Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War
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WHERE WE SEEM TO BE
Biden wants to end the war.
Putin does not want to end the war.
Xi does not appear willing to do anything to end the war.
Zelensky: it’s complicated.
In Saturday’s only essential read, the Washington Post looks at the very mixed signals coming out of Kyiv:
“I’m ready for dialogue; we’re not ready for capitulation,” Zelensky told ABC News earlier this week, while vowing to continue fighting Russia for as long as necessary.
Zelensky reiterated that [message in even stronger terms uesday when the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled to Kyiv to meet him in a risky wartime visit. “He showed very little interest in a negotiated settlement and said Ukraine needed to keep fighting until Putin altered his demands,” said a diplomat familiar with the discussions, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive meetings….
“There’s no indication on our end that the Ukrainians are suing for peace. They want to fight,” said a senior U.S. official.
When asked to account for some of Ukraine’s optimistic messaging about a deal, the official said “we’ve been puzzling over this too. We’ve been getting mixed messages.”
A second U.S. administration official said Ukraine’s statements suggest that Zelensky and his top aides haven’t come to a firm conclusion on what the Ukrainian people are willing to concede in exchange for a cease-fire and withdrawal of Russian troops.
“They just haven’t come up with a decision yet,” added a senior European official.
Others close to Zelensky say he is under extraordinary pressure to convey progress in negotiations with Russia even if the reality is less sanguine.
“Many Ukrainians are now suffering enormously. That puts our delegation under pressure to show some kind of progress in the talks,” said Yuri Vitrenko, the CEO of Naftogaz, the country’s largest state-owned oil and gas company.
So it appears we should not look for a peace deal anytime soon:
As for Putin:
President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday made his first public appearance since he ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine last month, addressing a cheering crowd of tens of thousands of Russians at Moscow’s largest stadium.
The Luzhniki arena was covered with posters that read “For a world without Nazism” — a nod to one of Mr. Putin’s stated justifications for launching the war in Ukraine, the false claim that Ukraine is run by Nazis.
As he walked to center stage, Mr. Putin proclaimed that Russians “have not had such unity for a long time.” (Associated Press)
Despite all the determination of Ukraine’s people, all the losses among Russia’s forces, and all the errors of Russia’s leaders, there is no sign that the war will soon be over. Even if he fails to take control of the country, Putin can keep up the punishing attacks on its cities and people.
As for Xi, the precise nature of his call with President Biden is as opaque as the terms of the conversation Jake Sullivan had with his Chinese counterpart earlier in the week in Rome. Team Biden has done a fine job executing its plan to keep the details of the message to China under wraps. Let’s see if that discipline pays off.
So the war goes on.
The latest, as of this writing, from the Associated Press:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces are blockading his country’s largest cities to wear the population down into submission, but he warned Saturday that the strategy will fail and Moscow will lose in the long run if it doesn’t end its war.
Zelenskyy accused the Kremlin of deliberately creating “a humanitarian catastrophe ” and appealed for Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet with him, using a huge Moscow stadium rally where Putin lavished praise on Russian forces Friday to illustrate what was at stake.
“Just picture for yourself that in that stadium in Moscow there are 14,000 dead bodies and tens of thousands more injured and maimed. Those are the Russian costs throughout the invasion,” Zelenskyy said in a nightly video address to the nation recorded outside the presidential office in Kyiv….
Fighting continued on multiple fronts in Ukraine. In the besieged port city of Mariupol, the site of some of the war’s greatest suffering, Ukrainian and Russian forces battled over the Azovstal steel plant, one of the biggest in Europe, Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said Saturday.
“I can say that we have lost this economic giant,” Denysenko said in televised remarks. “In fact, one of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is actually being destroyed.”
The Russian military reported Saturday that it has used its latest hypersonic missile for the first time in combat. A spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said Kinzhal missiles destroyed an underground warehouse storing Ukrainian missiles and aviation ammunition in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine.
Konashenkov said Russian forces also used the anti-ship Bastion missile system to strike Ukrainian military facilities near the Black Sea port of Odesa. Russia first used the weapon during its military campaign in Syria in 2016.
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If you don’t follow Ted Cruz on Twitter or read the Red press closely, you might not know that we are once again in a situation in which parts of America are deeply enraged by the conduct of the Dominant Media.
It has long been clear that the Dominant Media and Silicon Valley worked in tandem to do pretty much everything in their power to elect Joe Biden, including engaging in unprecedented censorship of news involving Hunter Biden during the final days of the campaign.
For some reason, the belated acknowledgement by the New York Times that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Hunter Biden’s laptop has set off a large round of critiques of how the matter was treated in 2020 and 2021 – as well as demands that the Dominant Media acknowledge the breathtaking failures around this story.
If our goal is to create peace, love, and understanding (as well as spread the gospel of The Presumption of Grace), I would ask those of you on the Blue team to read Glenn Greenwald, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal ed board on this topic.
As you read, look for sentences you think are false or misleading – and consider how Red America feels about what happened (and what is still happening) regarding media accountability and fairness.
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ESSENTIAL VIEWING
That time two Ohio Republican Senate candidates almost came to blows:
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