The US pushed Russia into its invasion of Ukraine and has pushed Ukraine into this counter offensive, with the lure of Nato membership if it prevailed over Russia.
Nato knew all along that the chance of military success was very small - the Wall Street Journal has made that clear in a widely-quoted article. The West seemed to have relied on sanctions although any study of the efficacy of sanctions shows that they are a non-starter.
In full cynicism, Nato proceeded to wage this war by proxy and the US and EU to arm and train Ukrainians.
The Vilnius summit then said that Ukraine would not join NATO and Stoltenberg the Sec General confirmed this. How could Ukraine ever hope to join NATO, with the possibility of conflict always ready to reignite and under article 5 the risk of bringing NATO's boots ie America's into Ukraine on the ground and in conflict direct with Russia, a direct and hot conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers.
The offensive is checkmated and losing ground. What is the future?
The future for Ukraine is either defeat by Russia, opening the possibility of a negotiated settlement if Ukraine and the US recognise that Ukraine has been defeated and agrees to diplomacy, unlikely because Biden will not want defeat clouding his election campaign; or collapse of its army and society and the disappearance of the country and its government in the present form.
The country will be neutral at any event, so the whole point of the war to bring Ukraine into NATO has been a failure.
Furthermore, Ukraine's infrastructure and its economy are completely wrecked; it has lost half a million of its brightest hopes for the future, tens of thousands are mutilated and many milliobs displaced; territorially it will be undoubtedly shrunken to about 3/4 at best of what it was pre-2014, including loss of access to the Black Sea, and possibly Poland will take over responsibility for some area in the west up to Lviv.
As to governance, the government will be replaced by one that is neutral as regards the West and Russia; and security arrangements will be made that satisfy all stakeholders, which obviously has always included the Russian Federation, limiting the number of troops, the arms, military exercises, and obviously forbidding the stationing of nuclear weapons.
Finally, the reputational damage to the US cannot be overestimated, with consequences for Nato, for the dollar and interest rates, American hegemony and China, the outcome of the presidential elections next year, relations with the EU and European governments, the rise of the global South and of a multitude of competing though equal powers in tge bew multipolar world.
This disaster, the worst in American history outside the Civil War and possibly its last, was completely foreseeable from way back in 2008 when Bush brushed aside European objections to offering NATO membership to Ukraine, if not before, and was accurately predicted by the authors of this website.
What needs to be done is for the leading newspapers publications to start accurate journalism and reporting for the sake of freedom and a free press, without which we are no better than The Rest; and for the neo conservatives in Washington, the EU and UK, to be chased out of office, possibly sent to The Hague; and replaced by rational people with rational thought-processes and thought-through goals and strategies and at least one Plan B, who want to make a success of Europe in a multi-polar world.
Lastly and most importantly, sensible arrangements need to be made for security and trade in Europe and some equivalent to the Versailles conference organised.
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