Now we are hearing the concessions from Ukraine's President Zelenskyy, it's showing how right I was when I argued against all your opposition that this war could have been prevented from happening just four weeks ago.
Zelenskyy has now, far too late, conceded that Ukraine will never join NATO and has also spoken about being neutral. Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, fresh from the talks, mentioned Russia perhaps keeping Crimea and Donbass, so clearly that has been discussed.
These are the things I listed long ago that can stop this war, and as I also said long ago could have prevented it, avoiding all the deaths, injuries, destruction and refugees with no loss to Ukraine.
Russia does not want to possess Ukraine. And the daft idea that Putin wants to recreate the USSR that some of you have argued simply isn't true. In fact as I've explained before, Putin has proved this when he crushed Georgia in 2008 but then declared a cease fire and withdrew, returning them to self rule, only keeping the two Russian population enclaves on Russia's border.
Once the dust had settled on the collapse of the USSR, Russia realised that it was not all loss since that had separated its enemy NATO from its borders. Ever since then they've made their policy clear repeatedly that they want to maintain that, so they fight the American attempts to continue to expand NATO to its borders again.
The non NATO countries between them and the NATO countries are their protective buffers and they are very reasonably insistent that must not change. The map below and the notes that follow explain this:
The All Blue countries are EU and NATO members, the Blue outline ones are EU only. The red line is the NATO border on Russia's side. You can see from this the six non-NATO buffer countries separating Russia from NATO; Finland, Sweden, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.
It means the only direct contact with NATO that Russia has is the tiny border with Norway and the short stretch of Estonia (EE) and Latvia (LV). Since Russia has good relations with those six, especially Finland, this arrangement in Europe was keeping the peace well until the USA butted in, trying to recruit Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, using the attraction of EU membership as a trojan horse.
That explains to you why I am so angry with the USA and why I say there will never be peace in Europe until we in Europe detach ourselves from the USA's foreign policies.
Even at this moment the US Congress might sabotage the peace talks by their pushing Biden to expand the conflict by getting more involved.
If Ukraine are sensible, once this war is over they will be able to return to independence, but how intact depends on how sensible they are. If they make it clear they will never be a threat to Russia, by proclaiming neutrality, and concede Crimea (which is no use to them anyway), they will be able to retain their Black Sea coastline and vital port of Odessa. If they are very sensible and good neighbourly, they'll even be able to use their other important port of Mariupol, once that city is rebuilt.
It's in Ukraine's hands and always has been.
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