eastwestaccord

A drone attack carried out against one of Putin’s residences was also an attack against a Russian nuclear command and control center located at the residence, according to the ex-adviser to the office of the President of Ukraine, Alexey Arestovich, and a military expert interviewed by Sputnik news and Tass.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope we are coming closer to an agreement about settling the conflict in Ukraine. I hope we can grit our teeth and accept the transactional and sometimes mercurial way the Trump Administration has gone about knocking heads together in pursuit of the end of the war. [Read more…] about ACURA Exclusive: The East Ukraine Gambit by Benjamin S. Dunham

Karaganov told Glenn Diesen in a much noted interview  that Russia is moving towards crossing the nuclear threshold against Europe . He says that any nation that does so will open up Pandora’s box, but also says it is “a myth” that once nuclear weapons are used it will almost automatically escalate to a global war. But he hopes that European “leaders” will be sobered up, because it is a moral/mortal sin to use nuclear weapons, which will result in the deaths of many innocents. [Read more…] about Sergey Karaganov Interview Summary by Steven Starr

Earlier this month, on December 17, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi paid a working visit to Moscow where he held a high-level meeting and press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Although the visit went almost entirely unnoticed by many observers of international affairs, it marked yet another significant milestone in Russo-Iranian relations, signaling a further deepening in ties between Moscow and Tehran amid the rise of a new multipolar world order.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with state-run media that Europe has been the main obstacle for peace amid its war in Ukraine since President Trump returned to office earlier this year.

Thanks to our donors, subscribers, readers and guest contributors. Best wishes for a happy holiday season. We will resume our regular postings December 29th. May peace prevail in 2026.

 

 

The release of the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) coincides with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent visit to India, offering a perspective on the Ukraine-Russia conflict often missing in Western media: a Russia whose influence is not waning, coupled with an America that is pivoting away from Europe.

To be sure, even limited military conquest by Russia and China along their borders should be deplored. The fact remains that the United States and its NATO allies did not intervene when Moscow crushed uprisings in its Warsaw Pact sphere of influence during the Cold War. Throughout the course of the conflict in Ukraine, a major proxy war, the United States and its NATO allies have refrained from sending troops and limited their military and economic aid to Ukraine. The mission of deterring Russia and China from limited local revanchism cannot justify the development, much less the use, of the American nuclear arsenal, or massive U.S. naval and air forces, for that matter.

The war has taken a decisive and irreversible turn.

A former senior Biden administration official admitted during a recent interview with who she thought were aides to Ukraine’s president that the Russian invasion of Ukraine could have been averted if Kyiv had agreed to stop seeking NATO membership.

Ukraine would join the European Union as early as January 2027 under the latest US plan to end the war with Russia, a senior source told Agence France-Presse on Friday. “It’s stated there but it’s a matter for negotiation, and the Americans support it,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. The complicated EU accession process usually takes years and requires a unanimous vote from all 27 members of the bloc. Some countries, most notably Hungary, have consistently voiced opposition to Ukraine joining.

The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting U.S. foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and “America First” priorities.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced a bill Tuesday that would require the president to “give notice of the denunciation of the North Atlantic Treaty for purposes of withdrawing the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” The bill would also prohibit the federal government from contributing funds to NATO budgets.

​It is all very well to offer this perspective like Joubert does, but anybody who would like to see peace in Ukraine should at least also take the Russian perspective on the conflict into account – as well as those of authoritative Western critics of the mainstream liberal European perspective.

“Half the country is on the run.”

A major difficulty in making peace in Ukraine today is that neither Ukraine nor Russia in fact possesses all the territories they claim to possess.

This open access book examines the Russia-Ukraine war and its origins. Based on analysis of a large number of primary and secondary sources, it provides a systematic analysis of this crucial war, its nature, outcome, possibility of peaceful settlement, violence against civilians, and origins. The book examines the role of such factors as the NATO accession of Ukraine, Russian imperialism, democracy, genocide, and the far-right in the start of the war and traces the conflict escalation ladder, which culminated in this war, to preceding violent conflicts in Ukraine, in particular, the Euromaidan, the Maidan massacre, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas.

When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte says that “We [NATO] are Russia’s next target. And we are already in harm’s way”, does he actually believe it? If he does not, then he is deliberately lying to Western democratic electorates, and poisoning the Western public debate. If he does, then this is even more dangerous; for it would be evidence that European security elites themselves have fallen into a condition of paranoid hysteria that is impervious to evidence and rationality.

On the whole, I would prefer to hope that he does not believe it. For while the method of inspiring this may be illegitimate, European states do need to strengthen their defences; and a case can be made that given European economic stagnation and acute budgetary pressures, the only way to get European electorates to spend more on the military is to convince them that otherwise the Russian bear will come to eat their children.

Even when it comes to rearmament however, there are dangers in exaggerating the imminent Russian threat. For this encourages a rush to spend money quickly; and as the tragicomic history of British military procurement over the past generation demonstrates, the reasons for our problems with manufacturing arms go well beyond lack of money.

Leaving aside staggering levels of carelessness and incompetence (and the seeming inability of our systems to hold even one senior officer or official responsible), the UK and most European countries have let our wider industrial bases shrink to the point where they cannot support efficient military sectors. To rebuild our industries will take many years. In the meantime, to throw huge amounts of money at weapons will mean huge amounts of waste and delay, or simply buying them from the US.

And this is unnecessary. For the idea of a deliberate, premeditated Russian attack on NATO “within five years” is simply nonsense. President Putin has repeatedly denied any desire or motive to attack NATO – unless NATO attacks Russia – and on this at least we can believe him.

Russian officials and experts have emphasized to me that Russia’s threats against NATO were intended to deter NATO from going to war with Russia over Ukraine, since that would have faced Russia with a choice between defeat and nuclear escalation: “Look, the whole point of all these warnings to NATO has been to stop NATO from joining the fight against us in Ukraine, because of the horrible dangers involved. Why in the name of God would we ourselves attack NATO and bring these dangers on ourselves? What could we hope to gain? That’s absurd!”

And where is Russia supposed to get an additional army from? Unless Ukraine collapses completely, the size of the peacetime Ukrainian army being proposed by Moscow is 600,000 men, presumably backed by numerous reservists. If Russia attacks NATO, then Ukraine will certainly take the opportunity to try to recover its lost territory, and Russia would have to guard against this.

Moreover, any such attack by Russia would completely contradict Russia’s political strategy towards the West, which is to encourage further the growing divisions both between the US and Europe, and between European establishments and the populist oppositions of Right and Left. Any direct Russian attack on NATO would wreck this strategy by reuniting the West in opposition. Why would Moscow have spent such efforts wooing Trump only to face him or his successor with a choice between war or humiliating retreat? Why would Moscow throw away the chance of future reconciliation with a French government under Le Pen and a British one under Farage?

And what could Russia hope to gain compared to the huge risks involved? Apart from the danger of escalation to nuclear war, the Ukraine War has demonstrated the immense contemporary superiority of the defensive. Russia has developed new weapons and tactics, but not ones that produce a breakthrough, but only help Russia in a war of attrition – and Moscow cannot possibly hope to win a war of attrition with NATO countries whose combined GDP is more than twenty times that of Russia.

One of the key reasons for Russia’s failures in Ukraine is that Putin has never dared to demand the public sacrifices required for mass conscription and mobilisation, even in a war whose outcome he regards as a truly vital Russian interest. Why would he dare this for the sake of a probably doomed war of choice with NATO? Rutte has warned that “we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured” but it is obvious that Putin does not think that the Russian people are prepared for this.

It is thus entirely within the capability of NATO – without hugely increased military spending – to build defensive lines in the Baltic States and eastern Poland that would deter Russia by demonstrating that any attack would make very limited progress at immense cost. Do our military analysts really think that the Russian establishment has learned nothing from the bitter experience of the Ukraine War?

All that said, there is of course a real risk that clashes or accidents could lead to an unintended spiral towards direct war between NATO and Russia. This could for example begin with European seizure of Russian cargoes on the high seas, leading to naval clashes and a NATO blockade of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. But that is an argument for prudence, not paranoia.

The wild exaggerations uttered by Rutte and his like act against such prudence. By suggesting that a few incursions by Russian (unarmed) drones and aircraft flying over the sea (not, as Rutte claims “over Estonia”) mean that “we are already at war with Russia”, Western security and officials perilously blur the critical distinction between real war and the sort of limited, non-lethal “hybrid” actions that Western countries too have frequently employed (we should remember in this context that by far the greatest act of sabotage in recent European history, the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, was carried out against Russia). If, God forbid, people like Rutte ever do lead us into real war with Russia, we will all come to understand that difference very well indeed.