American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Steve Witkoff, White House special envoy to the Middle East, talks about the phone call between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on ending the war with Ukraine. He says the leaders are likely to meet and a full ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine could be reached in a couple of weeks. Witkoff speaks on “Bloomberg Surveillance.”

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with a small force of around 142,000 troops. Not enough to conquer Ukraine, the invading force was sufficient to persuade Ukraine to the negotiating table. Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that was the original goal of the military operation: “[t]he troops were there to push the Ukrainian side to negotiations.”

President Zelensky should have pressed ahead with peace talks in August 2024, rather than invading Kursk. Ahead of talks between Presidents Trump and Putin this week, he has no cards left to play.

Early in 1973, Brezhnev expressed his happiness that the ‘Cold War’ was finally over. This turned out to be premature…

Part 2 of Professor Petro’s conversation with Pascal Lottaz.

There is a serious risk that even if the political establishment of Ukraine (Parliament and Government) came to the conclusion that only a surrender could save the country from complete annihilation, the ultra-right wing with its willingness to kill their own people, might be able to seize power if the army sides with them. That is a real fear that Professor Nicolai Petro expresses in this interview. Beyond this, they discuss the future of both Russia and Ukraine as the war is drawing to a close.

Last week came news of a Ukrainian “intelligence gathering” service called MOLFAR with an “enemies list” that includes, among other notables, the current vice president, JD Vance.

What makes this all the more galling is that it was ( is?) being funded by the US government though USAID. Whatever sympathy we may (and do) feel for people who have lost their jobs at USAID and at USAID-linked contractors, the Trump administration was absolutely right in pulling the plug on this kind of nonsense.

Benjamin Abelow’s book has garnered praise from the likes of ACURA’s own Jack Matlock who praised How the West Brought War to Ukraine as “A brilliant, remarkably concise explanation of the danger that U.S. and NATO military involvement in Ukraine has created.” And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote: “This is such an important book. I have read it three times. It is extraordinarily clear not only in language but also in thought. I can’t recommend it highly enough.” A link to the PDF is here, courtesy of Ben Abelow.

Russia’s position on the battlefield is getting better and better, but the US still insists on Moscow forfeiting its advantage to negotiate an end to the entire conflict. Why does Trump think this approach could work and what are the Russian calculations to not flatly reject this idea? To discuss these points, Pascal Lottaz is talking again to Dr. Nicolai Petro, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island and the author of the magnificent book, The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution.

Ideology is dead. We have entered the Age of Transactionalism. So far, Trump’s foreign policy has been shorn of the hypocrisy that came to characterize Washington’s engagement with the world during so much of the post-Cold War period. It’s now: I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine.

Video features Pascal Lottaz talking with Dr. Pietro Shakarian and Lasha Kasradze. Pietro is a historian at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburgh, Russia, and Lasha is an international relations analyst working in the US as a liaison officer for Georgia‘s Sokhumi State University.

It is crucial that US and international diplomacy to achieve a Ukraine-Russia ceasefire that leads toward a sustainable peace can then serve as a stepping stone toward a new and more constructive US-European-Ukrainian-Russian relationship.

Peter Ford is deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain which bills itself as something quite unheard of in America: socialist and socially conservative. 

Ford was a career British diplomat, serving as Ambassador to Bahrain (1999-2003) and Syria (2003-2006). Until 2015 he served as representative of the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in Amman, Jordan.

He is that rarest of creatures of the British (or any) foreign policy establishment: principled and fearless.

—James W. Carden

 

Carden: Today I am talking with Ambassador Peter Ford. So Peter, I understand you might soon be standing for office for the Workers Party. Can you tell us a little bit about the Workers’ Party?

Ford: Well, the Workers’ Party hasn’t been around for very long, only four or five years, but it came to prominence a year ago when the leader, George Galloway, who is a veteran actor in British politics on the left, last year got himself elected in a by-election in Rochdale, and made quite a splash because he is an extremely effective orator and he dedicated his victory to the people of Gaza. And that is an important part of the Party’s appeal, as it is pro-peace, anti-imperialism, anti-militarism while being common sense socialist.

Hopefully we can repeat that success in Runcorn [an industrial town of about 60,000 near Liverpool] although the odds will be stacked against us, folks in my hometown not being overly concerned about Gaza.

Carden: You described the Workers’ Party as pro-peace. What other parties would you say occupy that kind of space in the UK? 

Ford: Amazingly, historically the British Labor Party occupied some of that space and used to campaign for nuclear disarmament and was generally pro-peace when it was in opposition. But whenever it was in power, it would become very centrist if not downright right-wing and very pro-NATO and would go into any war that was led by the United States. 

[Read more…] about ACURA Q&A: Peter Ford: Ambassador, Dissident…Future MP?

It was not Putin, but Zelensky who signed the Minsk agreement with no intention of honoring it.

The Trump administration’s suspension of military aid and intelligence to Ukraine has some justification, but also involves serious dangers.

Ian Proud served in His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. He served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019 and is the author of a trenchant memoir titled A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019.

He is also the author of the widely read Substack offering, The Peacemonger. His work also appears in Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative, among other publications in the US and UK.

–James W. Carden

 

Carden: Ian, thanks for taking the time to talk.  A lot’s been going on the past 72 hours. We had the Zelensky-Trump blow up, then you had Zelensky here with Keir Starmer, followed by the EU defense ministers meeting. Seems to me anyway, that if you’re not going to get Trump to go along with any of these plans for boots on the ground, then it is all for show…

Proud: So big picture: This is a strategic repositioning going on at the moment, where people are basically trying to get to an off-ramp out of Ukraine in a way that doesn’t make it appear that they have totally failed.

So there’s a lot of choreography going on at the moment, particularly on the UK side. I’ll come to that. But on Zelensky and Trump, I mean Zelensky is trying to create himself as some sort of icon. This is his thing, he wears T-shirts. I think it’s completely ridiculous. It stems from his entertainment background where he’s more focused on the image and the brand rather than the substance. I don’t really see him as a states-person. I see him as someone who hasn’t recognized that the Earth really isn’t flat, that things are changing, and that he actually needs to adapt.

[Read more…] about ACURA Q&A: Ian Proud: From Misfit in Moscow to Peacemonger in London

The eminent Russianist Richard Sakwa is emeritus professor of Politics at the University of Kent. His new book (his fourth since 2020) is called The Culture of the Second Cold War  which examines the prevailing attitudes and ideologies behind the drive for conflict with Russia. 

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Professor Sakwa for a wide-ranging discussion in London last week.

The below has been edited for length and clarity.

—James W. Carden

[Read more…] about ACURA Q&A: Richard Sakwa: Trump’s Perestroika?

Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s clumsy rhetoric, he has taken the first courageous steps to ending the needless, all too avoidable NATO-Russia Ukrainian War.

The absurdity of the European position was perhaps best captured in its full hubris last year by the historian and writer Anne Applebaum when she won a prestigious German peace prize. During her acceptance speech, she maintained that victory was more important than peace, asserting that the West’s ultimate goal should be regime change in Russia.

President Trump’s restoration of the diplomacy that President Reagan and the first President Bush used to end the Cold War should be welcomed. Reestablishment of direct communication between the Russian and American presidents is an essential precondition for any settlement.