The War Will Be Decided on the Battlefield, Not at the Table
There is a comforting fiction that animates almost every round of diplomacy over this war: the idea that peace is something one assembles at a table, by leaning on both sides until they meet somewhere in the middle. Pressure Kyiv to give a little, pressure Moscow to give a little, and the killing stops. It is a tidy theory. It is also, I am convinced, a delusion — one that has cost a great many lives and will cost more before it is finally abandoned. This war does not have a diplomatic solution that anyone in Kyiv could accept and survive. It has a military solution, and the sooner that truth is spoken plainly, the sooner the war can actually end — on the battlefield, in Ukraine’s favor. ...