Let's Face It: So Long as Putin Breaths, There Will Be No Peace in Ukraine
And when Russia continues the invasion a year from now, Trump will blame Biden
One of the bad guys responsible for carrying out Putin’s war of genocide against Ukraine. In a courtyard that resembles thousands of such courtyards throughout Russia, a Russian general with a hearty breakfast of farmer’s cheese, eggs, and ham still in his belly and sweet tea on his breath, was blown to bits. Part of me wants to celebrate this assassination, but the more humane side prevents me. It makes me sad, because I think now of the Ukrainian men, women, and children who will be killed to avenge this legitimate death.
The 12 people killed yesterday in a massive attack on Kyiv were not legitimate. They were innocent bystanders. This is what upsets me the most. It upsets me because I know exactly how Putin and Russians think — not that all Russians are as diabolical and cold-blooded as Putin. There are a lot of people from Russia I still consider close friends, former-lovers, ex-wives, etc. But thanks to my relationships with them and with their culture, which I mastered over 28 years of life in that country, I know exactly why Putin wants “peace.” He wants it because Donald Trump and his team of sycophantic fascists are ignorant fools.
Trump’s “peace plan” is a goddamn joke and not worth the giga-byte of space it occupies in State Department computers. Trump’s plan is fulfillment of everything that the evil, reluctantly-beating little heart of Vladimir Putin wishes for. It is actually probably even more than he wishes for, despite that not every demand on his list is being met.
Trump’s plan, according to European sources who have seen the one-page outline, calls for the following:
• Russian and Ukrainian troops cease fire at their current positions on the battlefield. That means Moscow would control about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, including the bulk of its four easternmost (and, before the war, industrial-rich) provinces in Donbas.
• The U.S. also lifts all economic sanctions that it imposed on Russia as a result of the February 2022 invasion.
• Russia is recognized as controlling Crimea (which the Soviet Union had handed Ukraine as a gift in 1954, until Putin reannexed the peninsula in 2014).
• The U.S. is barred from stationing peacekeeping troops in Ukraine after the ceasefire, and Ukraine is forbidden from ever joining the West’s NATO military alliance.
• In exchange for all this, Russia is obliged to concede … well, it seems, nothing. In fact, Russian spokesmen continue to demand that even a temporary ceasefire be preceded by a settlement of all the war’s “root causes,” which it blames entirely on Ukraine (Trump’s Ukraine Peace Plan Gives Russia Everything It Wants).
NATO officials in Europe are openly asking whether Putin wrote the plan for the White House, and Russia’s propagranda news channels are rejoicing at the the collapse of the “unity of the West.”
Putin is rejoicing because he knows that if President Zelensky accepts the White House plan, then the Ukrainian people will turn against him in very short order. Whatever politician agrees to give away so much land, will surely lose the next presidential election, and in the delirium of Putin’s fever dream, he knows that given a year of behind-the-scenes meddling he will be able to get a pro-Moscow president elected to lead Kyiv. Putin, similiar to Trump, is a drug that many vile and cowardly politicians cannot resist. He will have no problem locating a Ukrainian willing to align with him.
After such a realignment, thanks to Donald Trump and the MAGA cult, Ukraine will sooner or later become a castrated, shadow of itself, a vassal state of Russia. Putin will demilitarize it fully, and try to turn the entire country into a region of Russia. Because Ukraine’s military will have been disbanded and underfunded as per the terms of the so-called peace plan, what will see instead is a World War II-style partisan war. Ukrainian soldiers and special forces will take the forests, the shadows, and to Russia to slaughter everyone selling out their glorious nation.
Peace will never come to Ukraine, or it will come only when the country has been turned into an armed camp run ruthlessly by the killers and rapists Russians in Russia call their “glorious heroes.”
If it comes to this, then we all must resist and fight until our own government is defanged, replaced. Because what happens to Ukraine, will eventually happen to all of us.
Short of such pressure or desire, a ceasefire, under Trump’s terms, would simply give Putin’s army a chance to regroup, remobilize, and at least threaten to resume an offensive toward Kyiv. Anyone who believes Putin would hold the line at Donbas, leave Kyiv’s government in place, or refrain from threatening other former Soviet republics hasn’t been paying attention to what Putin himself has been saying about his goals the past year — e.g., that Ukraine is a fiction, its people don’t exist as a separate culture, and that Russia has a legitimate interest in not only carving out a sphere of influence but re-creating the old Russian empire in the space of what was once the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact (Trump’s Ukraine Peace Plan Gives Russia Everything It Wants).
This is called the “art of the deal,” which translated means give everything to our enemies and to lose every negotiation even before they begin.