Wanted to say that I appreciate your insights on this.
We agree that the internal political shifts toward negotiations are good and the Zelenskyy regime is doomed. With the ban on opposition parties, the window is currently pretty small. I'm not sure there's anyone who could step into those positions if elections were held in the near future that would be meaningfully different. Zaluzhny seem to have ambitions to take over, but letting an open nazi run the country might undermine US narrative management. Anti-imperialist revolution seems far away for Ukraine (I'd like to be wrong, though). Assuming Putin can't find someone friendly to back, who, in your opinion, would be able to step a top-level position that wouldn't just be buying time to try this all over again? Does such a person exist in the current political landscape?
The UK, it seems, is amid financial collapse. I'd like to believe cooler heads will draw the line between proxy war spending and social decline, but I also believe the US will pressure everyone to stay on or be cut out of the spoils (like they did in Iraq). Do you believe there's really enough political opposition to this war after the elections?
That's a pretty good point about the Israel lobby on US policy. You're probably right on that lever being pulled the hardest. I did read something recently on the US trying to similarly "trump-proof" military funding to Ukraine as well. The relentless pull at both ends is almost like trying to break your own spine.
I also agree that the news media are irrelevant here, which I was trying to to express was decoupled from policy makers.
I think there is a real pressure that the sanctions haven't done much more than increase the cost of buying the same oil at a significant markup. It's also made it possible for non-sanctioning countries to directly profit from good relations with Russia. The failures of these sanctions are an apparent catastrophe and costs of funding a proxy war are mounting. But this is all part of the larger, century-long project of breaking up Russia and stripping it for parts. All the investment into NATO, from inception to present, has been about cracking this coconut. I'm not convinced the more conservative wing of the EU is any less complicit in the project. Some MPs may be getting cold feet at the moment, but they'd need to cut the strings of their puppet-state before the US would give them that kind of agency.
While this current proposal is probably the best Ukraine can hope for, the Istanbul proposal was a bigger gift to the Kiev regime. I still see the same guarantor expectation in both, so I'm not sure I'd say the target is different. Is it in the best interests of Ukrainians? Definitely. But so were the others. /shrug
Ukrainian people wanted peace to begin with, but are hostage to a fascist dictatorship and have had that expression hunted down and stomped out by the Kiev media gestapo.
Yeah, the manpower problem alone is deterministic of the failure the Kiev regime is facing. I think that's why Stoltenberg pushing for a NATO nuclear escalation is an admission of this being unwinnable.
On the question of which will be dropped? Neither the US, nor the EU seem to have any spoils on the table in occupied Palestine. Whereas carving up Russia means keeping capitalism on life support for a little bit longer. Also, the longer Isn'treal keeps this up, the more it damages US narrative control and erodes the legitimacy of their little middle-east outpost. For the west, there's a lot more to gain by pulling the plug on Isn'treal, imo.
2,6) Considering minsk and instanbul, while almost unmentioned in western media for the last 2 years, it was certainly known to everyone at the top, that good faith peace talks were an option since the very beginning. Also, the defense ghouls haven't seem to gotten bored of selling weapons and still seem to be pushing the belief that escalation will somehow result in a Ukrainian victory. What do you think changed that they aren't going to ignore this one as well?
canada sure has an interesting history of purposefully importing ss galicia members and banderites post ww2 to "deal with" canada's growing "labor organization and communist problem". I'm sure that was just regular, apolitical violence though...
I see it as an irrelevant question. We're affected by our material conditions, whatever the unresolvable scientific or philosophic nature of the universe may be. Asking what the nature and cause of our conditions are is the only thing that is really useful to us as human beings.
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Yep. No prior incidence of CIA or military torture policy. Only the last 20 years has this happened. I am a very smart journalist.