You miss a key point... Not sure if deliberately or due to distance from all of that.

Allow Russia to back down with positive land gains today and you create a precedent that any invasion on a non-NATO non-nuclear country is possible and viable just because you're a large world superpower.

This should not be the case, and a large part of Europe understands that. Hopefully, you will too.

But NATO didn't oppose Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008. So that precedent was already set?

> The Ukrainian government stubbornly refuses any negotiation.

Odd that a country that isn't losing doesn't want to negotiate with an invader who has expressed as a bottom line that "we'll keep the bits we've occupied".

Perhaps this is a better phrasing:

The Russian government stubbornly won't relinquish occupied sovereign Ukrainian territory.

They aren't winning either. After weeks of "counteroffensive"[1], the situation on the ground has hardly changed. Even the Institute for the Study of War (which seems to be one of the few sources for unadulterated Western reporting) had to give a little pep talk the other day about "interdiction" in the face of a lack of results.

Considering there has been no negotiations, I don't see how Russia's position can be resolutely that they are going to keep all the land they've occupied.

Consider the fact that in 2008, Russia overran Georgia in a matter of days. Today Georgia is a sovereign and independent state with no Russian troops present (discounting Abkhazia which was previously occupied and complicated).

Russia must want something other than simply conquering its neighbors?

[1] This operation cannot be considered a counteroffensive because the Russians had been conducting a defense for months. However, Ukraine conducting an offensive is quite bad for PR because it makes them sound like the aggressor, which obviously is not the case.

Will you give up your home forever to any robber showing up? You can find a new home in worse neighbourhood pretty easily after all.

~26,200 Ukrainian draft dodgers / deserters in Romania[1] don't seem to share your sentiment.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65792384

It is incredibly disingenuous to imply people who fled the war must necessarily support your position that Ukraine should make concessions to Russia. That is straight up trolling.

No, incredibly disingenuous would be:

1. Ukrainian military age males, legally required by their government to serve in the armed forces, fleeing 2. AND THEN insisting the war not end while their countrymen are dying on their behalf

I might assume you were trolling but instead I'll assume you don't understand what a Ukrainian draft dodger / deserter is in this situation.

Desperate people make desperate decisions, ergo, might makes right? And when did we establish that they're insisting on the war to continue? This is a knot of false assumptions: that people who flee the conflict have some uniform opinion; that this in any way justifies concessions; that people who flee the conflict have a particular unstated but heavily implied moral character.

You can make as much of a show of extending me good will add you please, this is not a good faith argument and I have no hangups about calling it a spade.

> 2. AND THEN insisting the war not end while their countrymen are dying on their behalf

I wish the war ended as soon as possible too and that no one dies anymore. Most of those fighting on the front want to stop this war as soon as possible so that they don't die (if they wanted to die, they could just storm Russian positions without weapons). Ukraine giving up doesn't look like a valid answer. They gave up some territories in 2014 but Russia still came with tanks and started shooting at everything and killing (often in gruesome ways) civilians.

I bet that if Russians could just go home, this war would be stopped pretty soon, but alas they don't want to go home. Why?

Don't forget most of Russians. They don't share my sentiment either. Many of them are even convinced that Ukrainians want to take their land, so they are in fact defending from Ukrainians. This doesn't change anything.

You never answered the question, I'll pose a similar one but my guess is you will never directly answer.

If someone came to your house, raped your child, castrated your bother and was occupying your kitchen.

Would you given, you have the capability to fight back, fight back, or would you roll over and give your attacker your kitchen as part of 'negotiations'.

Get out of here, Chamberlain.

> 3. Russia will not back down having gained nothing (but the gain likely does not have to be physical).

Idea is that they will coup and back down.

It almost happened like 2 weeks ago. It is really boiling inside Russia.

That seems like a rather false hope. Russia doesn't have much of a track record for backing down.

We can discuss the Prigozhin incident but no one outside of Wagner supported him. Nor does he seem to be in favor of withdrawing from Ukraine but rather assigning blame for mismanagement of the war. In fact, there are a whole host of vocal Russians ("ultranationalists") who seem to think Russia (and therefore Putin?) is not putting in enough effort.

If there is a coup, the rest of the civilized world really may not like whoever replaces Putin.

USSR fell apart, when the people saw their government and system as a complete fraud. Much to the surprise of Kremlin watchers. There is still hope for the Russian people

One would hope but I recently watched a YouTube video of an Australian touring a shopping mall / grocery store in Moscow. It looked practically identical to a western version. Contrast that to the USSR where grocery shelves were routinely empty and there was no variety of items.

Now maybe this is some kind of well funded information operation and sanctions really are working but there is no way the level of austerity is anywhere near the USSR's terminal levels. Until the Russian people's daily lives are adversely affected in a huge way, the comparative dissolution is not happening.

> 2. If Russian forces are pushed back to the pre-February 2022 borders (and/or even out of Crimea), then what? They can still lob artillery, missiles, and drones with impunity.

Counter battery fire is a thing. And Ukrainians have no problem to shoot into Russia itself. They will just say that it was Russian Freedom legion or Russian partisans. While everyone knows that it won't be true, nobody can also proof that they were Ukrainians. It is just use of Maskirovka against its inventor.

Drones and missiles are more difficult to intercept, but there must be somebody on the other side to control them and Ukraine is starting to adapt Mossad-like techniques to execute whoever is doing that. [0] is Captain of Russian submarine launching Kalibr missiles, shot dead yesterday.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/07/11/russia-ukr...

Counter battery fire[1] into Russia isn't going to end the war, just the opposite. I guess Russia will blame the mushroom clouds on the Russian partisans too?

[1] And we'll ignore issues with ranging, disproportionate numbers, ammunition, etc

Interesting article but any particular submarine captain getting schwacked on his morning run isn't going to affect the overall Russian war effort.

That some wishful thinking, truth is, that artillery fire into Russia [0] and drone attacks into Russia [1] are common occurrence if you did not slept last 500 days. And no mushroom clouds have followed.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/01/anti-putin-par...

[1] https://kyivindependent.com/russian-governor-claims-drone-at...