De-escalating to escalate: Ceasefire is no longer on the horizon in Ukraine | Russia-Ukraine war

For a while now, the Ukraine-Russia war has been compared by various pundits to the Korean War of the early 1950s. That conflict, which split the Korean Peninsula in two, ended without a clear victor. Hostilities ceased with the signing of an armistice in 1953, but no formal peace treaty ever followed. The Korean Peninsula remains technically at war, suspended in an uneasy truce and still divided along the 38th parallel.

Could Ukraine be heading toward a similar outcome? In many respects,…