All We are Saying is ………

Today the media talking heads reported on a conversation between Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskyy which took place last June.  The President had called to convey that the United States was going to provide another billion dollars of arms to Ukraine in order to continue the fight against Russia.

Biden was pleased to make the call and was somewhat taken aback when Zelenskyy, apparently without even a thank you, only asked for more.  Biden finally lost his cool and as Zelenskyy continued, the President said “You could at least be a little more grateful!”

What’s the message here?  What the President was saying was that he knew the American people would tire of spending billions for arms to Ukraine in a war which seems to have no end and could go on for years.

Ukraine has been wracked by shocking destruction and deadly violence since Russia invaded in February.  Tens of thousands have died and the slaughter can only get more horrific as long as all sides, including the U.S. and its NATO allies, remain committed to war.

In the first weeks of the war, the U.S, and NATO sent weapons to Ukraine to prevent Russia from quickly over running Ukraine’s military and conducting a “regime change” in Kyiv.  Since that was accomplished the only goals President Zelenskyy and his Western allies have publicly proclaimed are to recover all of pre-2014 Ukraine and decisively defeat and weaken Russia.

This is a really nice aspirational goal at best which, even if accomplished, would cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of Ukrainian lives, and take years to accomplish.  If Ukraine and its allies got close to this goal, the risk of nuclear war dramatically increases.

Sounds like the perfect no-win situation to me.  But hey, what do I know.  I’m just an old crank living in Florida.

Biden has said that we are supplying weapons so that Ukraine has the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.   Problem is Ukraine has no position at the negotiating table.  There is no negotiating table.

When Biden made that comment in an interview with the NY Times, Ukraine had no position at any negotiating table, thanks mainly to the conditions that Biden and NATO leaders attached to their support. In April, after Ukraine negotiated a 15-point peace plan for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a peaceful future as a neutral country, the U.S. and U.K. refused to provide Ukraine with the security guarantees that were a integral part of the agreement.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went on to tell Zelenskyy in Kyiv on April 9, the “collective West” was “in it for the long run,” meaning a long war against Russia, but wanted no part in any agreement between Ukraine and Russia requiring the West to guarantee Ukraine’s independence.

Six months after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declared in April that the new goal of the war was to decisively defeat and “weaken” Russia, there have been no calls for a new peace initiative.  The U.S. and Britain had no reservations about intervening to kill peace talks in April, but now they’ve sold Zelenskyy on fighting an endless war.

Anyone see a way out of this potential quagmire. other than negotiation?

Me nether.

Wars end at the negotiating table.  The perennial thorny question for war leaders is when do you negotiate?  If you think you are winning, you are in no hurry to sit at the table.  If you think you are losing, you want to continue fighting to improve your bargaining position.  In April, Zelenskyy was losing.  That was the hope on which Johnson and Biden convinced Zelenskyy to stake his country’s future.

Since then, Ukraine has launched localized counter-offensives and recovered parts of its territory. Russia has responded by throwing hundreds of thousands of fresh troops into the war and starting to systematically demolish Ukraine’s infrastructure.  More than half of Kyiv has no water today.  Power is questionable.  Gas for heating is in short supply. A year of Russian attacks on infrastructure and cities will leave Ukraine a wasteland.

Will Ukraine somehow be in a stronger military position after a winter of war and power outages, with hundreds of thousands more Russian troops in the areas they control?  “This is a bet on a much longer war, in which U.S. taxpayers will shell out for thousands of tons of weapons and many more Ukrainians will die, with no clear endgame short of nuclear war.”

Of course, that is not how the U.S. media sees it.  Zelensky was cornered by the U.S. and Britain into abandoning promising negotiations for the prospect of a long war which may destroy his country.  At the U.N; the Secretary General and some 66 countries have called for peace negotiations.  The Pope has called for peace.

Even former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose history of Vietnam-era war crimes is well documented, has spoken out on the senselessness of current U.S. policy. Kissinger told the Wall Street Journal in August, “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.”

In Congress, after every single Democrat voted for a virtual blank check for arming Ukraine in May, with no provision for peacemaking, Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and 29 other progressive Democrats recently sent a letter to Biden urging him to “make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire.”

Unfortunately, the backlash from Democratic leaders was so blistering that within 24 hours the caucus was forced to withdraw the letter.

“This is an extremely dangerous moment in history. Americans are waking up to the reality that this war threatens us with the existential danger of nuclear war, a danger most Americans thought we had survived once and for all with the end of the Cold War. Even if we manage to avoid nuclear war, the impact of a long, bloody war is likely to destroy Ukraine and kill untold numbers of Ukrainians, cause humanitarian catastrophes across the Global South and trigger a long-lasting global economic crisis.”

“The horrors of the war, the contradictions in Western policy, the blowback on European energy supplies, the specter of famine stalking the Global South and the rising danger of nuclear war are provoking a worldwide chorus of voices calling for peace in Ukraine.”

Here’s one more.

Mine.

.