Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 125

Caitlin Johnstone: It’s Hard to Think About the End of the World

By Caitlin Johnstone, Consortium News, 9/13/23

During an appearance on ABC’s This Week with Jonathan Karl, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken explicitly said that the U.S. would not oppose Ukraine using U.S.-supplied longer-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory, a move that Moscow has previously called a “red line” which would make the United States a direct party to the conflict.

“We understand that the United States is considering sending those long-range missiles that Ukraine has been asking for for a long time,” Karl said in the interview. “These are long-range missiles, 200 miles in range. Are you okay if those missiles allow Ukraine to attack deep into Russian territory?”

“In terms of their targeting decisions, it’s their decision, not ours,” answered Blinken after some bloviation.

“We’ve seen an increasing number of attacks on Russian territory by Ukrainian drones, some in Moscow, Rostov-on-Don just a couple of days ago. Did you bring that up?” asked Karl.

“No,” said Blinken.

“Are you — are you okay with — I mean, obviously, they’re — it’s their decisions, but is this war now escalating into Russia?” asked Karl.

“Jon, we haven’t encouraged and we haven’t enabled any use of weapons outside of Ukraine’s territory,” Blinken said.

“Having said that, let’s take a step back for a second. Virtually every single day the Russians are attacking indiscriminately throughout the entire country of Ukraine. Just during the 48 hours that I was there going in, more missiles were launched at civilian targets, including in Kyiv while I was there; a horrific attack on a marketplace, people just going to buy food, civilians, had nothing to do with this war — killed 17 people. This is the daily life for Ukrainians. This is what they face every single day. So they have to make the basic decisions about how they’re going to defend their territory and how they’re working to take back what’s been seized from them. Our role, the role of dozens of other countries around the world that are supporting them, is to help them do that. And ultimately, what we all want is an end to this Russian aggression and an end to the aggression that, again, is just and is durable. That’s what Ukrainians want more than anyone else. That’s what we’re working toward.”

The interview then concluded without any further follow-up from Karl. By successfully winding down the clock babbling about what Ukraine has a right to do, Blinken avoided discussing the real issue of what the U.S. itself is doing.

Nobody disputes that Ukraine has a right to attack Russian territory; Russia is attacking Ukrainian territory, so of course Ukraine has a right to retaliate. That is not being seriously debated anywhere. What’s being debated is whether the U.S. should be backing those attacks, because doing so could lead to nuclear war.

A year ago when Ukraine first started urging the United States to send it the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) — which has nearly four times the range of the HIMARS [high-mobility artillery rocket system] weapons the U.S. has been supplying — Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova immediately responded with a warning that their use on Russian territory would make the U.S. a direct participant in the conflict, and Russia would respond accordingly.

“If Washington decides to supply longer-range missiles to Kyiv, then it will be crossing a red line, and will become a direct party to the conflict,” Zakharova said, adding that Russia “reserves the right to defend its territory.”

As Michael Tracey noted on Twitter, Blinken was saying last year that Ukraine had provided assurances to the U.S. that it would not use the other weapons systems the U.S. has been supplying “against targets on Russian territory.”

Going by Blinken’s current statements and the attacks we’ve been seeing from Ukraine inside the Russian Federation, this agreement appears no longer to be in place. Blinken has already previously voiced support for Ukrainian use of U.S.-supplied weapons in Crimea, and now he’s saying the U.S. is fine with any U.S.-supplied weapons being used on any Russian territory.

Which means there appears to have been yet another massive escalation between nuclear superpowers, which is once again going alarmingly under-reported by the Western press.

In an article published in Antiwar in July, “ATACMS: Be Very Afraid of This Acronym,” West Suburban Peace Coalition President Walt Zlotow wrote that this missile system “has potential to draw the U.S. and NATO into all out war with Russia.” He continued:

“ATACMS are long range U.S. missiles that can strike up to 190 miles. Top U.S. officials, likely including President Biden, are seriously considering giving ATACMS to Ukraine in their battle to take back all Russian gains in Ukraine, including Crimea. They can reach both Crimea and the Russian mainland.

If so used by Ukraine to attack Russia, it may be a missile too far that could ignite Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Further escalation into nuclear confrontation between Russia and the U.S./NATO alliance seeking Russia’s defeat becomes more likely.”

The U.S. and its allies keep providing Ukraine with more and more offensive weapons that they had previously refused to supply for fear of getting drawn into the war and provoking a nuclear conflict.

Donate to CN’s Fall  Fund Drive

Last year then Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov correctly predicted that the U.S. would wind up supplying the tanks, F-16s and ATACMS it had previously deemed too escalatory, because that had already been established as the trend from the beginning of the war.

“When I was in D.C. in November, before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible,” Reznikov told The New Yorker last year. “Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimetre guns, the answer was no. HIMARS, no. HARM [high-speed anti-radiation missile], no. Now all of that is a yes.” He added, “Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and ATACMS and F-16s.”

As Branko Marcetic explained earlier this year in an article for Responsible Statecraft titled “Mission Creep? How the U.S. role in Ukraine has slowly escalated,” this continual pattern of escalation is actually incentivizing Russia to start taking aggressive action against western powers so that its warnings and red lines will cease being ignored.

“By escalating their support for Ukraine’s military, the U.S. and NATO have created an incentive structure for Moscow to take a drastic, aggressive step to show the seriousness of its own red lines,” Marcetic writes. “This would be dangerous at the best of times, but particularly so when Russian officials are making clear they increasingly view the war as one against NATO as a whole, not merely Ukraine, while threatening nuclear response to the alliance’s escalation in weapons deliveries.”

“Moscow keeps saying escalatory arms transfers are unacceptable and could mean wider war; U.S. officials say since Moscow hasn’t acted on those threats, they can freely escalate. Russia is effectively told it has to escalate to show it’s serious about lines,” Marcetic added on Twitter.

And it’s just so strange how this isn’t the main thing everyone talks about all the time. The fact that we are drawing closer and closer to nuclear conflict should dominate headlines every single day, and the subject of how to avoid planetary disaster should be the constant focus of mainstream political discourse. But it isn’t, because that would interfere with the grand chessboard maneuverings of a globe-dominating empire working to secure unipolar planetary domination by undermining disobedient nations like Russia and China.

It’s hard to think about the end of the world. It’s hard to even wrap your mind around it, much less stand staring into the harsh white light of deep contemplation about what it is and what it would mean. A lot of cognitive dissonance and discomfort comes up, and it’s easier to shift one’s attention to something easier to chew on like the presidential race.

But this is something that urgently needs to be looked at. Because the people steering our world today appear to be driving blind.

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is  entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on  Facebook ,  Twitter ,  Soundcloud ,  YouTube , or throwing some money into her tip jar on  Ko-fi , Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can  buy her books . The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at  her website  or  on Substack , which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform,  click here . All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

Lt. Col. Daniel Davis: How Ukraine’s Heroic Stand Against Russia Could Collapse Into Failure

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, 1945, 9/6/23

Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.” Davis is a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor.

In Washington, Brussels, and Kyiv, a never-ending stream of government officials, military officers, and opinion leaders often and defiantly declare they will support Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s illegal invasion “for as long as it takes.” The war’s objective, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is to drive every Russian out of Ukrainian territory. In the face of overwhelming and mounting evidence that there is no viable military path to a Ukrainian victory, such defiance and confidence is more likely to cause harm than to help.

Far from enabling Ukraine to win the war, the most likely outcome of continuing to resolutely fight is to doom Kyiv’s most valuable asset — its people — to ever deeper levels of loss. Providing blanket support to a country so it can continue fighting a war it is very likely to lose is, in my view, immoral.

If we truly care about the people of Ukraine, it is time to chart a new path forward — and before tens or scores of thousands more Ukrainians needlessly pay the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of a militarily unattainable objective.

Most of my adult life has been spent preparing for war, engaged in high intensity combat, or analyzing ongoing conflicts. During my four combat deployments I was shot at, bombed, or rocketed numerous times. And I have seen, on far too many occasions, the devastation and sorrow — the so-called collateral damage — imposed on the men, women, and children helplessly caught between warring parties. It is an egregious waste of human life.

I will concede up front that while any war is being actively fought, there are no guarantees of any outcome. It is theoretically possible Kyiv could win, Moscow could win, or that the conflict degenerates into a bloody stalemate of indefinite duration. Yet based on my personal experience with both peacetime training and active combat operations, I assess, with a high degree of confidence, that the chances Ukraine will attain Zelensky’s objectives are so remote as to be unrealistic.

At the moment, there is no appetite in either Kyiv or Moscow to even contemplate active negotiations to end the war. Both Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin are hardened into their corners, each apparently believing that with enough time, their side can amass sufficient numbers of trained personnel, armored platforms, air power, and ammunition to prevail on the battlefield. Odds are strong that neither is correct.

Whether Ukraine and Russia come to a settlement now, a year from now, or five years from now, the ultimate outcome will likely be the same: a negotiated end in which neither side gets everything it wants. Every delay in reaching that point condemns untold thousands to unnecessary deaths.

My colleague Rajon Menon, who has made three trips to Ukraine since the war began, has met with civilians, government officials, and combat troops at the frontlines. The citizenry of a nation that has been invaded will endure remarkable lengths to resist, he told me in a recent email, “enduring losses that outsiders may deem irrational.”

Wars only end, he continued, when one side comes to the point where they conclude “it’s better to compromise than to suffer additional losses.

“Not one person, soldier or civilian I’ve ever met on any of my wartime visits to Ukraine,” he somberly observed, “has said that the death and destruction had gotten so bad that it was time for talks and a settlement involving territorial concessions.”

Based on a number of Russian Telegram channels I have read, the opinion of many in Russia would seem to mirror such views. It is virtually certain, therefore, that without something changing the dynamics from the outside, the war will slog on mindlessly for the foreseeable future.

If a rational, unemotional analysis of the balance of power between Russia (with its few supporters) and Ukraine (with the support of 50 nations) suggested a valid path for Ukraine to achieve Zelensky’s objectives via military means, it would be reasonable for the United States to continue supporting the Ukrainian Armed Forces “for as long as it takes.” Not that there would need to be a guarantee of success. Perhaps as little as a 25% chance of success would be enough. Fully committed nations and soldiers have sometimes succeeded against great odds.

But those cases are rare.

The vast majority of major wars have predictably been won by the side that holds the most fundamentals of combat power on its side. In this case, that means Russia.

Cathal J. Nolan, author of the 2017 book The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars have been Won and Lost, argues that his research of studying wars over many centuries reveals that most major state-on-state conflicts are not decided by which side is in the moral right, which has the highest morale, or even which side employs the best commanders. “Wars are won by grinding, not by genius,” Nolan explained.

“Celebration of genius generals encourages the delusion that modern wars will be short and won quickly,” he explained, “when they are most often long wars of attrition. Most people believe attrition is immoral. Yet it’s how most major wars are won.”

Similarly, a 2015 Naval Postgraduate study analyzed more than 600 battles around the world from the 15th through the 20th centuries. The researchers found that force ratios — the side with more troops and equipment — were one of the biggest factors in determining the winner. The study also found that in the latter centuries, the side with more artillery, and in the 20th century the side with more tanks, tended to win. Russia has more available troops, more tanks, and more artillery than Ukraine can likely ever field (not to mention an enduring advantage in air power and air defense).

Based on historical precedent, then, the longer this war continues, the greater will be the chance that Russia wins. This owes nothing to brilliance or superiority in fighting ability. Rather, the conclusion rests on the banal calculation of the vast superiority of Russia’s natural and human resources over those of Ukraine. Russia has a population that is now five to seven times greater than Ukraine’s (owing to lost territories and to people who have fled Ukraine). Though sanctions have had a limiting effect on Moscow’s ability to produce weapons and ammunition, Russia still has a robust military industrial capacity that is likely to grow over time.

If this war simply grinds into an attrition contest, and if both Zelensky and Putin decide to continue fighting, there is no rational basis to suggest Ukraine can come out on top. Put bluntly, to continue supporting Ukraine in a war of attrition against Russia is likely to condemn tens or even hundreds of thousands of more Ukrainian lives, invite the destruction of yet more Ukrainian cities, and in the ultimate end, yield a military victory to Putin.

If nothing more, the West should be highly motivated to bring this conflict to an end in a negotiated settlement in which Putin will have to settle for less than his maximalist demands. But morally, the West should not continue to press forward in a vain attempt to accomplish the militarily unattainable objective of a Ukraine victory — especially when such support will most likely result only in the pointless loss of Ukrainian lives and territories.

We will either admit the unpalatable realities of how wars are fought and won and seek to engage in a diplomatic effort to gain all we can for Ukraine, or we will ignore the evidence we dislike and blindly press for a victory that will likely never come.

I fear I know what we will choose.

Kim Iversen: Zelensky Says Ukrainian Refugees Will Commit Acts Of Terror In Europe If They Don’t Get More Weapons

Link here.

Andrew Napolitano: Is the CIA in Your Underwear?

By Andrew Napolitano, Antiwar.com, 9/7/23

In a year, if a friend asks you if the CIA is in your underwear, you’d probably not take the question seriously. You’d be wrong. The CIA is spending millions in tax dollars to get into your underwear next year.

Eleven years ago, when this column asked if the CIA was in your kitchen, folks who read only the title of the column mocked it. Yet, then-CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus gave a talk to CIA analysts that he fully expected to be kept secret. In the talk he revealed that CIA vendors had discovered a means to log on to the computer chips in kitchen microwave ovens and dishwashers. From there, they could listen in real time to the conversations in a kitchen if those chatting were nearby the appliances.

Unfortunately for Petraeus, but fortunately for the Constitution, one of his analysts was so critical of the CIA’s disdain for constitutional norms that the analyst recorded a major portion of Petraeus’s talk and leaked it to the media. Is the CIA in your kitchen? Yes, not physically, but virtually.

The CIA, notwithstanding a clause in its charter that prohibits it from engaging in surveillance in the United States or from engaging in any law enforcement activities, has a long history of domestic spying without search warrants.

That last phrase “without search warrants” when used in conjunction with CIA spying is redundant. The CIA does not deal with search warrants. It behaves as if the Fourth Amendment – and the First (protecting the freedom of speech and of the press) and Fifth (protecting life, liberty and property), for that matter – do not exist or somehow do not pertain to its agents.

Not long ago, I was challenged to a public debate at the Conservative Political Action Conference by the general who was then the head of the National Security Agency, the CIA’s domestic surveillance cousin. The topic of the debate was whether domestic warrantless spying is constitutional. I accepted the challenge and aggressively pressed the general on the notorious lack of fidelity that the 17 federal spying agencies have for the Constitution in general, and specifically the Fourth Amendment.

The general gave me two answers, both of which would have flunked a bar examination. First, he argued that the Fourth Amendment only protects against unreasonable surveillance, and his 60,000 domestic spies were behaving reasonably. After the laughter died down, I pointed out that the Supreme Court has held that all searches and seizures – all surveillance – conducted without search warrants are as a matter of law unreasonable, and thus violative of the amendment.

Then he retreated to a post-9/11 argument crafted by the Department of Justice in the George W. Bush administration. That argument offers that the Fourth Amendment only restrains law enforcement; it does not restrain the intelligence community. I pointed out that this view is defied by both language and history.

The plain language of the amendment has no exceptions to it. Rather, it protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

I then reminded him – we were friends, mind you; but I could not let him get away with publicly trashing the document he and I had both sworn to preserve, protect and defend – that the Fourth Amendment was written in the aftermath of British intelligence agents breaking down the doors of colonists’ homes ostensibly looking for compliance with the Stamp Act of 1765 but really looking for subversive materials by folks whom today we call the Founding Fathers.

I present this brief background so as to offer a flavor for the mindset of the feds who spy on us and to address the latest craze among senior level intelligence folks in the Biden administration.

Last week, the Director of National Intelligence – she is the nominal head of all 17 federal surveillance agencies – revealed to Congress that she had spent $22 million in order to develop cotton fibers that she called smart clothing. The fibers will enable the CIA and other federal spies to record audio, video and geolocation data from your shirt, pants, socks and even your underwear. She billed this as the largest single investment ever made to develop Smart ePants.

Smarty pants – how appropriate is that name for federal intrusion? Smarty pants is the jerk who can’t stop talking and won’t change the subject.

The CIA does not directly develop its ability to connect to your kitchen microwave and dishwasher or your socks and underwear. Rather, it hires outside groups to do so. In the case of smarty pants, 28 American tech firms and laboratories have helped to develop this monstrosity. Most are not household names, but some are – like the University of Virginia (which is owned by the state of Virginia), Penn State (which is owned by the state of Pennsylvania) and DuPont (which owns most of the state of Delaware).

You can’t make this stuff up. The federal government’s appetite for surveillance is quite literally insatiable. And its respect for the individual natural right to be left alone is nonexistent. It traffics in evading and avoiding the Constitution, using absurd and puerile arguments that have never been accepted by the courts, even though every single federal employee has sworn an oath of fidelity to the Constitution as it is generally understood and interpreted.

When the DNI told Congress about this – while Congress was on its summer break – not a peep was heard from anyone in Congress or from the sleepy White House for whom the DNI works.

Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government? What employee gets to spy on his bosses by putting trick textiles into the bosses’ underwear and then gets away with it? When will Congress protect our liberties? When will enough of this warrantless spying be enough?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

COPYRIGHT 2021 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

Alexander Rubinstein: Neocon dark money front launches desperate ad blitz as support for Ukraine forever war craters

By Alexander Rubinstein, The Grayzone, 8/21/23

A PR offensive to inundate the American public with pro-Ukraine war advertisements during the 2024 election is the latest initiative of neocon chickenhawk Bill Kristol. While targeted at GOP voters, the campaign appears to be another Democratic Party front.

Defending Democracy Together, a neoconservative outfit led by career chickenhawk scribe Bill Kristol, has launched a new initiative called “Republicans for Ukraine” to transform the 2024 presidential election into a referendum on US funding for the NATO proxy war. 

Urging Republicans in Congress to support more funding for Ukraine in the upcoming appropriations bill is also a key item on the agenda.

Kristol had defined himself as a leader of the Republican Party’s neoconservative faction, bashing isolationist and antiwar GOP figures on the pages of his now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine while laying the intellectual groundwork for the invasion of Iraq through his Project for a New American Century. 

By fashioning his Defending Democracy Together as a bastion of Never Trumpism, Kristol was able to ingratiate himself with elite Democrats eager for Republican allies in their messianic battle against the Bad Orange Man. His anti-Trump efforts ultimately earned him a cringeworthy MSNBC tribute celebrating the unrepentant neocon as “Woke Bill Kristol.”

Now, as the Ukrainian counteroffensive fails and a majority of Americans declare opposition for the first time to sending more military aid to Ukraine, Kristol is launching a multimillion dollar ad blitz to keep the tanks slogging through the Donbas mud and the dark money flowing into his bank accounts.

“Ukrainian troops fought alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now they are fighting to defend their democracy,” Kristol’s campaign announces on its website. “Most importantly, American military, financial, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine has helped them weaken Russia.”

His initiative has therefore invoked the military debacles that turned the GOP base firmly against neoconservatism and into the arms of Trump, presenting Ukraine’s participation in these forever wars as justification for a new one. 

And as we will see, Kristol’s supposedly Republican operation has been funded by a top Democratic Party donor with close ties to US intelligence.

Pro-war ads for a GOP base turning firmly against NATO’s proxy war

To generate viral content for its $2 million “Republicans for Ukraine” campaign, Defending Democracy Together gathered testimony from 50 GOP voters, drawing from a base of mostly white collar baby boomers alienated by the non-interventionist direction of the party base. 

In each testimonial, the interviewees spouted boilerplate talking points on “defending democracy” and opposing authoritarianism that could have just as easily been produced by senior fellows at any arms industry funded think tank on DC’s K Street. 

One veteran featured in the campaign claims he spent two decades fighting the “Soviet Union’s threat to freedom,” and offers his hope that Republicans for Ukraine “can serve as counterprogramming to conservative radio and TV show hosts who are challenging additional aid to Ukraine.”

Some of the ads display a geopolitical paranoia far beyond the scope of average American voters. Teresa Benson from Minnesota, for example, is worried that “if nobody tries to stop [Putin] in Ukraine, that next he would attack Moldova and any other non-NATO countries in the area.”

The campaign’s advertisements will air “on cable and network TV and digitally on Youtube through the end of the year.” The outfit has even purchased ad space on Fox News during the first Republican primary debate on August 23 being held in Milwaukee.

In addition to the ads, the group has also purchased 10 strategically placed billboards in Milwaukee, urging debate attendees to “support Ukraine” and “Stand up to Putin.” Hints that the operation may expand can be found within a Google Drive folder maintained by the campaign, entitled “Billboards – August 2023.”

One image is labeled “ukraine-times-square-01.”

“Too many of the party’s leaders seem to think there’s no penalty to be paid for standing against Ukrainian democracy and America’s role in supporting the fight for freedom,” said Gunner Ramer, the campaign’s national spokesman. Among Ramer’s first positions out of college was an internship for the longshot pro-war 2016 presidential candidate and former CIA intelligence officer Evan McMullin.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Defending Democracy Together co-founder and former alcohol industry lobbyist Sarah Longwell lamented shifts within the Republican Party base. These included Republicans becoming “more protectionist on trade,” and “more populist.” But nothing causes her more concern than changes in “Republican attitudes around foreign policy.”

“It was alarming in the focus groups to see so many Republican voters talk about Ukraine or [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky in disparaging terms,” Longwell told the Washington Post.

The Omidyar connection

If Defending Democracy Together’s short history is any indication, the “Republicans for Ukraine” initiative may actually be powered by money from top supporters of the Democratic Party and the ultimate architect of the Ukraine war: President Joe Biden.

Defending Democracy Together was the top dark money spender in the 2020 election with its front, the Republican Accountability Project (formerly Republican Voters Against Trump) leading the charge. By injecting more than $15 million dollars into the campaign, the outfit more than doubled the spending of the second-highest ranked dark money outfit. Its ads urged Republicans to vote for the Democrat, Joe Biden.

Since the outfit is powered by dark money, it is impossible to know who greases its wheels. However, disclosures by one NGO offer insight into the liberal leanings of its main known backer: tech mogul and US intelligence partner Pierre Omidyar, whose Democracy Fund distributed $4.15 million into Defending Democracy Together and its offshoot, Republicans for the Rule of Law, between 2018 and 2021.

As I reported with Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal, Omidyar has leveraged the fortune he amassed as the founder of Ebay to support establishment Democratic candidates while his various foundations act as cutouts for regime change operations waged by US intelligence, including in Ukraine. 

Defending Democracy Together serves as the sponsor for a mind-boggling array of important-sounding initiatives, all supposedly representative of the GOP: Republicans for Voting Rights, the Republican Accountability Project, Republicans for the Rule of Law, the Becoming American Initiative, The Russia Tweets, and now, Republicans for Ukraine.

Its first project, Republicans for the Rule of Law, was introduced in a Washington Post column by Jennifer Rubin, a neoconservative former George W. Bush cheerleader who switched parties during the Trump era. Rubin hailed the Kristol-led campaign for launching an effort to “protect [Robert] Mueller,” the FBI’s special counsel investigator who ultimately failed to turn up evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia. The Republicans for the Rule of Law campaign pushed ads on Fox News and MSNBC touting Mueller’s Republican bonafides over footage of Marines firing off mortars in the jungles of Vietnam.

As calls to impeach President Donald Trump over his threats to withhold military aid to Ukraine reached a fever pitch in 2019, Republicans For The Rule of Law ran a million-dollar campaign to “run television ads on Fox and MSNBC, calling on Republicans to ‘demand the facts’ about Mr. Trump and Ukraine.” 

The name of Republicans For The Rule Of Law was tinged with an irony that is impossible to ignore: When US presidents have lied to the public to justify catastrophic military adventures and the sadistic torture of detainees, its founder demonstrated little interest in the rule of law. And today, the neocon guru may not even be a Republican at all.

Thomas Harrington: The Art of the Encounter

Photo by Andres Ayrton on Pexels.com

By Thomas Harrington, Brownstone Institute, 9/1/23

In his marvelous Samba da Benção the Brazilian writer, singer, diplomat, and professional malandro Vinicius de Moraes speaks of the “art of the encounter” which, as the rest of the famous song-poem suggests, speaks to the essentially prayerful and therefore sacred nature of our attempts to understand each other, and the need to persist in the midst of life’s many tragedies and misunderstandings. It presumes, in other words, that there is unexplainable beauty and enchantment to be experienced, providing we can learn to be fully present in our encounters—including sad ones—with our fellow travelers. 

It’s not like Vinicius was inventing anything terribly new. The call to cultivate a state of expectant waiting in the midst of often sordid realities of life can be found, in one form or another, in all of the world’s major religious traditions. Indeed, it could be argued, and many have, that it is precisely the cultivation of the habit of stubborn hoping that separates us from the rest of the planet’s living creatures. 

Though I cannot be sure, I doubt the steers trudging toward their demise in the chutes at a stockyard are engaged in prayerfully remembering the beauty their eyes have taken in over the years or the internal warmth felt in the intimate communications with other bovines, or that they are hoping against hope that something approaching the sheer magic of those moments will once again visit them in this world or the next. Or that, conversely, they are obsessively contemplating the fate of what awaits them in the kill-house. 

But if, in fact, they did have this same cognitive and emotional tendencies, you can be sure that agricultural scientists, working for the ever smaller number of firms that control our food supply, would have used every genetic, behavioral, and pharmacological tool in their power to rid them of this way of being. 

After all, an angry steer is much more likely to act out in the chutes, thus putting a crimp on productivity, and from there, profit, the be-all and end-all of contemporary life. And all the cortisol in the system of the stressed and depressed ones probably does, as some have asserted, affect the quality of the meat. 

An important element of the practice of expectant waiting is presuming, at least initially, the essential goodwill of all with whom we share words and ideas in the course of our days. 

But of course, not everyone does come to encounters with others in a spirit of goodwill. In fact, many people often arrive at personal encounters with their minds set on extracting whatever material or spiritual good they can from the other person, and/or seeking the thrill certain of them seem to get from exercising one degree or another of control over that other’s life destiny. 

Again, there is little terribly novel in what I have just said. All of the great wisdom traditions have recognized the irretrievably dichotomous nature of the human being.

However, for reasons having to do with our relatively brief and fortunate history, and the fact that our collective was conceived, unlike those in most other places, within the relatively new paradigm of inexorable linear progress, Americans, it seems, have a harder time than most when it comes admitting the essentially coequal status of good and evil within the human heart. Unlike people from other cultures I have known, Americans seem to have a need to believe that human beings are more good than malevolent, and that somehow someway everything will work out well in the end. 

This lack of what Unamuno called the “tragic sense of life” was, up until a very short time ago, arguably our greatest asset as a people, and perhaps the prime source of the magnetism we’ve exercised over so much of the world during the last hundred or so years. 

But as times change, so must our assumptions about how the culture around us actually functions. If, in fact, we were ever truly the fresh-faced kid on the block sowing optimism and promoting justice around the world in anomalously generous quantities, that is clearly no longer the case. 

We are now a large and flailing empire whose elites, like the elites of all empires in decline, are seeking to desperately stave off the inevitable by barricading themselves (and as many of us as they can) inside the walls of their own propaganda edifice, and by bringing the same brutality they have used to tame distant others and steal their resources to bear on the great mass of their homeborn population. 

It is never fun to have to admit that someone or some social entity to which you have given your trust and your presumption of goodwill is not only manifestly incapable of reciprocating it, but is frankly bent on sacrificing your well-being and your dignity to its desperate attempts to cling to a few more months, years, or decades of obscene privilege. 

But that is where we are with our present government and the behemoth corporate entities with whom they now seamlessly cooperate in their desire to further control and exploit us. 

A minority of Americans, not surprisingly from the less favored classes where the brutality of day-to-day life tends to rob the elite’s non-stop happy-ending stories of their legs, has figured this out. And this is why they are systematically slandered in the media as frothing racists and violent extremists. 

The elite gambit here is to stigmatize such people so badly that no one on the cusp of perhaps accepting all or part of their grim but realistic social analysis will deign to go near them for fear of being seen as similarly tainted. Out of sight, the elites presume, out of mind. 

But that still leaves us with 65-70 percent of the population who are not quite ready to accept the reality of the intense disdain our predatory government and corporate elites have for them, and who still want to believe, in some measure, in the possibility of justice and dignity under the rules of the game as currently constituted. 

If the elite game with the openly pissed-off cohort of the population involves the forced disappearance of their social reality and their feelings of anguish, the one with this much larger and potentially more troublesome group revolves around the gradual anesthetization of their inherent desire to dream of better outcomes. 

And that is why they are doing everything in their power to discourage among us the age-old practice of looking into the eyes of others and listening mindfully to their take on the world, for they know that doing so forges bonds of empathy and links of complicity that have the potential to catalyze the creation of new social and political institutions more capable of sustaining our hopes of a more dignified life. 

I don’t know about you, but I never asked for “contact-free” service at restaurants and stores, or the ever-inefficient “efficiency” of online apps and bots rather than human beings when it comes to solving business and bureaucratic problems. Or being protected from the contamination possibilities of my fellow human beings through Plexiglas screens and useless, personality robbing masks. 

Rather, I have and always will seek contact-rich engagements with full face visibility and full vocal expression in all my social encounters because, like Vinicius, I understand the immense generative power of these things. 

I know that if I hadn’t been effectively forced into sometimes challenging engagements with widely varying people in crazily diverse social settings in these full-frontal ways I probably would have forever remained an only slightly less anxious version of the often timorous young adolescent I was.

And had I not grown in confidence through those experiences, I would never have gained my now enormous trust in the life-enriching power of serendipity; that is, how, if you give others the slightest opening for communication, you will find out surprising, if not near miraculous things about them and their life trajectories, stories that, like our dialogues with nature, tend to fill us with awe and enhance our trust in the power of human agency and resilience. 

Our current elites appear, unfortunately, to be more aware of all this than are most of us. 

And this is why they seek to mask our children, fill them with germophobic dread, and promote having them before screens filled with garbage content before they’ve ever has the chance to listen silently and without distraction to the birds as they wake up on a summer morning, or sit at a dinner table with people from different generations and different points of view, and learn about the inherent complexity, as well as the frequent hapless folly (great for learning tolerance!), of human relations. 

They want, in short, that our young never really become aware of the art of the encounter and the enormous power and suppleness it can bring to their lives. 

No, they want them incurious, history-less and feeling inert as they trudge along in the well laid-out chutes leading to the land of UBI and regularly scheduled injectable “enhancements” that will seamlessly insure that they can more efficiently serve the grand designs of those “experts” who, of course, understand better than they ever could the real reasons why each of them were put on this earth. 

And these hubristic social engineers will succeed in much of this unless the rest of us forcibly reclaim the art of the encounter in our own lives, and perhaps more importantly in our interactions with those in the generations following in our wake.

Thomas Harrington, Senior Brownstone Scholar and 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.

Andrew Korybko: Vivek Ramaswamy’s Plan For Ending The NATO-Russian Proxy War In Ukraine Is Pragmatic

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 8/30/23

The NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine has been trending towards a stalemate since the beginning of the year after Moscow’s growing edge in the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” ensured that it won’t be defeated. NATO is unlikely to be defeated either, however, since it’ll probably intervene directly – whether as a whole or via a Polish–led mission that draws in the bloc via Article 5 – to freeze the Line of Contact in the event that Russia achieves a breakthrough and threatens to sweep through Ukraine. 

The counteroffensive’s spectacular failure and the subsequently vicious blame game between the US and Ukraine strongly suggest that talks with Russia will resume by year’s end for freezing the conflict. Ahead of that happening, these wartime allies are frenziedly trying to convince their respective people that the other is responsible for this debacle simultaneously with formulating an attractive post-conflict vision of the future. The first is served by their vicious blame game while the second will now be discussed.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s now polling third after winning last week’s debate and had earlier attracted enormous media attention for his outspokenness on sensitive issues, just published his “Viable Realism & Revival Doctrine” in an article for The American Conservative. Of relevance to this piece is his plan for ending the NATO-Russian proxy war. Liberal–globalist policymakers and their media allies responded with fury, and it’s not difficult to see why.

Ramaswamy describes the conflict as a “no-win war” that’s needlessly depleted Western stockpiles to China’s benefit. With a view towards more effectively containing the People’s Republic in the Asia-Pacific, he therefore suggests extricating the US from its proxy war with Russia as soon as possible. To that end, he proposes recognizing the new ground realities in Eastern Europe, ending NATO expansion, refusing to admit Ukraine to the bloc, lifting sanctions, and having Europe shoulder the burden for its own security.

The explicit goal is to “get Putin to dump Xi”, and that’s why he says that the quid pro quo is “Russia exiting its military alliance with China.” Ramaswamy is convinced that his plan will “elevate Russia as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia” if it’s implemented into practice, but the problem is that no such “military alliance” exists between those two. Moreover, it’s unrealistic to imagine that the US will “get Putin to dump Xi” since they’re good friends and their countries are strategic partners.

Having said clarified that, this plan does have its merits. From the Russian side, it ensures that country’s objective national security interests and gives it the chance to rely on the EU for preemptively averting potentially disproportionate economic dependence on China upon the lifting of sanctions. On the home front, Ramaswamy’s plan appeals to the pragmatic policymaking faction whose influence is on the rise as proven by the success over the summer of their policy towards India that was detailed here.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The US is looking for a “face-saving” way to resume peace talks like was previously explained, and the rising influence of pragmatic policymakers could lead to them overruling the liberal-globalists’ objections to this, though their rivals could still try to sabotage this. The enormous media attention that Ramaswamy has already generated, not to mention what he’s now receiving as a result of his proposal, could reshape the national discourse on the proxy war’s endgame.

Americans are becoming fatigued with this conflict but no one had yet articulated an attractive post-conflict vision of the future until now. Irrespective of Ramaswamy’s political future, his plan serves to spark a wider conversation at all levels about the pragmatism of compromising with Russia in order to free the US up for more effectively containing China in the Asia-Pacific. This can in turn facilitate the resumption of talks with Russia, especially if it emboldens pragmatic US policymakers.

The vicious blame game between the US and Ukraine over the counteroffensive’s failure leads to the inevitable one over who’s responsible for losing this proxy war, with all of this preceding America’s formulation of an attractive post-conflict vision of the future for its people and policymakers alike. The first dynamic is continually intensifying and making more headlines by the day, while the second is also presently unfolding but mostly in silence, and it’s this dynamic that Ramaswamy’s plan contributes to.

Accepting the impossibility of Russia abandoning its mutually beneficial cooperation with China and acknowledging that lifting the sanctions likely won’t happen either, the rest of his proposals could form the parameters of a potential Russian-American deal for ending their proxy war in Ukraine. That former Soviet Republic wouldn’t join NATO, nor would that bloc expand any further, and the West would de facto recognize the new ground realities in Eastern Europe while the EU bears the burden for its security.

Russia would obviously have to agree to some regional compromises too in that scenario, such as Ukraine’s privileged post-conflict relationship with NATO and the hard security guarantees that the Anglo-American Axis will likely provide, but these could be acceptable if its other interests are met. If there’s any movement in this direction, then it shouldn’t be maliciously spun as Russia conspiring to facilitating the US’ containment of China, but seen for what it truly is: Russia putting its interests first.

The Bell: “Russia’s de-dollarization delusion”

The Bell, 9/1/23

What’s wrong with using the yuan and the rupee?

The U.S. dollar and euro were used to pay for 30% of Russian exports in July (compared to 87% before the war). On the one hand, by continuing to trade in euros or U.S. dollars, Russian companies make themselves more vulnerable to Western sanctions. On the other hand, switching to the rupee or the yuan is far from ideal due to problems with conversion, risk management and capital flow.

The problems with using rupees to buy Russian crude are a classic example. After the European oil embargo, India became the biggest buyer of Russian oil. That led to a radical imbalance in trade between the countries: in the first half of 2023, Russian exports to India were worth $30 billion, while imports were just $7 billion. Russian exporters are paid in Indian rupees, which is only partially convertible and literally has nowhere to go — at the moment, most of the money is just sitting in Indian banks. Many believe this was a major reason for the ruble’s collapse over the summer. Others feel the “rupee problem” is overstated. Either way, it is a direct consequence of the de-dollarized Russian economy.

The myth of the single BRICS currency

One solution to this problem is the Holy Grail of anti-Americanism — the introduction of a single currency for the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. However, most believe that, even as this geopolitical club expands, a single currency is either an impossible dream or an expensive political sleight-of-hand.

Last week’s BRICS summit was interesting not so much because of what happened (offering membership of the group to Iran and Argentina, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Ethiopia and Egypt) but what didn’t. There was a total absence of any discussion of the previously-announced BRICS single currency.

Politicians in all BRICS countries have long talked about a single currency — although there has been little action. The idea is particularly popular among more anti-Western countries, who regard the U.S. dollar, euro and other Western currencies as instruments of neo-colonialism, or a means of inflating financial bubbles. 

Putin said last year that BRICS countries were discussing the creation of an international reserve currency. Brazil’s president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has also spoken in favor of the idea. South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor in January backed the creation of a single currency to finance projects between member countries and reduce dependence on Western currencies. In March, a nationalist member of the Russian parliament, Alexander Babakov, even went as far as to say that BRICS would print its own currency backed by land and rare metals. The U.S. dollar and the euro, he claimed, “are not backed by anything.”

What would such a single currency look like?

At one end of the spectrum, we have a true single currency like the Euro. But this cannot be replicated. There is no free movement of capital between BRICS countries since the authorities in Russia, China and India all restrict cross-border currency operations to varying degrees and their currencies are only partially convertible. There is also no free movement of labor between these countries. More importantly, the BRICS countries — apart from India — are on synchronized economic cycles that are driven by China’s demand for raw materials. And, while inflation in China is stable, in other countries it is not — which means the Central Banks cannot synchronize monetary policies. Any political decision to introduce a single currency would cost China dear.

A more realistic possibility is a synthetic unit, like the European Currency Unit (a precursor to the Euro). A closer parallel might be the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR). Much like the SDR when it was created in 1969, a BRICS unit of account could be based on a basket of currencies from participating countries. It could then be used to settle accounts instead of the U.S. dollar, euro, yuan or ruble.

Theoretically, it would be possible to introduce a specific unit of account that is not backed by anything, and use it to get away from pricing in U.S. dollars. But this does nothing to encourage de-dollarization — and, ultimately, is more or less the same as bartering.

What are the obstacles?

The major problem is political. India is unlikely to agree to a single currency that would be dominated by China, the largest BRICS economy (up to now, India has striven to contain its powerful neighbor). Russia would benefit from a BRICS currency, since it would gain access to a new reserve currency at a time when sanctions are boxing it in. But the other BRICS members do not have this problem, so the benefits for them would be minimal.

Another problem lies within the trade structures of BRICS. India and South Africa run a trade deficit, and using a single reserve unit would deplete their own reserves unless they could ensure a flow of revenues from outside. For Russia, that would be helpful in its current circumstances, but it would be hard to get its partners to agree.

And there is a final significant problem. Exporters in countries outside Russia that are not affected by sanctions can happily receive U.S. dollars or euros and exchange them for their national currencies. A new unit of account would require a newly-created market where the Central Banks of the BRICS countries would inject liquidity by buying and selling the new unit — while remaining unable to carry out emissions.

Ben Aris: Russians rally round war-time Putin, propensity to hold protests has fallen

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 8/31/23

In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating was 82%, according to the last available Levada centre poll.

Despite the speculation that the Russians might rise up and rebel following the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity remains higher than ever according to Levada.

Putin’s popularity had been hovering in the mid- to high-60s for much of the pandemic years, falling to a one-time low of 53 points in April 2020 when the first lockdowns were introduced before recovering to 66 in August that year.

However, following the invasion of Ukraine his popularity leaped over 10 points to 83 in March 2022 and has remained at between 81 and 83 points throughout the duration of the war, with the exception of September to November when it fell to 77-79 following Ukraine’s successful Kharkiv counter-offensive.

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has also enjoyed a bump in popularity, with his approval rating rising from the mid-50s pre-war to 69-71% since the start of this year. His approval was slightly down to 69% in July.

Mishustin’s government has also been lifted from around 50% approval pre-war to 67% in July and has consistently polled at 67-69% all year.

Russia’s regional governors are even more popular, as they have in the last ten years become more effective and have concerned themselves with dealing with the immediate needs of their constituents. Region governors received consistent ratings of between the high-50s to low-60s pre-war that rose to 69% following the start of the war and have stayed at 69-74 in since. In July their approval fell slightly to a still high 72%.

The Duma remains the most unpopular institution in Russia but even that has had a boost from the nationalist rhetoric and heavy-handed propaganda. Pre-war the majority of Russian disapproved of the Duma with a roughly 40%/50% approve/disapprove split.

However, that ratio flipped in March 2022 to a 59/36 approval/disapproval as the majority of Russians approved of the Duma and its actions. Since then the overall majority of Russians still approve of the Duma with the rate varying at 54-59, and the split was 57/35 approve/disapprove in July, the last data available, with the remainder expressing no view.

The surge in nationalism is also visible in Levada’s “which direction is the country going in?” poll. Pre-war around 50% of respondents thought the country was going in the “right” direction, with roughly 44% believing it was going in the “wrong” direction and the remainder having no opinion.

However, following the start of the war the number of respondents saying Russia was going in the “right” direction jumped to 69% in March 2022 and wrong fell to 22%.

Since then respondents have very consistently polled at 67-68% for the right direction, with a few aberrations, such as the months of the Kharkiv offensive disaster for Russia.

Those that think Russia is going in the wrong direction are consistently down 20 percentage points at around 22% compared to the pre-war period, while the “don’t know” category has remained the same, circa 10% for both pre-war and post-start of the war periods.

As for the propensity to protest with political demands, this has roughly halved between the pre- and post-start of the war periods. This metric is a little more volatile than the political approval results, but the propensity to protest with political demands has oscillated around 27-30% for most of the last five years, but it fell sharply in the first poll after the start of the war in May 2022 to 16% and was 17% in July.

Interestingly, the accompanying question of “could there be political protests and would you participate if there were?” has fallen even further. Pre-war the poll found somewhere between 19% and 29% said yes to this second question, but in May 2022 that fell to only 6%, its lowest level in years. Since then it has recovered to 15% in July, which is on par with many of the polls in the pre-war period.

The political protest questions suggest that immediately after the war started respondents were afraid to take to the streets because of the anticipated Kremlin crackdown. However, after the initial shock of the invasion wore off a small minority of around 15% remain opposed to the Putin regime and war has not added significantly to their numbers. The same people don’t like Putin now as didn’t like him before the war.

The propensity to protest with economic demands show almost identical patterns. Pre-war those that thought protests were possible numbered 25-30% with 21-29% saying they would participate if protests happened.

In the May 2022 poll that fell to 17% that thought protests could happen and 14% saying they would participate if they did. In July the same 17% said protests could happen but the number willing to participate has fallen to 10%.

Ted Snider: Was Putin Really Serious About the Minsk Accords?

By Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, 8/30/23

The trouble started in 2014. A US supported coup took out the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, with his eastern base, and replaced him with a West leaning president who was handpicked by the US. Victoria Nuland, who is now Acting Deputy Secretary of State and who was then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, can be heard on an intercepted phone call selecting Arseniy Yatsenyuk as America’s choice to replace Yanukovych. He did.

The new government changed Ukraine. For the first time, the government had been changed by western Ukraine and its monist vision of the country crushing the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine and the pluralist vision it had hoped for. The pluralist dream died, and the ethnic Russians of the Donbas would suffer attacks on their language, their culture, their rights, their property and their lives.

After the coup, the first election brought Pyotr Poroshenko to power. Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, says that Poroshenko would transform into the “prime sponsor . . . of Ukrainian nationalism.” Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at Kent, says that Poroshenko’s government represented “a monist vision of Ukraine statehood that denied the pluralist alternative demanded by the Donbas. . ..”

By May 2014, the people of the Donbas had rebelled against the coup government and had approved referendums declaring some form of autonomy. Civil war followed.

The solution with the greatest signs of life was the Minsk Accords, which were brokered by France and Germany, agreed to by Ukraine and Russia, and accepted by the US and UN in 2014 and 2015. The Minsk Accords would peacefully return the Donbas to Ukraine in exchange for autonomy.

Recent corrections to the historical record have revealed the Minsk Accords to have been a deception. Recent statements by each of Putin’s partners in negotiating the Accords, Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande, have unmasked the Minsk Accords as a deceptive soporific designed to lull Russia into a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful settlement while actually buying Ukraine the time it needed to build up an armed forces capable of achieving a military solution.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a host of Ukrainian officials have added their signatures to that testimony. Petro says that “From the outset, Ukraine’s strategy was to prevent the implementation of Minsk-2.” Former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, Petro reports, says that “Ukraine’s sole objective in signing Minsk-2 was to rebuild the Ukrainian army and strengthen the international coalition against Russia.” He then adds, reinforcing the deception, that “That was understood from the very first day.” According to Petro, “[t]he Minsk-II Process . . . was explicitly rejected by senior Ukrainian government officials at the end of 2021.”

Former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock has said that “The war [in Ukraine] might have been prevented – probably would have been prevented – if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO.” Since Ukraine, Germany, France and the US – who failed to pressure Ukraine to implement the Accords nor to provide Zelensky the support he needed were he to implement them—were not willing to abide by the Minks Accords, that raises the crucial question, Was Putin? Had his negotiating partners been sincere, would the Minsk Accords have been implemented and the current war possibly avoided?

In his important biography of Putin, Philip Short says he was: “For Moscow, progress needed to come through implementation of the Minsk accords.”

In a recent article on the reasons for the failure of Ukraine to implement the Minsk Accords, sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko gives several reasons why Putin was serious about implementing the accords, including, that “It would most likely have stalled Ukraine’s Western integration by partially restoring the electoral base of the pro-neutrality ‘Eastern’ parties” and “the transformations implied by the Minsk Accords would have prevented Putin’s feared ‘anti-Russia’ from developing in Ukraine, leaving open the possibility of Ukraine and Russia evolving peacefully as two separate states . . ..”

Prior to the war, Putin had consistently resisted annexing the Donbas. In 2014, when the Donetsk and Lugansk regions held referendums on autonomy, Putin asked them to delay them. When they went ahead with them anyway and voted for autonomy, Putin did not recognize the results. Sakwa says that Putin “repeatedly reject[ed] requests to accept the territory as part of Russia.”

Dmitry Trenin, professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, points out that when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin was acting “on a mandate from the Russian parliament to use military force ‘in Ukraine’ not just in Crimea.” But Putin resisted pressure from Russian nationalists to annex the Donbas and instead remained committed the Minsk Accord’s plan to keep the Donbas a part of Ukraine.

Putin, at the time, “believed that we would manage to come to terms, and Lugansk and Donetsk would be able to reunify with Ukraine somehow under the agreements – the Minsk agreements.” Russian hardliners have criticized Putin for that restraint and blamed it for the current crisis. They have criticized him for stopping at Crimea and not annexing the Donbas as well. They have chastised him for trusting Germany and France’s promise to ensure the implementation of the Minsk Accords.

But Putin’s commitment to the Minsk Accords did not seem to waver until the revelations by Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko proved his hardline critics right. Following their revelations, Putin told the nation that “For years, Western elites hypocritically assured us of their peaceful intentions, including to help resolve the serious conflict in Donbass.” He then went on to charge that “[t]he West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it.”

Right up until the war, Putin remained committed to the Minsk Accords. Geoffrey Roberts, in an article called “Now or Never: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine,” in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, quotes Putin as saying that he is “convinced” there is “still . . . no alternative.” In August, 2021, in response to a question from the press following talks with Merkel, Putin said “we have no other tool to achieve peace, and I believe they should be treated very carefully and with respect.” Roberts says that, in a November 13 interview, Putin “reiterated Russia’s commitment to the implementation of the Minsk agreements, saying there was no other mechanism to resolve the Donbass problem.”

At the same time Putin complained to Merkel that “Ukraine has adopted a number of laws and regulations that essentially contradict the Minsk agreements. It is as if the leadership of that country has decided to give up on achieving a peaceful settlement.” Putin was referring to laws that prohibited the use of Russian language and culture from official use and education and the shutting down of all ethnic Russian television and media outlets.

Putin continued to speak with the French and German brokers of the Minsk Accords in the days right before the war. Roberts reports that Putin spoke with Macron on February 12 and complained of the West’s failure to prompt Kiev to implement the agreements. The next day he told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that he believed a solution within the Minsk agreements was still possible but that Germany and France had to pressure Ukraine. But, though the key players in the Minsk negotiations continued to meet in the days right before the war, “it was clear,” Sakwa says, “that Ukraine was in no mood to fulfill the Minsk-2 agreement.”

Though perhaps no one else was – not Ukraine, not the US, not Germany or France – Putin seems to have been serious about the Minks Accords. Since their implementation may have prevented the war, the implications are significant. Although it does not absolve Putin from the decision to launch the war, it does suggest, along with the December 2021 proposal on mutual security guarantees Putin sent to the US and NATO, that he was trying to prevent it.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on US foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and  The Libertarian Institute . He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets.