Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 79

Ben Aris: Russia overtakes Japan to become the fourth largest economy in the world in PPP terms | World Bank Upgrades Russia to “High Income” Country

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 6/4/24

The Russian economy has overtaken Japan to become the fourth largest in the world in PPP terms (purchase power parity), according to revised data from the World Bank released at the start of June.

As bne IntelliNews reported in August, Russia had already overtook Germany to become the fifth biggest economy in adjusted terms. Hit by multiple shocks recently and cut off from cheap Russian gas, Germany is now stagnating and has fallen to sixth place in the World Bank’s ranking.

PPP GDP measurement is preferred by many economists, as it takes into account the difference between local prices and nominal prices similar to The Economist’s famous Big Mac index: a burger in Moscow costs about half as much as the same burger in New York.

The World Bank improved Russia’s ranking after revising its data and says that Russia actually overtook Japan in 2021 and has maintained its position as number four since then. Its previous calculations were based on 2017 data but have now been updated to reflect 2021 figures.

Previously, Russian President Vladimir Putin set his government the goal of producing economic growth ahead of the global average. Before the war in Ukraine started, Russia’s economic growth was well behind that of the global average and close to stagnation. However, following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the economy has been enjoying a military Keynesianism boost and is currently the fastest growing of any major economy in the world.

And Russia has overtaken Japan ahead of schedule. Putin explicitly set his government the goal of attaining fourth place among the world’s largest economies in terms of PPP earlier this year, and the Cabinet was instructed to prepare measures to achieve this goal by March 31, 2025.

By breaking off relations with the West Putin has made a big bet on the Global South Century, where most of the developing world countries are growing much faster than the West. Currently China and India are in the number one and three slots in the global ranking in PPP terms but both are expected to become the leaders in nominal terms as well over the next three or four decades. Most of the fastest growing economies from lower down the list are also from the Global South.

As bne IntelliNews has extensively reported, Russia has changed its economic model and after decades of austerity began to invest heavily, spurring growth in a new Putinomics. At the same time as investment is pouring into the military industrial complex, Putin has also launched the National Projects 2.1 programme to invest into the civilian economy as well and improve the quality of life for the average Russian, as he made clear in his recent guns and butter speech. And the war is proving to be a boon for Russians, as Russia’s poorest regions have been the biggest winners and as bne IntelliNews recently reported, the country’s despair index has fallen to its lowest level ever this year – the sum of inflation, unemployment and poverty.

As a result of these changes, economists estimate that Russia’s growth potential has increased from 1-1.5% pre-war to around 3.5% now. Last year, Russia’s economic growth caught analysts off guard with a 3.6% expansion. This year the World Bank has already almost trebled its forecast for growth from 1.1% to 3.2%. Russia’s Economic Ministry is similarly bullish.

Even the World Bank’s PPP adjusted size of the economy may be an underestimate. The World Bank also estimates that 39% of Russia’s economy is in the shadows, while the shadow economy only makes up 10% of Japan’s economy, which would add an additional $2.5 trillion to Russia’s $6.4 trillion PPP adjusted economic size – still not enough to overtake India’s $14.6 trillion PPP adjusted GDP value, but widening the gap with Japan further.

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World Bank upgrades Russia to “high-income” country due to war-spending boost

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 7/3/24

The positive economic news keeps coming for Russia after the World Bank upgraded it from an “upper-middle-income” to a “high-income” country, putting it in the same group as the leading G7 nations, the bank said on July 1.

Bulgaria and Palau were also upgraded to “high-income” in the World Bank’s ranking.

Russia’s economy has defied expectations by outperforming all expectations following the imposition of harsh economic sanctions that have been offset by heavy spending on the military industrial complex.

“Economic activity in Russia was influenced by a large increase in military related activity in 2023, while growth was also boosted by a rebound in trade (+6.8%), the financial sector (+8.7%), and construction (+6.6%). These factors led to increases in both real (3.6%) and nominal (10.9%) GDP, and Russia’s Atlas GNI per capita grew by 11.2%,” the World Bank said.

The World Bank’s reclassification is based on the increase in the size of the economy based on its 2023 gross national income (GNI) per capita of $14,250, the World Bank said in a blog. Any country with a GNI per capita of more than $14,005 is considered to be a high-income country.

However, the World Bank noted that the increase in wealth is mostly due to the military Keynesianism boost that the Russian economy has enjoyed as a result of the war with Ukraine that broke out over two years ago. Incomes have also been artificially driven up by the chronic labour shortage that has pushed up nominal wages well above the rate of inflation.

Russia’s economy grew by an unexpected 3.6% last year making it the fastest growing major economy in the world, and is on course to grow again this year by at least 3%, according to the latest Central Bank of Russia (CBR) monthly macroeconomic forecast.

If sanctions were designed to collapse the Russian economy, they have been a failure and some have argued that the economy is now stronger than ever as a result of a fundamental change to Putinomics strategy from hoarding money to releasing massive amounts of pent up fixed investment. Some economists have argued that what started as a Keynesian bump is now transforming into a structural change in the nature of Russia’s economy thanks to the investment that will make growth stronger and more persistent in the medium-term.

Last month Russia also overtook Japan to become the world’s fourth largest economy in the world in PPP (purchase power parity) terms, according to World Bank data. Three of the world’s five largest economies are now BRICS members: China, US, India, Russia and Japan, in that order. Germany was fifth in the last ranking, but has now been pushed into sixth place. Both Japan and Germany are seeing their economies slow in PPP terms while most of the leading Global South countries are seeing their economies accelerate and rise up the income rankings in recent years.

The World Bank attributed Russia’s economic uplift to a significant increase in military-related activities and rebounds in trade, the financial sector, and construction.

Despite the challenges posed by international sanctions and ongoing geopolitical tensions, these sectors have demonstrated resilience and contributed to the country’s economic performance, the World Bank reported.

Ukraine also had an upgrade to “lower-middle-income” to an “upper-middle-income” country, after its GNI per capita rose to $5,070 in 2023. Like Russia, Ukraine was lifted by heavy military spending that has largely been funded by international financial aid – money that Ukraine did not have access to before the war broke out. Since the start of the conflict Ukraine has received some $86bn from donors, equivalent to about two thirds of the value of the pre-war economy.

The World Bank Group assigns the world’s economies to four income groups: low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high. The classifications are updated each year on July 1, based on the GNI per capita of the previous calendar year. GNI measures are expressed in dollars.

The classification of countries into income categories has evolved significantly over the period since the late 1980s. In 1987, 30% of reporting countries were classified as low-income and 25% as high-income countries. Jumping to 2023, these overall ratios have shifted down to 12% in the low-income category and up to 40% in the high-income category.

The scale and direction of these shifts, however, varies a great deal between world regions. The World Bank profiled some of the notable changes in its blog:

·100% of South Asian countries were classified as low-income countries in 1987, whereas this share has fallen to just 13% in 2023.

·In the Middle East and North Africa there is a higher share of low-income countries in 2023 (10%) than in 1987, when no countries were classified to this category.

·In Latin America and the Caribbean, the share of high-income countries has climbed from 9% in 1987 to 44% in 2023.

·Europe and Central Asia have a slightly lower share of high-income countries in 2023 (69%) than it did in 1987 (71%).

Riley Waggaman: You will be tagged and you will love it

There are a lot of misconceptions about Russia that I encounter on a regular basis. There are, of course, the ones from the establishment about Russia being an autocratic backwards aggressor country. But I also encounter many of a different kind.

For example, I’ve had to explain to several conservative members of my family that Russian conservatism is rather different than American conservatism and if they think they’re going to move to the Russian countryside and enjoy minimal government and have lots of guns, they best think again.

There is also the anti-establishment civil libertarian types who think that the Russian government is some kind of warrior against the WEF-influenced biometric, “cattle-tag” digital id, and vaccine mandate agenda.

Um, no.

While many average Russians do not like or want this, the Russian government largely seems to be ramming it down their throats, as Russian media and sources attest. Neoliberal technocrats still have a lot of sway in the Putin government.

But many people would still rather believe goofy western commentators who are projecting their idealistic fantasies onto Russia. – Natylie

Riley Waggaman, Substack, 6/10/24

As expected, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum was the hottest anti-globalist multipolar traditional RETVRN values conference of 2024—possibly of all-time.

The unipolar world suffered non-stop humiliations during this mind-blowing freedom event. For example, Moscow Region governor Andrei Vorobyov made an incredible BRICS announcement during a titillating panel discussion about the joys of biometrics, causing the dollar to lose 50% of its value against the gold-backed ruble:

Biometrics is a tool that gives people better quality and more convenience in certain procedures, keeping them neat and tidy. You don’t need any papers or passports—that will all be in the past. Resisting it, in my opinion, is absurd.

The governor of Russia’s second-most-populated region, explaining the inevitable convenience of biometrics—which will replace archaic “papers” and “passports”.

Nothing is being hidden. They’re speaking very frankly. It’s all out there, in the open.

There is even a helpful “recap” of the panel discussion published by SPIEF. Behold the “highlights”:

source: https://forumspb.com/

“I am for biometrics … Everything I do is based on biometrics, everything is based on fingerprints, because I’m too lazy to carry cards with me and it’s much more convenient to just [login in/pass/go] through my face,” pontificated an expert panelist.

Was the BRICS Multipolar Happy Order incapable of finding a single panelist who had reservations about turning eyeballs into IDs? Igor Ashmanov, a member of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, had to shout his objections from the bleachers because they wouldn’t let his dirty anti-biometric ideas onstage:

source: Telegram

Friend of the blog Simplicius posted a Twitter-summary of Igor’s very rude unipolar objections to biometrics:

This guy sounds like Edward Slavsquat. Great minds think alike.

“Yes, but Russians like biometrics, the most convenient of all forms for identification, which will replace ‘papers’ and ‘passports’,” you might be saying to yourself for some weird and tragic reason.

Take the wheel, nakanune.ru:

People in Russia are narrow-minded and have not yet realized how beautiful, convenient and progressive biometrics are. Therefore, whether they want it or not, the authorities will introduce it wherever possible. Approximately the same reasoning (without these words, but with this meaning) was heard at SPIEF in the section devoted to biometrics. Nakanune.RU provides characteristic statements about the attitude of business towards people.

At first, the presenter of the Russia 24 channel, Maria Kudryavtseva, advertised biometrics, showing how she enters the Unified Biometric System using her face and even the greeting “Hello, Maria!” appears there, which she enthusiastically shows to the audience.

At the same time, there was a feeling of a white gentleman showing “digital beads” to the local natives. And the whole “discussion” came down to one thing—intrusive advertising. It is characteristic that the governor of the Moscow region Andrei Vorobyov, who is a public servant, but showed himself to be a business lobbyist, was also involved in this.

As with artificial intelligence in healthcare , the panel included only proponents of biometrics. Those who might object were simply not invited. Those present were mainly engaged in advertising. Old people do not understand the digital world, but young people were already born with a gadget in their hand, they are very flexible, progressive, digital. They understand how convenient, cool and fast it is. In general, the conversation became very revealing in its vacuity and disregard for the position of citizens.

The first question to the speakers was provocative: is society ready to use biometrics? That is, don’t people want it, does the country need it, not what it will give, not what the risks are—but is society ready, as if the issue has been fundamentally resolved. Which is obscene. Let us recall that according to a 2023 survey , a third of Russians have a positive attitude towards taking biometrics, but almost half are opposed—48%.

[…]

Vorobiev spoke as if he had gone back in time a hundred years ago and was telling backward people of the past about the wonders of the technology of the future. Here are just a few quotes.

“You don’t need a paper or a passport, all this will be a thing of the past, it’s absurd to resist it. We all already use biometrics, including children at school… It’s convenient, you don’t need to twist anything, you just look and that’s it,” said Vorobiev. […]

It is characteristic that one of the main experts in the field of artificial intelligence in the country, a member of the Human Rights Council, Igor Ashmanov, was not invited to the section, who was forced to make remarks from the audience several times, and the section participants politely drew attention to the fact that someone might disagree. So, when Lebedev said that all people are for biometrics, he objected that this was not true. And when they started talking about different points of view, he very briefly but accurately described what was happening.

“You haven’t invited anyone to the presidium, you’re all blowing the same tune! As a member of the Presidential Human Rights Council, I hear completely obscene advertising, and nothing more!” said Ashmanov.

Joe Lauria: Using Ukraine Since 1948

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 6/10/24

The United States has for nearly 80 years seen Ukraine as the staging ground for its once covert and increasingly overt war with Russia. 

After years of warnings, and after talk since 2008 of Ukraine joining NATO, Russia fought back two years ago. With neither side backing down Ukraine is increasingly becoming a flashpoint that could lead to nuclear war. 

The West thinks Russia is bluffing. But its doctrine states that if Russia feels that its existence is threatened it could resort to nuclear arms. Instead of taking these warnings seriously, NATO is recklessly opening corridors for a ground war against Russia in Ukraine; France says it’s putting together a coalition of nations to enter the war, despite Russia saying French or any other NATO force would be fair game. 

Unless you read  Consortium News  and a few other alternative outlets, you won’t get this perspective. You will  think Russia is an out of control aggressor bent on destroying the world.  So …

Please Donate to Our Spring Fund Drive!

In Paris the other day Joe Biden said Russia wants to conquer all of Europe but can’t even take Khariv. It is this kind of inflammatory nonsense, combined with allowing Ukraine to fire NATO weapons into Russian territory, that is imperiling us all. 

The danger started building up many years ago but it is now reaching a head. 

The U.S. relationship with Ukraine, and its extremists, to undermine Russia began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles. 

Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives. 

Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians….”

Instead of Bandera, the C.I.A. was interested in Lebed, despite his fascist background. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he directed sabotage and propaganda operations on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Soviet Union.  The U.S. government study says:

“CIA operations with these Ukrainians began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC. … Lebed relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship. It kept him safe from assassination, allowed him to speak to Ukrainian émigré groups, and permitted him to return to the United States after operational trips to Europe. Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his ‘cunning character,’ his ‘relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,’ [and] the fact that he was ‘a very ruthless operator.’”

The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sabotage and pro-Ukrainian nationalist propaganda operations inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s independence in 1991.

“Mykola Lebed’s relationship with the CIA lasted the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says. “While most CIA operations involving wartime perpetrators backfired, Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union.” 

Continued Until and Beyond Ukrainian Independence

The U.S. thus covertly kept Ukrainian fascist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrainian independence was achieved. “Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University,” the U.S. National Archives study says.  

The successor organization to the OUN-B in the United States did not die with him, however.  It had been renamed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), according to IBT.

“By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed [Yaroslav] Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT reported.  “Following the demise of [Viktor] Yanukovich’s regime [in 2014], the UCCA helped organise rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests,” it reported.

That is a direct link between the U.S.-backed 2014 Maidan coup against a democratically-elected Ukrainian government and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism. 

Since 2014, the U.S. pushed for an attack on Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who had rejected the coup, and NATO began training and equipping Ukrainian troops.  Combined with talk since 2008 of Ukraine joining NATO, Russia acted after years of warning. 

More than two years later, with Ukraine clearly losing the war, Western leaders will do just about anything to save their political skins as they have staked so much on winning in Ukraine.   Don’t listen to them.  They need a West in denial of the dangers facing us.

As President John F. Kennedy said in his 1963 American University speech:

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

The world may wake up when it’s too late — after the missiles have already started flying.

George Beebe: The Coming Russian Escalation With the West

By George Beebe, Time, 7/1/24

To judge from the editorial pages and Capitol Hill currents that both shape and reflect Washington’s perceptions of the world, the doomsayers sounding alarms over the risk of direct military conflict between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine have been proved wrong. Despite many Russian warnings and much nuclear saber-rattling, the United States has managed to supply advanced artillery systems, tanks, fighter aircraft, and extended-range missiles to Ukraine without an existential contest—or even significant Russian retaliation.

For Washington’s hawkish chorus, the benefits of providing increasingly greater lethality to Ukraine outweigh the dangers of provoking a direct Russian attack on the West. They insist that the U.S. not allow fears of an unlikely Armageddon to block much-needed aid for Ukraine’s defense, particularly now that battlefield momentum has swung toward Russia. Hence the White House’s recent decision to green-light Ukraine’s use of American weapons to strike into internationally recognized Russian territory and its reported deliberations over putting American military contractors on the ground in Ukraine.

There are several problems with this reasoning. The first is that it treats Russia’s redlines—limits that if crossed, will provoke retaliation against the U.S. or NATO—as fixed rather than moveable. In fact, where they are drawn depends on one man, Vladimir Putin. His judgments about what Russia should tolerate can vary according to his perceptions of battlefield dynamics, Western intentions, sentiment inside Russia, and likely reactions in the rest of the world.

It is true that Putin has proved quite reluctant to strike directly at the West in response to its military aid for Ukraine. But what Putin can live with today may become a casus belli tomorrow. The world will only know where his red lines are actually drawn once they have been crossed and the U.S. finds itself having to respond to Russian retaliation.

The second problem is that by focusing narrowly on how Moscow might react to each individual bit of American assistance to Ukraine, this approach underestimates the cumulative impact on Putin and the Kremlin’s calculations. Russian experts have become convinced that the U.S. has lost its fear of nuclear war, a fear they regard as having been central to stability for most of the Cold War, when it dissuaded both superpowers from taking actions that might threaten the other’s core interests. 

A key question now being debated within Russia’s foreign policy elite is how to restore America’s fear of nuclear escalation while avoiding a direct military clash that might spin out of control. Some Moscow hardliners advocate using tactical nuclear weapons against wartime targets to shock the West into sobriety. More moderate experts have floated the idea of a nuclear bomb demonstration test, hoping that televised images of the signature mushroom cloud would awaken Western publics to the dangers of military confrontation. Others call for a strike on a U.S. satellite involved in providing targeting information to Ukraine or for downing an American Global Hawk reconnaissance drone monitoring Ukraine from airspace over the Black Sea. Any one of these steps could lead to an alarming crisis between Washington and Moscow.

Underlying these internal Russian debates is a widespread consensus that unless the Kremlin draws a hard line soon, the U.S. and its NATO allies will only add more capable weapons to Ukraine’s arsenal that eventually threatens Moscow’s ability to detect and respond to strikes on its nuclear forces. Even just the perception of growing Western involvement in Ukraine could provoke a dangerous Russian reaction.

These concerns undoubtedly played a part in Putin’s decision to visit North Korea and resurrect the mutual defense treaty that was in force from 1962 until the Soviet Union’s demise. “They supply weapons to Ukraine, saying: We are not in control here, so the way Ukraine uses them is none of our business. Why cannot we adopt the same position and say that we supply something to somebody but have no control over what happens afterwards? Let them think about it,” Putin told journalists after the trip.

Last week, following a Ukrainian strike on the Crimean port of Sevastopol that resulted in American-supplied cluster munitions killing at least five Russian beachgoers and wounding more than 100, Russian officials insisted that such an attack was only possible with U.S. satellite guidance aiding Ukraine. The Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. ambassador in Moscow to charge formally that the U.S. “has become a party to the conflict,” vowing that “retaliatory measures will definitely follow.” The Kremlin spokesperson announced that “the involvement of the United States, the direct involvement, as a result of which Russian civilians are killed, cannot be without consequences.”

Are the Russians bluffing, or are they approaching a point where they fear the consequences of not drawing a hard line outweighs the dangers of precipitating a direct military confrontation? To argue that we cannot know, and therefore should proceed with deploying American military contractors or French trainers in Ukraine until the Russians’ actions match their bellicose words, is to ignore the very real problems we would face in managing a bilateral crisis. 

Unlike in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy and his Russian counterpart Nikita Khrushchev famously went “eyeball to eyeball” during the Cuban missile crisis, neither Washington nor Moscow is well positioned to cope with a similarly alarming prospect today. At the time, the Soviet ambassador was a regular guest in the Oval Office and could conduct a backchannel dialogue with Bobby Kennedy beyond the gaze of internet sleuths and cable television. Today, Russia’s ambassador in Washington is a tightly monitored pariah. Crisis diplomacy would require intense engagement between a contemptuous Putin and an aging Biden, already burdened with containing a crisis in Gaza and conducting an election campaign whose dynamics discourage any search for compromise with Russia. Levels of mutual U.S.-Russian distrust have gone off the charts. Under the circumstances, mistakes and misperception could prove fatal even if—as is likely—neither side desires a confrontation.

Pivotal moments in history often become clear only in hindsight, after a series of developments produce a definitive outcome. Discerning such turning points while events are in motion, and we still have some ability to affect their course, can be maddeningly difficult. We may well be stumbling toward such a moment today.

Jonathan McCormick – Nicolai Petro on Ukraine’s prospects: If something happens in Kiev, it will be sudden and dramatic

Brave New Europe, 6/6/24

So, we have reached the point where the first speculations concerning the removal of Zelensky are appearing

Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island and author of The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution

Cross-posted from Štandard (Slovakia) May 12, 2024

No country which is weaker and which borders a larger and stronger neighbour can survive if it makes an enemy of that neighbour. This has simply never happened in human history. The Americans and NATO obviously think only of their own security interests in relation to Russia, and Ukraine is only interesting to them as a tool to defeat it, says American professor Nicolai Petro.

As the situation in Ukraine gets steadily more desperate, with military experts now considering a possible collapse of Ukraine’s front line, some Western voices have begun to dismiss the conventional wisdom that negotiations must eventually take place between Moscow and Washington, calling instead for direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian leaders. One such voice is Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island and author of The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution.

Fluent in both Russian and German from his youth, Petro served as Special Advisor for Policy in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs at the US State Department in the early 1990s, as dramatic and historic events were unfolding. Since that time he has written extensively on Russian foreign and domestic policy, and was invited in 2008 by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences to come and talk about ‚future visions‘ of Ukraine. This began a long-term cooperation with Ukrainian academia which continues to this day. His recent remarks in favour of direct talks between Ukraine and Russia, which came as something of a surprise to me, have been echoed by the likes of John Mearsheimer, Chas Freeman and others. And so – as the mood among Western leaders deteriorates and more desperate measures are being considered – I wanted to hear more of what Nicolai Petro had to say on the possibility of some sort of directly negotiated settlement between the two warring countries.

Q: You’ve recently argued that the logical path to peace for Russia is not to negotiate with the West but rather directly with Ukraine, and that Ukraine should see that it’s in their interest to deal directly with Russia – which would essentially cut the West out of the picture. Given the strong influence of ultra-nationalist figures in the current Ukrainian government, do you see any realistic chance of that happening?

Someone more knowledgeable than I am, and with his ear to the upper echelons of Ukrainian society – and who was Zelensky’s advisor until January of last year – Oleksiy Arestovych, has made a similar point: that there is no alternative, for a Ukraine that wants to have agency in its own affairs, but to regain its sovereignty. Not only from Russia but also from the West. And that requires negotiating directly with the only country that can guarantee Ukraine’s stability and safety and prosperity, and that is Russia. Because, as I’ve said many times, no country that is weaker and that borders on a larger more powerful neighbour can survive by making that neighbour its enemy. That has just never happened in human history. And as a result, we will have to come to that at some point. The question is only at what cost.

Q: Why couldn’t Ukrainian leaders see that?

Because they believed Boris Johnson’s lie, when the Istanbul accords were derailed. At that time it seemed plausible to believe that a well-funded Ukraine could be given sufficient military supplies to fight back the Russian army. And in answer to the obvious question: How is that going to happen, given that Russia has a population, let’s say five times larger than Ukraine? Well, in the same way, presumably, that smaller, more dedicated countries have fought, historically, against larger empires. And that is by demoralizing them. And I remember the articles written at the outset of the Ukrainian counteroffensive last year, that once Ukrainian forces begin to make advances, the Russian front lines will collapse and they will flee. As a matter of fact they would even flee from Crimea. And so it wasn’t just a matter of supplying weapons that were, of course, supposed to be superior both in quality and in quantity to their Russian counterparts. And it wasn’t only that these be provided in very large numbers, along with all the additional social support that would be needed for Ukrainian society. It was also the aspect of morale, and the demoralization of the Russian troops, that would make a difference. None of this came to pass, and as a result we have a situation on the battlefield which is not successful for Ukraine. But if it had succeeded, this should have provided an impetus. As some argued in the West at the time: once Ukraine recaptures what it wants to recapture we will then rein it in, and Ukraine will be able to achieve a negotiated settlement much more to its liking than what it achieved in Istanbul. And now we have the reverse happening. I think the logic is true, but having failed, Russia is now in a much better position to open the negotiations. And it is interesting to me that Putin, who had disavowed not long ago the relevance of the Istanbul accords for future negotiations, is now starting to refer to them – I should say not Putin himself, but his press spokesman Dmitry Peskov – as a plausible starting point for negotiations, taking into consideration how realities have changed.

Q: In what sense can the Istanbul accords be a starting point for negotiations, now that four oblasts, in addition to Crimea, have been annexed to Russia, and Russia is not likely ever to agree to give them back?

No, but Russia is still advancing within those four regions and looking to ‚liberate‘ them, as it sees it, to their administrative borders. When that happens, as seems likely, will Russia continue? And to what end? If I am right, that Russia invaded not in order to subjugate Ukraine but in order to force it to accept neutrality – to keep it from manoeuvring in ways that Russia considered threatening – then we’re essentially back to where the Istanbul accords left us: with the same deal on the table of security and neutrality for Ukraine in exchange for Russia not taking more territory, for not pushing further. It’s still the same exchange. So let’s assume for a moment one scenario, which is being more and more widely discussed. There’s a breakthrough on the front lines, the lines collapse, Ukraine has no defensive positions left. Russia can now either move forward – for example in the direction of major cities, Kharkiv, Kiev, Odessa – or not. Let’s assume Russia really doesn’t want to do that, because of the costs involved – in all senses. Then the option of not doing that becomes what they are offering – because they could obviously do it, given the collapse of Ukraine’s lines. And they say to Ukraine: we will in fact guarantee the security of your borders, in a multilateral guarantee with other parties agreeing to serve as guarantors, as they did in the 1990s with the Budapest Memorandum. And this then becomes part of the negotiations.

Q: Right, the Budapest Memorandum, which involved Western countries as well. And you foresee this as a possibility as to how things might be settled, some sort of similar agreement for Ukraine’s security, guaranteed by Russia on one side and Western countries on the other?

Logic would dictate that if a country’s elite wants to survive, then in the face of military collapse it negotiates. It negotiates essentially a surrender. World War I ended without Germany being invaded, because the high command of the German staff said: Well, we lost the battle, we are now vulnerable, let’s cut a deal. Which is why they suffered at the settlement in Versailles, but not to the extent that the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires did, which were totally dismembered. And we know that the German high command basically posed an ultimatum to Kaiser Wilhelm II. They said we can’t fight anymore – there are no resources – so you need to abdicate, so that we can negotiate a ceasefire and surrender. So that would be the scenario presumably in Ukraine now. Again, not an unusual scenario – basically involving, as it did after World War I, a military coup replacing the political leadership at the time.

Q: And how likely do you think a military coup is? You said recently that you think it’s unlikely, given the presence of Western military intelligence everywhere the Ukrainian government and military. So any little hints of a coup being organized would immediately be reported to the authorities in Kiev.

Yes, that is a concern, but that’s not to say that Western intelligence services couldn’t decide to turn a blind eye, or couldn’t also decide that it’s time for Zelensky to go. There are clearly tensions already, about which we have not only hints but actual public statements by Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of Defense, and Vice President Kamala Harris, saying: Ukraine, stop bombing oil refineries in Russia – that raises the price of oil and endangers Joe Biden’s re-election. Much is said about the influence of the West in Ukraine, but this influence is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we have influence because we could withdraw the support Ukrainians need simply in order to pay their bills and fund the war effort. But will we do that? And what would the costs be? That depends on what we see as a plausible outcome. If in the higher echelons of power they decide there is no way to save Ukraine, then the strategy in the West might well be simply to fund Ukraine at a persistent but ever decreasing level in order to further weaken Russia – the objective being: who cares about Ukraine, we need to contain Russia. And the longer we can draw out this bloodletting between Russia and Ukraine, the better. The better for the United States strategically, and that’s an argument that makes sense in Washington. But if that’s the case, then it cannot have escaped the attention of Ukrainian political leaders. Hence the double-edged sword. And you see hints of this in the frustration attributed to Zelensky, and in the caustic statements by the Ukrainian foreign minister and several people in the president’s party in the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, that the West should be doing much more: ‚We are all frustrated and disappointed in the West; we are indeed angry with the West.‘ Then the question becomes: If we’re being hung out to dry, why not negotiate a settlement with Russia, because they can actually give us what we want. Whereas the West says it will give us what we want but is refusing to do so. So we can’t fight and we we’re just bleeding to death, whereas if we reach a settlement – an unpalatable settlement, a hurtful settlement, but nevertheless a settlement – we can then begin to rebuild. And that kind of settlement can only be reached directly with Russia, which the West does not want. So again, that’s an incentive, as I see it, for negotiating directly with Russia, and one that has been mentioned many times now by senior Ukrainian officials.

Q: What do you know about what’s happening within the Ukrainian political establishment – with hard-core nationalists on the one hand and moderates on the other – that might suggest this is more likely, or less likely, to happen?

If something happens it will be sudden and dramatic. There is no political life in Ukraine anymore, because there are no elections. In order to have a political life you have to have political competition, and elections have been suspended for the foreseeable future at every level – local, parliamentary and presidential. So there’s nothing, there are no debates. And the president therefore retains his office and his absolute majority in parliament. Which politicians in his party do not seem especially happy about, because they believe they are being scapegoated. Because Zelensky’s popularity remains fairly high – it has suffered somewhat as the political and military situation has deteriorated, but nevertheless it remains much higher than the popularity of the parliament. So as soon as there are elections, obviously everyone in parliament is going to go and be replaced with somebody. And so, whatever happens – in terms of changing the dynamics of the conflict and enabling negotiations – will happen, I think, by virtue of personalities replacing other personalities and beginning to speak about the need to do things in a very different light. And it will have to happen, as I said, fairly suddenly. And if it becomes a matter of senior officials in Ukraine reaching out to have a negotiation with Russia, then I think far right militarized units would oppose this and launch an attack on Kiev, and probably themselves try to oust the current government and form some sort of national committee for salvation or something like that. And so in order to avoid that – which is an obvious thing to worry about – the negotiations would have to be well underway and an agreement essentially presented as a fait accompli. And people would then have to be brought on board, larger groups of people, constituencies would have to be appealed to – to support the government in its peace efforts, and to oppose the nationalists who are committed to war and therefore the eventual destruction of Ukraine at any cost. That would be the argument.

Q: And these negotiations would have to happen in secret somehow beforehand?

Yeah, I think so. And then also there would have to be efforts made by the police and the military of Ukraine, essentially to arrest or contain key nationalist leaders who are on record as opposing any compromise short of victory for Ukraine. So it would be that kind of coup – not really slow moving and not overnight either. But essentially still a coup.

Q: And is that feasible, given the fact that – as you mentioned when we talked last year – these far right leaders have been placed in positions at the highest levels of government, precisely in the area of internal security? Wouldn’t be hard to arrest them?

It could be, but I don’t know enough about the people in the Kiev menagerie to really understand who feels committed one way or another. On the eve of his resignation, Oleksiy Arestovych was a Ukrainian nationalist. Now he’s all for ‚negotiate with Russia or we’re all doomed.‘ And he’s not the only one. You see a lot of that now.

Q: Would the West be able to prevent a coup of this sort, if they didn’t want it to happen?

I don’t think the West has enough special forces in Kiev and Ukraine to actually prevent it. They would be forewarned but unable to stop it. They could, at that point, exercise leverage on whoever the alternatives would be, and say ‚do this‘ or ‚don’t do that‘. But I don’t know what the scenario will be and it’s a very fluid situation. Right now we’re in a kind of ‚in between‘ period. Nine months ago we were saying ‚Ukrainian victory is on the horizon, let’s plan for negotiations with a defeated Russia.‘ Now we’re in the middle period of: ‚Oh, things are not going very well. Let’s try to sit it out, provide a minimum level of support and see how it goes.‘ In any case, we’re not ready in the United States to make any serious decisions before November. We just can’t focus on Ukraine right now, we have to focus on the American presidential elections. Everything else is a distraction. After November, whoever is in power will have a free hand. So November-December is the ideal time to actually make an innovative proposal with respect to Ukraine. But what the situation on the ground will be, we don’t know. Will it be one in which Ukraine has survived, or has theoretically retaken some territory and moved on the offensive, with Western assistance – new weapons and new troops and things like that? Or will it be, as people like John Mearsheimer and Lieutenant Colonel Davis have said, that the lines will collapse and it’ll be obvious that there’s nothing but military defeat ahead for Ukraine? The Americans can plan for these various contingencies, but I think the basic decision as to what to do next has to be made, and will be made, by Ukrainians themselves. But they have to decide that they have the agency to do that, and be willing to think again in the interests of the country of Ukraine, not in the interests of the United States. Obviously the Americans and NATO are only thinking about the interests of their own security with respect to Russia, and Ukraine is only interesting to them as a tool to beat Russia. So it’s important that Ukrainians think independently, recognising that ultimately only Russia can guarantee Ukraine’s security – not the West. And Russia is not demanding so-called ‚co-optation‘ – to co-opt or subsume Ukraine. What it has demanded is neutrality. Which is rather a generous position, I would say.

Q: Isn’t it more in Russia’s interest not to subsume Ukraine, but rather to keep it as a separate state that can serve as a buffer between Russia and NATO?

Well the interesting thing about that is that Ukraine is being offered a curious combination of security and economic prosperity: security by Russia agreeing to the current borders – guaranteed also by a number of other countries – and prosperity by membership in the EU.

Q: Which Russia will not object to?

Will not object to, right. That was part of the Istanbul accords as well. It’s an interesting strategy, because what it ultimately does, oddly enough, is to reconstitute Ukraine in what I have been arguing for, for more than a decade. Actually sixteen years ago – in 2008, my first trip to Ukraine – I gave a talk at Kharkiv University, which was later published. And I said: Ukraine needs to be a bridge between Russia and the West. And by linking the essential security and economic interests of Russia and Europe in Ukraine, it effectively constitutes Ukraine as that bridge.

Gordon Hahn: War or Peace? Towards a Ukrainian Peace or a Direct NATO-Russian War

By Gordon Hahn, SOTT, 6/28/24

Introduction

The following is an overview of the recent events and present state of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. We observe movement towards the end of the conflict in its present configuration and in two new directions simultaneously — a race to the final resolution of the NATO-Russia question. One direction consists of movement towards peace negotiations. The other is toward escalation into a open, direct NATO-Russia war likely to expand beyond the borders of Ukraine and far western regions of Russia. The race to resolution is on and it remains anyone’s guess whether peace or greater war will win the day.

Russia Proposes Diplomacy…Again

On June 14 Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a roadmap for ending the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War during a speech at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He called the “Ukrainian crisis” “a tragedy for us all” and the result not of a Russo-Ukrainian conflict per se but “of the aggressive, cavalier, and absolutely adventurous policy that the West has pursued and is pursuing.” He proposed what he called “a real peace proposal” for establishing a permanent end to the Ukrainian conflict and war rather than a ceasefire. Putin based his proposal on principles he has reiterated numerous times, most of which were agreed upon by Kiev and Moscow in Istanbul in March-April 2022; a process scuttled by Washington, London, and Brussels. In particular, he has now offered “simple” conditions for the “beginning of discussions.” They include: the full withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhia oblasts as they existed as of 1991 — that is, Russia would receive all the oblasts’ territories not just those now controlled by Russian troops. Immediately upon agreeing to this condition and a second requiring Kiev’s rejection of any NATO membership (Ukraine’s “neutral, non-bloc, non-nuclear status”), from the Russian side “immediately, literally the same minute there will follow an order to cease fire and begin negotiations” and Moscow “will guarantee the unhindered and safe withdrawal” of Ukrainian units. However, he expressed “huge doubts” that the West would allow Kiev to agree to this. If his offer is rejected, Putin emphasized that all future blood-letting in Ukraine would be the West’s and Kiev’s “political and moral responsibility” and that Kiev’s negotiating position would only deteriorate as its troops’ position at the front.

To be sure, Putin’s offer was not made under the illusion that it would be taken up within the next few months and was certainly another effort to lay blame for the conflict at Washington’s, Brussels and, less so perhaps, Kiev’s doors. Nevertheless, Putin’s public offering before Russia’s Foreign Ministry personnel is a most authoritative and official statement of a specific proposal from Russia; one that included paths to both a ceasefire and permanent peace, if Washington and/or Kiev choose to take them as Ukraine continues to crumble at the front, in the political sphere, and economically throughout this year. The pressure from the Western and Ukrainian publics to negotiate with Moscow will continue to mount through the U.S. presidential elections, as Ukraine deteriorates and the risk of direct, open, full-scale NATO-Russia war grows. It is possible that if US intelligence concludes and reports to the White House that the Ukrainian front and/or army and/or regime will collapse before the November elections, then the Biden administration may be moved to open talks or force the Ukrainians to do so.

Putin’s territorial demands are not likely to be static, as the territorial configuration changes rapidly on the ground. Russia seizes more territories beyond the four oblasts and Crimea, and the negotiating algorithm changes. Thus, the seizure of areas in Sumy and Kharkiv may not just be an attempt to begin establishing a broad ‘buffer zone’ to move more Ukrainian artillery and drones out of range. The Sumy, Kharkiv, and areas near, say, areas of Nikolaev and Odessa in the south can serve as trading cards to entice acquiescence to talks, as long as Russia makes no claims on those territories. In other words, the Ukrainians could have inferred and were perhaps supposed to infer that they could demand a request for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from Sumy and Kharkiv simultaneously with Kiev’s withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the four Novorossiyan regions. The incursions into Sumy and Kharkiv in May might reflect preparation then already for Putin’s official reiteration of the peace proposal in June. Putin’s call for Ukrainian withdrawal from the four noted ‘Novorossiya’ regions implies the ‘return’ of any and all other areas occupied by Russian troops. Continued refusal to talk with Moscow and any further Russian gains give Putin flexibility in enticing or threatening Washington, Brussels, and/or Kiev to the negotiating table. Refuse talks and lose non-Novorossiyan lands; accept talks and Kiev gets them back.

Also, both subjectively (with Putin’s intent) and objectively (without Putin’s intent) the proposal undermined Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s ‘disnamed’ ‘peace summit’ in Switzerland which was nothing other than an exercise in rallying support among supporters for the beleaguered Maidan regime. Tied to this issue is the Russian president’s assertions in the speech both Zelenskiy and the Maidan regime are illegitimate. Putin got mired down in some self-contradictions here. His assertion that the Maidan regime is illegitimate, since it came to power by an illegal “armed putch” – an absolutely correct one – contradicts his other claim that only Ukraine’s parliament or Supreme Rada is now a legitimate authority and representative of the Ukrainian people. According to Putin, Zelenskiy is not Ukraine’s legitimate authority according to the Ukrainian constitution and thus the Rada is, because Zelenskiy’s first five-year term expired without his being re-elected, but this is a plausible but debatable conclusion regarding a now extremely complicated legal issue. The key point here is that if the Maidan regime that arrived in power in February 2014 by way of an illegal coup is illegitimate, then the organs of power elected under it are equally as illegitimate, putting aside the issue of creeping legitimization by time (still too early) and international recognition. Indeed, it was a decision of the Rada on 21 February 2014 ostensibly impeaching the already overthrown (for all intents and purposes) President Viktor Yanukovych, without a quorum moreover, that gave a quasi-legal veneer of legitimacy to the Maidan coup, as Putin himself notes in his June speech.

However, it should be noted that Putin’s raising of this issue is probably less driven by legalities than politics. Putin may be trying to drive a wedge between parliament and the Office of the President in order to strengthen any coup d’etat being planned in the wings by those such as former president Petro Poroshenko and former Chief of the General Staff Valeriy Zaluzhniy. In Putin’s interpretation of Ukraine’s “unique juridicial situation” as well as that of some Ukrainians, Poroshenko’s or Zaluzhniy’s legitimacy to rule is no less and indeed greater than that of Zelenskiy’s own.

It appears that Zelenskiy’s increasingly weak position at home, which I have discussed numerous times elsewhere, declining support for Ukraine abroad and most importantly in the U.S., Ukrainian forces’ dire situation all along the front and in the rear (lack of men and weapons to fight), the threat of a Russian summer offensive (see below), and Putin’s June proposals had their effect. As Zelenskiy arrived in Brussels on the eve of the NATO summit in Washington DC, a series of events confirmed the likelihood that Putin’s speech reflected developments in secret US-Russian talks, and Zelenskiy suddenly moved to suggest . In the days prior, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin telephoned Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and supposedly discussed measures to prevent a US-Russian clash that could lead to war likely motivated by the ATACMs attack on Crimea that killed some ten beach-goers, including children, and wounded some 40. It seems almost certain that there was some discussion of negotiations on war and peace. This was followed by rumors that a Russian plane had departed to Washington DC on June 25th. Now, just days later, Zelenskiy said in Brussels that Kiev “must put a settlement plan on the table within a few months.” This followed a statement weeks earlier by Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba and Office of the President Andriy Yermak that the next Ukrainian peace summit following the failure of early June’s session should lead to a peace agreement and include Russia directly or indirectly for the first time and lead to a peace agreement. This confirms my sense that the Ukrainian war will end one way or the other this year unless NATO intervenes directly with troops on the ground.

Moscow’s Military Plans: Reject Talks and War You Shall Have

Moscow’s military plans for the remainder of the year can be summed up as continuity in Ukraine and preparations for war beyond Ukraine against the West. Thus, in Ukraine Russia will continue its more offensive strategy of ‘attrit and advance’ upgraded from, an intensification of what Alexander Mercouris calls ‘aggressive attrition’. Under attrit and advance, Russian forces still emphasize destruction of Ukraine’s armed forces over the taking and holding of new territory. The attrition of massive, combined air, artillery, missile, and drone war supersedes the advances on the ground by armor and infantry in this strategy. Thus, territorial advance is slow, but personnel losses are fewer. The Russians do not have their eyes on Kharkiv and may not even be attempting to create a border buffer zone. The main military strategic goal of the Kharkiv, now Kharkiv-Sumy offensive likely is to stretch the frontlines and thus resources of the Ukrainian armed forces. Building a buffer zone is secondary and concomitant with the military-political strategy of attrit, advance, and induce Kiev to talk. Look south in summer or autumn for offensives or very heightened activity in Kherson and/or, perhaps, Zaporozhia. The goal of this will be to stretch out the length of the entire war front beyond that which is being accomplished by the attacks on Kharkiv and Sumy oblasts. The Russian strategy at this higher level is to stretch and thin out the Ukrainian forces’ already exhausted personnel, weapons, and equipment resources in the hope that a whole can be punched deep into Ukrainian lines and the rear at some overstretched point, allowing a major, perhaps even ‘big arrow’ breakthrough aimed at some key Ukrainian stronghold or an encirclement of a large number of Ukrainian troops.

Despite the calls of some Russian hawks, Putin will never acquiesce to bomb Ukraine, no less Kiev ‘into a parking lot’ or ‘the stone age.’ For Russians, Ukrainians are a fraternal eastern Slavic people, with long-standing ties to Russia. Most Russian families have relatives or friends from or in Ukraine. Kiev is ‘the mother of all Russian cities’, and despite Russia’s possession of precise smart weapons, the risk of destroying Orthodox holy sites and other historical monuments in Kiev is too high. Russia’s overwhelming strength in weapons and manpower, despite Western inputs into Ukraine’s armed forces, could allow Russian attrit and advance to persist for many years — more than will be necessary to force negotiations or seize much of Ukraine.

Boiling the Russian Frog – Escalation by Any Other Name

There has been much talk about the US repeatedly stepping over Russian red lines. The most recent is Washington’s and Brussels’ (NATO’s) grant of permission to Kiev to target the territory of Russia proper (1991 territory) with Western-made weapons. The West itself has drawn many red lines that it said could spark direct war with Russia and, therefore, should not be crossed: offensive weapons, artillery, tanks, aircraft, various types of missiles, cluster munitions, etc., etc. Most recently, Washington crossed two red lines in rapid succession by approving Kiev use of U.S missiles, such as ATACMs to target Russian territory across the border in Kharkov and, presumably Sumy, where Russian forces have made a new incursion in order to develop a buffer zone so that Ukraine cannot target civilians as it has been doing in cities in Belgorod, send Ukrainian and Russian-manned pro-Ukrainian units across the border into Russia, and otherwise target Russian territory from northeastern Ukraine. It then expanded approval of the use of such missiles against any Russian territories from which attacks in Ukraine are being supported. Days later Ukraine fired 5 ATACMs (4 were intercepted) at Sevastopol which hit beach-goers far from any military target, wounding 46 and killing 3, including 2 children. The potential escalation of the overall war resulting from this Ukrainian target was compounded when on the same day jihadi terrorists attacked the ancient Muslim city of Derbent in Dagestan, long a hotbed of global jihadi terrorism in Russia. The terrorists, likely from Central Asia or Afghanistan’s ISIS-affiliated Islamic State of Khorosan, attacked an Orthodox church and a Jewish synagogue, killed several civilians, 15 policeman, and cut the throat of an Orthodox priest. This attack will likely be conflated with the Sevastopol attack. Recall the jihadin attack on Moscow’s concert venue, Crocus City Hall, which Russian authorities immediately suspected to be one involving Ukrainians.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has drawn few if any clear red lines, but several have been implied. Cautious and cagey Putin has never explicitly promised a particular response to any particular crossing of a red line. Instead, he has invoked Russia’s great military potential, including nuclear, as sufficient reason for rational leaders to cease and desist. The assumption – both Putin’s and observers’ – is that this is a spontaneous, gradual escalation, driven by panic over Kiev’s deteriorating military, political, and economic situation as Russia marches forward, expanding the war front. The likelihood is that this is not a spontaneous response to conditions at the battlefront but rather a calculated policy of ‘boiling the frog’, and the ‘frog’ is as much Western publics as it is Russian political and military planners. After all, it matters less to Russian military planners at least why NATO is escalating the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War than the fact that NATO is escalating, crossing red lines. For Western publics, however, the approach of war needs to go unnoticed until it is too late. Whether by hook or crook, a false flag operation or a provoked Russian overreaction, Western NATO leaders seem intent on expanding the war beyond Ukraine’s borders and that will require Western public support and thus a vacuum of public discussion of NATO actions and national interests. Even if the constant escalation is ‘simply’ a game of chicken, upping the ante to see if Putin blinks or if the war can be dragged out past the November U.S. elections, there are many in U.S. intelligence and other departments, who are itching for a war against Russia who may escalate or enable Kiev to do so, intentionally or not, such that one is provoked. Unintentionality comes in, as Kiev has been anxious to force NATO or at least NATO member-states into direct involvement in the war. Ukraine has achieved some success in this, but so far such Western involvement has been limited, initially, to secret injections of Western troops and mercenaries, and then to open advisory roles. The summer and fall of 2024 will be a dangerous window in which a spark can detonate the larger war that such mad men and women are playing with.

Comment: As Alexander Mecouris has remarked, the parallels with the U.S. strategy in Vietnam are unsettling.
To the extent that the West remains intent on continuing the escalation of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, Moscow will engage in asymmetrical escalation targeting Western forces outside of Europe and prepare for possible full-scale war with NATO or NATO members in and beyond Ukraine. Putin recently noted that asymmetrical escalation would be Moscow’s choice should the West continue escalating against Russian in Ukraine. Many commentators have noted what such options might be: arming the Houthis with missiles or air defense, supporting Hezbollah and/or Hamas against Israel, arming terrorist groups in the Middle East to attack U.S. bases, say, in Syria, Iraq, or elsewhere. Given the thousands of U.S bases around the world, American and other Western forces are eminently vulnerable. Moscow only needs the will and networks for deploying its ample means in the necessary directions. Moscow has the will. It is building networks.

Towards a Eurasian Security Pact: Getting Ready for Direct War with NATO

With war with NATO now firmly in the cards, a distinct possibility, the Kremlin is intensely set on military and military-political preparations. The rejection of Putin’s next peace proposal was likely the last straw that will set in motion the next phase in Russia’s diplomatic offensive in tandem with China aimed it rallying the Rest against the West. This new phase will focus on developing military partnerships and alliances. This was signalled most notably in the same June 14th speech in which Putin made his peace offering, evidencing the connection between it, the West-Ukraine rejection, and Russia’s first diplomatic move in this security direction.

For years, particularly after the Maidan coup, Putin has been conducting Russian diplomacy with the goal of creating a Great Eurasian and global alternative to the West’s ‘rules-based world order’, seeking to base a new, alternative international system of political, economic, financial, and monetary institutions on different rules written by all the great powers – the ‘Rest’ – rather than just the West. This ‘democratization’ or a certain ‘de-hierarchization’ or ‘levelling’ of the international system is to be organized on the principle of multipolarity and diversity for the world’s major civilizations. Putin’s model has come to mirror the ideas of the late Russian neo-Eurasianist Aleksandr Panarin in many ways. It has taken years for Putin to arrive firmly at the idea of an interconnected Greater Eurasia as the core of a global community of civilizations, preferably ‘traditional’ (i.e. non-postmodernist Western ones) as a kind of ‘Russian idea.’

However, in his February 29th annual address to both houses of the Russian Federal Assembly, Putin introduced the idea of creating a Eurasian security system. He reiterated his idea of “democratizing the entire system of international relations,” by which he means dismantling Western hegemony or ‘rules-based world order.’ However, he also proposed replacing it with a “system of undivided security,” under which “the security of some cannot be secured at the expense of the security of others,” and gave marching orders to Russia’s diplomatic corps and other departments to what in effect would culminate in a Greater Eurasian security ‘architecture’ or pact.

On June 14th, Putin declared the death, the “collapse of the system of Euro-Atlantic security,” and repeated his call for the international security architecture to be “created anew.” He instructed the government and foreign ministry to work out “jointly with partners, with all interested countries…their version of guaranteeing security in Eurasia, proposing them then for a wide international discussion.” He revealed that during his May visit to China he discussed this with PRC Chairman Xi Jinping, and they “noted that the Russian proposal does not contradict, but, to the contrary, complements and is fully in agreement with the basic principles of the Chinese initiative in the sphere of global security.” Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy responded to the summit by criticizing China for being Putin’s tool, contributing further to the anti-diplomatic dynamic and isolation of the West from the Rest. China responded by declaring its geopolitical military solidarity with Russia. Nevertheless, in his June speech Putin stated that Russia “future architecture of security is open to all Eurasian countries,” including “European and NATO countries.”This Greater Eurasia security pact is thus also a mechanism for splitting NATO, particularly Europe from the U.S. This is to be achieved by networking and lobbying all the international organizations in Eurasia that Russia has been building for decades now: the Russia-Belarus Union, BRICS+, SCO, EES, CSTO, and the CIS — all specifically mentioned by Putin in his speech behind such a project — as well as “influential international organizations of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.” According to Putin, the “states and regional structures of Eurasia should determine concrete spheres of cooperation in the area of joint security. Proceeding from this: that they themselves should build a system of working institutions, mechanisms, and agreements that would really serve the attainment of the common goals of stability and development.” In this regard, he supported the Belarus’s proposal “to work out a programmatic document: a charter of multipolarity and diversity in the 21st century”. The Belarusian proposal was made by Minsk’s Foreign Minister in 23 October 2023 speech and envisaged what Putin discussed on June 14 but included the OSCE as a potential participant.

It is likely no coincidence that Putin openly supported Belarus’s idea of such a charter ten days before Belarus, with Russian sponsorship, was set to become a member of SCO on June 25th. Belarus’s membership in the largely Asian based organization founded by Moscow and Beijing places SCO’s flag farther west than ever before. This comes days after Putin’s visit to North Korea and the agreement to establish a de facto Russo-North Korean alliance. Thus, the growing network of the Sino-Russian-organized networks of international networks based in Eurasia but extending globally through BRICS+5 to every continent is growing apace and now includes a robust security component.

Putin suggested in his June 14th speech that building an “undivided system of Eurasian security” and in fact global security architecture would be a post-Ukrainian war focus, again implying possible inclusion of the West or elements thereof, in any such architecture. But the train of the Rest’s rejection of the Western worldview has left the station, and, with the danger of escalation in Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere afoot, it seems more likely that the new Eurasian-South bloc will be an alternative to, possibly a foe of the West’s ‘rules-based world order’ rather than a partner.

Conclusion

Again, the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War – the current war with military combat confined largely to Ukrainian and far western Russian territory — will end this year or very early next year. However, a new broader war can take its place, if the peace fails or is never agreed upon. Such a broader war could be confined to the present war’s territorial parameters in Ukraine, while expanding to a worldwide proxy war led by Russia and its direct or indirect allies against Western foreign bases and/or spreading to western Ukraine as a result of a NATO military intervention across the Dniepr’s Right Bank. And NATO fighter jets, such as F-16s, based outside Ukraine, could make Romanian or Polish air bases or other facilities targets for Russian missiles and drones. A NATO or Russian no fly zone of one kind or another could lead to NATO-Russian air combat. A Russian shoot-down of the U.S. intelligence drone Global Hawk could be the spark for such tensions in the air.

The hope is that cooler heads will prevail, but the U.S. is in the midst of a deep and potentially explosive political crisis in which bureaucratic politics can become highly cryptic, conspiratorial, chaotic, and irrational, provoking new more dangerous conflict. Similarly, in Kiev a meltdown of the Maidan regime could be imminent and will likely come as a shot in the dark, unexpected by all. That could lead to the same kind of breakdown of bureaucratic, state discipline, and the rule of law – something far weaker in Ukraine than in the ‘U.S. – and lead to clandestine adventures of desperation, such as a false flag on a nuclear plat in Ukraine’s Energodar or elsewhere or a ‘Hail Mary’ operation targeting a Russian nuclear or other strategic object, sparking a Russian overreaction and a full-scale NATO-Russian war. Worse still, state organizational (as opposed to territorial) breakdown in Ukraine could bring a complete political, economic, social, and state breakdown, with opposing Ukrainian partisan armies, warlords, and ultranationalist/neofascist formations fighting between themselves and carrying out guerilla and terrorist warfare against Russian and even Western occupiers. That Zelenskiy is now broaching peace talks with Putin is a reflection of the opportunity and dangers that are in the offing.

Meduza: Why are Western tourists and expats returning to Russia?

By Alex Mitchell, Meduza, 6/6/24

New Year’s Eve 2023. My friends and relatives in Russia were dejected. Nobody felt like celebrating. It was my first time back since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the war fatigue was palpable everywhere.

In 2022, few foreign tourists came from the West — except small numbers of curious “war tourists” who wanted to capture the Russian reality for social media. Official figures show that tourism fell by about 30 percent year-on-year, with the number of people entering the country on tourist visas dwindling to 200,000 (one tour operator estimated that organized tourism fell by 90 percent).

Businesspeople, cultural figures, and academics did not want to harm their reputations by being seen in Russia. Academics made noise on X, formerly Twitter, about never returning unless the war ended. Nevertheless, 13.1 million foreign nationals visited Russia in 2022 for tourism, work, studies, and “private trips.”

For most would-be visitors, the only way into Russia was a nine-hour bus or three-hour train ride from Finland or the Baltic countries. With Russian planes banned from E.U. and U.K. airspace, flying in from another third country remains equally tricky. Higher flight prices and lengthy detours are just the start. Russia is cut off from the SWIFT international payment system, making it possible to book tickets on Russian airlines only with a Russian MIR card (or a huge pile of cash).

I was the only foreigner on my flight from Istanbul in late 2022. Those who took the buses and trains told stories of hours-long queues, border guards searching phones, and even full-on interrogations. But when I got to the border, I waltzed through.

Fast forward to 2023, and I was one of many Westerners standing in line at passport control at an airport in neither Moscow nor St. Petersburg. The border guards took the time to question each of us individually and search our phones, opening emails, messenger apps, and contact lists. I spent 40 minutes waiting behind visitors hailing from France, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, Italy, and even Argentina. The interview itself took all of 10 minutes, but I was still two hours late getting home.

‘What’s not to like here?’

In 2023, tourism to Russia was up nearly 3.5-fold compared to the previous year, with an increase in tourist flows from practically every country. The total number of trips by E.U. citizens shot up 30 percent, with Estonians and Germans making the most visits. Though a far cry from pre-pandemic tourism levels, more increases are expected this year. Labor migration figures are less reliable as the different visa types make it hard to decipher who is checking in permanently.

Yet, expats who stayed in Russia throughout the invasion say they are bumping into newcomers all the time. An old friend from the Vladimir region recently met an Englishman in Rostov-on-Don who had just moved there with his Russian wife and couldn’t speak a word of Russian. (The Englishman declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Some Westerners are coming back for purely practical reasons. Tony just flew into Izhevsk, the regional capital of Russia’s Udmurt Republic. He has to spend a certain number of days in the country each year to keep his permanent residency. A Colombian I met at a local mall said that he and his wife have nowhere else to go because of visa rules, but they expressed no regrets about staying in Russia. “What’s not to like here?” he asked rhetorically.

Western academics have started attending conferences again on the down-low. Some are even conducting bits of research — and indeed, it is still possible to visit the archives. Most academic institutions forbid their employees from traveling to Russia, but you can still visit as a private citizen.

One Cambridge academic who has traveled here twice since 2022 told me, “Having Russian contacts is vital, especially now. Russians still have a voice, and we need to hear it.” The academic also encourages PhD students to try and visit because understanding the nuances of Russia and its culture is impossible without spending a certain amount of time here.

Many more of those returning have Russian spouses and families. (This was true of most people I spoke to in the line at the airport in late 2023.) Craig, a Californian, has a young son. His work visa expired after the start of the 2022 invasion, and so he had to leave temporarily. In his own words, the war had a “zero-percent” impact on his decision to return.

“I missed my family. And things are just fine [here],” he said. “[The war] made certain things harder. There are more rules and visa requirements now, but to be honest my life has hardly changed. If anything, I make more money now than before.”

‘Western problems’

Raymond, back after a year’s hiatus, agreed. He is more in demand as an English-language teacher now because so many others left soon after Russia invaded Ukraine. But that’s not all he and Craig have in common. “A lot of the new arrivals from the U.K. and America are trying to escape Western problems,” Raymond explained. “The wokeness, the [political correctness], the entitlement.” 

Both he and Craig said they see Russia as a country fighting the “woke epidemic.” They do not see Russia as a savior of “traditional values,” as some claim, but rather as a bulwark against what they perceive as liberal values run amok. Russia, in their view, is not going down the rabbit hole over issues of gender identity, race, and policing language — and is much better for it.

Of course, gender and sexuality are actually huge talking points. Russia banned the so-called “international LGBT movement” late last year, effectively outlawing all LGBTQ+ rights activism and visibility. Discrimination is rife, and rights have been curtailed, particularly for trans people. Police have raided LGBTQ+ nightclubs and bars and charged their employees with “extremism.”

Everyone interviewed for this piece, including those who spoke off the record, mentioned rightwing talking points about a “culture war” and the alleged decline of Western societies. Many said they feel “lost” in the West and blamed the political and cultural elites for “forcing” social change on millions of people without their consent. Craig said he felt unable to express his opinions when he returned to America, fearing that young people — who, in his words, are “too easily offended” — would unfairly and prematurely judge him.

It is tricky to assess the degree to which these views reflect the majority of Westerners still living in Russia. Somewhat ironically, though, most of the people I approached for interviews declined to speak on the record because they and their families were afraid of possible repercussions.

These concerns are not unfounded. There are now stringent wartime censorship laws, and Russia has arrested and jailed several U.S. passport holders, including Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter accused of spying, and, most recently, Gordon Black, a U.S. soldier charged with theft. RFE/RL journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual Russian-American citizen, faces up to 10 years in prison for “discrediting” the Russian military. Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is currently serving a 25-year treason sentence, is also a British citizen. 

Getting on with living

Despite fearing the Russian authorities, the Westerners I spoke to seemed unaffected by the war. For many, this sense of detachment was due to the fact that they and their relatives have no direct connection to the fighting. That said, where they stood on the war was often hard to gauge — and this isn’t a popular topic of discussion.

Sarah, an American teacher at a prestigious Moscow school, said she ignores stuff that “bums her out.” “I don’t engage with anything negative anymore,” she replied when asked to comment for this story.

Asked if he felt guilty or complicit in Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Raymond said the war has nothing to do with him. “It would be no different if I lived back home and opposed the war. What would be different? What would that change?” he asked rhetorically. “Every country has its problems,” he continued. “If foreigners here live a good, happy life without hurting anyone, just let them be. Let them get on with living.”

Being here, it is indeed easy to sympathize with my foreign compatriots’ feeling of normality. The dust does seem to have settled following the early panic in 2022. Yes, sanctions and inflation have increased the cost of living, but things are manageable. Most of our favorite local and Western products are still available. Our favorite places are still open. Sending money abroad and traveling have become more complicated but not impossible. People have adapted and feel smug about it.

Moreover, Westerners who come to Russia for jobs or because of family members often live in a bubble. They do not engage in Russian politics and have little contact with society beyond a small group of people. They see a city like Moscow or St. Petersburg for all its splendor, not its sins.

Nevertheless, the sight of people busy living ordinary lives provokes a sense of melancholy. Most foreigners here see the carefully maintained image of “normalcy” in Russia, with its wealthy megapolis and picturesque countryside. Too preoccupied with work and families, the fighting on the frontline and the repressions that capture headlines and draw so much attention on social media often feel far away.

Learning not to worry about the war and living in an alternative reality is something Western expats appear to have learned from the Russian population. The risks of speaking out are prohibitively high and deemed futile. Perhaps only naturally, both have switched their focus from war to their personal lives and the things under their control.

When asked what advice he would give to Westerners moving to Russia now, Craig said without missing a beat, “You’ve gotta have a thick skin.” He continued, “People can be prickly and very direct. Imagine that or the police stopping you for no reason at 7:00 a.m. in the middle of winter. If you’re easily upset, go somewhere else.” This image of Russia was prevalent even before 2022. In some ways, it seems less has changed than one might think.

Mikhail Zygar: How Russian Elites Made Peace With the War

I’ve made some notes/comments within the text in a few places. Keep in mind that this analysis was published by Foreign Affairs – the pre-eminent establishment foreign policy journal. Is it any wonder that our foreign policy is so incompetent? – Natylie

By Mikhail Zygar, Foreign Affairs, 6/28/24

When the war in Ukraine began, the Russian elite entered a state of shock. As the West imposed sanctions and travel bans, Russia’s rich and politically connected citizens became convinced that their previous lives were over. Battlefield losses quickly piled up, and many deemed the invasion a catastrophic mistake. “The Russia we deeply love has fallen into the hands of idiots,” Roman Trotsenko, the former head of the country’s largest shipbuilding company, told another businessperson during a phone conversation that was leaked in April 2023. “They adhere to bizarre, outdated nineteenth-century ideologies. This cannot end well. It will end in disaster.” In another leaked conversation, the famous music producer Iosif Prigozhin (not related to Yevgeny Prigozhin) called Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government “fucking criminals.” Some of the oligarchs who were abroad at the time of the invasion refused to return to Russia, including Mikhail Fridman, the owner of the country’s largest private bank.

But that was then. As 2023 wound on, elites started endorsing the war. More musicians began traveling to perform in the occupied territories. In October, Fridman returned to Moscow from London, having decided that life in the West under sanctions was unbearable and that the situation in Russia was comparatively comfortable. And there have been no new recordings of oligarchs grousing about the war. In fact, it is hard to imagine such conversations happening.

That is because Russian elites have learned to stop worrying about the conflict. They have concluded that the invasion, even if they do not support it outright, is a tolerable fact of life. As a result, the odds that they might challenge the Kremlin’s decisions—which were always slim—have gone away entirely. And instead of debating whether to support Putin, Russian elites are now discussing a different question: how the war might end.

They have different answers. Some believe that a big battlefield win would allow Putin to claim a partial victory and, therefore, pause the war. Others think that Putin will not stop until he has gone all the way to Kyiv. Some are convinced that what truly matters to Putin is confrontation with the West, not victory in Ukraine, and that he will thus attack another state in Europe irrespective of what happens with the current conflict. But a few pessimists maintain that the premise of the question itself is wrong. As they see it, the war suits Putin’s political interests, and so he will keep fighting for as long as he lives.

HOW THEY LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING

There are multiple reasons why Russian elites have shifted toward Putin. One is that they have become more cautious as Moscow cracks down on dissent. Another, relatedly, is that they understand it is meaningless to protest. But perhaps the biggest reason for their change is they have begun to see the invasion in a fundamentally different light. Today, they believe Russia is prevailing. Moscow, after all, is making steady, if slow, battlefield gains. Ukraine is battered and outgunned, operating with a massive artillery-shell disadvantage. And Western support for Kyiv is waning, jeopardizing Ukraine’s access to military supplies.

“It’s bad to be an outcast as a winner, but it’s worse to be an outcast as a loser,” one Russian oligarch, who had criticized the war before but now seems to understand it, told me. (He, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity, to protect his safety.) The oligarch said that everything in Russia has changed: attitudes toward Putin, views of Ukraine, and outlooks on the West. “We must win this war,” he told me. “Otherwise, they won’t allow us to live. And, of course, Russia would collapse.”

With this switch in perspective, oligarchs are now discussing what conditions in Ukraine might constitute a victory. For the relative optimists, any major successful offensive would be enough. To these elites, such a victory would satisfy Putin and break Ukraine’s will to liberate more territory, even if it doesn’t deter the country from defending what it has left. They believe the most probable target of this sort of offensive to be Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

An all-out assault on Kharkiv would be gruesome. The city, Ukraine’s capital from 1919 to 1934, was a vibrant hub of Ukrainian and Russian culture, science, and education before the war began. If Russia tries to take it, Kharkiv will experience the near-total destruction of its remaining infrastructure, leading to rapid depopulation as already scant essential services become impossible to maintain. The people who stick around would then have to survive under Russian occupation.

But as horrible as this outcome is, it is the least terrible vision championed by Russia’s elite. According to one businessman with close connections to the Kremlin, Putin won’t be satisfied by winning Ukraine’s northeast. The only outcome he will accept is the capture of Kyiv. Putin harbors a special, almost mystical connection with the Ukrainian capital, which he views as the cradle of Russian civilization. Putin has a particular fondness for the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, an old Orthodox monastery where he spent nearly all his time during his last official visit to the city, in 2013. The Lavra is the resting place of several venerated Russian saints and historical figures, including the imperial Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, whom Putin deeply admires. Putin even commissioned a statue of Stolypin that now stands near the Kremlin. His desire to preserve the Lavra may explain why Russia has not heavily bombed Kyiv in the way it has other Ukrainian cities. (Russia’s new defense minister, the deeply religious Andrei Belousov, also has a strong affinity for the Lavra.)

If Russia launches a second campaign to capture the Ukrainian capital, the military would likely begin its offensive in Belarus, just as it did in the winter of 2022. It would probably involve, as it did then, Russian troops driving through the radioactive wasteland surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. But many in Moscow believe that this time, with Russia’s military hardened and Ukraine’s reserves weakened, their country could win. In the view of Russian elites, Ukrainians are simply too tired to put up another tenacious defense.

NO WAY OUT

For Putin, however, the war in Ukraine is not only—or even mostly—about Ukraine. Instead, people close to Russia’s president say that he sees the invasion as just one front in a conflict with the West. That means Russia’s battlefield success may not be enough to please Putin. To defeat his real foes, in Brussels and Washington, Putin may feel that he needs to attack a NATO member.

According to Russia’s elites, the most likely target would be Estonia or Latvia: the two Baltic countries with large Russian minorities. Moscow would follow a familiar playbook. First, members of the Russian Federal Security Service would get Russian speakers in one of the two countries to claim they are being oppressed by a neo-Nazi government and are in need of the Kremlin’s aid. In response, Russian troops would cross the border and take control of municipalities in an eastern part of either state, such as the predominantly Russian-speaking Estonian city of Narva. [The only way this would follow the Russian “playbook” of Ukraine is if the Latvian or Estonian governments started shelling their Russian speaking minorities like Kiev did. The Baltic countries are already in NATO, unlike Ukraine. The negotiations that almost led to a peace agreement in April of 2022 revealed that NATO membership and its trappings were the primary concern of Putin and the primary reason for the “special military operation”. Who is Zygar talking to about this stuff? It can’t be anyone with real connections to the Kremlin or even any Russian who is nominally informed.] This territorial seizure would issue a momentous challenge to NATO, an alliance based on the principle that an attack on one of its members, no matter how small, is an attack on all. By taking Narva, Putin would test whether the bloc is really willing to risk a third world war over a few square miles on the Russian border.

In the past, Russian elites had little desire to chance nuclear conflict. But now many of them are persuaded that NATO would not dare to respond. They see the West as tired and divided and, therefore, far less interested in a struggle against Russia. They believe U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders are weak. In this context, they think that NATO would not unanimously rally to defend an attacked country. Instead, Russian elites believe that NATO will be overwhelmed with so much panic and chaos that it would do little at all—ruining the credibility of Western governments. [Doing something this unnecessary and reckless would be out of character for Putin. Again, it makes me wonder who the author’s sources are. Do these anonymous sources simply not exist and the author is just making stuff up?]

A provocation like this could be particularly helpful to Russia in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election. The Kremlin may even believe that such a crisis would fatally undermine Biden’s odds. An emergency in the Baltics in which Biden stumbles could paint the U.S. president as weak and incompetent, and prove former U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertion that NATO is obsolete.

Putin, of course, may also try to weaken Biden without attacking the Baltics. Most of my sources believe that Putin could deal blows to the president by simply winning more battles in Ukraine—and that he will try to do just that. The Kremlin wants to weaken Biden so that Trump can win, given the latter candidate’s vocal fondness of Russia. [The laundry list of policies that Trump enacted that were totally antithetical to Russian interests has been enumerated by several writers. This idea that Putin really has much of a preference for either Biden or Trump is ill-informed] Trump, for example, has promised to end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” if elected.

But not everyone in Russia thinks the war will end if Trump is elected. Some believe that the war will not end in any situation. As a businessman close to the Kremlin told me, Putin has grown too fond of the war, which has helped him mobilize society, imprison some dissidents, kill others, and force most of the rest out of the country. The war has also united the elites, who now feel unwanted in the West and see Putin as their only hope for a good life. As a result, the invasion means there is less pressure on Putin than ever before. [The idea that Putin thinks this war going on indefinitely is some kind of day at the beach as opposed to it being resolved with an acceptable agreement, given the West’s constant escalations and braindead ideologues at the wheel, sounds a little batshit to me]

The notion of an endless war in Ukraine terrifies Russia’s elite, who still hope that the invasion will conclude. They dream of returning as quickly as possible to the peaceful time of February 23, 2022. But for now, they are silent. They see no way back.

Ted Galen Carpenter: US Must Accept Spheres of Influence To Preserve Peace

By Ted Galen Carpenter, Antiwar.com, 5/27/24

U.S. leaders once understood and accepted that strong powers would insist on a security zone and broad sphere of influence in their immediate geographic region. An especially persistent feature of international affairs has been the existence of spheres of influence. Major powers routinely seek to shape the international system to their advantage and exclude, or at least sharply limit, the influence of potential rivals. Both incumbent dominant players and rising powers are prone to engage in such behavior. Unfortunately, U.S. leaders have forgotten what they once understood. And until they relearn it, the world will be a more chaotic, and more dangerous, place than it needs to be.

The United States embraced the sphere of influence standard even before it had the power to enforce such a role effectively in its own region. That broader ambition became clear with the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. Washington still lacked either the economic clout or the military capabilities to enforce its claim to pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere. If Great Britain’s regional policy objectives had not generally aligned with Washington’s, the Monroe Doctrine would have been little more than a hollow boast for several decades. When a major European power (France) took advantage of the U.S. Civil War to set up a client regime in Mexico, there was little the United States could do about it. Only when America’s own conflict ended were U.S. leaders able to end the French intrusion. And it was not until the 1890’s that Washington could assert a role as the hemisphere’s hegemon.

After World War II, however, Washington was not just the hemispheric hegemon, but also the global hegemon.  Only the USSR offered a credible challenge to that status, and the degree of even Moscow’s challenge was inflated. Given the extent of Washington’s economic and military power during the post-World War II era, it is probably not surprising that U.S. leaders came to regard the entire concept of spheres of influence as illegitimate or at least irrelevant. Only the United States and a few chosen U.S. clients were apparently entitled to such a status. That attitude became even more pronounced after the Soviet Union unraveled. The U. S. government officially repudiates even the concept of spheres of influence, contending that today, such a standard has no place in the modern international system.

Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush’s secretary of state, made that point explicitly in response to Moscow’s 2008 military intervention in Georgia. She scorned the notion of Russian primacy along the perimeter of the Russian Federation as the manifestation of “some archaic sphere of influence.” President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, expressed a similar view. In November 2013, he even declared that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s unsubtle support for secessionist forces in eastern Ukraine, Kerry asserted that “you don’t in the 21st Century behave in 19th century fashion” by invading a neighbor.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the gradual emergence of a more multipolar world economically, though, Washington is pursuing an increasingly ineffectual, indeed dangerous and self-defeating, policy. The ongoing crisis in U.S. relations with Russia should underscore that reality. The Western bloc’s current wretched state of those relations with that country has developed primarily because Washington and its NATO allies refused to accord a weakened noncommunist Russia even a modest security zone, much less a broader sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The U.S. backed attempt to make Ukraine a NATO client was the last straw for the Kremlin.

Joe Biden’s administration apparently assumed that the rest of the world – even major, rising players such as China and India – would obediently follow the lead of the United States in adopting punitive policies toward Moscow in response to Russia’s escalation of force against Ukraine in February 2022. The range of responses was much more frustrating and disappointing from Washington’s standpoint, however. China, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, and other increasingly important players tenaciously defied U.S. wishes and pursued a neutral course.  It was especially significant that those governments have refused to impose sanctions on Russia, much less send military aid to Ukraine as the United States has been advocating. The roster of countries imposing sanctions is limited to the long-standing bloc of U.S. security dependents in NATO and East Asia.

There are other signs that U.S. dominance in the global arena is rapidly waning. Even before the Gaza war, numerous changes were taking place in Middle East affairs. In the past year, important signals of the new political environment were Saudi Arabia’s restoration of diplomatic relations with Iran and Syria’s re-entry into the Arab League. Instead of adjusting to the new diplomatic and geopolitical realities in the region, the Biden administration has engaged in futile obstructionism. In contrast, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) played a significant, constructive role in helping to resolve such long-standing tensions, especially those between Saudi Arabia and Iran. That breakthrough had an important ripple effect. It led to Riyadh ending its efforts to unseat Bashar al-Assad, the leader of Tehran’s principal Middle East ally, Syria. That more conciliatory atmosphere in turn led to Syria’s reentry into the Saudi-led Arab League, after it had been excluded for more than a decade.

Ukraine is even a more prominent case in which China sought to be proactive as a mediator.  On the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China offered a 12-point plan to bring an end to the bloodshed, starting with an immediate cease fire. The proposal stated that “the sovereignty of all countries should be respected” and reiterated China’s longstanding opposition to the use of nuclear weapons. However, it also called for an end to “unilateral sanctions” and – in an apparent swipe at NATO – condemned “bloc confrontations” and manifestations of a “cold-war mentality.” President Biden was utterly dismissive of Beijing’s handiwork. “If Putin is applauding it, so how could it be any good?”,  Biden said in an interview with ABC News.  Indeed, the president rejected the very idea that the PRC could play a constructive diplomatic role of any sort to end the war.

It was a disturbing, unrealistic attitude. Multiple developments confirm that the United States is no longer the diplomatic or even as the military global hegemon. Other powers are stepping up to pursue their own initiatives, without deferring to Washington. It is yet another manifestation of an increasingly multipolar international system. Defying that trend is a blueprint for futility. Like it or not, U.S. leaders will need to accept that the post-Cold War period of unipolarity is over. To minimize instability and the risk of war, the United States will need to recognize that both Russia and China, as well as a rising number of mid-sized powers, will work to establish their own spheres of influence and play more active roles in international affairs.

Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on international affairs. Dr. Carpenter held various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato institute. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

Author: Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, is the author of 13 books and more than 1,100 articles on international affairs. Dr. Carpenter held various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato institute. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022). View all posts by Ted Galen Carpenter

Stephen Bryen: Why did Pentagon chief phone Russian counterpart?

By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 6/28/24

On June 25 US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin telephoned Russian Minister of Defense Andrew Belousov. It was the first contact between the US and Russian defense heads in more than a year and it was initiated by Austin. Was the conversation useful?

There is very little information about the content of the call. Both the Pentagon and the Russian Ministry of Defense have given very brief accounts, but the two accounts do not align with each other.

US readout

According to the Pentagon Austin emphasized the “importance of maintaining lines of communication.” This came after a US ATACMS missile hit a beach in Sevastopol, Crimea.

In the wake of the attack the US Ambassador to Moscow, Lynne Tracy, was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry. According to news reports the Russians formally warned the ambassador that retaliation would follow from the Crimea attack.

After that there were reports among Russian mil bloggers that the Russians had shot down a US Global Hawk drone over the Black Sea. However, the US said that its drone supposedly involved in the targeting, identified as an RQ-4 Global Hawk, had returned safely to Sigonella (Sicily).

The US has had very minimal contact with Russia and only on specific issues including potential exchanges of political prisoners. On the whole, the American position has been to isolate Russia and not hold any dialog on Ukraine or other security issues.

Before the Crimea attack Ukraine launched two drone attacks on Russian strategic early warning radar stations. Such attacks would have required US/NATO targeting assistance including evasion tactics to avoid Russian air defenses. Unlike the US, which has satellite early warning capabilities, the Russians depend on land based radars that can alert air defenses designed to intercept ballistic missiles. 

On the same day as the attack on the Sevastopol Beach (June 23) four ATACMS missiles were fired at the NIP-16 Center for Long-Range Space Communications radar base, in Vitino, Crimea. According to russianspaceweb.com,

NIP-16 was intended for hosting the Pluton deep-space communications complex, which could maintain contact with spacecraft up to an incredible distance of 300 million kilometers. Such a capability would be enough to guide missions beyond the orbit of Mars. The Pluton antennas were designed to send commands, track trajectories and receive and decipher telemetry from spacecraft. In addition, the same complex could be used to bounce radio waves off the faces of Mars and Venus.

NIP-16 at Vitino is under the control of the Russian Ministry of Defense. It is not clear if it plays a role in the Ukraine war or if it is tied into Russia’s early warning system. According to satellite imagery, the Vitino base appears to have survived the Ukrainian attack.

On June 26, the day after the Austin call, The Ukrainian military shelled a radiation monitoring station near the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, the largest such facility in Europe. The attack targeted a monitoring station in Velikaya Znamenka, a village around 15 kilometers west of the nuclear facility​. The monitoring station was destroyed in the attack. The Velikaya Znamenka station is one of a group of such stations used to monitor potential radiation leaks. For some time Ukraine has been threatening the nuclear power station.

Russian readout

The Russian readout is not about maintaining communications. The Russians reported that Belousov and Austin “exchanged views on the situation around Ukraine.”

​Belousov, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, ​”pointed to the danger of further escalation of the situation in connection with the ongoing supply of US weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine​.” The Ministry added:”Other issues were also discussed.”

​Discussing the “situation around Ukraine” could be a reference to US Black Sea operations supporting Ukraine’s attacks on Crimea and on Russian territory, although that is only speculation.

It is clear that the Russian focus in the conversation was on escalation and a potentially bigger war. Austin’s emphasis on “maintaining lines of communications” is clearly ironical, as there are no significant lines of communications and the US Defense Department, along with the rest of the US government, has maintained a policy of isolating Russia and not engaging in any useful dialogue.

Time will tell if this was only a defusing exercise by Austin because of Russian threats of retaliation – or a serious attempt to engage in more meaningful contacts with Russia.