The Ukraine War just got much, much bigger. By Sensing Online.

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. …

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. …

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.

No one had any real hope for the negotiations occasionally held in Belarus, anyway. After the Bucha massacre, “Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Ukraine’s peace negotiators and aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the tone of peace talks had forever changed because of Bucha… .” …

The Ukraine war has now transitioned into a proxy war between Russia and the Euro-American alliance. Ukraine is tragically caught in the middle. The very difficult and very uncertain task before Europe and the United States now is to manage the war to keep it inside Ukraine. (But remember the caution attributed to Bismarck that starting a war is like entering a dark room, blindfolded, to look for a black cat that is not even there.)

WWI followed a failure to contain a dispute between Austria and Serbia to within the boundaries of Serbia.