And the weird thing is that I don’t see people about this concretely. It’s support / don’t support Ukraine, as if it’s a binary.
It’s also not clear what Zelensky wants. My read (and I could be wrong) is that he is very stubborn and wants to fight to reclaim all of the land taken since 2014. Trump seems to be pushing back against this. Yes, Trump and Vance were dicks to him in the Oval Office presser; at the very least, it was a bad look that does not seem conducive to their getting what they want. But what isn’t clear is what exactly they were pushing back against. So while it’s easy to slam Trump about anything and everything, and I do slam him for the ugliness of the presser, I am not making assumptions about what he is trying to achieve. It’s unclear, IMHO.
It’s simple. You just have to consider what Trump’s motivations always are – it’s always only about himself and nothing else. He’s trying to achieve the status of the Great Glorious Broker of Peace in Ukraine at any cost, and to hell with Ukraine. Underlying this is his long-time sycophancy toward Putin, so to the extent that there’s any preconceived outcome at all, it’s one that is favourable to Russia.
So that’s about it. End the war on terms entirely in Russia’s favour and to hell with Ukraine, claim the glory of Great Peacemaker, and demand the Nobel Peace Prize. Getting unconditional rights to mine “raw earth” (sic) in Ukraine would be the icing on the cake.
The odd thing is that Trump could be remembered the way he wants to be - as a tough guy admired around the world, if he would just hold Putin to account and give Ukraine what it wants, short of U.S boots on the ground. Instead, only Putin and his ilk will recall Trump fondly as a useful fool.
Zelensky wants peace and security for Ukraine. There are no easy options, but continuing to fight appears to be the best chance for peace and security for Ukraine right now. Giving into Russia might mean peace (of a sort), but the opposite of security for Ukraine and Ukrainians.
The solution, such as it is, is to cripple Putin’s fundamental ability to make war. This is exactly what the Ukrainians were busy doing early in the war by striking at the Russian army’s supply lines and depots, undermining them logistically while the Russians were ineffectually trying to sow terror by striking at civilian targets like hospitals, apartments, and shopping centers, and it is the reason that President Zelenskyy has persisted in asking for longer range weapons and the license to use them to strike within Russian territory. This can also be done economically by shutting down Russian access to foreign markets to sell their gas and oil (their only export of any significant fiscal interest) and preventing them from buying foreign-made components that they cannot produce domestically; and diplomatically by isolating them from any outside support (which has been less effective but they’ve essentially been reduced to selling valuable resources at cut rate prices to hermit kingdoms like Iran and North Korea for cheap weapons and conscript troops, and getting into bed with a geopolitical competitor like China).
While Putin will continue to throw men and armor into the meat grinder indefinitely because he can’t retreat for looking weak and doesn’t care about the human or economic costs, Russia is already well on its way to insolvency and dissolution as an empire even over its existing domain, and sitting virtually still in occupied Ukrainian territory is like slowly bleeding to death. And while Putin is busy focused on Ukraine, he can’t muster the force even for show to threaten any other nation, not even the little Baltic nations and certainly not Finland or Sweden even if he had assurance that the NATO alliance wouldn’t respond to an Article 5 callout for mutual defense.
Whether you believe that “Ukraine’s sovereignty and territory are not huge moral causes worth more death and destruction,” it is clear that Ukrainians do, and with very good reasons; Ukrainians are wiling to fight because they have a strong cultural memory of what it was like the Russian Empire and Soviet Union; not only the Holodomor but the continuous series of “Russification” (i.e. the eradication of cultural distinctions throughout what is not modern Ukraine), wholesale deportation of entire ethnic groups, and emigration of cultural Russians into Ukraine to take over farms, towns, and industries. Ceding control to Russia is in a very real sense an eradication of Ukraine, notwithstanding that capitulating to Putin would put Ukrainians in the same sinking autocratic boat as Russia instead of an aspiring democratic nation intent on expanding its industrial power and engaging with European and global markets.
I think that is basically it, so long as the cost is tolerable.
Well, the sunk cost is immense at this point, and we know how the sunk cost fallacy tends to mess with people’s heads. They need to have a realistic understanding of future cost, however, and plan accordingly.
I don’t think they should just give up at this point. The question is what level of cost is worth what conditions for peace.
Again, Trump’s intentions are always self-serving, all about self-gratification and self-glorification. His Cabinet secretaries are all crooks and liars with similar motivations. If there’s any apparent strategy behind any of their policies it’s purely happenstance.
On the subject of the thread, Ukraine is now dependent on the support and leadership of the European Union.
Which incidentally is an economic union that I kinda hope Canada will now join as we watch the USA go down in the flames of self-destruction.
There would be a point if Ukraine could expect enough support for them rebuilding a bigger and better military for the next go-round. They know Russia will come at them again, no matter what the agreement says, so it’s a purely pragmatic decision for them. Do they gain more from a pause than the Russians do?
I think this “peacemaker” theory is second to Trump simply being in the tank for Russia. As I said upthread, he has never criticized Putin, and has put American citizens (and undoubtedly agents) at risk in many ways.
The only question really is whether Putin has kompromat on Trump, or just the Russian infiltration of RW media has been that successful.
Personally I lean towards the latter. Trump has the attention span of an tazmanian devil having a grand mal seizure, yet he perfectly regurgitates Kremlin talking points verbatim. So I think it’s just years and years of having it in his feed.
I know it’s incredibly dumb that the fate of the world depends on a boomer’s inability to discern meme from reality, but that’s the dumb world we’re living in.
European countries seem determined to assist Ukraine even if the US doesn’t, which is likely to be an annoyance to Donny Dealmaker. My question is, would Trump threaten to escalate this even further and threaten to withhold energy exports to Europe?
Yes. But I wanted to make the distinction of whose choice it is, versus choice to support or not.
Some of that determination may be over causes, some because all war is idiocy on some level, but much of it is over stupid tactics that lead nowhere. A war of sitting in place and dying for no gains to either side is different than a war that chases an invader away.
The biggest issue isn’t that Ukraine chose to fight, it’s that NATO (espcially the US) didn’t give enough fat enough. Restricting weapons until they are not going to be enough to turn the tide was a poor execution of those three goals you stated. Say up front “Ukraine is in open warfare”, don’t limit your ally on how much they can do. They would be in a much different situation if we’d let them fight an actual war.
“What about Nukes?”, you cry? I think we need something like a version of Dune’s Great Convention. "The first country to deploy nights nukes - even “tactical” nukes, gets obliterated.
Of that’s too MAD for you, try a version where Europe declares that because any use of nuclear weapons will not constrained by national borders and will spread into greater Europe, any use of nukes in Europe is an attack on all of Europe, and thereby an attack on NATO.
Quite true, because the source of the death and waste is Putin. Those goals are at direct odds, and it’s not even a case of “pick any two”. It might be possible to achieve two, but it’s not like any two are readily compatible.
But you can’t know what another country will do or not do, so any invasion could be “not worth it”, but you won’t know at the time.
Your policy emboldens any would be aggressor to be as ruthless as possible.
Our primary energy exports to Europe is liquified natural gas (LNG), and the nations of Europe are are the main concentration of importers (The Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain made up 35% of such exports in 2023), a business that has grown substantially since 2015 and projected to get even large ever since sanctions upon Russia and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines; Germany may end up eclipsing the rest of Europe in its imports. The gas industry has been busy building the very expensive (multibillion dollar) liquefaction terminals to send gas overseas, and I can’t imagine that they are going to be very happy about any threats by Trump to withhold exports. So…it is probably just the sort of thing he might threaten to do because if Trump knows one thing about business, it is how to lose money like it is going out of style.
If there’s one thing Trump has demonstrated over and over again, it’s that he does not give a shit about the impact any of his crusades or acts of vengeance have on specific sectors of the economy. If European leaders expose his penis complex, he will lash out and not give a damn what the collateral damage is (see tariffs 2018).
