Ukraine: military (Aug '14 to mid-June '15) closed

[Firn]

Despite all of your hysterical (and frequently contradictory) claims about the mad-hatters in the Kremlin with their "altered state of reality", the fact is that Moscow and Kiev, as predicted, are coming around to an initial agreement facilitated by European governments to de-escalate the conflict and create political space for the potential establishment of a final settlement on some serious political (and social and economic) questions regarding Ukraine.

I hope that such an agreement takes place quickly although I'm doubtful to say the least. So far Putin has often 'de-escalated' - and escalated in words only to push hard in a single direction when it came to facts. We will see.

In the long term, Kiev is fighting a losing battle, the U.S. has no interest in direct conflict with Russia, and there is serious risk for the conflict's escalation to seriously damage the status quo in the rest of Europe. So - yes, an agreement will happen, and it will probably favor Russia more than Ukraine.

My take is that Russia is fighting a losing battle in the long term if the EU and the USA are not too mild with their sanctions and not too weak with their (mostly economic) support. In fact Russia has already lost a huge deal, less then the target of it's aggression of course but far more then the Western world. War is generally a loss for the countries involved, for some more and for some less. Sanctions are quite similar as they disrupt free trade. Sadly in quite a few occasions letting an aggressor continue does offer still worse choices.

I'm pretty sure nobody knows exactly what will happen in the next days, weeks, months or years. Lots of wars were started with the illusion of a relatively quick and bloodless victory, just like this one as I suppose. In quite a few cases those became very costly for the invader, eroding the will of the population. Propaganda helps to support the political goals of the leadership, but it has limits as history has shown.

In the meantime the German government has given the go-ahead for 20.000 protective vests. Merkel had promised at a CDU meeting to take personally care of their delivery. I have of course no idea how quickly they will reach the Ukrainian troops...