Vladimir Putin offers a ceasefire deal. Should Ukraine accept it?
Tonight, Vladimir Putin offers a ceasefire deal. Should Ukraine accept it?
Did you hear about Vladimir Putin’s proposal for a ceasefire with Ukraine? You can call it propaganda, a trick, or a lie. You can say it ought to be rejected — or whatever your point of view is. But did you even hear about it?
Maybe you did. Here’s how the country’s self-described newspaper of record reported on it: "Ahead of peace summit, Putin demands to keep parts of Ukraine."
Here's an excerpt:
"One day before the start of a summit in Switzerland aimed at advancing a plan to end the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he is still seeking Kyiv’s capitulation, not a negotiated peace deal.
A weekend meeting at the Bürgenstock Resort, near Lucerne, which many Western leaders are attending, but Russia wasn’t invited to participate in, is expected to end with the endorsement of parts of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s 10-point peace plan, which calls for a complete Russian withdrawal to pre-2014 borders – before Russia seized and illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.”
So the Burgenstock meeting is the peace summit. Putin is belligerent — he doesn’t want a deal. That’s how the Globe reports it.
As usual, the Western media coverage of the situation leaves a lot to be desired. How is it a peace meeting if the enemy isn't even there?
Furthermore, Volodymyr Zelensky's approach is that he wants Russia to withdraw not only from all the lands they’ve invaded in the past two years but also land that they formally annexed ten years ago. Maybe that’s just a dramatic starting position, but the idea that Russia would not only completely withdraw from Ukraine but also give back cities, industries, and territories with over 2 million people that have been Russian for a decade — leaving Ukraine with more territory than when the war started — seems like an offer that is deliberately designed to fail. They want reparations, they want a Treaty of Versailles. That’s what the unconditional victors in a war get, not the smaller country that's losing.
And the Ukrainian people are most certainly losing. Hundreds of thousands dead; millions of refugees. Nearly a million Ukrainian men have dodged the draft. Ukraine has resorted to conscripting women, the old and young, and even the mentally disabled. CBC reports that the average Ukrainian soldier is in their 40s.
It's not pro-Russia to want peace. If the fighting kept going for another year, would Ukraine really be able to "win"? And if so, at what human cost?
