Mr. Dunn is continually frustrated at Ukraine stubbornly insisting on existing. He has written repeatedly that surrender is a better option than war and that ANY western support for Ukraine is dangerous escalation pushing us all into nuclear armageddon. What he ignores is the avalanche of genocidal venom spewed forth by Medvedev, Solovyev, Ria Novosti, RT editor in chief Margarita Simonyan, who just admitted that she and her other Putin cronies risk ending up in The Hague (https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/)
Here's Russia's negotiating position, as articulated by Putin's permanent puppet:
"Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, said that Russia still demands "total surrender of Ukraine on its own terms", commenting on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's statement about the impossibility of negotiations with the Russian Federation until the war is over.
Source: Medvedev on Telegram
Quote from Medvedev: "A certain Zelenskyy said that he will not hold a dialogue with those who issue ultimatums.
This year's ultimatums are a mere warm-up before the demands [to be made] in the future. And he knows these: the total surrender of the Kyiv regime on Russia's terms."
Medvedev has defined "Russia's terms" as:
"“As a result of Western involvement, “Ukraine may lose the remnants of state sovereignty and disappear from the world map” and “Ukrainian criminals will definitely be tried for the atrocities committed against the people of Ukraine and Russia (July 21)
“The Ukrainian state in its current configuration with the Nazi political regime will pose a constant, direct and clear threat to Russia. Therefore, in addition to protecting our people and protecting the borders of the country, the goal of our future actions, in my opinion, should be the complete dismantling of the political regime of Ukraine.” (Oct. 10)
Zelenskiy's terms were clearly laid out to the UN General Assembly and Security Council. Where Mr. Dunn sees a middle ground between Russia's eliminationist terms and Ukraine's stubborn insistance on existing as an independent state is never made clear unless unknowing readers check his previous advocacy of surrender and definition of the war as a "manufactured distraction".
Mr. Dunn's "deescalation" is nothing more than appeasement, genocide apologia and surrender since Russia has never altered its insistence on Ukrainian surrender as the only route to ending the "special military operation" it refuses to call a war.
There is not a single western-delivered weapon in defense of Ukraine that Mr. Dunn has defined as non-escalatory. This defines his negotiation policy as identical to Neville Chamberlain's in 1938--grasping at the last straw of a phony peace and obtaining war and dishonor as the final result.
What is also left unsaid is that surrender to Russian nuclear blackmail, which dates from the Georgian war of 2008, will lead to every nuclear capable state crossing the nuclear threshhold. Think Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Poland, Germany, Sweden.....I'll stop here.
All that's needed to get Zelenskiy's terms past Russia's obsolete veto is to declare Russia and the old USSR are not the same states and that Russia's Security Council seat no longer exists.
Negotiations and a ceasefire will only give Russia the breathing space to freeze the conflict in place and prepare for round two. The % of Ukrainians surveyed who are against this ranges from 94% in the west to 88% in Kharkiv. They know that if they let up now their children will be fighting the same war 10-15 years from now under worse conditions.
As for Mark Milley's military forecast, he said Ukraine would fall in 3-4 days. My Riga Business School colleague, Glen Grant, the former British military attache in Estonia and Latvia, who worked on institutional transformation of the Ukrainian army from 2014-2020, knew otherwise. Maybe General Milley should talk to the lowly retired British colonel before his next forecast.
Mr. Dunn also omitted that Milley also:
"“told reporters emphatically that the United States would “continue to support Ukraine as long as it takes to keep them free” and that it was “up to Ukraine to decide how or when or if they will negotiate with the Russians. ...”Russia right now is on its back. The Russian military is suffering tremendously,” Milley said during the news conference alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “You want to negotiate at a time when you’re at strength and your opponent is at weakness.”
So Dunn's fantasy about the US starting negotiations about Ukraine without Ukraine is a non-starter. There will be no Czechoslovakia 1938. redux.
This is the last of Russia's genocidal colonial wars on Ukraine. The last one, the Holodomor in 1932-33, cost the lives of 4m Ukrainians.
This one can end only one way: Russia's defeat and continued isolation until it agrees to Ukraine's 2013 borders, full reparations and war crimes trials for its leaders who organized and waged this war. Russian defeat must persuade Russia's elites and its people that its continued interest in empire is a losing game. Russia must become as uninterested in empire as post-1945 Germany, Italy and Japan. Half-defeated empires typically become dangerous rogue states, as Germany did the half-defeated Germany of 1918 become in 1933. Don't stop until the job is complete.
The breakup of the USSR in 1991 left the empire demolition job begun in 1917 half done. Time to finish it and send that most misnamed political entity on the planet, the Russian "Federation", to the same dustbin as the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Japanese, German, Italian, Dutch, British, French and Spanish empires.
