No. of Recommendations: 11
Oh, okay. Here's the actual situation. Zelensky lacks the dudes, the guns and the money to throw Putin out of the Ukraine.
So since he can't recover all his territory...what do you propose? Oh, right. The Ukrainians keep fighting it out.
Slight problem. They don't have the dudes, the guns or the money.
So you give them the guns and the money. The West can do that for much longer than the Russians can - our economies are (collectively) doing okay, but theirs is on the brink of collapsing.
Ukraine can't throw the Russians out. But small nations never win these kinds of wars by physically throwing out the other side. Vietnam never had the power to throw the U.S. out, and Afghanistan never had the power to throw the U.S. (or the Soviets) out either. But those nations won their wars anyway, because they only needed to outlast the invading power's desire to keep fighting. The country being invaded usually has the edge there, because the fight is existential for the home country but (usually) by choice for the invading country.
If you were going into a cease-fire negotiation with Russia on behalf of Ukraine, you would typically position your side as being willing to supply Ukraine with guns and money for as long as they want them, so that Russia would face the incentive to insist on less in exchange for ending the war. Cutting off supplies to Ukraine and signaling that you care more about ending the war than any of Ukraine's objectives is probably not the best way to get them a good outcome.
