What Should Now Be Obvious To Everyone About the Ukraine War

As I said, day one, Russia was going to win this war if it wanted it enough. Russia’s advance is slow, but it is certain and it is NOT going to be reversed unless the US declares war, which is NOT going to happen. The Ukrainian army is finally nearing collapse, which I’d expect some time next year. The war will last another two years at most, I’d guess.

Peace will be made under the terms Russia wants, or the war will continue. Ukraine is still fighting, but everyone with the least lick of sense knows it is going to lose. Ukraine will have to accept the terms imposed on it, because if it doesn’t Russia will just keep going.

Trump’s peace plan (ostensibly) as floated in the WSJ was essentially a frozen conflict with a twenty year guarantee of not joining NATO. That’s not going to fly. Ukraine will be a demilitarized neutral state at best, if it won’t surrender it’ll be defeated and have a government imposed on it. The Russians will not cut any sort of deal with the West which requires the West to “keep” the deal. They believe that the West is “agreement incapable”, that is, that it will not obey any deals it signs if it doesn’t want to (as it didn’t obey the Minsk agreement) so no peace treaty which requires western enforcement or has Western troops in any part of Ukraine will be acceptable.

Russia has done just fine out of all this. Its people are happy and optimistic, its economy is booming and it’s now the 4th largest economy on PPP GDP terms and probably third in realistic terms: it has tons of resources, food, tech and a decent amount of industry, and it will handle climate change better than most nations. It is locked into the Chinese orbit as a junior partner, but China doesn’t spew contempt at Russia 24/7 the way the West does and has for my entire lifetime, nor slam it with repeated sanctions. (The sanctions started way before the war, and were mostly justified on the basis of “Russia shouldn’t run its own internal affairs the way it chooses. And the poor, poor oligarchs.”)

Again, this was always the most likely outcome and everyone who thought otherwise refused to look at the very simple differences in size, population, resources and industry between the two nations.

As for Ukraine, the best deal they could have gotten was offered by the Russians near the start of the war, but they believed NATO and the US and Boris Johnson and thought they could win. The result is going to be a much weaker and poorer Ukraine, probably with half the pre-war population.

Meanwhile sanctions, instead of harming Russia, boomeranged and hurt Europe far more than Russia, and have contributed to Europe’s ongoing de-industrialization.

Nobody in power the West or Ukraine has anything to be proud of in how they handled this. Even the depraved argument of “let’s fight to the last Ukrainian and weaken Russia” hasn’t worked, instead Russia is stronger than it has been since the fall of the USSR.

*Golf clap*

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