At time of writing, trump has spoken with Putin, and basically capitulated everything.
Trump, and his defence secretary Pete hegseth have said that Ukraine will not be permitted to join NATO, will not go back to 2014 borders (and hinted that it will not be permitted to go to 2022 borders) and even hinted that zalensky should step down.
Basically everything Putin could have hoped for before negotiations even begin.
I have a lot to say on this, but I’m a bit surprised not to see an open Ukraine thread (I couldn’t find one anyway), so I’ll keep the OP fairly vanilla.
I will simply say that I think zalensky, and Europe, should tell trump to sod off. If the US is going to pull support they don’t get to tell anyone what to do.
Well, there is not much. A cease fire will not hold back Putin. Putin will get a hunk of land, and Ukraine can only look to Poland for any direct help. But since Poles have not sent troops, this is pretty much it. No NATO no Ukraine as we knew it. And the stupid EU Nato members will just watch as all 3 Baltic countries are taken. Thanks Trump.
I don’t think that the EU nato members will do nothing, but I think it’s quite likely there the response will be too slow and uncoordinated. So will end up being the same result as nothing.
There’s still a 1% chance for hope though; several European leaders are talking about moving forwards without the US, and in the public sphere we only see the top of the iceberg of such plans. But we’ll see.
Yeah really not much they do at this point. I think the hardline Zelenski has been taking is good (calling Trump Putin out on their Molotov-Ribbentrop bullshit), and that invasion of Kursk is looking pretty smart right now. Holding a few acres of Russian land isn’t much but it’s a fuck load more than all the nice words coming from European leaders.
Get ready for a bunch of crap coming out of the Trump admin about how the Ukrainians are the ones being unreasonable and extreme here. You would hope the US media would not validate that bullshit line but nowdays…
There’s a level of dark humor in all of this that I never thought I’d see, just like thirty years ago I’d thought the idea of the Republican party ever being on the side of Russian expansionism would be patently absurd. It’s gone from having to explain to (predominantly) conservatives that not every geopolitical situation was akin to Munich 1938 and appeasement, to TFG doing his own personal reenactment of Munich 1938. His big plan is to sit down with Putin, decide what Ukraine has to concede to Russia, present it to Ukraine which will have had no representation in said negotiations and proclaim peace in our time, and Putin has assured him that he has no further territorial demands in Europe.
Publicly stating that Ukraine will have no place in NATO is an incredibly stupid thing to do, but at least privately that’s always been the case. Realistically NATO is not going to accept any new member that has unresolved territorial disputes, which Ukraine has in spades, because it is asking for Article 5 to be invoked. Honestly the best Ukraine could hope for in the short term after any potentially realistic peace settlement or ceasefire is the nations of NATO rearming them, not a guarantee that a breakdown of said ceasefire would result in it being treated as an attack upon all of the countries of NATO.
Totally. As in so many areas of GOP policy. We had to put up with frekkin decades where every god-damned thing was Munich all over again. Not invading Iraq, not bombing Libya, not supporting the Contras. Let me get on my high horse and explain how not doing this is exactly like signing away Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938.
Then for the first time we have an actual sudetenland situation in Eastern Europe, like exactly, could not be more on the nose. And the GOP are suddenly like “let’s Munich Agreement this shit” FFS
Though again in actuality Munich Agreement metaphors are too generous to Trump. This is more like Molotov-Ribbentrop
Yes I have been surprised by how much of the media has gone with the assumption that Ukraine will accept whatever terms the US gives.
I think we’re all used to a world in which the lion’s share of military aid and support comes from the US, and therefore the US often has the biggest seat at the table when it comes to brokering deals.
But in this case, with the US pulling all support, no they don’t get to run away and dictate terms. At most they can do one of these things. So I indeed expect Ukraine will fight on.
Yes, and this is where things become complex and dangerous.
While plenty of the American right have been persuaded that Ukraine is full of woke trans abortion labs or whatever (thanks to Russian misinformation, and the pundits that have accepted Russian money), I still think many will balk at the US actually attempting to harm, or even attack, Ukraine. Meanwhile for the American left, and Europe, it would be a five alarm fire.
So what I expect is that either Trump will verbally threaten Ukraine, but do nothing, or they’ll ramp up the campaign of disinformation against Ukraine and in a few months time the MAGA mob are all calling for the US to bomb Ukraine. Which Second-term Trump may well do.
Russia and Putin are still weak. I think they (and Trump) are underestimating Ukraine once again.
War is a contest of logistics and morale – always has been and always will. Without US’s support, Ukraine will undoubtedly suffer a blow to both. But enough for Russia to have an edge, in either one, much less both? We’ll see. I think this still is far from over.
Putin’s assurances are of course as worthless as Trump’s. The difference is that Putin once said to confidantes that, as a matter of strategy, “we say one thing and do another”. Trump is too much of a dumbass to have any strategy at all. He just says whatever comes into his head that he thinks his acolytes want to hear, and then promptly forgets about it. Putin is well aware of how stupid he is and is playing him for a fool.
Absolutely. To the extent that Trump has any discernible objective here at all, it’s to be able to take credit for “ending the war in Ukraine”, and crow about how he accomplished what Biden couldn’t. The fate of Ukraine is irrelevant – in his mind it’s just a pawn in this game. So if Ukraine rightfully rejects what will almost certainly be an entirely one-sided “peace plan” that capitulates to Putin, Trump will unleash his customary vengeance on them. Ukraine will have only the EU to fall back on.
I was just wondering what happened to Ukrainian born house representative Victoria Spartz.
As mad as she is, I wondered if in this case she could be the voice of reason for her party.
However, I hadn’t realized that she had already voted against aid for Ukraine almost a year ago, and somehow justified that in the same breath as talking about Russian atrocities against her friends and family.
Probably but it’s a tough decision to make. Trump has hung them out to dry, so every passing month Ukraine will be getting weaker and Russia stronger (i can’t image sanctions are going to be maintained on Trump’s watch). The next peace plan may be worse
Of course it’s possible that Putin has screwed up his armed forces(and their supplies of armor) so badly in this war that they are passed the point of recovery. But that’s a dicey thing to bank on if you are Ukraine.
Spartz happens to be my representative–that is, I live in her district. She doesn’t really represent me in any meaningful sense. She was, shortly after the invasion, quite upset about it. She called it genocide and called Putin “a crazy man.” She was, I believe, the only Republican who was present when Biden signed the bill to provide aid to Ukraine.
Since then, she seems to have changed her stance on aid to Ukraine. I suspect its because last time around, she had a challenger in the primary who accused her of putting Ukraine ahead of Republican priorities like building the border wall. I guess keeping her seat in Congress was more important to her than the “genocide” of her people.
For Ukraine it is a fight for survival. They will not stop fighting for their land if they can’t accept the deal that is offered. And if the US stops sending military aid they can and will fight on. And while the US is a huge donor to Ukraine, it is not everything. The rest of the democratic world will continue to support it and Russia is running out of time a and men. I think this could end up being quite embarrassing for Trump’s administration, and it could signal a shift in power away from the US as the EU and the other NATO countries begin to step up and ramp up their support. Though Trump will call that a win.
As much as I’d like to see Europe step up to help Ukraine, it will probably just be the Tragedy of the Commons again. On the whole, NATO-Europe will agree that European aid to Ukraine should increase. But on an individual level, each nation will argue “We have budget deficits/underfunded healthcare/high taxes/unemployment/energy problems, why should WE be the one to step up?” And it’ll be Bystander Effect again.
The biggest advantage for Russia in this war is that it is 1) non-democratic and 2) just one entity, not 32.
Possibly. It could be that Ukraine is put under enough pressure to accept terms it doesn’t want to - but they will never stop fighting, even if it has to be an insurgency.
But for a lot of European countries, this is more than just being about Ukraine. It is about protecting their whole eastern side and some of the EU is in the firing line. They will not give up on Ukraine for obvious reasons. It could be that they see Russia is weakened enough to not be a threat. But no-one really believes that. They believe that for Russia it will just be a pause. Russia has it’s own ambitions and that doesn’t involve just a tiny bit of eastern Ukraine.
