politics

My feeling is that we’ll end up with both the US and Russia claiming victory. The narrative in the West has been that Russia wants nothing less than to fully conquer Ukraine and subsuming it back into the new Russian Empire. So a result where Ukraine keeps sovereignty, regardless of what else they had to give up, will be spun as “we stopped the orcs at the gates!” Conversely, Russia has internally depicted this as being about stopping NATO encroachment, so as long as the peace treaty has “no NATO membership for Ukraine,” they can claim they’ve successfully drawn a line in the sand that America cannot pass.