The Ukraine war thread
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NYT's news analysis starts leads with this headline:
Trump Bets on Diplomacy Without Diplomats
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/us/politics/trump-witkoff-kushner-diplomacy.html
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Four years ago today.
Arthur Dron is a 22-year-old graduate student of journalism at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. In 2020, Dron published his first collection of poetry, Dormitory №6, which has been translated into Lithuanian, English, Polish, Italian, and Belarusian. However, now, instead of visiting lectures and receiving awards for his work, he is protecting Ukraine on the battlefield and writing poems about the experience of war. Despite the gentle quietness of his poems, Dron’s voice is loud in the sphere of modern Ukrainian poetry both in Ukraine and abroad.
First Letter to the Corinthians
Love is patient. Love is kind.
It is not jealous, is not pompous.
Love is terrified like a beast
but it perseveres.Love could give up and abandon it all
but it perseveres
Sometimes, love has gunshot wounds to
its legs or bullet fragments lodged in
them.Tourniquets squeeze love’s legs,
or it has no legs anymore.
Then love’s friends carry love.Love digs trenches and lives in them.
It gnaws ice from the bottle cut in half
when it gets thirsty at negative four.
Love takes up combat duty,
gets into position
with hernias, fevers, prostatitis,
with blast injuries,
asthmas and allergies,
with a high probability
of not making it back,
with thoughts about
the most significant one.
It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things!Love can distinguish by ear
the shots of rocket launchers,
the strikes of mortar shells, and
the movement of tanks.
Love’s eyes hurt when it stares into the
thermal imager for too long.
Love wakes up at night
when the mice in the dugout crawl
under its field coat.
Sometimes, love vomits long in the
trees after heavy combat.
Every now and then, it closes the eyes of
its friends.
Love wraps them up in sleeping bags
and carries them away.Love never fails!
But where there are prophecies, they
will cease;
where there are tongues, they will
be stilled;
where there is knowledge, it will pass
away.
For sometimes, the shelling is over,
and friends close Love’s eyes,
wrap it up in a sleeping bag,
and carry it away.And then it passes to the living.
Background and analysis:
https://nanovic.nd.edu/features/the-first-letter-to-the-corinthians/
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An excellent interview with Fiona Hill from yesterdays Global Story on BBC World Service:
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A dissenting voice on Russian television
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I find this hard to understand. The US is pressuring Ukraine to give up territory that Russia can’t seem to win militarily. Trump already stopped funding Ukraine, so what’s in it for them? Isn’t it just a straight-up win for Ukraine if the US walks away from ‘peace talks’ to focus on Iran, the (former) supplier of Russian drones?
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I find this hard to understand. The US is pressuring Ukraine to give up territory that Russia can’t seem to win militarily. Trump already stopped funding Ukraine, so what’s in it for them? Isn’t it just a straight-up win for Ukraine if the US walks away from ‘peace talks’ to focus on Iran, the (former) supplier of Russian drones?
I find this hard to understand. The US is pressuring Ukraine to give up territory that Russia can’t seem to win militarily.
Because Putin demands it and has disingenuously convinced Washington that to achieve an armistice, at bare minimum the US to must force Ukraine to concede all claims to the territory. It is, of course, a total deception as he fully plans to eventually take all that has been been annexed but not held or occupied. This just offers a temporary respite in the war to make Trump feel good about himself and the 30 pieces of silver from Putin in his pocket.
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I mean does anyone think we have any leverage over Ukraine to accept this? To coin a phrase, Trump doesn't have any cards.
Up until this latest chaos in Middle East started I would say no the US does not hold the leverage it did a a year ago. Between Trump’s bluster and Wikoff’s incompetence the US has lost a lot of its previous leverage.
From here on though and owing to the global economic fallout from the current crisis occupying Washington, there is no telling whether the initiative will pass to the Kremlin.
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Petraeus on Ukraine and Russia:
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5818227-david-petraeus-ukraine-russia-war/
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American (?) pro-Kremlin commentator flees Russia
https://uawire.org/pro-kremlin-commentator-flees-russia-after-fsb-threats-seeks-u-s-help
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About Russian elite and deception. Interesting read.
https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/73825 -
Renauda, care to comment on this? I really don't know the player in enough depth to say.
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Renauda, care to comment on this? I really don't know the player in enough depth to say.
I don’t believe he is wrong in his assessment. The Kremlin’s fear is Western liberal democracy and an open pluralistic society far, far more than Nato itself. In fact the Putin and his cronies know perfectly well, that Nato is a purely defensive military alliance.
Western liberalism however is a threat to the very concept of autocracy that Putin has being rebuilding the past 26 years. If the society were to liberalize he and his cronies along with all the Tsar’s oligarchs would held to account by the Russian people. That would unleash the undercurrent of anarchy that is ever present within the Russian political and social culture. Lenin unleashed it in October 1917 and spent the rest of his life trying to rein it back. Only the brute force of Stalin quelled it in the 1930s. Gorbachev unwittingly let the genie out of the bottle by introducing glasnost which, in turn, led to the impoverishment of the country the end of the USSR and a decade of semi anarchy under Yeltsin.
My only quibble with the author is how he interprets Putin’s desire for control over Ukraine. While Putin does fear Ukraine becoming a Western liberal state for the reasons stated above, I truly believe that he believes his own mythology that Ukraine and Ukrainians are merely a construct of Western minds, and do not exist beyond speaking what he (and many Russians) consider a quaint country bumpkin dialect of modern Russian.
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