Doesn't say much, but what this does at least signal is that both sides seem to understand how this war ends - with both sides unhappy.
This is Zelensky stating their likely starting postion: Unconditional ceasefire along current lines. Followed by diplomacy and security guarantees. The first part is easier. The second part, less so. Doesn't seem like much, but it IS the first time that they have said even that much.
Russia has spent too much to be content in the long term keeping only what they have now - and the heavy emphasis being on NOW. Including the exorbitant reconstruction costs they would have to pay. And I mean just internally within Russia to repair their oil & gas infrastructure to some new baseline level. But they ARE sort of, kind of, in the traditional bad-faith Russian way, acknowledging that their original war aims of total regime change and Belarus-ization of Ukraine aren't going to happen. Yet.
Unconditional ceasefire means exactly that - no conditions, including no reparations intially. That's what the diplomacy and security guarantees are for. But - who's going to provide security? Not the current U.S. administration, that's for sure. So what would that look like? For sake of argument, let's say a Euoprean NATO ground monitoring force and no-fly zone 100km from Ukraine's borders with Russia and Belarus. Total guess, but not that hard to imagine.
And what about reparations? Ukraine will want and deserves them in any world where justice matters. Russia will never, ever, EVER pay reparations willingly unless they are actively collapsing, like in WW1 with the treaty of brest-litovsk. BTW - the Russians paid only $6 billion marks then - like $160m dollars, or $3.5B dollars today. Seems like a bargain, but that's another story. The important part is there's no way Russia willingly pays out of pocket. Period. Too much pride and ego and nothing would get Putin killed faster than obliging oligarchs to pay a tax on their future earnings to get out of the war he started.
Ukraine might be assessing that an unconditional ceasefire is acceptable, because the future post-putin instability might present new opportunities to regain territory without having to do the bloody business of fighting for it today.
As for reparations - Ukraine COULD probably succesfully seek a portion of the seized assets post-war. Russia will lose their minds, and threaten to restart the war. This often happens in negotiations, but....rarely actually does. Let's assume that they aren't ready to resume fighting midway through peace talks. There would be signals like mobilizations if they were.
But, it's not crazy to think they might accept losing SOME of the $300 billion that Belgium is currently sitting on if it meant getting the rest back. They've lived without it for nearly 5 years, and they absolutely need it for their own post-war reconstruction costs. And it is not quite the political humiliation of outlaying new money. There's probably a way to do it quietly enough that even if the average russian muggle understands that it's reparations by other means, that it comes from already-stolen money that was never going to come to them anyways.
That settlement will be done during the Diplomacy phase. The glass-half full view is that IF the fighting stops per the initial Unconditional Ceasefire, it is hard to restart the war at the same intensity. There's so many issues of logistics, momentum, economic re-configuration and morale. Nobody on either side really wants to be the last person to die while diplomats quibble over semantics far away. Battlefield conditions rarely change much DURING negotiations - that's why they're really significnat even if it seems pointless. We're only JUST at the initial stages where they talk about their opening positions. You don't do even THAT when you think your position will be stronger tomorrow.
All this to say - both sides are going to end up unhappy, at least at first. But - in what seemed hopeless until pretty recently, both sides are publicly stating their positions. That's SOME kind of good news.
Thoughts?
That's inevitable, mate. Russia is a mafia state run by the intelligence services. Even Putin himself is an actor. But the brittle kleptocracy that reflexively oppresses any intenral dissent also prevents the development of competent future leadership.
The Russian political tradition has ALWAYS been strongman rule followed by a period of factional fighting. The prior Tsar is always blamed for eveyrthing, his history gets re-written - They LITERALLY change City names like Stalingrad and Leningrad!, then competing ethno-corporate warlords fight for the throne. There are winners and losers and everything gets worse for a while til the winning faction emerges, and then the cycle repeats itself.
That ineivtable power struggle and internal fighting is Ukraine's chance to reclaim portions of the occupied territories. But it wil take time. And that's okay.
I do get it, really, but everything has a breaking point and Ukraine as a nation is as close to it as it is possible (arguably we are long past it and just moving by inertia) cities are dying and I mean big cities far behind the frontline, a lot if not all vital infrastructure is at least damaged if not destroyed (and it takes years to rebuild), society is long past the unity we had in '22 or even '24. We see the same old people being shuffled between positions, without meaningful change in operation. Bad actors adapted and even worse systems are still in place 5 years into big war. And every citizen and politician likes to make this business as usual posture, where we are projecting strong stance and calling their bluff.
As someone recently very well observed at the start of invasion we all adopted roles: soldiers are strong and silent about political issues, families and society supports army with everything they have, political leadership is genuine in their desire for our victory and does everything possible internationally and domestically.
Well it wasn't ever true and now even less so. Fuck if know where everything is going but surely it's not going to get better for a looong time, even in case of "victory".
Dunno maybe I'm just too much of a doomer and from outside of it things are clearer and look better, personally I'm just tired of seeing dead people on the streets (even if I don't like them at all, don't know how can you be this blind and dumb, one time in occupation was enough for me) and idea of ever seeing my mother alive again or visiting home never really leaves me.
Thank you for a very thoughtful and personal response. It's easy to sit at a keyboard and be abstract about what might happen in the grand scheme without being personally affected. I'm very sorry for your circumstance and please don't take my "what's likely to happen" nonsense as ignroing or dismissing the human suffering. I'm just trying to make sense out of the mess of signals and attract conversation from folks who know things I don't.
I'd love to hear more of your perspective. This is not The Optimism Channel, but I remain generally optimistic that Ukraine will surivive, but I'm not so naive to think that it isn't forever changed. My thought was that once Rusisa fucks off and hopefully collapses into a period of post-putin ethno-corporate gangster warlordism, that it will be too distracted to threaten it's neighbors. And then Ukraine will undergo a reconstruction boom, with improved institutions and clear eyes about the lingering danger from whatever malevolence persists to the east. Foreign feel-good construction contracts seem likely to roll in, as has happened with many other post-war industrial societies in the last century. How that translates to Ukraine's long term demographic and economic prospects - who knows? But I expect futures like other post-Soviet states like Poland, Czechia, Romania etc. Namely - EU aligned and prosperous compared to the gray grinding hell of a a Russian run slave state.
But I find it fascinating that they've managed to survive given the brutal attacks, often limp support and outright betrayal by the U.S. Can you share a little more?
In a word it's all very tiring, like when I went out to protests in 2013 I've never expected that my region will end up occupied by m*scovites with close to zero opposition from our military (and it was possible at the time to deoccupy it easily) never expected to move out of occupation using dead old womans documents, never expected being called крисчанін (crimean rat) by my own people, etc., etc. Always expected big war tho.
When it finally started I felt relief that the waiting is over. There were hope at the start that we will soon end it one way or another. Instead we've got whatever this shit is. Glacial occupation and even more glacial development from our side always checked by other powers and multiple small and big betrayals (not only US) because big boys club wants their status quo, that died ten years ago. When I've started volounteering there was unity, like people actually believed in our nation, every year it withered with our economy, when I've became part of the armed forces drones were still big like it was our trump card, which we weren't allowed to use the full capabilities(we still aren't realistically).
Then we just stopped improving, r*ssians actually adapted (not as a whole but they did, and created doctrines and analyzed and learned). We are comically dependent on the whims of musk and trump, one can literally make us lose with a single drug fueled decision there are zero efforts to mitigate this. We still use r*ssian social messaging/media platform as the main channel of communication (among civilians). Worst part nobody wants to do something, there are no improvements in streamlining of anything, no R&D, no nothing. Just private companies that butcher some open source software and making proprietary hardware, making everything as different as possible due to NIH mentality. There are false claims of holding ground which is noman's land, there are commanding officers that live in the 1980s and dream of glorious infantry taking over shit in lightning strikes, etc., etc. And the worst of it, a small team of 5-10 technically inclined people with moderate resources of small IT company could do so much. Instead smart people with decades of technical knowledge end up as technicians inside one brigade or another doing menial work that monkey can do, at best or a pilot or infantry man at worst.
Sorry for the ramblings, I'm just an old linux nerd doing stooopid shit daily, without any days off and living underground, all the while listening to dumb people that shouldn't be allowed to work with cows, much less people.