What do you do when you’ve got a proxy war that you can no longer control that’s coming upon its first anniversary, when you’ve disregarded your own nation’s laws and the laws and edicts of international courts, when you’re still running weapons to, and political and legal cover for, a state that can’t even decide politically between overt genocide and quasi-legal genocide, engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and when an election looms just over the horizon?
Blame a hopelessly outmatched resistance movement and imply that the actions of a multi-state coalition representing some of the most powerful states to ever menace the Earth are dependent upon it accepting its own destruction, under an agreement which includes many already accepted points, in negotiations with a leader who has overtly said the war will continue despite any outcome, while a civilian population starves to death and dies of preventable diseases. With a sports metaphor.