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Pflockenspiel's avatar

I think it's important to acknowledge that this isn't actually about territory but about people. Every settlement that Ukraine leaves under Russian occupation is one where the atrocities uncovered time and again in liberated towns become the status quo. To concede the territory is to abandon the inhabitants to the same fate as the Uyghurs - forced "reeducation", deportation (not just as "the Ukrainians believe" but as has been documented by Human Rights Watch [1] among others), torture and permanent oppression. Those pressing for territorial concessions should make clear which constituent populations of their own nations they would consign to this hell.

Furthermore there remains the (predominantly) Western foible of imagining that Putin shuffling off the scene will substantially change matters for Ukraine. While Zelensky rightly refuses to negotiate with a war criminal whose personal fiat has unleashed indiscriminate terror on his country, Ukrainians know that the problem runs much deeper than the Russian leadership. Russian society is steeped in exceptionalist and imperially racist tropes, including the inherent inferiority of Ukrainian people. Russia's former colonies have long stated that this is a societal sickness, only to be patted on the head by Westerners still suckered by the "mysterious Russian soul" and something something Tolstoy. As they note [2], not all Russians are afflicted but it is endemic in the body politic; without a reckoning the like of which Germany endured after WW2, there will be no significant shift in attitudes. As Surovikin, the Russian general now in charge of operations in Ukraine (formerly responsible for the razing of cities and wholesale slaughter in Syria) recently opined, Ukrainians must understand that they are actually Russians - and if they don't? Well, the dead don't speak Ukrainian. You can find this attitude replicated again and again, from Putin's own words right through to vox pops on Moscow streets. It is a genocidal world view and it cannot be negotiated with. How can you negotiate with someone who denies your right to your own identity?

[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/09/01/we-had-no-choice/filtration-and-crime-forcibly-transferring-ukrainian-civilians [2] https://ekspress.delfi.ee/artikkel/120083694/human-life-has-no-value-there-baltic-counterintelligence-officers-speak-candidly-about-russian-cruelty

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Paul Harding's avatar

There's also the issue of returning kidnapped people, including children taken for forced adoptions, which will become extremely barbed in any negotiations (for Russia, having to admit that they did it and face justice for it, for Ukraine, you can imagine a "no child left in Russian hands" kind of attitude). The other war crimes / reparations could be imagined to have some resolution, but tens of thousands (?) of children missing when they have relatives wanting them back (even if parents were killed or missing) is going to be a national tragedy.

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