”Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory To Defeat Putin” runs the headline of an opinion piece in the New York Times that continues the paper’s very recent trend of preparing readers for Ukraine’s defeat. Serge Schmemann refers right away to a Times article from last week (see our coverage here that began preparing readers for the news that Ukraine would have to negotiate. That article was published just after a Russian government plane spent two days in Washington, D.C., with no public mention of what diplomatic activities were carried out by its passengers.
In the new opinion piece, Serge Schmemann assures us that “Recovered territory is not the only measure of victory in this war.” After hearing for the entirety of the conflict that Ukraine’s territorial integrity was sacrosanct, this comes as news. The Ukrainian counteroffensive achieved less than nothing, Ukraine military commanders refer to a “stalemate,” and leaders in the U.S. and Europe are holding up packages of funding and military supplies.
”[T]he prospect at this juncture is of a long war of attrition, inflicting ever more damage on Ukraine, sacrificing ever more lives and spreading instability over Europe,” Schmemann assesses. The endless conflict would be a “bleak prognosis if victory in the war continues to be defined in territorial terms.”
So losing territory is how to defeat Putin?
