eastwestaccord

Ukraine has lost an entire generation in the four-year war with Russia and, if the conflict continues for another two years, it will lose another one.

Cora, my friend and frequent collaborator, died in December at age 91. She was a champion of the United Nations and its mission to advance peace and women’s rights—and along with her husband, Peter, a brilliant international lawyer, she never stopped organizing to save the world from nuclear destruction. Unfortunately, in the last months of her life, that organizing became more necessary than ever.

The United States did not deny Cuban statehood during the Cuban Missile Crisis; it insisted that Cuba could not host Soviet nuclear missiles. Nor does Washington’s current pressure on Venezuela imply a desire to abolish Venezuelan sovereignty. These are examples of coercive security politics.

The National Security Archive at George Washington University published newly declassified verbatim transcripts of three conversations between Presidents George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin and their top national security advisers in 2001, 2005, and 2008. The transcripts contain a number of surprises and have significant historical implications…

The Ukraine war has, since its outset, been fertile ground for a particular kind of intellectual axe grinding, with establishment actors rushing to launder their abysmal policy record by projecting its many failures and conceits onto others.

The go-to method for this sleight of hand, as exhibited by its most adept practitioners, is to flail away at a set of ideas clumsily bundled together under the banner of “realism.”

When the Trump administration ordered special‑operations forces to seize Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife on January 3, 2026, electricity failed across Caracas and airfields filled with U.S. aircraft. The Venezuelan leader was spirited to New York to face an indictment on drug charges while President Trump pledged that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a safe transition could be arranged. He offered “boots on the ground” if necessary and invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify an operation condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Within hours, social media feeds filled with profile pictures draped in the Stars and Stripes and statements like “FAFO.” The mission’s execution and talk of “restoring democracy” tapped a familiar chord in the American psyche. The reactions to this raid highlight an ugly truth about the United States: Americans love war. They do not like higher taxes, a debased currency, or flag‑draped coffins, but they love war. And our short memory ensures we will learn nothing from the disasters we have created.

At Yalta in 1945, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt had no doubts about the role their great powers would play in pacifying and stabilizing the postwar international order: the victorious allies that had won the war would collaborate to preserve peace, if necessary, by the combined deployment of their enormous military power.

As negotiations accelerate toward a compromise settlement to end the Ukraine war, the voices of the Ukrainians living through the daily horrors have in many ways been suppressed by unending maximalist rhetoric from those far from the frontlines.

Nicolai N. Petro is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island, and formerly the US State Department’s special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union. Prof. Petro discusses the pending end of the Ukraine War and why Europe will likely fragment as a consequence of its proxy war against Russia.

In 2014 and 2022, the EU initiated sanctions regimes against Russia. The lists of entities and individuals were originally supposed to target Russia’s econmic and political elites only. But since 2024, the list has been expanded to include “disinformation” and is being used to target journalists and academics even in EU and Schengen-state areas, like the German nationals Alina Lipp and Hüseyin Dogru, , Jacques Baud, and Nathalie Yamb. To discuss the historical precedents is Professor David Gibbs, a professor of history at the University of Arizona.

Known as the “Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum,” this group, founded in Poland in 2022, calls for nothing less than the complete dissolution of the Russian Federation and its replacement with dozens of smaller ethnostates. According to the group’s defenders, such a breakup would better represent the interests of Russia’s many regions and minority populations. After all, the logic goes, Russia is fundamentally an imperialist state.

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.