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What you’re about to read is Chapter 10, the conclusion of the Divide series, as it was originally written, as mentioned in the disclaimer the script was originally written between September 2022 and December 2023, leading to a much more speculatory conclusion: As the final conclusion mentioned the US was then under the Biden administration, a government much more staunchly supportive of Ukraine, while the opposition Republicans were sounding out the fact that they wanted aid to Ukraine to be cut back or dropped entirely.
With the US election far away I laid out all the different possibilities I saw, the different turns that could be taken under Harris vs a Republican leader (presumably Trump, but I also mentioned his main competitor for the Republican nomination, Ron De Santis) and the possibilities and implications of each.
Would the Russians exhaust themselves, forcing the leadership to abandon their Ukrainian occupation, or would there be another Wagner coup style uprising? Or would the US dial back support under Trump, and how would the rest of the Western alliance react? Would they take over the task of supporting Ukraine or would they reduce aid as well? Seeing military aid to Ukraine was futile? Or would neither side break and the conflict just continues indefinitely?
The pace of production on the video version of Divide only really picked up to full speed in the last few months of 2024, to the point that we found ourselves outpaced by current events again. The US election happened and we got the result, Trump won, we could no longer use a version of the conclusion that left the possibilities up in the air.
As the final conclusion says, a door was closed on the outcome of a Harris led government keeping up the long term support for Ukraine with fewer and fewer strings attached, enabling the Ukrainians to play the long game, so the idea of the Russians being exhausted was out.
The idea of Europe picking up the tab from the US if they decided to unplug was also out as in the year between when the script was finished and when we were finishing production no major moves had been made to build the kind of military complex needed to do that.
So I had to alter the conclusion to reflect these facts and to change the commentary on the election from speculation to certainty, most of the original conclusion was gutted except for the final section “10.5 - Sendoff”, which became part of which became the second half of “10.3 - The Essentials” in the final version, and “10.3 - The Geopolitics”, which became the first half of “10.2 - Consequences”, the middle section of the final conclusion.
That section was all about the potential consequences of Russia getting its way, so it fit perfectly, although the peace plan Trump envisions isn’t totally what the Russians wanted it’s much closer to their ambitions than Zelensky’s, leaving large swathes of Russian occupation in place and Ukraine left out of NATO.
The end section was a broad commentary on how Ukrainians and Russians could react to the aftermath of the conflict, untied to any of the big scenarios, so it also worked more or less unchanged.
The final conclusion has 2 less subchapters than the older version, since a lot of the potential outcomes and the factors behind them are no longer likely or relevant, 10.4, the section arguing for self determination, was originally removed from the final conclusion entirely, because I thought it was pointless to argue for when there was no chance of it actually happening, but in the end I decided to include the topic (but not my original writing on it) as the second half of 10.2, since I felt it wouldn’t be right to complain about “peace without justice” if I didn’t put in some kind of effort to paint a picture of what I thought “peace with justice” would look like.
In the end I’ve decided to include this old version so the writing doesn’t go to waste entirely, and so you can judge how valid our predictions were.