T, Belman. I recently posted Armistice or annihilation—Ukraine’s end game which contained an interview of Mansur. I exchanged some emails with him about it as I knew him from his participation in my conference in 2017 on the Jordan Option. His talk is contained in Salim Mansur: “Jordan is Palestine”.
I don’t see an armistice taking hold until Russia consolidates it hold on Crimea and the four provinces or until the West concedes them.
By Salim Mansur
I mostly agree with Peloni that the collective West led by the U.S. is, as Putin and the leadership in Moscow have repeatedly said, “not-agreement capable.” In other words, there is no basis any more for Moscow to trust any Western/American leader, and especially those presently ruling, with whom they can negotiate an agreement that will be honoured in the West. The Minsk Agreements (I and II) erased all trust in Moscow of the post-1992 leadership in the collective West.
My argument for an Armistice is to draw attention to the historical precedent of how WWI was brought to an end. Germany did not surrender on the battlefield, and that history should be a necessary part of the collective memory of the people both in the West and the East, even though there is a collective amnesia raging presently in the West. If German leaders in October 1918 had some sort of crystal ball foreknowledge of what eventually would be thrust upon Germany following the Armistice by the weight of the Americans forces landed in Europe in the Treaty of Paris (Versailles) 1919, possibly Germany would have continued the war to a conclusion, a military defeat for sure but also many more deaths on the Allied side and likely the theory of “stabbed in the back” would not have had any credibility as it did in the brief life of Weimar republic and then the rise of Nazi Germany.
The one-sided vengeful Treaty of Paris was immediately denounced by many on the Allied side, such as John Maynard Keynes in his prophetic book on “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” and, ironically, that Treaty laid the grounds for the eventual collective suicide of Europe in WW2. But that Armistice was not responsible for the subsequent folly of the Western powers; the Armistice, which the Germans agreed to, was to end the mutual slaughter of Europeans and work out an agreement, knowing the tremendous cost of failure that the Great War had proven, in which no one European power alone could be held singularly responsible for the war and made to pay the reparation as what occurred in the making of the Treaty of Paris.
The precedent of the Armistice in the present situation in the Ukraine war is to halt the shooting before the most likely scenario, if the shooting is not stopped then the war will ratchet up beyond the high-end conventional warfare to the likely use of nuclear weapons. This is a war that Russia cannot lose and the collective West cannot win when on both sides we have nuclear weapon states. This is not the time to engage in any further discussion, while the shooting is going on, on the rights and wrongs of the parties involved. There will be ample time if people want to get into this discussion once the shooting is stopped and negotiated settlement is reached to the satisfaction of Moscow and the collective West, and in this settlement Ukraine will have no say in this matter since it has been all along and very willingly a sacrificial pawn of Washington/Brussels axis to entrap Russia and precipitate regime change in Moscow.
I agree that any offer of Armistice coming from the collective West will not be received seriously by Moscow. The latest word out is that William Burns, the CIA Director, sent an opening offer to Moscow that Washington is agreeable to partition Ukraine, handing 20 percent of the territory which would be practically all of the Donbass region to Russia, for ceasefire and an end to the war. Similar offer was sent by Tony Blinken, Sec. of State, through the Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry to Moscow, during Blinken’s recent visit to Cairo. And again, the offer was not taken seriously by Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.
But an Armistice is the only move available to stop the shooting before the shooting cascades into a wider European war, as the Poles are itching for as well as the warmongering Brits with their goofy pitbull Boris Johnson in his full nutty display. Therefore, the call for Armistice has to come from a third party, not the collective West, and such a party will have the credibility and influence in both Moscow and Washington. The American neocons with their talk of the rule-based order has poisoned the role of the UN insofar as Moscow goes, even though eventually the UN will have to seal the final settlement of the war and the status of Ukraine, whatever remains of it once the shooting stops. In this context, a leading member or members of the emergent BRICS nation that Moscow and Washington could respect can play the role of mediator(s) pushing for an Armistice and then proposing a place to host the negotiations to follow. I may imagine a number of countries, singly or together, could step up given the urgency of the situation to mediate an Armistice and then suggest a meeting place for delegates from Moscow and Washington/Brussels to meet. India comes immediately to mind along with Brazil; and Istanbul could well be the most favourable meeting place for the parties, with Turkey being both a NATO member-state and its growing relationship with Moscow given the mutual partnership that Putin and Erdogan have nurtured between themselves.
The broad outline of Moscow spelled out by Putin with the launch of the special military operation (SMO) on Feb 24, 2022, is now well known and has remained in place. The oblasts in the Donbass region that have acceded to the Russian Federation after the referendums in September of last year and have been integrated as “Novorossiya” are not going to be revoked or returned by Moscow, as is with Crimea, and the offers by Burns and Blinken in their respective messages to Moscow are indicators of Washington conceding to this reality, no different than Moscow conceding to the manner in which Kosovo was separated from Serbia by the NATO forces. Moscow might as well, if there is no stop to the shooting, shut the entire Black Sea coast to Kyiv by taking Odessa and moving into Transnistria. What then will be left for post-Armistice negotiations are the initial demands of the SMO, which were the denazification and demilitarization of what remains of Ukraine. In other words, Ukraine officially declared as a demilitarized neutral state, with guarantee written into the post-war Ukraine’s constitution that it will not ever be a member of NATO. Furthermore, I do not think Moscow will agree with any proposal for reparation to Kyiv, and if this matter is raised then Moscow will have as much right to demand reparation from the collective West for the effects of the war on the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass region going back to the genocidal military operations of the Kyiv regime launched after the 2014 Maidan coup that ousted the elected president Victor Yanukovych.
Wars have consequences, and the sheer arrogance of the neocon crowd in Washington through the Clinton, Bush (43), and the Obama-Biden administrations, has eventually brought the collective West its comeuppance. This Ukraine war spells the end of the unipolar hegemonic moment of the U.S. in world politics and history; it also spells the end of the Eurocentric Age that began around 1500 with its centre in the north Atlantic basin and the shift to the Eurasian/Pacific Age that is emergent. The only question in my mind, and in my prayers, is whether mankind’s survival instinct will prevail over the suicidal psychosis raging in the West with its nihilistic “wokeism” or not, and if it does prevail then the transition from the post-1945 world order to the 21st century multipolar world order might go forward without mankind in a fit of suicidal madness replaced by the Age of the Cockroaches.
Prof. Salim Mansur emigrated from India to Canada where he received a PhD in Political Science. He taught for many decades at the University of Western Ontario.
Mansur is a member of the board of directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, a group which seeks to support democracies and placed particular emphasis on calling for the Government of Canada to adopt a pro-Israel stance.
The danger is now from America and Europe.
The jingoistic attitude to these balloons is a terrible warning
@Michael
I would suggest that you entirely mischaracterize the situation with regards to Russia’s role in Ukraine. This is not Afghanistan or Vietnam, where super powers were conducting some military adventurism in some far off unrelated land which never threatened the respective super power. Russia’s involvement in Ukraine hits quite close to home. The people whom Russia is allied with in the Dombas, for instance is not some dissident proxy force – they are ethnic Russians, some of whom have family and friends who live in Russia proper. As a consequence of this fact, many Russians in Russia proper also have friends and family among the dead in Ukraine’s war in Dombas. Also, I do not believe that you will find that Russia invaded Afghanistan following the threats of the Afghan govt to attack Russia. Nor will you find that Afghanistan had raised and mobilized a NATO trained army filled with units of anti-Russian fascists and neoNazis on the Russian border murdering ethnic Russians.
Additionally, contrary to your premise about Afghanistan, this is not a war which is being fought by a popular local uprising against Russia. The people of the Dombas had been waiting for Russia to come to their aid and rescue for 8 years – they are not likely to raise a force against their rescuers, and it should also be noted over the past year, they have not done so. I also don’t believe that the Russian people are fooled by anyone into believing that this war will end easily for them should they lose, so this stands as another distinction between the current crisis and the idea that this is in any way resembling Afghanistan. In fact, this current war has no point of similarity with either Vietnam or Afghanistan as you seem to surmise.
I would further suggest that Russia is every bit as committed to this fight as is Ukraine, and, unlike Ukraine, Russia gambled her entire economy upon entering this war, as the American economic war launched against Russia was no surprise to anyone. Is it your belief that this is something which the Russian people did to support the war in Afghanistan? No, I think the answer is clearly that they did not. Also, unlike during the Afghan war, Russia stands to economically weather the storm from this war with relative ease, relative to the West in particular, whereas the Soviet Union was in its economic decline when it entered Afghanistan and the economic hurt only increased with this needless war.
You also often mention the economic superiority of the West over Russia, but the problem with this premise is that the Western economies are not on a war time footing, nor are they likely to be, as they are all moving into what is likely to be challenging recessions without the aid of the cheap Russian oil and gas to subsidize and support it.
As to the 12yr olds in Ukraine, if they are placed in a position similar to the Hitler Youth during the Battle of Berlin, well, it would not be likely to turn out any better for the Ukrainian toddler soldiers than it did for their role models back in ’45. It would be similarly sad to see that the hatred would burrow so deep in the Ukrainians as in the German Nazis, but then again, if drafted, the Ukrainian 12yr olds will have as little to say about their conscription as the Ukrainian 60yr olds are having at current.
For a long time, I hadn’t the foggiest idea who was telling the truth. Two things decided me, the documentaries the BBC posted over 8 years which somebody posted here on Youtube – and thank you – was it Reader? and this article:
https://nypost.com/2022/05/03/ukrainian-man-stabbed-for-speaking-russian-in-brooklyn-bar-brawl/
@Michael
West Ukrainians. The East Ukrainians fought for independence with no Russian involvement for 8 years taking 14,000 casualties, 3,000 of them civilians
@Michael
Everything I have posted on the Ukraine War says otherwise. I strand by what I have posted.
Yes, Sebastien: Watch out for the Swiss! 😮
Ted, concerning the title of your other post, namely,
“Armistice or annihilation—Ukraine’s end game”,
I wish the choices were that simple. Sebastien Gorka, one intimately aware of the Slavic character, noted correctly that the war will not be fought to the last Ukrainian soldier; it will be fought to the last Ukrainian 12-year-old. Putin has been learning how to duplicate Russia’s defeat in Afghanistan.
When I was in the Army, a fellow soldier told me that the North Vietnamese negotiators asked their American counterparts whether they wanted “a ten year war, or a twenty year war, or a thirty year war”, adding that they were willing and able to provide us with whichever we chose. The Soviets chose a ten-year war in Afghanistan, and had to pull out. The US chose a twenty-year war there, and ended up completely humiliated. For all the insults some Israpunditers have hurled at Zelenskyy, he has rallied the Ukrainians against a truly hated Russian enemy; and they have an endless supply chain coming from the highly-industrialized West. Fortunately for the Russians, I don’t think Putin will be around long enough for a twenty- or thirty-year war.
@Tanna
Thank you for your comment. I try to be particularly careful not to fall prey to injecting personal attacks to support my views, if for no other reason than the fact that it would characterize my views as having less merit then whatever merit they might actually hold. Furthermore, I believe such uncivil discord is simply mean spirited and unpleasant, far beneath the valuable writings shared here on Israpundit. This is not to say that I might make a bad choice of words or let my emotions write what my mind would caution against, but I do not believe that this can in any way be argued to be the case in what I have written here. So, again, I appreciate your confirmation of this fact.
Peloni,
Per your last comment. Any person who would take exception to what you wrote should slowed down and parse every word and sentence. And then look deep into their own heart and soul.
Before the flood gates open, I got one word to say to you: Your correct! 🙂
@Michael
Jeez!
Hi, Peloni.
Ooh! Michael and Honeybee are emotional and hate-filled now! 😮
Knock it off! A while back, people here were calling me an Anti-Semite. Now I’m being called an Anti-Russian. What’s next? Am I also Anti-Polynesian? Anti-Swiss? Anti-Kansan? Where are you getting all this “inside information” about Honeybee and me? Was it the Negro caricature of the Tar Baby? Have you gone Woke, and picked up CRT phobias? You were as rational as the day is long when talking about the COV-19 hoax. What’s happened all of a sudden?
Are you Russian? What gives? Why is that regional border war so all-fired important to people on Israpundit? None of this makes much sense.
Sebastien!!!!!! SEBASTIEN!!!!!!!!!!! COME BACK SEBASTIEN !!!!!!!!!!!!
@Honeybee Were you LAUGHING? How could you? For shame, for shame.
https://youtu.be/DtoCw2iOTSc