Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 39

Russia Matters: US, Russian Negotiators Discuss Steps Toward End of War, New Partnerships

Russia Matters, 2/18/25

Senior American and Russian officials agreed on Feb. 18 to establish high-level teams to work toward ending the war in Ukraine and finding a path toward normalizing relations, in the most extensive bilateral negotiations in more than three years, according to NYT. After the 4.5 hours of talks, U.S. Secretary of State Rubio described a three-step plan for what the U.S. and Russia planned to do next, NYT reported. First, he said, both countries would negotiate how to remove restrictions placed on each other’s embassies in Moscow and Washington. In addition, he said, the U.S. would engage with Russia about “parameters of what an end” to the Ukraine war would look like. “There’s going to be engagement and consultation with Ukraine, with our partners in Europe and others,” Rubio was quoted by NYT as saying. And finally, he said, Russia and the U.S. would explore new “historic” partnerships, both in geopolitics and in business.1After the talks, Trump’s national security adviser Waltz suggested Ukraine’s government would have a say, calling it “common sense” that “if you’re going to bring both sides together, you have to talk to both sides,” according to CBS. “We are absolutely talking to both sides,” Waltz said.After the talks, Trump’s envoy Witkoff said the U.S has consulted Zelenskyy and Macron, and that the EU was “going to have to be at the table at some point because they have sanctions as well that have been imposed.” But the Russian foreign ministry ruled out a role for Europe in the Ukraine talks and demanded NATO rescind an open-ended 2008 invitation to Kyiv, as it said Moscow was “categorically opposed” to a European peacekeeping deployment, NYT reported.After the talks Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said the discussions were “not bad,” NYT reported. Ushakov said the exact date of the meeting between Putin and Trump has not yet been determined, but it is unlikely to be next week, according to TASS.Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov stated that the parties “not only listened, but heard each other,” according to Republic.ru. Lavrov also announced that Russia-U.S. consultations on Ukraine would now be held regularly. Lavrov also said  that he was unaware of a reported U.S. peace proposal for Ukraine that includes agreeing to a ceasefire, holding elections and signing a final peace deal. The so-called “three-stage peace plan” was allegedly proposed by both the United States and Russia, Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich reported, citing unnamed foreign diplomatic sources.The Russian Foreign Ministry said: “agreements were reached on establishing a dialogue to agree on ways to resume cooperation in the economy, including energy, space and other areas of mutual interest.” “The parties agreed to resume communication channels on other international issues, taking into account the special responsibility of Russia and the United States in matters of peace and security as nuclear powers,” the ministry said.Russian deputy foreign minister Grushko said the Kremlin was “categorically opposed” to European troops deploying to Ukraine “no matter what their role is.” He added that such a move would be “a step towards escalation,” according to FT.Kremlin spokesman Peskov said any deal should “take into account the possibility of disputing Zelenskyy’s legitimacy” after the Ukrainian president’s term expired last year, according to FT.Pro-government Russian political analyst Markov claimed that the talks produced “no results” and that “all assessments are abstract,” according to Republic.ru. He noted that a Putin-Trump meeting has not been scheduled and that “it cannot yet be said that Russia and the U.S. are moving closer.”2“A strong transatlantic relationship remains as critical today as it has for the past 75 years,” but “the way the transatlantic partners confront common challenges must change,” according to a newly-released report by the Belfer Center Task Force on Building a European Pillar within the Transatlantic Relationship, which is co-chaired by Ivo Daalder, Camille Grand and Daniela Schwarzer.3 “For Europe—and for NATO—the territorial defense of the continent will be the top priority for years to come,” the task force’s report, entitled “Transatlantic Bargain: The Case for Building a Strong European Pillar,” argues. “Under a new and sustainable transatlantic bargain, Europeans need to augment their defense capabilities and contributions significantly to take much greater responsibility for the defense of the continent.” As for the United States, it “needs to proactively help Europe build a strong and capable European pillar both by advocating better burden sharing and facilitating a shift in responsibilities to Europe, and reducing roadblocks to European defense investment and collaboration with U.S. defense industry,” according to the report, which was published as the Munich Security Conference took place. One of MSC’s Feb. 15 panels featured Ian Bremmer, Fiona Hill, Dmytro Kuleba, Meghan O’Sullivan and David Sanger; and focused on “Adversarial Alignment.” See a summary of this panel’s analysis and recommendations below.*“If Europe wants to be at the negotiating table rather than being on the menu, it is time to act with unity and clarity, rather than continuing to act surprised, divided and embarrassed,” Camile Grant writes in a commentary for ECFR. First, Europeans need to make clear that their support for Ukraine is not conditioned on continued U.S. support and can be increased.4 Second, Europeans need to clarify what they are ready to offer in terms of security guarantees, such as deployment of troops to Ukraine. Finally, “Putin, who probably celebrates his new status as a special negotiation partner of Washington, has not shown any signs of an openness to compromise or closing a deal soon. This creates an opportunity for Europe to shape—even partially—the terms of the deal,” according to Grand.5

***

Summary of February 18th Meeting of American and Russian Diplomats in Saudi Arabia

By Brian McDonald, Twitter, 2/18/25

Lavrov & Rubio agree to create negotiation groups on Ukraine and a mechanism to ease tensions in US-Russia relations (Reuters).

Three-stage peace plan on the table: Ceasefire Elections in Ukraine Final agreement (Fox News).

Economic ties back on the agenda – Russia & US agree to cooperate on investment & energy prices post-settlement (Reuters).

Embassy staffing to be restored in Moscow & Washington – a major thawing move (Rubio).

State Dept: One meeting won’t solve Ukraine, but Riyadh was an “important step forward.”

Zelensky fumes – says talks without Kyiv are just bilateral Russia-US agreements, not peace talks.

Trump & Putin both believe Zelensky’s re-election chances are slim (Fox News).

Tatiana Stanovaya: What Does Putin Hope to Gain From Ukraine Talks With Trump?

By Tatiana Stanovaya, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2/13/25

Three weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration, he had a much-anticipated phone call with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Both sides have kept a diplomatic silence over who initiated the call, but the very fact that it took place and lasted almost an hour and a half looks like a major win for the Russian leader. Effectively, the long-awaited negotiations between Moscow and Washington on the fate of Ukraine have been launched in the format that best suits Putin.

In addition, the Russian president is entering into a dialogue at a time when negotiations appear desirable but by no means necessary for Russia to achieve its goals in its war against Ukraine. For Putin, this is a window of opportunity that he would of course like to make the most of, but virtually any outcome will be a good result for Moscow.

There’s certainly no guarantee that Trump will accept all of the Kremlin’s many demands and agree to a full-scale “deal.” But there are plenty of other possible outcomes that will still benefit Russia, such as the erosion of Western unity, Ukraine being forced to accept what the Kremlin terms “reality” (territorial losses), and a reduction in Western support for Kyiv.

Even the very attitude and approach of Trump and his team to potential negotiations is playing into Putin’s hands. Hours before the phone call took place, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said publicly that a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders is unrealistic, and so is the country’s bid to join NATO. While similar conclusions have been expressed behind closed doors, it was the first time they had been acknowledged at such a senior level, drawing new lines within Western debates on Ukraine.

For now, the prospect of a full-scale “deal” looks unlikely: the U.S. and Russian positions are too far apart. Putin’s key goal remains a “friendly Ukraine,” which is not about territorial divides or the security of the contact line, but about guarantees that Ukraine as a whole will turn away from the path of Western development upon which it has embarked.

In practical terms, that would mean persuading the West to withdraw from Ukraine in every sense. Russia’s deputy foreign minister has already said the Kremlin would require “cast-iron guarantees” that Ukraine will not join NATO. It would also mean annulling Ukraine’s existing bilateral security agreements with Western countries, not to mention a change in the country’s political leadership, the rewriting of the Ukrainian constitution, and much more.

Russia also requires guarantees that there will be no full-fledged army, Western weapons, or military bases in Ukraine. Trump’s position, meanwhile—mineral resources in exchange for Washington’s support, and European peacekeepers on the contact line—appears to have little in common with Moscow’s vision. In addition, it’s not just a question of what Trump wants, but what he can actually do. A full-fledged deal that would be acceptable to Russia would require the active participation of other Western countries and, of course, Ukraine itself.

At the same time, Moscow is clearly not prepared to soften its demands too drastically. Putin has repeatedly made it clear that he believes Russia can achieve its goals in Ukraine without any U.S.-brokered deal. As far as he is concerned, Moscow simply needs to wait until Ukraine falls apart of its own accord, after which the Russian army will crush any remaining resistance among the Ukrainian army.

Trump’s attempts to force Ukraine to start negotiations with Russia and to make Europe “own responsibility for its own security” are only helping Moscow advance toward its own goals in this war. For Putin, therefore, talks with Trump are a secondary issue, eclipsed by what is nothing less than an existential goal for him: ensuring a “friendly Ukraine.”

The Kremlin’s most basic task right now is to keep Washington in a constructive mindset toward Russia. That in itself is already facilitating the achievement of Putin’s goals in Ukraine, so the Russian leader is prepared to pay a certain price to preserve this conducive atmosphere.

That price could take the form of what are effectively hostage exchanges (even if the equivalence of the most recent exchange is dubious), the release of Ukrainian prisoners of war, and perhaps even in the future, suspending hostilities temporarily or sending someone not too senior to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose legitimacy Putin does not recognize.

It will be a lengthy bargaining process in which Moscow is ready for any outcome, from limited agreements to ending all dialogue and even military escalation. The Russian leadership will try to avoid that last option—but not at any cost.

Now that the first substantial telephone conversation has taken place, the tricky business of preparations for a meeting between the two presidents begins. Washington has made a concession by distancing Special Representative for Ukraine Keith Kellogg from direct contact with Moscow: there is reason to believe that Trump himself has cooled toward Kellogg’s approach to the issue in recent weeks in favor of greater pragmatism.

It is not yet clear who will represent Russia in any negotiating delegation, but it’s unlikely to be a figurehead like Vladimir Medinsky, whom Putin named as his chief negotiator in the conflict back in 2022. Putin may well use him in negotiations with Kyiv, however, if necessary.

Figures such as the Ukrainian-born Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund; the oligarch Roman Abramovich; and former Kremlin chief of staff Alexander Voloshin are often mentioned as informal intermediaries in establishing the current contacts, and each of them can indeed play a certain role in communications. But their influence should not be exaggerated. Anything of any real importance either has Putin’s approval or happens at his instigation.

Of course, much in the negotiations will be determined by external, rapidly changing circumstances: above all, by the state of play at the front, and in Ukrainian domestic politics. Russia is sorely tempted to try simply waiting for Ukraine to become more vulnerable—both in military and political terms—and then ramp up the pressure, radically improving its negotiating position. Especially since right now, negotiations with Washington will not give Moscow what it wants anyway. For now, therefore, it is enough for Russia to keep Trump in a positive mindset, and that’s something Putin does well.

Lyle Goldstein – John Sullivan: Biden’s Failed Diplomat in Moscow

By Lyle Goldstein, Responsible Statecraft, 1/31/25

Donald Trump is once again the president and there is no greater foreign policy challenge he has promised to tackle than how to resolve the Russia-Ukraine War.

In the frenzied rush to save Ukraine from Russian aggression, there has been scant attention paid to the origins of the conflict. However, an important memoir published in 2024 by John Sullivan, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2020 until 2022, could provide some answers.

Ominously titled “Midnight in Moscow” the book shows just how belligerent towards Russia the Biden administration was at a fraught moment — and how little key American diplomats seemed to think of real diplomacy.

A careful study of Sullivan’s account reveals he was the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sullivan had prior experience as an attorney and this helped shape his sheriff-like, good-versus-evil worldview. The result was an escalatory spiral in U.S.-Russia relations that ended in catastrophe for Ukraine.

Every U.S. ambassador to Moscow likes to compare himself to George Kennan — one of America’s most famous and far-sighted diplomats — and Sullivan is no exception. But whereas Kennan was a genuine scholar of Russia, Sullivan seems to have made misstep after misstep. The best that can be said is he does appear to have done his utmost to protect American citizens unjustly held in Russia. He also attempted to improve the U.S.-Russia relationship in certain ways, for example in seeking to renew the important START agreement on strategic nuclear weaponry.

Nevertheless, the many grave errors made during Sullivan’s tenure cannot be ignored. By far, the most important revelation from his memoir is that the Ukraine issue was hardly even discussed at an important Geneva summit in June 2021 between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. This is both bizarre and depressing, particularly as this was clearly the best chance Washington had to head off the escalation that eventuated in the Russia-Ukraine War.

The responsibility, of course, lies not only with Sullivan but other senior Biden administration officials, who neglected their duty by apparently not realizing the dangers that had been building in the Ukraine context. Of course, to make progress on that issue also would have required an inclination toward diplomatic compromise — one part of an ambassador’s job description that Sullivan seems to have missed.

Two more interesting facts emerge in this memoir regarding that key summit. First, Sullivan explains that the meetings were to consist of two sessions, planned for a total of about five hours. However, Biden proposed significantly truncating the meeting down to about three hours.

And whereas the Ukraine topic was hardly broached, Sullivan explains that the approaching U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was talked about quite extensively during the Geneva Summit. Apparently, the United States made clear that it was actively seeking an alternative base for its counterterrorism operations in the region. Putin then brought up the possibility of the U.S. using a Russian base in Tajikistan — a country bordering Afghanistan.

While this was clearly an attempt by the Russian leader to find common ground, Sullivan dismissed the overture as “utterly improbable” and failed to follow up.

It’s part of a dismaying pattern for Sullivan, who claims he is “not a Russophobe,” yet asserts with pride that he took this tough diplomatic post in order to “study an adversary up close.”

That may relate to another of Sullivan’s candid admissions: that he was almost fired by Trump in 2018 for authorizing sanctions against Russia. This move “incensed” Trump, who believed “the ‘deep state’ was acting without his approval to subvert his relationship with Putin and Russia.” Sadly, at nearly every turn, Sullivan, under both Trump and later Biden, opted to escalate tensions with Russia rather than seeking diplomatic solutions.

An obvious example of Sullivan’s failure to seek compromise was his evident support for Washington’s poorly thought-out dispatch of Victoria Nuland to Moscow in October 2021 as Biden’s top emissary to negotiate on the matter of Ukraine. Nuland is reviled and indeed sanctioned in Russia for her notorious role in the 2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. This choice demonstrated an evident desire to rub salt in Russian wounds rather than achieve necessary compromise.

Somewhat predictably, Sullivan concludes his book with a call to arms, urging Americans not to shrink from their “responsibility” to support Ukraine and bear the burdens of the new cold war. We can only wonder how history might have turned out if Washington still had diplomats who actually engaged in diplomacy rather than insults and escalations.

This whole sad story is only underlined by the pathetic fact that Biden’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, hardly even spoke with his Russian counterpart after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It’s a nearly unparalleled feat of diplomatic malpractice.

RT: Russia wants US to clarify Ukraine troop deployment threat

RT, 2/14/25

The Kremlin has requested clarification from the US after Vice President J.D. Vance suggested American troops could be sent to Ukraine if Russian President Vladimir Putin does not agree to a peace deal ensuring Kiev’s long-term independence. Moscow says it has asked Washington for an explanation.

Vance made the comments in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, saying that Washington had “economic” as well as “military tools of leverage” to pressure Russia into a peace deal. He added that the possibility of sending American troops to Ukraine remained “on the table” if Moscow refused to engage in good-faith negotiations.

“These are new elements of the [US] position; we have not heard such statements before, they were not voiced,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday. “During upcoming contacts [with the US administration] we expect to receive further clarification,” he added.

Vance’s remarks contrast somewhat with earlier statements by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Speaking at a gathering of Kiev’s supporters in Brussels this week, he ruled out sending American forces to Ukraine following any security agreement. Hegseth stressed at the meeting that military support for Kiev should primarily come from European countries.

The US vice president also told the Journal that the results of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine could be surprising. “I think there is a deal that is going to come out of this that’s going to shock a lot of people,” he told the WSJ. He added that Washington would prioritize its interests in negotiations with Russia and that “things that are very important to Ukrainians” may need to be sacrificed.

A meeting between Vance and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky is planned to take place at the Munich Security Conference. US President Donald Trump announced that “high-level” US representatives would meet their Russian counterparts at the event on Friday to discuss a resolution to the Ukraine conflict. Russian officials have not attended the Munich Conference since 2022, and Moscow has yet to confirm its participation this year or announce the composition of its delegation.

Putin and Trump spoke for nearly 90 minutes by phone on Wednesday, marking the first known direct interaction between the Russian and US heads of state since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. On Thursday, Trump said the phone call had paved the way for further direct contacts between American and Russian officials. The Kremlin described the conversation as “constructive,” with both leaders agreeing to meet soon in a third country.

Following his call with Putin, Trump spoke with Zelensky, after which the US president reaffirmed that Kiev is prepared to seek an end to the conflict with Russia.

Geoffrey Roberts: Towards a New Grand Alliance? Trump, Putin and the Path to Peace in Ukraine

By Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe, 2/16/25

Geoffrey Roberts is Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy

A Trump-Putin deal to make peace in Ukraine could be closer than some people think. There are plenty of pitfalls that could upend the dramatic about turn in American-Russian relations inaugurated by Trump’s telephone conversation with Putin, but as of now the two countries are tantalising close to agreement on the essential preconditions for an armistice that would halt hostilities in Ukraine and initiate the negotiation of a detailed peace treaty.

Putin’s terms for a ceasefire were set out last June: Kiev’s concession of Crimea and the four provinces – Donets, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhe – annexed by Russia in October 2022 – and acceptance of Ukraine’s neutralisation.

Trump’s administration has conceded that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO. Accepting that Ukraine will also de-align with NATO and become a permanently neutral state is not such a big step.

More complicated will be devising a credible international security guarantee for a neutral Ukraine. One possibility, long-advocated by Moscow, is a pan-European or pan-Eurasian collective security treaty, that would include Russia as well Ukraine. Under the terms of this treaty, Ukraine would be protected by the collective security commitments of a multitude of countries, There is also no reason why such a system cannot co-exist with the continuation of NATO (which would keep the Americans involved in Europe) and with the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation in the former Soviet space.

Putin has repeatedly identified the draft treaties initialled by Moscow and Kiev in Istanbul in spring 2022 as the starting point for detailed peace negotiations. Those drafts included provisions for Ukraine’s disarmament and limitations on the future strength of its armed forces.

Fearing the future rearmament of Ukraine, Putin will likely want a similar in-principle agreement before calling a ceasefire. At Istanbul the Russians proposed Ukrainian armed forces of no more than 75,000, but the 200,000 suggested by Ukrainian dissident politician, Oleksiy Arestovych, is more realistic. As Arestovych points out, the Ukrainians have long borders and Russia is not the only potential threat – Poland, Hungary and Romania all have historic territorial grievances against Ukraine that they might be tempted to activate if the country is too weak militarily. Arestovych has also proposed that Ukraine should undertake to guarantee Russia’s security by actively maintaining itself as a buffer zone against NATO.

In any event, Western hardliners who think Trump can wheedle Putin into a deal that will enable them to rearm Ukraine for a future fight with Russia, should dream on.

While the Americans have conceded Ukraine will lose substantial territories as a result of the war, the territorial issue remains tricky because of the complications of Russia’s domestic politics. Putin needs some kind of a victory to justify the blood and treasure he has expended. For Russia’s hardliners nothing less than the complete defeat of Ukraine and its western backers is an acceptable outcome of the war. But while Russia’s ‘pro-war’ party is very voluble, the majority of Russians will settle for a compromise peace that will protect them and safeguard their Russian-speaking compatriots who continue to live in Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Still, at minimum, Putin needs to complete the conquest of Donets and Lugansk. That means the capture of Pokrovsk and then an advance to Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Konstantinovka – big targets that will take weeks if not months to invest. However, in relation to Kherson and Zaporozhe, Putin could conceivably concede the capitals of these regions to Ukraine. He could also pledge to keep his hands off Odessa, Dnipro and Kharkov. All of which would boost Ukraine’s future viability as an independent state.

More straightforward would be Ukraine’s withdrawal from Russia’s Kursk region in exchange for the return of Russian-occupied territory in the Sumy-Kharkov area.

But why should Putin make any concessions? Russia is winning the war handsomely. Why not wait until Ukraine collapses militarily and then impose peace terms of his choice?

While Trump’s overture offers the most immediate and certain path to an enduring peace with Ukraine, as important is that ending the war could catalyse a radical reconstruction of Russian-American relations – towards a global compact between Washington and Moscow that, together with China and other Great Power partners, would underpin a stable, multipolar system of sovereign states.

Putin’s overarching global ambition is to safeguard Russia’s security and civilisation for the ages. To achieve that goal he needs peace and an equitable relationship with the United States.

Among the highlights of Trump’s Truth Social summary of his conversation with Putin was his reference to the American-Russian alliance of World War II and the great sacrifices of the two countries’ peoples. Rumours are rife that Trump’s projected visit to Moscow will take place on Victory Day in May, when Russia will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of the war. He would be in good company. China’s Xi Jinping will be there, as will the top leaders of many global South countries – states that will be a formidable lobby for peace in the coming months.

Trump’s remark about American-Russian cooperation during the Second World War was, in fact, a reprise of what he said at his joint press conference with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018.

Trump’s return to this theme coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Yalta conference. At Yalta, the leaders of the allied coalition—the U.S., U.K, and Soviet Union—proclaimed a peacetime grand alliance, intending to use their collective power to guarantee peace and security for all countries.

That collaboration would be buttressed by multilateral institutions such as the newly created United Nations. The UN Security Council’s much-maligned veto system was designed to ensure great power consensus on critical security issues, while the Council of Foreign Ministers, established at the Potsdam conference in July 1945, was tasked to negotiate postwar Europe’s territorial-political order.

This new world order would be based on some shared values, including protections for freedom, democracy, and human rights. But none of the great powers would have the right to impose their politics and culture on the rest of the world. Free trade economics would spread but would coexist with other forms of economic organisation. Above all, this new international order would be based on one fundamental universal moral value: no more war.

Alas, this idealistic great power compact collapsed when the Grand Alliance itself disintegrated shortly after the war. A far worse alternative – the Cold War – ensued, ushering in an era of dangerous conflict and confrontation that spawned numerous wars, military interventions, brutal dictators, coups, and catastrophes, as well as the proliferation of nuclear arsenals that continue to threaten the very existence of humanity.

Any ambition that Trump harboured for a renewal of the Grand Alliance was scuppered by the Russiagate controversy. But if Trump’s recent remarks signal a revival of that project, he will find a willing partner in Putin. A yearning for a return to the Grand Alliance has been a persistent theme of Russian foreign policy. After 9/11, Putin offered such an alliance to George W. Bush, but was spurned in favor of American unilateralism in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under Barack Obama, the so-called reset in U.S.-Russian relations promised a return to collaboration, but such hopes were dashed by Western military intervention in Libya in 2011 and by Russia’s unilateral response to the Ukrainian civil war in 2014.

A new grand alliance may seem like a utopian dream. But history shows that cooperation between the world’s two great nuclear powers is both possible and necessary. President Franklin Roosevelt collaborated with Stalin to defeat Hitler. Eisenhower worked to defuse the tensions of the Cold War after Stalin’s death in 1953. Brezhnev and Nixon created the détente of the 1970s. Ronald Reagan abandoned the hardline anti-Soviet policies of his first presidential term and embraced Gorbachev’s glasnost revolution in the U.S.S.R.

Unencumbered by Russiagate, surrounded by loyal and able courtiers, and armed with a strong mandate to change the course of US foreign policy, Trump is much more able to pursue radical, global ambitions than he was in 2018.

But first there has to be peace in Ukraine. Kiev and its European allies have to be persuaded or pressurised by Trump to accept the terms of the compromise peace that he negotiates with Putin. For the sake of peace and the future of Russian-American relations, Putin will have to make concessions and take his own risks.

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Paul Robinson: Inching closer to an uneasy peace in Ukraine

By Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension, 2/13/25

In December 1990, Serbian rebels declared independence in the Croatian region of Krajina. A year and a half of war followed, ending in a ceasefire in May 1992 that left Krajina under Serbian control. The Croats, however, refused to recognize the loss of the territory, rearmed, and in August 1995 attacked Krajina and rapidly reconquered it.

In a similar vein, in May 1994, a ceasefire brought an end to the First Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, leaving the contested province of Nagorno-Karabakh and a large amount of surrounding Azeri territory under Armenian control. But the ceasefire did not resolve any of the underlying issues that caused the war. While Armenia enjoyed the spoils of its victory, Azerbaijan rebuilt its army and in September 2020 launched the Second Karabakh War, the result of which was a decisive Azeri victory and the restoration of Azeri control of its lost territories.

And in a more recent example, after the Syrian National Army had driven anti-Assad rebels into a small corner of Syria around the town of Idlib, a ceasefire was agreed that left the Idlib area under rebel control. In the years that followed, the rebels built up their forces with Turkish help while the Assad government sat back and did relatively little. This year the rebels struck, speedily crushed the Syrian National Army and drove Bashar al-Assad from power.

These examples demonstrate that ceasefires that fail to settle the political differences underlying a war often prove to be temporary. Often the side that came out worse in the original war takes the opportunity to revive its military and then, when the time is right, renews the war in an effort to retake what it has lost.

Knowledge of this possibility can persuade political leaders not to make peace even when it would make sense otherwise to do so. In studies of war termination, this is known as the “credible commitment problem”—warring parties will not make peace as they do not believe that the commitments others make in peace negotiations are credible. Overcoming this problem is one of the most important tasks of would-be peacemakers.

As the war in Ukraine reaches the end of its third year, the credible commitment problem provides a useful lens through which to determine the prospects of US President Donald Trump’s efforts to bring the conflict to an end. These efforts have now moved firmly beyond talk into the realm of action. This Wednesday Trump announced that he had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone and that the two had agreed to commence peace negotiations “immediately.”

The timing is propitious as the military situation provides incentives to both sides to cease fighting. This is particularly true of Ukraine whose army steadily gave ground during 2024 and whose efforts to mobilize its population have fallen flat. Despite draconian conscription methods, recruitment to the army is insufficient to replace losses and desertion is increasingly common. A continuation of the war almost certainly means further losses of land, people, and infrastructure with no gains in return. Ukraine’s best option at this point is to cut its losses and make peace.

This does not mean, however, that Russia is close to what it might consider victory. The pace of its advance is painfully slow and there are currently no indications that the Russian army is capable of a major breakthrough. Given its superior resources, the attritional process favours Russia and may lead eventually to Ukraine’s “debellation.” But we do not as yet appear to be anywhere close to that. At least for the coming year, Russia faces the prospect of costly war for relatively few gains. It too would benefit from peace.

In theory, therefore, this is a good time for Trump to step forward with his peace plan. Press reports suggest that the first step would be a ceasefire, followed by a Ukrainian withdrawal from the land it holds in Russia’s Kursk province, and the introduction of a European peacekeeping force. Ukraine would be prohibited from joining NATO and would recognize Russian sovereignty over captured territories, but would continue to receive military support from the Western states and would be promised an accelerated process towards membership of the European Union.

Further clues about American thinking came on Wednesday with a speech in Brussels by the new US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. In this Hegseth declared that “we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.” Hegseth added that “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” and that “any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops. If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. … There will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine.”

Importantly, Hegseth showed himself to be aware of the credible commitment problem, noting that “A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again.” The question then arises of whether his government’s plan can convince the two warring parties that this is indeed the case.

This is by no means certain due to the fact that neither side trusts the other to stand by its commitments. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for instance, has repeatedly expressed his fears that Russia will exploit any pause in the fighting to its own advantage, declaring that “A pause on the Ukrainian battlefield will not mean a pause in the war. A pause would play into [Russia’s] hands. It might crush us afterward.”

This is why the issue of security guarantees has acquired such salience. Zelensky is unlikely to make peace if he believes that the war will later resume in circumstances that are even less favourable than today. But he could perhaps be persuaded if outside powers provide guarantees that the Russians will be forced to obey the peace treaty’s terms. For Zelensky, the most solid guarantee is NATO membership. Hegseth’s rejection of this is therefore a serious blow to the Ukrainians’ ability to trust in the permanence of any ceasefire. It is not clear whether the possibility of some non-NATO peacekeeping force will be a sufficient guarantee to overcome this problem. The US government needs to be ready to do some serious diplomatic arm twisting to get Kyiv to acquiesce.

As for the Russians, their experiences with the Ukrainians have also left them with reasons to doubt whether any peace will be permanent. In August 2014, the Ukrainian army suffered a serious defeat at the battle of Ilovaisk in Donetsk province. Had Russian-backed rebel forces continued their advance, it is possible that Ukraine would not have been able to offer serious resistance. Instead, the Russians agreed to a ceasefire under the terms of an agreement signed in Minsk.

The ceasefire, however, failed to hold. Fighting continued, eventually resulting in another Ukrainian defeat in early 2015. Again, Russian president Vladimir Putin refused to exploit his advantage and agreed to another ceasefire, this time according to the terms of the Minsk II agreement. But this ceasefire also failed to hold. Meanwhile, the Russians accused the Ukrainians of not fulfilling the political terms of the Minsk agreement, above all granting autonomy to the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. At the same time, the Ukrainians rebuilt their broken army, aided by Western weapons and trainers. The final conclusion drawn by the Russians was that the ceasefire was a mistake and that the Ukrainians could not be trusted to abide by another.

Due to this, there is an extreme reluctance on the Russian side to agree to peace proposals that do not ensure that Ukraine abides by its commitments. Trump’s peace plan does address this problem to some degree, first by ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine and second by requiring that Ukraine formally recognize Russian sovereignty over its captured territories. This last point is particularly important, as if the war ends in such a way as to leave a territorial dispute between Russia and Ukraine, the possibility that it will eventually resume is much greater. The prospect of Western weapons continuing to flow into Ukraine and of European troops being deployed there may well disconcert Moscow and discourage it from accepting what is on offer, but the offer is still one that gives it considerable gains. If it is wise, it should not dismiss the offer out of hand.

One of the difficulties here is that anything that reassures Ukraine that the Russians will not break the terms of any peace treaty (for example, promises of future weapons supplies) almost certainly has the opposite effect on the Russians, increasing their fears that Ukraine might eventually renew the war. The Trump peace plan goes some way towards squaring this particular circle by providing some guarantees to both sides, albeit far fewer than both would like. As such it is a reasonable compromise and a good starting point for further talks. There will be some hard diplomatic work ahead, but at least the long process of negotiation is finally about to start.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

David Stockman: NATO Was Never About American Security

By David Stockman, Antiwar.com, 1/27/25

This is the third part of a four-part article.   Read part one here. Read part two here.

The evidence from the Soviet archives shows that Stalin’s policy during the 1947 pivot to Cold War was largely defensive and reactive. But even that departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington.

We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to communists coming to power in France, Italy and elsewhere. The truth of the matter, however, is that even the worst case – a communist France (or Italy or Belgium) – was not a serious military threat to America’s homeland security.

As we pointed out in Part 2, the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles. Its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht and its Navy, which embodied but a tiny fraction of the US Navy’s fire-power, had no ability whatsoever to successfully transport an invasionary force across the Atlantic. Even had it allied with a “communist” France, for example, the military threat to the American homeland just wasn’t there.

To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for electorates who might have stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem, not a mortal threat to liberty and security on America’s side of the Atlantic moat.

Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs. These initiatives—aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan and then NATO—were clinically described as “containment”  measures by their authors, who averred that they were designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, and were not a prelude to intervention in eastern Europe or to an attack on Moscow itself.

But if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry, top communist party echelons and correspondence to and from Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane. To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta.

To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” from Stettin (Poland) on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues uneasy in the extreme. But as it happened, abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.

That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale and sustained effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left. Likewise, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.

So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed. Why did Washington plunge instead into deeply entangling alliances in western Europe and unnecessary confrontation and overt conflict with Soviet Russia for no good reason of homeland military security?

Part of the answer is embedded in the prevalent Keynesian theorem at the time which held that post-war demobilization would result in a collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression. So unless countered with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures, it would be the 1930s all over again.

However, most of Europe was fiscally incapacitated owing to the impacts of the war. The economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a substitute form of fiscal stabilization and safeguard against a relapse into 1930s-style depression.

Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard. During the very first year of demobilization (1946), in fact, the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% from 1945 and never looked back.

What in 1945 had been a private sector GDP of $1.55 trillion in today’s dollars had jumped to nearly $2.0 trillion by 1947 and to more than $2.3 trillion by 1950. Thus, even as the US was making the turn from a war economy to the booming prosperity of the 1950s, the private GDP growth rate clocked in at 7.6% per annum over the five-year period. So the American economy never came close to tumbling into the Keynesian abyss.

To be sure, the overall GDP accounts said otherwise because they simply weren’t designed for a full-on war economy. That is to say, by the reckoning of the Keynesian-designed NIPA accounts government sector GDP in 1945 had clocked in at $2.3 trillion in today’s dollars and accounted for 75% of total GDP. Thereafter, of course, the government sector GDP numbers tumbled rapidly downhill as demobilization proceeded apace, dropping by nearly 70% to $750 billion by 1948 and about 26% of GDP.

Of course, the bloated 1945 government sector GDP figures were mostly for items which got accounted in the NIPA tables as “investment” in ships, plans, tanks, artillery and machine guns – none of which had a market price or much peacetime consumer utility. Accordingly, the overall GDP numbers were a case of wholly incompatible cats and dogs, which did not even fully normalize until after 1950.

Still, when you peeled back the Keynesian accounting chimera the American economy in the late 1940s was actually blooming with good health. And there was no reason to believe that the European economies would not have similarly turned the corner to civilian prosperity in due course.

Indeed, that the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong was well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.

In short, Washington’s “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland security – the only valid basis for the foreign policy of peaceful Republic. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class and military contractors during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn. These European foundations, in turn, surely and inexorably formed the gateway to Empire and the fiscally crushing Warfare State that now plagues the nation.

The Soviet archives also make clear that the Soviet Union never had a plan to militarily conquer western Europe. In effect, the absolute absence of such offensive military plans amounts to the Cold War Dog which didn’t bark.

To the contrary, the Soviet leadership viewed themselves as relatively vulnerable and were well aware that their country was much weaker in industrial and military capability than the United States. Accordingly, their prime concern was consolidating the territory and security gains in Eastern Europe which the USSR had won in with blood and treasure in the war against Hitler.

In fact, during the early post-war period Stalin himself had constantly changed his mind even about the politics of western Europe, tacking inconsistently to and fro about the role communist parties should play in their respective countries. Even then, he had still pursued a variant of detente with the Western Powers, hoping to reach a negotiated settlement on most areas of difference, especially on the question of Germany’s future.

Indeed, for several weeks after Secretary Marshall’s June 5, 1947 speech at Harvard, the archives show that Soviet leaders hoped it might prove to be a source of capital for the reconstruction of the war-damaged USSR. As the details of the American plan unfolded, however, the Soviet leadership slowly came to view it as an attempt to use economic aid not only to consolidate a Western European bloc, but also to undermine recently-won, and still somewhat tenuous, Soviet gains in Eastern Europe.

They feared that the U.S. economic aid program might attempt to target Stalin’s new chain of Soviet-oriented buffer states for reintegration into the capitalist economic system of the West. Thus the Marshall Plan, conceived by U.S. policy-makers primarily as a defensive measure to stave off economic collapse in Western Europe, proved indistinguishable to the Kremlin leadership from an offensive attempt to subvert Soviet security interests.

At length, therefore, Stalin ordered Poland and Czechoslovakia to withdraw from planning meetings in late July that involved discussions with the west about joining the Marshall Plan—discussions he had initially blessed. Thereafter, all Soviet bloc participation in the Marshall Plan ceased and Stalin’s calculus shifted sharply from accommodation and towards a strategy of confrontational unilateral action to secure Soviet interests.

Yet even then, the archival documentation shows that in making this shift, the Soviet leadership was moved primarily by fear of its own vulnerability to American economic power, not by a plan of world conquest which became the ultimate justification for the post-war American Empire.

Nor were the Kremlin’s fears entirely an exercise in Stalin-style paranoia. As Scott D. Parrish, a leading scholar of the Soviet archives, concluded,

The Marshall Plan does appear to have been largely a defensive move on the part of the United States, as the orthodox scholars would have us believe. But the story hardly ends there. The plan had its “offensive” side as well, in that its authors did indeed hope to lure some of the Eastern European states out of the Soviet orbit and integrate them into the Western European economy.

In this sense, the revisionists were correct to focus on the economic motivations behind behind the plan, which was more than just a geostrategic move to counter Soviet expansionism. As for the Soviet response, as the new documentation suggests, it was indeed largely defensive and reactive, even if it often relied upon crude offensive tactics. What the new documentation helps us see more clearly, then, is that the real difficulty and source of conflict in 1947 was neither Soviet nor American “aggression.” Rather, it lay in the unstable international economic and political conditions in key European countries which led both sides to believe that the current status quo was unstable, and that assertive action was required to defend that status quo.

It was in this environment that the Western powers felt compelled to design the details of the Marshall Plan in such a way that it would stabilize Western Europe, but only at the cost of provoking a confrontation with the USSR. And it was this same environment that compelled Stalin to respond to the plan with a series of tactically offensive maneuvers which fanned the flames of confrontation even higher. This decisive moment in the emergence of the Cold War was thus more a story of tragedy than evil. Neither the West nor the Soviet Union deliberately strove to provoke a confrontation with the other. Instead, the fluid political and economic conditions in postwar Europe compelled each side to design policies which were largely defensive, but had the unfortunate consequence of provoking conflict with the other.

The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb one year later in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, it did not create a requirement for US air bases in Europe – just as the Soviets were never to have such bases in the Western Hemisphere, as ultimately confirmed by the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962.

To the contrary, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding a fringe of Dr. Strangelove types like Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.

This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally plausible and very highly certain.

In this respect during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US had this deterrence capacity early on – with long-range strategic bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union and returning with mid-air refueling. These strategic bombers included the B-50 Superfortress and the B-36 Peacemaker, both of which had impressive range capabilities, with the B-36 having a range of up to 10,000 miles without refueling.

However, it was the introduction of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in 1955 that removed any doubt. The B-52 could carry a heavy bomb load and had a range of approximately 8,800 miles without aerial refueling.

By contrast, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon the Tupolev Tu-4 to deliver their nukes, which was a reverse-engineered copy of the U.S. B-29 Superfortress. However, these bombers faced significant challenges, including limited range and payload capacity, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of A-bombs to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.

When the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Age (ICBM) materialized in the second half of the 1950s, the Soviets were the first to demonstrate a successful ICBM, the R-7 Semyorka. Yet not withstanding the vaunted “missile gap” charge by JFK during the 1960 campaign, the Soviet Union had only deployed 4 of these ICBMs by 196o.

The United States conducted its own first ICBM tests at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in October 1959. By the end of 1960, the United States had deployed approximately 20 Atlas ICBMs, which figure grew to about 129 ICBMs by the peak of the liquid fueled rocket era in 1962.

As the decade unfolded, both sides developed far larger numbers of more powerful, reliable and  securely-protected, solid fueled ICBMs, but neither the logic nor logistics of nuclear deterrence ever changed. To wit, the core national security policy of both sides remained based on the certainty of a devastating second strike retaliation delivered by ICBMs securely based in hardened underground silos in their home territories.

As technology evolved the same logic was extended to submarine based missiles, which were not only hidden even more securely in the deep ocean bottoms, but also required no allied partners to operate.

In short, by the time the Cold War reached it peak in the mid-1960s, two thing had been established. First, strategic nuclear deterrence was the heart of national security for both sides and was operated unilaterally from the home country of each.

Secondly, there was no risk of conventional military attacks on the US on the far side of the great ocean moats. So NATO was not any kind of useful military defense asset for the US.

As we will elaborate further in Part 4, NATO was actually about international politics. As such, it had actually and materially added to the cost of US military security. That’s because the nearly 300,000 US servicemen remaining in Europe and the scores of bases and facilities which supported them were stationed there for the purpose of defending European nations from a largely non-existent Soviet threat – but one which in any case should have been addressed by their own military capabilities from their own fiscal resources.

Ironically, in fact, Washington’s plunge into “entangling alliances” has had the effect of sharply lessening Europe’s Warfare State costs by effectively shifting them to American taxpayers per Donald Trump’s patented complaint.

But America didn’t get any extra homeland security in the bargain. What it did get was the privilege of indirectly footing the bill for Europe’s generous Welfare States and enslavement to the myth that global alliances, allies, bases, interventions and regime change adventures have kept the world stable and America safe.

But none of that is true. Not by a long shot.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books,  The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed ,  The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back , and the recently released  Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm . He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

Russia Matters: Trump, Putin Launch ‘Immediate’ Peace Talks, Plan a Summit Backed by China

Russia Matters, 2/14/25

This week, Trump has confirmed earlier reports that he and Putin will meet in Saudi Arabia, while also revealing that the two leaders may then visit each other’s countries. “In fact, we expect that he’ll come here, and I’ll go there, and we’re gonna meet also probably in Saudi Arabia the first time, we’ll meet in Saudi Arabia, see if we can get something done,” Trump said, according to Politico. A date for the meeting “hasn’t been set,” but it will happen in the “not too distant future,” Trump said of the summit with the Russian leader, whom his predecessor refused to meet or directly negotiate with after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Last week saw senior Russian MP Leonid Slutsky reveal the meeting could take place sometime in February or March, while Russia’s Kommersant reported that Russia is reportedly considering Saudi Arabia as a potential location for the meeting. Meanwhile, Trump and Putin have already chosen officials that will negotiate on their behalf on ending the Russian-Ukrainian war, preserving strategic stability and other issues. “I have asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the CIA John Ratcliffe, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Ambassador and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to lead the negotiations, which, I feel strongly, will be successful,” Trump said on Feb. 12, thus excluding his own envoy on the conflict, Keith Kellogg. In his turn, Putin is assembling what Bloomberg has described as “a heavyweight team with decades of experience in high-stakes negotiation.” They include Yuri Ushakov, the chief Kremlin foreign-policy adviser; his top spymaster, Sergei Naryshkin; and Kirill Dmitriev, a financier educated at Stanford and Harvard.The previously anemic process of key stakeholders in the Ukraine conflict slowly signaling their evolving negotiating positions has undergone a dramatic disruption by Trump and his team this past week.Trump personally launched the disruption by announcing on Feb. 12 an “ immediate ” start to negotiations to end the war after having a phone conversation with Putin. The Kremlin—which has previously been denying direct contacts between Putin and Trump—confirmed Trump’s claim this time, saying the Russian leader agreed with his U.S. counterpart to “work together” toward “a long-term settlement [that] could be reached through peaceful negotiations.” Speaking prior to the Feb. 12 phone call, Trump claimed to have developed a concrete plan to end the war. But even if he did have such a plan, Zelenskyy—whom Trump would refuse to grant the status of “an equal member” of the peace process and whom Trump didn’t warn of his call to Putin until after he’d made it—denied any knowledge of it on Feb. 14. Meanwhile, some of the statements made by Trump’ top aides also indicated that there is no firm plan yet. First, Hegseth announced on Feb. 11 that “we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine.” Then, JD Vance was quoted by WSJ as saying on Feb. 13 that the option of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate remained “on the table.”  In addition to pledging not to send troops to Ukraine, Hegseth called Ukraine’s desire for membership in NATO and a return to its pre-2014 borders unrealistic and illusionary this week. Hegseth’s remarks made some of America’s Europeanallies publicly wonder why the U.S. would “concede” on these issues ahead of negotiations rather than try to use them as bargaining chips. But even with Hegseth sending conciliatory signals to Moscow on Ukraine’s borders and NATO, it won’t be easy for Trump and his team to convince their Russian counterparts to first agree to a ceasefire and then, possibly, conclude a peace deal. For one, Putin has showed no signs so far of abandoning the conditions he has set for Russia to agree to a ceasefire.1 Moreover, the Kremlin says it will agree to a ceasefire only if it is used to negotiate a legally-binding agreement, which would include guarantees of NATO’s non-expansion to the east. Whether such a commitment can be obtained from the alliance, which operates by consensus, is an open question. If Putin does agree to Trump’s proposal for the ceasefire, it could be secured by one of two significant upcoming dates, according to European and Ukrainian officials interviewed by FT: Easter on April 20 or May 9, when Russia celebrates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. The key to successful peace talks could be having China join the U.S. in the peace efforts, according to Harvard’s Graham Allison. “I believe this terrible [Russian-Ukrainian] war will soon come to an end. In fact, I would bet that we will have a ceasefire within the next six months… with the help of a powerful partner: China,” Allison  told  Der Spiegel.Chinese officials in recent weeks have floated a proposal to the Trump team through intermediaries to hold a summit between Trump and Putin and to facilitate peacekeeping efforts after an eventual truce, people in Beijing and Washington familiar with the matter told  WSJ . The Chinese offer, notably, envisions a U.S.-Russian summit without the involvement of Zelenskyy. Part of China’s proposal to assist a Russia-Ukraine peace deal involves Beijing acting as a “guarantor” by sending peacekeeping troops to the region, according to WSJ.Trump has proposed a three-way meeting with the Russian and Chinese leaders to discuss nuclear arms control, according to AFP. The chief motivation would be to find ways to save money, Trump said Feb. 13. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.” In response to Trump’s statement, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, depicted China as a much smaller player among nuclear powers, compared to the United States. “As countries with the largest nuclear arsenals, the United States and Russia should earnestly fulfill their special priority responsibilities for nuclear disarmament,” Guo said. Trump has called for a trilateral ‘denuclearization’ before and Putin responded to this call by stating readiness to discuss strategic stability. China has been, however, consistently rejecting trilateral reductions.In the past month, Russian forces made a net gain of 151 square miles of Ukraine’s territory (6 ½ Manhattan islands), according to the Feb. 12, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report  Card . Meanwhile in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, Ukraine gained 2 square miles. According to the Ukrainian OSINT group  DeepState , Russian military advances in eastern Ukraine have slowed significantly since November 2024. In November, DeepState reports Russian gains of 280 square miles, and these have declined every month since: 152 square miles in December 2024, and 126 square miles in January 2025.

Active Measures: Plan for a ‘New NATO’ Would Place Nukes Next to Russia

YouTube link here.

“A coterie of elite military and foreign policy thought leaders in Europe have drafted a plan to reshape NATO to try to stay in Trump’s good graces. Among the insane ideas being floated in Brussels are placing nukes in post-1999 NATO states like the Baltics and creating a ‘NATO bank’ that they would make Russia pay for.”

Andrew Korybko: Here’s What Comes Next After Putin & Trump Just Agreed To Start Peace Talks

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 2/13/25

12 February 2025 will go down in history as the day when the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine officially began to end. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth started everything off by declaring that: Ukraine won’t join NATO; the US doesn’t believe that Ukraine can restore its pre-2014 borders; the US won’t deploy troops to the conflict zone; the US wants the Europeans to assume some peacekeeping responsibilities there instead; but the US won’t extend Article 5 guarantees to EU forces there.

This was followed by Trump and Putin talking for the first time since the former returned to office. They agreed to begin peace talks without delay, which was followed by Trump calling Zelensky to brief him about this and likely coerce the concessions from him that he presumably promised Putin. Trump also suggested that he’ll soon meet Putin in Saudi Arabia and that each of them might then visit each other’s countries as part of the peace process. Here are some background briefings about the larger context:

* 3 January: “Creative Energy Diplomacy Can Lay The Basis For A Grand Russian-American Deal”

* 17 January: “The Merits Of A Demilitarized ‘Trans-Dnieper’ Region Controlled By Non-Western Peacekeepers”

* 3 February: “Territorial Concessions Might Precede A Ceasefire That Leads To New Ukrainian Elections”

* 4 February: “Trump’s Interest In Ukraine’s Rare Earth Minerals Might Backfire On Zelensky”

* 7 February: “Trump’s Special Envoy Shed More Light On His Boss’ Ukrainian Peace Plan”

The first analysis about creative energy diplomacy contains a dozen proposed compromises for each side that could help move their talks along. In fact, the one about the US not extending Article 5 guarantees to EU forces in Ukraine is now policy per Hegseth, so it’s possible that some others might follow. Additionally, Trump just remarked about how unpopular Zelensky has become, which suggests that he’s planning the “phased leadership transition” via new elections that was also proposed in that piece.

It remains to be seen which of these other proposals might soon become US policy, with the same being said for the ones that Russia might implement, such as agreeing to limited military restrictions on its side of the DMZ that’ll likely be created by the end of this process for example. What follows are the five main issues that’ll shape the Russian-US peace talks on Ukraine between their leaders, diplomats, and whichever of their experts might be invited to participate in this via complementary Track II talks:

———-

* Territorial Parameters

The most immediate issue that must be resolved is where the new Russian-Ukrainian border will fall. Hegseth’s claim about Ukraine’s inability to restore its pre-2014 border hints that Trump could coerce Zelensky into withdrawing from at least all of Donbass, which is at the center of the territorial dimension of their conflict, though it’s possible that his forces might fall back as far as Zaporozhye city. Letting Russia control that city and the parts of its new regions west of the Dnieper is unlikely at this time.

That’s because Trump might not want to take the flak that would follow giving Russia a city of over 700,000 whose residents didn’t vote in September 2022’s referendum. The same goes for the parts of Russia’s new regions west of the river. Instead, he might propose a UN-supervised referendum sometime after the fighting freezes to resolve this aspect of their territorial dispute, all while allowing Russia to continue to officially lay claim to those areas. That might be pragmatic enough for Putin to agree.

* DMZ Terms & Peacekeeper Roles

The next issue to address after the above are the terms of the DMZ along their interim border and the role of the peacekeepers who’d then likely deploy there to monitor it. Hegseth’s declaration that the US will not extend Article 5 guarantees to EU forces there could deter them from playing a major role, which Russia would have to authorize via a UNSC Resolution in any case per Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzia otherwise they’ll be legitimate targets. Non-Western ones are thus much more agreeable.

As it turns out, the vast majority of UN peacekeepers are from non-Western countries, so they could prospectively deploy there under a UNSC mandate per Nebenzia’s suggestion and possibly even result in the total exclusion of any Western peacekeepers if it’s agreed that none will contribute to this mission. Their terms would have to be acceptable to both Russia and the US in order for this resolution to pass, so it’s unclear exactly what they’ll be able to do or not do, but that directly segues into the next issue.

* Demilitarization & Denazification

Two of Russia’s main goals in the special operation are to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, which it initially sought to do by militarily coercing Ukraine into this per the terms established in spring 2022’s draft peace treaty, though that didn’t succeed due to the UK and Poland. It’s unrealistic to imagine that Trump will agree to let Russia deploy its armed forces throughout the entirety of Ukraine to implement this so it can only be accomplished through similar diplomatic means involving Kiev’s acquiescence.

Therein lies the possible role that UN peacekeepers can play in monitoring and enforcing whatever is ultimately agreed upon for demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine. This could take the form of inspecting suspected illegal arms sites and all of Ukraine’s cross-border traffic (including at its ports) while having the right to mandate changes to its media reporting and school curricula as need be. This is the only way to ensure that Ukraine remains demilitarized and denazified after the conflict ends.

* Sanctions Relief

Russia has repeatedly demanded the lifting of all Western sanctions, but the argument can be made that “deal-master” Trump wouldn’t ever agree to do this all at once, instead preferring to draft a plan for phased sanctions relief as a reward for Russia’s compliance with a ceasefire, armistice, or peace treaty. This could take the form of what was proposed in the creative energy diplomacy analysis whereby some Russian exports to the EU could resume during the first phase as a trust-building measure.

While Russia would prefer that they all be immediately lifted, its policymakers might conclude that it’s better to accept a phased plan if that’s all that Trump is comfortable offering instead of nothing at all. He’d do well though to engage in the goodwill gesture of lifting sanctions on Russia’s oil exports by sea too since that could convince those policymakers that he’s serious about relieving pressure on Russia. This would in turn make it easier for Putin to sell the compromise of phased sanctions relief at home.

* New Security Architecture

Russia envisaged creating a new European security architecture through mutual agreements with the US and NATO in December 2021 per the security guarantee requests that it shared with them at the time. These were in hindsight meant to diplomatically resolve their security dilemma, whose roots are in NATO’s continued eastward expansion after the Old Cold War and especially its clandestine expansion into Ukraine, in lieu of the special operation that Putin was secretly planning at the time if that failed.

So much has changed since then that separate comprehensive talks on this must start right after whatever agreement they reach on Ukraine. The new issues include NATO’s eastern military buildup, Finland and Sweden’s new memberships, Russia’s hypersonic Oreshniks, their deployment to Belarus, Russia’s deployment of nukes there too, the future of the New START that expires next year, and the new space arms race, et al. Agreeing on a new security architecture will therefore stabilize the world.

———-

As can be seen, the path ahead will be very difficult due to the sensitive issues that Russia and the US must resolve, but their leaders have shown that they have the will to negotiate in good faith. Neither side is likely to achieve their maximum objectives, but diplomacy is the art of the possible, so each will do their utmost to achieve as much as they can in this regard given the circumstances. The best-case scenario is a fair and lasting peace that truly resolves the root causes at the core of this conflict.