What do you think are acceptable exit conditions for [the Ukraine] war?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Question for all of you: What do you think are acceptable exit conditions for this war?

  1. Kiev makes a deal to allow Russia to keep some small gains and promises not to join NATO in exchange for peace.

  2. Russia is pushed back to the 2021 borders, then peace talks begin.

  3. Russia loses everything, including Crimea and all of the Donbas, then is allowed to negotiate a cease-fire.

  4. This doesn’t end until Putin and his minions are on trial or in a box in the ground.

I ask because it looked like the war was being fought with a goal of simply pushing back the Russians into their 2021 borders. Then Kiev announced that it wasn’t stopping until it had Crimea and the Donbas back. And in the past several days, the administration has declared that option 4 is what they are going for.

That seems incredibly dangerous to me. I’m all for giving Ukraine the weapons it needs to defend its territory, but if we are not stopping until the Putin regime is gone, the odds of this escalating out of Ukraine and even going nuclear go up dramatically.

Kamala Harris gave a speech the other day in which she called Putin a war criminal and said the U.S. will not rest until he is brought to justice. That seems incredibly reckless to me, and a signal to Putin that he has no off-ramp and will have to fight to the death if he wants to have any chance to remain alive and in power.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has declared that we are ‘closer to midnight’ than we ever were during the cold war. The Russians just canceled their participation in the new START treaty. They are holding nuclear exercises next month in an obvious intimidation move.

Does the threat of nuclear war bother anyone? Was it smart to declare a man who has thousands of nukes a war criminal who will be brought to justice when the war ends? What possible motive does he now have for ending the war?

IMO, we should be arming Ukraine the way we are, but it should have been done quietly, both so that Ukraine gets credit for the wins, and to keep from turning Ukraine into a proxy war between the U.S. Russia, and now possibly China. Bellicose rhetoric by the U.S. is a bad idea, and plays into Putin’s claim that they are fighting in Ukraine to keep Russia from facing an existential threat from NATO on their border.

I think options 3 and 4 will end in one of two ways if tried: Putin is killed in a coup, or nuclear war in Europe. Whether it would be contained to Ukraine I don’t know, but I doubt it. I don’t want to bet the lives of millions on Putin being overthrown.

2

This is very likely veering away from breaking news, but I’ll bite.

Why would 3 end in nuclear war?

That’s what Ukraine’s position was from before the war started. I think we should arm them until they accomplish it. The main pity is that we waited until 2022 to start doing so, and didn’t start in 2014. The 2021 borders were basically a de-facto line of control, not a true border.

If it all goes nuclear because Russia wasn’t able to keep territory it invaded, then our time on the planet was always short.

3

“Then Kiev announced that” back in 2014. Ukraine has always, consistently, said that they’ll keep fighting until all of their territory is liberated.

If they push Russia out of Ukrainian territory (all of it), then they’d be willing to sign a peace treaty. That’s always been there position, and still is. Where #4 comes in is that it looks quite likely that Russia will not sign that treaty, even after they’re pushed out of Ukraine, for as long as Putin lives.

4

Okay, Kiev made it clear that they wouldn’t stop until they had Crimea and the Donbas back.

Look, no one knows what exactly will happen under any of these scenarios, as wars take on a logic of their own. However, I am assuming that if we can’t give Putin at least some fig leaf he can take to the Russians and say, “I did this for you, and we succeeded in our main goal”, that he will not survive in power. And in that case, he’s dead. Therefore, he will fight to the death to prevent that outcome.

Somehow, there has to be an off-ramp that both sides can live with. If we’re going to stamp our feet and accept nothing less than Putin hanging from a rope, we’d better hope that someone has the capacity to overthrow him. I wouldn’t bet on that, given the number of Russia’s leaders who have fallen out of windows in the past year. If there’s one thing a guy like Putin knows, it’s how to sniff out alternative power centers and eliminate them.

5

He can eat it. He played stupid games, and he can win stupid prizes. Nuking another country isn’t going to keep him him power, anyway. We may get nuked for wearing white shoes after Labor Day if that’s the type of thing that would trigger it.

6

That person would be just as bad as he.
Putin should declare that the Russians have managed to kill all the Nazis, will withdraw from Ukraine and look forward to pleasant relations between Russia and liberated Ukraine.

7

If Putin doesn’t live with it, I won’t shed any tears. Neither, I suspect, would very many other people, even in Russia. And Russia keeping all of their territory, as would happen in a Ukrainian victory, should be good enough for them.

8

IMHO functionally there is no differnce between 3 and 4. If Russia loses all of the Donbas and Crimea, there will be a successful coup against Putin. As for an off ramp, the problem is Putin doesn’t want an off ramp. Negotiating with Putin to let Russia keep part of the Donbas, Crimea, whatever they currently control, etc. would be no different than negotiating with Hitler during WWII, letting him keep parts of France or Poland, so that he could “have an off ramp” or “save face.” There’s nothing Putin could offer at the negotiating table that would convince Ukraine he can be trusted.

To put it another way, Ukraine doesn’t face the old fashioned decision of “live on our knees or die on our feet.” They face the decision of “live on our feet, die on our feet, or die on our knees.” There’s no circumstances where any reasonable Ukrainian should believe that “live on our knees” is an option, meaning negotiating with Putin is pointless, because any negotiation will essentially result in Ukraine being asked to believe that “live on our knees” is an option when in reality Putin will never accept that. Should Putin be delivered a Ukraine on it’s knees, he won’t let them live, he would kill them.

9

Do the Russians not regard Ukraine and Crimea as their territory?

10

So, no consideration for the millions who could be incinerated, including us?

And equating pushing a tyrant with nukes into a corner he can’t get out of is in no way similar to ‘wearing white shoes after labor day’. If you do 't think we’re inching closer to niclear war, you aren’t paying attention.

What I meant by ‘fig leaf’ was not any sort of actual win, but just enough of an ‘out’ that he can convince the peoole he screwed over to allow him to remain in power.

For example, push Russia back to the 2021 borders, then theeaten to continue to take Crimea unless Russia sues for peace. Then Putin can go home and tell everyone he ‘de-Nazified’ Eastern Ukraine, and that Ukraine had been secretly planning to retake Crimea all along but his brilliant military move scared them into negotiating for a secure Russian Crimea. He calls it a win and stays in power, but in the meantime the Russian military is a shambles, 150,000 Russian soldiers are dead along with a lot of generals, their huge cold-war weapons stockpile is rusting in Ukraine and the mystique of the invincible Red Army placed on the ash heap of history, and Russia will be relegated to being a bit player on the world stage, and under sanctions.

The problem with retaking Crimea, other than the risk of nuclear war, is that it has already been ‘Russified’, with Ukrainians clensed out of the area and replaced with Russians. It’s never going to be friendly to Ukraine again, and if they retake it, it will probably be a flashpoint for insurrections and further Russian interference. It’s also going to be extremely hard to take without extensive destruction and massive loss of life on both sides.

I want Putin to lose as much as anyone. Well, maybe not anyone, since I don’t want to start WWIII over it.

11

Indeed.

12

He pushed himself in there. All we did was provide the people he was attacking with weapons to defend themselves. That’s as natural as wearing white shoes after Labor Day (or whatever color you feel like wearing), to me. As to the millions that will die if he does something truly stupid, that will be on him, and would never save his ass.

He made up fictions to get himself in this war, he can make up his own fiction to try to get himself out alive. That’s the only thing that would work, anyway.

13

If Putin considers that an acceptable outcome, he would have considered his 2/23/2022 situation even more acceptable. The fact that he invaded Ukraine anyway shows that he cares more about conquest than saving face with the Russian people using some kind of fig leaf provided by Ukraine.

14

There’s no off-ramp that I can see. Moldova and Georgia (among others) have the same exact unresolved territorial issues.
Russia’s sphere of influence is rapidly evaporating and Putin knows it.

15

Right. With the way things are going, I think a Ukrainian victory is now likely to include Ukraine invading Transnistria and then returning it to Moldova. Of course that isn’t currently a priority, but if we’re at the point that Ukraine has retaken the Donbas, Kherson oblast, Zhaporizhia oblast, and Crimea, they might as well finish the job and not leave a rump Russian force in Transnistria.

16

Or negotiating with North Korea to allow a cease-fire, which we did because the war was threatening to go nuclear? Or negotiating with North Korea to withdraw from Vietnam? Or negotiating with Saddam to allow him to stay in power after Gulf War I, which everyone at the time said was a great example of U.S. diplomacy?

Are we not engaged in diplomacy any more? Just total war until the other side is dead or capitulates or launches their nuclear arsenal at us? Do you understand what even 10% of Putin’s nuclear arsenal would do to the world if he launched it? You’re really willing to take that risk because Putin needs to ‘suck it’?

So is there any point other than unconditional surrender of Russia you are willing to entertain? Any at all? What if he drops a nuke on Kiev? What then? Destroy Russia and accept a billion deaths in retaliation? What if he drops a nuke on a smaller town or an uninhabited location in Ukraine, then says “Back off now, or we take out London, Paris, Kiev, and Washington”? Are you ready to play nuclear brinksmanship? Because that seems likely if Putin is cornered.

17

I’m not convinced of that. Putin is almost certainly already cornered, in the same sense that Hitler was cornered after the loss at Stalingrad. It’s not obvious on the map, but he has to realize he has almost no chance of conquering Ukraine in a conventional war. If that’s the case, if he was going to go nuclear, he likely would have done so already. My guess it that the reason he hasn’t is because he knows if he gave the order to push the red button, that the people he gave the order to will give him a flying lesson out the nearest window rather than follow the order to push the red button.

18

I’m pretty sure no one sane (and no one in this thread) has said that Russia needs to capitulate to unconditional surrender. They need to return to their own goddamn borders, stop invading their neighbors, and potentially compensate them for the invading they’ve already been doing. If Putin’s regime can’t survive the domestic impact of that, all the better.

If Putin’s removal from power and/or death was going to end in nuclear war; then we we’re only delaying the inevitable. He was always going to be removed from power and/or die after he came back in 2012.

19

As noted, that is already the case. It is highly likely even the 2021 borders may not be enough to save Putin after he invested so much and lost so much to get there. Stalemate is defeat for him, one he cannot accept. Not practically and possibly not even existentially in his own psyche.

#2, with NATO membership baked in, is Ukraine’s bare minimum. They can only realistically accept that if they are on the verge of collapse. It’s already a ridiculous degree of realpolitik appeasement and it would have to come with a NATO membership guarantee to deter future hostilities. We could get there, but right now I don’t think Ukraine would or should accept it.

Some version of #3 or 2+ should be the goal, with NATO membership non-negotiable. I say 2+ because I can make a plausible argument (not an airtight one) that post-war Crimea should get to have a fair and internationally supervised plebiscite on where to go. It’s position has always been fraught. However Russia will never agree to that unless forced and likely the same for Ukraine, since its loss would be a permanent security problem.

#4 shouldn’t be pushed as a matter of policy, because it really doesn’t matter. If Putin accepts 2 or 3 he’s probably dog food anyway. It may well be this war doesn’t end until either he dies of natural causes or sheer exhaustion takes out one or both sides.

20

Oh, I’m pretty sure we’re engaged in diplomacy. If our stated position through back channels on the nuclear subject isn’t a very polite and far less direct version of this, I would be surprised:

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Nuking Kyiv because your poorly thought out attempt to conquer Ukraine has failed would not be advisable. What would it get you if you used a nuclear weapon on it or any other symbolic target in Ukraine? The only reason such weapons may have had an effect on the end of WWII was that we were openly willing to continue using them until Japan capitulated. As it was, you entered the war against them after we had used only two, and that assisted the Japanese in making up their minds. We thank your people for that. Without it, we may be more horrible monsters than we already are in the minds of some people, and it helped to shroud how long it would take us to manufacture more of them. But using nuclear weapons once in Ukraine would never be effective at accomplishing your goals, and you would have to use many of them to have any effect.

Do you really think the rest of Europe, much less the US would stand by while you used nuclear weapons in order to ruin the country you failed to invade? I will remind you that the United States is the only country to use nuclear weapons in anger, and your intervention was likely what saved us from ourselves and using more of them. We do not relish the prospect of using them again, but are ready to do so if it becomes necessary.

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And I’m not entirely sure what it says about us as a people, humanity in general, or if the threat of retaliation would be a bluff. But I figure it’s somewhere near there.