11 Aug 2022 10:58 am
The war that was supposed to engulf Europe was lost almost from the beginning. Putin made the extremely unwise decision to try to gambit for all of Ukraine as an overestimation of the potency of his armed forces. Now the conflict is right where it started 8 years ago minus the Minsk agreements and ceasefires that didn't seem to hold. The war is now a war of "attraction" much like the Vietnam quagmire that the United States found itself in during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. There's a problem though. Neither the Russian nor the Ukrainian people seem to be harnessing any solution out of the war. Russia is paying next to no political price even though his economy lies in deficit from the powers that be. Will this war ever end? How will it end? Are we just seeing another long stalemate like the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s where the conflict brewed at a stalemate for 8 years? What would peace even look like at this point? Shouldn't we be asking the question?
Nothing is easier than defending the status quo.