Perhaps if the two worlds are (1) rump western Ukraine with nato forces present as peace keepers and Ukraine de facto part of nato or (2) a demilitarized neutral Ukraine that retains more territory, with Russia not taking as much as they likely could.
Maybe (2) looks more attractive for a long term settlement than going for a maximalist territorial win.
Huh that evil cult of personality I mutter and I straighten the portrait of the queen in my home
When the back to office mandate results in the building entering the demilitarized zone
TL;DR Big Serge sees negotiations as untenable and theater. Russia is winning on the battlefield and Ukraine cannot, politically, make any meaningful concessions, which means that fighting will settle this and likely in Russia’s favor.
Thesis:
I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump’s self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia’s war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.
Classic battlefield analysis of the Kursk offensive, good slop for you war nerds (Russia focused on the flanks while Ukraine mostly prioritized depth over breadth):
Despite their tactical surprise and the early capture of Sudzha, the AFU was never able to parlay this into a meaningful penetration or exploitation in Kursk. Why? The answer seems to be a nexus of operational and technical problems the Ukrainians were unable to create a wide penetration into Russia (for the most part, the “opening” of their salient was less than 30 miles wide), which greatly reduced the number of roads available to them for supply and reinforcement. The narrow penetration and poor road access in turn allowed the Russians to concentrate strike systems on the few available lines of communication, to the effect that the Ukrainians struggled to either supply or reinforce the grouping based around Sudzha - this low logistical and reinforcement connectivity in turn made it impossible for the Ukrainians to stage additional forces to try and expand the salient. This created a positive feedback loop of confinement and isolation for the Ukrainian grouping which made their defeat more or less inevitable.
At the risk of making a perilous historical analogy, the operational form was very similar to the famous 1944 Battle of the Bulge: taken by surprise by a German counteroffensive, Dwight Eisenhower prioritized limiting the width, rather than the depth of the German penetration, moving reinforcements to defend the “shoulders” of the salient.
Operationally, the main distinctive of the fighting in Kursk is the orthogonal orientation of effort by the combatants. By this, we mean that Russian counteroffensives were directed at the flanks of the salient, steadily compressing the Ukrainians into a more narrow position (by the end of 2024, the Ukrainians had lost half of the territory they once held), while Ukrainian efforts to restart their progress were aimed at moving deeper into Russia.
On a schematic level, the Ukrainian position in Kursk was doomed by mid-September when Russian troops recaptured Snagost. If the Ukrainians had successfully isolated the south bank of the Seym, they would have had the river as a valuable defensive barrier protecting their left flank as well as access to valuable space and additional supply roads. As it happened, the Ukrainian flank was crumpled early in the operation by the Russian victories at Korenevo and Snagost, which left Ukraine trying to fight its way out of a very compressed and road-poor salient. The (correct) Russian decision to concentrate its counterattacks on the flanks further compressed the space and left the Ukrainians with inadequate supply linkages subject to persistent Russian drone strikes.
Confinement bred strangulation, and strangulation bred confinement. Fighting with a caved in flank for months, the Ukrainian grouping was doomed to operational sterility and eventual defeat almost at the outset.
The state of the front (multiple ongoing collapses for Ukraine and more to come):
The Kursk salient is the second front to be fully collapsed by the Russian Army in the past three months. The first was the southern Donetsk front, which was completely caved in over the course of December and then rolled up in the opening weeks of the year, which had the effect of not only knocking the AFU out of longstanding strongholds like Ugledar and Kurakhove, but also safeguarding the flank of the Russian advance towards Pokrovsk.
There was no Toretsk counter-offensive. Rather Russia was claiming a victory it hadn’t achieved:
It appears that what actually happened was rather that the Russian MoD announced the capture of the city while its extremities were still contested. Russian forces remain in control of the bulk of the city, but Ukrainian units remain dug at the periphery and fighting has continued in the “grey zone.” DeepState (a Ukrainian mapping project) confirmed that there was no general Ukrainian counterattack - rather, the fighting was simply part of a continuous struggle for the western periphery of the city.
Negotiation is theater (return to thesis):
So long as Russia continues to advance on the battlefield, they have no incentive to (as they would see it) rob themselves of a full victory by accepting a truncated and premature settlement.
The problem for Ukraine, if history is any guide, is that it is not actually very easy to surrender. In the First World War, Germany surrendered while its army was still in the field, fighting in good order far from the German heartland. This was an anticipatory surrender, born of a realistic assessment of the battlefield which indicated that German defeat was an inevitability. Berlin therefore opted to bow out prematurely, saving the lives of its young men once the struggle had become hopeless. This decision, of course, was poorly received, and was widely denounced as betrayal and cowardice. It became a politically scarring watershed moment that shaped German sensibilities and revanchist drives for decades to come.
So long as Zelensky’s government continues to receive western support and the AFU remains in the field - even if it is being steadily rolled back and chewed up all along the front - it is difficult to imagine Kiev acceding to an anticipatory surrender. Ukraine must choose between doing this the easy way and the hard way, as the parlance goes, but this is not really a choice at all, particularly given the Kremlin’s insistence that a change of government in Kiev is a prerequisite to peace as such. Any successful path to a negotiated piece runs through the ruins of Zelensky’s government, and is therefore largely precluded at the moment.
So for all the diplomatic cinema, the brute reality of the battlefield remains the same. The battlefield is the first principle, and the ultimate repository of political power. The diplomat is a servant of the warrior, and Russia takes recourse to the fist and the boot and the bullet.
Denmark will probably want to comply with this one
Lie on your resume
The US won’t shoot at Turkey but they’ll give guns to the Kurds. They already have been.
And the Jihadis were backed by Israel and were being bombed by Russia but Uno Reverso.
I think all Russia cares about in this is Tartarus. They dgaf who runs Syria so long as they get that naval base. And the Jihadis dgaf who supplies them so long as they get their caliphate. It’s a swipe right.
Is a language spoken at school worth the horrors of war?
Then why tf did Ukraine walk away from the deal they signed in Istanbul right at the start of the war?
Obviously to the people of Donbas it was worth fighting for. It was their language rights, apparently it meant a lot to them.
I don’t see a theory of victory for the axis.
Economic collapse doesn’t end Israel.
And maybe they’re suffering “heavy” casualties but heavy means uncomfortable rather than unsustainable. They can sustain these losses.
The closest I can see is that Israel becomes a pariah like South Africa but if they have the US and the EU behind them, they survive.
Tell me how I’m wrong?
Like, their economy retracts by 40% or something crazy and then what happens?
I don’t see Israel defeating the axis but I don’t see how the situation changes from what it is now.
If Russia believes they can push Ukraine out then all this achieves is to delay a cease fire and Ukraine isn’t even able to hold their extremely well fortified Donbas line so they won’t be able to hold in Kursk.
It’s Battle of the Bulge. This is the last hoorah. The next step is either the Donbas line breaks, which makes Kursk irrelevant, or they rush the elite units out of Kursk to reinforce the Donbas line, which means Kursk falls.
They’ve scored a PR win only and that’s not actually worth much.
Why do people hate Richard Nixon so much? The dude introduced price controls, made peace with china advancing the dialectic of a future global communist state, enacted far reaching environmental protections, and he fought hard against the deep state and CIA.
Nixon was fucking based. What are the bad things he did someone needs to remind me before I buy a T-shirt.
He was supposed to have landed at least manned missions to mars by now