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That's exactly what we will have if we reach peace right now. Except this state will have more living Ukrainians in it.
My initial bias was that Russia would score a quick victory. Then, influenced by my American media diet, I thought that the Russian economy would collapse and that the Ukraine counteroffensive, backed by advanced American weapons, would be effective.
When that didn't pan on I questioned my assumptions.
Reading the comments here, I believe that I have arrived at a more realistic stance than most people, who think things like reconquering Crimea are on the table still. I hope there is a cease fire because I don't think the war is winnable by Ukraine without unacceptable costs from the U.S. Confidence level: 80%.
That's the problem isn't it? How do value these fuzzy future utils that rest on things like predictions of future actions of dictators? My prejudice is to take a "greedy algorithm" approach. Let's prefer the utils right in front of our face over hypothetical future utils (which might even be negative utils!). If you know finance, think of it like a present value calculation with a high discount rate.
People are FAR too confident about the future.
Also. Please don't be a jerk, especially to people who are making an effort to argue an unpopular opinion.
What makes you think Putin would accept a ceasefire proposal along the current line of control? All I have seen indicates to me that he is fully prepared to fight a years-long war of attrition until Ukraine runs out of either artillery shells or people, because he thinks at that point they will collapse like the Germans in 1918 and he can have the glorious march to Kiev he was denied at the start of the war. I don't see any incentive for him to stop halfway besides saving the lives of Russian soldiers dying in the trenches, and after all what's a few million dead compared to reuniting the motherland?
I can only speak for myself, but I still support sending aid to Ukraine and I never thought that reconquering Crimea or the breakaway Donbass republics was feasible, only status quo ante bellum at most. As long as Ukrainians are willing to fight and there are no American boots on the ground (the odd volunteer excepted) though, I don't see any reason to deny their requests for assistance; we can stop the day Ukrainian public opinion turns against the war.
Isn't this just a general purpose argument for extending the war forever? Obviously the opponent would only compromise if he was weak. And if he's weak we can win!
Algorithm for perpetual war
Opponent is losing: Don't stop now, he's toast. March on to victory.
Opponent is winning: Don't negotiate from a state of weakness.
Honestly, I don't know. Maybe Putin wouldn't accept peace even at the current borders. Maybe he would. Maybe he'd give it all back in exchange for international recognition of Crimea. Why are we afraid to try offering an olive branch?
No. It's a specific-person argument relevant to the key decision maker based on past actions and demonstrated intentions.
Your algorithm lacks basic considerations such as not reflecting the considerations of what objectives are being pursued, the considerations of Putin that Resolute Raven was referring to, not factoring in the game theory of the nuclear weapons.
It also lacks the characteristic of having been made by the person you are responding to, rendering it a straw man that does not address their actual position.
I don't know- why are you afraid?
May other people aren't afraid, they just deem it an irrational and even harmful olive branch based on the multiple other olive branches Putin was offered that Putin discarded, ignored, or used as weapons in the course of his path to the present.
Which returns to your propensity to ignoring the history of involved actors and repeated iterations of conflicts and compromises as a factor in other people's considerations of how to deal with said actors.
To pick just one related to territorial claims, the history that Putin himself recognized Ukranian territorial integrity before he decided not to, before he said he had no further territorial claims on Ukraine, before he sponsored an uprising he claimed he had nothing to do with, before he launched an armed intervention to secure separatist republics he claimed he had no territorial ambitions on, before he annexed them but claimed he had no territorial goals on the rest of Ukraine, before he declared the annexation of not only territories held but territories never captured, to current highly costly efforts to continue conquering territory not held and never held previously.
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It won't, because it won't exist, because you can't reach peace right now.
Among the reasons you won't have peace right now is because the Russians are uninterested in peace right now that results in a European-Ukraine as opposed to maintaining what they know to be untenable and belligerent-unacceptable capitulation terms that would result in a Russia-dominated Ukraine that they know the Ukrainians will not accept.
Which is unsurprising to anyone with a vague awareness of the geopolitical calendar and the logistics of the conflict, because they would already be aware that Putin's predictable windows for a stronger hand in actual negotiations is late next year, after the results of the US presidential election are known, after a fighting year where the Russians are anticipated to have an artillery ammo supply advantage, where it's not clear if Ukraine will have enough for an offensive rather than grinding defense, and where the Russians will have a general year-long opportunity to making propaganda hay of a nominally one-sided conflict even as they are already spinning up various military-posturing dynamics to otherwise further their inevitable-victory narratives to try and have a stronger hands in relevant negotiations late next year than they do this year.
Admitting a susceptibility to propaganda narratives for nearly the entire duration of the conflict isn't the defense of your reading between the lines that you think it is.
By contrast, the sort of people who recognized the logistical limitations of western artillery ammo were also the people predicting a long drawn out conflict (guerilla or west of the Dneiper), had no pretensions that the Russian economy would collapse, and warned against dramatic territorial expectation-metrics for the offensive.
You adopted new, and in the current case old, propaganda narratives.
Your belief is irrelevant to your lack of realism, assuming that by realism you are alluding to an accurate understanding of reality of the conflict.
False appeals to probability are common in pseudo-rationalist posturing, but it only betrays a lack of understanding of what other people consider unacceptable, and acceptable, costs.
It's not a problem if you are not actually a utilitarian, but are adopting a utilitarian persona for gravitas while disclaiming the central conceit of considering abstract and future value considerations.
In such a case, the feigned confusion is an appeal to authority, in much the same way the classic 'I don't understand how one could disagree' is an appeal to the unstated reasonable-informed observer rather than an admission of personal limitation.
Your prejudice is a poor model for international conflicts in general, and Russia and Putin in particular, who neither collectively or individually follow your preferred paradigm.
Models that are not used by, not followed by, and do not predict the decisions or actions of others are useless for understanding others.
Clearly.
Still yawning. Repeating the latest iterations of a nearly two-year old propaganda narrative with even shoddier justifications is not a commendable effort to argue an unpopular opinion. It's simply repeating the latest iterations of a nearly two-year propaganda narrative without acknowledging or dealing with why the opinion earned it's unpopularity. In other words, trite.
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