The end to war in Ukraine is clear and Trump holds all the cards

Aside from the rhetoric, there is a growing consensus among Western diplomats, military analysts, military officers, heads of state and even much of the media about how to end the endless Ukrainian war.A proposed peace will see a DMZ established somewhere along an adjusted 1,200-mile Ukraine-Russia border.Tough negotiations will adjudicate how far east toward its original borders Russian forces will be leveraged to backstep.Publicly in the US and covertly in Europe, all accept that a depleted Ukraine will not have the military strength to retake Crimea and the Donbas.In 2014, both were absorbed by Russia during the Obama administration.

Neither that administration nor any since has advocated a military effort to reclaim them.Loudly, the US — and again quietly Europe — concedes that Ukraine will not be in NATO, a confirmation that Russia will use to justify to its people its disastrous invasion, and even many Ukrainians will accept.How will the West deter Russian leader Vladimir Putin from his inevitable agenda of reclaiming lost Soviet territory and Russian-speaking peoples? For now, his army is exhausted, its arsenals depleted, and its reputation shattered.In the future, a commercial corridor, anchored by concessions to American and international mining concerns, will supposedly serve as a tripwire to deter Putin from attacking in-the-way noncombatant Americans.More practically, Ukrainian forces will be kept fully armed.They have already inflicted perhaps a million casualties on Putin’s forces — possibly five times the dead, wounded and missing that the Russians lost to the Taliban over that entire decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan.If Trump can coax even a ceasefire, the oddly bellicose left will still rail about “Munich” and Trump as “Putin’s puppet.”But after perhaps 1.5 million total Ukrainian and Russian dead, wounded, sick and missing, transatlantic leftists will quietly admit they never had any realistic plan to win by fighting Russi...