You never know what will be in the news tomorrow. Next year is even less predictable. But there’s one exception: war in Ukraine. Get used to it. You’ll be reading battlefield reports from Ukraine for a long time.
Both warring armies have goals they must achieve before laying down their weapons. The goals are fundamentally incompatible. Neither side is willing to accept even the other’s minimum demands.
Ukraine is already devastated. Combined casualties are in the hundreds of thousands. After this amount of horror over the last 18 months, we might expect that blood and exhaustion would drive combatants to the negotiating table. It hasn’t. In fact, as is often the case, heavy losses and gruesome atrocities stiffen both armies’ determination to reject compromise. What we have seen since the Russian invasion in February 2022 may be just the beginning.
World War I began in July 1914 with both sides predicting that their soldiers would be “home by Christmas.” Instead, the war dragged on for four horrific years. It all but wiped out an entire generation of European men — more than 8 million soldiers, plus at least the same number of civilians. France lost more than a million soldiers. Germany lost 2 million. Brace yourself for something comparable in Ukraine.
Read more at MSN.com
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