Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 32
March 28, 2025
John Wight: Ukraine & Revolution
By John Wight, Consortium News, 3/13/25
The real enemy of any government or regime, in the last analysis, is its own people. They are who rulers fear most.
That is accordingly why so much effort is devoted by rulers to propaganda, primarily designed to sustain the myth there exists a national interest to which all are bound, regardless of socioeconomic status or one’s actual life experience.
In truth there is no such thing as a “national interest.” Only the interests of the dominant class of rulers matters. Thus heavy lies the crown, and lightly is tread the line between legitimacy and illegitimacy.
This dynamic is most pronounced in time of war. Men with guns sent to fight other men with guns are never more dangerous than when the initial, warm glow of patriotism, responsible for them readily marching towards their own demise, is replaced by the grim reality of suffering and slaughter.
It is then when that most dangerous of all things for rulers emerges: a still-armed soldier who starts to reflect.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 is the historical example, tout court, of how poor soldiers, thrown into the maw of combat, develop a revolutionary consciousness which supersedes the national one they’d set out to defend.
Civil unrest also erupted in France and Germany after this war to end all wars, though in both cases capital’s forces proved strong enough to overcome the threat from below.
A Turning in Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin talking with Alexei Smirnov, acting governor of Kursk, on Aug. 8, 2024, about the Ukrainian incursion. (Kremlin.ru / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)
Ukraine has lost the First World War of our time. Kiev’s Kursk offensive and occupation of Russian territory has at this writing turned into a disastrous rout. Further still, Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached critical mass. No amount of European Union and U.K. financial and material support will be able to salvage or alter the reality on the ground without the deployment of European troops.
The governing regime of any country reduced to literally kidnapping young men off the street, as the Ukrainians have been, to send into combat can be said to have relinquished any claim of legitimacy.
Ukraine, after three years of unremitting conflict, is no longer a sovereign state. It is a proxy of NATO and Brussels. It is a failed experiment in ethno-nationalism and ethno-fascism. It is the Israel of eastern Europe and equally reactionary. The country’s president, Volodomyr Zelensky, when viewed in this light, has been nothing more than a convenient agent of Western imperialism.
Zelensky with President Donald Trump in the White House on Feb. 28. (White House / Flickr)
To witness him being dressed down by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office was to see how power operates. The khaki-clad, diminutive leader of this corrupt state was by that point used to being feted like some touring rock star in Western capitals across the world. Now, suddenly, there he was being reduced to his “actual” status as Washington’s footstool, useful only until his usefulness has expired.
To Trump’s credit at least, he comes to the table shorn of illusions as to the machinations of the warmongering, Western security establishment that would apparently prefer WWIII to peace in our time.
From the very same establishment flows the sordid and squalid values of the mortuary. The deaths of a million young men is for them a sacrifice worth paying in the name of hegemony and legacy.
It is why EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron et al. are the worst possible leaders in place at the most critical time.
In every bombastic speech that von der Leyen delivers — during which she relentlessly attempts to paint Russia as the repository of a Mongol Horde intent on global domination — you are left with the indelible impression of a woman who has never forgiven the Red Army for storming the gates of Berlin in 1945.
“Raising a flag over the Reichstag” May 13, 1945. (Yevgeny Khaldei/ Adam Cuerden / mil.ru / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)
Starmer has made a virtue of lacking any. This pumped-up, local bank manager is Tony Blair — without the laughs. He is a tragedy middle England produced, a man so wooden he doesn’t put his suit on in the morning. His suit puts him on.
As for Macron, this centrist popinjay is a king without a throne. To watch him bestride Europe like an aspiring Colossus is to be reminded of Napoleon’s observation that “In politics stupidity is not a handicap.”
Russia under President Vladimir Putin has never been forgiven, and will never be forgiven, for the “crime” of recovering from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
A weak and pliant Moscow has long been the default position of those in the West who view geopolitics as a struggle for domination, no matter the consequences, instead of the need for co-operation with the desire to forestall such consequences in mind.
Ukrainian men and women have been sacrificed on the chopping block of NATO expansionism. They have been fed into the meat grinder fashioned in the name of the zero sum game of power politics, with the bastards responsible for so much death and destruction in need of being held to account, and soon.
The Bolsheviks understood this need and acted upon in it in the context of the killing fields of WWI.
Indeed, Ukraine has its Alexander Kerensky in the shape of Zelensky. In other words, a failed leader doing his utmost to continue a losing war in the name of power for power’s sake.
Ukraine, as things stand — and with the former historical comparison in mind — is in desperate need of its Vladimir Lenin. But there is none in sight. Nor any organized revolutionary party. There are some Ukrainian soldiers furious with Kiev, however.
In 2025, the guns of the Ukrainian soldiers, shivering and freezing in the trenches, are pointed in the wrong direction. As the man said: “War happens when the government tells you who the enemy is. Revolution happens when you figure it out for yourself.”
The sooner the long suffering troops of the Ukrainian armed forces figure it out for themselves, the better it would be for all of us.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
March 27, 2025
Aaron Mate: Behind Zelensky’s push for a security guarantee: extremist threats and Western betrayal (Excerpt)
By Aaron Mate, Substack, 3/24/25
…At home, Zelensky faces the traditional obstacle of Ukraine’s radical and heavily armed far-right, which remains steadfastly opposed to any negotiated solution with Russia. According to a 2024 survey, fifteen percent of soldiers and veterans would join an armed revolt if Ukraine and Russia reached a peace deal on unfavorable terms.
As the Financial Times noted last year, Zelensky’s “biggest domestic problem… might come from a nationalist minority opposed to any compromise, some of whom are now armed and trained to fight.” Entering “any negotiation” with Russia, a Ukrainian official said, “could be a trigger for social instability. Zelensky knows this very well.” Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of Zelensky’s political party, was even more blunt. “There will always be a radical segment of Ukrainian society that will call any negotiation capitulation. The far right in Ukraine is growing. The right wing is a danger to democracy,” Merezhko said.
The view that Ukrainian extremists pose an obstacle to peace has newly been confirmed by an unlikely source. In a recent interview, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson acknowledged that Zelensky was undercut by radicals who stood in the way of the Minsk Accords, the UN Security Council-endorsed pact for ending the post-2014 Maidan coup civil war. Zelensky, Johnson explained, “was elected as a peacenik,” and “in 2019, he tried to do a deal with Putin.” But “his basic problem was that Ukrainian nationalists couldn’t accept the compromise.” That compromise was predicated on granting the Russian-backed Donbas rebels limited autonomy inside of Ukraine and effectively abandoning hopes of joining NATO…
Read the full article here. This article is behind a paywall, but I highly recommend paying the $5/month subscription for Aaron’s Substack, if you’re not already. His articles are worth it. – Natylie
Oliver Boyd-Barrett on Status of US-Russia-Ukraine Negotiations
By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 3/26/25 (Excerpt)
The principal outcomes of the negotiation process so far (which is primarily taking the form of extensive talks between US and Russian teams and then providing a Ukrainian team some opportunity for comment) are still shaky. They mainly have to do with a partial and very temporary ceasefire that covers attacks on energy installations and energy infrastructures of either side, and an extension of this ceasefire to the Black Sea in a measure that is routinely described as the reinstatment of the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
If successful, then this measure should work in the interests of all parties:
providing security for commercial shipping in the Black Sea,providing additional revenue to Ukraine for its Black Sea exports;providing additional revenue to Russia for grain and fertilizer exports; reducing the weight of Western sanctions on Russia;improving Russian access to Western agricultural hardware;reopening Russian markets to US agricultural corporations; increasing supplies of Russian grains at lower prices to China – which accounts for half of all Russian export sales of grains;lowering food prices worldwide and reducing inflationary pressures.At this stage there are significant disagreements as to when the ceasfire begins, with Russia saying it began on March 18 (in which case Ukraine has violated the ceasefire in multiple instances) and Ukraine saying it begins whenever the White House formalizes the date (which I believe the White House now has done, for March 25). This disagreement would open up the possibility that Russia would renew attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities after March 18, attacks that Ukraine would then denounce as violations.
The Black Sea grain initiative refers back to a deal that was brokered by Turkey in 2022 whereby Russia undertook to allow safe passage to ships from Ukrainian ports for the export of grains to what at the time were believed to be very needy Global South destinations. Turkey was supposed to have inspected ships to ensure that the free passage was not being abused to cover for the flow of Western weapons into Ukraine. Turkey failed to live up to this important obligation.
Further, the majority of grain deliveries went not to the Global South, but to developed countries in the West. In addition, and most importantly, European countries did not live up to their undertaking to lift all measures in place to restrict the flow of Russian exports of grain and fertilizer. This last could have had the effect of limiting the overall volume of global trade in grain and, because of constrained supply of fertilizer and higher prices, the productivity of crops worldwide. It probably did have these effects even though Russia’s grain export earnings have continued to climb (see below).
The Black Sea grain initiative still needs to be thought through before it can be said to have taken effect, even though both sides have apparently agreed to it in principle. One major issue is who will do the inspecting. Turkey is clearly not a candidate. It is unlikely that relations between Russia and Turkey are as robust today as they were in 2022 (and they were always fragile, contingent on Erdogan’s notorious slipperiness in his balancing of Turkey’s interests between the US, Europe, Russia and the Arab World pressures).
Gilbert Doctorow has helpfully itemized some of the other measures that need to be resolved or executed. The initiative will take place only after:
(1) the US ends sanctions on Russian banks engaged in export of agricultural products, fish products and fertilizers;
(2) Rosselkhozbank is reconnected to SWIFT and correspondent accounts are opened with U.S. and other banks to handle the respective transactions;
(3) limitations on insurers for Russian flag vessels, restrictions on port services to these vessels are lifted;
(4) sanctions are lifted on producer and exporter companies in the sectors of agricultural, fish and fertilizer products. Russia will have to be allowed sanction-free access to purchase abroad agricultural machinery and equipment needed for its fish and fertilizer production.
Doctorow cites figures supplied by the The Financial Times showing that the sanctions have not actually prevented Russia from establishing alternative export routes and other work-arounds, and that Russian fertiliser exports hit a record 40mn tonnes last year and are expected to increase by up to 5 per cent in 2025.
TASS Summary of the Black Sea Initiative1. In accordance with the agreement between the Presidents of Russia and the United States, the Russian and American sides agreed to ensure the implementation of the “Black Sea Initiative,” which includes ensuring the safety of navigation in the Black Sea, non-use of force, and prevention of the use of commercial vessels for military purposes while organizing appropriate control measures through inspection of such vessels.
2. The United States will help restore access for Russian agricultural and fertilizer exports to the world market, reduce the cost of shipping insurance, and expand access to ports and payment systems to conduct such transactions.
Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall come into force after:
Lifting sanctions restrictions from Rosselkhozbank and other financial organizations involved in ensuring operations on international trade in food products (including fish products) and fertilizers, connecting them to SWIFT, opening the necessary correspondent accounts;
Lifting restrictions on trade finance transactions;
Lifting sanctions restrictions on companies producing and exporting food (including fish products) and fertilizers, as well as lifting restrictions on the work of insurance companies with cargoes of food (including fish products) and fertilizers;
Lifting restrictions on servicing ships in ports and sanctions against ships under the Russian flag involved in the trade of food products (including fish products) and fertilizers;
Lifting restrictions on the supply of agricultural machinery to the Russian Federation, as well as other goods used in the production of food (including fish products) and fertilizers.
3. Russia and the United States agreed to develop measures to implement the agreements between the presidents of the two countries on a ban on strikes on energy facilities in Russia and Ukraine for a period of 30 days, starting on March 18, 2025, with the possibility of extension and withdrawal from the agreement in the event of non-compliance by one of the parties.
4. Russia and the United States welcome good offices from third countries aimed at supporting the implementation of agreements in the energy and maritime sectors.
5. Russia and the United States will continue to work to achieve a strong and lasting peace.
March 26, 2025
Kommersant’ report on Putin’s remarks about Donets, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhe
By Geoffrey Roberts, 3/24/25
Below is a translation of the Kommersant’ report of Putin’s private remarks to Russian businessmen on Russia’s retention of the four incorporated territories of Lugansk, Donets, Kherson and Zaporozhe. This section comes at the end of a very long report by the journalist of the public proceedings of the businessmen’s congress – at which Putin also spoke.
Andrei Kolesnikov
Kommersant’
18 March
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7586520
In the closed part of the meeting, some participants told me, Vladimir Putin did not talk to the businessmen about business. He said he was leaving that to the Deputy Chief of the [Presidential] Administration, Maxim Oreshkin, with whom they could resolve all the issues.
Then he talked to the elected congress delegates of about what he had been thinking about preparing for conversation with Donald Trump.
First off, they had to sit through the traditional historical digression. From the beginning there could have been very little bloodshed, said Vladimir Putin. They just needed to hear him, Vladimir Putin, and start talking. First, about recognising Crimea. Then, when it became clear that they did not want to listen, about recognising the autonomy of the Lugansk and Donetsk republics. Finally, about recognising them, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhe regions, as part of Russia. And the further point at which Russia could be stopped, be pushed back, the less chance there was to reach an agreement. And in the end, it turned out that Russia could no longer be stopped…
“They don’t have time to dig in,” said Vladimir Putin…
Now, according to my interlocutors, the talks at the negotiations are about the fact that what has been achieved cannot be taken away from Russia and that Crimea, Sevastopol and the four known territories should be recognised as part of Russia: the Lugansk and Donetsk republics, the Kherson and Zaporozhe regions.
If this happens in the near future, the meeting participants told me, Russia will not lay claim to Odessa and other territories that currently belong to Ukraine.
But this point may also shift, because “they don’t have time to dig in.”
ACURA Q&A: Ian Proud: From Misfit in Moscow to Peacemonger in London
By James Carden, ACURA, 3/10/25
Ian Proud served in His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. He served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019 and is the author of a trenchant memoir titled A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019.
He is also the author of the widely read Substack offering, The Peacemonger. His work also appears in Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative, among other publications in the US and UK.
–James W. Carden
Carden: Ian, thanks for taking the time to talk. A lot’s been going on the past 72 hours. We had the Zelensky-Trump blow up, then you had Zelensky here with Keir Starmer, followed by the EU defense ministers meeting. Seems to me anyway, that if you’re not going to get Trump to go along with any of these plans for boots on the ground, then it is all for show…
Proud: So big picture: This is a strategic repositioning going on at the moment, where people are basically trying to get to an off-ramp out of Ukraine in a way that doesn’t make it appear that they have totally failed.
So there’s a lot of choreography going on at the moment, particularly on the UK side. I’ll come to that. But on Zelensky and Trump, I mean Zelensky is trying to create himself as some sort of icon. This is his thing, he wears T-shirts. I think it’s completely ridiculous.It stems from his entertainment background where he’s more focused on the image and the brand rather than the substance. I don’t really see him as a states-person. I see him as someone who hasn’t recognized that the Earth really isn’t flat, that things are changing, and that he actually needs to adapt.
I once compared him to Madonna, unfavorably. Madonna constantly changed her style and adapted. He hasn’t. And he’s saying what he’s been saying since the beginning of the war, and now he’s come up against President Trump. I mean, his first three to six months, I think he played quite well, apart from not signing in Istanbul. But since then, he’s been stuck and he’s increasingly centralized power upon himself, hasn’t listened to advice, and we’ve humored him. We’ve built him up as this icon of democracy. Which is amazing.
Carden: No one has reported on the fact that he has sanctioned and chargedhis predecessor [Petro] Poroshenko with high treason. Now, Biden, I guess, in his own way, tried to do that to Trump. And Trump called Zelensky a dictator, he was actually, in his Trumpian way, correct because he was supposed to hold elections a year ago.
Proud: He was, and people keep making these ridiculous comparisons to Winston Churchill which drives me nuts because during World War II, there was power sharing in the UK. Like, okay, elections were put on hold, but there was power sharing, all the main parties involved shared power. Churchill led it, but he had Labour ministers throughout—whereas Zelensky has centralized power upon himself.
Carden: You’re right. There was a specific effort at bipartisanship, as we call it. There’s none of that with Zelensky who has banned 11 opposition parties during his time in office. But he has this image….
Proud: As that narrative breaks down, they will say, well, when the war in Ukraine finishes, okay, maybe we’ll be able to have elections in six months. It will be so difficult. Well, we had elections less than two months after Victory over Europe Day following World War II, before indeed, the defeat of Japan.
Carden: One of the things that struck me is that Starmer seemed to be in quite a bit of political trouble up until very recently, but now he seems to be positioning himself as a kind of bridge between Europe and the US.
Proud: Essentially, since Lord Mandelson [now the UK’s Ambassador to the US] has arrived in Washington, the ambassador, and he’s not a Starmer ally, but he was chosen by Starmer for that job.
He wanted somebody who was from the Labour Party who would speak truth to power. Now, in the period running up to Lord Mandelson’s arrival in DC, Starmer was not really interested in foreign policy, and Lammy [David Lammy, the current UK foreign minister] is useless. They’ve been fed the policy by the deep state.
And in fairness to them, we’ve had nine foreign secretaries since 2014, and seven prime ministers. So what that means in practice, I think, for anybody in power, is that you are more reliant than normal on advice from the Blob.
And if you come in focused on the domestic agenda, fixing the country with the economic stuff, then you’re going to fall back on the Blob for easy answers on foreign policy. And what they did when they came in was just to, in the absence of ideas of their own, just adopt a more extreme version of what the Tories have been doing in Russia: Saying the same things, but tougher.
Tougher, which is total nonsense. And then Mandelson has come in and people are thinking about geo-economic issues right now, about trade wars and so on. And Mandelson, I think has said to Starmer, look, you’ve got two choices: You can show a point of difference with Trump and support Zelensky come what may and go against Trump, risk Trump’s ire and possible tariffs. Or you can actually align with the US and say, well, what we need more than anything else from our relationship is the acceleration of trade talks, which have been on hold really since Obama’s time, and an avoidance of tariffs. And we are going to throw Zelensky under the bus, but softly and over time in a way that it doesn’t look like we’re actually throwing them under the bus.
Carden: Maybe Trump, in a way, is doing Starmer a favor, since no one’s going to notice because Trump has just thrown him out the window in such a public fashion….
Proud: That’s true. Although at the same time, the Zelensky brand is much more powerful here than it is in the US. And so ditching Zelensky is not as easy a job here as it is in America.
Public opinion is pretty squarely behind, really, because the mainstream media just are completely aligned. All the political parties say exactly the same things. This is almost worse than Russia in terms of the avalanche of propaganda that we are fed.
Carden: That’s quite shocking though I did have a sense that was true, which is why I’m here. But one of the things I learned through my discussions this week was something that I was completely unaware of, which are “D notices” [they are officially called Defense and Security Media Advisory Notices] which are apparently warnings issued by the government to media organizations seen to be deviating from government policy.
Proud: I mean, this actually goes back to the Iraq war in 2003, and to 9/11, when Labour, much like Starmer’s doing now with Trump, wanted to align with George W. Bush. And it’s almost a repeat of what happened in 2001-2003, we wanted to be America’s best friend at a pivotal time in history. And Alistair Campbell famously sexed up the intelligence dossier to justify Britain’s involvement in the Second Iraq War.
But the point is that from that time, Number 10 started to exert a cast iron grip on the media narrative. And on one hand, they opened their doors to the media as never before for ‘on the record,’ ‘off the record,’ daily briefings. But the flip side of that was they were exerting control over what the media could say. So, for a period of now, 24 years, Number 10 has progressively been controlling the narrative. There is a relentless Number 10 media campaign to ensure that none of the mainstream media outlets step out of line from where the government is at. And if they’re called “D notices”, well, this is where the government says ‘These are our lines’—a bit like what the presidential administration in Moscow does.
Carden: So when were you in Moscow, in 2014? Were you there because they needed to staff up because of the craziness that was…
Proud: No, I chose to go.
Carden: Okay. So you were there at the very beginning of this terrible story that’s been going on in the Donbas?
Proud: Well, in fact, it precedes that because I organized theG8 Summit in Britain that Vladimir Putin attended. So I’m the only member of the current generation of people from the diplomatic service who’d actually seen Vladimir Putin on his last visit to the UK. And that prompted me to apply because Russia was due to take the G8 presidency in 2014.
And that drove my decision at a time when UK-Russia relations were in a much better, healthier shape than obviously where they are now, which is no shape at all.
It was clear to me right from the beginning, the Embassy in Kiev went totally native: Russia’s evil, we need to support the anti-terrorist operation. And they just totally bought into that narrative from the start. And indeed, the operation in London was on the same wavelength. And it was really, really difficult for the Ambassador in Moscow to get the Russian perspective heard in London.
Carden: So you were there during the Michael McFaul experiment?
Proud: Experiment. Yeah. Well, I mean, the latter end of it. I think he probably left just as I was arriving because he totally screwed up.
Carden: I assume your guy was more professional and knowledgeable about the region than…
Proud: Yeah, Tim Barrow. He is an astoundingly good diplomat—super talented guy who also served as Ambassador in Kiev. And he was going back and forth to London pretty much every week trying to bring a more nuanced perspective. And it was a constant struggle to introduce the Russian perspective into policy thinking.
Carden: In the States, even among people I know who know better, professors, journalists and the like, they go on TV and they say that the war has nothing to do with NATO. Do they trot out that line here?
Proud: You’ll find, particularly when you listen to people like Boris Johnson, that it’s all about, well, you can’t deny Ukraine a choice to join [NATO]. Well, no, you can’t. But you can’t deny Russia the right to say, well, actually, we’re not very happy about that.
Carden: NATO’s a military alliance, and we have every right to say to them: No…
Proud: And the point about NATO is that actually Russia’s concerns about NATO had been clear since at least 2008. This wasn’t a surprise. And in fact, you could say right back to 2006 when the Balts joined NATO, Russia had concerns, but there was still quite good collaboration between Russia and NATO. I mean, NATO was still shipping weapons to Afghanistan via Russia and Uzbekistan…
Carden: Through the Northern Distribution Network…
Proud: Exactly, and even after the 2008 Bucharest summit, there was good NATO-Russia collaboration. But Putin in 2007 at the Munich conference and then in 2008 with [the war in Georgia], he’s saying, well, look guys, NATO is a problem for us. And he was ignored.
He was ignored. And unless we accept the fact that he was ignored, we’ll never get past this…
Carden: Whatever anyone thinks about Putin, that’s the point.
Proud: That’s the point. Everything has become personalized. It shouldn’t matter what you think of Putin, it’s irrelevant. It shouldn’t matter what you think of Zelensky. It’s irrelevant. You should look at the issues, the interests and decide on the basis of that.
Carden: Lavrov and Putin have always been admirably clear as to what their red lines are, crystal clear. There’s no mystery. And we still pretend like we don’t understand why they’re acting this way….
Proud: And the thing is, that is Russia’s only demand. When I lived in Moscow all signs were that Russia wanted to strengthen economic ties with us. They were always, always, always going to us saying, well, we actually want our relationship to be in a better shape than it is now. And we were saying, nooooo, after Crimea and the Donbas, obviously we can’t do that.
Carden: It’s ridiculous. Of course, now it’s gotten even crazier. There’s now this push among academics and some of the more warmongering journalists in the West to “decolonize” Russia….
Proud: More Ukrainian propaganda…
Carden: Let’s totally destabilize a country with over 1,500 strategic nuclear warheads. That’s a great idea….
Proud: And even Kaja Kallas, the supposed top diplomat from that titan of geopolitics, Estonia, has said that. It’s nonsense.
It is about bringing the grown-ups back into the conversation. The key aim for that 27th of February meeting between Trump and Starmer was to kind of shift the narrative—because of where the Labour party had been at in terms of criticizing Donald Trump in the past—a stupid thing to do, given the risk that that person could eventually again become the president of the United States.
There’s a huge amount of damage limitation that Starmer has to do now, having gotten off to such a bad start with Trump. But I think the ‘feel good’ vibes of a state visit is part of that package of putting Starmer in a better place.
You saw the way he went against Trump just before the Oval Office meeting, Hegseth said, Ukraine joining NATO is unrealistic, but Starmer said, Ukraine’s membership is irreversible. President Trump said, Zelensky is a dictator. Starmer replied Zelensky is a Democrat.
But after the 27th of February, that narrative has changed.
Starmer is actively avoiding saying anything which suggests any difference with President Trump. And that is a very significant shift in tone—because he’s been told that, actually, he can’t carry on just being the counterpoint to Trump.
March 25, 2025
Brian McDonald: You may not have heard of Yevgeny Primakov. But in Moscow’s corridors of power, his ideas are very much alive — and shaping how Russia is engaging the United States right now
By Brian McDonald, Twitter, 3/24/25
You may not have heard of Yevgeny Primakov. But in Moscow’s corridors of power, his ideas are very much alive — and shaping how Russia is engaging the United States right now. 
As US-Russia talks grind on, one thing is clear: the Kremlin is not looking for a reset. It’s not looking for escalation either. It’s playing for time, leverage, and options. This is classic Primakov doctrine at work: strategic independence and multi-vector diplomacy.
Primakov served as foreign minister and prime minister in the 1990s, under the very pro-American Boris Yeltsin. He wasn’t a romantic about the West. He understood that a unipolar world would always treat Russia as a subordinate. So he proposed a different model: a multipolar order, where Moscow balances power blocs, not joins them.
At the heart of Primakov’s approach: 
Avoid binary alignments 
Preserve maximum sovereignty 
Cultivate ties with multiple great powers 
Reject ideology in favor of national interest
Sound familiar? It should — it’s back in vogue in Moscow.
Today’s negotiations with Washington reflect this logic. Russia isn’t begging for sanctions relief or threatening a grand bargain. It’s conducting strategic procrastination: waiting out electoral cycles, testing Western unity, and keeping all doors ajar.
At the same time, Moscow is deepening ties with China, hedging with Indiai, and engaging the Global South. But crucially, it avoids formal alliances. No junior partner status. No ideological camps. This is diplomacy in the Primakov mold.
Even BRICS, the SCO, and alternative payment systems trace back to his thinking: global structures that aren’t anti-Western, but post-Western — frameworks that sideline the need for Western approval.
This stands in contrast to older ideas like Surkov’s “Great North” — a failed dream of Russia-West integration. And Gorbachev’s ‘Common European Home.” That world no longer exists. Primakov understood that early.
The current diplomatic posture is not improvisation. It’s strategy. And it means Moscow won’t be pressured into picking sides in a US-China conflict or trading Ukraine for relief. It will maneuver — but only on sovereign terms.
Primakov’s legacy is now embedded in Russia’s foreign policy culture: cautious, multi-directional, sovereign. As the US pushes for deals, it’s confronting a Russia that remembers the 1990s — and refuses to repeat them.
Lee Fang: Unwinding Government’s ‘U.S. Institute of Peace’ Unlikely to Undermine Peace (Excerpt)
By Lee Fang, Substack, 2/24/25
…Far from building a lasting peace, much of USIP’s regular work involves hosting American military leaders to discuss the maintenance of U.S. empire. The USIP regularly publishes articles and podcasts on the importance of increased NATO armaments and the need to increase economic sanctions on U.S. adversaries.
For instance, a recent report from the institute argues in favor of the installation of long-range missiles in Germany. The system is designed to launch nuclear weapons into Russia.
Over the last few years, the USIP has pursued a curious line of advocacy around Afghanistan. After the U.S. withdrawal in 2021, the ruling Taliban government rapidly snuffed out widespread poppy cultivation, effectively ending the heroin trade – which had long flourished under local warlords and other allies of the U.S.-backed occupation government.
The end of the heroin trade, however, is strongly opposed by USIP.
The institute has published several reports decrying the end of the trade as dangerous because Afghan farmers are now growing “low-value wheat” and other agricultural products. The new economy, USIP warned in December, may “worsen rural poverty, increase dissatisfaction among landholders and spur political instability.”
“It’s mind-blowing to see the principles of American narco-capitalism stated so plainly,” noted Seth Harp, a journalist who has written extensively about the Afghan conflict. “Fuck food, grow drugs, get rich or die trying.”
President Donald Trump, in a flurry of related executive actions this past week, targeted the USIP for downsizing. In an executive order that called for minimized staffing and administrative efforts to wind down spending at various government-chartered entities, the Trump administration appears to be pushing to reduce or eliminate the entirety of USIP. The order mentions the institute and others, including San Francisco’s Presidio Trust…
March 24, 2025
Racket News Library – Timeline: The War in Ukraine
Racket News, 3/7/25
By Matt Taibbi and Greg Collard
Where to find relevant documents, videos, translations, and procurement statistics for the conflict that began with a Russian incursion in February, 2022
On February 24th, 2022, at 5:30 AM Moscow time, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a televised speech announcing a “special military operation.” Here is that address, with English subtitles:
(Go to original page – link above – to view video – NB)
Minutes later, explosions were recorded in Dnipro, Kharkiv, and other locations across Ukraine. This footage was shot near the Antonov Airport in Kyiv:
(Go to original page – link above – to view video – NB)
Many would call this the beginning of the Ukraine war. Others would say it started weeks, months, years, or even decades earlier. This is why any effort at a “timeline” for this war is controversial.
Academics like Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer would say a disagreement about NATO expansion dating to the early 1990s, before the Soviet collapse, is necessary context. The United States Department of Defense, meanwhile, marks the same date of February 24th, 2022, and specifically Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s order sending 7,000 troops to Europe, as the first event in its “Ukraine Events” timeline.
Both old and new materials appear below, in a collection that as always favors full primary source materials over links. When possible, we’ll provide brief context, with contemporary critics given voice.
This list is not meant to be comprehensive and will be continually updated. If you think we left out something important, we want to hear from you. More to the point, if you think something relevant has been overlooked for a reason, we want to hear that complaint. Please let us know what we missed and send what you have to library@racket.news.
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February 9th, 1990Memorandum of conversation between Secretary of State James Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev. Prepared by the State Department and public via a FOIA address, the heavily redacted document nonetheless contains an oft-cited passage from Baker: “We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that… not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”
Mikhail Gorbachev, James Baker, September 10, 1991 (Wojtek Laski/Getty Images)[image error]
Bakergorbachev
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February 9th, 1990Conversation between James Baker and Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, which repeats the formulation. “There would, of course, have to be iron-clad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward. And this would have to be done in a manner that would satisfy Germany’s neighbors to the east.” This memo was written by former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman, who confirmed the story to Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone in 2017:
Memo of James Baker’s comments to Eduard Shevardnadze.[image error]
Bakershevardnadze
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February 12, 1990Notes of Shevardnadze aide Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze, saying, “If [unified Germany] stays in NATO, we should take care about non-expansion of its jurisdiction to the east.”
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Document 10 01 Teimuraz Stepanov Mamaladze Notes
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July 16, 1990Ukraine issues a Declaration of Sovereignty, part of which involves an agreement “not to accept, produce, or acquire nuclear weapons.” It’s the first step to becoming a full non-nuclear weapon state in the Non-Proliferation Treaty some years later. Had it not made this move, Ukraine would have been the third most heavily armed nuclear power in the world. It had 176 long-range ballistic missiles and 42 nuclear bombers containing roughly 1,900 nuclear warheads.
December 1, 1991Ukrainians overwhelmingly vote for independence in a referendum. The lowest votes are in Sevastopol and Crimea, but even those are majority votes in favor of secession from the USSR. Supreme Soviet Chairman Leonid Kravchuk is elected president.
George H.W. Bush, left, and Leonid Kravchuk (Dirck Halstead/Getty Images)[image error]
Ukrainian Independence Referendum – Seventeen Moments In Soviet History
127KB ∙ PDF file
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120191ukrainereferendum
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October 19, 1993White House staff secretary John Podesta and deputy Todd Stern outline a new two-track policy, one that imagines welcoming former Soviet satellites into NATO without a firm timetable, and a second that creates a “Partnership for Peace” that could include “all European states.” National Security Adviser Anthony Lake explains to Bill Clinton, “All your advisors agree that doing anything at this stage to indicate that NATO’s border will move closer to Russia and Ukraine without at the same time including those two states would have major negative consequences within both.”
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Podestalnn
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October 22, 1993Russian President Boris Yeltsin meets with Secretary of State Warren Christopher and, upon being told about the NATO expansion, reportedly says, “This is genius!” Some reports claim Yeltsin was drunk and misunderstood, believing the “Partnership for Peace” would take place instead of wider NATO growth. Subsequent Russian cables show a different reaction.
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Document 08 Secretary Christopher S Meeting With
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January 10, 1994President Bill Clinton announces a new Partnership for Peace, in which NATO membership is open “to all the former Communist states of the Warsaw Pact, along with other non-NATO states.” Asked who is the enemy, he answers, “Well, there will be different enemies.”
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The President’s News Conference | The American Presidency Project
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January 14, 1994
Leonid Kravchuk, Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton (Wojtek Laski/Getty Images)Kravchuk, Yeltsin, and Clinton sign the “Trilateral Statement.” Ukraine surrenders warheads and receives financial compensation from the United States and fuel rods for nuclear power plants from Russia. In return, the U.S. and Russia pledge to “reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate UN Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.”
Between the Baker-Gorbachev discussions about NATO and the later Trilateral Agreement, both Ukrainian and Russian politicians will come to believe they were lied to by American diplomats.
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Trilateralstatement
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June 28, 1996Ukraine adopts a new constitution, breaking from its Soviet legal legacy. It enshrines Ukrainian as the sole state language and outlaws foreign military bases, leaving the status of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, uncertain.
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Ukconstitution
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April 24, 1997Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and leaders of 19 NATO countries sign a “Distinctive Partnership” agreement. Kuchma had previously declared that Ukraine made a “strategic choice of integrating in European and Transatlantic structures.” Two NATO officers, one civilian and one military, are stationed in Kyiv, and “the NATO Allies have officially designated the Yavoriv defence training area, west of Lviv, as a [Partnership for Peace] training centre.”
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Distinctivepartnership
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May 27, 1997NATO member states and Russia sign the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation. It says NATO is undergoing “a historic transformation — a process that will continue,” in which its “political functions” will expand. New member states will not feature any “threatening build-up of conventional forces” and as matters stood, would seek to avoid “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.”
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Natoreformagreement
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May 29, 1997Russia and Ukraine sign the Black Sea Accords, under which Russia leases the Sevastopol base from Ukraine for 20 years. The status of Crimea, which was given to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in 1954, continues to be a source of tension for some Russians, with nationalist politicians beginning to make demands that it be returned.
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Blackseafleetagreement1997(in Russian)
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June 26, 199750 prominent American policymakers, including Democrats like Bill Bradley and Gary Hart, sign a joint letter to Clinton opposing NATO expansion in favor of preserving the START II denuclearization. “NATO expansion will make it much more difficult to establish the atmosphere of trust required for Moscow to agree to additional transparency measures,” they wrote.
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Opposition To Nato Expansion | Arms Control Association
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July 25, 1998Vladimir Putin, a former first deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, is hired to be head of the FSB by Boris Yeltsin. Putin, who helped his former boss Anatoly Sobchak escape corruption charges, makes a name for himself by suppressing investigations of Yeltsin. On March 18, 1999, a video of “a person, resembling [General Prosecutor Yuri] Skuratov” is shown on television cavorting with “two girls of easy behavior.” Putin says Skuratov, who was investigating Yeltsin, must resign.
February 23, 1999NATO officials after meeting at the Château de Rambouillet in France propose an eponymous peace agreement to Serbia, seeking to end hostilities with Albanian neighbors. It declares that the “use of force in Kosovo shall cease immediately” and explains that a NATO-based authority called KFOR will police the territory of the former Yugoslavia to maintain the peace.
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990123rambouilletaccord
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