Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

The head of NATO just announced that the war in Ukraine could last for years. It's not going to last for years, unless Ukraine and NATO make it last for years. What's going to happen is that Russia is going to continue fighting until it has whatever amount of land it wants. The most important piece for it to get was the land bridge from Russia to Crimea, so that they wouldn't be entirely dependent on that bridge they built over the Kerch Strait, which everyone said they couldn't do, calling it "Putin's folly." They surely intend to secure the whole Donbas region. And they are going to keep the Kherson region, which I have been to. It's nice. I spent quite a bit of time there. Will they try to take Kharkiv? I strongly doubt it. If anything, they would try to take Odessa. 

But, whenever they're done taking what they are going to take, they are going to announce a unilateral ceasefire and tell the Ukrainians that the war can be over, but they have to stop fighting. If they make any attempt to retake captured lands, then the war will resume. 

Will the Ukrainians choose to have more war in a vain effort to retake captured lands? They could never do it. If they could, they would have retaken Crimea.  They are no more going to take back Kherson or Mariupol than they are going to take back Crimea. 

Hopefully, we are not going to be stupid enough to urge them to keep fighting. Let the fucking war end, for Christ's sake. And the truth is that most of the people in the taken lands want to go with Russia anyway. Again, I've been there. I threw away my Ukrainian dictionary. Nobody spoke it. They all spoke Russian. 

I'm saying all this, but I don't defend what Russia did. I don't think anyone has a right to start a war. If there is no war, and you start one, you've done a monstrous thing. But, this war needs to end, and the only way it's going to end is if Ukraine admits that it's lost a huge chunk of its land.