Putin Has No Off-Ramp. He Wants Ukraine Dead

The constant chaos of war means a never-ending stream of bad news getting worse. This weekend, Russia made a harsh demand regarding one of the major Ukrainian cities under siege: Surrender Mariupol or everyone there dies. Via Adam L Silverman at Balloon-Juice:

There is only one real story from Ukraine to focus on tonight: the Russians have given the Ukrainian government an ultimatum. Surrender Mariupol and they’ll let the remaining 130,000 civilians, as well as Ukrainian forces that lay down their weapons leave. Everyone remaining will face Russian military justice...

Military Justice = Death by Bombs and Artillery

What the Russians are threatening to do is, essentially, reduce Mariupol. The Russian military has besieged the city and is fighting against Ukrainian forces inside the city that are trying to defend Mariupol. These forces are essentially fighting in close quarters to the civilian population. As such taking Mariupol by force will mean destroying as much of the city, its defenders, and the civilian population as necessary to achieve the objective.

The Ukrainian government has responded that they will not surrender Mariupol to the Russians...!

...All we can do now is wait and see if Putin is going to commit an industrial scale war crime while the entire world watches.

Ukraine has no reason yet to think the Russians are negotiating in good faith. Previous attempts to evacuate the civilians in Mariupol ended with the Russians shooting and bombing the escape routes anyway.

It should be noted Russia under Putin's rule has a terrible record of observing neutral zones and civilian areas. Even if Mariupol surrenders, there are no guarantees that the Russian troops won't come in, round up everybody they have on blacklists, kill enough civilians to try and scare the rest of the Ukrainian people into ending their resistance, and then lie to the world that they honored their "deal."

The Russians aren't even honestly dealing. For all their public proclamations that they want peace (and telling their favorable media allies that Ukraine is close to agreeing to a deal that doesn't exist), Putin's underlings are stalling and delaying for time. More from Silverman on that:

Earlier today, a few hours before Putin told Ukraine it was planning to commit an industrial scale war crime unless Ukraine gave him what he wants, the Russians managed to launder some more disinformation and agitprop regarding “peace” negotiations through the Turks who are hosting the talks.

Meanwhile Turkey, which is mediating alongside Israel between Russia and Ukraine, claimed the two countries were converging on key aspects. Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said “the parties are close to agreement on fundamental issues”. “It’s not that easy to negotiate while the war is ongoing, or to agree when civilians are dying. But I want to say that there is momentum,” he said. Kyiv and its western allies fear Russian president Vladimir Putin could be buying time in peace talks to replenish Moscow’s forces and launch a broader offensive.

Turkey’s pro-government Hurriyet newspaper reported that the two countries were edging towards agreement on Kyiv declaring neutrality and abandoning its drive for Nato membership, “demilitarising” Ukraine in exchange for collective security guarantees, what Russia calls “denazification” and lifting restrictions on the use of Russian in Ukraine. Two people familiar with the discussions said it was likely a compromise would involve token concessions from Kyiv on what Russia calls “denazification”.

This, like the same statements made last week, are bullshit...

If the Ukrainians agreed to what the Russians have told the Turks they want, then Putin despite not actually winning on the battlefield right now, would actually wind up winning the war. If Ukraine emerges from this war formally having abandoned its constitutional directive to seek NATO membership, as well as formally neutral and demilitarized, all it does is set the stage for Putin to rebuild his military and start all over again with a new made up pretext for having to liberate Ukraine from the Ukrainians...

I've said this back when the invasion started: The demands Putin are making on Ukrainians are ones that Ukrainians dare not give him. Even if Putin is talked into pulling back and stopping this bloodshed, there are no guarantees stopping him from finding another excuse five years from now to re-invade.

Putin's already made it clear: He doesn't think Ukraine exists as its own nation. He's bought into the myths of Imperial Russia thinking that they're all one big happy Empire and that Ukrainians better get used to being second-class citizens if they want to live.

Just asking Ukraine to roll over and play dead, just this once, isn't acceptable to them, because they know their own history under Russian rule: Misery, famine, and death. For Ukrainians, Putin wants to reboot another Holodomor, and there's no appeasing him on this matter.

(For all the Far Right wingnuts who yelled and screamed at Obama for every peace deal he made around the world, accusing him of pulling "another Munich" appeasing dictators, do YOU see the hypocrisy in YOURSELVES now begging Zelenskyy and Biden and the rest of the European leadership in appeasing with an openly brutal monster like Putin?)

The way the invasion is going right now - with Russian forces openly shelling and bombing cities and civilians with no concern for human rights, with Putin doubling down on his speeches accusing Ukrainians of being Nazis and justifying his atrocities back home - I can see it, even me as an amateur historian: Putin doesn't want a deal. He never wanted a deal.

Putin wants all of Ukraine. No half-measures or compromises. And not just because he has to (because by now after all the global humiliation Russia's army has suffered, any deal he makes will make him look weak). Putin wants his dream of Empire to become reality, and Ukraine is the key to that. If he takes Ukraine, he can reimpose a Russian presence on all of Eastern Europe again, from Poland to Slovakia to Czechia to Romania to Bulgaria, get back his influence over his buddy Orban in Hungary, even rattle the Central nations like Germany and Austria. He can threaten to retake the Baltics in spite of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania's defiance. He'll even try to scare Finland and Sweden into giving up their recent petitions to join NATO (which they did before it's too late).

The thing about autocrats, about dictators, about their dreams and when they don't achieve them. Like spoiled monsters, they won't take the losses well. The way things are going, Ukraine will not surrender, they won't make any deals because Putin's not offering any. And without that, Putin runs the risk of wasting more men and weapons and other resources in a quagmire of a poorly-planned invasion/occupation, in which he can't find any Quislings to play his puppet on Ukraine's seat of power and in which his army will never see a moment of peace.

Putin's recent actions - the escalation of targeting civilians, in spite of the war crimes charges that would follow - underscore how he knows he can't win in Ukraine.

So he's going Scorched Earth instead. Old school, Cato the Elder "Carthage Must Be Destroyed" madness, only it's Kyiv that Putin wants to flatten and salt the Earth to prevent it from ever being rebuilt. 

If that means risking nuclear weapons, I do kind of doubt that. The risk of fallout from even a limited use of atomics would cross into Russia, condemning everything west of the Urals to a radioactive hell.

But Putin will not leave Ukraine, not until he owns it or ruins it.

And the Ukrainian people are sadly going to have to suffer for that violent bastard's ego.

Gods help them.