“Putin doesn’t want a deal — Putin doesn’t want a deal that Ukraine can accept. Putin wants a deal where Ukraine would essentially, now or in the future, cease to be an independent, sovereign country with ties to the West. So, I am skeptical in the extreme that a lasting peace could be negotiated.
Also, Putin’s made it clear that, at a minimum, he wants all sorts of territorial transfers. Well, it’s one thing for Zelenskyy to recognize that Russia occupies Crimea and much of the Donbas. It’s something very different for Zelenskyy to sign away Ukraine’s title and rights to these areas.
The biggest difference then, between a ceasefire and a peace is that in a ceasefire you don’t sign away your rights to anything. You simply agree to stop the war. In a permanent peace, you’ve got to sign away rights, potentially to territory, to populations, you name it.
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If you go back to the summer of 2021 and Putin’s so-called essay or op-ed, he obviously sees Ukraine as central to Russia’s future. It’s part of the Russian Empire identity and central to his own legacy, which makes it extraordinarily difficult for him to agree, in a permanent way, that Ukraine will be separate and different from Russia. So yes, it makes it very hard for Putin to agree to a final status or a permanent agreement that doesn’t give him a great deal. It ought not to rule out a ceasefire, because then he could say, this is simply a tactical pause.”
“The new levies — imposed, in part, to pressure Russia to end its war on Ukraine by punishing one of its largest oil buyers — will raise the country’s tariff rate to 50 percent and are likely to inflame tensions between the world’s two largest democracies.
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The Indians, meanwhile, have shown little sign of budging on their Russian oil purchases, which the government has framed as purely an economic decision.
Now, India’s 50 percent tariff rate will be nearly as high as the 55 percent levy Chinese goods face.
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For much of this century, U.S. presidents have sought to pull New Delhi into closer strategic ties — and pry it away from its traditional relations with Moscow — through India’s membership in the China-countering group known as the Quad, which also includes Australia, Japan and the United States.
Those efforts appeared to be bearing fruit as recently as January following a meeting in Washington with top diplomats from Quad countries when India’s Foreign Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told reporters that New Delhi was willing to nudge the grouping toward a greater defense and security focus. That initiative is likely dead as long as the Trump administration’s tariff punishment continues.”
“Vladimir Putin’s desire to grab Ukraine’s key defensive lines echoes how Adolf Hitler secured Czechoslovakia’s fortifications.
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“Ukraine has spent the last 11 years pouring time, money and effort into reinforcing the fortress belt and establishing significant defense industrial and defensive infrastructure in and around these cities,” the institute said.
If that happens, Russia would move its frontline roughly 80 kilometers further west, while Ukraine would be forced to build new defenses on flat and open terrain in neighboring Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk — far harder to hold than the fortified cities it controls now.
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In September 1938, Adolf Hitler argued that handing over the ethnic-German majority Sudetenland region to the Reich would satisfy his ambitions and end the threat of war in Europe. France and Britain agreed, and browbeat Prague into accepting. Hitler — whose word was as reliable as Putin’s — said he had no further territorial ambitions.”
“Day by day, meter by meter, the Russian front rolls ever westward. More than a million casualties in, Russia’s general staff shows no sign of slackening; indeed, it is currently increasing pressure across the eastern front. Far-away analysts talk of “frozen” frontlines and “static” positions, but the truth is that the frontlines are a cauldron of combat activity, with Ukrainians fighting frantically to slow the creeping red tide. And yet, demoralizing as all this might seem, this steady loss holds the key to a potential triumph.
Losing as slowly as possible—husbanding one’s manpower and resources during a careful strategic retreat—is a time-tested strategy against an ostensibly superior force.
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the slow retreat strategy only works if the enemy eventually breaks—either militarily, economically, or politically.”