Zelenskiy had offered peace talks, but only 1 to 1 with Putin, which Putin rejected. Now Putin and Lavrov rejected talks as pointless.
I don't know who the Yves Smith in the link is, nor how he concludes Russia is winning the war. But he needs to listen to the intercepted conversations of Russian soldiers talking about shooting or fragging their officers, look at what HIMARS are doing to Russian logistics and how this senile ex superpower is now buying drones from Iran and artillery shells from North Korea.
94-99% of Ukrainians, depending on the region, think they're definitely or likely winning the war. The polling data, which includes Kharkhiv, shelled daily, and the unoccupied areas of Donetsk, is at minute 76 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce5TR-qWCk4
Why? They no they're fighting a decolonization war against a genocidal empire bent on erasing ("lustrating" (purging) them, as Putin's mouthpiece Timofey Sergeytsev put it. Negotiating with self-declared genocidaires makes as much sense as Warsaw Jews negotiating with Nazis in 1943. With a Jewish president, Ukrainians are learning what it's like to be Jewish.
My fluent in Russian UCLA classmate, who studied the Stalin party purges in Leningrad in Soviet archives in 1983, told me yesterday that Russia needs to be utterly beaten and humiliated to learn the futility of empire-building. Who knows more about Russia? You, Yves Smith or he?
In all but four EU countries big majorities favor supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes. The exceptions are Orban's Hungary and dirt poor Bulgaria and Romania.
Unlike Russia, Ukrainian society is fully mobilized and Ukrainians are ready to do whatevere it takes to win. Read this Atlantic profile of Anna Bondarenko, my former entrepreneurship student in Berlin, who went from working for Impacthub, Odesa to organizing thousands of volunteers in the VKS, the Ukraine Volunteer Service. There is no Russian counterpart to this. In Russia nobody's crowd funding drones to donate to the armed forces.
