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The Ukraine Conflict End State? – by English Outsider
by English Outsider
Russia will just overwhelm Ukraine and then install a puppet government to ensure it remains as a neutral buffer between Russia and Europe/NATO. This could go on for some more years, or maybe Russia will speed things up, surprise everyone, and make it happen sooner.
Posted by: aelfwed | May 28 2026 0:24 utc | 52
Yes, the end state of remnant Ukraine will be along those lines, though precisely how it’ll be done is unclear and is still maybe unclear to the Russians themselves. Friendly state (unlikely), neutral state, puppet state or occupied territory. The last decidedly the worst case for the Russians and they’ll avoid it if they can. Also, of course, the worst case for remnant Ukraine.
The position has changed, however, since the early Istanbul negotiations. Paramount now is the Russian need to prevent remnant Ukraine being used by the West for attacks into Russia. These have increased greatly in scale and intensity over the last few years and there is no indication that these attacks will cease unless remnant Ukraine is neutralised in one of the ways set out above.
This is not some rarefied “geostrategic theory” for the analysts to mull over. It is an urgent practical necessity for the Putin administration. How long would any American administration last if the American President had to say to his voters “We’re getting sabotage and assassination missions run in against us from Mexico. Drones and missiles are still coming over. There’s not a lot we can do to close these attacks down entirely so we’re going to have to put up with them for the indefinite future.” Impossibly to imagine an American President saying that and similarly impossible for any Russian President. So the Russians do have to aim for an end state to this conflict that precludes, permanently and entirely, any such threat on their Western border emanating from remnant Ukraine.
This imperative takes precedence over any other Russian goals. Maybe they’ll get their “new European Security Architecture”, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll come to some accommodation with the US, maybe they won’t. But if they don’t solve the problem posed to them by the Western use of remnant Ukraine as a convenient base for mounting attacks into Russia, their entire Special Military Operation will have gone for nothing. They’ll be ending up precisely where they started from in February 2022. They will have been defeated.
Since the Russians can’t be forced to accept what would be to them an entirely unsatisfactory outcome, they won’t. They can’t be forced by economic or diplomatic means, certainly not by military means, to accept defeat. So the end state for remnant Ukraine will inevitably be as set out. Friendly state, neutral state, puppet state or Russian-occupied. Any one of those results will preclude the hostile use of remnant Ukraine by the West and one of those results will be what we see at the end of this war.
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The above is not speculation or theory. It’s what’s going to happen. But is it permissible, in a comment section, to engage in hopeful speculation?
Because there’s always something new coming up. What seemed a very remote possibility indeed a couple of years ago is now perhaps a little less remote: that the people of remnant Ukraine themselves will finally understand that they’ve been used by the West, used as a mere counter in the Western/Russian conflict, and mercilessly used to an extent now resulting in their destruction. Here on “b’s” site Jeremy Rhymings-Lang, and often others, are charting the change in public opinion in Ukraine in detail and it does look as if that change might be gathering force.
We don’t know how much of the old Ukraine is going to end up as remnant Ukraine. Nothing like as much as would have been the case had the Istanbul negotiations succeeded. But that outside chance, that the Ukrainians themselves will say, “a curse on both your houses,” and themselves prevent the use made of them by the West as a convenient Western attack dog, might just possibly be there.
It should never be forgotten that in 2019 the Ukrainians themselves voted by a landslide majority for just that course. In the intervening years the savagery of war, the increasing grip of the extremists on power, the unremitting efforts by the Wester powers to “keep Ukraine in the fight”, and the heroic obstinacy of the Ukrainians themselves, has seemed to rule that 2019 decision out. The chance is still there.
End of hopeful speculation. But given that the end state of remnant Ukraine is inevitable, it’d be good if that’s how that end state was arrived at.
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b here:
My hunch is that whatever will be left of Ukraine, twenty years from now, will end up similar to Georgia. A country that has opted for a kind of neutrality while it is doing good business with its large Russian neighbor. It does so, against the wishes of Brussels, Washington and their paid for ‘nationalists’, because it makes sense.
@English Outsider | May 29 2026 13:22 utc | 237
And thanks to you for replying! I came across that Ritter piece… somewhere. Maybe a Simplicius comment thread, I forgot.
>>Professor Diesen joins Professors Roberts and Mearsheimer and a host of other authoritative sources who get that Russian invasion of Ukraine wrong.
Seems that Jacques Baud escapes your scorn? He seems to be rigorous and comprehensive in his analysis? And Jeffrey Sachs has a sweeping narrative of how the US always has steered post-Soviet history towards this culmination, with him witnessing things first-hand. (Well, “witness”: critics contend that Sachs played his own, not very proud, role initially as one of the Harvard Boys.) Why would any of them even be “authoritative”: surely some of them are knowledgeable, others are articulate, and yet they screw up no less than we do; provided we keep thinking for ourselves.
You also reference someone you call the Colonel. You mean Jacques Baud? Or Doug McGregor, Daniel Davis? There used to be a Pat Lang, whom I never followed. Guess all such types are filtered out before they make it to General. 🙂
Indeed, the Donbas crisis is key. I always raise it, together with the question “Who started the shooting?!” And we have Lavrov’s warning from Spring ’21 I think, “An attempt to resolve the Donbas crisis with violence, through ethnic cleansing, will be the end of the Ukrainian state.” Certainly, the willful Donbas escalation in Jan/Feb ’21 is the proximate cause, and explains the timing of the Russian intervention. This is the key to so much; no wonder the West deliberately obscures it through the Holy Words “full-scale invasion, brutal and unprovoked.” No: surely Moscow had some contingency plans in place but at the hour of truth they went in with what limited forces and preparation they could muster–because they were on Tony Blinken’s schedule, not their own (a position any general surely hates to be in). But doesn’t all this also show that Moscow didn’t have a clue whom they were dealing with, and did this even change meanwhile in Putin’s case. They recognized LDNR and put a tripwire force in; thinking surely that would be the end of it, for now Kiev had to back the hell down or risk open war. Little did they understand that the key playas were salivating at the idea of setting it all off.
Fundamentally, isn’t this simple: Maidanistan was created with the sole purpose of waging war on the Russian Federation. The West has no other positive, civilian, use for this territory. Like the Bamboo Lounge in Goodfellas once it fell under mafia protection, Ukraine has been looted and written off, until you finally torch it for the insurance money. Or, in the words of Jens Stoltenberg (I may be paraphrasing slightly), “The AFU is our anti-Russia fist.” That fist should thus be cut off from the main body, and I’m most willing to believe that the procedure hurts a bit…
Then again, why one thing or another? With US wars we have these endless chicken-and-egg discussions “Oil or Israel”, completely missing the point of how professional warmongers build coalitions and manufacture consent in Washington corridors, ensuring that money sloshes through all the system’s key nodes. Focusing on the LDNR civilians to the exclusion of other factors makes this out to be a humanitarian war, and I don’t believe any power wages purely humanitarian wars–certainly not on this scale. It was NATO encroachment and planned missile silos in E Ukraine which created the security threat to the Russian Federation.
Anyway, I’d be happy to continue the discussion.
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@Tel | May 29 2026 13:36 utc | 240
>>By the way, Sumy is already under pressure from multiple sides and largely indefensible
There we go again. According to which map or other source? After some bloody back-and-forth, the SouthFront maps at least have this area much as it was–over a year ago already. @smartfox I think quoted yesterday the official Moscow MOD that they bombed Yunakivka–you know, the last logistics stop before the Russian border during the Kursk caper. Assuming the good folks in Moscow haven’t completely lost it (unlike a certain other VIP who seems to think he appointed the Pope, and would make a better pope himself), that means that even Yunakivka is still in AFU hands, not their own. Without a map this Sumy encirclement just looks like a meme to me and if so, such delusion is dangerous.
Posted by: Ma Laoshi | May 29 2026 16:18 utc | 251
@English Outsider | May 29 2026 20:33 utc | 273
>>Can’t think what the Swiss government was up to, allowing a Swiss citizen to be put under what amounted to house arrest by the EU.
The Swiss (like the Swedes, and us Dutch for a long time) have done a good job projecting a wholesome image. But in fact, they were subsumed into the Borg long ago. I even have my own theory of when. Shortly after Holy Tuesday (what 9-11 is called in KSA), Washington came down hard on the Swiss, saying their banking secret could be abused by the terrists–and who are we to say that never happened, right? Ominously, Little Bush added “If you’re not with us then you’re against us”, and early this century those words carried a lot of weight. So the end-state was that Swiss banking became transparent to the Dark Throne as one-way traffic; same deal as with SWIFT. Ever since, this has been a huge advantage also in civilian, commercial US dealings with Europe; information is power, right?
Another episode were those Swiss encrypted phones every bigwig just had to have as a status symbol, proving you had Serious Business to discuss. Correct me if I’m wrong, but interestingly I think the company behind them started legit. Over time though, the CIA inserted themselves; as Biden said when announcing the Nord Stream hit, “We the US actually have that power.” From then, everybody and his dog was volunteering to deliver their dirty laundry to the CIA on a silver platter; what were they thinking?!
Final example at the point of no return, the June ’21 Biden-Putin summit in Geneva. Everything was worked out, and then at the very last moment the Swiss rejected the COVID-vax certificates of the Russian journalists–only. Putin should have learned a thing from the Kim dynasty, and turned right around to Moscow without saying a word. He just won’t do it, because he conceives of Russia as being subordinate to US hegemony. Five years later, the Russkies are still whining why nobody else takes them seriously, just like Josep Borrell used to do.
>>Summary of Colonel Lang’s career and writings here:-
Well let’s keep in mind that IIRC Pat Lang did filthy business in Libya, just as our good friend Larry Johnson did filthy business in Honduras (or, being an analyst, at least to Honduras). Not suggesting that, for the sake of purity, we should shun people who actually have subject knowledge; just keeping the whole picture in mind. I remember or misremember that people here or on SouthFront griped that TTG was a rabid Lithuanian neocon bringing the whole site down. Anyway, with the world falling apart before our eyes, little reason to delve into yesterday’s news.
>>Probably why they’re still seething and hoping to get back at the enemy somehow.
I think something changed: a real Zeitenwende, but not like Olaf Scholz meant it–and I’d never have imagined Russians making the mental break. Europe is apoplectic “Butbutbut, if you’d just capitulated to our banks, you could’ve made more money!” And Russia, in effect, answers “We have money: our people have enough to eat, and our cannons aren’t going hungry either. Besides, unless Mother Russia is sovereign and secure, all that wealth we think we have is just an illusion, which we’ve seen can be stolen from us any given day.”
Bravo! But since then, we’ve seen Russian elites vacillate. Ideally, they’d like to have it both ways–who wouldn’t? But they can’t, and it’s time to choose. Unfortunately, it’s so unlike Putin to commit to one choice, stick with it, and see it through.
>>and the Ukrainian PBI stuck at the sharp end
No idea what “PBI” is; are you ex-military perhaps? Please enlighten me.
>> I think it might have been Baud who said that if they’d thrown the lives of our own troops away like that, they’d have been cashiered.
Aleks at Black Mountain thinks it’s more extreme than “Oh well no matter, it was worth a try.” Dead Ukies all end up in NATO’s profit column, because Ukies are Russians. No loose ends; for all the marbles.
Posted by: Ma Laoshi | May 30 2026 18:49 utc | 290
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