"They must be slaughtered"
"Superfluous people" who "must be exterminated"
Terms Limits
There will be no Minsk 3. It's an illusion to think--as most "negotiate don't escalate" advocates seem to--that Russia and Kiev can reach any such "compromise." No resurrecting that carcass this cruel Easter.
It's disingenuous to say, "all wars end in negotiations," without recognizing it's not always that kind of "negotiation." In this situation, as in many previous instances, the only negotiations are over terms of surrender. Of one side or the other. After a decisive military defeat.
Russia's terms, which would have avoided the conflict and would likely be the result of any negotiation not controlled by US imperialism, are clear: The Kiev government must explicitly and unambiguously--no deferrals, no implications--renounce NATO and its threatening military infrastructure, embrace neutrality, and accept the loss of Crimea and the Donbass republics. If Russia were to accept anything else, some kind of Minsk 3, it would be a defeat, and a fatal submission to American hegemony. The Russians understand it this way, and they are correct. No shrewd compromise formulation is going to convince them otherwise.
Similarly, if Zelensky's or any Kiev government were to accept these conditions, it would be a decisive defeat for the post-Soviet Ukrainian state as crystallized since 2014. It would be a surrender of territory that all Ukrainian nationalists--and certainly the fascists--would correctly understand as a humiliating defeat. It would also be the reversal of a core NATO advance that the U.S./NATO would correctly understand as the beginning of an inexorable global retreat. No shrewd compromise formulation is going to convince them otherwise.
This is a fight that will be settled by force, not a negotiation that will be settled by words. And, despite his ridiculous promotion to celebrity status in the West, it is certainly not anything that will be settled between Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky, or even between Russia and "Ukraine." The parties to this conflict, those who control the outcome, are Russia on the one hand, and the U.S., allied with Ukrainian fascist militants, on the other.
Zelensky is a puppet of the latter bloc who will not be allowed by his controllers--the USG and Ukrainian fascists--to make the necessary peace deal with Russia.
Please note how central the fascists are in this charming threesome. Both the U.S. and the Ukraine fascists do not want the war to end, and Zelensky is right now happy enough or forced to go along with that. If he were to attempt the necessary peace deal, even with permission of the U.S., the fascists would kill him and install an embarrassingly obvious fascist government, which the U.S. would then, embarrassingly, have to overthrow. If it could. Fascism has a tenacious grip on this triple alliance.
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