https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html

Larry C. Johnson:

The paper suffers from the usual self-delusion that #NATO is tremendously powerful, that the war is confined to #Ukraine, that #Russia is losing and desperate for a Western-brokered settlement, that Russia desperately wants sanctions lifted. (Amusingly the authors rule out total victory by saying they don’t think Ukraine can do it but they never entertain the possibility that Russia could).

So, to summarize – Ukraine is winning and Russia is losing but it may take so long for Ukraine to win that Russia might win instead and we don’t want a long war anyway so we’ll support a negotiation which we will assist by doing more of the same stuff that didn’t work the last time but offer Ukraine neutrality but we probably don’t mean it. This is not defeat – oh no! – because “Russia has already been weakened dramatically.” Got it? Yay! Props all round!

Don’t bother reading the thing – the only interesting bit is the very tiny step towards accepting the failure of the proxy war in Ukraine that #RAND helped start and a trial balloon for the cover story (Russia won but it cost it so much it that we really won).