Skip Navigation
37 comments

  • This is really sad.

    Yet again, I can't help but look back towards Biden, who overall seems to have employed a practice of making no plans to safeguard any of his work against an election loss.

    I wish he would've negotiated an end to this while Ukraine still had some leverage. I feel like that's been treated as a shocking proposal for the last three years. But it always seemed obvious to me: if Trump wins, you could lose any and everything. He could simply withhold weapons and invite Russia to complete full conquest. He could issue Zelinsky an ultimatum to surrender and live in exile or face a firing squad in St. Petersburg.

    Ukraine will be lucky to simply survive these peace talks. Why they didn't negotiate this before the election seems to be another in an endless catalog of hubristic decisions.

    • Seems obvious to me why the Biden administration couldn’t negotiate with the Russians: the Russians were waiting for Trump to come back to power.

      • I'm sorry, but that seems like BS.

        I recall very clearly that Biden and Blinken maintained that they were refusing to open any negotiations with Russia. Maybe Russia would've refused. But I distinctly recall Biden taking a hard line stance, and anyone who suggested that he, Blinken, and Zelinsky accepting that they weren't likely to recover full territorial control being basically tarred and feathered as MAGA puppets.

        I just don't see the point. So many lives were spent to defend the country. Will it mean anything? We'll see.

    • I wish he would’ve negotiated an end to this while Ukraine still had some leverage.

      Ukraine doesn't want to give up land, and isn't willing to tolerate not having security guarantees. Russia is convinced that it can ultimately militarily prevail.

      Wars end when one side is either unable to continue or the two sides moderate their demands to some kind of meeting point. What's the Biden administration going to do?

      The US isn't willing to go to war on the matter, so compelling Russia militarily probably isn't an option. The US could have withdrawn military support for Ukraine, but I don't think that that's what you want. There's more sanctions, but we've already got a lot of sanctions in place, and you want a rapid resolution.

      Maybe we could have dramatically ramped up aid for Ukraine, as long as Ukraine could have made use of it. The US is probably willing to do that to some degree, as long as it doesn't compromise its position relative to China. But will that substantively change the situation? Like, if you're Putin, you've probably got a pretty good incentive to try to stick it out, if you feel that Biden and Trump are going to have much of a difference in position.

      • And Russia has zero interest in working with Biden. Because they knew that between their election interference, their US-based puppets, and general voter dissatisfaction with Biden (and Harris), all they had to do was wait it out to get a much more favorable administration who will acquiesce to their demands.

      • This is uncomfortable to say, but the US President has pretty much unconstrained authority to control the diplomatic matters of most of our allies. It's not unlimited, but it's obviously enough that the President of the United States can -- if they choose to -- simply dictate the end of a proxy war. I think this is really more obvious common sense than some fringe theory, but for any skeptics, Trump demonstrated this by commanding Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal he hated that Biden had ostensibly been trying to secure for about 7 months. The only difference between Biden's seven months and Trump's seven days was that Trump didn't ask. He just dictated what was going to happen.

        That is... horrible. It's not a basis for international relations or peace or sovereignty or respect for allies...

        But it is a frank demonstration that Biden could end the war in Ukraine at pretty much any time. Any month of the year that suited him, he could've picked up the phones and said it was time to strike a deal.

        He couldn't end it on the terms of his choosing! The terms would've sucked at all points, but negotiated settlement was always an option. And at any point if he'd done that, I can guarantee you that Ukraine would've gotten a better "deal" than what whatever is going to be imposed on them by Trump & Putin.

37 comments