Won’t the landmines help stabilize the front and potentially lead into more of a gridlock? Russia has been advancing pretty steadily, which decreases their willingness to sit down for negotiations.
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it’s possible, but that would only delay the outcome not change it.
My view is that the neocons are trying to muddy the waters for Trump who has said he will end the conflict.
I’m not sure that Putin’s willingness to sit down for negotiations is an issue. According to reports there was a tentative deal which both sides had agreed to back in April 2022 that Boris Johnson (UK PM) scuppered, which would have seen the situation on the ground revert to the status quo ante (23 Feb 2022) along with a promise that Ukraine would not seek NATO membership. Since then, there appear to have been several peace conventions to which Russia wasn’t invited. Almost certainly, Ukraine will now end up with less than the offer Boris Johnson scuppered.
I’d say now when Russia is advancing and the West is losing its will to support, Putin’s willingness to sit down is low. With landmines, the advances will likely slow down, come to a full stop or make further advances so costly, that it’s just better to negotiate.
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There’s been news that the draft version of the peace treaty is very similar to the one discussed (and was almost signed) in April 2022. If that’s the case, it is just crazy to think how much blood and destruction has been shed just to end up in the same place where it started. The estimate now is that both sides have lost 75.000-125.000 men and about 500.000-600.000 wounded. Infrastructure has been destroyed and Ukraine is becoming a failed state.
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Don’t understand why Russia just doesn’t rage quit. I commend Ukraine for not bending the knee.
As for us, they hurt an enemy, helped an ally, and sold their old weapons.
" Pansexuality is sometimes considered a sexual orientation in its own right or, at other times, as a branch of bisexuality (since attraction to all genders falls under the category of attraction to people of the same gender and different genders[5]) to indicate a lack of gender preference.[2][6][7] While pansexual people are open to relationships with people who do not identify as strictly men or women, and pansexuality therefore explicitly rejects the gender binary in terms of the chosen etymology,[2][8] this is by no means a feature which is exclusive to pansexuality and can also be found in broad definitions of homosexuality, bisexuality and the asexual spectrum.
No wonder Trump won by a very wide margin.
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Sex and gender has become a way of identifying oneself and belonging to a group. I read an interesting article about polarization and the argument was that as home, family and patriotic values have been “erased”, politics and gender stuff has become the new way of “belonging to something”.
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The Frankfurt School argued that such values were preventing the West from adopting marxism and they therefore needed to be erased.
Cultural marxism.
I think I’m myself a quite the guinea pig. I used to be pretty left leaning if not outright leftist, up to around 2011. But then I moved to France in 2012 and then to Paris in 2014. I started to see how well the multicultural reality really worked - not only at the local neighbourhood level but also at the office.
Our office was at this “banlieue”, the 19th arrondissement. At the office, there was literally tv screens announcing “gang violence high tide”, “women not expected to walk around by themselves” and what not. Just literally crazy stuff for a foreigner.
Thats when I decided that this is just pure craziness.
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And this was just the trigger that made me think of stuff.