NYT Admits: Only More War Allowed in Ukraine

Ukraine cannot defeat Russia on the battlefield and the West doesn't know what to do

The New York Times ran a story on Friday that summed up what The Trends Journal has been saying since the start of the Ukraine War: no talk of compromise is allowed unless Ukraine achieves all of its goals against the much larger Russian army.  

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The Times reported on the Western backlash that NATO’s Stian Jenssen faced when he mentioned that one of the ways to possibly achieve peace would be for Ukraine to give up land already occupied by Russia.   

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Jenssen, the chief of staff for NATO head Jens Stoltenberg, told Verdens Gang, a Norwegian paper earlier this month, that he believes ceding land to Russia could be a “possible solution.” 

He told the paper that he was not necessarily endorsing such an idea and said it should be up to the Ukrainians to determine what they see as an acceptable outcome. 

Mykhailo Podoliak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's top adviser, was outraged.  

“Trading territory for a NATO umbrella? It is ridiculous. That means deliberately choosing the defeat of democracy, encouraging a global criminal, preserving the Russian regime, destroying international law, and passing the war on to other generations,” he said. 

Jenssen, like a good boy, quickly apologized and said his comments were part of a larger discussion and he should have framed it differently.   

“It is completely Ukraine’s independent right to decide,” he said, repeating what he said a day earlier. 

The Times, citing analysts, reported that the backlash that Jenssen faced “reflects a closing down of public discussion on options for Ukraine just at a moment when imaginative diplomacy is most needed.” 

Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told the paper, “There is a broad and increasingly widespread sense that what we’re doing now isn’t working, but not much of an idea of what to do next, and not a big openness to discuss it, which is how you come up with one. The lack of success hasn’t opened up the political space for an open discussion of alternatives.” 

The paper also spoke with Thomas E. Graham, a former American diplomat in Moscow. Graham was one of the former U.S. officials who NBC News reported met in April with Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat. 

The report said the group met for several hours and one of the key agenda items was the “fate of Russian-held territory that Ukraine may never be able to liberate and the search for an elusive diplomatic off-ramp that could be tolerable to both sides.” 

Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman from the Russian Foreign Ministry, took to Telegram to label the report “fake news” and “disinformation spread by Western media.” 

Graham said: “Any open discussion of a Plan B is politically fraught, as Mr. Jenssen found out the hard way, as do we who try to articulate possible Plan B’s. We get a storm of criticism and abuse. What was somewhat taboo is now highly taboo.”