Surely Putin does not want to repeat the same mistakes from Minsk I and II or from the beginning of the war/SMO. If Putin agrees to negotiate, he will dictate his own conditions, and, in my opinion, not before most objectives of the SMO are accomplished, which probably is not that far anyway.
Let's not forget that Putin tried until the last minute to avoid the war. Even Stoltenberg admitted it recently:
So, either US/NATO accepts the terms & conditions set by Putin (i.e. the European security system he proposed years ago), since he is the one who is clearly winning, and peace follows (hopefully!), or he will continue the war to the end, until ALL objectives of the SMO are accomplished.
On a side note, I would like to remind everyone that Russia has never said no to negotiation. Au contraire... it's always been the other side to say no, first before the war, then at the beginning of it, when the negotiations in Turkey were thrown off the table by Boris Johnson visiting Kiev and the staging of the Bucha massacre. Not to mention the fact that Zelensky signed a decree forbidding negotiations with Putin.
Bucha is a serious problem, and I've seen no credible evidence it was 'staged'.
The best, or rather least bad one can say is that atrocities like Bucha or My Lai or Srebrenica occur in war, and that just about all major players on all sides of the current war have been guilty of them.
The first casualty of war is truth - on both or all sides.
Your links are not objective surveys, but the Wikipedia article on the Bucha events seems fairly balanced, linking numerous sources with many varied perspectives.
Machiavelli changed history, or the writing of history, by correlating accounts by different actors and spectators with their interests and 'positions' (in the same way different people see a spatial object differently from their different positions or perspectives).
From Machiavelli down to Ranke and beyond, this is the only way to write objective history.
When some of the partisan dust finally starts to settle, Bucha will be understood as a massacre like My Lai, despite the initial wartime distortions and dis- and mis- information from all sides.
Yes, truth is always the first casualty of war, but telling me that my "links are not objective surveys", but citing a Wikipedia article is just bonkers, since it is well known at least since 2007 that Wikipedia is edited by FBI and CIA:
Also, the "numerous sources with many varied perspectives" are mainly Western MSM outlets, which nowadays are just propaganda repeaters or parrots fed by the neo-cons. Just have a look at how all of them have depicted what happened yesterday in Palestine as "surprise attack" or "unexpected attack" or "unprovoked attack by Hamas"! Seriously?
Israel knows very well that the al-Aqsa mosque is red line for Muslims [1]. Actually, Hamas even warned Israel not to cross this red line exactly a week ago [2]. Yet, Israel decided to cross it just a few days ago [3].
PS: I get really, er, PSsed by the way everyone has to take sides, especially in America these days (with an increasingly McCarthyite NYT suggesting that any criticism of NATO's war must be part of some covert Russian propaganda campaign).
I refuse to take sides - so in most Western media I'm simply a 'Putinbot', for Russophiles I'm apparently some CIA stooge.
A great model of objective analysis, if only on the military level, which is so subject to partial and partisan reporting, and so essential to the wider political dynamic, is for me this guy:
"[Larry Sanger] has told journalist Glenn Greenwald that the platform he helped create has become an instrument of control for what he described as "left-liberal entities", including the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies."
Yes, Wikipedia is part of the online battleground, though Sanger doesn't claim it's *run* by those lefties (?) at the CIA, rather that it's a significant site of the PR battle.
I wasn't citing it as an authority, only as a useful initial source of links, from which can can explore competing versions of what happened further - more useful than Google, for example, which over the course of the war in Ukraine really does seem to have been taken over by NATO editors and algorithms.
Donbas (to the Oskil?) and Crimea remaining Russian has been a given since 2014, and I guess it's difficult to see how Putin could be persuaded to retreat from the left bank of the Dnieper between Crimea and Vasilivka in particular, or from all the 'liberated' parts of Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts in general - though there are not the same 'natural' topographical or ethnic boundaries between Vasilivka and the Donbas as elsewhere. And Ukraine formally ceding the whole Azov coast seems a big ask under any elected leader.
A land bridge too far for the Ukrainian electorate?
Or is that the price they will simply have to accept, if not formally, to have any hope of a functional country in the future?
You make good points. It may be that it is not Zelensky who negotiates. He may be gone. Naturally any negotiation will be extraordinarily hard. But the more time that passes and the more Ukraine gets smashed up, the worse it will be.
Zelensky is certainly a big obstacle to any pragmatic resolution of the Ukraine mess.
He remains an actor playing a role, and as Aristotle saw nearly 2400 years ago, tragedy and comedy both turn on people being locked into a self-image or role, unable to step outside it and reflect on more fundamental questions of all the options available, and their consequences: they cannot ultimately make rational ethical choices about optimizing outcomes for themselves or, more importantly, their community.
And the theatre management, or his new producers Nuland and Biden (after he locked up Kolomoisky) seem to be pretty locked into the tragicomic dynamic with their star.
I imagine a final Act where America's favourite actor reappears on the world stage in January 2025, and tells his Ukrainian counterpart "You're Fired", if the Servant of the People doesn't slip into the wings or fall off the stage before then.
Excellent answers. In my opinion, Putin wants to get back to being the meddler (eg - Syria, Iran, etc.) while also taking money from the West while he does it. Also, it's very hard to get some covert revenge for the Nordstream and Crimea attacks while he's center stage.
Surely Putin does not want to repeat the same mistakes from Minsk I and II or from the beginning of the war/SMO. If Putin agrees to negotiate, he will dictate his own conditions, and, in my opinion, not before most objectives of the SMO are accomplished, which probably is not that far anyway.
Let's not forget that Putin tried until the last minute to avoid the war. Even Stoltenberg admitted it recently:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jp3-Ph5lnuo
Transcript from NATO web-site itself: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_218172.htm
So, either US/NATO accepts the terms & conditions set by Putin (i.e. the European security system he proposed years ago), since he is the one who is clearly winning, and peace follows (hopefully!), or he will continue the war to the end, until ALL objectives of the SMO are accomplished.
On a side note, I would like to remind everyone that Russia has never said no to negotiation. Au contraire... it's always been the other side to say no, first before the war, then at the beginning of it, when the negotiations in Turkey were thrown off the table by Boris Johnson visiting Kiev and the staging of the Bucha massacre. Not to mention the fact that Zelensky signed a decree forbidding negotiations with Putin.
Bucha is a serious problem, and I've seen no credible evidence it was 'staged'.
The best, or rather least bad one can say is that atrocities like Bucha or My Lai or Srebrenica occur in war, and that just about all major players on all sides of the current war have been guilty of them.
Sorry, but there are many, many things that do not agree with the Ukrainian version of what happened in Bucha:
- https://www.workers.org/2022/04/63341/
- https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-bucha-massacres-mortar-alley.html
The first casualty of war is truth - on both or all sides.
Your links are not objective surveys, but the Wikipedia article on the Bucha events seems fairly balanced, linking numerous sources with many varied perspectives.
Machiavelli changed history, or the writing of history, by correlating accounts by different actors and spectators with their interests and 'positions' (in the same way different people see a spatial object differently from their different positions or perspectives).
From Machiavelli down to Ranke and beyond, this is the only way to write objective history.
When some of the partisan dust finally starts to settle, Bucha will be understood as a massacre like My Lai, despite the initial wartime distortions and dis- and mis- information from all sides.
Shit really happens in a war.
Yes, truth is always the first casualty of war, but telling me that my "links are not objective surveys", but citing a Wikipedia article is just bonkers, since it is well known at least since 2007 that Wikipedia is edited by FBI and CIA:
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia-idUSN1642896020070816
Even Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, admitted it:
- https://english.almayadeen.net/news/technology/wikipedias-secret-agent:-cia-role-in-moderating-online-encyc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR6dO8U8okk
Also, the "numerous sources with many varied perspectives" are mainly Western MSM outlets, which nowadays are just propaganda repeaters or parrots fed by the neo-cons. Just have a look at how all of them have depicted what happened yesterday in Palestine as "surprise attack" or "unexpected attack" or "unprovoked attack by Hamas"! Seriously?
Israel knows very well that the al-Aqsa mosque is red line for Muslims [1]. Actually, Hamas even warned Israel not to cross this red line exactly a week ago [2]. Yet, Israel decided to cross it just a few days ago [3].
[1] https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/diplomacy/al-aqsa-mosque-turkiyes-red-line-israel-must-stop-provocations
[2] https://en.irna.ir/news/85244896/Hamas-warns-Israeli-regime-not-to-cross-al-Aqsa-redline
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/4/israeli-settlers-storm-al-aqsa-mosque-complex-on-fifth-day-of-sukkot
Here you can find some more info about Wikipedia being a covert propaganda operation: https://swprs.org/wikipedia-and-propaganda/
Here you can find more about the "propaganda multiplier": https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/
And here you can find lots of articles, books and videos about how CIA manipulates most of the Western media: https://swprs.org/video-the-cia-and-the-media/
PS: I get really, er, PSsed by the way everyone has to take sides, especially in America these days (with an increasingly McCarthyite NYT suggesting that any criticism of NATO's war must be part of some covert Russian propaganda campaign).
I refuse to take sides - so in most Western media I'm simply a 'Putinbot', for Russophiles I'm apparently some CIA stooge.
A great model of objective analysis, if only on the military level, which is so subject to partial and partisan reporting, and so essential to the wider political dynamic, is for me this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/@Theti
If only more journalists and politicians and their in-house 'experts' could follow his example...
"[Larry Sanger] has told journalist Glenn Greenwald that the platform he helped create has become an instrument of control for what he described as "left-liberal entities", including the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies."
Yes, Wikipedia is part of the online battleground, though Sanger doesn't claim it's *run* by those lefties (?) at the CIA, rather that it's a significant site of the PR battle.
I wasn't citing it as an authority, only as a useful initial source of links, from which can can explore competing versions of what happened further - more useful than Google, for example, which over the course of the war in Ukraine really does seem to have been taken over by NATO editors and algorithms.
What Putin Wants ? It doesnt matter What Putin Wants !
It's what the neocons want that matters...Putin didnt want this war, the neocons did...Putin is reacting...
Putin doesnt want a prolonged, dragged-out war. The neocons do "to wear-down Russia"...
The Ukraine is only the current front - and Putin knows it...Putin has no choice but to fight...
Putin just opened up a second front in the Middle East.
I don't think so, but we don't know a lot yet. For sure, Iran did the training and support for the terrorists.
Good and valid response to a good and valiv question.
The war needs an optimistic look; the only way it will be resolved.
Donbas (to the Oskil?) and Crimea remaining Russian has been a given since 2014, and I guess it's difficult to see how Putin could be persuaded to retreat from the left bank of the Dnieper between Crimea and Vasilivka in particular, or from all the 'liberated' parts of Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts in general - though there are not the same 'natural' topographical or ethnic boundaries between Vasilivka and the Donbas as elsewhere. And Ukraine formally ceding the whole Azov coast seems a big ask under any elected leader.
A land bridge too far for the Ukrainian electorate?
Or is that the price they will simply have to accept, if not formally, to have any hope of a functional country in the future?
You make good points. It may be that it is not Zelensky who negotiates. He may be gone. Naturally any negotiation will be extraordinarily hard. But the more time that passes and the more Ukraine gets smashed up, the worse it will be.
Zelensky is certainly a big obstacle to any pragmatic resolution of the Ukraine mess.
He remains an actor playing a role, and as Aristotle saw nearly 2400 years ago, tragedy and comedy both turn on people being locked into a self-image or role, unable to step outside it and reflect on more fundamental questions of all the options available, and their consequences: they cannot ultimately make rational ethical choices about optimizing outcomes for themselves or, more importantly, their community.
And the theatre management, or his new producers Nuland and Biden (after he locked up Kolomoisky) seem to be pretty locked into the tragicomic dynamic with their star.
I imagine a final Act where America's favourite actor reappears on the world stage in January 2025, and tells his Ukrainian counterpart "You're Fired", if the Servant of the People doesn't slip into the wings or fall off the stage before then.
Excellent answers. In my opinion, Putin wants to get back to being the meddler (eg - Syria, Iran, etc.) while also taking money from the West while he does it. Also, it's very hard to get some covert revenge for the Nordstream and Crimea attacks while he's center stage.