It’s been nearly a year since I asked, How Does This Ukraine Thing End? It will end, much as the people with little yellow and blue flags on their Twitter profile refuse to admit it, with a negotiated peace. In the meantime, as I also asked, how many people have to die?
That’s the frank choice of anyone who refuses to start negotiating: more taxpayer billions fed into the gaping maw of the military-industrial complex and thousands more people dying.
Anyone who fantasizes that the war will end with some kind of Hitlerian downfall for Vladimir Putin is deluding themselves.
“From a military standpoint, I still maintain that for this year it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from every inch of Ukraine … That doesn’t mean it can’t happen; doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but it’d be very, very difficult,” he said, adding the war “is likely to end in a negotiation”.
Those are the words of no less an authority than the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. Naturally, the blood-gorged warhawks of the Washington war machine and its media camp followers screeched in outrage, but it’s difficult to disagree.
For almost a year we’ve read how Vladimir Putin is on the verge of death and Russia, enfeebled by Western sanctions, is about to collapse. None of this has happened, for all the billions spent and lives lost, and there’s precious little evidence it will.
The more likely, however unappealing, scenario is that Russia gets to keep the territory it controls, regardless of how long the conflict goes on.
Ukraine has nearly been drawn to the negotiating table previously, but, every time, distracted away by the Biden administration dangling another wad of US taxpayer’s cash. The only problem with Biden’s Forever War-by-proxy, though, is that it is sapping American power at a critical moment in the Pacific.
Only last week US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro remarked that US assistance to Ukraine would eventually undermine the US Navy, pockets of which might be looking for excuses down the line not to help other US allies.
Those allies would be Australia, New Zealand and Japan, not to mention Taiwan.
When even veteran warhawks like Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates are saying it, it’s time to listen.
Former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, in an oped for The Washington Post, made similar points a week earlier: unless NATO is willing to provide Ukraine with a “dramatic increase in military supplies and capability”, Russia would keep the territory it has.
“The Russian economy and people will suffer as the war continues, but Russians have endured far worse,” Rice and Gates wrote. “Count on Putin to be patient to achieve his destiny.”
Indeed, rumours of Putin suffering serious health problems have circulated for at least a year but he is probably more likely to die in a coup if he withdrew than from cancer, a powerful incentive for him to press on.
As for the Russian people, theirs is a culture and history of suffering, under the tsars, the Soviets, and now Putin, who even after 20 years at the helm enjoys vastly more popularity than any Western leader.
Ordinary Russians are more likely to embrace loss of personal liberty, denial of educational and economic opportunities, higher taxes and even conscription as a duty to the state than to agitate to remove their leader. Even Stalin, for all the chaos he wrought, was and is still revered.
Instead of jaw-jaw, though, the reckless proxy-belligerents seem intent on not just prolonging but amplifying the conflict. The latest craziness is throwing German tanks into the Eastern Front again for the first time in 80 years.
Can you imagine a better propaganda gift to Moscow than sending German tanks, which in World War II contributed to the deaths of more than 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians, about three times Australia’s population at the time, to Ukraine. I would hazard a guess Russians learn at school about the role of German tanks in WWII.
The Australian
Of course, the warhawks respond that, why shouldn’t Ukraine defend itself? This is a fair point — but one that might also have been made for Iraq and Afghanistan. What would the West have made of major powers who handed a hundred billion dollars worth of weapons to Saddam Hussein?
Then there is the simply risible argument that “We fight Putin over there, so we don’t have to fight him over here”. Surely we’ve heard that song played far too often, whether it be about Ho Chi Minh or Saddam Hussein, to still be taken in by it?
In any case, given that, for all his territorial gains which Western propagandists prefer to ignore, Putin is still a long way from overrunning Ukraine. Who seriously thinks that he’ll take on the might of NATO? If Europe’s military heavyweights, Germany and France, really believed that, they’d be doing a lot more to prepare for it.
Or, perhaps not: with the Democrats in the White House, they know they can always rely on the American taxpayer to shield them, as they have for the last 80 years.