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This is the rub. Russia has always cared more about Ukrainian "neutrality" than they do about the exact position of the border - the demands immediately before the invasion related to "neutrality" and not territory, and the Istanbul negotiations broke down over the issue. Russia has said that troops from NATO countries in Ukraine is a red line - and if you accept the Mearsheimer realist view of Russian goals then it should be one. If they are willing to accept peacekeepers from European NATO countries then that is a major move. And the vagueness from the Trump administration on this point suggests that they are not. And on the flip side, Ukraine has no incentive to accept a deal that doesn't leave them more defensible than they are now, given the risk of Russia reneging and restarting the war in the future.
The hard part of negotiating a Russia-Ukraine deal is the security arrangements. By default any arrangement which makes it easier for NATO to defend Ukraine from a Russian attack in future is something that could, in theory, make it easier for NATO to attack Russia from Ukrainian territory. If the security arrangements are TBD (as they have to be if the countries that will actually be guaranteeing Ukraine's security were excluded from the negotiations) then there isn't a deal.
Why not just attack from NATO territory in Poland, Finland (only decided to forego neutrality because of the Ukraine invasion), or the Baltics? They are closer to the presumable targets anyway.
Because nukes.
Any geopolitical discussion on what Russia needs to survive as a state that does not acknowledge or address the role of second-strike nuclear deterrence is not a serious discussion.
And how is that any different between attack from Ukraine vs attack from eg. Latvia?
There is no meaningful difference. Any existential invasion from any direction remains deterred by second-strike nuke capability.
Typically though, you want to avoid situations where your two options are “lose and die” and “press the small red button marked ‘The End of the World’”
Why would they lose and die when losing and dying is followed by the end of the world for the attacker who forces them to lose and die?
This is where we get to the sillyness of pretending nukes don't matter or adopting inconsistent nuclear deterrence paradigms. Somehow nukes would be used for the end of the world, but not the end of nuclear state to hostile invasion which will result in the death of the people with nukes regardless.
But you notice that in either case, they still die.
I think the point is that NATO, knowing they have nukes and are willing to use them, would choose not to invade in the first place. They still die in a hypothetical world where NATO wants the world to end. They live in the world where NATO doesn't want the world to end and chooses not to invade them, because they have nukes.
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