There is no evidence that either side in the Russia-Ukraine war wants to end the fighting and plenty of evidence that they don’t. As the war goes on, so does the propaganda making it difficult to see through the ‘fog of war’, but the ongoing fog of negotiations are more about posturing and blaming the other side for the negotiations going nowhere.
Beyond the propaganda though, it is obvious that both sides want to keep on fighting.
Wars end when someone wins. No one has won and the likelihood of anyone winning remains debatable, but the Russians and Ukrainians hate each other enough (as I’ve been saying since Day 1) to go on slogging it out. It’s not WWIII (as I’ve also been saying since Day 1) it’s more like WWI with drones and GoPros.
President Trump may be able to force a temporary ceasefire, but even that is uncertain. The Israelis wanted to please Trump and Hamas wanted to rearm and prepare for the next round of fighting. And that ‘ceasefire’ didn’t last very long either. Neither Ukraine nor Russia seem especially keen to do likewise. But that’s not an end to the war, it’s an end to a round of fighting. The war is, as anti-war types like to say, endless because the identity of both sides is intimately tied to mutual hostility. Russia needs Ukraine to regain its sense of greatness. Ukraine needs to fight Russia because that is what a nice chunk of its history is about. In between are various ‘mixed’ populations playing odd-man out in the fighting much as they do in Iraq.
Is there any answer to this? Not really. We can force a ceasefire, but the fighting will eventually resume.
The good news is that the Western Europeans are arming up (the Eastern Europeans are an easier sell) and taking some of the burden off our shoulders. That’s good for us. It’s good for them.
