Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 166

Uwe Parpart: Ukraine armistice coming into view

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Uwe Parpart, Asia Times, 11/15/22

“In the Kherson direction, today at 5 o’clock in the morning Moscow time, the transfer of units of Russian troops to the left bank of the Dnieper River was completed. No units or military equipment and weapons were left on the right bank. All Russian soldiers crossed to the left bank of the Dnieper,” read the announcement of the Russian Ministry of Defense on Friday, November 11, 2022 – the anniversary of World War I Armistice Day, 1918.

The amount of misinformation and sheer nonsense about the Russian withdrawal from Kherson published since the time of the announcement “wouldn’t fit on a cow’s hide” (geht auf keine Kuhhaut), said a German military intelligence officer based at Grafenwöhr, Bavaria, where Bundeswehr trainers advise Ukrainian soldiers in the use of advanced artillery equipment.

(It’s on parchment made of cowhide that the devil keeps a record of people’s sins qualifying for time in hell or purgatory.)

As has become commonplace, the blödsinn (“utter rubbish”) was mainly purveyed by the Washington, DC–based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), founded and headed by Kimberly Kagan, wife of Frederick Kagan, head of the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, brother of neocon guru Robert Kagan, husband of the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria “Tori” Nuland, spiritus rector (“guiding spirit”) of the 2014 Maidan Orange uprising that deposed elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Nuland became notorious for her “F**k the EU” outburst, published from a covert tape recording.

What the ISW may have left out by way of rubbish and propaganda was filled in by Britain’s Ministry of Truth – pardon, Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) – and duly amplified by the echo chamber of the Western press.

The Anglo-American echo chamber predicted 1) a bloodbath, with the mass slaughter of panicked, fleeing Russian soldiers; 2) retaliation for the defeat at Kherson by a Russian electromagnetic pulse (EMP) strike by a low-yield nuclear detonation in space, causing a total blackout and shut down of unprotected electronic devices in the city of Kiev, a fairytale circulated by the ISW; 3) blowing up the Kakhovka dam with thousands of civilian casualties (UK MoD).

The accusation that destroying a dam constituted a war crime was especially ripe coming from London; British forces invented this sort of war on the night of May 16-17, 1943. “Operation Chastise,” the mass bombing attack on six major German dams, destroyed two of the targets and killed 2,400 people.

To date, nothing of the sort has happened – though we won’t rule out that Ukrainian or Russian fire might damage or destroy the dam at Nova Kakhovka in the future.

What has happened, instead, is an orderly retreat of Russian forces from the west bank of the Dnieper River with virtually no reported casualties and no serious effort by Ukrainian forces to exploit the retreat.

Those facts and the resulting new military situation constitute one of two factors that point toward a ceasefire, possibly leading to a formal armistice. US Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered his professional judgment to this effect in a November 11 speech to the Economic Club of New York. Milley did not hedge.

“There has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably, in the true sense of the word, not achievable through military means, and therefore.… When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it,” he said.

The other factor is the economic situation of Ukraine and its Western European supporters. Ukraine says its economic output is down 35% year on year. That is nowhere near the truth. The country has neither the labor nor the capital to sustain itself at any level.

It is entirely dependent on foreign donations for its ability to conduct the current war and keep its dwindling population fed and clothed. Western Europe, in turn, has reached the limits of coping with the influx of Ukrainian refugees as well as continuing immigrant flows from Africa.

The military situation

On October 8, after the bombing of the strategic Kerch Strait bridge connecting Crimea and Russia’s Taman Peninsula, Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Army General Sergey Surovikin as the new overall commander of operations of the war.

Surovikin, 56, has ample combat experience in Afghanistan and Syria. He took his time – one month, to be precise – to assess the military situation. And he made a decision for which he may well be vilified: to withdraw all Russian forces from the right bank of the Dnieper to defensible positions with much shorter interior lines on the left bank, requiring fewer troops to defend.

Any defensive evacuation of substantial numbers of troops (approximately 30,000) with a major river at your back is a high-risk operation. Based on net assessment, Surovikin regarded it as necessary and got it sorted. The map below shows the current alignments and military options of both sides.

A Ukrainian attack across the river would face major problems, including guarding against the possibility of a Kakhovka dam burst and flooding of the lower Kherson regions.

Ukrainian attacks from the areas east of the city of Zaporizhzhia in the direction of Melitopol and further east of Mariupol are possible, but would require significant massing of forces, potentially denuding Ukrainian positions opposite the city of Donetsk. The danger for Ukraine there lies in the possibility of a Russian counterattack in the direction of the city of Pokrovsk near the western border of Donetsk Oblast.

The hardest current fighting is taking place in the Bakhmut-Soledar area. The area around the transportation hub of Bakhmut guards entry to the Popasna-Luhansk corridor. Neither side can afford to abandon these key positions.

Last, further north, the focus is on the parallelogram southeast of Kharkov. But the Ukrainian offensive there is literally stuck in the mud. It is difficult to see how much progress can be made by the Ukrainians, notably because of the closeness of Russian territory.

Bottom line: Surovikin’s move out of Kherson City and points northwest of the city has created a strategic stalemate.

Time is not on Ukraine’s side. Larger-scale efforts to regain more territory than achieved in Kharkov and Kherson would require not only the continued large flow of NATO arms, but a buildup of manpower.

The 15,000-20,000 troops currently being trained in Poland, Germany and Ukraine will not suffice even if they are twice as capable as the Russian reservists being brought in.

General Milley’s assessment was based on this simple body count. Ukraine is no longer a country of 42 million people, but more likely a country of 10 million fewer than that.

American military intelligence assessments assume about equal numbers of Ukrainian and Russian casualties of about 100,000 since the start of the war. That does not bode well for the country with currently just one-fifth of Russia’s population.

Armistice assessment

General Milley’s assessment that neither Ukraine nor Russia can achieve their maximum goals is widely shared by other NATO militaries.

German and French assessments are more pessimistic, assuming that even parity will not last long and that now is the optimal time for Ukraine to start talking.

There can be little doubt that this is what prompted US national security adviser Jake Sullivan to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that, yes, we fully support you, but, hey, maybe start negotiations.

Sullivan reportedly told Zelensky that it would be easier to maintain Western support if it were “perceived as being willing” to engage in diplomacy.

Kriegsmūdigkeit (war-weariness) is strongest in Germany among Ukraine’s NATO backers; 78% of the population want to see negotiations, and a similar number believe Germany has done enough to support Ukraine.

An estimated 1.3 million Ukrainian refugees have arrived in Germany and receive immediate social security, free health care and emergency shelter. The capital city Berlin, which has processed 400,000 refugees, has declared a humanitarian emergency.

Militarily and economically, conditions for a Denkpause, a pause to think things over, are ripe.

As reported on November 14, US Central Intelligence Agency director William Burns – the former US ambassador to Russia who warned about NATO’s eastern expansion – met in Istanbul on Monday with his Russian counterpart Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service.

Burns, the story goes, went to Istanbul to warn Naryshkin against the use of nuclear weapons. Really? And Naryshkin complied obediently and went there to talk about that?

There is little doubt that their meeting was a follow-up to the Sullivan’s and Milley’s probes about ending the fighting.

And why Istanbul? Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has offered to play peacemaker.

The US and the wider West are attacking Russia “almost without limits,” prompting a natural defensive reaction, Erdogan said on November 12 while returning from a summit of Turkic nations in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. But he also reminded reporters that he had brokered a grain export deal with Ukraine and signaled that he is available to broker a wider deal.

The major caveat regarding an early ceasefire is strictly political. President Putin is under attack from his nationalist right. President Zelensky would have to answer the questions from his own population as to why he would negotiate a truce now when the only outcome will be the status quo ante – before the deaths of tens of thousands, the displacement of millions and the wholesale destruction of the country.

Big Serge: Surovikin’s Difficult Choice – Russia Abandons Kherson

Map of Ukraine

By Big Serge, Substack, 11/12/22

In January, 1944, the newly reconstituted German Sixth Army found itself in an operationally cataclysmic situation in the southern bend of the Dnieper River, in the area of Krivoi Rog and Nikopol. The Germans occupied a dangerous salient, jutting out precariously into the Red Army’s lines. Vulnerable on two awkward flanks, and facing an enemy with superiority in manpower and firepower, any general worth his salt would have sought to withdraw as soon as possible. In this case, however, Hitler insisted that the Wehrmacht hold the salient, because the region was Germany’s last remaining source of manganese – a mineral crucial for making high quality steel.

A year prior, in the opening weeks of 1943, Hitler had intervened in another, more famous battle, forbidding the previous incarnation of the Sixth Army from breaking out of a pocket forming around it at Stalingrad. Prohibited from withdrawing, the Sixth was annihilated wholesale.

In both of these cases, there was a clash between pure military prudence and broader political aims and needs. In 1943, there was neither a compelling military nor political reason to keep the 6th Army in the pocket at Stalingrad – political intervention in military decision making was both senseless and disasterous. In 1944, however, Hitler (however difficult it is to admit it) had a valid argument. Without manganese from the Nikopol area, German war production was doomed. In this case, political intervention was perhaps warranted. Leaving an army in a vulnerable salient is bad, but so is running out of manganese.

These two tragic fates of the Sixth Army illustrate the salient issue today: how do we parse the difference between military and political decision making? More specifically, to what do we attribute the shocking Russian decision to withdraw from the west bank of the Dnieper in Kherson oblast, after annexing it just a few months ago?

I would like to parse through this issue. First off, one cannot deny that the withdrawal is politically a significant humiliation for Russia. The question becomes, however, whether this sacrifice was necessary on military or political grounds, and what it may signify about the future course of the conflict.

As I see it, the withdrawal from west bank Kherson must be driven by one of the four following possibilities:

1. The Ukrainian Army has defeated the Russian Army on the west bank and driven it back across the river.

2. Russia is setting a trap in Kherson.

3. A secret peace agreement (or at least ceasefire) has been negotiated which includes giving Kherson back to Ukraine.

4. Russia has made a politically embarrassing but militarily prudent operational choice.

Let us simply run through these four and examine them in sequence.

Possibility 1: Military Defeat

The recapture of Kherson is being fairly celebrated by Ukrainians as a victory. The question is just what kind of victory it is – political/optical, or military? It becomes trivially obvious that it is the first sort. Let’s examine a few facts.

First off, as recently as the morning of November 9 – hours before the withdrawal was announced – some Russian war correspondents were expressing skepticism about the withdrawal rumors because Russia’s forward defensive lines were completely intact. There was no semblance of crisis among Russian forces in the region.

Secondly, Ukraine was not executing any intense offensive efforts in the region at the time the withdrawal began, and Ukrainian officials expressed skepticism that the withdrawal was even real. Indeed, the idea that Russia was laying a trap originates with Ukrainian officials who were apparently caught off guard by the withdrawal. Ukraine was not prepared to pursue or exploit, and advanced cautiously into the void after Russian soldiers were gone. Even with Russia withdrawing, they were clearly scared to advance, because their last few attempts to push through the defenses in the area became mass casualty events.

Overall, Russia’s withdrawal was implemented very quickly with minimal pressure from the Ukrainians – this very fact is the basis of the idea that it is either a trap or the result of a backroom deal that’s been concluded. In either case, Russia simply slipped back across the river without pursuit by the Ukrainians, taking negligible losses and getting virtually all of their equipment out (so far, a broken down T90 is the only Ukrainian capture of note). The net score on the Kherson Front remains a strong casualty imbalance in favor of Russia, and they once again withdraw without suffering a battlefield defeat and with their forces intact.

Possibility 2: It’s a Trap

This theory cropped up very soon after the withdrawal was announced. It originated with Ukrainian officials who were caught off guard by the announcement, and was then picked up (ironically) by Russian supporters who were hoping that 4D chess was being played – it is not. Russia is playing standard 2D chess, which is the only kind of chess there is, but more about that later.

It’s unclear what exactly “trap” is supposed to mean, but I’ll try to fill in the blanks. There are two possible interpretations of this: 1) a conventional battlefield maneuver involving a timely counterattack, and 2) some sort of unconventional move like a tactical nuclear weapon or a cascading dam failure.

It’s clear that there’s no battlefield counter in the offing, for the simple reason that Russia blew the bridges behind them. With no Russian forces left on the west bank and the bridges wrecked, there is no immediate capacity for either army to attack the other in force. Of course, they can shell each other across the river, but the actual line of contact is frozen for the time being.

That leaves the possibility that Russia intends to do something unconventional, like use a low yield nuke.

The idea that Russia lured Ukraine into Kherson to set off a nuke is… stupid.

If Russia wanted to use a nuclear weapon against Ukraine (which they don’t, for reasons I articulated in a previous article) there’s no sensible reason why they would choose a regional capital that they annexed as the site to do it. Russia has no shortage of delivery systems. If they wanted to nuke Ukraine, very simply, they wouldn’t bother abandoning their own city and making that the blast site. They would simply nuke Ukraine. It’s not a trap.

Possibility 3: Secret Deal

This was sparked by the news that US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has been in contact with his Russian counterpart, and specifically the sense that the White House has been pushing for the negotiations. Under one rumored variant of the “Sullivan Deal”, Ukraine would acknowledge Russia’s annexations east of the Dnieper, while west bank Kherson would revert back to Kiev’s control.

I find this unlikely for a variety of reasons. First off, such a deal would represent an extremely pyrrhic Russian victory – while it would achieve the liberation of the Donbas (one of the explicit goals of the SMO) it would leave Ukraine largely intact and strong enough to be a perennial thorn in the side, as an inimical anti-Russian state. There would be the problem of probable further Ukrainian integration into NATO, and above all, the open surrender of an annexed regional capital.

On the Ukrainian side, the issue is that the recovery of Kherson only enhances the (false) perception in Kiev that total victory is possible, and that Crimea and the Donbas can be recovered entirely. Ukraine is enjoying a string of territorial advances, and feels that it is pushing its window of opportunity.

Ultimate, there seems to be no deal that satisfies both sides, and this reflects that the innate hostility between the two nations must be resolved on the battlefield. Only Ares can adjudicate this dispute.

As for Ares, he has been hard at work in Pavlovka.

While the world was fixated on the relatively bloodless change of hands in Kherson, Russia and Ukraine fought a bloody battle for Pavlovka, and Russia won. Ukraine also attempted to break Russia’s defenses in the Svatove axis, and was repulsed with heavy casualties. Ultimately, the main reason to doubt news of a secret deal is the fact that the war is continuing on all the other fronts – and Ukraine is losing. This leaves only one option.

Possibility 4: A Difficult Operational Choice

This withdrawal was subtly signaled shortly after General Surovikin was put in charge of the operation in Ukraine. In his first press conference, he signaled dissatisfaction with the Kherson front, calling the situation “tense and difficult” and alluding to the threat of Ukraine blowing dams on the Dnieper and flooding the area. Shortly thereafter, the process of evacuating civilians from Kherson began.

Here is what I think Surovikin decided about Kherson.

Kherson was becoming an inefficient front for Russia because of the logistical strain of supplying forces across the river with limited bridge and road capacity. Russia demonstrated that it was capable of shouldering this sustainment burden (keeping troops supplied all through Ukraine’s summer offensives), but the question becomes 1) to what purpose, and 2) for how long.

Ideally, the bridgehead becomes the launching point for offensive action against Nikolayev, but launching an offensive would require strengthening the force grouping in Kherson, which correspondingly raises the logistical burden of projecting force across the river. With a very long front to play with, Kherson is clearly one of the most logistically intensive axes. My guess is that Surovikin took charge and almost immediately decided he did not want to increase the sustainment burden by trying to push on Nikolayev.

Therefore, if an offensive is not going to be launched from the Kherson position, the question becomes – why hold the position at all? Politically, it is important to defend a regional capital, but militarily the position becomes meaningless if one is not going to go on the offensive in the south.

Let’s be even more explicit: unless an offensive towards Nikolayev is planned, the Kherson bridgehead is militarily counterproductive.

While holding the bridgehead in Kherson, the Dnieper River becomes a negative force multiplier – increasing the sustainment and logistics burden and ever threatening to leave forces cut off if Ukraine succeeds in destroying the bridges or bursting the dam. Projecting force across the river becomes a heavy burden with no obvious benefit. But by withdrawing to the east bank, the river becomes a positive force multiplier by serving as a defensive barrier.

In the broader operational sense, Surovikin seems to be declining battle in the south while preparing in the north and in the Donbas. It is clear that he made this decision shortly after taking command of the operation – he has been hinting at it for weeks, and the speed and cleanliness of the withdrawal suggests that it was well planned , long in advance. Withdrawing across the river increases the combat effectiveness of the army significantly and decreases the logistical burden, freeing resources for other sectors.

This fits the overall Russian pattern of making harsh choices about resource allocation, fighting this war under the simple framework of optimizing the loss ratios and building the perfect meatgrinder. Unlike the German Army in the second world war, the Russian army seems to be freed from political interference to make rational military decisions.

In this way, the withdrawal from Kherson can be seen as a sort of anti-Stalingrad. Instead of political interference hamstringing the military, we have the military freed to make operational choices even at the cost of embarrassing the political figures. And this, ultimately, is the more intelligent – if optically humiliating – way to fight a war.

In Conversation with Jeffrey Sachs on Ukraine, NATO, etc.

Link here.

Aaron Mate: Urging peace with Russia, top US general challenges DC’s proxy war

By Aaron Mate, Substack, 11/12/22

When the Congressional Progressive Caucus was bullied into withdrawing a letter urging diplomacy with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, everyone from neoconservative pundits to Sen. Bernie Sanders came forward to scold them. But now the same call is coming from a source that cannot be so easily ignored, and intimidated.

“A disagreement has emerged at the highest levels of the United States government over whether to press Ukraine to seek a diplomatic end to its war with Russia,” the New York Times reports. Leading the call for talks with Moscow is Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to US officials, Milley “has made the case in internal meetings that the Ukrainians have achieved about as much as they could reasonably expect on the battlefield before winter sets in and so they should try to cement their gains at the bargaining table.”

The top US general has made no secret of his stance. “When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it,” Milley declared in a public speech this week.

Milley’s view “is not shared” by President Biden or his National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, the Times claims. Nor by the top US diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken. As one US official explained to CNN, “the State Department is on the opposite side of the pole,” leading to “a unique situation where military brass are more fervently pushing for diplomacy than US diplomats.”

While US “diplomats” oppose diplomacy, White House officials would not be disclosing that Milley, the nation’s highest military officer, is challenging their stance if he were alone. Indeed, the Milley revelation is only the latest in a series of leaks suggesting that, despite the uproar over the progressives’ pro-diplomacy letter, at least some close to the president agree with its message.

The first sign came via an alarmist story planted in the New York Times on Nov. 2nd. Top Russian military leaders, the Times claimed, have “recently had conversations to discuss when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, contributing to heightened concern in Washington and allied capitals.” Yet the Times also noted that US officials have “seen no evidence that the Russians were moving nuclear weapons into place or taking other tactical measures to prepare for a strike.” The report, after all, came just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly renounced the prospect of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. “There is no point in that, neither political, nor military,” Putin said in a speech.

The Biden officials who leaked this story made the effort to highlight their contacts with Russian counterparts. “While the risk of further escalation remains troublingly high, Biden administration officials and U.S. allies also say that the phone calls between Western and Russian counterparts late last month helped ease some of the nuclear tensions.” Putin’s speech, they added, “further lowered the temperature.”

If there is no evidence that Russia was mulling the use of nuclear weapons, then a leak nonetheless claiming that diplomacy has “lowered the temperature” signaled that US officials were creating space for additional talks.

That prospect was bolstered with another White House leak three days later. “The Biden administration is privately encouraging Ukraine’s leaders to signal an openness to negotiate with Russia and drop their public refusal to engage in peace talks unless President Vladimir Putin is removed from power,” the Washington Post reported on Nov. 5th. To presumably appease proxy war supporters, the Post’s sources insisted that this private pressure on Kiev was just for show. Rather than “pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table,” officials told the Post, the White House was only making “a calculated attempt to ensure the government in Kyiv maintains the support of other nations facing constituencies wary of fueling a war for many years to come.”

For a Biden administration that bragged about its pre-invasion diplomatic efforts while refusing to even discuss Russia’s core demands, such a ploy would be perfectly in character. But if White House officials were indeed pressing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fake interest in peace talks just to placate jittery allies, it seems rather unlikely that they would divulge their ruse to a major US newspaper.

The impression that the US is in fact embracing diplomacy with Russia was reinforced with another leak. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan “has engaged in recent months in confidential conversations with top aides to [Putin],” the Wall Street Journal reported on Nov. 7th. As with their previous disclosures to the Times and the Post, US officials added face-saving caveats. The aim of the talks, they insisted, is “not to discuss a settlement of the war in Ukraine” but instead “to guard against the risk of escalation and keep communications channels open.”

But the Journal’s account suggests that the talks are about more than that. Sullivan’s interlocutors have included his direct Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, as well as Yuri Ushakov, a foreign-policy adviser to Putin. If their discussions were strictly about avoiding escalation, that would be the domain of the US-Russian military leaders. Sullivan also has experience with outreach to US foes, including his key role in the secret overtures that ultimately yielded the Iran nuclear deal.

Indeed, during a recent visit to Kiev, Sullivan “did broach the idea of how the conflict can end and whether it could include a diplomatic solution,” NBC News reported two days after the Journal’s article. Sullivan, a source said, “was testing the waters a bit.” The US message on that trip, Politico added, was that Kiev “must show its willingness to end the war reasonably and peacefully.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who hosted the March-April talks between Ukraine and Russia that were thwarted by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (presumably with US backing), has been floated as a possible broker.

The reports about Sullivan’s diplomatic efforts coincided with news that the US and Russia will resume talks on extending New START, the last remaining treaty that limits both countries’ nuclear arsenals. The negotiations will mark the first time that US and Russian officials have met under the auspices of the pact since October 2021.

Finding a settlement in Ukraine will not be easy, but is perhaps not as intractable as it may appear. Dan Rice, an advisor to the commander of Ukraine’s army, recently told CNN that Russia, rather than conquering all of Ukraine, is “trying to get to the negotiating table, to try to go back to the 2014 lines,” — wherein Russia controls Crimea, and Russia-backed rebels control the breakaway republics of the Donbas. But “Ukraine won’t have it,” Rice said. “Ukraine wants all of their land back to the ’91 lines.”  

Charles Kupchan, a former senior National Security Council official under Presidents Obama and Clinton, has proposed a settlement in line with Rice’s rendering of the Russian position. Along with a pledge to not join NATO, Ukraine would renounce claims to Crimea and the pro-Russian areas of the Donbas.

“Russia has legitimate security concerns about NATO setting up shop on the other side of its 1,000-mile-plus border with Ukraine,” Kupchan writes. “NATO may be a defensive alliance, but it brings to bear aggregate military power that Moscow understandably does not want parked near its territory.”

While giving up territory would be painful for Ukraine, the consequences of a protracted war are far worse, Kupchan argues. “If the defense of Ukraine is not worth U.S. boots on the ground, then the return of all of the Donbas and Crimea to Ukrainian control is not worth risking a new world war.” This is especially the case, I would add, given that a significant percentage of the Donbas population wishes to remain with Russia, along with the vast majority of Crimeans.

It is unclear if Russia would accept Kupchan’s terms, which would require the return of newly annexed territory to Kiev’s control. But Russia’s recent withdrawal from one of those areas, Kherson, shows that it is not willing to risk significant casualties at all costs. That retreat might suggest the potential for further Russian withdrawals. In any event, engaging in talks with the Kremlin is one path to finding out.

If Ukraine does end up permanently losing territory to Russia, it can blame its own far-right forces and their enablers in Washington. Had Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists been willing to tolerate the 2015 Minsk II Accords, Ukraine would have kept all of Donbas in exchange for granting the breakaway republics limited autonomy – including the right to speak the Russian language. But for Ukraine’s far-right, recognizing the equality of the country’s ethnic Russian population has been a non-starter. “The Russian language must disappear from our territory altogether, as an element of hostile propaganda and brainwashing of our population,” Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security Council, recently declared.

That a change in US policy could have blunted Ukraine’s far-right was made clear in the fateful months before Russia’s invasion. As Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border in November 2021, Samuel Charap, a senior analyst with the US government-funded RAND Corporation, argued that US support for the Minsk II accords could help avert disaster.

 “The reality is that Ukraine depends on political, diplomatic, economic and military support from the West, and particularly from the United States,” Charap wrote. Accordingly, that gives the US “significant leverage” on Kiev, which at that point had been “largely untapped.” To date, the US had “not yet used its influence to push for progress on the Donbas conflict.”

Instead of “focusing only on coercing Russia,” Charap proposed, “the Biden administration should also push Kyiv to take steps toward implementing its obligations under the Minsk II agreement, which Ukraine has shown little desire to do since the deal was brokered six years ago.” If the Ukrainian government could be pushed “toward complying with the agreement, flawed as it is,” that “might actually invite de-escalation from Russia and reinvigorate the languishing peace process,” while saving Ukraine “from calamity.”

Instead, Biden chose to sit idle as Ukraine’s far-right blocked any such peace process, to the point of threatening Zelensky with an outright coup if he reached a deal with Russia. “If anybody from the Ukrainian government tries to sign such a document,” Yuri Hudymenko, leader of the far-right Democratic Ax, declared in early February, less than two weeks before Russia’s invasion, “a million people will take to the streets and that government will cease being the government.”

Rather than help Zelensky make peace, Biden adopted a strategy of flooding Ukraine with weapons to “weaken” Russia militarily and crippling sanctions aimed at destroying its economy. Although Russia has suffered heavy losses on all fronts – this week, Milley estimated that Ukraine and Russia have suffered some 100,000 casualties each — it has still managed to capture about 20% of Ukrainian territory and keep its economy afloat. Despite its battlefield setbacks, “the Russian military continues to wage an effective missile and drone campaign against Ukraine’s infrastructure, according to U.S. defense officials and military analysts, exposing gaps in a heavily strained Ukrainian air defense network,” the New York Times reports.

One can never discount the possibility that the current US nods to diplomacy are merely a ruse: publicly floating an olive branch to Russia while privately preparing for more Ukrainian counter-offensives at an opportune moment.

But with hundreds of thousands of additional Russian troops set to mobilize, winter approaching, and talk of “Ukraine fatigue” growing across NATO capitals, there are enough signs to suspect, albeit cautiously, that for some of the proxy war’s Washington backers, the calamity in Ukraine has run its course.

MICHAEL GFOELLER AND DAVID H. RUNDELL: Why Now Is the Time for Russia and Ukraine to Talk

By Michael Gfoeller & David H. Rundell, Newsweek, 11/3/22

The absence of any serious effort to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine through negotiations is striking. The withdrawal of Russian forces, Ukrainian neutrality, an end to economic sanctions and most importantly a cease fire and legitimate U.N.-monitored plebiscite are all negotiable, though you would hardly know it from the rhetoric of Russia or the West.

Before dismissing such efforts, it is important to ask yourself, “How much do I really know about Ukraine?” For most Americans, the answer is not much. A year ago, few of us could find Crimea on a map. Ukraine’s history is complex and the current situation fluid.

Part of the problem is just defining the borders of Russia. Are you talking about the Czarist Empire that included half of Poland, Stalin’s Soviet Union that covered most of Central Asia, or today’s much diminished and embittered Russian Federation? In none of these configurations does Russia have clear, naturally defensible borders. As a result, it has been invaded by the Mongols, Swedes, French, and twice by the Germans. Freeing themselves from the Nazis cost Russia 22 million lives. For comparison, American losses during World War II were 400,000 from a population of roughly similar size.

Because secure borders are such a vital concern for Russia, the eastward expansion of NATO was always going to be problematic. George Kennan was America’s pre-eminent Soviet expert and the author of our Cold War containment policy. In 1997 he wrote, “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. … Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy, to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations and to steer Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” His predictions were entirely correct, but his advice was ignored. NATO expanded, adding 14 new members that had either been part of the Soviet Union or dominated by it.

Ukraine was not among these new NATO members in part because Russia made its opposition very clear. U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns presciently wrote in a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Russian President Vladimir Putin). In more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

It is not hard to understand why Ukraine would be “brightest of all red lines,” for Moscow. Simply put, the key is the Crimean Peninsula and land access to it. Despite containing 11 time zones, Sevastopol has been Russia’s only warm-water naval base for nearly 250 years. It became Russian in 1783. In 1853, the Czar fought a war against France and Britain to keep it. During the Second World War, tens of thousands of Soviet troops died defending and ultimately liberating Sevastopol from the Wehrmacht. Whoever controls Crimea dominates the Black Sea and can threaten Russia’s southern flank. The idea that Sevastopol could become a NATO naval base has always been as unacceptable in Moscow as the placing of Soviet missiles in Cuba was to Washington.

Some argue that we are fighting for democracy and must crush Putin however long it takes. They clearly overlook not only how unpopular costly forever wars have become with the American public but also our checkered experience with regime change. Other pundits even call for reparations or war crime trials as if we were at Versailles or Nuremberg. They forget that both the Treaty of Versailles and the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials were entirely predicated on abject German defeats. Short of a nuclear war, that is not going to happen to Russia.

Ukraine has had historically flexible borders. Until 1918 the city of Lviv, (then Limburg) was Austrian. Between the two world wars, western Ukraine was Polish. Crimea was transferred from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian one only in 1954 primarily to increase the number of Russian speakers in Ukraine. Not counting Crimea, post-Soviet Ukraine has now lost nearly 20 percent of its prewar territory and become almost entirely dependent on foreign arms and financial assistance, three quarters of which is American. Millions have been made homeless or fled the country. As manpower reserves and the tax base collapse, inflation has soared, and infrastructure been systemically destroyed. Despite recent gains, it is not at all clear that Ukraine is winning the war. Yet Ukraine remains a difficult country to help. Its post-Soviet governments have been profoundly corrupt, and one cannot give money endlessly to a man with a hole in his pocket.

Russia on the other hand is largely self-sufficient in food, energy, and armaments. The ruble is stronger today than it was a year ago. Western sanctions have caused more economic havoc in Europe than Russia. It is perhaps worth remembering that Putin’s parents lived through the Siege of Leningrad where 600,000 Russians chose to starve to death rather than surrender. It seems unlikely that he will now capitulate because he can no longer buy a Big Mac.

We do, in fact, live in a rules-based world order, and one of the cardinal rules of international relations is that large powers expect to control a sphere of influence that they will fight to defend, as we are prepared to do in Taiwan. One of the principal functions of diplomacy is avoiding or ending the carnage of military conflicts. Most often, that involves talking to people with opposing views whom you neither like nor trust.

What would a negotiated solution look like? It should begin with an honest appreciation of what the local populations want. Support for self-determination has been a central plank of American foreign policy since President Woodrow Wilson went to Versailles. We remain confident that the consent of the governed is the most fundamental form of legitimacy. The Czechs and Slovaks peacefully went their separate ways. Citizens of Quebec were allowed to vote on remaining Canadian. The people of Scotland were given a chance to leave the United Kingdom. The British even got to vote on staying in the European Union. Don’t the people of Crimea and the Donbas deserve as much? If we trusted the U.N. to monitor Iran’s nuclear activities, surely it can also be trusted to organize and monitor a fair election.

The First Crimean War (1853-1856) ended in a negotiated compromise. In all probability, the Second Crimean War will end the same way. In 1962, when faced with the possibly of nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did his utmost to defuse the situation through independent thinking, negotiations, and compromise. Today, we face a similar situation. There are numerous issues to negotiate, but a ceasefire and plebiscite would be a good place to start. This would be complicated, controversial, and expensive to administer, but so is continuing to support and fund a war. The suffering of the Ukrainian population is getting worse by the day and winter is coming. It is time for creative thinking and effective diplomacy to end this war before it spins further out of control.

David Bromwich: Russia Hating: A Study of the News—and Views—We Find Fit to Print

By David Bromwich, The Nation, 10/31/22

Ukraine is a country we are just getting to know. What is more important is to hate Russia: an emotion in which Americans have been well trained. Media workers and the experts they interview, one notices, can’t help stumbling occasionally: “the Soviet Union—I mean, Russia.” A history of contempt takes us back to an entity at once exotic and primitive, suspended in time and space.

This Russia hovers between barbarism and modernity, between Asia and Europe, an uncertain profile that has long troubled the Western mind. But the task has now been simplified: Hate Putin, hate “Putin’s Russia,” hate Russia—before, during, and after the fact, and in excess of the facts. And the Russian people? We will come back to them.

The Western moral calculus that ramps up war fever can be detected in a headline like “Fear of Reprisal for Bridge Blast Dims Kyiv’s Joy” (The New York Times, October 10, print edition). You sense it, too, in the teacherly posture of news analysis: “Putin’s Plan to Bomb Kyiv Into Submission? History Says It Won’t Work” (the Times, October 11). Was that, in fact, Putin’s idea? Pretty clearly, he did not decide to bomb Kyiv until Ukraine blew up the bridge connecting Crimea to Russia. The tone of polite journalism on this subject hardly differs from that of the tabloids: “How Moscow Grabs Kids and Makes Them Russians” (ABC News, linked on Drudge Report, October 13).

A recent on-the-ground story by Jeffrey Gettleman in The New York Times conveyed the experiences of a freelance American soldier in Ukraine; the long headline and deck in the print edition brought together the politics and human interest and the necessary ethical judgment: “American Finds in Ukraine the War He Sought: A Morally Clear Effort After Tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.” What is the meaning of the second part of the headline? War is a kind of health, it says, if only we find the right war. But the phrase “moral clarity” has also become a mantra for left-wing activist reporters. It instructs you to know where you are headed before you set out to write. Don’t let a morally clear viewpoint be confused by subtle, complex, and inconvenient facts: Those are the boring middle part of the story, and they can safely be skipped. Clarity is crystallized by silent omissions and an economy of truth. Your choice of adjectives and adverbs, meanwhile, will vouch for your passion.

The media in the US and in other NATO countries have achieved a harmonious moral clarity, and they are skipping the part with the inconvenient facts. “Putin’s Russia” functions as a kind of suture that binds the relevant wartime emotions to a generalized hatred of Russia—Russia past, Russia present, and the Russia to come. An exemption is carved out for courageous Russians who protest openly, or the disaffected ones who have left the country or hope to exit soon. How many does that leave us to hate? Possibly quite a few.

The Gettleman story was filed from Soledar, a town in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, 80 miles northwest of Luhansk, where clashes between Russian-leaning inhabitants and the Ukrainian army go back to the ascent of an anti-Russian government in 2014. Yet the story makes a puzzle out of one old woman’s reluctance to obey Ukrainian orders that all non-Russians should evacuate immediately. The solitary woman whom the American soldier and the reporter met on the road may simply have preferred not to follow those orders, not to leave her home (without hope of ever returning), but to gamble on the Russian army sparing it. This was not a Peasant Mystery. It was more like an ordinary calculation.

Why have such perceptual errors become so common? The reason is that they fit into the selective division of allowed facts in the liberal-corporate media. We hear of the anti-war protests in Russia, of the anger toward Putin by generals who want him to be more decisive and among the populace who never wanted the war, and we hear of the new repression and censorship inside Russia. All this is the proper work of a free press. And Ukraine? We seldom hear of the censorship there, of the banning of opposition political parties, of the fact that all men of fighting age are forbidden to leave the country—or of the law that made Ukrainian the mandatory language of public workers, and thereby demoted Russian in Donetsk and Luhansk, which was itself a signal cause of the war. (Try to imagine the effects of prohibiting the Spanish language in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.) We do not hear of the assassination of Ukrainian mayors who were insufficiently hostile to Russia, and mainstream attention has sunk to zero (except here and there, in a subordinate clause) regarding the history and politics of the Azov Battalion.

None of these facts justifies anything that Russia has done. But they are, to repeat, facts, and they should be known by the citizens of a country that is well on the way to committing $100 billion in assistance and weapons to Ukraine for the purpose of prolonging this war. Such facts are part of the present crisis, which honest reporters have a duty to convey. But this means full publicity must also be accorded to facts that are inconvenient for your own position—in this case, your loyal membership in a West for whom the defeat of Russia has become suddenly more important than climate change, nuclear disarmament, the prevention of starvation in Africa, and many other causes that cannot be thought of honestly without a recognition that they stand in some tension with unconditional victory over Russia.

Do the people who call “Putin’s Russia” a totalitarian state affix any answerable meaning to the word “totalitarian”? Russia indeed has a heavy-handed authoritarian government whose censorship and obstruction of dissent have greatly increased since the start of the war. Even so, there have been protests inside Russia; the crowds have not been fired on, and most of the persons involved have not been arrested. The media hosts and the clutch of military, think tank, and academic experts who call Russia totalitarian should see if they can find anything remotely comparable in the annals of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. A recent report on NPR told of a Ukrainian family returning to the bombed-out city of Mariupol. They were coming back voluntarily, though they blamed the Russians for the damage. They had decided to leave their safe haven in Warsaw, where permanent refuge was available, because they felt that Mariupol, even when occupied by Russian soldiers, was still their home. How many civilians ever chose to go back to a city occupied by Hitler’s army or Stalin’s?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February met the definition of an international war of aggression. But it was not unprovoked. Ever since the change of government in 2014 and the subsequent series of military clashes with Russia, Ukraine has subjected the Donbas region to persistent artillery shelling. The current war might have been avoided but for two circumstances: the US refusal to accept Ukraine as an independent nation outside NATO, and the Russian refusal to accept Ukrainian membership in the EU. A chance to resolve the dispute was apparently agreed on, in late March, by Recep Erdogan and Volodymyr Zelensky, with a proposed cease-fire set to open the way for negotiations. The US dispatched then–British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to scuttle the deal and inform Zelensky that a cease-fire was not an option agreeable to the West. Whether or not you classify it as a war crime, the deliberate protraction of the suffering of war is an immoral act. We say we do it because this is what Ukraine wants. But there is no evidence that the Ukrainian people want a long war, just as there is no evidence that the Russian people desired the invasion in February.

The Second World War is the picture that has held us captive. Every tyrant since then has looked like Hitler or Stalin. So every temptation to fight becomes an urgent imperative whose only alternative is appeasement. During the Cold War, the picture seemed to fit real events, but the Cold War ended and still the picture held us captive. The myth of the Second World War corrupted the wits of many clever people during the Vietnam War. Any act of aggression thereafter by a hostile non-Western government, in response to which the US had an ostensible moral justification and an economic or political motive for intervention, flipped the same switch: The year once more was 1938, and diplomacy was Munich. Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin have all been tapped to answer our need for a new Hitler. Or, for that matter, a new Stalin. George Will in a March 2014 column referred to Putin as “Stalin’s spawn.”

Eight years later, in his column on October 7, Will averred that “the behavior of the Russian army in Ukraine demonstrates…a centuries-old continuity: a culture of cruelty.” The reports of atrocities in Bucha are now proof of “Russia’s endemic cruelty”—in short, to be Russian is to be cruel. The diagnosis is medical: “Putin’s Russia has a metabolic urge to export its pathologies.” But consider now the implications of the “metabolic urge.” It resembles what used to be said about the desire by men of the darker races for white women—that, too, was an ingrained and irresistible reflex. Combine the biological tinge of this amateur analysis with the word “endemic” and you are inhabiting a well-known frame of mind: nation-as-race, race-as-virus. There were people in the 1930s who called the Jews a “bacillus.” Hatred is an extraordinary passion.

Let us try and return things to the human scale. Anyone who lived through the 1980s can remember the call to American leaders to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”—that is, to restore the national self-confidence that enables a great nation to fight its good wars. We were told that this syndrome had been surmounted by the US invasion of Panama and, close on its heels, the Gulf War. Read the grim history of actual Russians in Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, and you see how inconceivable they must find the idea of war as a healthy restorative. Some 21 million Soviet citizens were killed in World War II, and—though we find the fact hard to acknowledge—the Soviet Union itself was responsible, more than any other country, for the victory over fascism. The journalists and professors who have called Russia a fascist country are playing a poisonous game with words. They get away with it because war is only a distant dream to a great many Americans, and because most Americans now know the Second World War only as a myth.

“I’m trying to figure out,” President Biden said on October 6, “what is Putin’s off-ramp?” A better use of his time might be to determine our own off-ramp, short of the total defeat of Russia on its own border. The US withdrawal from the INF Treaty in 2019 and from the Open Skies Treaty in 2020 must have left Russians wondering how far the US would go in the cause of nonappeasement and reordering the world. Because an all-but-avowed American goal since the second expansion of NATO in 2004 has been to dismantle post-Soviet Russia: a design already achieved in part, which no imaginable Russian leader will permit the US to complete. And what would follow after bringing Russia to its knees, militarily and economically, even if that were possible? The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the Crimea bridge, and now the Russian attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, are sowing such mutual hatred that compromise on either side will soon be as inadmissible as defeat. No one seems to have thought it through.

Branko Marcetic: Today’s Hawkish Discourse Makes the Cuban Missile Crisis’s Nuclear Brinkmanship Seem Sane

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin, 10/30/22

Sixty years ago today [October 30] , the world breathed a sigh of relief after humanity’s closest call with nuclear holocaust ended peacefully. Over the thirteen days from October 16 to 29, 1962, the Cuban missile crisis graphically showcased how easily catastrophe could be triggered in the nuclear age.

Exactly sixty years later, the world is again at risk of nuclear “Armageddon,” according to US president Joe Biden, as the same two states again find themselves locked in conflict over a neighboring state. Over the past eight months, a pervasive narrative has emerged in public discourse about the war in Ukraine: Russian president Vladimir Putin is a Hitler-like madman bent on European, if not world, domination, so dialogue and negotiation are pointless. Putin won’t talk, Russian officials’ statements to the contrary are merely a ruse, and even if they weren’t, talks would be immoral — a “reward” to an aggressor state — and would actually make things more dangerous, just as appeasing Nazi Germany made war more likely. The only way to end the war is through “overwhelming power” on the military side, and to “humiliate” its leader, or even remove him from power.

To that end, diplomacy for the purpose of de-escalation and finding a way out of the conflict before it triggers nuclear disaster, has become a “quasi-thought crime” in Washington. When thirty House progressives recently signed a letter meekly urging the president to add “a proactive diplomatic push” to his war strategy, they quickly retracted it and called for military victory instead under a blizzard of attacks. The Biden administration said it was “reassured” by the withdrawal of the letter, and has spent the war avoiding talks with Russian officials, with the president most recently ruling out a meeting with Putin to discuss the war.

As both US foreign policy and its political climate come to resemble more and more the most dangerous and intellectually stifling years of the Cold War, it pays to look back at those thirteen fearful days sixty years ago and how that era’s media and political establishment experienced them. What lessons does it hold for us today?

Brinkmanship in the Fog

In October 1962, the United States and Soviet Union were caught in a conflict spiral. Years of rising confrontation and conflict reached a boiling point in the fall of 1962, as the two nuclear powers found themselves in a long-running standoff over the divided city of Berlin. Then, on October 15, the CIA produced photographic evidence of Soviet nuclear missile installations being built in Cuba, which had been moving toward an alliance with the Soviets since the 1959 revolution that brought the Fidel Castro to power. Suddenly the focus of United States–Soviet conflict had shifted to ninety miles off the coast of Florida. It was, incidentally, a month before the midterm US elections, and Republican leaders made it clear they would make the issue the cornerstone of their campaign.

The Soviet move, spearheaded by premier Nikita Khrushchev, was prompted by a number of motivations. In part it was an attempt to even the strategic playing field, giving the Soviets the capability to strike targets on their adversary’s home territory, something the US had long been able to do vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. A bigger consideration was to defend Cuba, which had already suffered an attempted invasion by US-backed forces a year before, and now faced a harsh economic squeeze, as well as a widespread destabilization and assassination campaign run by the CIA.

From the start, the Soviets’ armed support for Cuba drew condemnation for constituting a clear provocation to the United States. The New York Times’s Washington bureau chief James Reston admonished the Soviets for “not understanding the limitations of political debate in America,” where many leaders were far more hawkish than President John F. Kennedy, and only grew more so after Khrushchev, in their view, “sought to tip the balance of power.”

Adding to the danger, many of Kennedy’s hawkish advisors were convinced that the United States would win a nuclear war against the Soviets but remained unaware of key facts — for instance, that Soviet submarines in the Caribbean were carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes that could have done severe damage to US forces.

“I have confirmed some years ago from a source that they didn’t know Russia had this weapon,” says Lyle Goldstein, director of the Asia Engagement program at Defense Priorities.

They didn’t know that Soviet readiness to fire nuclear missiles at US cities from Cuba was far further along than they assumed, nor that nuclear cruise missiles were moved to within fifteen miles of the US base at Guantanamo. They didn’t know that Khrushchev was being pressured by his military advisors to “stand up to” the United States, or that Cuban leader Fidel Castro was urging him to carry out a preemptive strike.

“There was as much he didn’t know as what he did know,” says Michael Dobbs, author of One Minute to Midnight. “I’m sure there’s a lot of things Biden doesn’t understand about what’s going on in Ukraine and about Russian preparations for escalation.”

After nearly two weeks of agonizing tension, the crisis ended with an agreement: in return for a public declaration that the United States would not invade Cuba, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles under UN supervision. Kennedy also agreed to quietly remove nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles from Turkey (a fact that was kept secret for years after the crisis). For Kennedy, the takeaway from the episode was clear, as he outlined it in a speech months later: “while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.”

“It’s Worth It To Win”

In the heat of the crisis — and lacking much information we now possess in hindsight — calls for a military response to Khrushchev’s stationing of missiles began immediately in October 1962. M[any] of these calls came from the Right, which claimed that the Soviet’s Cuban gambit was just the start of a worldwide communist takeover.

“At this moment, there is only one way out of the Cuban fiasco and that is for the United States . . . to go into Cuba and to take it over, as we did before,” George Sokolsky, one of the era’s most virulent anti-communist voices, wrote on October 16. “The risk could be war with Soviet Russia . . . but it would seem to me that we have reached Armageddon and that we either do the job or make up our minds to lose Venezuela next: Brazil and Panama after that, and then witness a Fascist-Communist Revolution in the Argentine.”

Henry Luce, the influential media magnate who controlled Time and Fortune magazines, called for “a direct US invasion of Cuba,” a demand echoed in televised debate by National Review editor William F. Buckley. Republican Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, already a front-runner for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination (who believed military commanders shouldn’t need presidential authority to use nuclear weapons), pointedly borrowed Kennedy’s own words from the latter’s hawkish 1960 presidential campaign, asserting that “it is time for the United States to do ‘whatever must be done.’” Even the New York Times lent its voice in favor of “some overt action” against Cuba.

These calls, if anything, got more strident once the crisis became more clearly a nuclear one, with Kennedy revealing the existence of the missile sites to the public on October 22, and announcing a “quarantine,” or blockade, of Cuba as a response. Seen by turns as dangerously aggressive or a half measure, depending on who was talking, Kennedy made the move to buy time while avoiding more escalatory responses.

“If I judge American sentiment correctly, the nation is looking for further action by the president,” influential columnist Roscoe Drummond wrote a day later, “to eliminate by whatever means the offensive Soviet weapons now on hand.” The public weren’t “afraid of war,” he asserted, and “clearly accepts these risks.”

Arguments in favor of brinkmanship were common. “The die is cast” and the United States is now “committed to a course from which it cannot turn back,” stated one editorial, and “whether there will be a thermonuclear holocaust depends upon the Soviet Union.”

“No man on the planet can avoid being apprehensive in this showdown,” wrote the prominent editor of the Atlanta Journal, Eugene Patterson. “But this is not the time for public panic . . . or for sudden discovery of the terrors of nuclear war.” He insisted that other than “the occasional invisible man,” the US public would “close the door on fear” and “meet whatever obligation honor imposes.”

Columnists had some basis to say this. “It is impossible not to be deeply impressed when you hear a solid, hard-working family man pointing to his neat little house, and saying: ‘I know the policy I favor might mean an A-bomb right there. But I’ll risk that. It’s worth it to win,’” influential columnist Joseph Alsop had written earlier that month, after informally surveying a Los Angeles neighborhood, one of several newspaper surveys around the country that found ordinary Americans supporting stronger action. Yet while public opinion backed Kennedy’s blockade, polls showed it was overwhelmingly opposed to an invasion.

“Don’t Trust Any Damned Russian”

Calls for military escalation and a willingness to tolerate nuclear annihilation were paired with pessimism about the prospects for reaching an agreement to exit the crisis with the Soviet Union — a state seen as bent on the destruction of the United States.

“‘Co-existence’ is a dangerous illusion,” one editorial insisted, a widespread sentiment among hawkish voices. A number dismissed Khrushchev’s October 24 suggestion of a summit with Kennedy to resolve the issue. The October 22 view of National Review founder and prominent McCarthyite Ralph de Toledano prefigured what was to come: “War, as soon as possible, is the fixed policy of the Soviet Union,” and negotiations were just there to “lull the West.” “Whatever concessions the West makes . . . will make no difference,” he insisted.

“Khrushchev’s word has never been a guarantee. A Soviet promise usually is only a delusion and a cover-up,” read one editorial. “Stalin and Khrushchev have gained more from summit conferences than they have gained from conquests,” complained a Democratic congressman. Pointing to the Soviet premier’s infamous shoe-banging incident at the UN, the Chicago Tribune urged Kennedy not to “take another ride on the merry-go-round of UN futility or summit duplicity.” “In Cuba, Khrushchev has a gun pointed at our head,” wrote another. “At the bargaining table he would be asking for a reward for withdrawing the gun.”

When Khrushchev later floated a trade — withdrawing from Cuba for the removal of NATO bases from Turkey (not far from the eventual secret deal that would end the crisis) — former president Harry Truman weighed in: “Don’t trust any damned Russian.” Kennedy “quite properly” and “correctly” rejected the offer, said the press, since it would have let Khrushchev “make a profit.”

Beware the Bear

These views were driven by a distrustful, even paranoid view of Khrushchev, the Soviet leadership, and their intentions. The Soviets were thought disingenuous, conniving, and almost congenitally predisposed to aggression.

Of course, these views were partly based in fact. The Soviet leadership presided over a far more comprehensive system of dictatorship than today’s Russia, and in addition to Khrushchev’s often aggressive rhetoric, he had already once invaded a satellite state (Hungary) to put down a reformist uprising. In the United States, a vast system of domestic propaganda and self-censorship existed to keep these facts in the public mind, and the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s was just a few years in the past.

“Beware the Bear that Smiles,” warned the Philadelphia Daily News, which recounted a then recent anecdote about Khrushchev going to the opera to watch an American singer to charge he was “trying to appear reasonable and smiling.” It cast his conciliatory words (calling for a summit and affirming Russia would “take no rash actions” in response to the blockade) as a mere ruse.

Khrushchev’s actions in Cuba were depicted as part of a “vicious military trap” to “upset the existing balance of nuclear striking power.” He wanted to “use the missiles as a psychological weapon” at a planned December summit over the Berlin standoff. He was a “fanatic,” whose “phony-jolly professions of peaceful intent” were part of a “darkly Machiavellian scheme,” and it was “extreme gullibility” to believe any Soviet overtures were sincere, when Khrushchev was “topkick of the Communist conspiracy to put the world in chains.”

Back to 1938

Pro-war voices constantly invoked Adolf Hitler, Munich, and the notion of “appeasement” to justify escalation. This rhetorical strategy was echoed by US Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay — today remembered as one of history’s most dangerously reckless hawks — who privately told Kennedy a refusal to attack Cuba would be “worse than the appeasement at Munich,” a reference with particular emotional significance for the young president.

“As Sir Winston Churchill once said, surrender or unwillingness to fight for what is right when the military odds are in one’s favor leads eventually to a big war in which the risks are greater and the involvement is far more dangerous,” conservative US News & World Report publisher David Lawrence, who would go on to be one of the Vietnam War’s most prominent cheerleaders, wrote two days into the crisis. Hitting Kennedy for withholding air support from the Bay of Pigs invaders the previous year, Lawrence charged that there was “an appeasement faction in this country which has a considerable influence with President Kennedy,” which meant that the communist takeover of Latin America was effectively “sanctioned today by US policy.”

Lawrence wasn’t the only one to charge that US timidity had signaled weakness and emboldened Khrushchev. “Those who call for action against Castro are referred to as a ‘war party.’ Actually, such Americans are the true peace party,” wrote conservative radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, who likewise invoked Hitler. “Our failure to enforce our rights in Cuba and Berlin has increased the danger of war. We prefer appeasement to running a risk.”

Conservative radio broadcaster Henry J. Taylor blasted the “small-time Neville Chamberlains” whispering in Kennedy’s ear. “With Nazi and Communist history so easy to see,” he wrote, it was clear that “appeasing Khrushchev 90 miles from Florida” was “exactly the political weakness that . . . would have cost England her life and soul.”

A Balance of Terror

Alongside these arguments for military escalation and against diplomacy, a number of voices expressed confidence — misplaced, it would later turn out — that the danger of war, and particularly nuclear escalation, was low. So, the reasoning went, the United States could afford a more aggressive posture to force a Soviet back-down.

“There will be no nuclear holocaust as long as we maintain our deterrent capability and as long as the leaders of the Kremlin know we mean what we say,” Iowa Republican senator Jack Miller wrote on October 20.

Such statements underestimated the risk that accidents and misunderstandings could trigger inadvertent escalation — as in fact happened on October 27, a moment viewed by historians as the most dangerous day of the whole crisis. The Soviets’ shooting down of a U-2 spy plane over Cuba, not authorized by Khrushchev, very nearly triggered a US military response, and came on the same day that a different U-2 plane strayed into Soviet airspace, sending Soviet MiGs in pursuit and causing both sides to fear the other was deliberately escalating the crisis. Hours later, US attempts to surface a Soviet submarine were interpreted by its exhausted captain as the start of the war above ground, and he had to be talked down from launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo — only the most dangerous of multiple similar incidents.

“In the end, neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev completely controlled their own forces,” says Dobbs.

On that very day, David Lawrence argued that the nuclear balance of terror “restrains the two major powers from destroying one another,” so that there was little chance of a mistake triggering catastrophe.

“It takes more than one man to make a decision of such importance, either in Moscow or in Washington, and the people who surround any commander-in-chief nowadays know the consequences if a mistake is not prevented,” he wrote.

Ignoring this danger of accidental escalation, many voices at the time claimed that because Cuba was relatively peripheral to Soviets’ interests, there was little danger that war would be triggered as a result of the confrontation over the island. “If he will stall over such a vital problem as Berlin,” wrote columnist Ray Tucker, alluding to Khrushchev’s failure to follow through on a 1958 threat over the city, “it is not believed that he will invite nuclear destruction through love of Castro.” The world was not on the edge of war, a political science professor told an audience in Chicago, and “Khrushchev will not fight over Cuba.”

And with key elements of the ultimate agreement hidden from the public, many observers took away the lesson that Kennedy’s “firmness” alone led to the peaceful outcome, ignoring the contribution made by his willingness to offer the Soviets inducements. The fact that Kennedy quietly fed the press a false story after the fact, casting Adlai Stevenson as a weak appeaser — which belied the reality that he’d asked for and followed the UN ambassador’s advice to defuse the crisis almost to the letter — added to this perception.

“When confronted with the high resolve of US policy, supplemented by Russian intelligence which showed that the United States was prepared to attack, Khrushchev backed away,” the Des Moines Register told its readers.

Today, officials and some experts are similarly reassuring the public there’s little chance of Putin using a nuclear weapon over the Ukraine war.

Diplomacy Not a Dirty Word

A lot of this might sound familiar to observers of the current moment. But what’s remarkable about the public discourse of 1962 compared to that of today is the relative diversity of debate, as well as the positive coverage of, and steady drumbeat for, diplomacy — even as Kennedy and Khrushchev lobbed threats at each other and a platoon of armchair Cold Warriors lashed out at “appeasers.”

As the furious reaction last week to congressional progressives’ push for diplomacy shows, the idea of dialogue to de-escalate and resolve the current crisis in United States–Russia relations has become nearly taboo in today’s environment, in both the United States and Europe. Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas has deemed any call for talks over the Ukraine conflict “very dangerous,” while Finland’s young, progressive prime minister rejected the idea of an off-ramp for Putin, saying that “the way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine.” French president Emmanuel Macron has been repeatedly criticized for backing talks and warning against humiliating Russia, while fellow NATO member Romania’s defense minister was recently forced to resign for saying that the “only chance for peace may be negotiations with Russia.

But in 1962, there was nothing unusual about world leaders calling for diplomacy. “Talks on such problems are better than fight,” German foreign minister Gerhard Schroeder said on October 18. The Associated Press reported that Latin American government ministers expressed “grave fears” after Kennedy’s speech on October 22, and felt it must “inevitably lead to a summit meeting” — the same day the Senate Democratic leader expressed support for the idea. There were “worldwide appeals for negotiation,” the New York Times reported on October 26, including from the Pope, the UK, Canada, and Japan. This was certainly not a unanimous feeling, but neither was it considered out of bounds. Nor was the anti-diplomacy position the default.

The press likewise wasn’t monopolized by anti-diplomacy voices. The Washington Post’s Karl E. Meyer mocked “General Luce and his battalion of editorial rough-riders” for demanding Kennedy invade Cuba. “If the Russians are seeking a way out of Cuba, the US can do no less than look equally hard for the means of getting them out without too great a loss of face,” the Iowa City Press-Citizen editorialized in the wake of the blockade. European newspapers greeted news of talks with hope and relief. As late as the peak of danger on October 27, Walter Lippman and the Christian Science Monitor’s William Frye called on both Kennedy and Khrushchev to look for avenues to talks.

More than that, newspapers reported regularly and in detail on diplomatic overtures between the two governments, with talks carried on throughout the crisis. Kennedy’s decision to send word to Khrushchev that he was willing to have an informal discussion with the Soviet premier when he visited the United States was front page news all over the country on October 19, a day after Kennedy met with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko for an ultimately fruitless dialogue lasting hours. “Prospects of a Kennedy-Krhushchev meeting next month grew in strength,” the Miami News reported on October 21 after Khrushchev met with the new US ambassador to Russia, Foy Kohler.

This happened throughout the crisis, as with the US draft resolution for the UN that called on the two governments to “confer promptly” on resolving the crisis; or with Khrushchev and Kennedy’s indirect communication via the intermediary of antinuclear campaigner Bertrand Russell, with the letters from all three men reported on extensively; or Khrushchev’s October 26 acceptance of UN-mediated talks involving Cuba and the United States.

Speaking of Khrushchev, throughout the crisis, newspapers reported both his and his lower-ranking officials’ statements making clear their openness to talks, despite the Soviet leader’s consistently negative portrayal. As early as October 18, the fact that Khrushchev felt positively toward talks was widely reported, a trend that continued throughout. October 24 reports that the Soviet representative to the UN was “talking ‘negotiation’” were likewise widely printed.

It’s a very different story today. If any diplomatic engagement is happening between the US and Russia today, then unlike in 1962, it’s happening under the most ironclad secrecy, and in fact multiple sources are saying there is no engagement between the two sides. And today’s Western news consumers have been kept largely uninformed about diplomatic developments, including the Ukrainian president’s once-frequent calls for diplomacy and Western involvement in it, while public statements that suggest Moscow would be willing to negotiate are routinely ignored by US commentators. While Biden officials are reportedly looking for an off-ramp for Putin, it’s unclear if the political space exists to pursue it.

Unlearning Lessons

Sixty years on from the Cuban missile crisis, we have ended up with the worst of all worlds from that episode. The then widespread cries of appeasement and calls for military escalation over dialogue are now even more widely voiced than they were six decades ago, with today’s liberals and progressives sounding almost indistinguishable from that era’s hawks and reactionaries. At the same time, the quieter, underlying consensus in 1962 among both political leaders and the press, which held that dialogue was needed to prevent disaster, has, at least until the House progressives’ letter recently sparked some conversation, largely vanished in public discussion throughout this war.

Yet decades on, we know the hawks and those echoing their arguments were wrong: the Soviets were ready to take risks of nuclear war over Cuba; the prospect of accidental escalation was dangerously high; and the gestures of compromise that ultimately helped end the crisis didn’t encourage more Soviet aggression. If those calling for an invasion had been listened to, the result would almost certainly have been catastrophe. The very course they denigrated as “appeasement” that would make war more likely was, in the end, what saved the world.

“The lesson is the risks were far higher than we believed. We were closer to nuclear war than we thought,” Stephen Young, senior Washington representative for the Union of Concerned Scientists, says today.

What’s most shocking isn’t that decades later, we’re repeating history. It’s that today’s political leaders and media establishment seem determined not to learn from it.

MARIUPOL – MARTYRDOM AND REVIVAL (DOCUMENTARY)

From Donbass Insider, 10/27/22

From the beginning of March 2022 to the beginning of September 2022, we made 25 trips to Mariupol and the surrounding villages to report from the field on what was happening during the battle to take control of the city, but also afterwards, during its reconstruction. We also carried out several humanitarian missions there.

For two months, the population of Mariupol experienced a real martyrdom, as told to us by the inhabitants themselves. After the city was completely taken over, the DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic) and Russia launched its reconstruction, so that Mariupol could rise from its ashes like a phoenix.

In this documentary with English subtitles, you will find a chronological account of the life of the inhabitants during the battle and the reconstruction of Mariupol

Since it’s posted on the Odysee platform, I’m unable to embed the documentary but it can be viewed at the link here.

Warning: this film contains disturbing images.

Al Jazeera: In Russia, patriotic critics speak out on Ukraine war failures

Al Jazeera, 11/1/22

Artemy Sich has spent the past eight months trying to do his part to support the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

The Muscovite activist has organised several crowd-funding drives to buy clothing, equipment, and medicine for Russian troops. He also co-founded a social media project that provides original reporting and analysis about battlefield developments in Ukraine.

Earlier this month, he travelled to Russia’s Belgorod region to interview soldiers stationed near the border.

Sich says he supports the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine because he does not see any option left for protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Nevertheless, he readily admits that Russia’s military campaign is not going according to plan – in contradiction to President Vladimir Putin’s assessment.

According to Sich, Russia failed in several ways. Moscow did not deploy enough troops, failed to target Ukrainian critical infrastructure early in the conflict, and did not prepare echeloned defences in captured territories, he said.

“Russia probably acted on incorrect assumptions, most notably underestimating the enemy’s capabilities and willingness to offer resistance,” he said.

“There was no collapse of the Ukrainian government, and consequently the Ukrainian military also did not collapse.”

Patriotic critics

Sich is part of a burgeoning group of “patriotic” critics in Russia who support the war, but are concerned by Moscow’s handling of it.

They generally avoid criticising Putin directly and instead frequently take aim at Russia’s top military brass for perceived incompetence or indecision.

For now, they oppose peace negotiations with Ukraine, saying it is too early for a ceasefire, and call on the Kremlin to seek victory through mobilisation, large-scale air raids, and sweeping military reforms.

But these critics are difficult to box into a single group.

They include war correspondents and military bloggers, novelists and historians, longtime activists and political neophytes, and Russian soldiers and mercenaries fighting on the front lines.

Putin supporters, as well as nationalist and communist opposition members, have also been lashing out in recent weeks.

What unites this otherwise eclectic movement is the belief that Russia needs to make serious adjustments to its military strategy or risk losing the war in Ukraine.

Since the start of the conflict in February, these groups have been firing up social media channels, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers.

Among them is a team of open-source analysts named Rybar, Igor Strelkov, a retired Russian military officer who commanded Donbas rebel forces back in 2014 and Vladlen Tatarsky, who is currently serving as a fighter in the Donbas and whose real name is Maxim Fomin.

Grey Zone and Starshie Eddie are two other popular accounts that operate on Telegram, VK and YouTube.

With detailed reporting and analysis of the situation on the front, their feeds have become the preferred source of information for many Russians.

And their relative editorial independence is also attractive in the current climate.

While state media presents an upbeat picture of the battlefields, pro-war commentators online question whether Russia had enough manpower to hold a 1,000km (620-mile) front line and comment openly on the Russian military’s shortages – that it lacks, for instance, sufficient quantities of drones and other key equipment.

Their criticism grew after the Ukrainian counteroffensive began in Kharkiv in early September, a move which forced the Russian military to withdraw troops from the entire region.

The subsequent Ukrainian gains in the east and the south during the next several weeks raised further alarm among patriotic critics.

“Nearly all the members of the Russian patriotic civil society warned about a potential Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv, months before it happened,” Sich said.

“We couldn’t imagine that anyone could fail to see that this was about to happen, but it turned out that the Russian armed forces were completely unprepared for this breakthrough.”

So far, the Kremlin has shown a surprising level of tolerance.

There have been no visible efforts to silence criticism by pro-war commentators despite new legislation that threatens up to 15 years of prison for “discrediting” the Russian military.

On the contrary, state media has gradually begun to adopt some of the rhetoric pioneered by the patriotic critics.

During a recent fiery monologue, television host Vladimir Solovyov accused Russian military officials of hiding the true condition of the country’s armed forces.

“Too many scoundrels lied from top to bottom,” he said. “And not a single one of them was shot or even taken by the ear!”

Even more surprising, there are signs that the Kremlin is listening in for hints on military strategy.

In September, Putin announced the “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 military reservists in a bid to replenish Russia’s fighting force in Ukraine.

On October 10, Russia launched a mass air raid campaign against Ukrainian energy facilities.

The patriotic critics had been advocating for both of these moves for months.

Denis Volkov, head of the Levada Center, Russia’s leading independent polling agency, told Al Jazeera that data showed that committed hawks and opponents of the war each accounted for about 15 to 20 percent of the population.

The majority of Russians, he explained, were broadly supportive of the war, but tended to stay in line with government decisions.

So what explains this trend?

Volkov said that the Kremlin is aware that the public need an outlet to let off steam and hawks are regarded as politically loyal.

“The anger of patriots tends to be aimed at generals and mid-level bureaucrats, whereas those calling for immediate peace negotiations tend to blame the central political leadership and are opposed to Putin personally,” he said.

Sich had a different explanation.

He argued that the war and its bleak realities have forced Kremlin to recognise the value of feedback from observers that are outside the political system.

“Russia has a very adaptive regime and it became clear in September that we could no longer afford not to mobilise society,” he said.

“The government has been forced to welcome input from patriotic civil society because mass mobilisation requires you to accept the fact that there is no such thing as unnecessary help.”

Yet there are lingering questions about the sustainability of the partnership.

Volkov noted that the Russian government still has plenty of instruments to punish commentators who “step too far out of line”.

As an example, he pointed to the recent suspension of state media host Anton Krasovsky, who sparked mass controversy after he suggested drowning or burning Ukrainian children.

Sich warned that the Kremlin has long had a complicated relationship with Russian nationalists, and there was no guarantee the current detente would hold up in the long run.

“The Russian government has always been more wary of the patriotic opposition than the liberal opposition because the former group is better positioned to represent the will of the people instead of just copying Western political trends,” he said.

“For now, the Russian government is seeking to expand cooperation with the patriotic opposition, but it could very well reverse course once doing so is no longer expedient. Everyone on our side who goes for this collaboration needs to understand this.”

Ted Snider: Look Who’s Talking – Slivers of Hope in Ukraine

Map of Ukraine

By Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, 11/8/22

There is no scarcity of reasons to despair of hope for a push for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine.

Thirty Democrats in the House were pilloried for suggesting only that the US open diplomatic channels parallel to full military and economic support for Ukraine.

When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded to a Turkish offer to mediate talks by declaring Moscow’s willingness “to engage with the United States or with Turkey on ways to end the war,” the State Department dismissed him as “posturing” and responded that Washington has “very little confidence” that Lavrov’s offer is genuine.” When Lavrov said Russia could consider a meeting between Putin and Biden on the sidelines of the G20, Biden replied that “I have no intention of meeting him.”

When India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi told President Zelensky on the phone that India was prepared to mediate in peace efforts, the Ukrainian President turned him down, insisting he would not participate in negotiations with Putin.

But revelations in the past few days have also offered a sliver of hope: a very thin sliver of hope. The minimum necessary conditions for negotiations are a willingness to talk and an openness to compromise. The hardened Ukrainian position has negated both. Zelensky has gone so far as to sign a decree banning negotiating with Putin. He has also spurned compromise by reversing an earlier openness to discussing the status of Crimea and the Donbas with a hardened position on the full return of all the territory that has been absorbed by Russia since 2014.

If Zelensky has refused to negotiate, Biden has refused to nudge him. The Washington Post has reported that “US officials . . . have ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table.”

But both the refusal to negotiate and the refusal to compromise have become more nuanced in the past few days.

Zelensky’s decree banning negotiating with Putin and putting talks on hold until there is “another president of Russia” has worried a weary and soon to be cold international community. There is a very low probability of regime change in Russia. So Zelensky’s decree becomes a prescription for endless war.

Recent reporting by The Washington Post reveals that, secretly, the US has been pushing Zelensky to “signal an openness to negotiate with Russia and drop their public refusal to engage in peace talks unless President Vladimir Putin is removed from power.” Publicly, Ukraine at first rejected the request, with Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Zelensky, saying that Ukraine will only “talk with the next leader” of Russia. Kiev publicly pushed back, “saying talks could only resume once the Kremlin relinquishes all Ukrainian territory and that Kyiv would fight on even if it is “stabbed in the back” by its allies.” But the US push suggests a change, and the change provides a sliver of hope. The US maintains that the request is an attempt to massage international perception and not an attempt to push Ukraine to the negotiating table.

But on November 8, the message from Ukraine suddenly dramatically changed. Zelensky announced that he is open to peace talks with Putin. Zelensky urged the international community to “force Russia into real peace talks.” Zelensky insisted that his preconditions for talks are “restoration of (Ukraine’s) territorial integrity … compensation for all war damage, punishment for every war criminal and guarantees that it will not happen again.”

Some of those demands will be very hard to achieve. But it is an opening: negotiations usually start with both sides’ ideal demands. Importantly, Zelensky did not include NATO membership.

The US has also signaled a change in, at least, the perception of Zelensky’s willingness to compromise. Though Ukraine has insisted on a full Russian withdrawal as a precondition to talks, and Zelensky has promised to “return the Ukrainian flag to our entire territory,” Washington is quietly suggesting otherwise. The Post reports that “U.S. officials say they believe that Zelensky would probably endorse negotiations and eventually accept concessions, as he suggested he would early in the war. They believe that Kyiv is attempting to lock in as many military gains as it can before winter sets in, when there might be a window for diplomacy.”

Less reported is that the US may even be telling other countries what the line is that Ukraine must push to before it is willing to open that window for diplomacy. According to reporting in La Repubblica, “The US and NATO think that launching peace talks on Ukraine would be possible if Kiev takes back Kherson.” According to the Italian newspaper, the US has not only discussed this possibility with NATO and its allies, but is “instilling this idea into the mind of the Kiev regime.”

The US has long insisted that its goal is backing Ukraine militarily until “facts on the ground” put Ukraine “in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.” The US may now have come closer than ever in identifying those facts on the ground, saying that retaking Kherson could be strategically and diplomatically significant enough “to hold negotiations from the position of force.”

A second sliver of hope, in addition to the willingness to talk and the willingness to compromise, comes from recent revelations that the US may have been talking to Russia more than has been reported. Though they have reportedly not discussed “a settlement of the war in Ukraine,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has reportedly “engaged in recent months in confidential conversations with top aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to reduce the risk of a broader conflict over Ukraine and warn Moscow against using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, US and allied officials said.” The officials say “The aim has been to guard against the risk of escalation and keep communications channels open, and not to discuss a settlement of the war in Ukraine.”

And it is not only Sullivan who has been speaking to his Russian counterpart. In October, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on the phone. While the conversation may have focussed on measures to avoid accidental clashes between US and Russian planes and ships in the Baltic and on accusations of dirty bombs, the Pentagon says that “Secretary Austin emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid the ongoing war against Ukraine.” According to Russian reporting, the two discussed “current issues of international security, including the situation in Ukraine.”

Less reported is that Austin and Shoigu spoke again two days later. And, again, Austin “reaffirmed the value of continued communication amid Russia’s unlawful and unjustified war against Ukraine.”

The third sliver of hope comes from subtle cracks in European solidarity. On October 23, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace took his turn talking to Shoigu. On that call, he expressed a “desire to de-escalate this conflict.” Surprisingly, and perhaps for the first time for a British official, he added that “the UK stands ready to assist” if “Ukraine and Russia seek a resolution to the war.” That offer is a significant shift from Boris Johnson’s reprimand of Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that, “even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, the West was not.”

French President Emmanuel Macron has recently again broken from the war without talks consensus by calling on Putin to “come back to the discussion table.” Macron has been one of the few leaders to maintain a dialogue with Putin. In September, Macron insisted that “The job of a diplomat is to talk to everyone, especially to people with whom we do not agree. And so we will continue to do so, in coordination with our allies. . . . Preparing the peace means talking to all the parties including, as I did just a few days ago and will again, to Russia.”

Meanwhile, Germany fractured from the consensus in a novel way. On November 4, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz went to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, breaking from the US led consensus not to talk or trade with nations, especially China, who have not gone along with US sanctions and censures of Russia. XI asked Germany and Europe to “play an important part in calling for peace and facilitating negotiations.” Scholz urged XI”to deepen trade ties with Germany,’ seemingly pulling away from US policy.

Even Russia and Ukraine have recently spoken, at least at some low level. The proof is the October 29 prisoner exchange in which 52 Ukrainian soldiers and 50 Russian soldiers returned home and the even larger November 3 exchange. Those exchanges follows an earlier September 22 prisoner exchange and another exchange that took place on October 18.

None of these developments portend an imminent diplomatic opening or negotiated settlement to the war, but they may signify the first changes in tone and the first slivers of hope since the April talks in Istanbul.

Ted Snider  has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.