The suspense continues over Ukraine - but what does Biden's current position mean?

The suspense is still there in the confrontation in the Ukraine. (Biden says Russia poised to invade Ukraine as the U.S. continues to seek diplomacy PBS Newshour 02/18//2022)

There are reports of clashes in the Donbass area between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists. Biden repeated again that US intelligence believes that Putin has made the decision to invade, although it's not exactly clear what that means. For all of us who can only watch from a distance with limited independent reporting from the area, we could ask if Biden is that confident that invasion is a near-certainty, how is that reflected in the official negotiations? If the US is really convinced the Russians are negotiating in completely bad faith on this, shouldn't the Administration be doing some public form of walking away from the negotiating table?

And given the EU's pitiful response to Belarus sending a few thousand refugees across the Polish border last year, which looked an awful lot like a sad combination of mindless panic and irresponsibility, shouldn't the US and the EU be preparing some kind of all-hands-on -deck preparation for the estimated Ukrainian refugees that will soon be pouring into the US. The number of 1.2 million is being reported as a possible number in case of a Russian invasion of all of Ukraine.

As the apocryphal quote from Ambrose Bierce has it, war is God's way of teaching Americans geography. So here is a Google Maps snapshot of Ukraine and its western neighbors:

From northwest to southwest, Ukraine shares borders with EU and NATO countries Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Since experience especially since 2015 has shown that EU politicians tend to collectively wet themselves when confronted with a big wave of refugees, and if the US knows that Putin has made a clear decision to invade: refugees, people. It's a problem we're likely to have to deal with within weeks.

It strikes me as non-foreign-policy-blob person who really doesn't want to see another Ukraine war - on top of the low-level one that's been going on since 2014, that the Putin-has-decided-to-invade message is a strange formulation.

Meanwhile, it's also worth remembering that whether a war is justified or not is never totally dependent on who shot first. So the current mutual accusations about the other side's actions in Donbass are not something that those of us who don't have access to top-level intelligence information is not something we can adequately judge immediately. It's worth remembering that even the initiating act was officially justified by Germany as a defensive reaction to a Polish military incursion. The Germans dressed up some Polish prisoners in Polish army uniforms and shot them, then arranged their bodies on the ground as documentation. (A strange footnote: the uniforms were supplied to the German government by a man named Oskar Schindler, whose support for the Nazi cause famously shifted later.)

The (present-day) German channel is reporting that the Russian-dominated separatist mini-republic of Donezk has ordered a general military mobilization. (Ostukraine-Separatisten ordnen Generalmobilmachung an 19.02.2022) The ZDF report also notes (my translation from German):

Since 2014, Western-backed government forces have been fighting Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, not far from Russia's border.

According to UN estimates, more than 14,000 people have already been killed, mostly in separatist territory. A 2015 peace plan under German-French mediation is not being implemented.

On that last point, it's worth noting that from 2017-2021, we had a scammer and demagogue as the US President whose only real interest in foreign affairs was in how he and his immediate family of grifters could make money on it. A more active negotiating position by the US and other NATO powers could have made a real constructive difference.