Since the war started, voices in the alternative media have said that Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia. Indeed, John Mearsheimer has been saying this since 2014.
VIDEO: A Revealing Panel Discussion from the Munich Security Council
Featuring Hillary Clinton, Radek Sikorski vs. members of the burgeoning European right.
Landmarks: The Return of the Bunker State: An Interview with Nel Bonilla
Since 1945 (maybe even before that, starting around 1917), and accelerating after 1990, the US elite structure, which lacks the European historical memory of the “Common Good” or the “Social State”, has culturally, materially, and institutionally integrated the European elites. This transatlantic caste, then, gradually, as the tides turned, needed the “Bunker” as an architectural form of society since they fear their own decline more than they value their own values.
In essence, the Open Society rhetoric masked what was actually a period of concentrated Western power projection through NATO expansion, financial globalization, structural adjustment, and the Washington Consensus. Communities were atomized and fragmented into market actors and identity groups, which simultaneously destroyed older forms of solidarity (labor unions, class politics) and created new manageable categories for technocratic governance. Capitalism became an ordering principle of society, reducing citizens to consumers in the first step.
Pietro Shakarian: JD Vance: A Prisoner of the Caucasus
If there is one characteristic that defines the erratic and incoherent “Donroe Doctrine” of President Trump, then it must be the principle that “might makes right” in international politics. The Trump administration has little need for international law. It is willfully and blatantly disregarded and, indeed, discarded. Instead, from Greenland to Gaza, from Venezuela to Iran, the “law of the jungle” reigns supreme.
The Nation’s Nadezhda Azhgikhina interviews Russian parliamentarian Grigory Yavlinsky
On January 26, The Nation’s correspondent Nadezhda Azhgikhina interviewed Grigory Yavlinsky at his Moscow offices. Yavlinsky is a member of the Russian State Duma, the leader of the Yabloko Party, and the chairman of the Center for Economic and Political Research in Moscow. An economist by training, he held a series of high positions during 1990–91 in the governments of the Russian Republic and the USSR. In June 1996, he was a candidate for the presidency of Russia. Azhgikhina is an independent journalist and writer and a frequent contributor to The Nation.
Ted Galen Carpenter: Trump Didn’t Destroy the ‘Rules-Based International Order’
Despite their pious, idealistic statements throughout the decades, U.S. and allied leaders have waged numerous wars of aggression, selectively empowered corrupt, murderous tyrants as clients, stolen land and other resources from disfavored nations, and embraced flagrant double standards with respect to both international law and basic ethics.
Ian Proud: The Coalition of the Willing has achieved nothing
The war in Ukraine happened because western nations insisted that Ukraine be allowed to join NATO but were never willing to fight to guarantee that right.
Peter Kuznick and Ivana Hughes: We are sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe
Kennedy’s fear of nuclear proliferation only grew after the terrifying events of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, which demonstrated to him just how easily human civilization could end should nuclear weapons be used in a war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. A world with “15 or 20 or 25 nations” that are nuclear armed would necessarily become ever more dangerous, Kennedy stated in his famous 1963 American University commencement address. This diagnosis would become the fundamental rationale for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was negotiated in the years after Kennedy’s death and signed by key states in 1968, entering into force in 1970.
Wolfgang Streeck: American Violence
Could it be that the US, or the EU for that matter, doesn’t want peace either?
Sen. Peter Welch: Nuke treaty loss a ‘colossal’ failure that could lead to nuclear arms race
VIDEO: Lord Robert Skidelsky’s Interview with Ian Proud
A new interview series by retired UK diplomat and author Ian Proud.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The End of Arms Control?
“If it expires, it expires” is a reasonable way to manage a week-old gallon of milk—not a treaty designed to stave off a potentially apocalyptic nuclear conflict between Russia and the US.
CBS News: Zelenskyy says U.S. gave Ukraine and Russia a June deadline to reach agreement to end war
“The Americans are proposing the parties end the war by the beginning of this summer and will probably put pressure on the parties precisely according to this schedule,” Zelenskyy said, speaking to reporters on Friday. Zelenskyy’s comments were embargoed until Saturday morning.
Politico: A new New START?
From Politico’s National Security Daily:
The New START treaty died today, thus ending the last major U.S.-Russian arms control pact. But instead of opening the floodgates to a new arms race, the deal’s demise could create an opportunity for the U.S. to strike a more expansive agreement — and potentially loop in China. [Read more…] about Politico: A new New START?
ACURA Exclusive: Peter Kuznick: The End of New START and the Descent into Madness
I fear the lunatics have taken over the asylum, especially in the U.S. The world had been on a seemingly more rational path in terms of nuclear weapons, having steadily reduced the total number of nuclear weapons from more than 70,000 in 1986 to approximately 12,000 in 2024. While the Bush and Trump administrations had torn up most of the nuclear arms-related treaties in the 21st century, New START, which Obama and Medvedev negotiated in 2010, at least limited the number of weapons and launch vehicles the U.S. and Russia could deploy.
Now Mad King Donald, the pathological narcissist whose approval is cratering in the U.S. and globally, has decided he wants to abrogate New START too, officially ignoring President Putin’s completely reasonable proposal to extend the treaty for at least one year while the U.S. and Russia negotiate a new one. But Trump has developed illusions of omnipotence in his second term, bombing seven countries his first year back in power, including Iran. He has also kidnapped Venezuela’s Maduro and threatened numerous other countries. He says he is constrained only by his own mind and morality and not by international law and is egged on by the dumbest and most vile group of advisors–Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Dan Crain–ever to surround a U.S. president.
To behave this outrageously in the nuclear age reflects a complete indifference to the well-being of the world we inhabit, much as have his repeated assertions that global warming is a “hoax” and a “con job” or his idea that his puerile “Board of Peace” can replace the United Nations. The last thing the world needs today is a new nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia. We were very lucky to have survived the first one. All bets are off this time around. The modernization that all nine nuclear powers have been conducting is bad enough as they all endeavor to make their arsenals more efficient and more lethal. Now, instead of diplomacy, the U.S. is banking on its ability to outproduce Russia and win a nuclear arms race. There are also U.S. nuclear experts who believe the U.S. can fight and win a simultaneous nuclear war against Russia, China, and North Korea as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned on August 20, 2024 and Admiral Thomas Buchanan affirmed exactly three months later. No wonder U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned on June 10, 2025, in a fleeting moment of lucidity, that “we are…closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before” and Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Agency SVR acknowledged on October 20 of last year, “The world is now experiencing the most fragile moment for international security since World War Two.”
On top of that, Trump has his childish fantasy about building a Golden Dome above the United States to protect it from incoming missiles even though almost all experts know that it would be more like an exorbitantly expensive golden sieve that would be easily penetrated by America’s adversaries. But having someone so rash, impulsive, bellicose, ignorant, and delusional in charge of a vast and growing nuclear arsenal is a gamble that the human species can ill afford to risk–at least not if we want to see humanity survive into the 22nd century. So those of us who do hope for a peaceful and prosperous future cling to the sliver of a possibility that Trump will have a change of heart and agree at the last minute to extend the treaty and negotiate a new one. But we are not optimistic as the clock runs out on the New START Treaty and the world furthers its descent into madness.
Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University and co-author, with Oliver Stone, of The Untold History of the United States.
An Interview with Nicolai Petro: The Tragedy of Ukraine: From Crisis to ‘Forgetting Evil’
Fabio Calzolari, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mae Fah Luang University in Thailand recently interviewed Nicolai N. Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island. Petro’s most recent book, The Tragedy of Ukraine (De Gruyter, 2022), demonstrated how classical Greek tragedy offers a conceptual framework for healing divided societies, revealing the emotional dynamics that precede violence and inhibit reconciliation. Petro’s earlier books, such as Christianity and Russian Culture in Soviet Society (Westview, 1990), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Harvard, 1995), Crafting Democracy (Cornell, 2004) outline how the engagement of civic actors can bring about dispute resolution even when official state structures are contested.
The Quincy Institute: Frequently Asked Questions About the Russia–Ukraine Negotiations
Several sticking points remain on territory, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, and security guarantees.
Russia’s Economy is strained, but not broken by Anatol Lieven
There is little doubt that the war in Ukraine and the weight of Western sanctions are placing the Russian economy under growing strain, making it reasonable to assume that this pressure has begun to shape Moscow’s negotiating position in the ongoing peace talks. In light of these pressures, Moscow has shed its maximalist aims. According to my Russian sources, what remains are the minimum conditions Vladimir Putin can accept while still being able to present the war as some form of success at home.
The Russian government reportedly needs to find an additional $16 billion (0.5% of GDP) this year in order to finance the war without a mushrooming of the budget deficit. Inflation is increasingly eroding living standards, as well as the real value of the elevated military pay that has enabled Russia to recruit hundreds of thousands of volunteers for the war. The value of Russian oil exports has declined steeply as a result of the drop in world prices and increasingly tough Western sanctions. And mortgage costs are soaring; the only reason this has not become a far larger problem is that one of the few tangible gains of the early Nineties for ordinary Russians was full ownership of the homes they already occupied.
That said, the Russian economy appears nowhere near collapse. The spring and summer of 2025 saw a flurry of Western reports about soaring inflation and imminent collapse, but since then, inflation has in fact moderated, and the price of certain staple foodstuffs has dropped significantly.
Western hawks like to claim the unreliability of Russian official figures and cite the impressions of ordinary Russians instead, but as a recent article in the independent Moscow Times points out, this discrepancy is true across most of Europe. In Russia, the official inflation rate from 2022 to 2025 was 9% while the “observed” rate was 16%; but in Ireland, the figures for that period were 4.6% against 7.8%, and in Italy, 4.2% against 8%.
Nonetheless, the war is not going well for Russia. On the front line, the situation appears frozen. In part, this is because of the winter conditions, but throughout the whole of last year, Russian advances were extremely slow, and at a cost of heavy casualties.
The Ukrainians are also suffering, but since they have abandoned their hopes of reconquering their lost territories, all the Ukrainians have to do is hang on. The tremendous advantages that contemporary drone and satellite technology give to the defensive side mean that so far, they have been able to do this with remarkable success. And last spring, as Western analysts were predicting imminent Russian economic collapse, I was being told that Russian generals were instead assuring Putin that Ukraine would suffer a military collapse by year’s end — a prediction that likewise failed to materialize. Indeed, there remains a possibility that Ukraine’s outnumbered and outgunned army could break. But it no longer appears that Putin is basing his strategy on that outcome.
The Russians are no longer calling for Ukraine to give up the whole of Zaporizhia and Kherson provinces. They have accepted that there will be no meaningful cap on the size of the Ukrainian armed forces or the arms that the West can supply to Ukraine. They have accepted that Ukraine can join the EU. They have agreed in principle to Western security guarantees. They reject Western troops in Ukraine — but given European military realities and distrust of the US, the idea of a European “reassurance force” is, in any case, looking increasingly fantastical.
The only remaining serious sticking point in talks is admittedly a very big one: the Russian demand that Ukraine hand over the remaining part of the Donbas region that it still holds. This is a mere 2,500 square miles and a few largely ruined towns (though still containing around 200,000 people). In practical terms, it is of little value to either side.
Morally, however, it is extremely difficult for Ukraine to surrender national territory that it still holds, and for Putin to accept that four years of a bloody war have not even succeeded in “liberating” the whole of the Donbas. However, the Trump administration is working assiduously to try to find a compromise over this issue, and given the growing exhaustion of both sides, there is reasonable hope that they may succeed. Future historians may well judge the sacrifice of tens of thousands more lives for Pokrovsk and Kramatorsk as among the starkest examples of what Barbara Tuchman called The March of Folly.
Anatol Lieven is a former war correspondent and Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC.
Doug Bandow: On Foreign Policy, Trump 2.0 Is Dangerously Unrestrained
As Trump completes the first year of his second term, he is demonstrating that his first term was merely a playful preview. This time he has gotten serious, with new wars and threats of war multiplying, sometimes on an almost daily basis. He believes that there are no meaningful limits—legal, institutional, constitutional, or even moral, other than his own musings—on loosing the dogs of war with the most powerful military on earth. This makes him potentially the most dangerous U.S. president yet.
Owen Matthews: Why is Ukraine trying to cancel Swan Lake?
Two of Ukraine’s most famous ballet dancers face dismissal, cancellation and possible mobilisation into the army. Their crime? They dared to dance a segment of Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake during a European tour. [Read more…] about Owen Matthews: Why is Ukraine trying to cancel Swan Lake?