There are times I worry that I am sounding like a broken record on the subject of Ukraine, but, checking Bluesky Monday morning — I check Bluesky so you don’t have to — I saw this skeet from The Philadelphia Inquirer’s furthest leftward columnist, Will Bunch, promoting neoconservative columnist Trudy Rubin’s latest:

After three years of war in Ukraine, a Trump-backed ‘Russian peace’ would spell disaster

Leaders who still believe in democracy — not only Europeans, but also Japan and South Korea — must ensure that Putin cannot destroy Ukraine.

by Trudy Rubin | Monday, February 24, 2025 | 6:00 AM EST

BERLIN — Today, on the third anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, it is clear who should win the 2025 Nobel Peace prize.

I do not know if Mrs Rubin or an editor wrote that headline, but the war in Ukraine is already a disaster.

That honor rightly belongs to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — no matter what emerges from the sham peace process that President Donald Trump is promoting for his own glory, all in open pursuit of the accolade.

It is Zelensky who has shown what leaders of European and Asian democracies must do to prevent reverting to a pre-World War II status quo, where great powers devoured weaker countries and seized their resources. He has led his people in holding off the supposedly second-most powerful army on earth for three years, with substantial (but insufficient) U.S. assistance and even greater amounts of aid from Europe.

But now, the American president is repeating Putin’s mantras, denigrating Ukraine, and seems poised to cut aid.

It should be noted here that Donald Trump campaigned on ending the war in Ukraine and many of his supporters, and voters — and yes, I voted for Mr Trump — did so based on that issue. My older daughter is in the United States Army Reserve, and the last thing I want is to see her called up to join the fight in Ukraine.

I read Mrs Rubin’s column, and once again I did not see anything from her telling us how Ukraine can actually break the stalemate and actually win the war.

If the stalemate cannot be broken, the war will continue its death and destruction for no other purpose than to keep killing people and devastating the country. The Washington Post reported, last December, how there are many forty and fifty-year-old soldiers on the front lines for Ukraine, because they are running short of fighting-aged men. The truth is simple: Ukraine cannot expel the Russians — and complete expulsion of the Russian military is how President Zelenskyy has defined Ukraine’s war goals — and win its war without US/NATO troops on the ground directly fighting Russia, nuclear-armed Russia, and that’s World War III. Is there any public support in the US or NATO to send their own troops to fight Russia in Ukraine?

If we are not willing to do the only thing possible to actually win that war, what is the sense of prolonging it?

Mrs Rubin concluded with three points, a “last chance” for “the GOP’s Ukraine hawks . . . to finally grow some courage”; direct aid to Ukraine’s military, “complete with a vetting process to ensure where the money goes”; and “every country that supports democracy should start talking up Zelensky as a future Nobel Peace Prize winner”, to portray him as a hero for democracy. Those things would do nothing.

What does Mrs Rubin not propose? She doesn’t propose the one thing which could reasonably break the stalemate, and allow Ukraine to expel the Russian military, and that’s the sending of US/NATO troops to fight the Russians. She doesn’t propose that because she knows, just as well as the rest of us, that that’s tantamount to World War III, with a nation which possesses a strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal. She doesn’t propose that because she knows that the United States under President Trump, just as under President Biden, would not do that, and she knows that, despite some tough talk by the United Kingdom and France, the European NATO members won’t do it either. She even admitted it:

Yet, although they made strong declarations of future aid to Ukraine in Munich, and subsequently in Paris, top officials in Germany, France, and Great Britain are hobbled by domestic politics.

“(H)obbled by domestic politics,” huh? Translation: the European people might want Ukraine to win the war, but they sure don’t want to fight in it! The columnist seems to believe that we could help Ukraine win by holding demonstrations and rallies in support of President Zelenskyy and his brave resistance from half a world away.

One final point:

Judging by what Trump has said so far, and the herky-jerky way that peace talks in Saudi Arabia have been rolled out, the president would be satisfied with a ceasefire that contained no guarantees of Ukrainian security should Putin later renege on the deal.

Mrs Rubin was certainly willing to support the ceasefire in Gaza, “a ceasefire that contained no guarantees of Israeli or Palestinian security should Hamas or Israel later renege on the deal”. Mrs Rubin apparently supports continued fighting and destruction and bloodshed in a stalemated war, yet a ridiculous ceasefire in a war Israel was clearly winning. Where is the intellectual consistency in that?

I certainly don’t want Russia and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to win this war, but I am not willing to do the one thing that could change that, sending American and NATO troops to Ukraine and set off World War III. And for all of the articles I’ve seen proposing that we keep the war going by continuing to send money and military equipment to Ukraine, I never seem to see anyone seriously proposing a way in which Ukraine could be helped to actually win that war.