SOME MAPS

 

HERE IS AN INTERESTING SET of maps by Colonel Jacques Baud presented on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive podcast. They show, in time, the various ceasefire deals Ukraine could have had with Russia. The first two see no territorial changes at all. These were the Minsk I and II Accords, following the installation of a pro-Western government in 2014.* The Minsk agreements were put in place to resolve conflicts between the eastern provinces of Ukraine, which are ethnically Russian and mostly Russian-speaking, and the western provinces, which are ethnically Ukrainian and who speak Ukrainian. There were civil rights concerns with the minority ethnic Russians in Ukraine not being able to be educated or receive government services in Russian, for example. “Minsk” was set in place with France and Germany acting as “guarantors” of the deal. It was meant to address these and other concerns, but as we know now, there was never a genuine effort to make the deal work or to ratchet down the tensions between east and west. This simmering ‘civil war’ between eastern and western Ukraine continued on a slow burn, with increasing hostilities between eastern and western militias and with Kiev forces until early 2022, when Kiev, which by then had amassed an army of several hundred thousand along the borders of the Donbass, seemed poised to invade. So Russia intervened to stop Ukraine’s shelling of the Donbass and to broker a peace deal that everyone could live with. It sent troops in to make it clear to Kiev that they meant business. 

The third and fourth maps show more peace deals Ukraine could have had, if they had sued for peace accepting that they could never win against Russia. The fourth map is the “Istanbul” peace proposal, negotiated after only two months of fighting. In terms of real estate being lost, either deal was one Ukraine should have accepted.

Of course, we know what happened. The Americans sent British clown prince PM Boris Johnson to cajole and arm twist Zelensky into staying in the fight. And the rest is history. The longer this war continues, the more Ukrainian real estate that is lost to the Russians. The “N” on the maps stands for the core demand by Russia that Ukraine be "neutral", something along the lines of the Austrian model.

THE LAST TWO MAPS show what’s in store for the beleaguered nation if it doesn’t bid for peace right now. Otherwise, it will become a neutral, land-locked agrarian backwater, existing as a buffer-state between Russia and the West. Right now, that looks like what fate has in store for Zelensky’s Ukraine.

  

Cheers, Jake.__________________________________________

 

* The now infamous “Maidan Revolution” was, in essence, a coup orchestrated by the CIA and State Department, and the execrable neo-con Victoria Neuland, to install a pro-Western regime in Kiev. Which they did.