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Frankly I’m not sure Putin is willing to accept any offer right now. The problem is geography. The Russians have spent three years attriting the Ukrainian army and slowly breaking through the massive network of fortifications, trench lines, and bunker complexes that were built up over ten years along the LPR/DPR border. Also most of Ukraine’s few hilly areas are in the east. Everything after Pokrovsk and Kramantorsk will likely be significantly easier. Russia has put in a large percentage of the effort, blood and money needed to conquer half or all of Ukraine, and they are being asked to walk away and leave that on the table. The time to make a deal would have been about six months into the war when the Russian army only had 180,000 men in theater and were being routed out of Kharkiv.
If he doesn't want a deal, because, as usual, since day one, total russian victory is just around the corner, that's fine. Ukraine, for its part, can accept trump's offer, gets increased aid, and continue the war. Westerners aren't exactly under pressure to end the war.
I much prefer to make the same deal (whatever it is) now rather than earlier (assuming it was even on the table). If you're going to make a deal with a mafioso, it's much better morally to have him pay for it in blood, rather than just handing it over. Losses on your side that result from this preference are par for the course & acceptable. This only seems heartless from a naively pacifistic view. The mafioso is of course far more heartless.
The mafioso isn’t the only one paying in blood thoughbeit. Even in a best case scenario Ukraine’s economy and demographics have been permanently ruined. A harsh sacrifice perhaps, but one that Reddit and the US State Department are more than willing to make.
yeah, I already said this, losses are acceptable.
I don't take the pro-russian right seriously when they say they care about ukraine, its economy and demography. For one thing, because they say they don't care about ukraine on the next argument (it's far away, strategically unimportant, we need the money for the people here, etc). For another thing, because it's an argument putin makes, a mafia-extortion argument ('pay the black hand and nothing will happen to your nice flower shop'). Like zelensky says: We never pay any-one Dane-geld, no matter how trifling the cost; for the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!
Yet Kipling is unfamiliar with his own country’s history. King Alfred literally paid the Danegeld. He used the time to establish his defenses and actually grew the Saxon power.
Part of the deal that people think is on the table is rump-Ukraine dismantling its defences and promising not to seek western help rebuilding them. So the opposite of the situation with King Alfred.
Yet that wasn’t the deal a month or so in. That is, sometimes paying the mafia can make sense.
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The Russian's limiting factor for breakthrough isn't terrain, but logistics. If the Russians wanted less rough terrain, there are and always have been significantly flatter areas in the northern and southern fronts they could have taken before they cracked their mechanized forces and downgraded to cold war kit even less capable of breakthroughs.
The Russian terms before and after the Kharkiv have included conditions like the Ukrainians disarming their tankforce to fewer tanks than the Ukrainians captured in the Kharkiv offensive.
Which is to say, the Russians weren't really interested in a credible deal that didn't leave the Russians in a superior position to invade after the deal than before the invasion.
If this sounds like a bad deal-making strategy on Putin's part... yes. Putin is not a good strategist, and regularly sabotages his own strategic goals while depending on westerners to sanewash Kremlin positions into rationalizations for compromise.
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