Possible Ukraine Settlement

The Russians are stalled and are focusing on fully occupying the Donets and Luhansk regions. In short, rather than conquer the entire country, they seem to be settling for capturing Eastern Ukraine. 

The Russians will not win, and the whole world has a stake in this matter being settled as soon as possible so as to avoid an escalation to a wider war.

A settlement of this conflict could see the following:

1. All hostilities will cease immediately. Humanitarian aid will be allowed into regions occupied by the Russians. Russia will immediately return all Ukrainian citizens who may have been forcibly removed to Russia.

2. Ukraine and Russia will exchange all prisoners of war.

3. Russia will evacuate all areas of Ukraine outside of Crimea or the Donets and Luhansk regions within a week of the agreement.

4. There will be UN-supervised referenda in Crimea and the Donets and Luhansk regions within three months to ascertain whether residents want to stay within Ukraine or join Russia. Ukraine and Russia will cooperate with and facilitate these referenda. Neither country will seek to move residents into these regions in order to influence the outcomes of the referenda.

5. Russia will evacuate either Crimea or the Donets and Luhansk regions within one week should the  referenda that indicate that the residents in the regions would prefer to remain part of Ukraine.

6. Russia and Ukraine will go to arbitration to settle on compensation for Ukraine should either Crimea of the Donets and Luhansk regions opt join Russia. The arbitrators will be chosen by the UN Security Council, absent Russia.

7. Ukraine will guarantee that it will not seek to join NATO.

8. Russia will guarantee that it will not interfere in Ukraine internal affairs, and that Ukraine will be free to pursue any economic or political arrangements with other nations.

9. Ukraine and Russia will convene a joint dispute settling body to facilitate settlement of future disputes. 

This would be an agreement between Ukraine and Russia. Other nations would be free to maintain whatever relationship with the two countries that they prefer, including keeping sanctions against Russia or aid to Ukraine.

Channeling My Inner Trump!

 In May of 2021, I wrote this blog...

"In terms of specific tactics, if he can stay out of jail until the 2022 mid-term elections, and should the Republicans retake the House of Representatives and the Senate, he could coerce his lackeys in the Republican Party to put through a motion recognizing him as the true President of the United States, and repudiating the election of Joe Biden. Trump then would be able to go to any court and say that, because it is at least possible that he could be restored as the President of the United States, any charges should at least be stayed."

Please see here...

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/8182703650793673539/2096835209158165873

Yesterday, we learned that Trump had asked this of one of his lackeys, Mo Brooks, to do this should Mr. Brooks be elected to Congress in November, 2022..

....'“rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency.”

Please see here...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mo-brooks-trump-rescinds-endorsement-alabama-senate-1325520/

I was wrong in my blog in assuming that this entire episode would be about Trump trying to avoid criminal sanction. In fact, it is worse than that. As with what happened on January 6, 2021, Trump is bent on sedition to return to power. The United States of America has never faced a challenge like this.

To his credit, Mr. Brooks has refused to accede to Trump's demand. He will stand behind his oath to uphold the constitution, fully understanding that what has been asked of him breaches the highest law in the land. 

Will other Republicans do the same? 

We will find out how loyal these people are after the 2022 congressional elections, as Trump is almost certain to ask all Republicans in Congress to overturn the 2022 presidential election as soon as they take their seats in that august institution.

Do We Want WW3? What Are We Doing!?

Here are a few psychological studies of Putin. 

https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Waller_AriasKing_Putin_July2021_Optimize.pdf

https://worldcrunch.com/world-affairs/putin-psychology/particle-5

http://www.immelman.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Putin-poster.jpg

Summary - Latent homosexual, possible pedophile, posing as someone he is not and never was, in denial and desperate to not be found out, who thinks the world will never really accept him...sees in Russia's expansion and restoration of its greatness his own Napoleonic personal restoration, and Kiev in particular as key as having some relation to his mother,...primary traits are sadism, narcissism, obsessive/compulsive = he's nuts.

Thoughts...

Will Putin's inner sense that he will never be accepted by his own country spur him on to risk them all..."...love me or I'll nuke everything?"...similar to what Hitler did to Germany at the end of WW2? 

He derives joy from the idea that one person could decide the fate of thousands of others....what fate could he potentially have in store, and who are "the others"? 

He viciously attacks any opponents seeing all as threats. Would he see a defeat in Ukraine as a threat to his essential being that had to be thwarted/avoided with the maximum effort available to him...i.e. nukes? 

Is he desperate to avoid defeat and removal from office in order to avoid being "found out", whether that means as a homosexual, or just a wimp?  What would he do to avoid this, which could follow a defeat in Ukraine?

Is his sadism and narcissism such that he cannot identify at all with the suffering he is imposing on others, and he would not see how serious even nuclear weapons may be? He has mentioned using them three times in a week, and has put Russia on a high nuclear alert.

If the question is agreeing to keep Ukraine out of NATO, versus the risk that he will use nukes, maybe we declare that Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO; challenge the Russians to leave; then resort to the long game of waiting/encouraging Putin to either die, retire, or be removed?

Was Ukraine going to be allowed into NATO any time soon anyway? What are the West's actual interests here?  

Putin likely wants way more, but getting him to agree to a cease-fire and starting talking about Ukraine not joining NATO would be a defeat for him, and a victory for our primary goal here, which is to make sure he does not go nuclear even if the risk is very low. 

Why are we facilitating a war that could kill tens of thousands of Ukrainians and possibly end everything for everyone?  

Is it appeasement to recognize that your opponent is nuts and could blow up the entire world, so maybe a short-term accommodation to wait him out is in order? 

Hitler didn't have nukes...

Is This How It Ends?

The invasion is not going to plan. 

Putin is up against the wall, and he is nuts and increasingly desperate. 

What is going on in the Kremlin? 

Is a battle going on there that will decide whether or not humanity continues to exist?  

Is the fate of the world in the hands of a few generals and advisors and hangers-on who are trying to figure out how to sneak a handgun into a meeting with him, or doctors who are trying to figure out how to slip him some poison, a la Stalin. or a girlfriend who is planning to plunge a knife into his heart?  

Is the CIA activating assassination plans?

I do not think any human would survive a nuclear holocaust.

If Putin goes nuclear, the only intelligent life in the universe will be snuffed out.

We have never been closer to complete annihilation. The nuclear clock should be at 11:59:58...

Is this how it ends? 

Curtains For Putin?

I was dead wrong. Biden did not make a secret deal with Putin to keep Ukraine out of NATO. The Russians invaded yesterday. 

Let's take a walk through time...we may want to try to understand what is going on through a search for historic precedents.

Focusing on Russian history, we may want to start with the expansion of Russia from a Grand Duchy to an Empire over a period of about 700 years, and see this invasion as a modern version of this imperial imperative.

We could also interpret the invasion from a more recent perspective, and see this as the third of three national suppressions including Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, where the Russians felt compelled to reign in their vassal states by taking military action.

Reference to more recent events would conjure up memories of the Georgian-Russian War from 2008, and the occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014, when the Russians took advantage of a distracted and/or disinterested world to take back territory. 

Finally, there is the Russian suppression and reincorporation of Chechnya into Russia in 1999-2000.  Chechnya had gained its de facto independence following a war with Russia in 1994-96. The later war to bring them back into Russia killed up to 50,000 people. 

There are many ways to interpret what has happened here - economic imperatives; a drive to restore Great Power Status; the need to deflect from internal troubles. I think that the historic precedents are key to understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those precedents speak to a centuries-long and relentless determination on the part of the Russian leadership - of every ideological stripe - to control the peoples on their borders. There appears to be no question that Putin sees the world the same way, considering Ukraine to be nothing more than a break-away part of Russia which he is determined to return to the fold. He has as much as said so.

How will this turn out?  

Well, no one knows, but it is certain that the days of empire are over, at least those empires established by force of arms and maintained through the use of soldiers and not financiers. Putin's perspective is at least three decades out of date, and his perspective is certain to have many detractors, including people in his own country.

Regarding those people, the war may be taking place now in order for Putin to deflect from the obvious failure of Putin's government to bring to the Russians the type of economic and social success that is being enjoyed by many of their former vassal states. By way of comparison, the Russians have almost five times the population of their former vassal Poland, but barely twice the GDP of that country. As noted in a previous post, Russia should be the wealthiest country on Earth. They are nowhere close to this. Does Putin see writing on the wall?

Other countries that tried the path of war to defect from economic stagnation and internal troubles include Argentina that launched the Falkland's War in 1980, and the Austrian Empire which gleefully vaulted into WW1 in 1914. Both countries saw the end of the respective regimes as a result of their involvement in those wars.

We know what Ukrainians and the West think about this new war. It may be that we should be paying closer attention to the Russians themselves. Behind the propaganda, a storm may be brewing.

Putin and Biden - Let's Make a Secret Deal

I suspect that there will be no invasion of Ukraine. 

Why?  

Putin has demanded that Ukraine never be allowed to join NATO.  I think that the Americans will agree. In particular, I think Biden will promise Putin that Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO, and he will also ask that Putin keep this promise secret. This approach is consist with Biden's emerging foreign policy philosophy - The Biden Doctrine - of matching America's commitments to America's interests. The USA has no observable interest in defending Ukraine from Russia. NATO's expansion is probably over.

The precedent for this may be the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the crisis was resolved, in part, when the Americans undertook to withdraw missiles from Turkey in return for the USSR withdrawing missiles from Cuba. In order to not look like they had appeased the Soviets, the Americans asked that their promise be kept secret.  They removed their missiles six months after the Soviets removed missiles from Cuba.

For an awesome series on the Cuban Missile Crisis, please see here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEXjoBe5ZdI&list=PLrG5J-K5AYAWbzTXiTzPEFQHLoozkqchz

On the Biden Doctrine, Biden faced a mass of criticism for pulling out of Afghanistan last year. Is anyone now complaining that the USA is no longer spending its money and shedding American blood in Afghanistan?  

Nope.

Putin Has A Point

 Here is a map of Russia and Ukraine...

If Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would face a hostile alliance with a bridgehead jutting right into the heart of their country. NATO says it is peaceful, but Russia sees NATO as a threat. Including Ukraine in the alliance would be adding one country too many. Doing this would be almost guaranteed to spark a violent reaction from Russia. No one has an interest in this, especially the Ukrainians, as it is in their country that any violent reaction would likely be focused.

At the start of WW1, Russia had the fourth largest economy on Earth. One horrible world war; one horrible civil war; a second more horrible world war; seventy years of Communism; forty years of Cold War; and a botched return to normalcy after the Cold War later, and the combined GDP of NATO is about thirty times that of Russia. No country on Earth exhibits more failed promise than the one that Putin leads. That country deserves our condolences, not our apprehension.

Russia will only become a real threat if it is truly provoked. We need to make sure to not provoke it.

And Ukraine? Would being militarily neutral, but free to join any economic and political collectives it prefers really be an awful a situation? It works well for Finland.

The West needs to look in the mirror, and realize that this time, we may be the bully.