This is really where I am:
Dr. Ian Garner @irgarner
Thread: How does this end? Even in the West, the wars we compare all others to are World Wars I and II: conflicts which had neat and clear ends. The former with an exact time and date we all know. The latter with the achievement of an obvious goal: total defeat for the enemy.
The problem for understanding how this war ends, and how we want this war to end, is that the World Wars are an exception when it comes to neat conclusions. Most wars drift into ongoing fighting, endless instability, messy and mucky conclusions.
As media consumers - as humans - we HATE not having an ending. Honestly ask yourself, how many times in the past five weeks have you seen some chink of light and got excited because of the neat ending it promised you? So now, when Russia is signalling peace, you look to the end.
It's natural. War is chaotic. It's disordering. It breaks apart physical space, but it also breaks apart understanding and our ability to describe. We project plots and endings onto it in order to bring it under control.
But Putin's Russia - indeed, post-Soviet Russia - has been engaged in mucky, endless conflicts for yrs. Transnistria, Abkhazia, Donbas all explained as "frozen" in our media shorthand, where "frozen" = no action, nothing happening. Not ended, maybe, but...in the intermission.
The likelihood of this war ending neatly with a peace signed - whatever that peace is - and the military and economic consequences simply ceasing is tiny. Russia won't waltz back into the international fold. Ukraine won't rebuild itself overnight. Fairy tales don't come true.
But already, within minutes of every tidbit of news, the Twitterati and media will try to impose familiar plots onto events - until, one day, the conflict will be declared "over" or "frozen." Then it can be parcelled up into myth, stories, easily digestible chunks.
We'll have processed the chaos into order. But reality won't be ordered, no matter what we say or desire. We have to keep pushing to break down simple narratives of beginnings, middles, and ends, and asking - what's really happening? What's really coming next?
A fudge.
Russia can't be seen to sign a peace deal. But that doesn't rule out a permenant 'ceasefire' though.
That puts Ukraine in a limbo situation where doing x, y or z to defend itself might be problematic and might hold up its redevelopment...