Critter Corner

PAGE 30 | SEPTEMBER 29 - OCTOBER 5, 2022

LOCAL

BACK IN THE DAY

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Falls Church News-Press

Vol. VIII, No. 28 • September 25, 1997

No Level Playing Field: New Sod Is No Go on GMHS Field

Falls Church News-Press

Vol. XXIII, No. 31 • September 27, 2012

F.C. School Enrollment Leaps By 4.5% For 2nd Straight Year, at Record High

Continuing problems with the new sod on the George Mason High School football/soccer field will force the move of the third straight home football game to another field and could result in the loss of the entire home football season if repairs cannot be made in time.

Although the deadline for reporting official enrollment numbers is not until Friday, Falls Church City Schools’ Superintendent Dr. Toni Jones offered a snapshot to the News-Press yesterday showing a whopping 4.5 percent overall enrollment increase. FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM

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Outcomes On How Ukraine War Ends

Conti nued from Page 9

claimed, a state led by “Nazis” and the spearhead of a NATO plan to push farther east toward the Russian motherland, how could Putin not ask the Russian people to mobilize for that fi ght? If the cause was so just and the war so necessary, why did Putin have to pay criminals and mercenaries to rise up and expect the middle classes of Moscow and Leningrad to just shut up?

People talk, and every Russian soldier or Russian-speaking Ukrainian who sided with Putin has to be thinking: “Do I stay? Do I run? Who will protect me if the front breaks?”Such an alliance is highly vulnerable to cascading collapse — fi rst slowly and then quickly. Watch out.

Why? Because Putin has already alluded several times to being willing to contemplate using a nuclear weapon if Ukraine and its NATO allies start to overwhelm his forces and he is staring at complete humiliation. I sure hope the CIA has a covert plan to interrupt Putin’s chain of command so no one would push the button.

Outcome 2

I cannot imagine Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accepting a cease-fi re or something near it right now, with his forces currently having so much momentum and his having committed to recovering every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. But keep this outcome in the back of your mind as winter sets in and Putin’s refusal to sell natural gas to Europe drives up energy prices so high that it forces more factories to close and poorer Europeans to choose between heating and eating.

Even though it would mean Putin’s war gains fell far short of his goals, he may be interested in seizing this outcome, so he has at least something to show for all his losses and avoids total humiliation.

A lot of European leaders would grab this deal, even if they will not say so out loud. Here is how a retired senior European statesman, who spoke on condition of not being quoted by name, explained it at a business and politics seminar that I attended.

The goal of Ukraine is to win, he said. The goal of the European Union is a bit diff erent. It is to have peace, and if there is a price for that, some leaders in Europe would be ready to pay the right price. The U.S. is far away, and for the U.S., he added, it is not the worst thing to keep the war going to weaken Russia and make certain it doesn’t have the energy for any other adventures.

To be sure, he added, the EU is more united than before the war started. However, in the next few months things will get quite diffi cult. There will be a big divide in the EU — and it will get more and more diffi cult because the goals will become more and more diff erent, the former statesman said. Even if the public statements are the same, the EU is divided on how to deal with the war — not on the big question of whether Putin is right or there is a threat, but on how to deal with the whole situation, especially where the populist backlashes emerge when people get totally stressed this winter.

Some European leaders will begin to ask, “Is there a way out through negotiations?” Sure, some like the Baltic countries will 100 percent support Zelenskyy. But others will not care about freezing for Donetsk or Luhansk, he concluded.

As Michael Mandelbaum, the author of “The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy,” put it to me: Putin may smell this and decide that his best move to save a shred of dignity and “expose the divisions in the EU is by announcing that he is ready to negotiate a cease-fi re in place and would resume gas shipments to the EU if a deal can be done. But this would surely require providing Zelenskyy with the inducement of permanent, binding security guarantees — perhaps full NATO membership.”

This outcome is dirty because it would mean that Putin got away with both murder and grand larceny, showing that he can change the borders of Europe by force. But if you don’t think some Europeans (and more than a few MAGA Republican members of Congress) wouldn’t seize it and press for it if the war stretches to winter, you are fooling yourself.

I also would not rule out an Outcome 2-B, where Putin doubles down to ensure that he can unilaterally take home at least a bite of Ukraine, by trying to do more damage to Ukrainian towns he doesn’t control and by having his puppet parliament pass legislation to enable four Russianoccupied Ukrainian regions to hold “referendums” on joining Russia. The moves this week to hold referendums appear to have two aims: stopping the panic in these regions among pro-Russia Ukrainians that they could be abandoned and signaling to Kyiv, America and the EU: “I’ve still got lots of rockets and no conscience. If you don’t give me some face-saving slice so I can justify this war to my people, I will really destroy this place. Remember Grozny and Aleppo.”

Outcome 3: This IS a less dirty deal, but with the Russian people, not Putin. In this scenario, NATO and the Ukrainians propose a cease-fi re on the basis

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of the Feb. 24 lines: where Russia and Ukrainian forces stood before Putin’s invasion. Ukraine is spared more destruction, and the principle of the inadmissibility of changing borders by force is upheld. But Putin would have to admit to his people: “We suffered some 70,000 casualties, lost thousands of tanks and armored vehicles and experienced terrible economic sanctions — and I got you nothing.”

Of course, it is impossible to imagine him saying that. But such a deal could be in the interest of the Russian people. So, as far as I can imagine it, Putin would probably have to be ousted by a popular mass protest movement, or by a palace coup. All blame for the war could be pinned on him, and Russia could promise to be a good neighbor again if the West lifted its sanctions. Zelenskyy would have to give up his dream of recovering those areas of Ukraine seized by Russia in 2014, but Ukraine could begin healing and at least resume the process of joining the European Union, and maybe even NATO.

All of this helps explain the undertow I detected in Europe last week, the sense that this war could end in many diff erent ways, some better, some worse, but none easy.

And that’s even without Outcome 4 — something no one can predict.

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