Biden Gets Spanked Again

In this post, I advanced my theory that, as a result of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal followed by the public disagreement over sending Polish Migs to Ukraine, the lizard people through the agency of Antony Blinken told President Brandon that he was not to interfere in Ukraine policy, and in addition, he was not to say anything about the conflict that had not been previously drafted and approved by Secs Blinken and Austin -- and in addition, when he delivered any such approved statements, he was to deliver them without deviation. (A normal president, even a Donald Trump, would understand this implicitly. The problem with Brandon isn't medical, it's the Dunning-Kruger effect -- he thinks he's the smartest guy in the room.)

A data point emerged yesterday that, at least for me, confirms this:

Canadian [sic] socialist tyrant Emmanuel Macron is spending the weekend in Prague, attending a European Union summit along with other NATO leaders. During one press gaggle, Macron was asked about Joe Biden’s recent comments where he invoked the image of “Armageddon” if Vladimir Putin deploys any tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Macron took the bait and decided to criticize Biden, saying he needed to display prudence and “choose his words carefully.” Oddly, Macron also made a reference to not engaging in “political fiction” when it comes to Mad Vlad and his stockpile of nuclear warheads.

Leaving aside the truly awful standard of copy editing on display at Hot Air, this stikes me as a calculated response to Brandon's violation of his orders. On Friday, I noted my own discomfort with the Armageddon remarks and the implication that he knows more than anyone else about what Putin might do, or more importantly, what his actual capabilities are. In fact, I privately wondered if this was in fact a violation of the hard carveout he'd been presented with, and what the outcome might be.

I think we've got our answer. As best I can read the tea leaves, Secs Blinken and Austin -- who were in business together as global strategy consultants while out of the government after 2017 -- appear to have worked out a strategy to cover Putin's nuclear threats. The US would say nothing directly. A "knowledgeable" third party, in this case Gen Petraeus, would speculate without attribution about what the response might be and what may have been conveyed to Putin through channels. This no doubt was also throroghly reviewed and massaged among NATO leadership, including President Macron.

And suddenly Joseph R Brandon jumps in with all four feet at a Deomocrat fundraiser to yap about Armageddon. On one hand, this is understandable -- I've got to assume this is an event with a clubby atmosphere of heavy hitters where the tone is entre nous, and in return for their open checkbooks, they're expecting some sort of unique insights the plebs won't get. But this is dangerous to the candidates. It's where Mrs Clinton made her "basket of deplorables" remark that helped lose her the 2016 election.

In fact, the problem with the event was that it fed Brandon's ego, which didn't need feeding, and he felt the need to preen before his audience about how well he knows Putin, precisely the sort of thing he should not have been doing, and my guess is also that it was just the sort of thing Macron and others had been assured Brandon would not be allowed to do. I also assume that Macron was previously on the phone, not with Brandon, but with Blinken. Things working the way they do, words to the effect of prudence, careful choice of words, and political fiction were incorporated in that discussion some hours previous to Macron's public announcement.

I went to school with these people.

Biden and the results of the 2020 Götterdämmerung strategy, defeat Trump at all costs with promises to the extreme fringe, are coming back to haunt the lizard people, whose current priority, in the spirit of Nelson Rockefeller-Averell Harriman centrism, has been to defeat Russia in a proxy war in Ukraine and open the former empire to Western markets. One of their key problems is that Biden is proving even less controllable than Trump, while other aspects of the fringe agenda are also in conflict with their aims in Ukraine -- will Zelensky be on board with having Ukraine in the EU if the EU imposes radical reductions in agriculture, as it's tried to do in the Netherlands?

However, whatever else occurs, I think it's more certain that Biden will be told what his decision on whether to run in 2024 will be, irrespective of what Dr Jill or anyone else thinks. The lizard people will need to find a credible replacement, but I assume they're on it.

I Feel A Disturbance In The Force

From Reuters,

A powerful explosion seriously damaged Russia’s road-and-rail bridge to Crimea on Saturday, hitting a prestige symbol of Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula and the key supply route to Russian forces battling to hold territory captured in southern Ukraine.

. . . It now represents a major artery for the Russian forces who have taken control of most of southern Ukraine's Kherson region, and for the naval port of Sevastopol, whose governor told locals: "Keep calm. Don't panic."

It was not yet clear if the blast was a deliberate attack, but the damage to such high-profile infrastructure came at a time when Russia has suffered several battlefield defeats and could further cloud the Kremlin's messages of reassurance to its public that the conflict is going to plan.

This is a key event in the war, symbolically as important as the sinking of the Moskva, but strategically much more important, as among other things, it appears to have caused panic among the Russian occupiers in Crimea. But it's also a significant blow to Russian supply along the whole southern front:

The strike on the Crimean bridge will significantly affect further events on the front. This was announced by military expert Alexander Musienko during the information telethon.

He drew attention to the fact that most of the weapons and reinforcements of the personnel of the Russian army were carried out from the Crimea. Troops across the peninsula were transferred to the Zaporozhye direction and to the Kherson region. The destruction of the bridge will make this impossible.

To be clear, photographic evidence shows that only two of the four highway lanes have been destroyed, while what appears to be a prestressed concrete rail bridge section is visually intact, although it's likely that the heat of the hydrocarbon fuel fire on the train will cause less visible but critical damage to the rail bridge as well:

These fires release enormous heats within seconds and then come into being extremely high temperatures that can almost melt a lot of materials, as shown in Fig. 2 (Baidu, 2022b). Consequently, bridge fires are typically high and intense followed with explosive burning. Peak temperature stemmed from these bridge fires can exceed 1000 °C as discussed above.

These high and intense fires can lead to severe deterioration of the structural rigidity and load-bearing capacity in key structural members of bridges. This deterioration of rigidity and strength in main structural members can cause commonly complete failure and even collapse of fire-damaged bridges.

According to The Guardian, the Russian transport ministry has announced that rail traffic will resume at 8 PM. But as a commenter said, "And will halt again at 8.01pm when the first train collapses the span and falls into the Black Sea."

As of now, it simply isn't clear how this was done. As far as anyone can tell, this was two simultaneous detonations, one on the train carrying flammable fuel, and a separate one that collapsed two spans of the highway bridge in one direction. This leaves two highway lanes open out of four, plus the theoretical ability simply to pull the wrecked train off the bridge (very carefully) and repair the track -- but Western engineers almost certainly would not regard this as a realistic solution due to the clear fire damage to the concrete rail spans.

In fact, I would imagine that the damage to the rail spans due to the hydrocarbon fire was planned by Ukraine as part of the operation.

And although the bridge has been damaged and not completely destroyed, it's plain that if Ukraine was able to do this once, they can do it again, especially as it's just not clear how they did it. But Putin has ordered an investigation.

I think this thing is going to end a lot sooner than people expect.

We Expect Our Policymakers To Be Poker Players

After all, the field of game thbeory came to prominence when it was used to develop nuclear strategy in the 1950s. The problem I'm seeing now is how little our policymakers seem to have learned about poker playing, and how little effort they're putting into the game. Thus we have the largely unmentioned issue arising from the Russo-Ukraine War, how Western intelligence wildly overestimated Russian military capability in the runup:

Ever since Ukraine launched a successful counteroffensive against Russian forces in late August, American officials have tried to claim credit, insisting that U.S. intelligence has been key to Ukraine’s battlefield victories.

Yet U.S. officials have simultaneously downplayed their intelligence failures in Ukraine — especially their glaring mistakes at the outset of the war. When Putin invaded in February, U.S. intelligence officials told the White House that Russia would win in a matter of days by quickly overwhelming the Ukrainian army, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information.

The Central Intelligence Agency was so pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances that officials told President Joe Biden and other policymakers that the best they could expect was that the remnants of Ukraine’s defeated forces would mount an insurgency, a guerrilla war against the Russian occupiers.

. . . The CIA “got it completely wrong,” said one former senior U.S. intelligence official, who is knowledgeable about what the CIA was reporting when the Russian invasion began. “They thought Russia would win right away.”

But remember that the collapse of the Afghan military that led to the disastrous US evacuation from Kabul last year was also said to result from an "intelligence failure".

U.S. military/intelligence leaders are directly responsible for the biggest intelligence failure since Tet in 1968. How did the Taliban plan, organize, position, and execute this massive offensive nation wide offensive under the noses of USMIL, CIA, DIA, NDS, ANDSF, etc.?

— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) August 12, 2021

The basic question I have is the CIA is estimated to have 21,575 employees with an annual budget of $15 billion. but this covers only one agency, as suggested by the tweet above. At least as relates to their track record in Afghanistan and Ukraine, we may as well not have had them on the payroll at all -- the cost of our catchup aid to Ukraine as of now is also roughly $15 billion. We could have saved that money one way or the other -- either a competent CIA might have helped avoid the war, or without the CIA, we could have paid for the aid with that extra cash.

This makes one Trump policy agenda all the more intriguing:

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday seemed to endorse a recently unveiled plan by a cadre of his former staffers to strip tens of thousands of federal workers of their civil service protections and fire them at will under the next Republican administration.

Trump spoke Tuesday at an event hosted by the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by former staffers in his administration. His speech came on the heels of an Axios report last week that former White House aides are planning to revive the controversial Schedule F, a job classification system that would take current federal workers in “policy-related” positions out of the competitive service, stripping them of civil service protections and making them effectively at-will employees.

Schedule F was authorized via executive order in October 2020, but the Trump administration failed to implement the measure before he left office in January 2021. One of President Biden’s first acts as president was to rescind the edict.

. . . Those involved in the effort to revive Schedule F told Government Executive last week that they have identified 50,000 federal employees that could be fired under the proposed new authority, although they hope to fire only a fraction of that total to create a “chilling effect” to keep the rest of them in line.

The basic problem as it relates to intelligence is that we expect our policymakers to be competent poker players. I browsed around for lists of those attributes, and I came up with these:

• An understanding of odds, but an awareness of possibilities
• A good grasp on risk management, but patience and timing
• An awareness of motivations, and impulse control
• Cognizance of how the game changes as players are taken out
• An ability to read others, and project for effect.

It seems to me that competent intelligence agencies are key to these traits at a geopolitical level, but of course, they need to be linked to competence in the key players who make and execute the policies. One current issue that will need to be addressed by Biden's successor will be cleaning out the intelligence agencies so they can contribute to these capabilities. But meanwhile, Biden is nothing but a regent, a placeholder. A good example is his remarks about "nuclear armageddon" yesterday:

But Biden’s comments also show that, in one way at least, Putin’s nuclear threats have worked: They have left his adversaries unsure how he might behave.

Biden told Democratic donors that the world had arrived at a dangerous moment.

“(For the) first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use (of a) nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going,” Biden said.

“We’ve got a guy I know fairly well,” Biden said of Putin.

The important quote here is the last line -- Biden is pumping up his own putative experience on the world stage, but at the same time, he knows nothing more than anyone else about what Putin might do, or more importantly, what his actual capabilities are. A few people have asked the real question, which is, in light of what we've learned so far this year about the Russian military, whether its nukes would even launch, much less reach their targets.

Somebody should have been working on that. And down the road, a bunch of people need to be fired.

Another Quick Glimpse Into Brandon's Mind

The New York Post covered an episode the other day that I noticed in a few video reports, but as the Post story notes, it wasn't reported generally because the main camera feed had already been turned off:

President Biden on Tuesday ranted about the White House press corps for their standard — and longtime — practice of shouting questions as reporters were ushered out of an event focused on legal barriers to abortion and contraceptives.

“They’re among the only press in the world that does this. Seriously. Seriously,” Biden told his guests as he opted not to answer any of the questions from the small daily press pool.

Biden’s disbelieving tone on Tuesday wasn’t the first time the president was caught seeming to diss the press as they clamored for his attention.

There's a video at the link, but it's tied to an annoying Cadillac ad you have to sit through first (an electric version for only $60K), and apparently because the main cameras had been turned off, I can't find a better clip on YouTube.

What I noticed, though, was that as he made the remarks about the press, his face changed in exactly the way it did when he blurted to the teachers about "She was 12 -- I was 30". His remarks took the manner of an aside, and his face became animated. He dropped the affectless, squinty-eyed expression, and his eyes danced with delight. “They’re among the only press in the world that does this. Seriously. Seriously.”

In other words, he's addressing a largely imaginary audience (since the cameras have been turned off) in confidence, giving us the gems of wisdom he's picked up from his decades in Washington. You can see a bit of it in the photo from the event at the top of this post. He's focused. He's interested. This is not the same guy who wanders around the stage wondering if he should be shaking hands or walking out.

This goes to my working hypothesis that there really isn't a medical condition involved, it's just that he's bored with the job of president, and he thinks the public side of it is simply beneath him -- so far beneath him that he won't waste the effort to stay focused. (In private, apparently, he doesn't bother to get dressed if he doesn't feel like it.) What he does like are the perks, the baksheesh, and the all too infrequent opportunities to sniff the hair of nymphets. But as I've said, Stein's Law applies: That which cannot continue must stop. The version in the media is roughly this:

According to Politico’s Eugene Daniels, Jonathan Lemire, Jordain Carney, “[i]f a GOP-led House turns up the heat on Hunter Biden, it could weigh heavily in the president’s decision to run for a second term.”

“White House officials said Biden is preparing to seek reelection, but a final decision likely won’t be made for several months, with the first lady having an outsized influence. Some aides believe that Biden could forgo another campaign if it would shield his family from hostile congressional investigations,” the report states.

I think the real story is that the lizard people have been losing patience with the big guy's general lack of seriousness for some time -- I believe he's simply been cut out of deliberations on Ukraine, for instance, and has been since the public disagreement over the Polish Migs in March. Too much is at risk if he interferes, as he did with Afghanistan.

If the public story is that he'll decide, with the help of Dr Jill, after the election, that's balderdash. He'll in fact be told what his decision will be when it suits the lizard people to tell him.

Kissinger Recalibrates

Henry Kissinger, 99, has been making occasional public remarks since the start of the Russo-Ukraine War, and there's little question that at his age, he's sharper than President Biden, almost 20 years his junior, although he was certainly sharper 50 years ago as well. In July, as I've noted here, he backtracked on his May assessment that Ukraine would need to give up land for peace. Just last week, he gave a new assessment about China:

After watching China’s “no limits” partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin fall well short of expectations, the stage is set for President Xi Jinping to tilt at least modestly toward the United States after the 20th party congress, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said on Monday.

“Xi gave a rather blank check to Putin,” Kissinger said at the Asia Society in New York. “He must have thought the invasion would succeed. He must need to recalibrate.”

. . . Xi almost certainly expected Putin to be successful after Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine – an offensive that has revealed deep weaknesses in the Russian military – and wants to avoid seeing a wall of Western opposition against China develop in the way it has against Russia, potentially raising questions at home, Kissinger said.

Well, it wasn't just President Xi who expected Putin to be successful, was it? I would say that just about everyone but President Zelensky and his inner circle expected the same thing, and that would have to include Sec Kissinger. And it isn't just Xi who's having to recalibrate; by changing his position on Ukraine's prospects for success between May and July, Kissinger has done the same thing.

But let's consider that Kissinger was the executor of Nixon's China policy, which was that China needed to develop as a counterbalance to the Soviet threat. The Soviet threat was in turn the dominant theme of Cold War politics and diplomacy. The Kissinger-Nixon solution would be a three-poled balance of world power that would avert Soviet domination by producing a second near-peer to the US in the form of China.

On one hand, Reagan departed from this policy with his view that the West could successfully compete both economically and militarily with the Soviet Union, and that view was vindicated in Gorbachev's reported remark that the Chernobyl accident "bankrupted" the Soviet Union and led to its collapse. Nevertheless, Western diplomatic and military policy has continued to view the balance as being essentially three-poled, with the US, NATO, and the Pacific allies having only slight superiority to near-peers Russia and China.

But let's consider the implications of only one recent public assessment of the actual military state of affairs, that of Gen Petraeus. (I assume his remarks were at least tacitly cleared with Secs Blinken and Austin; the White House -- 'Jake' -- would have been irrelevant):

Retired Gen. David Petraeus predicted Sunday that the U.S., along with NATO allies, would “take out” Russian forces if Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to use nuclear weapons in his war against neighboring Ukraine.

. . . “And what would happen?” [interviewer Jonathan] Karl asked.

“Well, again, I have deliberately not talked to Jake about this. I mean, just to give you a hypothetical, we would respond by leading a NATO, a collective effort, that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea,” Petraeus replied.

The implication here is hard to avoid: what has taken Ukraine seven months to accomplish so far, with secondhand former Warsaw Pact weapons comparable to those Russia has been using, plus second-tier US weapons like HIMARS, would likely be finished within days by NATO with first-tier weapons and air power; that is, Russia would be driven out of Ukraine's pre-2014 borders and rendered militarily innocuous, without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Given US battlefield success in the First and Second Gulf Wars, plus proven Russian failure in Ukraine, this is simply a foregone conclusion. Not only that, but the end state Gen Petraeus proposes is inevitable, but there are only two scenarios: if the job is left to Ukraine as a proxy for NATO, it will take months, though likely less than a year. If NATO steps in directly, it will take days.

But that's just an interim end stage. The problem for Kissinger and the shades of Nixon is what next -- there is no longer a three-pole balance of world power. If Kissinger isn't thinking about this, I assume Blinken is, or at least he should be.

Elon Musk Solves Ukraine!

For a smart guy, Elon is sometimes pretty dumb. Not only did he date Amber Heard, but he apparently froze embryos with her, whatever that was about. But just yesterday he got lots of attention when he solved Ukraine, whatever that was about:

Ukraine-Russia Peace:

- Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.

- Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).

- Water supply to Crimea assured.

- Ukraine remains neutral.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2022

If he was just trying to get attention, well, maybe he accomplished something, but at least as far as Ukraine is concerned, I'm still left with the question my co-worker used to blurt out in meetings, "What problem are we trying to solve?"

Recognize that even as of this past May, when Henry Kissinger made an equivalent proposal, he was thought even then to be behind the times, and by July, he'd reversed himself. To judge from yesterday's tweet, Elon still buys into last year's conventional wisdom that a balance of power must be maintained between NATO and Russia, and that balance hinges entirely on an uneasy ongoing game of appeasing Putin in Ukraine -- otherwise we "start World War III".

One reason I follow the Russo-Ukraine War with such interest is that it feeds my instinctive contrarian nature; conventional wisdom blows up there as frequently as the turrets fly off Russian tanks. Musk's views, and the views of the US right that still agrees with him, have been overtaken by events. Even so, as of this morninig, Tyler Durden continues to argue,

Bloomberg has observed that Musk's tweets are "drawing the wrath of Ukrainians" for his proposing a negotiated solution which would involve ceding Crimea for good, and for suggesting that citizens in occupied areas should "decide if they want to live in Russia or Ukraine," per the report.

Just the evening prior, journalist Michael Tracey pointed out the following, which is aptly demonstrated in Monday's Elon Musk Ukraine Twitter controversy...

"The media should do a much better job explaining to Americans that the reason they're at heightened nuclear risk right now is because the US government **knowingly chose to put them at heightened nuclear risk**," Tracey said. "Pro-war ideological zealots deliberately imposed this risk on them."

There are two issues here. One is that a referendum on Ukrainian independence was held in 1991, in which 92.3% of voters approved the parliament's declaration of independence from Russia. The voters in occupied areas after 2014 had approved independence in 1991 as well. You don't re-litigate such plebiscites every decade or two; there'd be chaos.

The second issue goes to the heart of the "start World War III" question. Durden's position is that Americans have been put at "heightened nuclear risk" due to US policies of arming Ukraine, which it is doing simply because Ukraine has demonstrated the ability to defeat Russia on the battlefield on one hand, but on the other, the conflict has illustrated Russian military weakness and incompetence at a level Western policymakers can't ignore.

The difficulty for the right's position is that World War III has already started, at least in the sense that there is now a near-direct live-fire confrontation between NATO and Russia, with Ukraine government spokesmen pointing out that Ukraine and NATO are in a de facto alliance. Indeed, Russian domestic propaganda is already explaining its battlefield defeats by claiming they're fighting NATO, not Ukraine.

But whether the conflict will ever become nuclear and thus officially "World War III" is currently an open question. The retired generals, who'd apparently been advised to stay quiet for several months, are back again on the talk shows indicating that Russia has been warned that any use of tactical weapons, which would be the first step in nuclear escalation, would be met by the US directly wiping out all Russian ground forces in Ukraine, as well as the Russian Black Sea fleet.

Realistically speaking, given the proven Russian battlefield weakness up to now, this would mean a complete military defeat for Russia that would render it innocuous as a geopolitical force. In fact, the retired generals are saying this will be the inevitable consequence of the current war, either in the short term if Russia goes nuclear, or in the longer term if it doesn't. Defense and diplomatic policymakers would be derelict not to recognize this completely new state of affairs.

In fact, to ignore this now would be to ignore the increasing evidence of mass civilian deaths in places like Mariupol, where current totals apparently exceed 100,000, with smaller but significant numbers everywhere in areas from which Russia has withdrawn. There seems to be general agreement that ignoring atrocities at such near-genocidal levels in return for "peace" is immoral.

Elon in particular, as far as I can see, isn't paying attention and has long since been overtaken by events.

Yet Again, What Is The End State?

It isn't hard to search the web and find speculative maps that have been created over decades purporting to show an eventual partition of Russia -- the one above is just one such. What surprises me is that as far as I can tell, nobody at all has put anything like this up in light of developments arising from the current Russo-Ukraine War. Indeed, news reports yesterday indicated that Ukraine's application to join NATO caught the Biden administration off guard. Isn't that peculiar?

Until very recently, everyone from Henry Kissinger to Donald Trump seems to have taken it for granted that there was a Russian-NATO balance of power secured by, among other things, a vague understanding that Ukraine would remain a neutral buffer, except that Russia occupied the Donbas and Crimea in violation of previous security guarantees, except this made it an even surer deal or something. If we talk about starting World War III, thinking this sort of complacent castle in the air would guarantee world peace ranks with the idea that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the deeply unpopular heir apparent to the Austrian throne, by a bunch of fringe Serbian nationalists, could hardly upset the European balance and start World War I.

Current statements from the Kyiv government suggest the application to join NATO should not have been a surprise:

In the defense sector, Ukraine is already cooperating with NATO more deeply than some of the Alliance’s members.

That’s according to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, Ukrinform reports referring to his Facebook posting.

"From the moment of my appointment to the post of Minister of Defense of Ukraine, I have repeatedly emphasized across various platforms the priority of my work – to implement integration into NATO de facto. So that at the moment when a political consensus of 30 countries is formed, the integration will take place de jure," Reznikov noted.

. . . "The historic decision to submit an application to join the Alliance is to continue integration. We will go through this path step by step. Today we have a large arsenal of Western weapons with which we are successfully beating Russian invaders. 11 months ago, when I asked to provide Ukraine with Stingers, in response I heard that it was impossible. Now everything has changed. The Ukrainian people, Ukrainian defenders, and authorities have made the impossible possible. Everything will work out for us," Reznikov stressed.

This suggests to me that Ukraine is at least well ahead of US policymakers in thinking about their overall objectives in the war. In the story I linked at the top of this post,

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when asked whether she supports Ukraine's accession to NATO, avoided a direct answer, Politico said. Instead, she reaffirmed her support for “security guarantees” for Kyiv.

“We are deeply committed to promoting democracy in Ukraine. Let's win this battle. However, I would prefer they have the security guarantees,” Pelosi said.

The "security guarantees" she refers to appear to be the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that established Ukraine would give up the former Soviet nuclear weapons on its territory in return for guarantees from both the West and Russia that its territorial integrity would be maintained. But Putin violated this by taking over Crimea and the Donbas in 2014; the West did nothing. How does Speaker Pelosi expect this to work any better in the future than it did then?

President Zelensky's goals for Ukraine are pretty simple, a return to the pre-2014 borders, plus war crimes trials for Russia, plus war reparations, plus the condition that any negotiations will be conducted with a Russian leader other than Putin. These strike me as reasonable, but the reality of the matter is that a mere Russian withdrawal to pre-2014 borders under a renewed Budapest Memorandum won't work unless a radically different Russia without an expansionist agenda is involved -- and this leaves out Nuremberg style trials, reparations, and the departure of Putin.

Ukraine can and will militarily push Russia back to the pre-2014 borders, but NATO and the West will need to enforce any resulting agreement. There's no question that a minimum condition to make this workable will be for Ukraine to join NATO. After all, historically neutral Sweden and Finland have grasped the same reality; why shouldn't Ukraine? Why, after seven months of war, is this such a surprise to the West, especially in light of the existing de facto cooperation?

Note in the hypothetical map at the top of this post, a rump Russia is shown as "occupied". Occupied by whom? Frankly, I think something like this will need to happen in the wake of an initial cease fire in the war -- how else can there be guarantees of war crimes trials, or for that matter reparations? It's a little disturbing that nobody is thinking about this.

On the other hand, I suspect Zelensky is a couple of moves ahead of even that plan.