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We're sitting on a > 48 hour interval with no top level posts which might be some kind of record. It's been awhile since we talked about Ukraine, so here we go..
It would seem that Ukraine is still slowly losing a war of attrition. Of course, the big news is Ukraine's incursion into Kursk, in which they managed to capture some Russian territory after catching the Russians with their pants down. Coupled with that, Ukraine has also been mounting more long-range attacks against Russian oil infrastructure. Neither of these actions is really what Ukraine's western allies want to see, but what can they do? Ukraine's best bet may to escalate in order to draw in more Western support without which they will collapse. But it's looking quite grim. Germany has vowed to stop new aid.
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-halt-new-ukraine-military-aid-report-war-russia/
In response to Kursk and the oil infrastructure attacks, Russia has attacked Ukraine's energy grid.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-strikes-ukraines-power-grid-in-most-massive-attack-of-war/ar-AA1pt39P
What many people don't realize is that the Ukraine/Russia conflict has been in many ways quite limited. Life goes on in the cities. Casualties have largely been limited to combatants. The longer things go on, the more this might change. People in Kiev are now facing the real possibility of a winter without heat and electricity.
Here in the West, people's enthusiasm for the war seems to be waning as the news cycle covers newer, shinier topics. But the war grinds on and every day men die at the front.
Edit: As usual, the cure to a stale front page is to post about Ukraine which inspires another post on a different topic moments later.
So, anyone have a read on what a realistic ceasefire deal looks like? Does one exist? Is anyone serious mooting one around in the world of think tanks?
Ukraine's winning scenarios have run out at this point. The abortive and telegraphed offensive ate up too much time and material for them to win in any conventional sense. Prigozhin might have been the Black Swan they needed, but he pussied out. The Russian economy is showing no signs of collapse. Some point to a Wunderwaffen or to some chart that shows NATO production coming online at a faster pace from 2025 onward, but I doubt that will make a material difference. Ukraine is basically hoping for a Russian collapse as a result of some as-yet-unknown cause, which is not impossible, but not much of a strategy.
Russia's odds of winning much more than what they have so far seem longer still. They're hoping Ukraine just gives up, but that might be longer odds than a Russian collapse, as Ukrainian psychopathic nationalism seems more systemic rather than oriented around a single individual.
Neither side is going to win the kind of victory that will make good their losses. So how is a ceasefire outlined that will deliver a lasting peace?
I still haven't come up with a better idea than putting Harry and Meghhan on the throne in Kiev.
'Realistic' by who's standard?
One of the many issues of a ceasefire is that it hinges on people making realistic demands to people who can deliver on them. To date, the Russians haven't indicated either, creating a tangle of un-deliverable expectations to people who can't deliver them.
As a result, non-Russian ceasefire chatter inevitably requires assuming the Russians will selectively drop various declared conditions, with which conditions the Russians will drop changing based on the biases of the speculator.
That's certainly a take. Alternatively, Ukraine is no more on the edge of collapse than it has been constantly claimed to be since 2022 and in some respects considerably further away, 2024 has been generally unsurprising and consistent with forecasts made in 2023 bar a far greater expansion in Western comfort in Ukrainian weapon use against the Russians, no one who was unsurprised at Russia not collapsing in 2022-2023 was expecting it to collapse in 2024-2025 either, and the Russian manpower strategy is showing its limits even under the 'just pay more' paradigm.
As a result, absent some collapse of the Ukrainian nation-state (possibly some sort of mass exodus from a power grid collapse, as seems to be a reoccuring Russian point in the witners), the Ukrainians remain on track to continue the many-year process of attriting the Russian's Soviet Inheritance that serves as the military-economic center of gravity of Russia's ability to field larger armies and pose a strategic offensive threat.
Russia's strategy is not that Ukraine gives up, it is that the Americans stop supporting the Ukrainians and push the Europeans to stop supporting the Ukrainians until the Ukrainian state lacks the economic and military capacity to resist.
Calling Ukrainian nationalism pschopathic seems rather shallow as a pejorative goes, particularly given the lack of equivalent for Russia despite Russia' various policies in the war to date.
Lasting ceasefires hinge on some combination of a belief in the other party's intentions, and an evaluation of their capabilities. Due to Putin's lack of credibility, a ceasefire acceptable to the Ukrainians and Europeans will be built on Russia's loss of long-term capabilities vis-a-vis the Europeans, who both want Russia to lose the Soviet inheritance and to build their own military production capability so that post-war Russia can't out-arm them.
This is not the structure Putin has in mind at this time, however- Putin almost certainly believes the Americans are the hyperagent whose decision will be decisive, that the Soviet stocks are so indefinite that they are functionally infinite, that if he can de facto control the de jure territory of the separatists oblasts then he can compel western parties to accept the Russian annexation of those regions, and that as part of a peace deal Russia can economically re-connect with Europe and end the various sanction regimes / get back the frozen war chest assets.
This is unlikely to happen, but Putin is also a strategic procrastinator, and absent a critical disaster is likely to keep delaying any decision on EU-acceptable concessions in hopes that one more election cycle in the US / Germany / EU may do the trick.
As a result, the war will likely continue for years more, easily beyond 2026. Putin is likely to try for some sort of negotiations in 2025 with the new US president regardless who wins. It will probably fail due to the difference in the politically acceptable positions between what Putin is willing to offer and what the US/west would be able to legislatively deliver, but he will then hold out hope that the 2026 mid-terms might shape the US president's position. It would be the end of the 2026 campaign season before the results were realized, and by 2027 the prospects of the next cycles will offer the next excuse to procrastinate.
While I respect (though disagree with) the idea that we can't possibly talk to unreliable partners, this doesn't seem to be a position of the U.S. government.
The US has been brokering ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas literally every week for the last few months. Hamas is the least trustworthy partner I can possibly think of. They will immediately turn around and start rearming and launching terrorist campaigns the second the ink is dry.
So it would seem the US government views this war as a good war.
Thats kind of the point though isnt it? It doesnt mater how manny talks the US brokers if niether HAMAS nor the IDF are going to take them seriously.
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If 'views this as a good war' is synonymous with 'the Russians maintain that the pre-emptive Ukrainian withdrawal from the Russian-claimed oblasts is the precondition for talks,' sure, but that's more than a little silly.
But would be fair, if you were trying to be unfair. Many appeals for ceasefire are unserious, as demonstrated by your own example. The US has not been brokering ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas literally every week- the US has (and other regional actors have) been going through the kubuki theater of pretending to have ceasefire talks that neither involved party are actually interested in, which everyone involved in knows is not going to deliver, and everyone already knew this before the first dozen times Hamas walked away from one sort of condition or Israel walked away from another.
However, because Hamas claims to be interested in talks, and does not have blatantly non-starter preconditions for said talks, said talks occur even though no one expects anything from them. Russia's conditions for equivalent public talks, however, amount to a Ukrainian withdrawal regardless of the result of the talks.
This isn't a matter of the US government views. It's a matter that the US government isn't the hyperagent, and that the views of the other parties matter as well- and if a party is making unreasonable demands to even have ceasefire talks, let alone demands within the ceasefire talks, the preferences of the US government are not going to bend everyone else to make concessions to the unreasonable party for the sake of ceasefire talks.
Which, going to post you replied to, is the point that realistic talks are far away: the Russian positions are not realistic by the standards of less-silly people.
I think it's quite obvious that both sides stated positions aren't their actual final positions for the hypothetical peace treaty if it was signed right now. They just have no reason to downgrade their stated goals before any negotiations.
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Isn't Ukraine, symmetrically, still demanding Russia's withdrawal from the territories it has successfully captured as a precondition? The problem with this war is that neither side is actually even close to being exhausted, so they don't see a point in taking about negotiations except as an opportunity for games and posturing.
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