SENSING ONLINE: The Ukraine War just got much, much bigger.

These massacres and casualty levels (on both sides) now mean that a negotiated peace is off the table. For Putin to make such an agreement would be seen by the senior military and civilian Russian leadership as an admission of Putin’s personal failure. And Putin would have to realize that making such a peace would be professionally and possibly personally lethal for him. Russians know good and well that the Czar/General Secretary/President is never the one who fails the country, ever. If Putin accepted a negotiated peace, everyone else within the senior reaches of government and the military would know that the scapegoating purges would come quickly. And Putin knows that they would know that. Who would act decisively first – Putin and his inner, purge-immune circle, or the intended victims?

As for Zelensky, to negotiate a peace with invaders who have mass murdered his people on repeated occasions would also be an admission of failure. Unlike Russia, he would likely remain in office until the end of his term, and even if he was forced out, his exit would have the façade not of disgrace, but of an exhausted hero of world significance, to whom the nation owes its everlasting gratitude.

Until a point, that is, And that point is if the war simply drags on. Putin cannot relent. Ukraine now must win. Before now, all Ukraine had to do was not lose, but that is no longer good enough. Now it must eject Russia from the country, and not slowly. But Putin cannot allow his army to be so defeated.

Plus: “The very difficult and very uncertain task before Europe and the United States now is to manage the war to keep it inside Ukraine.”