Ukraine soldier fires mortar: The Guardian
Ukraine soldier fires mortar: The Guardian
Putin, who went after Ukraine with bullets but no words, will probably agree to words with no bullets for a while, and then as he has before, will go back to bullets and no words. Putin knows he can get away with this. The question is, what does Donald Trump know?
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
All ceasefire negotiations favor the aggressor. In a nutshell, that’s what Ukraine is afraid of. The negotiations for the so-called ceasefire deal that came out of Saudi Arabia earlier in the week were conducted by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, and diplomats for Ukraine. Reports today said that while President Zelenskyy was in Jeddah for the talks, he was not in the room during the negotiations. Ukraine agreed yesterday to the ceasefire deal after Trump lifted his ban on intelligence sharing with Ukraine and restarted military aid to the beleaguered country.
If that sounds to you like a partner to a deal being let in through the back door with a gun to his head, you are correct.
At this hour, Russia is said to be “cautiously awaiting details of the agreement from the Americans.” The White House announced late today that National Security Adviser Waltz had spoken with his counterpart in Moscow.
Let’s take a garden rake and see if we can work our way through some of the bullshit that’s being spread around about this so-called deal. The first thing you’ve got to know is what’s been going on while these talks and the talks about the talks have been happening. Russia launched what was described as “a devastating ballistic missile and drone attack” on the Ukrainian port city of Odessa and five other population centers in Ukraine including Kharkiv, Kyiv, Slovyansk, and Ternopil in the country’s west hitting apartment buildings, hospitals, and power infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, wearing camouflage military battle dress, visited Russia’s Kursk region where heavy fighting has been going on between Russian and Ukrainian troops that seized parts of the region last year. Russian forces are said to have regained more than 1000 square kilometers from the Ukrainian military, which now holds onto a small area around the Russian town of Sudzha. With the presence of Putin in the heavily disputed area of Kursk, it’s clear that the Russian plan is not to sign any ceasefire deal until they can push the Ukrainians completely out of their territory, which Ukraine has seen as a key bargaining chip in any ceasefire or peace deal with Russia.
There have been reports today that Russia plans on taking a hard line in any continuing negotiations for a ceasefire deal with Ukraine. They are said to be ready to demand that they get to keep all the territory that they have already taken from Ukraine, about one fifth of the country, and they will also demand some sort of buffer zone between Ukrainian and Russian forces along the ceasefire line. Any buffer zone between Ukraine’s military and Russian forces would involve Ukraine yielding more of its territory to form the buffer zone, a certain non-starter for Ukraine. The front lines in Ukraine’s war to defend itself against Russian aggression are approximately 700 miles long, so you can see that any agreement for a buffer zone along the ceasefire line would end up with Ukraine losing even more territory than they already have.
Here’s what Russia probably plans if a buffer zone is granted along the ceasefire line. They will spend the ceasefire tunneling under the buffer zone, so when the ceasefire is over, or when they decide to break it, they will have already penetrated far beyond the amount of territory they have taken. Ukraine knows this and will never agree to such a buffer zone because they know that Russia has broken every ceasefire agreement they have ever agreed to, and Russia has no intention of abiding by this one.
So, what’s going on here? The estimable Jay Kuo reports today that the ceasefire resulting from the Jeddah talks is already a good deal for Ukraine, because “the ceasefire plan manages to make Trump happy and to put Russia on the spot.” Every report on the ceasefire deal negotiated between the U.S. and Ukraine, including those coming out of Europe, say that the deal is to Ukraine’s advantage because it’s gotten them past the hole that Trump and Vance dug for them in the Oval Office during the trap they laid for Zelenskyy.
British Prime Minister Kier Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron were said to have helped Zelenskyy craft a letter he sent to Trump last week thanking the U.S. effusively for the aid it has provided to Ukraine and praising Trump for his idea of a ceasefire. Which was of course not his idea, but the way to get Trump to agree to anything is to assure him that it was his idea.
Ukraine hit Moscow and other Russian targets with an attack by more than 300 drones, letting Putin know he’s not the only one who can carry out attacks on an enemy. Jay Kuo quoted a European defense analyst who called the Ukraine drone strike a brilliant move because “Now Putin has to accept the ceasefire or become the one who is making Trump look bad. Given that Moscow was just hit, accosting the ceasefire makes Putin look weak domestically.”
All of this is the kind of stuff commonly referred to as three-dimensional chess. But that’s bullshit because they’re not playing chess on the battlefield in Ukraine where tens of thousands of Ukrainians have already lost their lives defending their homeland and are still dying today, along with the 20 or more Ukrainian civilians who were killed in the missile and drone attacks by Russia last week.
That’s another thing that gets lost: Nearly all of Russia’s attacks other than along the 700-mile front lines have been against Ukrainian civilians, and that has been true from the first day of the war in February of 2022. Russia has hit apartment buildings, schools full of school children, shopping malls, night clubs, churches, and hospitals.
Russia has also carried out brutal murders of civilians in Bucha and other Ukrainian villages. Russian military killings of civilians and strikes against civilian targets have been so devastating that the International Criminal Court has charged Vladimir Putin with war crimes and issued an arrest warrant for him, which I am sure he will demand to be dropped in the ceasefire negotiations once Russia gets involved.
This is the way that all wars of aggression go: one country attacks another and seizes its territory. The other country fights back trying to hold on to its territory. If the aggressor country is larger and more wealthy than the country it attacked, the aggressor has the advantage not only on the battlefield but in the diplomacy that inevitably follows a war.
Hitler knew this. It’s why he was able to attack his neighbors in Europe, because Germany was bigger and richer and more industrialized than the countries it attacked. It took the entrance of the United States into the war against Nazi aggression, with this country’s wealth, population, and industrial might, to overwhelm Hitler’s Germany.
The presence of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of Russia, the United States, France, and Great Britain explains why the U.S. and NATO did not respond the way we responded to Hitler’s aggression in World War II. Every decision of Biden’s White House was made with the threat of nuclear war in mind. That’s why Putin was able to carry out his attack on Ukraine, and that’s why he’s going to sit on the Ukrainian territory he has taken throughout any ceasefire or so-called peace agreement that lies in the future. It doesn’t matter that he has probably lost a half million or more of his soldiers, and thousands of tanks and other heavy military equipment in his war on Ukraine. His army and his aggression is backed up by the civilization-ending threat of nuclear war, and there’s really nothing that we can do about that.
So Putin, who went after Ukraine with bullets but no words, will probably agree to words with no bullets for a while, and then as he has before, will go back to bullets and no words.
Putin knows he can get away with this. The question is, what does Donald Trump know? The only thing that Ukraine has going for it at this point, besides the military support it receives from NATO and European Union countries and whatever the United States decides to supply, is Donald Trump’s ego. You may laugh that he thinks that he will be awarded the Nobel Prize for “solving” the war in Ukraine, but that insane dream of Trump’s may end up being Ukraine’s ace in the hole.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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