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[al bupp]

25. I agree, Yanis makes some points that are worthy of consideration

As much as I detest what Putin has done, perhaps backing him into a corner is not the best strategy. Here's the key quote from the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain this further. You’re saying Biden should be sitting down with Putin, that Biden represents the United States, the world’s largest superpower, and could lead to a ceasefire. What isn’t he doing?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: That. Look, I wish — as a European and a Europeanist and internationalist, I wish the European Union existed in substance, so that, you know, the president of the European Union could be sitting down with Putin. But we don’t have that. The European Union is a disunion, really. So, Biden is the only representative of NATO, of the West at the moment. I’m not going to pass judgment on the gentleman. He is, however, the only one who can sit down with Putin. They can talk on the phone, to begin with, before they actually sit down. Their foreign ministers will have to come to these exchanges.

But the idea must be really very simple: Putin must be given a golden bridge from which to escape his conundrum. He must be given something he can sell to his own people as mission accomplished. The only thing we can do, as democrats and internationalists, we should be able to tolerate, is the neutrality of the Ukraine, because this is a tiny, tiny, nonexistent price to pay for ending the war, having Russian troops evacuate the Ukraine, some kind of arrangement to be established for the Donbas area — we could kick into the long grass the question of Crimea; it could be shelved, something to be discussed in 10 years or so — in order to stop the killing and to stop the toxicity which is spreading from Ukraine across Europe, across the United States. I’ve been hearing senators in the United States, members of parliament of various European countries calling for NATO to intervene — because we know what that will mean. It will mean that the nuclear threat is going to reach levels that we haven’t seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. We should be moving towards a rational solution that will leave everybody slightly dissatisfied — the Ukrainians, the Russians, me, you, Biden, Putin — but which will end the killing and will lead to an independent, democratic Ukraine.