JRL NEWSWATCH: “Putin’s Russia is closing in on a devastating victory. Europe’s foundations are trembling” – The Telegraph (UK)
“Kyiv’s counter-offensive has ended in failure. This could be NATO’s Suez moment.”
“… Any deal that rewards Russian aggression will signal to the rest of the world that NATO, with all its collective wealth and weaponry, could not succeed in the minimal goal of rescuing a country that its two most powerful members, the US and the UK, had undertaken to protect. The case for intervention in Ukraine is not that it is a liberal democracy. Sure, it is vastly more liberal than Russia, but it falls well short of our standards. Russophile parties have been banned, and there is a worry that the crackdown might extend to pro-Western opposition politicians, too. … [I am] wondering, not for the first time, why Zelensky refuses to draw other parties into a wartime coalition. … But this is not yet over. Ukraine has driven Russia out of the western Black Sea, which is open again to international shipping. … It is still possible to imagine a peace deal that does not overtly reward aggression. Perhaps the eastern oblasts could win autonomy under loose Ukrainian suzerainty; perhaps an internationally supervised referendum might be held in a demilitarised Crimea. …”