Peace is not peace if it is arrived at through a non-committal third party steadying the hand of your enemy who is pointing a pistol at you.
That is not peace; that is not even appeasement. It’s surrender. Which could easily lead to occupation.
Ukraine is very careful about declaring numbers of its dead and injured, and the general consensus is that Russia now is at more than 1 million dead and injured – again without specifying the breakdown. Russia is big enough and populous enough to have been able to mobilise “politically insignificant” (as they see them) conscripts from its further geographic reaches. Many of the educated professional middle classes fled across the border as soon as the war was declared. Putin has prevented serious political unrest by not conscripting greater numbers from the urban elite in the most populous and politically relevant cities. The Wagner Group ploughed through tens of thousands of prisoners, promising them amnesty from their crimes and a lump sum, if they stayed fighting for 6 months. The general belief is that roughly 50% of these prisoner conscripts died – as they were the least trained and the most expendable – and deployed to the sharp end of the front line. The current deal for prisoner recruits is “till the end of the war or death, whichever comes first.” Nice.
The simple point being, Russia simply doesn’t care who it kills, including a sizable portion of its own population.
Surely one of the most embarrassing agreements in modern history is the Budapest Memorandum. Signed by John Major for the UK, Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma, for Ukraine. In exchange for Ukraine surrendering its nuclear arsenal, the signatories provided security assurances that respected Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. The realpolitik of this has proven too difficult. Why then, should Ukraine trust any peace treaty signed by Russia? Why? Apparently there is such disquiet on the streets of Kiev, amongst veterans of the Army, and soldiers on leave, that already a revolution is being spoken of. So, externally disastrous for its territorial integrity, surrendering cities not yet militarily seized – and internally disastrous, as the country’s own society rejects such a peace plan.
Zelenskyy has said with gravity that Ukraine faces losing either its dignity or its leading partner, in acceptance of such a deal. Yet beneath this sadness, I am sure a very real sense of betrayal exists. As one Ukrainian politician said, “on the one hand we lose US Patriot missiles, if we don’t accept, yet on the other hand, we lose our country if we do…”
I’m not sure this will go down too well for Trump with the Nobel committee…
#Ukraine #Appeasement #BudapestMemorandum #WagnerGroup #Zelensky
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