Only if
The invader reminds us he’s not doing all this for the hell of it. If he doesn’t profit what was any of it for?
Vladimir Putin has said that the outline of a draft peace plan discussed by the US and Ukraine could serve as a basis for future negotiations to end the war – but insisted Ukraine would have to surrender territory for any deal to be possible.
It’s like when you rob a bank, or a woman walking down the street. You do it because you want their money. If you don’t get any money, you’re not going to stop, are you. You’re there for a reason.
Speaking to reporters during a working visit to Kyrgyzstan, Putin said Russia would halt its offensive only if Ukrainian forces withdrew from unspecified areas currently under Kyiv’s control. “If Ukrainian troops leave the territories they occupy, then we will stop fighting,” he said. “If they don’t, we will achieve our aims militarily.”
Of course he said that. He’s not there because he got confused. He’s there to grab as much of Ukraine as he can. Stalin would be proud of him. Trump is proud of him.
Quite apart from the illegitimacy of the territorial demands, there’s the fallacious assumption that Putin would indeed be satisfied and leave Ukraine in peace if the Ukrainians would only make the required territorial concessions. As people like Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum keep pointing out, Putin has never once moderated his official stance that the end-goal is the eradication of Ukraine as a sovereign state. Because this war was never about territory in the first place. Nor was it ever about protecting Russian speakers in Ukraine from persecution (as Snyder pointed out, Russian speakers in Ukraine have a lot more rights, protections, and freedoms than Russian speakers in Russia).
I’m persuaded by the argument that what Putin fears most of all is that the Ukrainians are going to succeed in establishing a thriving democracy, since that might lead his own people to think “Haven’t we always been told that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, that Ukraine is culturally part of Russia etc. If they can have democracy and the rule of law, why can’t we?”. Trump supports Putin because they both share the same desire for a world in which the powerful get to rule without constraints.