by Lorenzo Canizares 4/30/25
There is light at the end of the tunnel in Ukraine.
This is from an article by Oliver Lane in yesterday’s (4/28/25) Breitbart News “Trump: Hard Working Zelensky willing to give up Crimea for Peace.” In the article Lane says “Besides Russian recalcitrance, one of the most apparent stumbling blocks to peace has been the now repeated public statements by Ukraine’s Zelensky that he would not — and could not, even — budge from his original stated war aims of a maximalist total victory, with a complete rout of the Russian armed forces from every inch of Ukraine. Yet a compromise may be in the offing here, with Zelensky apparently willing to come round to Trump’s view that, in reality, some of Ukraine is now gone and can’t be won back on the battlefield or the bargaining table.”
That’s a major advance on the quest for peace in a war that should have never happened.
The Russians made very clear before the inception of the war their concern was twofold. First, stop the massacring of the Russian-speaking population in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. Second, make sure that the security set-up will assure there would not be a repetition of what happened during the Second World War when the Nazis and their collaborators took the lives of 27 million Russians.
One clear demand from the Russians then , as it is now, is that NATO will be kept away from Ukraine. Is this a fair demand? Absolutely. From those countries that make up NATO came the troops and the collaborators that devastated the Russian people during the Second World War.
A first order of business for the government of any nation is to protect their citizens. Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been irresponsible if he had allowed such gross security violation.
Peace now would be a little different to what was offered before the Russian invasion started. Before Russia was willing to accept autonomy for the two Russian-speaking provinces and no NATO troops in Ukraine.
Now, I predict that in the soon coming negotiations, not only will Crimea be lost to Ukraine but also the Russian-speaking provinces, either by absorption into Russia or independence with Russian military support.
Is Ukraine in danger of disappearing? I don’t think so unless Zelensky decides to continue fighting on behalf of the West. Today (4/29/25) the New York Times had a front page article bragging about the war innovations that Ukraine is developing, but inside the article written by Andrew Kramer he states ““All wars spur innovation, such as the invention of radar during World War II and night-vision goggles in Vietnam. But Ukraine’s drone strategy was also born of a major weakness of its military after more than three years of war: the waning motivation of Ukrainians to join the army. As draft evasion has become widespread, force replenishment has become a challenge.”
In a nutshell this is why Zelensky should settle to keep the vast majority of Ukraine before he loses it trying to keep his Western donors happy.
