Putin has limited the Russian capture of Ukrainian territories to formerly Ukrainian areas that were primarily Russian speaking and had been resisting Ukrainian rule since the 2014 coup. How that translates into a launching pad for the conquest of Europe has never been explained. From Ray McGovern at consortiumnews.com:
Given their lack of information about the Ukraine-Russia deal scuttled by Boris Johnson early in the war, many Americans will be inclined to believe Biden’s evidence-free claims in last week’s CNN debate.
Trump and Biden during the CNN debate on Thursday. (C-Span still)
At Thursday’s debate with Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” claimed that he “wants all of Ukraine. … Do you think he’ll stop? … What do you think happens to Poland and other places?”
Spoiler Alert: Official Ukrainian sources confirm that Putin did stop in March 2022, after Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky agreed to forswear membership in NATO. This was the key provision in the Ukraine-Russia deal initialed by Davyd Arakhamia, who at the time was Zelensky’s chief negotiator (and his party’s faction leader in the Rada) at the talks in Istanbul at the end of March, hardly a month into the war.
The Russians lifted their objection to Ukraine joining the EU, as the Ukrainians agreed to neutrality. Security guarantees sought by Kyiv (short of NATO membership) would be worked out. The fighting would stop. Agreement on the status of Crimea would be put off to the future.
Putin and Zelensky reportedly were micromanaging the March 2022 negotiations, and at that early stage the Russians expressed readiness for the two to meet.
At the same time that Biden and other Western leaders raise the alarm that Putin will attack other parts of Europe when he’s through with Ukraine, they claim Russia can’t even take the Ukrainian province of Kharkiv, has lost more than 500,000 men to just 30,000 Ukrainians and its economy is faltering (none of which is true.) But Cold War Western power was based on an exaggerated Soviet threat and the same is true today.
Der Friedensstifter 