Noam Chomsky: “Much of the rest of Europe is calling for negotiations now, while the U.S. insists that priority must be to severely weaken Russia, hence no negotiations.”
in the Eastern Mediterranean are expected to rise a meter by mid-century and up to 2.5 meters by 2100. Of course it doesn’t stop there. The consequences are almost impossible to envision.
The referenda in this case lack any credibility. It was different in the case of the Crimea referendum in 2014. For one thing, the Russian takeover of Crimea didn’t happen in a vacuum. For another, there’s reason to suppose that Crimeans looked to Russia more than to Ukraine. Though the referenda were not internationally accepted, it was recognized by many that the results were not very surprising. That’s not the case with the current referenda.
The second way suggests that what Russia hopes to achieve is primarily neutralization of Ukraine and “demilitarization and denazification.” The former means cancellation of the programs of the past years to integrate Ukraine de facto within NATO. That approaches President Zelenskyy’s proposals as recently as last March for neutralization with security guarantees. The latter would be a topic for discussion in serious negotiations.
There are other issues to be settled, primarily Crimea and the Donbass region. An optimal solution would be internationally sponsored referenda on the various options that have been proposed. That is presumably not possible now, but a serious effort on negotiations might improve the prospects. Recall that we havethat as recently as last April there were serious Ukraine-Russia negotiations under Turkish auspices and that the U.S.-U.K. opposed them.
Only a few days ago, French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been more closely involved in current negotiation efforts than any other figure, expressed somewhat similar views. In his opinion, at the time of Zelenskyy’s election in 2019, a settlement favorable to Ukraine could have been reached along the lines of the Minsk agreement. He also feels that options for diplomacy remain open.