Elon Musk proposed a way to end the war in Ukraine on his Twitter account (@elonmusk). He proposes to conduct new referenda under UN supervision in the four regions that Russia occupied, so that the people who live there can decide whether they want to be Ukrainian or Russian. Musk would give Crimea to Russia, which it took by force in 2014.
This proposal is completely unacceptable to Ukraine, because these four regions are part of Ukraine. Russian forces do not fully control them, and with every passing day, Ukrainians are liberating more of the occupied territories.
In addition, it is not possible to hold a fair and free election in areas where a large part of the population has been killed or fled. As Ukrainian troops recapture villages and towns, they find many of them deserted. What does a referendum mean when the residents are gone?
Furthermore, Russia could pull the same stunt in all the former Soviet satellites: invade, terrorize the local population, then hold a referendum…the victors representing whom?
There is a far simpler way to end the war and stop the killing.
Putin could announce that he had achieved his goal of preventing Ukraine from joining NATO, declare victory, and withdraw all his forces.
The war would be over.
Once the killing ends, someone must decide who will pay to rebuild Ukraine. Clearly it must be Russia, which started the war, without provocation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Crimean Bridge. Just went BOOM!
A $4 BILLION Putin Pet Project.
Also a Strategic link between Russia & Land-Grabbed Crimea.
October 8 A Truck exploded. Next Fuel tankers ignited.
Finally, a Freight train went KABLOOEY.
The bridge is now 12 miles of collapsed concrete.
Train Ticket Refunds Are Available.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/08/crimea-kerch-bridge-attack-explosion-russia-ukraine/
LikeLike
When it comes to geopolitical matters and much else of much import, Elon Musk would do well to keep his piehole tightly shut. What a collosal sense of unearned entitlement he possesses.
LikeLike
exactly
LikeLike
Thank you. Said what I was thinking in clear, concise language.
LikeLike
Because Elon is so rich, he thinks he’s the smartest man in the world. He’s not.
LikeLike
At best, Musk is only the second smartest.
Cuz, as you know, Bill Gates is the smartest (except when he is meeting with pedophilanthropists (Eg, Jeffrey Epstein))
LikeLike
Exactly right! Elon suffers from being e-lon. 🤮
LikeLike
I’d take the advice of Y-vonne over that of E-lon any day of the week.
LikeLike
Not sure why anyone pays attention to Elon, anyway.
He hires good people who make things happen and make him a lot of money, but most of what he produces himself is just hot air.
Take his claims about putting a million person colony on Mars by 2050, for example. Even if his company could somehow manage to produce sufficient number of rockets and the tens of thousands of flights to get a million people to Mars safely (without dying from ionizing radiation enroute), that’s actually the easy part of the whole thing.
The international space station is not an example of a self sustaining human outpost because they get all their supplies from earth. And attempts like Biosphere 2 at self sustaining human colonies involving just a handful of people here on earth have failed miserably.
A million colonists on Mars by 2050, Uranus!
Musk is utterly clueless about much of the stuff he talks about — but lots of people hang on his every word and buy into all his elaborate BS.
As Reb Tevye said in Fiddler on the Roof, when you’re rich they really think you know.
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-mars-colony-delusion-1848839584
LikeLike
Bill Gates is the same. He declaims on every subject in the world, and the media think he’s a genius. This college dropout. No wonder Melinda bailed.
LikeLike
P.S. Happy 70th birthday, Vlad the Irredentist.
LikeLike
One might with equally good argument restore Ukraine to Lithuania or Mongolia. LOL.
PUTIN: Ukraine and Russia are one country!
HISTORIANS: Uh, no.
INTERNATIONAL LAW: Uh, no.
UKRAINIANS: Hell no.
LikeLike
And strangely as Putin launches senseless attacks on civilian targets daily to terrorize Civilians or operates torture chambers ,we hear talk of overreach .The media wringing their hands that this or the car bomb attack on a Russian Fascist or correctly his Fascist daughter is a provocation.
This war would never have been if Ukraine had not given up their Nukes. The war would end if Russian leadership had an equal fear of reprisal . As the populace seems to be signaling as they flee the mobilization. A lot easier to be an arm chair patriot.
LikeLike
Bizarrely, he bombed apartment buildings in one of the oblasts that he supposedly annexed to Russia the day before. Russians bombing Russians. But, of course, Putin kicked off his career as President by bombing Russians asleep in their apartments, didn’t he?
LikeLike
Putin leveled Chechnya with savage tactics two decades ago.
LikeLike
Yup. He’s a monster. Always has been. A twisted, sick person. Clearly, a psychopath.
LikeLike
Joel,
You are right. Ukraine had a very large nuclear stockpile. It gave up its nukes in exchange for a guarantee of territorial integrity, agreed to by RUSSIA, the U.S. and Britain.
LikeLike
Yeltsin was ill and had to retire. But he had a problem. He had done some illegal stuff, turning over former Russian state assets with enormous value to his own relatives and cronies for small loans to the Russian state. He feared being prosecuted for these activities once he retired.
He had brought Putin from St. Petersburg and put him in charge of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. Putin had arranged to spirit his former boss, the Mayor of St. Petersburg, out of the country, to Paris, so that the former mayor could avoid prosecution. Yeltsin decided that Putin would do the same for him, that he was loyal in this sick, moblike way. So, he chose Putin as his successor.
But there was a problem. Even though Putin was head of the FSB, almost no one in Russia was familiar with him. He was not high profile. So, all of sudden, bombs started going off in apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities in Russia, and Putin started appearing on television, blaming the bombings on Chechen terrorists and promising to hunt them down. This worked. It raised Putin’s profile and made him a national hero. This false flag operation killed hundreds of innocent Russian men, women, and children.
But then one of the apartment bombs failed to go off. And when it was examined, it turned out to be made of explosives available only to–guess who?–Putin’s FSB. And some FSB operatives were arrested. However, Putin made all that go away.
LikeLike
And then, having secured the Presidency by such horrific, bloody means, Putin put his similarly thuggish but servile old intelligence buddies, the siloviki, in charge of everything, and he called together the oligarchs that Yeltsin had created by selling off state assets and told them, basically, from now on, I get my vig, my cut, my protection money. And he arrested Khodorkovsky the oil oligarch to prove his point. Thus was born the current Russian kleptocratic/Mafia state.
LikeLike
It’s not strange if you’re a sociopath with delusions of grandeur.
LikeLike
The rest of it needs to come down. Now.
LikeLike
Musk would give Crimea to Russia, which it took by force in 2014.”
What would you expect from a Muskovite?
LikeLike
Also Elon is just 3 steps from Lenin
Elon
Leno
Lenon
Lenin
LikeLike
a Muskovite. LOL.
LikeLike
There is no easy or simple to end a war. Particularly when it is started by a ruthless person such a Putin. For Putin to simple say he has prevented Ukraine from joining NATO will not be good enough for him. Partly because it would mean Putin made a mistake by starting the war. Putin, like Trump, will never ever admit that he made a mistake. Never!!
The war in Ukraine will continue to happen with death and destruction until someone in Russian has the intestinal fortitude to do something about Putin. Good luck with that happening.
LikeLike
Simple way to end this war: Putin picks up the phone and says, the war that people are not allowed to call a war is over; remove all our troops from Ukraine.
LikeLike
Yes!!
LikeLike
Elon Musk is another super rich idiot with no clue how the rest of the world works.
LikeLike
yup
LikeLike
Give Elon a break.
He is focussed on saving the world — ie, on Twitter.
LikeLike
There is an extremely important principle here, one on which the United Nations is based, and that’s the idea, enshrined as Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, that the territorial integrity of UN member states is inviolable (except in some extreme conditions and for a short time as spelling out in various UN Conventions). For this reason, because international law rests on this principle, Ukraine should not, and the rest of the world should insist upon this, concede one nanometer of land to the marauders and to the bloody little deluded murderous criminal Chekist dictator.
LikeLike
cx: as spelled out
LikeLike
My take: NATO should immediately recognize Ukraine as a member and petition for a UN resolution to put together a force to drive out the Russian imperialist rapists and murderers.
LikeLike
I agree completely.
LikeLike
Some wars end in capitulation, others in negotiated settlements and others simply never end … are we repeating 1914, 1938??? Truly scary times
LikeLike
How to save the world
Send him to the moon and Mars
Send him with his Tesla cars
Send him with his robot kin
Send Elon, a win win win!
LikeLike
“Diane: What does a referendum mean when the residents are gone?”
But Putin said 97% passed the referendum so was that 97 percent of nobody?
LikeLike
LOL, Cheryl!
LikeLike
First, whatever Putin said was likely untrue.
Second, in order to know what the vote meant, we would need to know how many people lived in those regions before Putin’s invasion. Then, we would need to know how many of the original residents voted. Then we would need to know the conditions under which the vote was conducted.
At the end of all that, it would still be illegal for one nation to invade another and attempt to annex the territory it seized. Should we do that to Mexico or Canada?
LikeLike
“we would need to know how many of the original residents voted.”
My point exactly. No one should trust Putin (or Elon, or Bill, or 45).
LikeLike
“No one should trust billionaires” pretty much covers all the bases.
LikeLike
No room up there to reply to your Gates comment, Diane, but I was thinking exactly the same thing. Just because Elon Musk & Bill Gates are gazillionaires, they certainly are NOT the sharpest tools in the shed. My advice to both (& to others who don’t put their money where their mouths are, but feel compelled to open their mouths & tell us & the rest of the world what to do because, they, of course, are experts) is to: MYOB.
LikeLike
Oh, &, Elon, fix your “self-driving” Teslas before more people are killed.
Clean up your own house (from which you can’t even see Russia).
LikeLike
Elon can prolly see Russia with the satellites he put in space with his rockets, so in a sense, he actually can see Russia from his house.
Much better than Sara Palin can, at any rate.
LikeLike
Musk’s company faces a trial involving a Tesla that crashed into a semi truck in 2017 while on Autopilot (something that seems to be a pattern with Tesla’s on autopilot: they seem to be actually attracted to semis like a magnet to a refrigerator)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-13/tesla-trial-on-fatal-florida-crash-to-test-musk-autopilot-claims
It will be interesting to see what a jury says.
But we can be sure that if the judgement goes against Tesla, Musk and his millions of Twitter fanboys will have a two-year-old temper tantrum like they always do in response to any criticism of Musk and his products.
LikeLike
Traitor Trump is an alleged billionaire and he’s made it known repeatedly that he knows everything there is to no better than anyone else.
Apparently, Traitor Trump isn’t the only billionaire that thinks they know everything.
In Traitor Trump’s case, he was born wealthy and no matter how much he lost and he lost more than he’s allegedly worth, daddy, when he was a live, kept bailing him out. But, the traitor still thinks he knows everything because he says he is a billionaire and lives like one.
Amazing, the only qualification, in most of the wealthiest people’s minds, to know everything and solve all the world’s problems that have mostly been caused by the same people, is to be worth a lot of money.
“Similar to East Asia, the United States’ poorest and richest follow the same trend: the bottom 50% emitting fewer than 10 tonnes, the middle 40% emitting around 22 tonnes and the richest 10% emitting over 70 tonnes of carbon dioxide.”
https://impakter.com/billionaries-rich-carbon-emissions-ineqauility/
LikeLike
I wonder what a musk ox would suggest?
LikeLike