https://roddreher.substack.com/p/how-will-the-russia-ukraine-war-end?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=136360&post_id=131614553&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=emailDoc Holliday said:
Geezus how much longer is the damn war gonna continue?!
How Will The Russia-Ukraine War End?
Not Soon, And Not Cleanly, Says Mearsheimer In A Blackpill Analysis:
Well gang, this is a hell of a thing to share with you: the foreign policy specialist John Mearsheimer's read on where the Russia-Ukraine war is going from here. It's long but very important. I'm going to quote some of it. Here's how it begins:
You may recall that Mearsheimer is a foreign policy "realist," and made himself very unpopular from the start of the war by blaming the West for igniting the conflict. From his Substack:Quote:
This paper examines the likely trajectory of the Ukraine war moving forward.
I will address two main questions.
First, is a meaningful peace agreement possible? My answer is no. We are now in a war where both sides Ukraine and the West on one side and Russia on the other see each other as an existential threat that must be defeated. Given maximalist objectives all around, it is almost impossible to reach a workable peace treaty. Moreover, the two sides have irreconcilable differences regarding territory and Ukraine's relationship with the West. The best possible outcome is a frozen conflict that could easily turn back into a hot war. The worst possible outcome is a nuclear war, which is unlikely but cannot be ruled out.
Second, which side is likely to win the war? Russia will ultimately win the war, although it will not decisively defeat Ukraine. In other words, it is not going to conquer all of Ukraine, which is necessary to achieve three of Moscow's goals: overthrowing the regime, demilitarizing the country, and severing Kyiv's security ties with the West. But it will end up annexing a large swath of Ukrainian territory, while turning Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state. In other words, Russia will win an ugly victory.
I don't want to quote Mearsheimer at too much length here, but good grief, to read his detailed account of the pre-war machinations of the West is to wonder what the hell our leaders were thinking. I was unaware of how we betrayed Russia with the Minsk agreement:Quote:
It has been clear since April 2008 that Russian leaders across the board view the West's efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO and make it a Western bulwark on Russia's borders as an existential threat. Indeed, President Putin and his lieutenants repeatedly made this point in the months before the Russian invasion, when it was becoming clear to them that Ukraine was almost a de facto member of NATO.
Since the war began on 24 February 2022, the West has added another layer to that existential threat by adopting a new set of goals that Russian leaders cannot help but view as extremely threatening. I will say more about Western goals below but suffice it to say here that the West is determined to defeat Russia and knock it out of the ranks of the great powers, if not cause regime change or even trigger Russia to break apart like the Soviet Union did in 1991.
In a major address Putin delivered this past February (2023), he stressed that the West is a mortal threat to Russia. "During the years that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union," he said, "the West never stopped trying to set the post-Soviet states on fire and, most importantly, finish off Russia as the largest surviving portion of the historical reaches of our state. They encouraged international terrorists to assault us, provoked regional conflicts along the perimeter of our borders, ignored our interests and tried to contain and suppress our economy." He further emphasized that, "The Western elite make no secret of their goal, which is, I quote, 'Russia's strategic defeat.' What does this mean to us? This means they plan to finish us once and for all." Putin went on to say: "this represents an existential threat to our country."
Russian leaders also see the regime in Kyiv as a threat to Russia, not just because it is closely allied with the West, but also because they see it as the offspring of the fascist Ukrainian forces that fought alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union in World War II.
I'll stop quoting Mearsheimer there, but again, I urge you strongly to read his careful, richly detailed analysis. It's a real black pill, mostly because he writes with such a cool head, and includes lkefacts that are very hard to get around. He talks about how Russia does not have an army big enough to subdue Ukraine, but it does have the industrial capacity to keep manufacturing enough artillery to devastate the Ukrainian armed forces. And, Russia has far more people than poor Ukraine.Quote:
There is a final reason why a lasting peace agreement is not doable. Russian leaders do not trust either Ukraine or the West to negotiate in good faith, which is not to imply that Ukrainian and Western leaders trust their Russian counterparts. Lack of trust is evident on all sides, but it is especially acute on Moscow's part because of a recent set of revelations.
The source of the problem is what happened in the negotiations over the 2015 Minsk II Agreement, which was a framework for shutting down the conflict in the Donbass. French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel played the central role is designing that framework, although they consulted extensively with both Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Those four individuals were also the key players in the subsequent negotiations. There is little doubt that Putin was committed to making Minsk work. But Hollande, Merkel, and Poroshenko as well as Zelensky have all made it clear that they were not interested in implementing Minsk, but instead saw it as an opportunity to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military so that it could deal with the insurrection in the Donbass. As Merkel told Die Zeit, it was "an attempt to give Ukraine time … to become stronger."
Similarly, Poroshenko said, "Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces."
Shortly after Merkel's Die Zeit interview in December 2022, Putin told a press conference: "I thought the other participants of this agreement were at least honest, but no, it turns out they were also lying to us and only wanted to pump Ukraine with weapons and get it prepared for a military conflict." He went on to say that getting bamboozled by the West had caused him to pass up an opportunity to solve the Ukraine problem in more favorable circumstances for Russia: "Apparently, we got our bearings too late, to be honest. Maybe we should have started all this [the military operation] earlier, but we just hoped that we would be able to solve it within the framework of the Minsk agreements." He then made it clear that the West's duplicity would complicate future negotiations: "Trust is already almost at zero, but after such statements, how can we possibly negotiate? About what? Can we make any agreements with anybody and where are the guarantees?"
I"m old school You **** with my country and I'll nail your ass to the wall. However, some of you have convinced me that our foreign intervention policy is stupid. I just have a hard time getting over someone invading another but I'm mellowing. I supported Bush's invasion and I was wrong then too. 