Yours truly must confess to not writing regularly of late about the Ukraine war because there’s been a dearth of big new developments. The pattern for some time has been of of Ukraine and the European Commission, and most NATO members trying what are repeats of failed/rejected strategies vis-a-vis Russia to keep the conflict going while pretending that they are consistent with a peace deal. So we see, for instance, everything from a pointless 19th European sanctions package to endless variants of peacekeeping and reassurance forces to continued scheming about how to seize frozen Russian assets (fiercely resisted by Euroclear) to demands that the US back long-distance missile strikes into Russia and keep supplying weapons despite not being able to produce remotely enough for Ukraine, let alone its many other demands.
Some high-profile members of the Ukraine-skeptic commentary community are giving thumb’s up to Trump apparently having scored a win against the Ukraine hawks and Europeans. As we’ll explain, as much as Trump might indeed have successfully slipped a noose, this gambit in no way solves Trump’s much bigger problem, that he will still be The President Who Lost Ukraine. And his own messaging will be partly to blame.
Admittedly, Trump has come up with a solid basis for rejecting the Senator Linsey Graham demand, loudly cheered by the pro-war faction in the EU, for “bone-crunching” US secondary sanctions against buyers of Russian energy like China, India, and if one is being consistent, Turkiye and Europe, among others. Trump was all in for imposing an additional 25% tariffs against India over the 25% already imposed until they backfired. Even the not-well-reported fact that the additional 25% tariffs were limited in the number of included products still had an impact on India, with the domestic press highlighting the damage and the rupee falling to an all-time low against the greenback. And that’s before getting to the fury of the betrayal after the Biden Administration had pressed India to buy Russian oil to keep market prices from rising and Trump had acted as if he were a friend of India.
But as we have pointed out, Trump looked to be cornered by Graham, who said he has over 80 votes for sanctions. Whether the House would fall in line and also provide enough votes to override a veto (were Trump to go that route) is an open question. But 80 votes is also enough to impeach Trump if the House were to impeach Trump and send the motion to the Senate for trial.
Recall that Trump first gave Putin a 50 day deadline to agree to a ceasefire or be subjected to the sanctions.1 Russia did not moderate its prosecution of the war. Trump moved the deadline up to 10 to 12 days, which looked likely to confirm US impotence. Trump then in an effort to try to do….who knows what,2 but ultimately buy himself more room for maneuver. We did not write up the summit because we deemed the coverage at the time to be overheated, as if Putin briefly demonstrating on national television that he did not have hooves and horns would make a difference. We probably should have thrown down a marker, that this meeting would do absolutely nothing to solve the problem that there was no bargaining overlap between Russia’s relentlessly-stated position and what the Collective West is prepared to accept.
Even though Alaska session did produce one outcome, that Trump accepted the Russian rejection of a ceasefire, that inching towards the Russian view makes no practical difference in terms of progress towards a peaceful resolution. Zelensky is not backing down. The Europeans tried breathing new life into their corpse of mustering forces and finding a pretext to get them installed in Ukraine, under the pretense of peacekeeping.
And critically, Trump kept up belligerent noises after the summit. From Newsweek:
Trump has since proceeded to host Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage on August 15. After a three-hour meeting, though, no new sanctions were announced and the Russian president has not formally agreed to a ceasefire.
But Russia’s continuing barrage of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles exemplified the lack of momentum of U.S. peace efforts and the original 50-day deadline has expired without the breakthrough Trump had hoped for…
A White House official referred Newsweek on Tuesday to comments Trump had made on August 25 that Russia could face substantial consequences, stressing that the war needs to end.
“It will be an economic war that will be bad for Russia, and he doesn’t want that. As he stated, he will know in the coming weeks what he is going to do,” the White House said, noting Trump’s previous comments that this could consist of “massive sanctions or massive tariffs or both.”
Donald Trump has threatened tougher sanctions against Russia after its heaviest aerial bombardment on Ukraine since the war began…
Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that no sanctions would ever be able to force Russia to “change the consistent position that our president has repeatedly spoken about”….
Speaking to reporters after the bombardment, the US president said he was “not happy with the whole situation.”
Trump has previously threatened harsher measures against Russia, but not taken any action when Putin ignored his deadlines and threats of sanctions.
Asked on on Sunday if he was prepared to move to the “second phase” of punishing Moscow, Trump replied: “Yeah, I am,” though gave no details.
The threat follows remarks from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said Washington was prepared to escalate economic pressure but needed stronger European backing.
In an interview with NBC, Bessent said that, if EU nations increased sanctions and secondary tariffs on countries which buy Russian oil, “the Russian economy will be in total collapse, and that will bring President Putin to the table”.
He added: “We are in a race now between how long can the Ukrainian military hold up, versus how long can the Russian economy hold up.”
With that background, let’s look at the latest development, that Trump appears to have found a way out of the pressure to impose secondary sanctions on more countries that buy energy from Russia by saying NATO members need to join, otherwise they won’t be effective:
It is surprising that some commentators do not get that the whole point of this gambit is that NATO members can’t go along without destroying their economies, and hence would not, getting Trump off the hook:
Trump wants the EU to stop buying Russian oil, pointing at Turkey as well.
He seems to ignore that EU imports of oil have been slashed since March 2023 and even the remaining drizzle has diminished since.
And Turkey is an American ally in NATO, but not in the EU. pic.twitter.com/vxu6EZURlc
— René Duba (@ReneDuba) September 15, 2025
Now let’s turn to commentary, first from Simplicius in Trump Finally Outwits Europe and the Neocons on Ukraine?:
Trump appears to have fairly cunningly outplayed Europe and put the ball into their court by challenging Europeans to put their money where their mouth is…
Translation: “I will put sanctions on Russia as soon as you guys do something I know is impossible to do.”
Trump has backed Europe into a zugzwang by conditioning his actions on Europe choosing between two equally fatal positions: if Europe completely cuts its “indirect” purchase of Russian “shadow” oil, as well as tariffs China to hell, it will crash Europe’s already crumbling economy. If Europe refuses to do this, then Trump will continue the status quo of the absolute bare minimum in supporting Ukraine while essentially giving Russia carte blanche to finish Ukraine off—which is equally as politically disastrous to Europe as the first option.
With this move, Trump has managed—for now at least—to extricate himself from the deadlock by out-maneuvering critics and neocons alike who are hereby prevented from pressing Trump on “enabling Russia”. Trump will now have a ready, plausible excuse for them: “Why should we make the effort of such sanctions when Europe refuses to meet us half way? It’s their war, after all.”
Simplicius takes pains to signal that this maneuver might only provide temporary relief and adds:
However, the neocon deep state immediately sprang into action. Speaker Mike Johnson said that sanctions on Russia are “far overdue” and that there is a “big appetite for that in Congress”.
Ever-devious Lindsey Graham went a step farther in trying to force a sanctions package by kitchensinking it into a federal funding bill:
Everywhere you turn the global deep state clerisy is trying their damndest to raise the temperature on the conflict in portrayal of Russia as some threat from beyond looming over all of civilization.
If you think this move indicates an effort by Trump to extricate himself from Project Ukraine, as opposed to extricate itself from immediate and obvious (as opposed to longer-term) self-sabotage, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. For instance, see RT on September 13, US to press G7 on seizing frozen Russian assets – Bloomberg:
The US will press its G7 allies to establish a legal framework for seizing frozen Russian state assets and channeling them to Ukraine, Bloomberg has reported, citing sources.
Western nations froze an estimated $300 billion in Russian assets following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, some €200 billion of which are held by Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear. The funds have generated billions in interest, and the West has been exploring ways to use the revenue to finance Ukraine. While refraining from outright seizure, the G7 last year backed a plan to provide Kiev with $50 billion in loans to be repaid using the profits. The EU pledged $21 billion.
According to a proposal seen by the outlet, Washington will urge the G7 to back measures enabling the outright confiscation of the frozen reserves for transfer to Kiev. Separately, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that senior US officials have discussed the idea with their European counterparts.
So Trump is not really moving away from the war, as opposed to avoiding the most stoopid measures to try to advance it. The big problem for him is he is firmly attached to the Ukraine tar baby. The war will be settled on the battlefield, in 18 months at the outside. The direction of travel will be too obvious to cover up for the midterms. For anyone looking at the conflict at a remove, Biden lavishing money on that “bring Russia down” misadventure and stripping the US and its allies bare of weapons stocks did keep Ukraine fighting and limited territorial losses, which is what the press and most observers focused on. And the press was only haltingly starting to become candid about Ukraine’s increasingly desperate condition in the second half of 2024.
By contrast, war-watchers are now providing many indicators of Ukraine’s military collapse becoming more and more imminent, such as extremely thin manning on the front lines and Ukraine’s one solace, its supposed drone prowess, now being outmatched by Russia. John Helmer has pointed out that Russia also has resumed its campaign against Ukraine’s grid, which if the General Staff were given its head, could bring Ukraine to its knees in short order.
And even though correlation is not causation, Ukraine’s defenses will start undeniably coming apart when Trump did not continue the Biden policy of pumping Ukraine full of arms and weapons. Again, not that that would have changed the outcome (charitably assuming the US had the means) but many believe so and more importantly, have been getting the press to promote that notion. And Trump, with his intense need to appear to be the driver of events, kept taking rather than refusing meetings with Zelensky, European leaders, and NATO officials. So he has very much identified himself with the war via his deluded belief that he could settle it, which has resulted in him discussing it frequently and at length, again attaching himself to the conflict.
Many observers, particularly Douglas Macgregor and the Duran duo, have said that Trump needed to repudiate the Ukraine war when he took office or he would own it. And a big reason he does is not simply persistent neocon messaging and effective stoking over time of hatred for Putin and Russia generally. It is that Trump himself has been complicit in the messaging that Ukraine could win. He has repeatedly depicted Russia as suffering unsustainable losses to its military and economy. A few of many examples:
CNBC, August 25: Russia’s economy ‘stinks,’ Trump says, and lower oil prices will stop its war machine
Times of India, August 27: ‘Going to be very bad for Russia…’: Donald Trump warns of ‘economic war’ if Putin doesn’t agree to Ukraine talks; says ‘very serious what I have in mind’
RFE/RL January 25: Trump Says Putin ‘Destroying’ Russia By Failing To Seek Ukraine Peace Deal
Newsweek February 15: Fact Check: Trump Says Russia Has Lost 1.5 Million Troops In Ukraine War
New York Post, August 1: Trump reveals ‘almost 20,000 Russian soldiers died’ in July during Ukraine war
So image-and-legacy-obsessed Trump will indeed rack up a big black mark thanks to failing repudiate the Ukraine war when he took office. But his narcissism runs so deep and he has surrounded himself with so many sycophants that he will likely be able to convince himself otherwise.
____
1 Some commentators were promoting the incredible argument that Trump picked that drop dead date so he could attend the big Chinese victory over Japan event if Russia agreed. That would be a fast track to assassination and Trump surely understands that. Depending on whether you counted the day Trump made the demand as part of the 50 days, they expired either on Labor Day or September 2, the first day both houses of Congress were back in session after their summer holiday. September 2 does not seem ideal from a spin-management perspective.
2 Pre-summit messaging was all over the map, with Trump going from presenting himself as intending to strong-arm Putin to sounding almost meek, that he wanted to listen.
61 comments
Comments are closed.
Trump had his chance at the beginning of the year. He could have declared the war in the Ukraine as “Biden’s war” and let the Europeans deal with it. He could have walked away. His MAGA base would have agreed with this and then he could have moved onto other things. But he did not. I feel convinced that he told himself that he could ‘win’ this war which is why military aid and intel has never ceased to that country. Maybe it is because Trump himself is a Neocon which is why he listens to his good buddy Lindsay Graham so much. Maybe it is because he always wants to be the ‘winner’ and cannot tolerate a situation where he comes out as the ‘loser.’ Certainly he must be very frustrated in that he simply cannot order Russia to stop as they are not a small country. He tap dances around the whole thing with talk about deadlines and only him being the only one that can negotiate between Putin and Zelensky but he has boxed himself in far too much. It is no longer Biden’s war, it is now Trump’s war.
In order for the US to actually walk away they would need to hand over the leadership of the alliance. US generals would no longer be running the war, which means either some European generals would be put into leadership in NATO or it would be run outside of NATO. I don’t know if either is acceptable to the US miliary establishment.
I forget who said it (probably one of Napolitano’s guests), but the generals running things in US different commands has more power over local political leaders than Washington or the diplomats, because they control more resources and stick around a longer time. And so far they have kept running the war, as I understand it.
I think seeing the european political leaders as distant from the US military establishment in Europe creates paradoxes that dissolve if one views them as tightly connected.
Can someone please explain to me why the US Establishment is so hard on Russia for so long a period?Not looking for a facile answer. What would be the deep seated reason. Thank you!
Russian resources will pay US.
ilsm: Russian resources will pay US.
This.
The clear and precise turning point was 2003. Till then Putin was ‘our man’ into whose eyes George W. Bush had looked and declared this was a man with whom we could do business.
Then in 2003, oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had accumulated some 20 percent of Russian oil fields from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s and consolidated them under the name Yukos, concluded a deal with ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco to give those companies a controlling stake in Yukos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky
Putin and his government stopped that flat, putting Khodorkovsky in jail on corruption charges. That precise moment, when it became clear Russia’s assets was no longer to be accessible to the West’s corporations as they had been during the 1990s under Yeltsin, was when the drumbeat against Putin began and it has not ceased since.
I have multiple theories.
1) A lot of people were educated in the Cold war, and this is all they know how to do.
2) Imperialism needs to eat. Neocolonialism of Russia, like happened in the 1990s, would be great for the stock market, Dow Jones would probably reach 200,000 if they could take over those natural resources and shut down that competing aerospace/military sector.
3) Revenge for the treatment of the ancestors of some the neocons, for example of Victoria Nuland.
4) Many people really believe that Putin blocked Hillary from becoming President.
5) By virtue of support for Orthodox Christianity and issuing its own currency, it’s a threat to the materialist, neoliberal, neoconservative world order.
These are my guesses. I didn’t write them in any particular order.
I agree with most of your points. But the person who blocked Hillary was
Hillary, with her arrogant talking down to the voters. Her platform promised
nothing for the people, and everything for the Elites.
What happened in 2016 was the repeat of what happened in 2007, imho. HRC was the embodiment of the establishment and they (the establishment, in form of HRC) was done in by Hope and Change both times, even if the 2016 version was much darker abd angrier than the 2008 version.
Hillary needed to spend a few days in Oostburg, Oshkosh and Weyauwega with a cheesehead on in late October 2016, not money grubbing in New York and California.
My almost totally uninformed guess: if Russia is able to block Ukraine’s entry into NATO, the whole “rules-based order” (basically U.S. hegemony) unravels and we’re back to regional powers and spheres of influence.
A generation of US leaders that grew up watching TV and movies in the 70s and 80s and believed the anti-Russian propaganda that they saw all around them might be unable to imagine a world where Russia isn’t the constant enemy. It then becomes a self-fulfilling misunderstanding.
Sorry, that’s a facile answer, but I think it’s also deep seated.
I’m not deeply ensconced in the deep-seated theories about Western bankers and imperialists regarding the “world island” and their long running determination to take over the Eurasian continent. But these theories certainly exist and generally date back over a century, and usually trace back to (or through) an article by Halford John Mackinder in 1904 (c.f. Wikipedia):
This has always seemed like kind of an underpowered theory and IMO insufficient to justify long running Western antagonism to Russia and the USSR. I don’t know if there is any one thing at work here, but sometimes it does seem like this is a monomania and idée fixe that cannot be explained in any rational or sound manner, and for me always conjures up mental images of elderly men sitting around drinking brandy and smoking cigars in a paneled library with slightly crazed looks on their faces.
Certainly a succession of powerful Western leaders, including Napoleon, Hitler, and a succession of post World War II US and European leaders superficially subscribed to this idea. Western treatment of the Soviet Union at the end of World War II was quite strange in my eyes: the USSR had almost single-handedly defeated Hitler and had built a huge military force, by any reasonable definition it was an ally of the western powers, but the Allies themselves wasted no time in making an enemy of the country and haven’t let up since.
Please let me know if you find a more compelling explanation for this very strange state of affairs!
According to Aaron Good, the US after WWII needed an enemy to maintain the military needed to take over as the supreme power. So there was a material reson for treating the Soviet Union that way.
And while I think Mackinder’s theory is the kind of nonsense an empire comes up with that needs new enemies, I agree that there appears to be influential people in Washington whose belives matches Mackinder’s. For example:
– Center for Strategic and International Studies
But there is quite an entanglement between long term material reasons like supplanting Europe, medium term material reasons like new areas for primitive accumulation, short term material reasons like weapons stocks going up and ideological reasons.
An aside, I don’t think Napoleon had Mackinderesque theories. He wanted to force Russia back into the continental system against Britain, and he also never met a war he didn’t want to fight and win. Though he was stuck in another interesting model, the continental system was designed to bleed Britain of money, without which it would surely collapse.
Russia viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as merely an economic transition. However, the United States perceived it as Russia’s defeat. Since then, the United States has been fixated on forcing Russia to acknowledge that defeat. This fixation ultimately led to an actual war to settle the matter.
Not just the US Establishment, but here in the UK too. My theory for this is that the foreign office is still smarting from the Crimean War in the 1850s as well as the Bolsheviks executing the Russian Royalty, which makes any monarchist in the UK pretty nervous I would suggest.
Meanwhile, most Russian monarchists (I have known quite a few) bear a grudge over the British failing to rescue the Imperial family (there were some negotiations to that effect, but they fell through). Also, them keeping us out of Constatinople in 1878.
Or, that Alexander beat them to Paris?
At the Tsar’s abdication, Lloyd George actually said in Parliament that through it ‘Britain has achieved one of its major war aims’! There was little love lost.
One possible reason is Russia is a legacy communist state. One tenet of western predatory capitalism is no tolerance of communism.
Russia is no more and no less a legacy communist state than Ukraine, though. Well, I suppose the Ukrainians banned and repressed their communists while we merely tamed and coopted ours, but either way, communism has been decisively defeated in both countries and poses no real threat. Some statements from American pundits suggest they did not notice it. I’m not sure if that extends to the US establishment at large, though.
Agree, but Russia was vilified for just this reason over a stretch of time that that strongly influenced our present geo-political reality. “Human rights abuse!”, “Corruption!”, “War Mongering!”, “Election Thieves!”, etc became the villain narrative when “Commies!” inconveniently became dated.
We don’t dislike the Vietnamese the same way, though, even though they are, more than just technically, still a communist state.
We feel guilty about Vietnam and the Vietnamese have managed not to hate us.
I don’t think there is any evidence of any US administration and the overall US regime, since the end of the Vietnam War (the American War for the Vietnamese) feeling guilty about it. Maybe “guilty” that they have lost that war…
The Brits couldn’t keep it going themselves after 500 years. The Great Game.
To borrow part of a U.S. boxer quote from about 60 years ago, no Russian ever called me a …
US interventionism in Russia started in The Russian Civil War and has never stopped. General Graves, the US commander tasked to secure the train line, stores and port which was the raison d’etre of the US Siberian Intervention, recounted how he spent his entire tenure staving off attempts by the US State Department subverting his mission into one of ‘regime change’*. The USA has been at it that long.
Russia and China are large states and only large states matter. If the USA can break up these states it can be unchallenged globally, India should watch its back and there’s no reason why the process should stop there.
The USA has always been an expansionist state, the whole ‘isolationist period’ thing only refers to Europe as in that time the USA was aggressively expanding everywhere else apart from maybe Africa. Back in the 1920s they were vocally so. So the system sees all other global entities as either rivals or tools and Russia has been a target since the USA finished expanding across its own continent.
*WS Graves “America’s Siberian Adventure 1918-1920” New York 1941. Graves’ use of the term ‘regime change’ is the first I’ve seen in any account.
The Great Game created Russophobia (and anglophobia on the other side). It first appeared in 1834, by 1840 had grown legs and ran strongly until WWI and the sudden need to ally with Russia against the Germans. Even as alliances were done and discarded, Russophobia still lurked deep, and was to blame for some of Britain’s disastrous moves in the 1900s.
The Americans inherited Russophobia from the British.
If keen – check out a book called The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk.
It’s funny because The Great Game was the Great Britain term for undermining Russia, the Russians didn’t have an equivalent and barely registered in the British political scene. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance which the US pressured the British to dissolve was all about placing pressure on Russia from both sides and succeeded a little too well for America’s taste when the Japanese – a geopolitical rival in the Pacific north – military evicted the Russian from areas they’d leased from the Chinese and captured a vast swathe of resource-rich territory. Of course the British refusing the Russian relief fleet access to the Suez Canal and stealing and then sending to the Japanese the military plans for Port Arthur means the British weren’t minor players in that war.
Where the Americans really come in is when Russia goes communist after getting rid of one of the nastiest autocratic monarchies in Europe and for the whom the term ‘secret police’ was coined. The USA is seeing an upswing of labour power in this period and the Russians become communist created the fusing bond that began the merger of the British Empire and the east Pacific US Imperium. A list of the US interference during the Interwar when they are supposedly ‘isolationist’ would be long and tedious, just the section on the economic destruction of France alone is several books but a summary would be that the USA never let a chance to isolate the USSR slide past and created its pariah status to the benefit of Nazi Germany.
The treaty with Japan was mostly about the naval race with Germany. UK wanted to concentrate more of their fleet in home waters, so they started making deals, and not only with Japan.
Not long before, Britain had reached an understanding with France, which enabled UK to reduce naval commitments in the Mediterranean. Britain was also appeasing the USA, conceding every boundary and fisheries dispute in the Western Hemisphere.
Not long after the Russo-Japanese war, Britain reached an entente with Russia, too.
Let’s not forget the Russo-Japanese quarrel was mostly over who got to pillage (“lease”) Manchuria. Is there any reason to cheer for one or the other? Russia got embarrassment, a failed revolution, and a token Duma. Japan got some bragging rights, a Chinese tarbaby, and national bankruptcy. A bunch of foreign attaches got a sneak preview of trenches and machine guns, but not one of them clued in. i.e. It was just another stupid war.
A decade later, Japan was supplying considerable arms to Russia, during the Great War. During WWII, Japan adhered to the 1941 pact made between Matsuoka and Molotov. Few people know that the majority of Lend-Lease to the USSR, by tonnage, was non-munitions aid arriving by the Pacific route, aboard Soviet-flagged vessels, sailing through Japanese-controlled waters.
A personal recollection: I was in Kiev, when in February US aid to finance Kievs pro war influencers was stopped. The effect was immediate and elicited howls of derision and Schadenfreude when the “granteaters” suddenly had to beg for money. For me it was a crystal clear sign that the new administration wants to stop project Ukraine. I agree there is a lot of contradictory noise from Trump and his administration is basically disfunctional but in my eyes deeds matter more than words: neither has the financing of Ukrainian Ultras resumed nor has there been any meaningful arms deliveries. I wonder whether the seizing of Russian assets is not anything else but another round of “virtue signalling”. I can´t imagine that anybody in his right mind in Europe would consent to that. And anyhow, there are no weapons to be bought with that money. The cupboard is empty and Germany seems to be more concerned with building useless tanks to mask her automotive disaster than in actually seriously preparing for any kind of modern war. France and Britain are both teetering on economic disaster and there Ukraine as well seems to serve more internal purposes than anything else. Still, as long as the Europeans are giving moral support the Ukrainians will keep fighting on. At least that minority that is now in power in Kiev.
The main problem for the Kremlin is not winning the war but winning the peace. That is in my mind why Moscow has – until now – refrained from destroying the thermal power plants without which the big cities can´t be heated. Ukraine will return into Russia´s sphere of influence after the war and the less restive and hostile the population the better. Furthermore Russia simply can´t occupy all of Ukraine. Putin is no Stalin. The latter deported 10% of the population of Western Ukraine to Siberia but still had to battle insurgents there well into the Fifties. Putin needs regime change in Kiev but not utter chaos.
For that very reason there are certainly Russophobes in Washington that would like nothing better than to indirectly force Russia to go to the Polish border if they want a non hostile regime in Kiev. For now Selensky and his ilk still have the backing of Starmer, Macron and Merz. I don´t think though that they will be in power very much longer. The far right as well as the far left have had it with project Ukraine and they are getting stronger all the time. Finally there ‘s the possibility that nature might help speed things along. Amplon, one of the German network authorities has warned that they might have to resort to cut off electriticy supply for hours at a time if we get a cold winter as Germany might very well run out of gas by spring.
May be that what you saw had instead two objectives: 1) Press Kyiv to negotiate with Moscow and that hasn’t go far 2) Let our allies cope with the financing. February is now long gone and Trump hasn’t shown further serious intention to stop Project Ukraine. The new packages are to be paid with European moneys.
Sure. But the Europeans won´t be able to pay for much longer. That much seems certain. I don´t think the Russians are worrying to much. Starmer, Macron and also Merz won´t be around their full terms.
Tom67: The main problem for the Kremlin is not winning the war but winning the peace….Russophobes in Washington … would like nothing better than to indirectly force Russia to go to the Polish border….
There’s a noteworthy RAND corporation policy paper from 2019, ‘Extending Russia: Competing From Advantageous Ground,’ articulating precisely that as the explicit strategy the US should pursue —
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3063/RAND_RR3063.pdf
Starmer, Macron and also Merz won´t be around their full terms.
From your mouth to God’s ears.
I would not read a concrete geopolitical strategy into USAID cuts that were part of slipshod cuts across the board by Big Balls et al. The Ukrainian pro war NGO class and their western backers were still powerful enough to fight off Zelensky’s attempt to bring them to heel in the last couple of months. Everything in your second and third paras I agree with.
I wouldn´t take seriously a single public affirmative statement by German authorities or affiliates.
They have been planning to dismantle the so-called welfare state for 2 decades.
The Ukraine War has offered the perfect pretense in ways unimaginable untill 2022.
Only “war” can compromise labour unions. So that´s what they did.
Only “war” can unite ununifiable factions – such as German LEFT, GREENS and CDU.
Or Ukrainian Nazis and so-called anarchists in Ukraine.
(Almut Rochowanski btw pointed out that of course as serious queer, anarchist etc. you have a major problem in Ukraine – so that talk of cohabitation too is mostly just dishonest PR).
Only “war” can justify the destruction of freedom of speech supported by the very institutions that embody freedom of speech.
Only “war” can turn pseudo-educated German peacemongers into war hawks.
Depending on how quickly EU economies will be caught up in serious turmoil in a way that it would disrupt coming elections I wouldn´t be surprised if sooner than later the new demarcation line between RU and the West will be the Ukrainian-Polish, Slovakian, Hungarian, Romanian border.
No EU-controlled Ukrainian territory in that. After all this is not about Ukraine.
It ´s about an idea which Ukraine has served excellently to install in people´s minds. But once that´s achieved and Ukraine has bled out they can throw it away.
A post-war situation which btw would couch in Hungary and Slovakia between two rabidly pro-US elites. And prepare to solve more serious domestic EU problems.
If Exxon and Co. will have worked out their new RU-deals and all the other big players with serious geopolitical weight I see no reason why West Ukraine should remain under EU/(US) control if it is not accepted by RU.
For EU purposes the threat of war is what they need. The projection is more important than the real deed.
We have seen how proficient they have become in fearmongering the educated classes into believing lies.
They even rigged a national German election without lifting a finger. The media and other elites just committed the murder for them. So why seriously try to wage war??? If the simulation satisfies the needs.
Again: If you want to know how this will end and play out -it´s gonna be with a whimper – look at the careers of Marin, Habeck and Baerbock. That same will hapen with the current Project Ukraine.
Once the Russians have seized control the same we have been experiencing now will go on in the EU just with the ideological contact line moved to the West by a few hundred miles.
The chatter will remain the same, just like the effect on the domestic EU population.
A self-suffication of nations which most of us cannot stop.
And when the countries are drained of wealth those who can, leave.
End of story.
p.s. On the example of the current theatre with Poland German Anti-Spiegel´s Thomas Röper in the first 9 min. of his Monday morning podcast offers a pretty good grasp:
see ca. 5:30 (German language!)
https://open.spotify.com/episode/59sTnCDHZp7ucsGCpJYuZq
Whenever Poland suggested to pick up the gauntlet, the US shook their head and Poland immediately stepped away from the brink. So it is a constant game. He quotes Duda in a recent radio interview where Duda said clearly, that Ukraine´s PR frenzy over the 2 missiles crashing on two Polish farmers was an attempt to push Poland and the EU into a hot war with RU. And of course that´s nothing any Polish government would be doing at their peril. So even if highly corrupt, the EU elites are very rational in whatever they are pulling off if it concerns their own well-being.
So whether chauvinst or not, Andrei Martyanov on this level is a very good reference.
Budapest 2026 as a bookend to Budapest 1956?
I am not sure Trump is in control.
US intel and targeting are doing the best it can, the strategy, order of battle and logistics are wrong. The logistics war is: US in the same position as Nazi Germany in late 1944. Largely, because of long line of communications and also the weapons and expendables were built to hold 72 hours before the nukes came out. Good money for MIC, though.
Obvious to everyone except in Tel Aviv.
That’s a nice way to put it.
“Ukraine’s defenses will start undeniably coming apart” –The Duran and the Military Summary channel seem to agree that “will start” might better be “are”.
They are coming apart. The pace of Russian advances shows that. Russia is taking densely populated areas (Soviet construction = great fortification) in weeks when that type of task formerly took months.
I was thinking like you. But I had a long conversation with a very knowledgeable journalist the other day who told me how an anarchist he knew in Kiev was conscripted to the front and become an ardent nationalist. Stockholm syndrome you might say. But it is also a fact that people get paid quite well while at the front and bind up with there fellow soldiers. But more importantly any large assembly of forces is simply not possible anymore. Even with limited firepower any volley will nowadays be right on target. That is why the Russians are still moving that slowly. They trickle in at small numbers through the very thinly held Ukrainian lines and then assemble in the rear. Pokrovsk in the last days and weeks is a prime example. As long as the Ukrainians keep fighting there will be no fast advance. And as long as the money from Europe keeps flowing I believe chances are that the war could go on for much longer than the pure disposition of forces would suggest. Albeit if the Russians finally destroy the thermal power plants, who knows….
Point of order. The lifetime of a soldier at the front is so short it doesn’t matter what they think they have become.
It is an important point, however, that the Ukrainian army still exists and has not lost all cohesion. It is being degraded inexorably, but very slowly. That it has some esprit d’corps left despite all is the key point – weapons are useless if the army won’t fight, and manpower is also irrelevant if everyone just gives up and runs away (as some do, but not nearly enough to end the war).
The Events in Ukraine substack mentioned that quite a few anarchists took part in the 2014 protests, forcing them to first accept a truce with their erstwhile far right enemies who served as the protests’ muscle and then, in some cases, to gradually join the far right (one such anarchist even started talking about how Mussolini was pretty great, actually). And why not? They “get things done” and history, at least then and there, appeared to be on their side. Interesting to see that this trend has continued.
Well, Mussolini did begin as an antiimperialist socialist before serving in the army…
Yes, but I think it was about Mussolini as a ruler.
https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/from-antifascism-to-hitlerophilia
Here is the post I was thinking of, including the translation of a 2015 interview. It’s fascinating stuff: “I can say that my views have transformed from anarchist to conservative-nationalist.” “I call myself an anti-fascist, but there were things in fascist Italy that I liked. […] Building a strong vertical of power, destroying the pro-Soviet opposition, positive changes in the economy.”
Your anecdote stands in contrast with reports on desertions and soldiers with no replacement, discharge, de-mobilization becoming worn out.
Pokrovsk. I think i commented this few days ago. Contrast the 80.000 troops that Ukraine were able to gather in and around Bakhmut while fighting the stalled counteroffensive in Zhaporizhia with the 24.000 troops, i read the other day there is a link somewhere, in and around Pokrovsk, where today the main battle is fought. This will indeed stuck the Russians in the area for some time but the concentration facilitates quite a bit of de-militarization in a single spot. This, I think, is what the Russians prefer to do. Ukrainians decide they cannot loose some place and send there all men and material available. It may be the case Ukraine has still some spare troops here and there but the water in the pool is increasingly shallow.
All true and accords with my personal observations in Ukraine. All I am saying is that under current conditions (the transparent battleground) any large scale movement is impossible if even a small number of Ukrainians are still willing to fight. And there are still some trickling in like this Anarchist.
It is going to be interesting to see what they do with Zaporizhzhia.
If the AFU lasts that long.
I have noticed the pro-Ukraine propaganda online has become, if anything, more adamant recently that things are going badly for Russia: Russian oil refineries under drone assault, Russian economy under strain, Russian populace unhappy with Putin, Russian battle casualties mounting past a million, clever and feisty Ukraine scoring hits. I don’t have any idea for whom this nonsense forms an alternate reality. How many believe the short bits they get from TikTok or YouTube influencers channeling this stuff?
Trump will get blamed by an unhappy Deep State for “losing Ukraine” if he does anything to bring the conflict to a clean resolution in some finite span of time. And, a bunch of people believing that what they were told by Business Insider represented a realistic status quo ante where Ukraine was winning “against the odds” Hollywood-script style before the collapse would be leverage in shaping a post-war narrative, should Ukraine simply collapse or experience unscheduled regime change.
I’ve noticed the same trend in headlines generated in a general msm newsfeed. I’m also noting headlines combining Putin and Netanyahu as co-villains, for example Axios has a piece up titled “Trump stands by as Putin and Netanyahu cross new lines”.
someone I know on linkedin just posted a video of Anne Applebaum in Kyiv (link), basically saying that because the lights are still on there at night it can’t be losing. She says she talked to a lot of Ukrainians there and no one is concerned, and then she pans the camera around to show… no one out at night, and a few cars driving around.
reminds me of this meme from Nathan Fielder.
Mail was still being delivered and trash being picked up in Berlin at the beginning of April, 1945, so how bad could it have been?
Trump wants to bring the war to an end on something like his terms. That is impossible. He wants to be seen as the peacemaker and he cannot be that since the US is among the belligerents. He cannot and does not understand why anyone would stand on principle, why anyone would be immune to a deal. He must … must … see himself as a winner. Oh, there are plenty of geopolitical reasons but I am of a mind that Trump’s transactional view of everything and his bone deep fear of being seen as a loser and his desire to please everyone who counts is more important. That number does not include people, institutions, and countries that he can successfully bully. Of course, he is surrounded by neocon weasels who want what they want when they want it and would sell DJT down the river in a heartbeat to get it.
Somewhere in the first chapter of the secret book that all national leaders receive on the evening of taking office is a section entitled “Situations to avoid at all costs.” This is one of them, when you are so far down a rabbit hole you never intended to fall into that you can’t even see the light any more. In crises of this type, governments eventually lose all genuine contact with reality, and have long forgotten why they even got into the crisis, so busy are they just reacting to unexpected events. I’ve been through this personally, and it’s not funny: there are lots of examples in the history books as well.
Remember the original expectation was a Russian collapse in days if not weeks, then it was a Russian collapse with western weapons and training for Ukraine, then it was, well, maybe a bit longer, now it’s, frankly, just hoping. The only strategy that stands even a 1% chance of working is hanging on and hanging on, and waiting for the fantasy of collapse to play out. The reason why the western media and political system is talking so much about a Russian collapse is that they are desperately trying to convince themselves that it might happen.
In any case, what’s the alternative? Oh, there are theoretical ones, but the problem is that there are now a very large number of players (many of whom weren’t in office in 2022) with no clear consensus on anything, and no chance of one. Even attempting to find a common position on ending the war in major western capitals would be a nightmare, and of course there’s not the slightest guarantee that the Russians would accept it. The attempt would probably destroy NATO and the EU. As I said in an essay a while ago, driving straight ahead is a terrible policy: it’s just that all the others are even worse.
And no, it has nothing to do with the Crimean War. Few decision-makers in London today will have heard of it, and if they have it will be the standard view which I remember as a schoolboy: a catastrophic example of failure and incompetence by a stupid aristocracy, under no circumstances to be repeated. That War put the British off foreign military adventures until 1914, and even then it was hard to convince the public that the BEF should go to France.
By my account there are are at least 4 leaders of significantly big countries stuck in the rabbit hole with no alternative in sight. May be there is no need for a consensus but one of the 4 failing to go on digging and digging.
The results of the Alaska meeting are coming in. Mr Putin promised not to take the whole of Ukraine, he probably didn’t say how much he would take though. That is a moving feast. In return diplomatic and air travel ties are being re-established with Belarus and de facto through them with Russia. This is to keep the Lindsay Grahams of the world off Mr Trumps back. Official US observers are at the Zapad 2025 exercises.
None of this will survive European attempts to shoot down drones across the Ukraine border. They are probably calculating that because no pilots are involved Russia may not respond, rather them than me, they are in no condition to cope if their calculations are wrong.
I worked on a USAF general’s staff in early 1980’s. He had fought with fighter planes in every US war including WW II.
He would occasionally quote from Kipling’s “Tommy” 1890.
“For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!”
Kipling wanted to shame Britain for treatment of soldiers and veterans.
Is it better today?
The MIC is sitting in the catbird seat. The generals and contractors make money whether wars are won or lost. Even if, by virtue of some miracle, Trump had managed on day one to walk away from Ukraine on day one, the MIC guys and gals would have found another place to play. They keep in the cooler a rich set of options — China, Central Asia, the good old Midde East, Latin America, the Baltic … take. your pick
I have to agree with the Duran and others who commented that Trump had a window of time to walk away from Ukraine, and that window is closed.
I have to agree with those who commented that walking away from Ukraine was never a realistic option. Trump is all hat no cattle. He thinks that he can run the World like it’s a reality show. He should fire himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHzdxly0Y9Q