Volodymyr Zelensky, in the next phase of talks to end the war in Ukraine, intends to draw a red line at the most contentious issue on the table: the Russian demand for Ukraine’s sovereign territory. As long as he remains the nation’s president, Zelensky will not agree to give up land in exchange for peace, Ukraine’s chief negotiator, Andriy Yermak, told me today in an exclusive interview.
“Not a single sane person today would sign a document to give up territory,” said Yermak, who has served as Zelensky’s chief of staff, lead negotiator, and closest aide throughout the full-scale war with Russia.
“As long as Zelensky is president, no one should count on us giving up territory. He will not sign away territory,” he told me by telephone from Kyiv. “The constitution prohibits this. Nobody can do that unless they want to go against the Ukrainian constitution and the Ukrainian people.”
By doing what?
A little tired of hearing this endless “well, if I were Ukraine, I would simply win the war and claim a trillion dollars in reparations and make Russia disappear off the map” Internet wish casting.
What do you do to extract any of these concessions that hasn’t already been tried? And how many more people are you willing to throw into the meat grinder trying?
“How many people are you willing to throw into the meat grinder”
Yes us lemmy posters are all high ranking Ukrainian officials. Our moral inputs into this site dictate outcomes on the battle field and our opinions hold us accomplice to the slaughter. Putin is not responsible at all; it’s the people posting on the internet!
101st chairborne, to be sure. Tons of folks seem to think this war is a team sport that you just cheer at from the sidelines.
Capitulating to an aggressor isn’t going to save lives.
Nobody in this thread seems interested in saving lives. It is entirely an argument over territorial control
What? I’m here telling you that if you want to save lives, don’t capitulate to the country killing everyone.
As any child knows, if you let a bully take your lunch money they’re just going to come back tomorrow.
That hasn’t proven out over the last 3 years. The death toll in Ukraine has significantly outrun every other Russian conflict since WW2.
When you think like a child, you get the results to match
Giving a country with a track record of violating treaties as long as Russia’s anything that lets them feel like they gained from the war in return for a treaty saying they’ll stop the war is going to cost more Ukrainian lives than continuing to fight, even to the last man. All a peace treaty like that achieves is vindicating Russia’s decision to violate the last treaty. It doesn’t stop the war, just pauses it while Russia rearms, so it can be even bloodier when it resumes than it would have been if it hadn’t paused. If Ukraine can’t make Russia lose, more Ukrainians (and more citizens of Russia’s other neighbours who are at risk of being next in line) survive if they make Russia’s victory pyrrhic so they learn that it isn’t profitable to invade their neighbours again.
Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate
A good book and worth a read, if you’re genuinely curious at the history leading to the current crisis.
But it’s a hard read for anyone who believes history started in 2014
When you post about Ukraine on reddit you get conservative white Americans who have bought the propaganda and think strong, proud, masculine Putin is saving Ukrainian orphans from nazis, and have a mountain of arguments why we shouldn’t fund wars overseas unless it’s Israel, Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan. Or Venezuela of course.
You post about Ukraine on Lemmy and suddenly every tankie hiding in the shadows can’t take the pressure anymore and HAVE to pile out to whinge about how unwinnable the war is, and that it’s useless to resist a tyrant and invader because something something 21st century capitalism and oil economies and nothing will even change under Putin’s rule anyway so why are we even so worked up and on and on.
I feel bad for Ukrainian people having to endure not just a hostile invasion but scorn and skepticism from the whole world because some people have such loose, soupy brains that they have invent entire straw-universes to validate the erections they get thinking Putin’s bare chest.
Being a Tankie is when you don’t want to fight a war? But being a conservative is when you do want to fight a war? And they’re both on the same side?
I feel bad for anyone trapped in a warzone and treated like fodder for the war machines.
But I’ve got no pity for the cheerleaders on the sidelines eager to trade human bodies for rhetorical points.
There are a lot of people who have sacrificed their lives to defend their homes from invaders. A lot of people would say that’s about as noble of a goal as you can fight for and pretty fucking far from “rhetoric” when it’s a hostile army burning your homes and raping your daughters but hey, yah lets keep saying what’s best for the country and what we need to “give up” to get peace.
Don’t bother replying unless you want to keep showboating for others.
That’s not some kind of virtue. Make the other fucker die for theirs, etc.
But once you’re dead, it’s not your land anymore. Telling tens of thousands of additional Ukrainians to die so the state can auction off a dead guy’s property to Jared Kushner’s holding company is fucked.
🚢
It’s not our decision to make how many people Ukraine is willing to sacrifice for their land. That’s THEIR decision.
The better question here is how many people is Russia willing to sacrifice for a war of conquest that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
It’s our decision whether we give them billions of dollars of weapons.
Absolutely it is. We choose whether we live in a world where we defend freedom or where we appease bullies.
I guess for some people it’s an easier choice than for others.
Is that why Ukraine is over $100 billion in debt to its Western “allies”?
Putting people into debt slavery is a weird way to defend freedom…
Debt is a normal part of war, and Ukraine’s war debt is about a quarter of their peacetime GDP. Most of that has already been covered by the EU aid package last year.
Characterizing that as debt slavery is a pretty huge stretch.
At this scale those debts are a chain around their necks that can be used to control them.
As for the aid package, it merely covers half of the debt. On top of that? It’s conditional! Ukraine has to meet certain requirements to receive that aid: energy, border management, agricultural demining, and the development of a list of “strategic and essential” raw materials. Aside from demining that doesn’t sound like defending freedom, that sounds like they are trapping a client state into dependency so they can be exploited for primary production.
This has never been about freedom, I don’t know how anyone could ever believe it was.
Removed by mod
It clearly is, or you wouldn’t be telling them the terms for peace.
They’re not the ones negotiating loss of territory. You gotta quit this “Well I’m rubber and your glue” line of reasoning.
It’s Zelensky that says it, rumor has it Ukraine won’t give up land in exchange for peace
Kinda seems like Ukraine are winning the war of attrition to me.