On: War in Ukraine: Zelensky proposes face-to-face meeting with Putin to end years-l

Diary Entry

Zelensky offers a ceasefire and a meeting. He is playing the turkey. For a thousand days, the farmer feeds you. On day one thousand and one, he wrings your neck. The asymmetry is total: for Putin, a ceasefire is a free option. He can rearm, regroup, and restart the war at a time of his choosing, having solidified his territorial gains. For Ukraine, a ceasefire is a surrender of momentum, a freezing of the conflict on terms that are not its own. The downside is bounded for Russia - a pause. The upside is unbounded for Russia - consolidation of conquest. For Ukraine, the downside is ruin - the permanent loss of sovereign territory and the guarantee of a future, stronger attack. The upside? A temporary respite that makes the next shock more lethal.

This is not diplomacy. It is a proposal to accept fragility. An antifragile system - a nation under invasion - must gain from disorder, not seek to placate it. The gain comes from exposing the invader’s overextension, from making the cost of occupation convex for him. To stop now is to grant the invader the one thing he needs most: time to repair his own fragility.

Where is the skin in the game? The mediators, the diplomats, the commentators in distant capitals who urge “negotiation” - they bear no cost if this “ceasefire” becomes the mechanism of Ukraine’s eventual dismemberment. Their payoff is positive regardless: they get to claim they “pursued peace.” The pilot in the cockpit, however, is Zelensky. He and his people will pay the full price of a structural error. He is listening to the intellectual yet idiots, who mistake a signed document for a durable outcome.

The via negativa is clear. Do not add another layer of negotiation. Remove the illusion that you can reason with a counterparty for whom agreements are strictly non-convex - he profits from breaking them. The only robust move is to increase the cost of the war for Russia until its continuation becomes impossible for the Kremlin. Anything else is just feeding the turkey.