Putin and the Russians are harnessing this conflict to sow doubt in Uncle Sam's commitment to its Article 5 obligations.
Their ultimate goal — not to say it'll necessarily be fully realized in the short or medium term — is to fracture NATO and bring forth a new security architecture for Europe, or at least Eastern Europe.
Not inquiring facetiously, but do you believe such a scenario to be plausible?
If so, how would NATO and Russia get there?
If only NATO's leadership were more well versed with Clausewitz in general and culmination in particular.
Though even then such a strategy would've been politically unpalatable for the myopic domestic elites and impatient general publics of NATO countries.
Moreover, NATO severely and recklessly underestimated the Russians, while overestimating the Ukrainians.
Drank too much of their own "kool aid."
The main issue for Ukraine now is more soldiers that can be put onto the battle front, which they don't have. EU's money and weapons will only solve a small portion of many problems.