Simon Turner 🇨🇦🌻🇺🇦❄️🇬🇱

The most interesting thing is that nobody seems capable of actually explaining what exactly those famous “Russian security concerns” are that must be “addressed” in order to “eliminate the root causes of the conflict” and at least secure a ceasefire in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Especially if you actually listen to what Putin himself and his minions, like Lavrov, have been saying all these years, rather than the feverish fantasies of assorted Putinverstehers and “independent Ukraine skeptics.” What exactly do they want in order to stop a war they have been unable to bring to a successful conclusion for almost five years (or twelve years, in the broader sense)? For Ukraine to simply surrender the rest of Donbas without a fight? The famous “fortress belt,” the country’s largest defensive stronghold, which all of mighty, invincible Russia has failed to capture by military force for YEARS? Well, Putin himself and his minions, speaking as though from their future seats in the dock at an international war crimes tribunal for Ukraine, have openly said for years that the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Donbas is merely a “precondition” for beginning “real negotiations” on peace. In other words, you hand over your main defensive lines to us, and only THEN will we consider what comes next. And what comes next? Well, it will “suddenly” turn out that Russia has also written Kherson and Zaporizhia into its so-called “constitution” as “inalienable parts of Russian territory.” Russia lost the former after a defeat back in November 2022, while it has still failed to capture the latter and won't manage to do so in any remotely foreseeable future. Putin has been openly talking about “four regions,” not merely “just Donbas,” all these years. So Putin will finally calm down and leave Ukraine alone only after he is handed Ukraine’s main defensive line in Donbas for free, along with a bridgehead on the western bank of the Dnipro, an open route for an offensive into the heart of Ukraine that he lost on the battlefield years ago? And he will most certainly, absolutely, GUARANTEED not take advantage of this magnificent invitation to launch another offensive, but will instead give his word that Russia’s “security interests” have been satisfied? And what about that supposed “buffer zone” along the Russian-Ukrainian border, from Sumy to the outskirts of Kharkiv, which Putin also declared absolutely vital to Russia’s very survival years ago, and which he has likewise failed to conquer all this time? Is that included in the grand package of appeasement for the aggressor, or not? And what about all the renewed empty chatter about a “new European security architecture”? Is that also something Putin absolutely must have before he can stop raining missiles down on apartment buildings in Kyiv every night, full of sleeping people? And what exactly does “rolling NATO back to its 1997 borders” mean? Is that another thing we must hand to Putin, who practically orgasms on live television over (false) reports that his forces have captured some single street in the Ukrainian town of Druzhkivka after five years of fighting, and behaves as though his victorious space marines are feasting in Reykjavík? Does it mean that, to secure a “ceasefire,” he must be allowed to kick every country from Finland to Czechia out of NATO and be handed his very own, personal, brand-new Warsaw Pact? Or does it mean NATO must pledge not to defend those countries in the event of a Russian invasion, because doing otherwise would constitute an intolerable threat to Russia’s security and one of the “root causes of the crisis in Ukraine,” where Putin has already put half a million of his own soldiers into the ground trying to seize what remains of the ruins of Ukrainian Donbas? And the most outrageous thing is that all this idiocy is being fueled by people who couldn't care less about the consequences, or about the fact that they're trying to sell something they neither own nor control. All they need is to create, for two minutes of television airtime, the illusion of a spectacular diplomatic triumph and the “achievement of peace in Europe,” and then line their own pockets with the “economic opportunities” promised by the Kremlin.