As the Ukraine counteroffensive grinds on, conditions on the ground are now too obvious to ignore. Is it time for talking, yet?
Responsible Statecraft, JULY 28, 2023, Katrina vanden Heuvel and James Carden
The fog of war over much of the last 18 months has skewed press coverage and our understanding of what is happening in Ukraine. Yet media opacity can no longer mask the facts on the ground.
In only the past week, reports have emerged in the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Financial Times and the New York Times indicating, among other things, that Ukraine's much awaited spring offensive has ground to a virtual stalemate and munitions from its NATO-allied partners are drying up.
The situation is such that, as the Financial Times columnist Ed Luce noted, "At some point, Volodymyr Zelensky … will need to sit down with Vladimir Putin, or his successor, to reach a deal."
Perhaps more worrying still was NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's admission that "the war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of munitions and depleting allied stockpiles. The current rate of Ukraine's ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production. This puts our defense industries under strain."
None of this is exactly news. This past April, the so-called "Discord leaks" revealed that Washington officials believed back in February that the war wasn't going as well as it had been heretofore portrayed. But at the time, the media was more focused on helping authorities hunt down the leaker than reporting the contents of the leak. The unavoidable implication of the leaks, that the Biden administration was presenting two different versions of the war's progress — one private, the other public — seemed almost willfully deleted from the script.
And so, as the Ukrainian counteroffensive turns into a brutal slog, Kyiv seems to lack the requisite human resources or physical infrastructure to achieve its goals. Isn't diplomacy now more important than ever? And if not now, when?
There is a growing recognition by a number of experts that conditions do exist for a negotiated settlement to end the war................................................
War casualties (now estimated at well over 350,000 Ukrainian and Russians), the accompanying European economic downturn, the burgeoning food crisis in Africa, the sure-to-be devastating legacy of tens of thousands of unexploded landmines, and the ever-present nuclear risk all tell us one thing: The time has come for talks. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/07/28/when-will-we-concede-that-it-is-time-for-talks/
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