(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



How the War in Ukraine Might End [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-05  

The historian Stephen Kotkin on the state of the war and the dangers of a Russian Tet Offensive.

“.....Ukraine is battling. They’re fighting and dying. The courage and the ingenuity are still there. But they’re running out of eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds. The average age of the Ukrainian soldiers training in Europe at the bases in Germany or the U.K. is thirty-five and older…. I’m very worried, because of the huge casualties and the sheer size of Russia’s population compared with Ukraine’s....

....Putin doesn't care. Ukrainian leadership can’t just sacrifice their people in big numbers. So it’s not just that the numbers are bad; it’s that one side can use bodies as cannon fodder....

...The problem is that there are two key variables in a war of attrition. One is the other side’s ability to fight. You’ve got to bomb their factories and take out their munitions production. The other variable is their will to fight. And, for Russia, the will to fight is about one guy….

.....In the U.S.’s rhetoric, nothing could be bigger than this, right? This is about deterring authoritarian powers, or they’ll do it again. This is about securing the rules-based order. This is about everything. There’s nothing bigger than this. But, at the same time, we can’t put American troops on the ground in Ukraine...

Those two statements cannot both be true.....

....We need an armistice. We need a D.M.Z. We need the fighting to stop. We need the eighteen-to-thirty-year-old Ukrainians who are left not to die. We need the Ukrainian kids who are going to school in Poland and Germany and elsewhere to come home, and go to school in the Ukrainian language, and become the future of the country.

if you take back Crimea, what do you do with the Russians, ethnically cleanse them? There were 2.3 million people in Crimea, approximately, before the war, predominantly ethnic Russian. Five hundred thousand people from Russia have moved into Crimea since the war started (2014).

(Could we) force Putin to buy it? To pay for it? You do it on the installment plan...—and if, during that period, they behave in a way that doesn’t threaten Ukrainian sovereignty—we would internationally recognize it as Russian territory.

I’m aiming for a Ukraine that’s rebuilding, not being bombed and destroyed, and I’ll take as much of that Ukraine as I can get in the time being. And, if I don’t get it all, I’m not going to acknowledge Russian occupation legally.”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/5/2197657/-How-the-War-in-Ukraine-Might-End?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/