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Notes -
Interesting developments in Ukraine. Very unclear what's going on, but possibly US supported change of leadership within the near future. That's just a guess.
On Friday the 18th, there were two hit pieces on Zelensky, one in FT and another in Spectator. TL;DR on them is: West is disappointed with Zelensky because he appears to be using the cover of war to attack people who were fighting against corruption in Ukraine and using authoritarian means to go after politicians who aren't seen as fully loyal to him.
That's not new - Ukrainians have been muttering about precisely that for years. But Westerners are reading it now, and as has been pointed out, if you're reading it, it's for you..
There were some Ukrainian and one older Politico.EU articles with a similar tone but all much lower profile. Now the Man wants us to know Zelensky is not the greatest hero since Churchill. Why?
Then, on Saturday, in a surprising move, Zelensky called for negotiations. Here's Guardian reporting on it..
Looking at the previous round of negotiations, those were futile. Without concessions that Ukrainians, especially the nationalists find unthinkable, Russians aren't stopping. In addition last week Trump gave Russia some sort of '50 days' ultimatum.. No idea what that means- threatening tariffs on a country that has had 20 rounds of sanctions imposed on it seems odd.
The last time(end of may '25) they tried negotiating there was no agreement (Russians wanted the 4 oblasts, a little land in them they didn't have yet and ofc Crimea), which Ukraine didn't want to agree too even though they have, at present, a snowball's chance in hell of regaining any territory and are inexorably losing more at an escalating pace. Mind you, this is pretty much 'minimalism' on the Russian side. Ukrainians, just to start proper negotiations wanted an 'unconditional 30 day ceasefire', to which Russians were unwilling to agree because they thought it was just a stalling tactic to get time to build more defensive lines.
There's no reason to believe Russians are going to be in any way more amenable this time -they've taken more ground, their forces are being sustained, unlike the Ukrainian ones.
Town of Pokrovsk (~70k before war) whose supply lines have been interdicted for months now & ofc town itself has been under constant attrition is getting ever more cut off. Russians have massed forces to actually cut off the town and Ukraine doesn't have any reserves to counter that, so there's risk of the city getting wholly cut off.
So what to make of it? Seymour Hersh claims that US wants to replace Zelensky with Zaluzhny. A regime journalist calls that 'Ukrainian disinformation'..
But Hersh also claims US is trying to reach an agreement with Russia while it's still possible. Russians who are confident they can see it through obviously don't want to make any deal that'd be less than full recognition of conquered territory & Finlandization of rump Ukraine. So, why even attempt to negotiate? If Zelensky were to make peace, he'd have to fight the nationalists who won't give up this easily, go against his western sponsors who don't want the war to end either. He clearly doesn't have support to end the war.
It looks like desperate flailing from Zelensky's side. Or is the army personnel/ammo situation so critical that he expects it to be close to collapse within a month? Very little is known about how bad it is for AFU (it's all secret and they rarely say anything). About the best report is this Polish one, which says Ukraine requires 300,000 soldiers to fully staff its combat formations, and that presently there are cca 300,000 men in the trenches.
My knowledge of Ukr politics begins and ends at ‘I support whatever the UGCC wants’, so this is an honest question- does Zaluzhny have sufficient internal support to force through a peace agreement over the nationalist’s objections, or to expand the draft until Ukraine is fully staffed again? Could that be the reason?
As for Zelenskyy, making high risk maneuvers is far from unknown when leaders sense a direct threat to their power.
@Dean
Do you think this will help? While team U has shortage of everything, I think their main issue right now is that Russia will soon be able to degrade their air defenses to levels that their drones will be able to strike the whole country. If they get to this point - you won't even be able to build new air defenses or training camps. They will be just sitting ducks.
interceptor drones are appearing on larger scale and turning out to be quite useful
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Elections in Ukraine are cancelled indefinitely with US State Department approval, so barring a military coup Zaluzhny can’t force anything through. The State Department might be changing its tune though. The war is going very badly for Ukraine. Budanov was supposed to be the hard-headed butcher that would fight to the last Ukrainian, so if he wants to tap out that means the situation must be very dire. A catastrophic, total Ukrainian collapse would make NATO a lot harder to defend because the Russians would be sitting right on the Polish border. The Balkans would also be at much higher risk. It would be better for NATO to force Ukraine to give up everything east of the Dneiper and freeze the conflict for another ten years. That at least gives Europe time to rearm.
and how it would be supposed to be changing things?
Kaliningrad is a thing, Belarus is effectively absorbed as far as military staging goes.
US State Department is not adding here much, elections are suspended in accordance of Ukrainian constitution on account of having a war
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Russians wouldn't settle for 'freezing the conflict', they're not idiots. They're going to demand neutrality or keep fighting.
They have said that over and over.
Yes probably, when I say freezing the conflict I was being a bit unclear. I’m including solutions like giving away the eastern half and making the remaining rump swear neutrality, not just a Korea style freeze. Anything that could stop the conflict without getting Poland encircled.
War in Ukraine would need to go truly badly to end with Russian Germany. Or at least Russian-occupied Czech Republic and Slovakia.
I meant that if all of Ukraine falls you have Poland abutting Russia and Belarus to the east and Russian Kaliningrad to the north.
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