On "Peace Plans" and Military (Im)Mobility in Europe
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Schengen Area
15 min read
The article discusses 'military Schengen' as a proposed solution for troop movement, but readers may not fully understand the original Schengen framework - its history, how it actually works, which countries participate, and why it was revolutionary for European integration. Understanding the civilian system illuminates why a military equivalent is both desirable and complex.
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Permanent Structured Cooperation
12 min read
The article mentions PESCO as the EU mechanism working on military mobility since 2018, but doesn't explain what PESCO actually is. This EU defense framework is poorly understood even by many Europeans - its history, how it differs from NATO, what projects it encompasses, and why it represents a significant shift in European defense policy.
Hello Everyone,
There’s a lot of fuss again about a secret US-Russian peace plan for Ukraine. I have lost count but I think this is the fourth serving of the same nothingburger. Just like in February/ March, May, and August, it is not up to Trump and Putin to decide this – even if they really would like to. Unless Trump and his team significantly learned something from the Gaza peace plan about consulting partners and parties to the conflict, this has little chance to amount to anything substantive.
Actually I wanted to write about something else - military mobility - so that also features this week !
Yours,
Minna
...on the rumoured US-Russia “peace plan”
I don’t expect much to come out of the latest push for a peace deal. Ukraine cannot accept just any kind of conditions, and given the corruption soup Zelenskyy is in, he is in a weak position to sell a bad deal to the domestic audience. There is also even less reason for Europe to help pressure Ukraine now than there was earlier this year. The EU has taken a silver lining approach to the currently ongoing corruption scandal in Zelenskyy’s close circles: that the investigation shows that anti-corruption bodies are working in Ukraine – even during wartime. A caveat is that Ukraine is currently in a difficult spot on the battlefield, but it’s also not the first time, even if the manpower issues that Ukraine is facing now are obviously more severe than they were in the beginning of the full-scale war.
Trump’s threat of a US exit from NATO is not new (Jens Stoltenberg’s new book about his time at NATO gives a chilling account of how close Trump got to doing so in 2018 already) and we also went through the threat of US giving up SACEUR in March. And most importantly, the battlefield situation has not changed so significantly for the worse for Russia that Putin would have any new incentives to agree on anything. Putin now needs the war to keep his power apparatus going – a perk of keeping the meat grinder up and running is that you don’t have to bother with PTSD-ridden violent veterans that bring the war back home. Apart from that, once you’ve transformed the economy into a war production mode, reversing it is risky. As the WSJ puts it, “peace ...
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