RSN: FOCUS: Ukraine Is Desperate for Peace, but We Won't Sign Up to a Bogus Russian Deal

 

 

04 June 22

Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News

 

FOCUS: Ukraine Is Desperate for Peace, but We Won't Sign Up to a Bogus Russian Deal
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Guardian UK
Zagorodnyuk writes: "We Ukrainians want peace more than anyone in the world. For about 100 days, we have been fighting Russian forces on the ground, in the sky, on the sea, and in cyber and information spaces."

Kissinger is wrong: surrendering territory to appease Russia would have terrible consequences for the whole world

We Ukrainians want peace more than anyone in the world. For about 100 days, we have been fighting Russian forces on the ground, in the sky, on the sea, and in cyber and information spaces. Defence experts originally gave us little hope of success. They changed their position when we showed our ability to resist. Now we need to demonstrate the strength to hold our course and resist the temptations of a false resolution.

In this existential battle for our future, ostensibly friendly or consoling pundits and politicians persistently suggest we should surrender to achieve peace more quickly. Of course, we do not want a war to take longer than necessary, but we will not get trapped into a bogus deal which will only make things worse.

Among those who advised a quick fix was the former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who suggested we should cede territory in exchange for ending the war. His intervention was appalling and, for a well-known strategic thinker, he was amazingly non-strategic. Conceding territory will not end the war. It will reinforce it. Russia has not abandoned its primary objective of getting rid of Ukraine, wiping us off the map. Any concessions would reward and legitimise its strategy. Far from stopping Russia’s pursuit of its broader military goals, it would feel emboldened.

Responding to force with territorial concessions would also have tragic global consequences. It would open the door to similar cases around the world. We do not want to live in a world where brute force decides which country we live in and which regime we belong to. We do not want to live in a world where only large countries can be truly sovereign.

Receiving that suggestion from a renowned expert was very surprising. However, the idea was immediately picked up by the Russians, who cynically blamed Ukraine for a desire to continue an unnecessary war. Some media commentators also started to debate the need for a compromise to secure peace. This is manipulative and wrong.

Imagine the harrowing scenario of your home being invaded by a street gang which then occupied part of your house. What peaceful compromise is possible? None. You would expect the police to deal with it. Suggesting that compromising with a criminal act leads to peace is ridiculous. It is similarly absurd in the case of the Russian invasion.

Many armed conflicts do end with a compromise, but it would be illogical to assume all of them should. The only reason for this invasion was Putin’s obsession with subjugating Ukraine. What compromise is possible when your adversary’s goal is that you should not exist? The unspeakably brutal way in which Russians treat our occupied towns and villages is known throughout the world. True peace can only be secured when the invader leaves our country.

As the old saying has it, the night is darkest just before the dawn. Russia is now applying maximum available force, but the evidence of 1960s tanks being dusted off for battle, use of conscripts and the patching up of new military units without collective training demonstrate that it has exhausted its options. That is why Russia is pushing the idea of a compromise. It needs a pause to show gains to the Russian public and to give itself time to recover before moving on further with its attempt to subjugate Ukraine.

Ukraine’s forces are more efficient than Russia’s. With more equipment and ammunition, pushing Russia back and out of the country is a realistic prospect. The flow of western help is only beginning and will increase. Putin’s desperate attempts to intercept the supplies from the west by bombing rail lines and fuel depots are strikingly similar to Hitler’s attempts to attack allied convoys in the Atlantic. But they are failing to affect the overall situation, and equipment is successfully getting to the frontline. US weapons from the unprecedented $40bn aid package, which we expect will include much-needed multiple rocket launch systems, will start arriving soon.

The free world has decided to stop accepting Russia’s bullying behaviour, but it must be consistent in its application of that approach. For many years, western leaders tolerated Russian aggression: invading Georgia; invading Ukraine; occupying Crimea; occupying the Black Sea; carrying out targeted assassinations in the UK; carrying out cyber-attacks; allegedly meddling with elections; abusing human rights. Every time it was said: “It is Russia. It has always been like that.”

It is time to stop accepting such injustices. How often have people been told to tolerate something because “it has always been like this”? Racial discrimination, sexual abuse, domestic violence, corruption, social inequality and organised crime have been endemic in societies. The only time things have changed is when people have challenged the old ways and refused to accept them any more.

We cannot allow past approaches to dominate the way we live now. Kissinger may have played a significant role in creating the world as it was – a less than perfect world, I must say. But no longer we will accept an unjust and unfair past defining our future.

HENRY KISSINGER is a War Criminal who should have been prosecuted....suddenly he has credibility?

READ MORE

 

Contribute to RSN

Follow us on facebook and twitter!

Update My Monthly Donation

PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611

RSN: FOCUS: After 100 Days of War, Ukraine Is Resolved to Take Its Land Back From Russia

 

 

03 June 22

Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News

 

FOCUS: After 100 Days of War, Ukraine Is Resolved to Take Its Land Back From Russia
Lauren Egan, NBC News
Egan writes: "As Russia’s invasion grinds into its 100th day with no clear end in sight, Ukrainians seem more determined than ever to take back every lost inch of their battered land."

“Of course, we want peace, but we also want our territories back,” said one woman whose house near Kharkiv was destroyed. “If not, then what are we suffering for?”

As Russia’s invasion grinds into its 100th day with no clear end in sight, Ukrainians seem more determined than ever to take back every lost inch of their battered land.

From officials in Kyiv to residents in Kharkiv, the message is clear: The country will not accept concessions of territory in order to reach a peace agreement with its invading neighbor.

In conversations with people around the Kharkiv region, just miles from the Russian border, many expressed frustration and anger at recent suggestions that their country should consider giving up some territory currently under occupation in order to achieve a cease-fire agreement that might avert a bloody war of attrition that could drag on for another 100 days — or longer.

The Kremlin’s forces are advancing in the east and now control 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, according to President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, while his Western allies have shown signs of wavering in their support.

Yet, Ukrainian public opinion illustrates just how challenging it could be to reach an acceptable diplomatic resolution with Russia.

“Of course, we want peace, but we also want our territories back,” said Anna Ockmanko, 57, whose house in a small village outside of Kharkiv was destroyed when the Russian forces invaded. “If not, then what are we suffering for?”

Olena Ruban, 53, said that conceding territory in exchange for peace “should not even be a discussion.”

“We will fight to the end. I will pick up a gun and fight myself if I need to,” she said, as she worked to clean up her house that was damaged when Russian forces occupied the region. Ukrainian troops pushed them out last month in a successful counterattack outside the country's second-largest city of Kharkiv.

“I understand even more clearly now that compromise is not an option,” she said. “We still believe in victory.”

As the death toll increases, oil prices skyrocket and fears mount of a global food shortage, some Western officials have recently suggested that Ukraine should consider giving up land to Russia in exchange for peace.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said Kyiv should accept ceding territory to bring an end to the invasion, while Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi called for a cease-fire in Ukraine “as soon as possible.” The New York Times’ editorial board argued in a recent piece that Ukraine would have to confront “painful territorial decisions.”

Ukrainian officials have slammed the idea.

Zelenskyy compared the suggestion to the 1938 Munich Pact — a failed European attempt to appease Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler by giving up territory in Czechoslovakia.

In a video address posted online, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Zelenskyy, said that “no one is going to trade a gram of our sovereignty or a millimeter of our territory.”

“Our children are dying, soldiers are being blown apart by shells, and they tell us to sacrifice territory. Get lost. It’s never going to happen,” he said.

Since the war started Feb. 24, Ukrainian forces have successfully pushed Russia out of territory around the capital city of Kyiv, as well as Kharkiv in the northeast. But Russia controls the strategically important cities of Kherson and Mariupol in the south, and is gaining ground in the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, which together make up the Donbas region. Moscow may not be far off creating a much-desired land corridor to Crimea, which it invaded and annexed in 2014.

Zelenskyy has acknowledged that the war will only end through a diplomatic solution rather than a military victory. In a television address last month, he said the war “will be bloody, there will be fighting, but it will only definitively end through diplomacy.”

But peace negotiations have stalled, and Ukrainian public opinion could continue to harden as new allegations of Russian atrocities are uncovered.

A recent poll from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 82 percent of Ukrainian adults believe that “no territorial concessions should be allowed” in order to reach a peace agreement, compared to 10 percent who thought some territorial concessions should be made.

“Russia wants to establish control of all of Ukraine, and Ukrainians do not want this,” said Anton Grushetskyi, the deputy director of the institute. “When some politicians, experts in the West try to put pressure on Ukraine in this very complicated situation to concede some territory, they should understand that’s just not the real intentions of the population.”

The Kremlin seems determined to exert long-term control over areas it has seized, but Zelenskyy has said that any peace agreement would require Russia pulling back to its pre-invasion positions.

Some Ukrainians say that’s not enough.

Olena, 59, who asked not to use her last name out of fear that Russian troops could identify her son who is serving in the Ukrainian military, said that Russia’s brief occupation of her town changed how she felt about Crimea and other parts of the country’s east that have been under the control of Russian-backed separatists since 2014. Any peace agreement should include those territories, she said.

“We think about the people who’ve been living under occupation for eight years. We’re crying for them,” she said. “I feel guilty that we didn’t do more earlier on, but now having lived under occupation for just one month, I understand so much better now what they are going through — the exhaustion, the fear.”

Serhii, 55, who also asked not to use his last name out of concern that Russian troops could return to the region and identify him, said that Ukrainians were clear eyed about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan “to conquer all of Ukraine.”

“The only option is to get everything back,” he said. “But we also need to accept that it might not happen soon.”

READ MORE

 

Contribute to RSN

Follow us on facebook and twitter!

Update My Monthly Donation

PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611