2022-12-16
To make a change from the ongoing ruminations of "armchair generals", this article in the Salisbury Review paints a vivid picture of life (if you can call it that) in what I shall term western Ukraine.
When Russian troops first entered Ukraine there were putative negotiations about ending the hostilities, but these came to nought (allegedly after intervention by Boris Johnson).
This site has never deviated from proposing that the sooner a negotiated settlement is reached the sooner the war could be ended, and that is clearly true. It's also reasonably clearly true that the Russians are having the better of the war - whilst there are plenty of reports from the Donbass of apparently arbitrary shelling of civilian areas by the Ukrainians with corresponding civilian casualties (and no doubt less reported military casualties), there doesn't seem to be anything like the desolation revealed by this article.
Of course nobody who hasn't been there can say for sure, but there seems little reason to doubt the overall balance of desolation.
Harsh though this may seem, the West needs to stop aiding and abetting this calamity and tell Zelenskyy to negotiate before the Russian bear leaves him with nothing to offer. At least he might save some face whilst that is still possible.
The alternative is to either abandon him to his fate or to use NATO forces to escalate to a degree that would immediately trigger another world war where multiple countries would be in the nuclear firing line. Does anybody really want that?
