He's Been Doing It All Along

Just for fun, I did a google search this morning on "Biden sniffing hair" to see if anyone had anything intelligent to say about last weekend's episodes, and the messages above came up -- "It looks like the results below are changing quickly". This is actually the first I've ever seen this message on a search, which suggests more people than usual are looking it up -- but nobody has anything new to say about it. However, this tweet from last July suggests it's been going on steadily in the background and has never really stopped, despite the big guy's 2019 promise to abstain:

Dad ran into Joe on a biking trail in Delaware and got a live sniffing video lmfao pic.twitter.com/qz9KuEzN9E

— martman (@big__marty) July 10, 2022

This raises a question of etiquette if nothing else. A year ago, Brandon caused a minor stir when he put his hand on Prince William's shoulder during a visit to the UK. One does not touch the royals. Indeed, I assume there's a generally similar rule with the US Secret Service: the president may venture into a crowd and shake hands, but the overall conditions must certainly be circumscribed, and the agents must be carefully surveying all those nearby for any signs of hinky intent.

I've got to assume that if any member of the public approached the president intending to sniff his hair, he'd be taken down in an instant. This makes me wonder, in fact, what the precise circumstances were surrounding the famous public embrace between Bill and Monica -- would an ordinary member of the public be able to do that or anything like it? What did the secret secret service know?

And this brings up the question I had yesterday: who was the middle-aged woman in the jacket next to Brandon while he fondled and sniffed the girls at the table? Was she some sort of minder over and above the obvious Secret Service? Why did she seem initially to reach her hand out to restrain him and then think better of it, turning apparently to fuss with the fan instead? Might Brandon and the nation be better served if there were a permanent Easter Bunny designated to remain at his side and usher him away from nymphets?

Why are we even having to ask these questions? And why hasn't anyone said anything about this?

The Return Of Creepy Joe!

On April 3, 2019, Joe Biden said

he’s ready to respect people’s “personal space” after new attention came to allegations he had acted inappropriately with women.

“I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, ‘You can do this.’ Whether they are women, men, young, old, it’s the way I’ve always been. It’s the way I show I care about them, that I listen,” he said. “Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted. And the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it. I get it. I hear what they’re saying, I understand it. And I’ll be much more mindful. That’s my responsibility and I’ll meet it.”

Biden offered no direct apology for his past actions but said he would be mindful of changing norms around physical contact.

But as of this weekend, he's back to being creepy with little girls. On Friday, in Irvine, CA, he'd returned to his old ways:

President Joe Biden grabs a young girl by the shoulder and tells her “no serious guys till your 30” as she looks back appearing uncomfortable, secret service appears to try to stop me from filming it after Biden spoke @ Irvine Valley Community College | @TPUSA @FrontlinesShow pic.twitter.com/BemRybWdBI

— Kalen D’Almeida (@fromkalen) October 15, 2022

Red State notes at the link:

If you watch the video, there are several things to note, and none of them are acceptable for any man to do, much less the President of the United States.

First, before Biden grabs the teenage girl’s shoulder, you can see Biden lean in to sniff her hair. He’s been caught many times doing that over the years and no viable explanation has ever been offered to explain his behavior. You’d think the news industry, which claims to care about stuff like this, would have some curiosity, but I guess not.

Secondly, after the sniff, he grabs her shoulder without her consent. It’s a really odd action that any normal, fully-sentient man would avoid. I would never lean in to grab a young girl (or any girl) I don’t personally know, even during a photo op. That’s not endearing, and it’s not just “ole Joe.” It’s creepy and highly concerning. You can tell by the way she tilts her head away as she turns around that she feels uncomfortable with his touching.

But it turns out this wasn't a one-time slip. Yesterday, at a Baskin-Robbins in Gresham, OR,

Biden attempts a sniffing at a Baskin Robbins in Oregon today pic.twitter.com/HeTcGxPLXj

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 16, 2022

While he was eating his ice cream Biden turned his focus on a girl who was sitting in the store and went over to shake her hand. It’s hard to tell what he said and he held her hand longer than is required to shake it. But it isn’t hard to see how fast the little girl pulled her hand away from him.

Biden also bent in, sniffing the head of the woman next to the little girl. He also appeared to kiss the top of her head.

I don't know what the role of the middle-aged woman in the jacket to Biden's right is in the vignette above, but she appears to be flustered and almost seems to move to restrain him but thinks better of it and fusses with something else instead. The secret service agent behind her seems just a trifle uncomfortable as well. The problem here is that somebody's campaign is going to use these images in a meme.

I imagine that many of us have put up with people in authority -- parents, bosses, teachers -- who repeatedly overstep boundaries and decorum, through inappropriate touching, comments, or whatever else, who've had the problem explained to them over and over again in no uncertain terms, but keep doing it. Pretty clearly that's what's going on here. I don't think this reflects any medical issue, it's a question of implulse control and entitlement, and it's apparently something he's been doing all his life, or at least ever since he realized he could get away with it.

And there's no question that before he announced his presidential campaign, back in 2019, somebody read him the riot act about the touching and hair sniffing, but it hasn't made any difference. In fact, I wonder if someone said something to him after the Irvine episode on Friday, but he went ahead and did it again in Gresham the next day just to prove a point.

The lizard people need to get on this. If he won't listen, he needs to be told what his decision about 2024 is to be. .

Kerch Bridge Update

In the week following the explosion or explosions on the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea with European Russia, there have been lots of questions and few solid answers. Initial analysis of the damage, even from informed engineers, was sanguine. For instance, as of this past Monday,

Observers have been left wondering: what was the effect of the blast and fire on the surviving bridge elements, what repairs could be required, and when is it safe to re-open a bridge after such an event?

As experts in bridge safety and blast engineering, we have (some) answers.

. . . In structural engineering, safety is not an either-or proposition. It is measured on a continuum known as the probability of failure, or more positively, the reliability index of a structure. . . . for key bridges such as the Crimean Bridge, it may be reasonable to accept a reduced level of safety when the costs associated with a disruption are very high.

Cranes have been shown lifting the fuel tanker wagon wreckage off the Crimea-bound rail line. It remains to be seen how the steel girders will perform under train travel. It is likely the trains will be instructed to go slow to reduce vibratory effects, and that wagons will not be fully-loaded.

Under normal circumstances, the blast and damage we have seen would result in an extended closure and repair works. Clearly, however, the circumstances are far from normal.

Official Russian statements as of Monday were also sanguine but vague:

A pillar and a part of the rail track of the Crimean Bridge, which was damaged on Saturday in a terrorist attack, will need to be repaired, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said on Monday. Speaking at a meeting with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Khusnullin offered reassurances that the damage did not pose any safety risks to vehicles.

“As a result of the diagnostics, the need to eliminate damage to the expansion joint on one of the pillars was established. The preliminary deadline for repairing the damage to the pillar is the end of this week,” Khusnullin said.

. . . Metal structures for the repairs will begin being delivered by the end of the week from the cities of Tyumen, Kurgan, and Voronezh, the deputy prime minister said, expressing gratitude to everyone involved for their “prompt work.”

As for the railway portion of the bridge, Khusnullin said that a preliminary assessment of the tracks had shown that two spans needed to be replaced.“The repairs do not affect the delivery of goods and passengers,” he emphasized.

The head of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, has estimated that fully restoring the bridge could take about two months.

It was thought that the rail bridge that runs parallel to the highway bridge suffered the least damage, since it was farther from the blast, although the effect on the steel of the heat from the burning tank cars loaded with fuel was hard to calculate. The rail bridge has two tracks, with the track farthest from the blast thought to be able to carry trains at reduced speed and loads, as outlined in the first link above. An initial video showed a test train operating on this track, but as of Tuesday, there were no additional trains:

Day 4 and still no train runs on the Kerch Bridge. No (military) supplies for Kherson and Zaporizhzhia since 4 days, at least not in large quantities. Remember, war of logistics and every day counts. #Kerch #Crimea #Ukraine

— (((Tendar))) (@Tendar) October 11, 2022

Repair of the highway bridge is likely to be complicated by damage to one of the piers, visible in the photo at right. This means that restoring this section of the bridge will require more than just replacing individual spans; likely this pier will also need to be replaced, a much bigger job. The official Russian version was updated later in the week, and it appears to reflect the damage to the highway pier:

On Oct. 13, the Russian cabinet issued a decree identifying Irkutsk-based construction firm Nizhneangarsktransstroy as handling the repairs and ordering all work on the bridge to be complete by July 1, 2023. According to Khusnullin, the main work repairing the bridge expected to be completed by the end of the year.

"Technologies have been found to dismantle the existing destroyed bridge supports,” Khusnullin told the news agency. “I can say that the first supports of the new bridge have already been manufactured at factories and are going to the Crimean bridge.”

Howwever, this time line is considerably longer than the two month estimate for fully restoring the bridge that was given on Monday. There's no specific reference to the status of the rail spans, but the few discussions available on the web suggest that both tracks on the railroad bridge are supported by a single set of steel box girder spans, which means that the fuel fire would have damaged one or more spans supporting both tracks, which means the rail bridge will not be usable for some months.

The problem, of course, is that Ukraine has resumed a southern offensive in Kherson as of this morning, and Russian forces west of the Dnieper are already isolated from supply and reinforcement due to loss of bridges over that river. For now, it looks as though Russia won't be able to supply its forces elsewhere in Kherson or Crimea for a period of some months just as Ukraine begins a serious offensive in that area.

PayPal Bank Run!

The fallout from the PayPal "glitch", whereby they announced they would debit customer accounts up to $2500 directly for publishing "misinformation", continues.

Do not take their $15 bribe. Delete your PayPal account. https://t.co/lFd7QBxG7M

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 13, 2022

Despite this, however, it sounds as though PayPal has been experiencing an effective bank run:

Following the trend to boycott PayPal, some users were having a problem closing their accounts.

One user commented, “Endless hours chatting with the support here. Some people are able to close it in seconds. Others it takes weeks. Criminal.”

Another said, “Looks like they’ve disabled Account Closure over at Paypal to prevent customers exiting their platform. No doubt there’ll be the usual corporate-speak on “temporary technical issue” inbound.”

Well, consumers aren't stupid. When I began to research this issue, I discovered information that was already in the public domain: PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy was a risk to businesses long before they mooted the "misinformation" clause:

As a business owner, you want to make it easy and convenient for customers to pay with their method of choice. That’s why it’s so important to find a reliable payments partner that allows you to securely accept credit and debit card payments.

However, not all payment processors are created equal. Some of the biggest names in payments are notorious for their poor treatment of merchants. From Stripe’s restrictive list of prohibited businesses to PayPal’s extreme fines and bans, there are plenty of reasons to steer clear of these payment processing giants.

In fact, running your business through PayPal could cost you everything. Whether you’ve heard the PayPal horror stories or have been a victim yourself, this article will help you protect your business from any further catastrophe.

. . . PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy is notoriously vague. This allows them to shut down your account or freeze your funds at their own discretion. PayPal can fine your merchant account somewhat arbitrarily, including charging $2500 per violation of the Acceptable Use Policy.

Well before the "misinformation" kerfuffle, the Acceptable Use Policy already listed "the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory" as activities that could result in $2500 fines or cancellation of an account. The link continues,

. . . Not only is $2500 a significant fine for small businesses, but there’s also no clear list of violations that result in the fine. So, many business owners are operating somewhat blindly, hoping that they aren’t breaking any of PayPal’s ill-defined rules.

Perhaps the biggest problem with PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy is that it’s open to interpretation. PayPal uses vague language to define “acceptable use” so they can freeze or charge your business account at their own discretion.

. . . Furthermore, if PayPal decides to ban your account altogether for violating the Acceptable Use Policy, they can hold the funds in your account hostage for up to 180 days. That’s almost six months during which not only is your account closed down, forcing you to look for alternative methods for customers to pay you, but your cash is tied up for no good reason. Unfortunately, that’s often enough to cripple a business and force you to close up shop.

. . . To make matters worse, there is no defined appeals process. They can ban you without warning, potentially without allowing you to cash out your account balance for six months. Plus, they can fine you multiple times to deplete your balance—and there’s not much you can do to stop them.

At minimum, the site's recommendations include withdrawing funds from PayPal as soon as possible after payments are deposited and beyond that, for a business, moving to a more reliable payment processor. The "misinformation" issue is only the most recent and most visible risk associated with its product.

At this point, though, the misinformation flap is starting to metastasize into a textbook corporate crisis for PayPal:

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is demanding PayPal provide answers about new language added and then removed from its user agreement — asking specifically if the payment processing giant consulted with the Biden administration on the policy.

PayPal this week announced that it would deduct $2,500 from users who violate its policy on “misinformation,” “hate,” or speech the company deemed “unfit for publication,” but then quickly pivoted to reverse the move following backlash.

, , , Issa asks PayPal how they intend to “adjudicate the ambiguous term ‘misinformation’,” asking specifically if COVID misinformation would be included, as well as gender pronouns.

. . . Former top management at PayPal, including Elon Musk, David Sacks, and David Marcus, spoke out on social media against the announcement.

Markus called the policy “Insanity,” to which Musk replied “Agreed.”

David Sacks warned, “Get your money out of paypal right now.”

I use PayPal primarily to order through eBay, which has much better prices on many items than Amazon. As such, I'm using it exclusively as a payment processor. In the past, as a freelance writer, I sometimes got payments through PayPal, and I withdrew those balances immediately to my normal checking account. As such, for now, I don't intend to make any changes. But clearly the "misinformation" issue has alerted consumers, and especially online small businesses, to the risks of dealing with PayPal, and this in turn could threaten PayPal's ability to continue as a viable operation.

Where's the crisis management team? Typical advice would include:

[I]n the age of social media, the truth – or a version of it – will always come out. If you don’t tell the truth, and get found out (and you will), it will be far more damaging than getting the issue out in the open, on your own terms. Never, ever lie. . . . If you don’t communicate, someone else will – and they may not have your best interests at heart. . . . Put right what’s gone wrong, and tell people (or even better, show them) what you’re doing to make things right.

Rep Issa's letter, quoted in the link above, asks PayPal to

detail the offices and/or departments within PayPal that approved of the updated Acceptable Use Policy language that was posted on the company’s website, with a planned implementation date of November 3, 2022. . . . What categories of “misinformation” did PayPal contemplate needed censorship that were not already covered by the previous policy?

These questions are inevitably starting to emerge, and PayPal is going to need to come up with answers. I suspect this case will wind up in future PR textbooks.

Zelensky Is Driving The Agenda

As I've been saying, since late February, Ukraine President Zelensky has been setting a de facto agenda for the Western response to the invasion, and if he doesn't get what he wants right away, he gets it later. Sec Austin's remarks (translated back to English from a Ukrainian report at the link) at the start of yesterday's Ramstein conference reflect this state of affairs:

In Brussels on October 12, the next Ramstein meeting brought together defense ministers from about 50 countries to discuss assistance to Ukraine.

Opening the meeting, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin stated that the dynamics of the war unleashed by the Kremlin had changed.

He stressed the serious progress of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in this conflict, Dialog.UA reports .

. . . He stressed that the Ukrainian troops changed the dynamics of the war by seizing the initiative from the occupier.

It seems to me that Sec Austin is talking about two dynamics. Ukraine seized the initiative a few months ago, this isn't new. The dynamic that's changed is the effective Western response to Putin's threats of escalation, which has been in short, if you use nukes, you'll make our day. The implicit consequence, telegraphed by Gen Petraeus, is that this would bring, if not a coordinated NATO retaliation, an individual non-nuclear attack from at least some Western countries like the US or Poland within Ukraine's borders that would destroy Russian forces there and end the war within days.

The dynamic that changed was the recognition of Russia's incompetence at fighting a war -- if they could be fought to a standstill, denied air superiority, and beaten back by a third-rate country using largely Warsaw Pact weapons supplemented by obsolescent NATO reinforcements and drones, there can be no question about the result of a direct conventional confrontation with the US that would make nukes irrelevant. Interestingly, this was the substance of Reagan's strategy toward Moscow, essentially using precision guided weapons to bypass the nuclear threat. At some point, this was filed away and forgotten until World War III actually started in Ukraine, and Zelensky reminded the West they had it.

As I noted yesterday, in Tuesday's G7 meeting, Zelensky outlined a full-scale peace plan, the first part of which was an air shield for Ukraine. This is a further development of his February proposal for a no-fly zone, which was rejected at the time because if Western fighter jets attempted to enforce it against Russians, it would mean escalation. The dynamic that's changed after seven months is that if Western countries supply Ukraine with SAMs that Ukraine can clearly operate, Ukraine continues to act as a proxy, and there's no direct confrontation. But Zelensky effectively gets what he wants.

Every indication I have from the reddit /r Ukraine Conflict thread is that Germany, France, the UK, and the US have moved immediately to send Ukraine the SAMS it has requested. Done.

The second point of his peace plan is some type of international guarantee of Ukraine's borders, supplemented with an authority that is able to locate, prosecute, and punish war criminals in Russia. This would require nothing short of an occupation force equivalent to those that imposed peace terms on Germany and Japan in 1945, and it would have equivalent effect on world history. If it imposed partition on Germany in 1945, there would likely be an equivalent result for Russia in the wake of its defeat.

Zelensky is ahead of the game here, it's a big order, but as with his other proposals, I feel pretty sure there will be no real alternative.

The last part of his peace plan is no negotiation, or stated otherwise, unconditional surrender, the Grant-Lincoln policy in the US Civil War and the Allied policy at Casablanca. So far, the Western policy as expressed up to now by Biden and Scholz is that Zelensky and Ukraine are the only ones who can authorize any sort of land-for-peace deal, and that's likely to continue.

I think the reason is that dismantling the Putin state and the potential partition of Russia, especially including a Western-oriented carveout for European Russia, is too attractive and too attainable a prospect to give up. And Zelensky is offering to do it on the cheap. He will have had an effect on European history more profound than Napoleon and Metternich combined.

Interesting guy.

Zelensky's G7 Address

I said yesterday that Volodymyr Zelensky is the de facto leader of the free world. Elsewhere I've maintained the point that he makes proposals that at first seem out of bounds -- longer range missiles like HIMARS, for instance -- but are eventually approved, often in unofficial ways, by Western countries. So far in every case, Ukraine has made effective use of them, which gives him more credibility with each subsequent proposal.

I complained yesterday, as I've complained before, that there's been no Roosevelt equivalent who can lead a Western consensus on what a world would look like after the Axis forces, or in this case, the Russian bloc, is defeated, even though the Russo-Ukraine war almost immediately turned into a proxy conflict between Russia and the West, with the effective defeat of Russia as a geopoliical force the inevitable outcome.

I had an instinctive sense that Zelensky might provide a substitute in his address to the emergency meeting of the G7 yesterday. Some excerpts:

Thank you Chancellor Scholz for convening this extraordinary G7 summit and thank you to all the countries that supported this initiative and to all the leaders who are here today.

For the second day now, Ukraine has been suffering from massive Russian missile strikes. And for the 230th day – from the Russian terrorist war.

In other words, thank you, Chancellor Scholz, for convening a meeting that was effectively called at my request, even though Ukraine isn't in the G7. But then we get to a proposed blueprint for transition to a postwar world, something we most definitely haven't had from Biden or any of the others:

I thank you for all the help already provided. It is big, it is significant. But the Russian leader, who is now in the final stage of his reign, still has room for further escalation. This possibility of his is a threat to all of us.

But we can overcome this threat. We have a formula for peace. And now, reacting to Russian terror, sham referenda and the attempt to annex our territory, we can apply the peace formula so that the terrorist state stands no chance.

The first point is defense support. Air shield for Ukraine. This is part of the security guarantees that are an element of our peace formula.

This is nothing new. Zelensky called for a no-fly zone in February, but by mid-March it had been definitively rejected due to the "risk of escalation". But now he renews his call for it, even as Putin now threatens more escalation. What's going on? I'll comment after his second point.

The second point is the territorial integrity of Ukraine. It is also an element of our peace formula. And it is logically combined with the third point - with punishment, which is an integral element of any peace formula.

The one who started the armed aggression is an international criminal. He must be convicted.

The protection of the territorial integrity of Ukraine is the protection of the entire international legal order, starting from the UN Charter. Various potential aggressors in the world are now watching the reaction of democracies to the farce arranged by Russia with sham referenda and attempted annexation.

Here he repeats his reference to a "peace formula". Again, this is something the standard-issue Western leaders aren't putting forward. Then he moves to the Casablanca Conference step, unconditonal surrender as the war aim:

We must also recognize the obvious fact: there can be no dialogue with this leader of Russia, who has no future. He himself rejected the dialogue. Despite all our efforts to negotiate peace over the years! He speaks with ultimata, terror is his attitude to the world, to other people.

After the Russian strikes, all the murders, all the abuse of civilians and international law, your societies will not understand you if you do not cut off any prospects for this leader of terror.

All of us in the world should realize: talks can be either with another head of Russia - who will comply with the UN Charter, the basic principles of humanity and territorial integrity of Ukraine - or in a different configuration, so that the key terrorist does not have the opportunity to influence key decisions through terror. Now one person is blocking peace - and this person is in Moscow.

This is the only realistic approach -- the war ends either with an agreement by Russia to comply with the UN Charter, or with a reconfiguration of Russia involving Putin's removal, plus penalties. Nobody else has mentioned this as a war aim. But then he moves to another key point:

Russia is trying to directly draw Belarus into this war, playing a provocation that we are allegedly preparing an attack on this country. Indirectly it has already involved them. And now it wants to involve them directly.

Ukraine did not plan and does not plan military actions against Belarus. We are only interested in restoring our territorial integrity. But in order to completely remove this provocation, to remove these narratives by Lukashenko, to remove even the assumption of any alleged threat from us, we offer our solution.

A mission of international observers may be stationed on the border of Ukraine and Belarus to monitor the security situation. The format can be worked out by our diplomats. And I ask you at the level of the Group of Seven to support this initiative of ours.

Zelensky's point since February has been in effect to say this problem is bigger than Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting Russia; in fact, it has no dispute with Belarus except insofar as Russia is using it to project its own threats against Ukraine. Thus it's an interational situation that's above Zelensky's paygrade (I would add "cough cough"; Zelensky has been de facto running the show).

I think Zelensky is offering what the rhetorician Richard Weaver calls an "argument from circumstance", which Weaver goes on to say is the most desperate form of argument. It bascially argues that the enemy is surroudning us from three sides, and on the fourth is the sea. If we try to swim away, we'll drown. Thus we have no choice but to stand and fight. Charge!

Zelensky's point boils down to this: Russia is violating international law. Putin does not negotiate, he simply makes threats of escalation. An implicit but unstated part of his argument is that the threats have been idle-- throughout the year, Zelensky has made proposals like a no-fly zone that have been rejected due to fear of escalation, but other proposals, like supply of more powerful weapons, have been approved in spite of the threats, and the escalation hasn't occurred.

Thus it will at some point be incumbent on the West to guarantee Ukraine's borders, to stop further Russian aggreession, and to enforce a postwar regime in Russia that includes the ability to punish war crimes and collect reparations. Zelensky is basically saying we can do this now or do it later, but not doing it isn't an option.

Where's The End Game Strategy?

Let's get real. The de facto leader of the free world is Volodymyr Zelensky. For now, everyone else is in reactive mode, and the whole subtext for the rest is what they can send Zelensky in the way of second-tier NATO weapons that won't provoke Putin to use nukes. The result is a slo-mo collapse of the former Russian empire, done on the cheap. It's generally understood, based on the unofficial threat from Gen Petraeus more than a week ago, that if NATO were to step in with more advanced weapons, the war would end in a matter of days.

So the state of the game is Putin loses more or less slowly, or he loses right away, nukes or not. Conversely, Zelensky wins slowly as Western leaders gradually recognize that Putin has no credible response to their weapons, or Zelensky wins quickly when Putin makes some last, critical miscalculation, and either NATO ships long range missles, F-16s, Panthers, or whatever else, or NATO steps in directly.

For now, the clearest potential Putin miscalculation would be to use nukes. Another potential tipping point would be to widen the war by invading the north of Ukraine via Belarus, with the Belarus army involved. This would widen the war via a third party and make the Poles nervous, with unpredictable results. Either one would simply hasten an already more or less predictable outcome of the war, but then we're still up against the question of what the West wants as an actual outcome.

Here's where the real difficulty begins. Zelensky as a national player has expressed his wishes pretty clearly by this point: Russia withdraws to pre-2014 borders with Ukraine; there are war crimes trials and reparations; Ukraine joins both the EU and NATO; someone other than Putin signs the treaty. Slowly or quickly, this will happen. But how does this affect the world outside Ukraine's borders?

Let's take just the problem of Belarus. For now, it's a close ally of Russia. But once Zelensky gets what Ukraine should have as a local outcome of the war, this leaves Belarus as a Russian ally surrounded on three sides by NATO (assuming Ukraine joins) or NATO and Ukraine as powerful NATO proxy (the current actual state of affairs). There will need to be some official solution of this problem, especially as it relates to Russia. If Belarus is to become a neutral buffer, this will need to be imposed by a Yalta-style consensus -- but under the circumstances, wouldn't Belarus also want to join NATO as well?

And with Ukraine in NATO and a for-now neutral Belarus, how does this affect Kaliningrad/Königsberg? It's farther and farther from Russia and less and less defensible. Hypothetical post-World War III maps show it ceded to Poland, which is what I would bet as well.

Then there's the Kuril Islands dispute between Russia and Japan. According to Wikipedia,

The San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed between the Allies and Japan in 1951, states that Japan must give up "all right, title and claim to the Kuril Islands", but it also does not recognize the Soviet Union's sovereignty over them. Japan claims that at least some of the disputed islands are not a part of the Kuril Islands, and thus are not covered by the treaty. Russia maintains that the Soviet Union's sovereignty over the islands was recognized in post-war agreements. Japan and the Soviet Union ended their formal state of war with the Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956 but did not sign a peace treaty. During talks leading to the joint declaration, the Soviet Union offered Japan the two smaller islands of Shikotan and the Habomai Islands in exchange for Japan renouncing all claims to the two bigger islands of Iturup and Kunashir, but Japan refused the offer. This disagreement between the two-island offer made by the Soviet Union and Japan's demand of regaining two bigger islands as well became the cornerstone for continuation of the dispute into the present day.

Last week, President Zelensky in his capacity as de facto leader of the free world called on the international community to recognize Japanese claims to all four disputed islands:

Zelensky said Russia has no right to the territories, and the entire world knows this. He said the international community must “de-occupy” all lands that Russia has occupied and is trying to keep.

“With this war against Ukraine, against the international legal order, against our people, Russia has put itself in conditions — and it is now only a matter of time — of the real liberation of everything that once was seized and is now under the control of the Kremlin,” he said.

I don't see how the West wiggles out of this dilemma. Solving the Ukraine war is going to mean a lot more than just Ukraine. The problem is in fact going to be bigger than just NATO, and it's going to mean overall agreements similar to Yalta. Biden, of course, is not the figure to accomplish this, which means that replacing Biden is at roughly the same level of urgency as replacing Putin.