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.”
Don’t give up a single meter of land
Require reparations from Russia
Demand all children back
Demand a formal apology for the pain and suffering caused
Demand Putin in jail through the ICC
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
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
Kinda seems like Ukraine are winning the war of attrition to me.
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.
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.
Fuck off tankie. Acting like you live in a country where you’re giving Ukraine any aid instead of being a fucking Soviet sucking pig. I’ve seen enough of your dumbass around Lemmy to know you don’t make any statement in good faith. So kindly fuck off.
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