Tag: ukraine

Once again, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proved on Tuesday that he is the obstacle to peace for Ukraine and Russia.

Zelensky said he would agree to a ceasefire but he would NEVER ceed territory to Russia.

Someone needs to tell him, he’s not the one holding the cards right now.

When you lose a war, have marched hundreds of thousands of young men to their death, and have lost battle after battle to the opposing forces, you don’t get to call the shots.

President Zelensky: As far as red lines, I as president, and Ukrainians as citizens of their country, will not violate their constitution. And will accept our sovereignty and independence. Protecting people and our land. It’s not easy for us to accept fighting such an enemy. This is understandable. But today we are fighting for our independence. Therefore we will not recognize any occupied territories by the Russian Federation.

This is a fact. Our people fought for it. Our heroes died for it. How many wounded. How much has passed. That’s why no one will forget about it. And when I say no one will forget about it, this is the most important red line. We will not let anyone forget about this crime against Ukraine.

Here is another translation from a different source.

President Zelensky: We don’t accept any occupation of Russia. We don’t accept. It’s a fact. Our people were killed for it. Our heroes were killed. How many of my country, will not violate their Constitution, but will defend our sovereignty, our independence, protecting our people and our land.

It’s not easy to fight such an enemy, that’s clear, but today we are fighting for our independence, and therefore, to recognize any occupied territory of the Russian were killed? How many of them were killed? So no one will ever forget about it. When I say no one will ever forget about it, it’s not going to be. This is the main point. We will not let anyone forget this crime against Ukraine.

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Ukraine has agreed to the terms of a 30 day ceasefire, and President Trump has invited Volodymyr Zelensky back to the White House.

The development comes after Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with a Ukrainian delegation in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia this week, engaging in several hours of negotiations

“Ukraine expressed readiness to accept the U.S. proposal to enact an immediate, interim 30-day ceasefire, which can be extended by mutual agreement of the parties, and which is subject to acceptance and concurrent implementation by the Russian Federation,” the U.S. and Ukraine said in a joint statement released by the State Department.

The U.S. will also “immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine.”

“The United States will communicate to Russia that Russian reciprocity is the key to achieving peace,” the statement added.

In comments to the media, President Trump said he expects to speak to Vladimir Putin later this week and hopes Moscow will also agree to the terms.

“Ceasefire… Ukraine has agreed to it, and hopefully Russia will agree to it,” Trump said, adding he expects it to take effect “over the next few days” but that it “takes two to tango,” referring to Putin.

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There should be little doubt about how a lasting peace can be established in Ukraine. In April 2022, Russia and Ukraine were on the verge of signing a peace agreement in Istanbul, with the Turkish Government acting as mediator. The U.S. and U.K. talked Ukraine out of signing the agreement, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have since died or been seriously injured. Yet the framework of the Istanbul Process still provides the basis of peace today.

The draft peace agreement (dated April 15, 2022) and the Istanbul Communique (dated March 29, 2022) on which it was based, offered a sensible and straightforward way to end the conflict. It’s true that three years after Ukraine broke off the negotiations, during which time Ukraine has incurred major losses, Ukraine will eventually cede more territory than it would have in April 2022 — yet it will gain the essentials: sovereignty, international security arrangements, and peace.

In the 2022 negotiations, the agreed issues were Ukraine’s permanent neutrality and international security guarantees for Ukraine. The final disposition of the contested territories was to be decided over time, based on negotiations between the parties, during which both sides committed to refrain from using force to change boundaries. Given the current realities, Ukraine will cede Crimea and parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, reflecting the battlefield outcomes of the past three years.

Such an agreement can be signed almost immediately and in fact is likely to be signed in the coming months. As the U.S. is no longer going to underwrite the war, in which Ukraine would suffer yet more casualties, destruction, and loss of territory, Zelensky is recognizing that it’s time to negotiate. In his address to Congress, President Donald Trump quoted Zelensky as saying “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer.”

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The strife and war in Ukraine started with a U.S. supported coup eleven years ago. It might end, ironically, with a U.S. supported coup eleven years later. There is an embryonic chance that, if Vladimir Putin signs an agreement to end the war, it will not be Volodymyr Zelensky’s signature on the line beside it.

Being the leader to negotiate an end to the war was always going to be a struggle for Zelensky. He may have been the perfect president to lead Ukraine through the war with Russia. But he may not be the perfect president to lead them out.

Negotiating an end to the war with Russia could be challenging for Zelensky for three reasons. The first is that Ukrainians were nourished throughout the war on Zelensky’s promises of maximalist results. To rally both Ukrainians and Ukraine’s partners, Zelensky promised that Ukraine would reconquer lost territory and redraw the borders of Ukraine to include, not only the Donbas, but Crimea. After all the suffering and loss of life, to negotiate an end to the war, having not gained back territory, but having lost even more would be a difficult sell for Zelensky. Especially given that the concession will certainly come without the compensation of membership in NATO.

The second is that, having insisted that Putin should not and cannot be negotiated with, Zelensky would have to rescind his decree that Ukraine would not negotiate with Putin.

The third is that Zelensky would face solid, and potentially lethal, opposition from the same ultra-right nationalists who persuaded him to abandon his campaign promise to negotiate a peace with Russia when he was elected in 2019. Even then, Zelensky faced a backlash and defiance from ultranationalist leaders who even threatened his life. How much worse would the resistance be were Zelensky to lead Ukrainians back to those negotiations with the loss of the Donbas that then could have been theirs and with the hundreds of thousands of people who died or were wounded for nothing?

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German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock this week, on entering a “new era of nefariousness”:

I say clearly and across the Atlantic, what is right and what is wrong shall never be irrelevant to us. No one wants and no one needs peace more than the Ukrainians and Ukraine. The diplomatic efforts of the U.S. are of course important here. But such a peace must be just and lasting and not just a pause until the next attack… We will never accept a perpetrator-victim reversal. A perpetrator-victim reversal would be… the end of security for the vast majority of countries. And it would be fatal for the future of the United States.

Baerbock’s declaration that a “perpetrator-victim reversal” (a Täteropferumkehr, I’m reliably informed) would be “fatal” to the U.S. was historic. It was accompanied by a promise that “as transatlantacists,” Europeans must “stand up for our own interests, our own values, and our own security.” Although new leaders are ready to take the reins in Germany, she said, there can be no waiting for the transfer of power. Immediately, “Germany must take the lead at this historic milestone.”

A few years ago Baerbock pleaded for patience with a British conservative who demanded to know why Germany wasn’t providing Leopard tanks to Ukraine.

Now, with Donald Trump cutting off weapons deliveries and shutting down access to ATACMS missiles, Baerbock’s speech is an expression of more enthusiastic European support for continued fighting.

The war in Ukraine is often called a proxy conflict between Russia and the West or Russia and the U.S., but it increasingly looks more like a fight between Baerbock’s “transatlanticists” and those who believe in “spheres of influence.” In preparing Racket’s accompanying “Timeline: The War in Ukraine,” I found both sides articulated this idea repeatedly.

In January, 2017, as he was preparing to relinquish his seat to Mike Pence, Joe Biden alluded to the recent election of Donald Trump in a speech at Davos. Describing the “dangerous willingness to revert to political small-mindedness” of “popular movements on both the left and right,” Biden explained:

We hear these voices in the West—but the greatest threats on this front spring from the distinct illiberalism of external actors who equate their success with a fracturing of the liberal international order. We see this in Asia and the Middle East… But I will not mince words. This movement is principally led by Russia.

Biden even then lumped Trump and Putin together, as enemies of the “liberal international order.” Russian counterparts like Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, spoke of a “post-West world order” where diplomatic relations would be based on “sovereignty” and the “national interests of partners.” These are two fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews. Was conflict inevitable, or could peace have held if Russia didn’t strike in 2022?

There’s no question who invaded whom. Hostilities began in February, 2022 with an angry speech by Vladimir Putin and bombs that landed minutes later in Ukraine. Little discussion of the “why” of the war took place in the West, however.

Phrases like “unprovoked aggression” became almost mandatory in Western coverage. Politico interviewed a range of experts and concluded that what Putin wanted was “a revanchist imperialist remaking of the globe to take control of the entire former Soviet space.” This diagnosis of Putin’s invasion as part of a Hitlerian quest for Lebensraum and a broader return to national glory might have merit, but it was also conspicuously uncontested. A differing article by University of Chicago professor John Mearshimer declaring the crisis “the West’s fault” made him, as The New Statesman just put it, “the world’s most hated thinker.” Few went there after.

Russians and Ukrainians don’t have the typical profiles of ancient warring tribes. They have a deeply intertwined history, with citizens of both countries retaining many of the same customs, jokes, and home remedies, while living in the same crumbling Soviet buildings, with fondness for the same cabbage soup and moonshine. There are huge numbers of mixed/bilingual families and many famous cultural figures (including my hero Nikolai Gogol) are claimed by both countries. They’ve fought before, but what jumped out reviewing this “Timeline” is how much it seemed that these old Slavic neighbors mostly fall out now over attitudes toward the West.

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