Does Putin not have a map that has Estonia on it? Or Latvia?
And since he started this war he is soon to have Finland as well.
Also, Ukraine doesn’t stand alone. They’re currently reliant on foreign arms suppliers. Sure, Ukraine could put down any terms it wants, but if the terms are too outrageous, they might find the enthusiasm for supporting them waning. While Ukraine might have the biggest stake in the game, they’re not the only ones with a stake in the game.
If Putin were to conquer Ukraine… he’d have NATO bordering ‘Russia’.
[quote=“crowmanyclouds, post:38, topic:980189”]
And I’m more than willing to give Putin Canada in addition to Ukraine if that’s what it takes.
[/quote]Okay, but Alaska is definitely off the table. 
I am willing to have Canada support Ukraine until option #3 is achieved, or the Ukrainian leadership decides they want peace. I’m certainly not going to dictate to them that they should keep fighting until Option #3 is achieved, but if they want to, then I’ll support them.
Putin is a war criminal, but he will never be brought to trial so there’s no point trying to achieve it.
I didn’t say he thought logically.
I know, but it’s the only way to protect Ukraine from a future incursion unless, of course, Putin wants to attack a NATO protected nation. If that happens, it’s on!
Where have Kamala Harris or anyone else in the administration demanded that Putin be put on trial or killed?
“While the latest crimes against humanity determination is significant, it remains largely symbolic for now. It does not immediately trigger any specific consequences, nor does it give the US the ability to prosecute the Russians involved with perpetrating crimes against humanity. However, it could provide international bodies such as the International Criminal Court, which work to hold perpetrators accountable, with evidence to effectively try to prosecute those crimes.”
“International legal bodies are also constrained. At the International Criminal Court, for instance, jurisdiction extends only to member states and states that have agreed to its jurisdiction, such as Ukraine but not Russia.”
If some Russian military leaders feel slight unease at allowing their troops to commit atrocities, good.
The minimum exit price for Russia should be withdrawing to its borders before this latest invasion, recognition of Ukraine’s right to join NATO, and preferably payment of war reparations in return for being allowed to do business with the West.
Nuclear war is much less a worry than the fact that so many on the U.S. right are Russia appeasers.
While I don’t think it is a given that Putin will be removed in a coup (he’s done a very thorough job of eliminating anyone who might be able to challenge him) if he loses Crimea and the Donbas, it would certainly undermine his appearance of strength that gives him authority and respect among the Russian people which would compound the multitude of domestic civil and economic crises that Russia is facing. There is a larger problem facing Russia however, which is its impending demographic collapse, which is only compounded by the ‘brain drain’ of younger professionals fleeing the country rather than endure the harsh economic conditions and now conscription into a hopeless meat-grinder war. While pretty much all of Europe as well as many of the developed nation in Asia are facing severe demographic contraction with aging populations, Russia (and China) are in freefall and will simply not be able to sustain themselves economically in the coming decades, and even if Putin was successful in taking over all of Ukraine and the Baltics (which also face this problem) it would not change the outcome, not withstanding the economic costs of trying to maintain an indefinite occupation.
Putin isn’t interested in ‘peace talks’ except as a guise to conceal more aggression, so options #1 and #2 of the o.p. are completely void, nor does Ukraine have any interest at this point in participating in any ‘peace talks’ that are virtually guaranteed to be in bad faith from Putin’s standpoint given the recent history. Even allowing Russia to retain Crimea—which it does at least have a quasi-historical pre-Soviet Union claim to—just gives up strategic security and allows for Russia to claim false grievance. There isn’t going to be any peace until Russia withdrawals from Ukraine and Crimea completely, or else fully subdues the region, which is so unlikely that we may as well dispense with that possibility. I highly doubt that Putin will ever face a trial or any personal consequences for his actions (as much as he should) so I’ll go with option #3, although on a much longer timeframe than people have been predicting.
As for nuclear war, that is really up to Putin and how he wants to go out. Russia is, again, on its way to collapse, and sometime in the next quarter century Russia will not exist as it is currently constituted. It can accept dissolution into distinct, perhaps confederated republics in which Russia is only a first-among-equals and a vast array of ethnic enclaves, or it can go out in a fiery regional or global nuclear conflict, and there is really very little the United States or NATO can do to influence. We can only guess at what the post-Putin leadership of Russia looks like but it probably isn’t very different (and may be even worse) because the problems that Russia faces are not solvable without accepting this dissolution, which no ‘strong’ leader that the Russian public will follow is going to accept.
NATO and Europe gain nothing by pressuring Ukraine to accede to Russia, nor by promising to make Ukraine “neutral”, other than to perpetuate the current posture of Russia and potentially encourage further attempts at incursion, although whether the Russian military could even engage in an effective campaign into Moldova or the Baltics is highly doubtful at this point.
Stranger
I think that if the United States and NATO-Europe were to provide Ukraine with a robust military’s worth of arms after the war is over, that alone would suffice to deter Russia from invading Ukraine again in the future, even without NATO membership.
The problem is that even with a shooting war going on, there is still a lot of Western reluctance to give Ukraine the armaments it needs. So I’m not at all confident that a postwar Ukraine would be given what it needs either to prevent Ukraine War 2.0 (or…3.0?) happening again.
Looking at maps of the area, it’s not clear to me how Russian troops would even get to Moldova in large numbers, absent Russia conquering a significant portion of Ukraine. Airlifts would have to pass over or near Ukraine, as would any sea lifts. Ground routes are just right out. They’ve got some small number of troops already in Transnistria, but in such small numbers that there’s little more they can do than act as martyrs for Russian to use as propaganda. I suppose, were peace to break out, they could spend a few months sneaking in troops disguised as tourists, but you can’t sneak in tanks that way.
#4 will be fine with me. #2 or #3 is up to Ukraine to decide but we should encourage them not to accept #2 since Putin can’t be trusted in negotiations. Putin is a threat to the world and we finally have presidents and world leaders who recognize that and understand it’s time to finally put an end to the Russian Empire. They must be demilitarized because they have been a threat to the world for over a century, changing their internal structure from tsardom to Sovietism to Putinism hasn’t made any difference.
A good point. Soon after Trump was elected, he made it a point to criticize NATO and threatened to withdraw the United States, which might have destroyed it altogether. This suggests that, were he still president, Ukraine would have received no support from us, and Russia would have been victorious fairly quickly. No way to know for sure now, of course.
And there is still a significant portion of the Republican party that is pro-Putin, and favours the complete annihilation of Ukraine as a country. Whatever their motivations for this stance are, they are dangerous, and need to be closely watched.
@Stranger_On_A_Train: Great post. Agree with all of it. That’s the way this mess will play out. The idea that one can “deal” with Putin is simply fanciful.
As to this bit:
The Russian military at this point can’t engage in effective campaigns to take and hold territory anywhere, not even really in Ukraine.
What they can do is wreck territory. Their psyops and internet propaganda crap / bots can destabilize polities anywhere on earth. Including the USA. Rendering target governments unreliable and weak.
It’s different, and worse, in areas physically near Russia proper such as all of eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In those areas in addidtion to the psyops, etc., Russia can attack with missiles, air power, “little green men”, and guerrilla “volunteers” to create endless smoldering conflicts, ethnic and religious strife, refugee flows, and economic dislocation.
What’s going in Moldova now is them warming up for turning all of the Caucasus into the social / political equivalent of an inextinguishable coal seam fire.
My personal bottom line:
Putin’s Russia is essentially a nihilist power now, certainly not a status quo power, and not even a wannabe imperial / expansionist power. It cannot build anything, it can only enshittify anything it can touch. It’s not actually pursuing its own aggrandizement, no matter how much Putin may claim otherwise. It’s simply trying to degrade as much of the world as possible to the same dystopia it’s fast becoming itself.
Despite our OP’s naive ideas about appeasement, I see no way other than raw force to contain / control / influence a nihilist power. One can hope a successor Russian government can be persuaded to recognize that improving their own country is better for both their own power elite and for their mass populace than is un-improving other nearby countries.
It ought not be a heavy lift. But it sure seems like it will be. Color me hopeful, but pessimistic.
I kind of figured that a possible goal of, uh, enshittification is that a Putin type might do it to establish his bona fides as a guy who’s perfectly willing and able to enshittify Country A like a nihilist would, and then be in a position to get concessions when plausibly threatening to enshittify Country B: folks would usually say, about enshittifying B, “I think you’re bluffing; you wouldn’t do that; there’s nothing in it for you, and you’re not a nihilist” — except, y’know, for what happened to A.
The OP restricts us to choosing from only 4 options for discussion in this thread.
But I’d like to suggest a fifth possible way for this war to end:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5. Ukraine collapses.
Everybody is talking about how long it will take for Russia to collapse. Maybe due to Putin’s death, maybe a coup, or maybe massive military defeat, or maybe economic collapse .
It’s the idea of economic collapse which I’m interested in.
In post #49 stranger seems confident that economic disaster for Russia is inevitable.
But it seems to me that economic collapse is also a danger for Ukraine…and much,much sooner than for Russia.
Half the population of Ukraine have become refugees. I read several months ago that of 40 million people, some 7 million have left Ukraine to other countries, and about 10 million have fled their homes ito seek shelter in areas farther from the fighting.
All these people used to have productive jobs. Now they have no job, and probably no home to go back to in the future, since so many cities have been obliterated into rubble.
How much longer can Ukrainian society and economy keep going like this?
The internet in English is full of nothing but propaganda --proudly showing 30-second video clips of smiling Ukrainian grandparents among the rubble, and Ukrainian soldiers playing with kittens while reloading their guns. But there must be millions of other perfectly average citizens who are not so positive. They are shivering in buildings with no electricity and no water, hungry, and with no way to comfort their crying children, or themselves.
Meanwhile, for Russian citizens in Moscow, life goes on as usual. The economic sanctions are having no effect.
The war will continue for several years…and maybe by then, the shopping malls in Moscow will be less crowded as people face a small bit of economic stress. But Ukrainian citizens will be facing far more stress: bankruptcy, both personally, as their checking accounts empty, and nationally, as the Ukrainian economy collapses.
(If this is a thread hijack, I apologize, and we can start a new thread)
Is this true? (not challenging, just asking)
Sanctions are not instant gratification. Like an Elastrator, it takes a while for things to dry up and drop off.
I have come to believe that a feasible off ramp is:
The 2021 control line becomes the internationally recognized border; and Ukraine joins NATO, giving them long term security
No one is happy, but everyone can claim some sort of victory