Moderating breaking news thread, conjecture on assassination belong elsewhere.
Is Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreeing that Ukraine will lose territories as a compromise to end the war?
I suspect that this is badly worded. I think Ukraine is only agreeing to freeze the lines and begin peace talks.
Guardian live feed
I think maybe he’s cottoned onto the fact that he can agree to just about any terms for negotiation short of total capitulation. Putin isn’t going to accept or abide by anything else, and Ukraine can point to that as further proof that they’re not serious about trying to end the war in any other shape, form or fashion.
It could be that Zelenskyy has made the calculation that Ukraine can build up their forces more rapidly than Russia could should there be a pause in the hostilities, or maybe that Ukrainian soldiers would benefit more than Russian soldiers from taking a break from direct action. Given that a larger percentage of Ukrainian troops are seeing active front line combat than Russian troops are, that is almost certainly the case. If so, a pause would be of more benefit to Ukraine than Russia.
He’s right, as long as Ukraine maintains the support of the EU (aka NATO sans the U.S.).
In the long run, Russia can’t win against Europe. I’m worried that if Putin takes this deal, he will do so thinking that he can dry up Ukraine’s support in Europe with Russia no longer being a direct at-war threat from the East.
I’m not sure he (ETA: Putin) would be wrong about that.
I seems that Zelenskyy has learned to avoid publicly disagreeing with Trump. Zelenskyy wants to keep the military aid flowing to Ukraine.
Putin tends to make inflammatory statements that disagree with American interests.
Maybe that will work to Ukraine’s advantage.
Zelenskyy must feel the strain of walking that tightrope. He has to represent Ukraine’s interests and still avoid another public spat with Trump
Is Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreeing that Ukraine will lose territories as a compromise to end the war?
What Zelenskyy is doing is agreeing that Russia has de facto control of the territory they control but not agreeing that it is legally Russian territory.
This serves two purposes. In the short term, it is something of a face-saving technique in that it allows him to say he is allowing Russia to keep the territory but still not legally conceding it.
In the long term, if Russia were ever to collapse again. Something that it has done twice in the last 110 years. It would provide the legal pretext for Ukraine to get the land back.
Only, that will not work in the sense that Ukraine may be able to continue the war at some more favourable time.
The European countries supporting Ukraine’s have a solid majority of their population in favour of that because Ukraine defends itself against a war of aggression. Russia is unambiguously seen as the aggressor.
If there is an armistice in place and some years later Ukraine chooses to resume hostilities, that support would evaporate because a large majority of European electorates would see Ukraine as the aggressor. Support for wars of choice is not a thing in Europe (something that a lot of people in the US did not seem to be able to understand in 2003).
And they are next. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, etc. all all next on Stali.… err I mean Putin shopping list, He was stated he is going to recreate the old Russian empire, which includes Alaska I will note. Also most of the ‘Stans.
No surprise here, I suppose, but even so, the depravity is Stalinesque:
I love recycling. I guess they’re collecting horse tails for the nets. That must require thousands of horses.
Doesn’t matter because Ukraine is getting used nets that have little value.
The article seems like it might have been written in part by AI. It seems odd, for example, that they describe the amount of nets donated so far using kilometers rather than kilograms or number of individual nets. That being the case, I think what they are using is hair collected by brushing horses, not entire tails from (presumably) horses that have been slaughtered.
I don’t think that odd. With fishing nets, and their new purpose, the distance they extend would be a more natural concept to measure than either weight or the number of nets.
Except that, on a brief google search, horse tails used to be used for fishing lines, but replaced by plastic now.
I know a lot of foreign officials travel to Kiev by the rail line from Poland.
But, I remember reading at the beginning of the war that Russia’s military supplies are extremely dependent on railways.
There’s video of a Russian sub being blown up by an underwater drone. The sub was in port, not in the open sea. If they’d had more of those underwater drones, they could have wiped out almost the entire Russian Black Sea fleet, which you can also see in the video.
There were a couple posts in the regional thread about this. But since it’s about combat, I believe it belongs here. The video is from a stable camera (not drone footage), so likely a hacked security camera.
That’s awesome. Even if they don’t have too many more of these drones, this will cause a huge ripple affect in the Russian Navy - expensive new security measures in nearby ports, and possible even moving naval assets (subs and ships) to facilities further from combat, meaning less ability to threaten Ukraine from the sea.
You don’t see any russian defenses operating in the port during that sub attack footage which indicates they were caught completely by surprise and knew nothing about the attack until it was already over. Imagine if Ukraine had had a half dozen of those underwater drones attacking in concert. It could have been Pearl Harbor for what remains of the Black Sea fleet.
I never hear of Russian naval operations against Ukraine anymore. What is Russia doing with their ships against Ukraine? What are they doing in the Black Sea? What kinds of ships does Russia have there? Which are the most valuable targets?
According to an article about this sub, it was launching missiles at Ukraine. Which is why they targeted it first. Dunno about any of the rest of the fleet.