Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 100

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Free Boris Kagarlitsky

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation, 3/5/24

As people flooded Moscow’s streets March 1 protesting Aleksey Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison camp, the outpouring became a display of dissent at a time of growing repression. As the Russian Orthodox service unfolded in the working-class Marino district, where Navalny and his family lived for decades, other Russian antiwar dissidents are confronting a new and expanding wave of repression and arrests.

Perhaps in anticipation of Presidential elections slated for March 17 (no cliffhanger), the growing strength of nationalistic “siloviki,” or part of an attack on the Russian Left movement, Russian authorities are handing out harsher sentences to those who appeal their charges. Prominent Russian activist Oleg Orlov, a veteran human rights campaigner and a leader of the Memorial human rights organization that jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, was initially fined $1,630 for an article “discrediting the armed forces.” When Orlov appealed the ruling, a Moscow Court sentenced him last month to two and a half years for opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And on February 13, a military court sentenced Boris Kagarlitsky, prominent sociologist, Marxist scholar and labor activist, to five years in prison for criticizing the war in Ukraine. This was after a Moscow court initially ordered him to only pay a $6,500 fine for “justifying terrorism,” charges which Kagarlitsky denied. Prosecutors appealed the lower court’s decision to fine him, calling it “excessively lenient.” Kagarlitsky, the founder and chief editor of the left-labor news organization Rabkor, and director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (which was labeled a “foreign agent” in 2018), was first detained in July 2023 in connection with a since-deleted YouTube video about the 2022 Crimea bridge explosion.

Perhaps because Boris has been arrested before as a dissident—in 1982 during the Brezhnev years and in 1993 when he protested Yeltsin’s shelling of the country’s elected Parliament—he responded to the decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country.”

I met Boris Kagarltsky in Moscow in 1982. He was a research assistant to the Marxist dissident historian Roy Medvedev, author of On Socialist Democracy and Let History Judge. My late husband, Stephen Cohen, who was living in Moscow on IREX’s academic exchange in 1976, met with Medvedev—who lived far from the city’s center—every few weeks to exchange ideas and historical documents. Our visit was unusual because of Boris’s presence, but even more so due to the presence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya. She had asked Roy whom she might trust to take her typescript/manuscript about her life with Solzhenitsyn to the West for safekeeping. Steve had experience with taking out—and bringing in—books, from Russia to the West and vice versa, and he agreed to do so. (It may have been one reason why neither Steve nor I could get a visa to travel to Russia from 1982 to March 1985. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came into office.)

Boris became a friend, introducing me to the Rabkor team, the Fellows at his Institute, sharing insights, history, and gossip about the media and political scene. He visited The Nation many times over the years and contributed articles. Boris is a person of integrity, great intelligence, and, yes, irony, humor, and creativity, qualities necessary to keep living and working in Putin’s Russia.

Boris has been a steadfast and productive dissident. He was editor of the samizdat journal Left Turn from 1978 to 1982, which led to his arrest for “anti-Soviet activities” in 1982. He was released in 1983. In 1988 he became coordinator of the Moscow People’s Front, and in 1990, he was elected to the Moscow City Soviet. He cofounded the Party of Labor. In 1993, he was arrested for his opposition to President Yeltsin during the September-October constitutional crisis—but was released quickly after international protests. Later that year, his job and the Moscow City Council were abolished under Yeltsin’s new Constitution.

Boris wrote in a letter to global supporters when he was arrested last year:

“This is not the first time in my life. I was locked up under Brezhnev, beaten and threatened with death under Yeltsin. And now it’s the second arrest under Putin. Those in power change, but the tradition of putting political opponents behind bars, alas, remains. But the willingness of many people to make sacrifices for their beliefs, for freedom, and social rights remain unchanged.

“I think that the current arrest can be considered a recognition of the political significance of my statements. Of course, I would have preferred to be recognized in a somewhat different form, but all in good time. In the 40-odd years since my first arrest, I have learned to be patient and to realize how fickle political fortune in Russia is….”

The experience of the past years…does not dispose much to optimism. But historical experience as a whole is much richer and gives much more grounds for positive expectations. Remember what Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth?

“The night is long that never finds the day.”

Boris’s daughter, responding to Navalny’s death, made this statement: “And for all of us, this is a special sign, especially for those of us who have relatives, friends, associates, in the hands of Putin’s regime, we are all not safe. Now when Boris is behind bars, it is especially important…to show even more solidarity around Boris, around his case and around other political prisoners.”

Last week, in a post on Telegram, Boris said he was “in a great mood as always” and that he plans to continue collecting materials for new books, “including descriptions of prison life.”

Last year, galvanized by Boris’s detention, a “Free Boris” movement arose globally and, perhaps more importantly, across Russian cities and towns. Spontaneous demonstrations were held; online protests and coordinated international actions commemorated Boris’s birthday in August. Thousands of signatures were collected from prominent intellectuals, activists, and political figures. Brazilian President Lula da Silva criticized Boris’s detention, as did leaders in other BRICs countries whom Putin counts as allies.

Significantly, when Boris’s first arrest occurred last year two pro-Kremlin figures, RT’s Margarita Simonian and analyst Sergei Markov, were quoted in The Washington Post stating what a mistake it was.

When Boris was released on December 13, 2023, it was a demonstration that international pressure and solidarity works.

According to the Moscow court’s decision, Boris will be sent to pretrial detention center No. 12 of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in Moscow. In Moscow, this center is known as one of Russia’s harshest lockups—word is that he is being held in a cell with 15 other men.

For information on how to show solidarity and support, use Patreon or Busti. Visit freeboris.info.

Fact Check: Debating NATO was never out of bounds

By Brandan P. Buck, Responsible Statecraft, 2/16/24

President Trump’s latest comments criticizing NATO and the ensuing media reaction obscure the fact that Americans have long held dissenting opinions on the U.S. relationship to European security.

As has happened all too often throughout the Trump era, the heat of escalating rhetoric on the part of the 45th President and his committed adversaries has distracted from the more substantive foreign policy debate.

Today, the U.S-European security relationship has never been more sacrosanct, at least in the mind’s eye of the national security establishment and their allies in the mainstream press. Yet historically, the range of debate and criticism of this ostensibly sacred pact has been far more open than nostalgia or the modern commentariat may suggest.

Throughout American involvement in NATO, the nation’s national security elites, members of Congress, commentators, and, yes, presidents, too, have all challenged the contours of commitment to the organization and its members at one time or another. Furthermore, they did so when Western countries faced a significantly larger Soviet military deployed deep into the heart of Central Europe.

During the early Cold War, the nature of American involvement in the alliance and its commitment to staff Europe with a permanent garrison were not seen as beyond question, even by American officials in positions of authority. In fact, American Cold War architects sold an American garrison in Europe as a temporary measure meant to shore up allies still licking their wounds from the Second World War. In congressional testimony concerning the ratification of the NATO treaty, Sen. Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) pressed Secretary of State Dean Acheson on if he thought the treaty meant that the U.S. would leave “substantial numbers of troops over there.” An indignant Acheson responded, “[t]he answer to that question, Senator, is a clear and absolute ‘No.'”

Even as Acheson’s assurances to Congress proved hollow, NATO’s first commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, while supportive of NATO’s legal mechanisms of collective security, believed that America’s garrison and material aid were temporary. Eisenhower warned that if “in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.”

Later as president, Eisenhower, despite solidifying the Cold War policies of his predecessor and eschewing the Republican Party’s non-interventionism, continued to press behind the scenes for a greater degree of burden-sharing on the part of NATO’s European members, quietly fuming that they were “making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.” Several of his successors shared Eisenhower’s sentiments, from Kennedy and Johnson to George W. Bush.

In Congress, the extent of American military involvement remained a persistent issue for the Republican Right. Be they principled noninterventionists or Asia First unilateralists, the extent of American troop presence in Europe remained a contested issue. Retired Army officer Bonner Fellers, writing in a July 1949 issue of Human Events, a conservative magazine, summed up the widely agreed-upon position of these dissenters. While Fellers believed that the NATO treaty had “enormous psychological value,” as it served as a “symbol of unity” and deterrence, he did not think that that should translate into a massive and permanent military garrison in Western Europe.

Fellers revisited the issue two years later in an article for Human Events, which was read into the Congressional Record. Rather than see the American European garrison as a deterrent, Fellers asserted that it could be viewed as a provocation and argued that the “presence of our forces on the Rhine gives Stalin a visible symbol, a unifying agent which tends to enlist the support of all Russians behind the Kremlin.”

It is important to note that Fellers was hardly a dove. Instead, he was a committed anti-communist who loathed the Soviet Union and supported a nuclear deterrence on the cheap, a Fortress America 2.0. Yet, he, like many within the Republican Right, did not allow their ideological priors to automatically dictate a desire for endless security commitments to Western Europe.

On Capitol Hill, Fellers’s views were common and supported by conservative Republicans who saw an American military garrison as an expensive handout to allies whose rebuilt economies could shoulder their defense, all while providing little deterrent effect. In 1953, speaking on the issue of America’s military mission in Europe, Rep. Lawrence H. Smith (R-Wis.) asked rhetorically, “[w]here is the threat of military aggression?”

According to Smith, after returning from a fact-finding mission in Europe, his subcommittee on Europe reported that “there was no fear of communism in the hearts and the minds of the people there.” The sentiments espoused by Fellers and Smith persisted in pockets of the Republican Right throughout the early Cold War despite the ideological demands of the era.

During the final decades of the Cold War, opposition to the presence of an American military garrison in Western Europe and the continuation of military aid emanated primarily from the left wing of the Democratic Party as a new generation of Democrats took office and sought to rein military spending and commitments. On Capitol Hill, Democrats attempted to force American troop level cuts in Europe in the House in 1988, and the Senate in 1990.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the horseshoe of opposition to maintaining the status quo thickened as a body of conservative Republicans joined progressive Democrats in opposing NATO expansion, first in 1994 and then in 1999. While both votes failed, and the United States maintained a sizeable garrison in Europe, the opposition to outdated Cold War paradigms remained and flowed freely, untainted by the scurrilous charge of echoing “Putin talking points.”

Indeed, even as late as November 2016, President Obama mirrored the sentiments of then President-elect Donald Trump in stating that “[i]f Greece can meet this NATO commitment, all our NATO allies should be able to do so.”

This latest fervor has, as all too often now, completely ignored these historical debates around American foreign policy commitments, creating in their passions an ahistorical sense of policy inevitability. If Americans past and present, from presidents on down, could question the contours of American security commitments and did so in far more perilous times, then so should we.

James Carden: The “Disinformation” Complex and US Foreign Policy

By James Carden, ACURA, 2/13/24

During Mr. Obama’s second term in office (2013-2017), it had become clear that the terms of the public policy debate were undergoing a radical and worrying transformation. In the space of a very short time, certain ideas and policy proposals were being ruled as out of bounds not on the grounds that they were unwise, impractical, or inefficient, but on the grounds that they were products of “disinformation” campaigns on the part of foreign intelligence agencies.

To take one example: Those few who publicly expressed reservations with regard to Mr. Obama’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine found themselves branded not as merely unwise or wrongheaded but as nefarious tools of a foreign disinformation campaign.

The late Obama years witnessed a proliferation of OSNIT (open-source intelligence) outfits helmed by inane YouTube sleuths like Eliot Higgins, a figure with little in the way of formal education and absolutely zero experience in intelligence gathering who somehow became a public figure virtually overnight (Gosh, how did that happen?).

It can hardly be a coincidence that Bellingcat and its imitators sprung up at exactly the same moment that the US foreign policy establishment embarked upon a new and more dangerous cold war (one that has both Russia and China as its target).

Under Obama, the division of the world between “democracies and authoritarian regimes” was made the centerpiece of US foreign policy, animated by a paranoia not seen in this country since the late 1940s and early 1950s. And stoking the paranoia among both the chattering classes and the population at large necessitated the formation of a new information apparatus, and this, in turn, required a revision of a Cold War era law, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 which heretofore had prohibited the US government from propagandizing its own citizens at taxpayer expense.

Soon after the Smith-Mundt “reform” was passed, the so-called Global Engagement Center was stood up under the auspices of the US Department of State. The Center, now led by former Clinton administration flack Jamie Rubin (husband of the reliably pro-interventionist CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour), provides grants to “disinformation” outfits such as NewsGuard, which is currently facing a defamation lawsuit filed by Consortium News, the news outlet founded by legendary Iran-Contra reporter Robert Parry.

That aside, it must be admitted that the efforts of the “disinformation” complex have perhaps succeeded beyond the wildest wishes of those who set it in place. The work product of these outfits has been “weaponized” (a favorite term of art of the complex, and a word that has become unfortunately ubiquitous over the past decade thanks to it) to marginalize and stigmatize dissent. By turns vicious and unscrupulous, the tactics of the “disinformation” complex have, over the years, been co-opted by legacy media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times. And, as a consequence, policy alternatives are now routinely ruled out on grounds not that they are merely mistaken but on grounds they are treasonous, that they are Manchurian policies that ought to be dismissed out of hand, lest they play into the enemy’s hands.

It has always been the case that the American president is, due to his reliance on the intelligence fed to him by his circle of advisers, in some respects a prisoner of the national security apparatus which he ostensibly oversees. In a 1971 essay titled “The National Security Managers and the National Interest,” Richard Barnet, a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies observed that “National Security Managers exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.” Picking up on Barnet’s theme, the philosopher Hannah Arendt further observed that “The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man in the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined.” That is, more or less, the role of the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council whose remit is to, among other things, set the agenda and the range of policy options that will be presented by the NSC principals to the Commander-in-Chief.

I would argue that today the chief executive’s choices are even further circumscribed by the existence of the public-private “disinformation” complex which further stacks the deck in favor of the national security state which acts as a buffer to facts, common sense and alternatives by rendering it politically even more difficult (if not impossible) for a president to challenge the prerogatives of the system.

After all, it is one thing to buck your national security advisors, it is quite another to buck your national security advisors, Congress, The New York Times, The Washington Post, large segments of the public and the entirety of official Washington. Precious few US presidents have ever had the courage to do the former – what, do you suppose, is the likelihood of any finding it within themselves to do the latter?

As such, the president is the “disinformation” complex’s most valuable hostage.

MK Bhadrakumar: Putin’s nuclear warning is direct and explicit

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 3/4/24

The spectre of Armageddon has been raised often enough during the 2-year old war in Ukraine that the reference to it in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state of the union address on Thursday had a familiar ring about it. Therein lies the risk of misjudgement on the part of the western audience that Putin was only “crying wolf”. 

Three things must be noted at the outset. First, Putin has been explicit and direct. He is giving advance notice that he is obliged to respond with nuclear capability if the Russian statehood is threatened. Eschewing innuendos or dark hints, Putin actually made a sombre declaration of epochal significance.

Second, Putin was addressing the Federal Assembly in front of the crème de la crème of the Russian elite and took the entire nation into confidence that the country may be pushed into a nuclear war for its self-preservation.

Third, a specific context is sailing into view precipitated by foolhardy, impetuous western statesmen who are desperate to stave off an impending defeat in the war, which they began in the first instance, with the stated intention to destroy Russia’s economy, create social and political instability that would lead to a regime change in the Kremlin.

In reality, the US Secretary Lloyd Austin’s prognosis on Thursday at a Congressional hearing in Washington that “NATO will be in a fight with Russia” if Ukraine was defeated is the manifestation of a predicament that the Biden Administration faces after having led Europe to the brink of an abysmal defeat in Ukraine engendering grave uncertainties regarding its economic recovery and de-industrialisation due to the blowback of sanctions against Russia.

Plainly put, what Austin meant was that if Ukraine loses, NATO will have to go against Russia, as otherwise the future credibility of the western alliance system will be in jeopardy. It’s a call to Europe to rally for a continental war.

What French President Emmanuel Macron stated earlier last week on Monday was also an articulation of that same mindset, when he caused a storm by hinting that sending ground troops to help Kyiv was a possibility.

To quote Macron, “There is no consensus today to send ground troops officially but … nothing is ruled out. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war. The defeat of Russia is indispensable to the security and stability of Europe.”

Macron was speaking after a summit of 20 European countries in Paris where a “restricted document” under discussion had implied “that a number of NATO and EU member states were considering sending troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis,” according to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Fico said the document “sends shivers down your spine,” as it implied that “a number of NATO and EU member states are considering sending troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.”

Fico’s disclosure would not have come as surprise for Moscow, which has now put on the public domain the transcript of a confidential conversation between two German generals back on February 19 discussing the scenario of a potential attack on the Crimean Bridge with Taurus missiles and possible combat deployment by Berlin in Ukraine belying all public denials by Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Aptly enough, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the transcript “a screaming revelation.’‘ Interestingly, the transcript reveals that American and British servicemen are already deployed in Ukraine — something Moscow has been alleging for months — and such other details too. 

This is a moment of truth for Russia. After learning to live with the steady upgrade of western weaponry supplied to Ukraine, which now includes Patriot missiles and F-16 fighter jets, after having signalled vainly that any attack on Crimea or any attack on Russian territory would be regarded as a red line; after gingerly sidestepping the US-UK participation in operations to bring the war home to Russian territory — Macron’s belligerent statement last week has been the proverbial last straw for the Kremlin. It envisages western combat deployment to fight and kill Russian soldiers and conquer territories on behalf of Kiev.

At the speech on Thursday, which was almost entirely devoted to a hugely ambitious and forward-looking road map to address social and economic issues under the new normalcy Russia has achieved even under conditions of western sanctions, Putin held out a warning to the entire West by placing nuclear weapons on the table.

Putin underscored that any (further) crossing of the unwritten ground rules will be unacceptable — that while the US and its NATO allies provide military assistance to Ukraine but do not attack Russia’s soil and do not directly engage in combat, Russia would confine itself to using conventional weapons.

Quintessentially, the thrust of Putin’s remarks lies in his refusal to accept a fate for Russia in existential terms arranged by the West. The thinking behind it is not hard to comprehend. Simply put, Russia will not allow any attempt by the US and its allies to reshape the ground situation by impacting the front lines with NATO military personnel backed by advanced weaponry and satellite capabilities.

Putin has put the ball firmly in the Western court to decide whether the NATO will risk a nuclear confrontation, which of course is not Russia’s choice.

The context in which all this is unfolding has been pithily framed by the leader of a NATO country, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, while addressing a forum of top diplomats in Antalya in the Turkish Riviera in the weekend when he stressed that “Europeans, along with the Ukrainians are losing the war and have no idea of how to find a way out of this situation.”

Orban said, “We, Europeans, are now in a difficult position,” adding that European countries took the conflict in Ukraine “as their own war” and realise belatedly that time is not on Ukraine’s side. “Time is on Russia’s side. That is why it is necessary to stop hostilities immediately.”

As he put it, “If you think that this is your war, but the enemy is stronger than you and has advantages on the battlefield, in this case, you are in the losers’ camp and it will not be an easy task to find a way out of this situation. Now, we Europeans, along with the Ukrainians, are losing the war and have no idea of how to find a way out of this situation, a way out of this conflict. This is a very serious problem.”

This is the crux of the matter. In the circumstances, the bottom line is that it will be catastrophic speciousness on the part of the western leadership and public opinion not to grasp the full import of Putin’s stark warning that Moscow means what it has been saying, namely, that it will regard any western combat deployment in Ukraine by NATO countries as an act of war.

To be sure, if Russia faces the risk of military defeat in Ukraine at the hands of NATO forces on combat deployment and Donbass and Novorossiya regions are at risk of being subjugated once again, that would threaten the stability and integrity of Russian statehood — and challenge the legitimacy of the Kremlin leadership itself — wherein the question of using nuclear weapons may become more open.

To drive home the point, Putin glanced through the Russian inventory that buttresses its nuclear superiority today, which the US cannot possibly match. And he further de-classified some top-secret information: “Efforts to develop several other new weapons systems continue, and we are expecting to hear even more about the achievements of our researchers and weapons manufacturers.”

Mark Galeotti: Russia’s nuclear doctrine has been exposed

Emphasis by bolding is mine. – Natylie

By Mark Galeotti, The Spectator, 2/29/24

Secret documents have been leaked that reveal Russian scenarios for war games involving simulated nuclear strikes. They shed light on Moscow’s military thinking and its nuclear planning in particular, but ultimately only reinforce one key factor: if nuclear weapons are ever used, it will be a wholly political move by Putin.

The impressive twenty-nine documents scooped by the Financial Times date back to the period of 2008 (when Vladimir Putin was technically just prime minister but still effectively in charge) to 2014 (after the sudden worsening in relations with the West following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity and the annexation of Crimea). Although this means that they are a little dated, they nonetheless chime with our understanding of Russian doctrine today. As a result, they give a useful sense not only of the circumstances in which Moscow might use nuclear weapons, but also the degree to which China — for all the mutual expressions of friendship — is still regarded as a potential threat by the Russian military.

They spell out a series of criteria for the use of tactical or non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNW), with yields of “merely” Hiroshima-level, compared with the kind of larger warheads which could level whole cities. All of them, in keeping with the state nuclear policy adopted in 2020, allow for the first use of nuclear weapons as a response to a serious and material threat to the state. Quite what this means seems to range from a significant invasion onto Russian soil to the loss of 20 percent of the country’s nuclear missile submarines. Overall, their use is envisaged in situations where losses mean that Russians forces could “stop major enemy aggression” or a “critical situation for the state security of Russia.”

Although the nuclear threshold looks a little lower than we might have previously thought, we need to be cautious about drawing too concrete a set of conclusions from the war game scenarios — not least because of how old the plans are. It is essentially a given that major Russian exercises will include a simulated nuclear strike for training ground purposes. To this end, they may be massaged to ensure such an outcome.

Yet there are two specific sets of questions that the FT‘s scoop does raise. The first relates to Ukraine. Could, for example, a major Ukrainian incursion into territories Moscow claims to have annexed trigger a nuclear response? The honest answer is that — in theory — it could, as these are now considered Russians. However, we have to be clear that any use of NSNWs would be a political one: it will be Putin, not some doctrinal flow chart, that makes the decision.

The documents are also interesting in the light they shed on Moscow’s relationship with Beijing. It should hardly be a surprise that the Russians wargame a clash with China. First of all, that’s what militaries do: prepare for even unlikely circumstances. Secondly, they’re not necessarily that unlikely, especially as nationalists in and outside the Chinese government periodically question the “unfair treaties” imposed on it in the nineteenth century, including the 1858 Treaty of Aigun and the 1860 Treaty of Peking. The latter, for example, saw some 390,000 square miles surrendered to Russia. Finally, there is a deep-seated suspicion of China within many of the security elite.

These documents post-date the 2001 Treaty of Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation between China and Russia. In recent years, the Sino-Russian relationship has strengthened, but even so this is more than anything else because the enemy of my enemy is my strategic partner. It is a deeply pragmatic relationship, though. Beijing uses Moscow’s desperation for oil and gas sales to force down the price, while Russia’s security services have been stepping up their hunt for Chinese spies (and finding them).

There remain fears that Beijing might some day seek to take the under-populated Russian Far East for their land, their resources, and their historical importance. Even before the Ukraine invasion, there was no meaningful way Russia’s thinly-stretched forces in the Far Eastern Military District could stop such an attack, and thus it is no surprise that in the exercise notes, NSNWs are to be deployed “in the event the enemy deploys second-echelon units.”

Of course, both Moscow and Beijing have disputed the authenticity of these documents. However, they are not so much proof that Russian nuclear policy is more permissive than we had assumed but a reminder of the political aspect of their use. At sea, the Russians are more quickly willing to use NSNWs, not least because of the presumed lower risk for civilian “collateral damage.” On the eastern front, they are an essential equalizer when facing a more populous and rapidly-arming frenemy. In the west, they are an information weapon, a threat to brandish in the hope of scaring electorates into demanding Kyiv be forced into an ugly and unequal peace to avert potential escalation. The real unknown is quite what Putin thinks about using them in his Ukraine war, and that is not something we can find in any doctrines or documents, alas.

Glenn Greenwald on Victoria Nuland’s Resignation from the State Department

Rumble link here.

Kremlin Meeting on economic issues

Kremlin website, 2/12/24

The meeting was attended by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov, Deputy Prime Minister – Chief of the Government Staff Dmitry Grigorenko, Presidential Aide Maxim Oreshkin, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, and Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, colleagues,

As we agreed, today we will discuss the current situation in the Russian economy, including the 2023 economic performance, current trends in key industries, and of course, we will review further plans to strengthen manufacturing, finance, foreign trade, and the economy in general. I suggest we look into both the tasks at hand and the long-term priorities until 2030.

As I have already said, last year’s economic growth surpassed forecasts. Our calculations indicated Russia’s GDP growth at 3.5 percent, but according to the latest data, it is even 3.6 percent. It is higher than the global average, which is three percent. The economies of the developed countries are growing at a rate of 1.5 percent.

It is very important that this dynamic has been reached, primarily, on the basis of our internal capacities. Thus, industrial output has grown by 3.5 percent over the year, and the processing industries by 7.5 percent.

Double-digit growth is seen in sectors like computer manufacturing, aircraft production, shipbuilding, and the production of furniture, electrical equipment, and vehicles. For your reference: computers and peripherals saw an increase of 32.8 percent, while vehicles, particularly aviation equipment and ships, experienced growth of 25.5 percent. Furniture production increased by 20.7 percent, the leather and leather goods sectors, by 12.3 percent, while motor vehicles, trailers, and semi-trailers recorded a growth rate of 13.6 percent.

In turn, the real economy’s positive performance and the business sector’s confident work are making public finances more resilient. Last year, the federal budget deficit amounted to 1.9 percent of the country’s GDP. At the same time, non-oil-and-gas revenues increased by about 25 percent. In the fourth quarter, they exceeded projected estimates by almost 500 billion rubles. In January 2024, they soared by about 85 percent compared to 2023 levels. This once again confirms the growing role of the non-resource, processing sectors.

In January, the federal budget deficit totalled 308 billion rubles. Mr Siluanov, as far as I understand, this is much less than last year, is that right?

Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov: Yes, Mr President, definitely. We spent a lot of money in January 2023, and, of course, we posted a much higher deficit. We made substantial advance payments while financing multiple expenditures; and the deficit was therefore much higher.

Vladimir Putin: My data shows that it has dwindled by 1.3 trillion rubles on 2023. This is a serious indicator.

Speaking of regional budgets, we have balanced most of them. Last year, we recorded a small deficit totalling 0.1 percent of GDP. In January, total budget revenue of all Russian regions exceeded expenditure by 14 billion rubles.

I would also like to note that, according to current data, nationwide economic activity remains high. The situation is developing in accordance with the Government’s expectations and those of expert circles. For example, consumer demand remains strong, just about as high as in the fourth quarter of 2023. It is very important that this has a positive effect on the mood and plans of national businesses.

Of course, we should pay special attention to inflation and measures for curbing it. In late January, annual inflation was 7.2 percent. Of course, we know that consumer prices increased by 7.4 percent in 2023. This means that inflation is beginning to subside. I would like to note the joint actions of the Government and the Bank of Russia in this connection.

At the same time, against the backdrop of the increase in the Central Bank’s key interest rate – of course, this was predictable – lending slowed. Thus, in January, the corporate lending portfolio shrank by 0.2 percent, while the retail lending portfolio, on the other hand, increased slightly – by the same 0.2 percent. I know that my colleagues are closely monitoring these parameters. Of course, we will talk about this today as well.

The parameters I mentioned, of course, affect the growth rate of our economy both in the short term and in the long term. There are pluses and minuses to everything – I won’t go into detail now, we understand it well. I will only repeat: it is extremely important to maintain a balance between the overall goals of development, increasing investment and lending, preserving employment, and ensuring price stability.

I would also like to note that in the coming years, given the challenges facing the Russian and the entire global economy, we need a proactive, incentive-based policy that will enable us to unlock Russia’s industrial, agricultural, transport and high-tech potential at a new level and to create and revamp production facilities with modern, well-paid jobs in all constituent entities of the Federation.

We are now entering the final stage on our socioeconomic action plan for the next six years. Among other things, it will cover such key areas as investment support, ensuring technological sovereignty, upgrading and building infrastructure, comprehensive development of populated areas, and much more. At the same time, our main goal, our unconditional priority, is to improve the incomes and quality of life for our citizens and the well-being of Russian families.

Once again, I would like to emphasise that in implementing all the plans outlined, it is important to maintain the stability of public finance and adhere to the same principles of macroeconomic stability as in previous years, which, in fact, allowed us to overcome today’s challenges with such dignity. I ask my colleagues to proceed from these basic considerations.

Let’s move on to the discussion.

Gilbert Doctorow: German officers plot Taurus missile attack on the Crimea bridge

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 3/2/24

You very likely have not heard anything about the headlined news, but it is an item which has been widely discussed in official Russian media yesterday and today. RT took the lead in publicizing it and other news portals followed suit. Moreover, it was featured on yesterday’s Sixty Minutes news and analysis program of Russian state television.

The plans to destroy the bridge at Kerch have not been reported by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which yesterday was very heavily invested in covering the Navalny funeral in Moscow, but they are mentioned in the German publications Welt and Bild. The focus in these publications was on whether allegedly intercepted audio conversations of high level German officers are genuine and not AI faked. The verdict is that they are likely genuine. Meanwhile the German authorities have banned the X (Twitter) accounts which initially disseminated the recordings.

The essence of the scandal is that the officers were on 19 February discussing preparations for an attack on the bridge using Taurus long range cruise missiles launched from French-made Dassault Rafale jets. The participants in the intercepted conversations were the head for operations and exercises at the Air Forces Command of the Bundeswehr command Frank Grafe, Air Force Inspector Ingo Gerhartz and employees of the Air Operations Command within the Space Operations Center of the Bundeswehr Fenske and Frohstedte.

This news was commented upon by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who called up the German press to show their independence and question German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock about this plot, which runs directly against what Chancellor Scholz was saying at the time about the inadmissibility of introducing the Taurus into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The transcript of the plotters is available here:

https://www.bundle.app/en/breakingNews/full-transcript-of-german-top-military-officials%E2-leaked-plot-to-attack-crimean-bridge-15a59c62-f695-4d07-852d-788455d17230

It makes for good weekend reading.

You will notice how these senior German officers are looking for solutions that do not cross the Chancellor’s red lines against appearing to collude with the Ukrainians and appearing to direct their targeting. Also note the hand-in-glove cooperation with the British, who have accumulated a lot of experience assisting the Ukrainian strikes behind Russian lines using their Storm Shadow missiles. Finally, see the remark that there are a great many individuals speaking with American accents who are assisting the Ukrainian military in operating the sophisticated weaponry being delivered to them while wearing civilian dress.

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Leaked Crimean Bridge attack conversation is real – Berlin

RT, 3/2/24

The discussions between German officers, including a top Air Force commander, about aiding Kiev in a potential attack on the Crimean Bridge are genuine, a German Defense Ministry spokeswoman told the national public broadcaster, ARD, on Saturday.

The leak was published on Friday by RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, who said she’d received it from Russian security officials. The journalist initially released a Russian-language transcript of the conversation and then posted the source audio file in German on social media.

The 38-minute audio dated February 19 contained a conversation between four officers of the German air force (Luftwaffe), including its commander, Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz. The military were discussing the operational and targeting details of Taurus long-range missiles that Germany was considering sending to Kiev.

The officers were discussing the matter as if the delivery had already been agreed upon, and also spoke about maintaining plausible deniability in the event of the bridge attack that would allow Berlin to avoid being dragged into the conflict between Kiev and Moscow.

“According to our assessment, a conversation in the Air Force was intercepted,” the ministry’s spokeswoman told ARD, adding that the German officials were unable to determine whether any changes were made to the transcript or the recording itself.

Earlier, the German media also reported that the audio clip appeared to be authentic. Germany’s DPA news agency said that the officers were talking using the Webex online calling, messaging and conference platform. Der Spiegel reported that “according to an initial assessment, AI-supported counterfeiting is largely ruled out.”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the leak a “very serious matter” earlier on Saturday. “That is why it is now being investigated very intensively, very carefully and very swiftly,” he told journalists in Rome following an audience with the Pope, adding that such a probe was “necessary.”

He did not comment on the contents of the recording and did not elaborate on whether Berlin was aware of the plans discussed by the senior military officers.

Some German politicians assumed that the incident might have further implications. A German MP, Roderich Kiesewetter of the Christian Democratic Union party, himself a retired colonel and the head of the German reservists’ association, told the German media that other sensitive military conversations could have been intercepted and might be published by Russia in the future.

“It is in no way surprising that such a conversation was intercepted,” he told Germany’s n-tv news media outlet, adding that it was “equally unsurprising that the recording became public.” “We have to assume that the Russians have more material of this kind,” the retired colonel said.

The incident drew strong criticism from other German politicians. “There must finally be an end to our naivety,” the head of the Bundestag’s Defense Committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, told n-tv. She also called for enhanced “counter-espionage” efforts while admitting that Germany was “obviously vulnerable in this area.”

The chairman of the Parliamentary Control Committee, Konstantin von Notz, demanded an “immediate clarification of all background information” in a conversation with the German media company RND.

MK Bhadrakumar: China resumes shuttle diplomacy as Ukraine war drums get louder

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 3/1/24

The Chinese Foreign Ministry announcement on Wednesday that Beijing’s Special Representative on Eurasian Affairs Li Hui will set out from home on March 2 on a “second round of shuttle diplomacy on seeking a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis” may seem a mismatch.

Just two days earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke up that he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of putting Western boots on the ground in Ukraine in order to prevent a Russian victory. Li Hui is expected to visit Russia, the EU headquarters in Brussels, Poland, Ukraine, Germany and France.

The Chinese spokesperson Mao Ning kept the expectations low by adding that “Behind this, there is only one goal that China hopes to achieve, that is, to build consensus for ending the conflict and pave the way for peace talks. China will continue to play its role, carry out shuttle diplomacy, pool consensus and contribute China’s wisdom for the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis.”

Macron spoke up after a summit of European leaders in Paris on Monday. But in diplomacy, there is always something more than what meets the eye. Macron later insisted that he had spoken quite deliberately: “These are rather serious topics. My every word on this issue is weighted, thought through and calculated.” Nonetheless, representatives of most of the 20 participating countries at the Paris conclave, especially Germany, later took a public position that they had no intention to send troops to Ukraine and were strongly opposed to participation in military operations against Russia.

The French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne since explained that the presence of Western military in Ukraine might be necessary to provide some types of assistance, including de-mining operations and instruction of Ukrainian soldiers, but that did not imply their participation in the conflict.

The White House reaction has been a reaffirmation that the US would not send troops to Ukraine. The National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement that Biden “has been clear that the US will not send troops to fight in Ukraine.” The NSC spokesman John Kirby also denied that US troops could be sent for de-mining, arms production or cyber operations. However, Kirby underscored that it would be a “sovereign decision” for France or any other NATO country whether to send troops to Ukraine.

Interestingly, though, two days after the White House reacted, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin added a caveat during a hearing at the House Armed Services Committee that if Ukraine falls, Russia and NATO could come into a direct military conflict, as the Russian leadership “won’t stop there” if Ukraine is defeated. “Quite frankly, if Ukraine falls, I really believe that NATO will be in a fight with Russia,” Austin said.

What emerges out of this cacophony is that quite possibly, the ground is being prepared for a soft landing for the idea of western military deployment in Ukraine in some form going forward. Within hours of Austin’s testimony on Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on the Telegram channel, “Is this an overt threat to Russia or an attempt to cook up an excuse for Zelensky? Both are insane. However, everyone can see who the aggressor is — it is Washington.”

The NATO has been steadily climbing the escalation ladder while the Russian reaction has been by and large to rev up the “meat grinder” in the war of attrition. But then, it is the Ukrainian carcass being ground and that doesn’t seem to matter to the Brits or Americans.

There was a time when attack on Crimea was deemed to have been a “red line.” Then came the October 2022 Crimean Bridge explosion — on the day after the 70th birthday of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Well, Russia successfully repaired the bridge and reopened it to traffic. An emboldened West thereupon began a string of attacks against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Russia repeatedly alleged that the British, along with the US, acted as spotters, supplying the Kiev regime with coordinates of targets and that the attacks against the Black Sea Fleet were actually literally conducted under the direction of British special services. The Russian MFA spokesperson Maria Zakharova said yesterday, “In general, the question that should be asked is not about Britain’s involvement in separate episodes of the conflict in Ukraine, but about the unleashing and participation of London in the anti-Russian hybrid war.” Indeed, recent reports mentioned that none other than the UK’s Chief of the Defense Staff Admiral Tony Radakin played a significant role in developing Ukraine’s military strategy in the Black Sea.

In retrospect, a NATO roadmap exists to bring the war home to Russia, the latest phase being a new air strike campaign against the Russian oil and gas industry. The escalation on such scale and sophistication is possible only with the direct or indirect participation of NATO personnel and real-time intelligence provided by the US satellites or ground stations. Equally, there is no more any taboo about what Ukraine can do with the weapons the NATO countries have provided.

Lately, the CIA began to brazenly speak about all that, too. The New York Times featured an exclusive news article Monday that a CIA—supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years going back to the coup in Kiev in 2014, that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.

Suffice to say, while on the diplomatic track, Russia’s repeated attempts to halt the fighting have been ignored by the West — the Istanbul negotiations in late March 2022; Putin’s proposal for a freeze on frontline movements and a ceasefire as early as autumn 2022, and then again in September 2023 — the CIA and Pentagon have been working hard to achieve victory at all costs.

Even after September 2023, Putin signalled willingness to freeze the current frontline and move to a ceasefire and even communicated this through a number of channels, including through foreign governments that have good relations with both Russia and the US. But the faction that wants to crush Russia militarily at all costs has prevailed. Austin’s remark on Friday suggests that this passion seems to be impervious to facts on the ground.

Make no mistake, on February 24, Canada and Italy joined the UK, Germany, France and Denmark to sign 10-year security agreements with Kiev. These agreements underscore a collective commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and its aspirations to join the NATO military alliance, implying that their aim is a long-term confrontation with Russia. And Europe is now discussing the deployment of boots on the ground in Ukraine.

In this foreboding backdrop, what is it that Li Hui can hope to achieve as he meets up with the deputy head of the department Mikhail Galuzin, a middle ranking Russian diplomat in the foreign ministry, on March 3? Succinctly put, while China’s interest in resolving the Ukrainian crisis is not in doubt, Li Hui’s “shuttle diplomacy” can only be seen as an effort to understand the current positions of the parties, as the situation has changed since May 2023 when he last touched base — and the fact remains that there are active discussions about further steps regarding the conflict in the West after the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Conceivably, this upgrade of the opinions of the parties will enable Beijing to make decisions about its actions. A potential Europe trip by President Xi Jinping is also being talked about that may include France.

China is painstakingly rebuilding trust with the European powers and both sides eye pragmatic cooperation despite geopolitical frictions. China remains intrigued by Macron’s advocacy of Europe’s “strategic autonomy.” Meanwhile, the spectre of Donald Trump haunts both Europe and China, which, hopefully, may boost the latter’s chances at winning Europe’s trust.

Paul R. Grenier: Thoughts on The Quincy Institute’s “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine”

Emphasis via bolding is mine. – Natylie

By Paul Grenier, ACURA, 2/29/24

Anatol Lieven’s and George Beebe’s “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine” serves as a refreshing antidote to the usual mainstream account of the Ukraine conflict. They provide objective, factual data on the demographic, economic-industrial, and troop strength gaps — not to say chasms — separating Russia and Ukraine today. They further note, in a similarly realistic vein, that attrition warfare by no means favors Ukraine:

… in a war of attrition, the numbers, munitions and economy of one side falter before the other does so, leading to a collapse either of the army or the home front. As things stand at present, if either side in the Ukraine War eventually cracks, it seems likely to be Ukraine.

This circumstance, Lieven and Beebe conclude, should motivate even ardent supporters of Ukraine to start negotiations with Russia immediately, since delaying will only serve to put Kiev in an even weaker position. They point to President Putin’s apparent openness to such negotiations – an openness hinted at during his Feb. 8, 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson — as an encouraging sign. (What the Russian president in fact understood to be the purpose of such negotiations, however, remains, to me at least, somewhat mysterious.)

The authors raise the question, and it is an entirely rational question in the context of proposing negotiations, as to why the Russian side would wish to participate, given their present successes on the battlefield in this war of attrition.  The crux of their argument runs as follows:

Russia … has shown that it can block the further expansion of NATO into ex–Soviet republics, but it cannot fight its way into Western recognition that Russia has a legitimate role to play in Europe’s security order, nor can it reduce the potential for direct war with NATO absent diplomatic engagement with the United States and Europe. In sum, although Russia can make progress on demilitarizing Ukraine, it still has some significant reasons to want an understanding with the West over Ukraine and the broader European security order [emphasis mine – PRG]

Parenthetically, it would appear that the authors are framing this conflict – accurately, in my view — as a conflict transpiring between Russia and the ‘collective West’ and not, as popular narratives often would have it, as a war Russia is waging on Ukraine.  Whether or not this is what the authors intended to say, certainly this is precisely how Russia’s political and intellectual elites understand the current war.  Russian political elites, with good reason, view the present war as between Russia and the collective West, and they view the West as using Ukraine as an instrument to assist the West in weakening Russia.  I will not spend time here explaining why I agree that such a framing is in fact rational.  Anyone who cares to can read the prior work of such scholars as John Mearsheimer or look up the suitable quotes from  President Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and a great many others. What follows from such a framing are some considerations both tactical and political-philosophical (or simply political) that it is my purpose, in what follows, to explore.   

In respect to tactics, if and to the extent that Russia views the United States and its closest allies as their true foe, then it is entirely possible that the Russians will not see bringing the war to a rapid end, or trying to seize large swaths of territory, as a near-term or even medium-term goal.  Although this is speculation, it seems likely that the Russian side is turning back against the United States the ‘bleed Russia’ strategy that, they no doubt accurately surmised, was the intent of the West at the outset of the war (hence all the sanctions, hence the ‘let’s create another Afghanistan for Russia’ rhetoric, etc.).  

And why wouldn’t Russia be thinking in such terms?  After all, how many more packets of 60 billion dollars can the West afford to provide to prop up Ukraine?  When that cash finally dries up, how much loyalty will a population no longer receiving paychecks or pensions still feel toward their Western ‘benefactors’?  When that day comes — i.e., when the cash runs out — Russia might manage to achieve a political settlement inside Ukraine corresponding to its original war aims even without the physical occupation or military conquest of Ukraine’s large territory.  To be sure, this would in no way, in itself, lead to a cessation of hostilities between Russia and the U.S., but it would nonetheless represent a noteworthy defeat for the United States, a defeat dwarfing the earlier Afghan fiasco in its global geo-political implications. 

The United States, in other words, may well have a far greater interest of its own in coming to the negotiating table than is suggested by the authors of “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine.”  Which brings us to the key question: Is it true that negotiations between the U.S. and Russia can succeed in an atmosphere without trust?  

America Not What It Used to Be

On the one hand, as Lieven and Beebe point out, “Moscow and Washington have decades of useful Cold War experience in constructing, implementing, and monitoring a wide range of security agreements despite mutual distrust and broader geopolitical competition” (emphasis mine – PRG).   And yet, what this ignores is that Cold War II is unfolding in a U.S. that differs strikingly from even the U.S. that existed as late as the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan.  In the intervening years a whole generation of students has been educated by professors steeped in French post-structuralist theory (Foucault and the like).  The key point is not so much that ‘truth’ (today always in scare quotes) has disappeared, as that it is simply assumed that truth only ever exists in reference to some particular power configuration: ‘truth’ is now simply an expression of someone’s interests, and nothing more.  

Let us consider, for a moment, the style of argumentation now pervasive in nearly all discussions of foreign affairs.  As Matthew Dal Santo has helpfully pointed out, today, questions of fact are no longer proven or disproven by appeals to logic and material evidence, but instead only ever by pointing out in whose interests it is to accept or deny a given proposition.  

Did the U.S. play a role in the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines (which, incidentally, was a massive violation of international law as well as an attack on Germany)? Which side, Russia or Ukraine, was purposely shelling civilian areas of Donbas after 2014 and, year after year, killing innocent women and children? Which side was shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant in 2022 – 2023 after it had been occupied by Russian troops?   In all such cases, the answer is allegedly already known in advance prior to any material evidence – even though, to be sure, such real evidence is never even sought.  ‘It definitely wasn’t our side, it wasn’t our team doing something wrong or illegal,’ we are repeatedly assured. After all, to assert otherwise would be to repeat ‘Putin talking points’! 

This new American rhetorical style is by no means specific only to Russia or to the Ukraine war.  To speak out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the destabilization of Syria and Libya starting in 2011, was similarly dismissed on the basis that questioning such policies was tantamount to promoting the interests of Assad and Qaddafi. Conformance to U.S. policy objectives has become the measure of truth.

But how can diplomacy take place between the U.S. and other states, if the U.S. has renounced the givenness of factual reality, if it has substituted for reality a utilitarian narrative whose veracity, on the one hand, and whose correspondence to American interests on the other hand, is always considered an identity?  

Let it be granted, for the sake of argument, that what concerns American policy makers is not philosophical profundity but ‘what works.’  It is apparently widely assumed in Washington that the reduction of international politics to a conflict of warring interests does work, such that, if our application of pressure is continuously escalated, eventually the other side will be forced to accept the American picture of ‘reality’ and learn to ‘play ball’ according to our rules. 

In the present case under consideration, will this ‘methodology’ (one can’t call it diplomacy) produce the desired results?  In theory, at least, it could work if Russians were fully analogous to Pavlovian dogs that can be trained to respond to external stimuli – now the ‘pain’ of economic sanctions, now the ‘pleasant’ feelings of being told that they will be accepted by Europe and made part of its ‘security order.’  Apparently this approach did produce results for the American side in the 1990s. Many Russians bought what was on offer back then.  It appears, however, that today’s Russia  is different.  Despite Putin’s recent statement to Tucker Carlson that Russia is now, like the West, ‘bourgeois,’ this is evidently not true.  A bourgeois population sees everything in terms of interests, especially interests that bring comfort. But Russians today are becoming once again philosophers, which means that they are willing to accept pain rather than accept as ‘true’ something they know to be false.  This might be considered Russia’s own ‘revolution of dignity.’  

Today’s Russians, therefore, will be unimpressed if American and E.U. diplomats come to them with a peace agreement, saying, ‘sign here, this time we will observe all our promises.’  Why will they be unimpressed? Because Russians have a memory. They recall that the Minsk II agreements, despite having been duly accepted by their ‘Western partners’ and even made subject to international law via the UN Security Council, were subsequently not only not observed; as we later learned from no less a personage than Angela Merkel, there had never even been any intention to observe them.  This has since been publicly admitted by both the European and Ukrainian signatories of the Minsk agreements.  

This latter point, shocking as it is, demonstrates how far Western ‘rationality’ has degraded since its birth in the Enlightenment, and this despite the West’s frequent efforts to justify itself by reference to its glorious founding in the Enlightenment rationality of, in particular, Immanuel Kant.  Whatever there may be that is questionable in Kantian epistemology, there was nonetheless much that is of value in Kant’s practical ethics.  We may recall, for example, that in article 1 of Kant’s famous essay on the topic of peace, the philosopher states that no peace treaty can be regarded as valid if made with the secret reservation of material for a future war.   Well, in the Ukraine case, this was precisely what happened, although the ‘material for a future war’ was sent to Ukraine by its Western partners for the most part after their signing of the Minsk peace agreements.  As for Kant’s article of peace number 6  — forbidding the use of assassins and treachery, or otherwise engaging in actions that “would make mutual confidence impossible in a subsequent state of peace,” it suffices to recall the assassinations of a number of Russian civilians and journalists by agents of Ukrainian intelligence (acts not yet condemned by the U.S. side); Ukraine’s so-called Peacekeeper (Mirotvorets) hit list (not yet condemned by the U.S. side);  the never honestly investigated Nord Stream pipeline explosions – and, nota bene, this is very far from being a complete list – to realize how thoroughly the West has rejected its own Kantian inheritance of rationality and morality.  Finally: Kant famously taught that it is always immoral to treat others as a mere means to one’s own ends, and yet that is precisely how the U.S. has treated Ukraine: as an object to be used to ‘kill Russians’ in a proxy war, and as a means to teach distant China a lesson.

If this discussion were happening in the usual U.S. media space, it would be at this point that the counterarguments, like an avalanche, would begin to rain down about the evil of the Russian side.  The historical record would be appealed to so as to illustrate the thuggish behavior and perfidy of the Russian president in particular.  Some of these narratives would be true.  Has Putin sometimes displayed thuggishness? No doubt he has – as have U.S. leaders, and their counterparts in England, Germany and France. 

All sides can play this game, which literally has no end, of pointing out the other side’s past perfidy, while ignoring one’s own.  History can only become a constructive aspect of a diplomatic process if the standards of truthfulness are sufficiently present as to allow for a shared reality.  In the ideal case, the warring sides would come to recognize that all are to blame, even if not equally. The important thing is that all participants  begin to see the often tragic nature of past historical choices and gain thereby at least some modicum of empathy for the other side.  The transformative power of the historical perspective so understood – understood, in other words, as tragedy — is the topic of Nicolai Petro’s extremely insightful The Tragedy of Ukraine.

At present, U.S. officialdom and mainstream media, implausibly assign all the blame for the Ukraine war to the Russian side (Russia’s ‘unprovoked invasion’).  Still worse, the U.S. side holds fast to a narrative about Russia that, in a number of important respects, has no basis in reality at all.  For example, that Russia ‘hacked the 2016 American election,’ even though there is no evidence for it. Or that Russia turned President Donald Trump into its helpless sock puppet, despite Robert Muller’s two-year long investigation failing to present any evidence of it.  Nor does the historical record support it. 

To be sure, Russia’s own historical narratives, at the official level, are also often unconducive to fruitful dialogue.  For example, it is true that during WWII many Ukrainians, in the wake of the horrors of collectivization, faced a tragic choice between evils which, at the time, may have been hard for many to assess – which is not to make excuses for those who actively participated in Nazi war crimes.  Russian historical narratives become self-serving and alienating to the extent that they fail to acknowledge the tragedy of Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s.  

What is to be done?

The most fundamental question is rarely what we will do; more often it has to do with what we are.  In the case of the United States, it has long since become obvious that we are no longer very serious.   What must we do to become serious?  We need to accept  that reality is firstly something given, before it is created (by us).  Only a reality that is accepted as given – not manufactured — can be a shared reality, and therefore become the material for forging a successful diplomatic settlement. Only by making clear that we accept reality – in other words, by being truthful – can we begin to earn the trust of the other side. 

Such a return to reality will be an arduous task.  In the U.S. and in E.U. states, it will likely require a fundamental rethinking of educational systems and curricula.  It will necessitate finding some very different criteria than presently in use for selecting our key civil servants and elected officials.  (One does not have to be a Simone Weil to realize the pervasive, and pervasively corrupting influence of money in the American selection process and on American culture and civil society more generally.)

Unfortunately, such a process of reform might last a generation, assuming it is ever embarked on at all — and yet the dangers of leaving the conflict between the U.S. and Russia unresolved do not countenance such delay.  Though the following measures will clearly be insufficient to effect a full cure, they might at least jump-start our moribund diplomatic process by beginning to restore trust:

Stop demonizing Russia. Stop denying to Russians the right to define their own sense of who they are; stop insisting that Russia is not legitimate until and unless it accepts American values and sense of what is ethical.  Questions of gender, for example, should be viewed as something that each culture can best define for itself.  This would represent a return to the ‘live and let live’ version of liberalism for which the U.S., in former times, was admired even by many Russians. Russians will never accept the current iteration of American liberalism, which illiberally dictates: ‘live as we do.’   The U.S. government, in some official capacity, should publicly admit that the Russiagate scandal had no sufficient basis in fact and should hold those government officials who manufactured it to account.  U.S. representatives should commit, henceforth, to contradicting any media stories that continue to make use of that narrative, and they themselves should promise to stop making use of it as a means of demonizing Russia, and stop treating Russia as an untrustworthy state for what was entirely (except to a trivial extent) a U.S. – manufactured narrative. It hardly seems plausible, in the near term, that the U.S. side will admit to having sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, even though no one has come up with a more plausible explanation of what happened than Sy Hersh.  It would be easier, and therefore more likely to take place (granted, this is still most unlikely) for the U.S. to offer, using its own financing, to collaboratively restore the destroyed pipelines and to not object to the restoration of Russian sales of gas to Germany and Europe.  This might have the long-term beneficial effect of reviving the German economy and not thereby creating the danger that an angry and impoverished German populace eventually grow tired altogether of its relationship with the United States.  Of course, ideally, we would see a genuinely neutral, professional and open investigation of the Nord Stream incident in which experts from all sides, including Russia, would have access to all the evidence. Commit to abandoning, immediately, the politicization of international sports, including the Olympics, and commit to never again preventing Russian sports teams from participating, and under their own flag.  Even better: apologize for having done so in the past. 

I agree with George Beebe and Anatol Lieven (who at least hint at this outcome) that a final settlement with Russia over Ukraine will entail the acceptance by the West that Ukraine will never become a member of NATO. This is a necessary but not a sufficient requirement, at least from the Russian perspective.  The Russian side will insist that not only will Ukraine never be a de jure member of NATO, neither can it ever be a de facto member, as it was already becoming in the years prior to the outbreak of hostilities, given Ukraine’s arming by the U.S., its participation in exercises with NATO troops, the placement of advanced U.S. weapons systems within Ukraine and the planned expansion of those systems to ever more sophisticated ones.  

Right up to the torpedoed (by the U.S. and England) peace negotiations in Istanbul in April 2022, Russia repeatedly declared its willingness to accept a neutral and independent Ukraine. For the Russian Federation to be willing today to accept such a neutral and independent Ukraine, the U.S. must first take decisive steps to restore trust.  Otherwise, negotiations, even if started, will prove fruitless; the war will continue, tens or even hundreds of thousands of soldiers will die, and in the end, as now seems almost certain, the Russian side will impose its own, very different terms.

Paul R. Grenier is an essayist and translator who writes frequently on political philosophy, urbanism and foreign affairs. His essays have appeared in American Affairs, The National Interest, The American Conservative, Solidarity Hall, Consortium News, The Huffington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Ethika Politika, Johnson’s Russia List, Russkaya Idea, Tetradi konservatizma, and in translation in Russian, Spanish and French. He holds graduate degrees in International Affairs and Geography (Columbia University) and a certificate from the Harriman Institute of Columbia University where he studied Russian intellectual history under Marc Raeff. He worked for many years as a simultaneous interpreter for the U.S. Defense and State Departments, interpreting for Gen. Tommy Franks and serving as lead interpreter for US Central Command’s peacekeeping exercises with post-Soviet states. He was a research director at the Council on Economic Priorities, where he led collaborative projects between US and Russian academics on military-economic affairs. He was a founding editor at Solidarity Hall. In October 2016 he was keynote speaker at the Berdyaev Readings Conference in Paris. He lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.