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Zkuq 6 days ago
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Ryuu96 said:

I have strong concerns about a "peace-keeping" force though, what is to stop the UK from simply withdrawing troops if they think things are getting too heated? What is to stop the next leaders from withdrawing them because they stupidly believe Russia won't attack (for the 3rd time)? Anything less than NATO is still worthless Imo, unless this is the most iron-clad security agreement second only to NATO with explicit terms that any attack on Ukraine is an attack on the UK and will be responded to with military, soldiers, actual attacks from the UK.

But even then I have my doubts there wouldn't be some get out clause or simply, a politician ignoring it, because who will stop them? The thing with ignoring NATO is that if that happened it would pretty much destroy the whole idea of NATO so that's a lot harder to ignore than individual security agreements and Ukraine already had one of those which did absolutely nothing to stop the invasion. Putin can wait out any "peace-keeping" forces, especially if sanctions were lifted on Russia allowing them to rebuild their military.

And secondly, the stolen territory needs to return to Ukraine.

Peace-keeping doesn't have to be a permanent option though, it just needs to buy Ukraine enough time to re-arm itself and hopefully to a much better state too. Peace-keeping will also increase the threshold for Russia to attack again, even if it ends up not preventing an attack altogether. Also, Russia is probably much less likely to try again if Ukraine gets time to re-arm itself after seeing how this 3-day operation went. We just need to get Ukraine past its weakest moment, and the situation should already be much better. I'm sure Russia will try again if given the chance, but it also helps if we can just buy Ukraine enough time.

It also helps that Putin isn't all that young anymore. He still has quite a few strong years in him, but he doesn't have forever either. Maybe he's capable until 80, or maybe he start's slowing down sooner.

That said, I do agree that there probably needs to be a proper guarantee as well, and at the moment it's hard to see peace-keeping being that guarantee.