Ukraine (Updated)

Better late than never getting this post out. 

First, remember the Ukrainian War is a religious one, and even that is not clearly favoring Moscow. See Dr. Daria Morozova's “Protection of the Rights of Ukrainian Believers” and the Unnoticed Movement of Dialogue (Public Orthodoxy)

All these processes demonstrate that church life in Ukraine is by no means reduced to a conflict between the “canonical” and the “patriotic” Orthodox Christians. On closer inspection, most Ukrainian believers are pro-Ukrainian, and many of them resist the hierarchs’ desire to divide them into church parties. According to statistics from 2023, 67% of Ukrainians consider interfaith relations to be calm or friendly, with only 11% complaining about interfaith tensions. Thus, Ukrainian believers, except for a handful of pro-Kremlin bishops and clerics, do not need protection from each other; they all need protection from Russian aggression.

Trump's hot air meets reality: Donald Trump backtracks on pledge to end Ukraine war in 24 hours as special envoy sets 100-day timeline 

Trump vowed to end the war in Ukraine quickly but Moscow and Kyiv are digging in before any talks

Trump Vowed to End the War in Ukraine Quickly but Moscow and Kyiv Are Digging in Before Any Talks

The views from Moscow and Kyiv 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared Moscow’s readiness for talks but emphasized that any peace deal should respect the “realities on the ground,” a not-so- subtle way of saying it must take into account Russia's land gains.

He emphasized in June that Ukraine must also renounce its NATO bid and fully withdraw its forces from Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — the regions Russia annexed in September 2022 — demands that Ukraine and the West have rejected. Moscow also wants the West to lift its sanctions that has limited Moscow's access to global markets and dealt a heavy blow to Russia's economy.

Massive military spending has bolstered Russian economic output that grew by nearly 4% last year, but the weakening ruble and labor shortages fueled high inflation and increasingly destabilized the economy. Last week, President Joe Biden sharpened the pain for Moscow by expanding sanctions on Russia’s vital energy sector, including its shadow shipping fleet used to bypass earlier restrictions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's initial “peace formula” demanded Russia’s full withdrawal from all occupied territories, but he later softened his position as Moscow continued to make gains, and he is no longer making that retreat a condition for talks. Zelenskyy has faced reluctance from some allies to offer Kyiv quick membership in NATO, but he insists on strong security guarantees from the U.S. and other Western partners as the key element of any prospective peace deal.

Zelenskyy has emphasized the need for a comprehensive agreement, not a temporary halt to hostilities that would only allow Russia to replenish its arsenal. He has pushed for the deployment of Western troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers.

If there is a quick peace that favors Putin, then Trump has only accomplished what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich.

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Updated on 1/24.

The Bulwark reviewed Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine by Jonathan Haslam under the headline Russia Invaded Ukraine. Blame America First. A new history of the war in Ukraine ignores the main characters. The reviewer, Brian Stewart, wrote:

Even after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there are still some who maintain that NATO somehow provoked the invasion and that the freely elected government in Kyiv is a creature of the West.

On that last point, many Ukrainians would agree—they want nothing more than to take their rightful place in the West. Curiously, the self-proclaimed anti-imperialists seem consistently to disregard the wishes of Europeans, especially those formerly within the Soviet empire, to live in free, peaceful countries. This is where the narcissism of so much “anti-imperialist” commentary becomes apparent: by emphasizing the American role while paying less attention to—or outright ignoring—the agency of smaller countries like, say, Ukraine.

Hubris might describe much of American foreign policy: we know better what is good for the locals than do the natives.

Haslam’s main argument is that the war in Ukraine can be traced back to the negotiations between Russia and the West following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This position is defensible, but also reductionist in that it ignores the role that Ukrainian independence itself played in bringing down the Soviet Union, as historians like Serhei Plokhy have documented so deftly. Haslam posits that Russia became resentful of Western triumphalism and over time became incited to belligerence by NATO’s acceptance of new members in Central and Eastern Europe. Haslam may be right that the enlargement of NATO, and subsequently of the EU, stoked fears among the Russian elite about a concerted attempt to marginalize Russia, reduce its role in global affairs, and cut off its influence in Europe. That fact is an indictment of Russia’s rulers, not of its former colonial subjects, its democratic neighbors, or the United States.

Haslam dismisses the conventional arguments from a bevy of American diplomats and scholars that successive U.S. administrations tried in good faith to integrate post-Soviet Russia into the international system, welcoming it into the G7 (subsequently G8, then G7 again), establishing the NATO-Russia council, and accepting that Russia would inherit not only the Soviet Union’s permanent membership of the United National Security Council but also its nuclear arsenal at the expense of other post-Soviet states. He insists that the American response to the Soviet collapse was to pop champagne corks, which helped squander the opportunity for peace at the end of the Cold War. 

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