Ukraine will win, because they are in the right defending their homeland.
Diplomacy doesn't necessarily mean capitulation.
Just like in one of those Hollywood movies ...
Didn’t they? The aggressor got what they wanted and then came back for more. That sure doesn’t sound like an acceptable diplomatic solution.
Wait uhmm. The former colonies didn't win because they were in the right, defending their homeland Britain just
That doesnt fit the whole picture at all.
I’ll pass thanks. I don’t do YouTube politics as I prefer my cookies to stay clear of cancer.
Tell this Russian paid Kremlin troll to stop writingTodays The Times
Of course we’ll have to do a deal with Putin
new
It’s dangerous folly for our bellicose ministers to think the West can or should seek to pulverise Russia into submission
Matthew Parris
Friday July 01 2022, 9.00pm, The Times
Share
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/of-course-well-have-to-do-a-deal-with-putin-bdjrkfv0x
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?te...e-well-have-to-do-a-deal-with-putin-bdjrkfv0x
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sha...e-well-have-to-do-a-deal-with-putin-bdjrkfv0x
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/of-course-well-have-to-do-a-deal-with-putin-bdjrkfv0x
Save
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/of-course-well-have-to-do-a-deal-with-putin-bdjrkfv0x
The drunken misbehaviour of an accident-prone deputy chief whip shares top billing with stories about a European war that will stain the modern history of our continent. About that Carlton Club story we may plunder the lexicon for expressions of shock, rage and condemnation, because it doesn’t matter. About where things are going in Ukraine we must be so much more careful. I thought my fellow columnist on these pages, the respected former foreign secretary (and a friend) William Hague, was uncharacteristically incautious in his column here on Monday, headlined “There’s no peace deal to be made with Putin”. Lord Hague risks being — at best — misinterpreted.
If it’s about the tense, he’s right. At present no such deal is visible. But were it about the future, he would be wrong. There will have to be a deal, and probably with President Putin. A line must be drawn, not least on a map: a line behind which each side can recover its stability and rebuild, confident this particular war is over.
Even as we rebalance our commercial relations with Russia to eliminate dependence, we’ll need to pull back from the present (necessary) measures to sabotage their whole economy. At the very depths of the 20th-century Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, there was never an intention to wreck Russia itself. Nor should there be now.
It’s right that by force of arms Russia has been pushed back, and there’s further yet to go. But pushed, finally, where? We should be clear in our own heads that we don’t mean oblivion, perdition, extinction, or any other word calculated to induce utter despair.
Despair is so dangerous, in nations as well as individuals. We should be signalling that the aim of the free world is to secure Ukraine’s safety behind agreed borders. But not to smash the Russian economy permanently, sweep away an entire political establishment, render the continent’s biggest country militarily impotent, and crush and humiliate an entire nation, a deep, rich and complicated culture with a proud and fitfully glorious history.
ADVERTISEMENT
Russians have done so much, in so many ways and on so many different levels, for our European continent. Now (and not for the first time) they are trying to do a cruel and breathtakingly stupid thing and they must be forced to stop. But once the free world’s military response has stopped them, terms must be agreed and relations normalised. Everything we say should be framed both by an iron will to seal and underwrite Ukraine’s place as an independent European nation and by western respect for a Russia that stays behind its own borders.
Even as I resist it, let me acknowledge the potency of the argument the other way. Mine faces perhaps four objections. First (one might object) it’s for President Zelensky himself to decide his war aims. Let me dispose of that. The West is paying the piper here. Zelensky may be the most popular person in the world at present, which is why our prime minister is snuggling up to him in hopes the stardust might rub off, but he is human, fallible, and under domestic pressures of his own. His allies must take a view on how far they and their chequebooks will follow. Is it unquestionably to the old borders of Crimea and Donbas, a massive and bloody task, if even possible? We should keep our counsel on that.
The second objection is that Putin is not Russia but a criminal lunatic who must be destroyed if peace is to be possible. This is dangerously seductive. Seductive because Putin may well be unhinged and is clearly untrustworthy. Dangerously seductive because a war leader’s belief (especially in old age) that he personally faces incarceration, the destruction of his career, his retirement, his legacy and perhaps even his life, leaves him with nothing to lose and tends to make him both fearless and careless.
Besides, should Putin be toppled it might well be at the hands of rivals whose complaint will be not that he made war but that he messed it up. Slaying the dragon of a Putin presidency might be sowing the dragon’s teeth.
SPONSORED
So, no, this can’t all be pinned on Putin, nor can we suppose removing him fixes the problem. It should be a given, a basic premise in all circumstances and a footnote to any deal made with Moscow, that the Kremlin must be watched with hooded eyes and cannot be trusted. The remedy for Ukraine is security through defensive capability underwritten by western allies, not through the pulverisation of one individual in Moscow.
And that’s the answer, too, to the third objection: that a peace deal would give Russia breathing space to regroup and return. It might — in their dreams. But sooner or later the war must end. If we think Moscow may later take another shot, we must give Ukrainians the solid basis for survival: the means to defend themselves next time, so no president in the Kremlin is tempted. Russian ambition will in time be curbed in this century as it was in the last: by economic failure. In the immediate they are more dangerous than over time. Our task in the West is to contain, with a quiet steeliness, while nature takes its course.
That’s my answer, too, to the fourth objection: that Russia’s dream of recovering the Baltic states must die. It probably won’t, whatever we do. So Moscow must see practical reasons not to try. There has been much psychobabble written about the mental processes of Russian leadership. Best to quit the psychoanalysis, lower the voice and increase the size of the stick.
How inappropriate and how unseemly, therefore, is the auction of bellicosity going on, with our prime minister, defence secretary and foreign secretary all bidding up. Boris Johnson says Putin has a toxic testosterone problem. Ben Wallace goes one better with a diagnosis of small man syndrome. Liz Truss, still flushed from her performance calling for war reparations from Moscow, has now swivelled her attention eastwards to Taiwan, where this week she seems to be threatening war if China tries to occupy that island — as if Britain would ever call the tune.
ADVERTISEMENT
Jockeying for position in a future Tory leadership challenge, and trying to turn these awful dilemmas for every European country into another excuse for Europe-bashing is one thing; world wars are quite another.
Someone, if not their mothers, should be telling them to stop it. Wars that do not end in occupations end in deals. Anyone who doubts that in the end there will have to be negotiations with some very nasty people should be readying their boots for the Russian winter.
Global politics
Ukraine
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/topic/liz-truss
It is taking time to train the Ukrainian military on modern weapons, An error admittedly this should have been done immediately after Crimea was annexed by the ORCS, but it is underway and will bring a pretty awful conclusion to this war for Russian cannon fodder, Shame it wont kill the Russian television gobshites, ruling classes, and political elite.
And if it wont?
Like I wrote, I don’t do YouTube politics. As for clueless, you have no idea about me.
Of course, you are clueless if you judge the credibility of a documentary by the mere fact that its being hosted on YouTube.
I don’t smoke, but otherwise you’re closer than you think.
Yes probably is, although I'd have thought publicly supplying weapons and training would risk an escalation too but for some reason Putin doesn't seem to be willing to up his game so maybe nuclear isn't the threat some people think?
Let's assume you are right, what does a compromise look like? It surely can't be giving away land because how would you deal with the people that have been displaced? They can go back to their homes but they now have to live under Putin?
Exactly through filtation camps.
