Aug 30- Dmitry Grozoubinski: It's not time to negotiate
Dmitry Grozoubinski
Dmitry Grozoubinski is the founder of ExplainTrade and Forever D&D. He’s an experienced former Australian diplomat and trade negotiator and provides training in how to negotiate, how trade negotiations work, how trade policy is formed and what it means for you.
Dmitry’s expertise is cutting to the chase, be it trade and political issues pertaining to Brexit, the war in Ukraine. His thread below makes for interesting reading. I slipped in a few posts to animate the reading.
Thread: It's not time to negotiate
As Ukraine advances and Russian troops around Kherson soil their recently stolen underpants, it feels a good moment to unpack the Hitchens et al hypothesis that Ukrainian concessions for peace are inevitable and NATO aid merely prolongs the suffering until that moment.
If you take away all the grandiose language and puffery, the argument is quite simple: Regardless of how much aid the West sends, it is inevitable that the Russian army will eventually push Ukraine to where it is prepared to offer land for Putin's guarantee of peace.
It's based on a assumptions that really don't stand up to even basic scrutiny. First, it envisages a moment where things are going so badly for Ukraine that Zelenskyy can (politically) offer major concessions but not so badly Putin wouldn't just push for total victory.
Ukrainian public support for handing over Luhansk and Donetsk for peace, and trust in Putin's word was very low even before HIMARS and MARS started turning Russian ammo dumps into firework displays.
I imagine it's lower still now.
In order to shatter that support, the war would have to be going very, very badly.
Under such circumstances, why wouldn't Putin just push to finish what he started or demand Kharkiv, Odessa, Kyiv? A land bridge to Transnistria?
Second, it assumes the Russian military can sustain its invasion, and indeed make substantial gains, regardless of attrition, sanctions and whatever a Ukraine supplied by the West can throw at it.
We can't rule that out, but it's a bold claim.
The Russian military fighting in Ukraine has showed none of the unstoppable grandeur someone might have assumed it possessed from their time getting shitfaced in Moscow watching tank parades roll by.
-cough cough-
There is substantial evidence that Russia is having to scrape the bottom of its barrel harder and harder to muster increasingly inferior troops and equipment.
You don't beg Zimbabwe for reinforcements and Iran for drones when things are going well.
Putin could still declare mobilization, but it's not clear that would solve the army's immediate problems and it would make the war very real for the urbanites he's currently desperately trying to shield from it.
It's not some 'easy win button' he's neglected to hit yet.
Now sure, a cold winter and the passing of time could erode Western support for Ukraine, though we hope it doesn't.
But that's a possibility and not an inevitability, and articles suggesting such aid is cruel or counterproductive aren't helping.
This war will eventually end in negotiation. That's inevitable. Russia has proven it can't take Kyiv, and Ukraine isn't marching on Moscow.
That does not however make it inevitable that Ukraine will eventually be negotiating from a position of weakness.
At every stage Western aid has improved Ukraine's negotiating position immeasurably.
In February, Javelins and NLAWs helped ensure Putin wasn't negotiating while holding Kyiv and standing over Zelenskyy's broken body.
In March, Bayraktar drones and western trained, night vision equipped Ukrainian SOF hunted Russian fuel trucks and helped turn the highways into gridlocked starvation traps.
In April, May and June, increasingly sophisticated shipments of artillery and AA gave Ukrainian troops their own teeth to help blunt Russian advances with something other than man portable weapons and bravery, and all but kicked the Russian airforce out of the country.
In July and August, HIMARS and MARS are following NATO intelligence guidance, SOF targeting, drone sighting and brave partisan tips to pummel Russian bases, headquarters and logistics, supply lines and now infantry with near impunity.
Throughout it all, Western money and supplies have kept Ukraine afloat in the face of unprecedented economic hardship and disruption.
Every shipment, and every hard won victory that shipment enabled, has increased Ukraine's bargaining power, humiliated Russia, and left it more and more isolated on the world stage as the quick victory it promised allies like China turned to smoke.
Don't listen to the fatalists and the fools.
Give Ukraine what you can spare, and trust they'll use it right.
Victory may not be inevitable, but the defeat contrarians prognosticate is more distant every day.
Sláva Ukrayíni and heróyam sláva!
