This is new NATO chief and former Dutch politician Mark Rutte:
“At this moment, clearly Ukraine is not there, because they cannot at this moment negotiate from a position of strength,” Rutte told EU lawmakers. “We have to do more to make sure by changing the trajectory of the conflict that they can get to that position of strength.” [1]
Well. We have come a long way from “defeat Russia in Ukraine”. Which I don’t hear so much these days. (Let alone the exuberant shouts from excited retired generals that Kiev might even be able to take Crimea, or ‘analysis’ from any number of think-tank experts that the “Putin regime” is about to fall. Indeed the regime has been about to fall, the economy has been going to collapse, and the ‘oligarchs’ are about to stage a coup, for about two years now).
But even this new fallback position expressed by Rutte is still a lie. It looks like they have decided to rewrite the narrative in stages. The media will do their job of producing the narratives and avoiding, to the best of their ability, giving the impression of a Western defeat. I can’t believe (however much I am generally disposed to think that these people really do believe their own propaganda) that Rutte really believes that Kiev can be rescued from their desperate situation – to the extent that they can “negotiate from a position of strength”. Just how? Their army is collapsing. There are mass desertions. Even if they were to be given 10x as much fancy equipment, which apparently isn’t available to give anyway, they still don’t have the men to fire the weapons. Oh, and, apart from a few hundred (or dozen in some accounts) 300 km ATACMS and Storm Shadows with limited permission to fire into Russia, they have virtually no long-range strategic capability and no one is planning to give them any. So, Mark Rutte – just how are you going to 180 degrees change the battlefield situation? He must be lying. But the consequences of this are – let’s keep it going for another few months. Let’s pour in some more weapons. Let’s let thousands more Ukrainians die. What for? To put off the moment when the West has to admit defeat? This is like Afghanistan – when they delayed the inevitable pull out for years, until they could do it in such a way as to minimise the domestic political cost.
And, anyway. Any negotiated deal at this point would be far worse than what was available in March 2022. Kiev could have agreed not to join NATO, (which was in their constitution before the 2014 coup anyway), and given up (on paper as well as in reality) Crimea, and the Donbas. The rest of Ukraine could have gone on and joined the EU and lived happily ever after (though that would still have included many people who did not in fact actually want to join the EU). What does Rutte mean “negotiate from a position of strength?” At this point; the question is “what can they salvage from this disaster?”
Notes