Here’s the lede in the WSJ article:
Germany, France, and Britain see stronger ties between NATO and Ukraine as a way to encourage Kyiv to start peace talks with Russia later this year, officials from the three governments said, as some of Kyiv’s Western partners have growing doubts over its ability to reconquer all its territory.
Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelenskyy always has been willing to engage in peace talks with the barbarian invader, and his criteria for entering into those negotiations have been clearly stated all along. That Vladimir Putin refuses to meet those criteria—his insistence, in fact, that Ukraine isn’t even a real nation—are on the barbarian chieftain, not on Zelenskyy. Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and Olaf Scholz, the British Prime Minister, French President, and German Chancellor, respectively, know this full well. I’ll have more on that growing doubt of Ukraine’s recovering its territory (not reconquering, as those three put it) below.
There’s this from a carefully anonymous French…official:
We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable. And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.
None of these wondrous national leaders—or the Biden administration, come to that—believed Ukraine would be able to defeat the barbarian’s initial invasion, either; they expected Ukraine to fall in a matter of days. That was their rationalization for withholding weapons Ukraine—the folks actually doing the fighting, bleeding, and dying—said they needed to drive the barbarian back out. And so here we are, a year later, and the Ukrainians are still fighting, bleeding, and dying, and they have recovered much of the territory the barbarian took (and devastated and inflicted atrocities on the captured populations during the occupations, on the way back out, and still from afar. But these wonders continue to avert their eyes from that).
If these august personages, including our own President Joe Biden (D) were serious about Russia mustn’t win, or whether the war goes on for [too] long, they’d get out of the way of arms transfers to Ukraine, they’d rapidly supply the weapons Ukraine says they need, in the numbers and at the pace Ukraine says they need them, so Ukraine could avoid an attritional war, recover all of their lost territory—including Crimea—and win quickly.
Finally, there’s this most blatant bit of hypocrisy, and outright dishonesty, from Macron himself as he told Mr Zelensky that (as paraphrased by the WSJ)
even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II.
Of course. But not until after Germany had been driven back completely out of France—and all other Nazi German-occupied territories. Peace talks were not even allowed until then; the Allies demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender before peace talks could begin. Zelenskyy is not holding out for the barbarian’s unconditional surrender, only that he leave Ukraine.
