Analysis

The latest attempt at U.S. mediated peace talks between Russia and Ukraine are in disarray with the chance of success rapidly shrinking. Trump originally offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a plan that “He’ll have to like… and if he doesn’t like it, then you know, they should just keep fighting.” And he demanded an answer by Thanksgiving. But that date has past, and the plan turned out not to have to be one that Zelensky liked.

Among the 28 clauses contained in the initial American peace proposal, point 21 — obliging Ukraine to cede as-yet unoccupied territory in the Donbas to de facto Russian control, where it would be a “neutral demilitarised buffer zone” — has generated the most resistance and indignation.

Even though the risks of nuclear war are rising, with America’s new belligerence and Israel having over-extended itself while remaining determined to subdue Iran among the elevated risks, most want to avert their eyes from this threat to humanity and a lot of life on this planet. For instance, Tucker Carlson had an extended discussion with an expert on what a nuclear war would produce, which was highly informative if also predictably deeply disturbing.

In an article for Landmarks almost a year ago, I examined theories of war termination and applied them to the case of Ukraine in order to determine what policies would best suit the cause of peace. I concluded that, since the start of war.

Bloomberg’s scoop showing how Trump aide Steve Witkoff coached the Kremlin on the best way to get into Trump’s good graces is extraordinary for what it tells us about Witkoff’s dubious loyalties and the Kremlin’s potential influence over US negotiation efforts. But equally interesting is the leaked material itself and where it may have come from.

The one lesson Trump 2.0 did not learn from Trump 1.0 is that the personnel is the policy, particularly with a president who appears uninterested in details and disengaged from complex processes. Trump 1.0 was dragged down by neocon albatrosses John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, among others.

Even a Col. Douglas Macgregor brought in in the 4th quarter at the two minute warning to throw a “Hail Mary” pass to get us out of Afghanistan was tackled behind the line of scrimmage by Robert O’Brien, Trump’s final National Security Advisor and neocon dead-ender.

Neocons are wreckers. That’s the one thing they are good at.

Ukraine is a state but not yet a nation. In the thirty years of its independence, it has not yet found a leader who can unite its citizens in a shared concept of Ukrainian identity. Yes, Russia has interfered, but it is not Russian interference that created Ukrainian disunity but rather the haphazard way the country was assembled from parts that were not always mutually compatible.

There is an element of madness in our situation in Europe.

The spectre of Russian expansion is once again haunting Europe. The longer the Ukrainian crisis rumbles on, the louder become the voices in favour of reviving the cold war policy of containment. Putin may be an authoritarian nationalist rather than a totalitarian communist, but those voices contend that — like his Soviet predecessors — the Russian President is intent on creating a sphere of influence to challenge western values and political systems.

During the Cold War, the US recognized that to compete with the Soviet Union it needed more than weapons and alliances. It required minds capable of understanding its adversary’s history and worldview. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were among several prestigious institutions that poured millions in funding to build Area Studies centers at universities like Harvard, Columbia and Berkeley. These institutes trained generations of scholars who became advisers, analysts and diplomats. Among the most notable were George Kennan, Robert Tucker, Jack Matlock and Stephen Cohen who embodied the “scholar-statesman” ideal – intellectually rigorous, linguistically trained and able to explain Russia to Americans in Russia’s own terms.

There is, once more, hope for peace in Ukraine, and it is—once more—freaking out the Europeans. The US and Russia are nearing a proposal for cessation of hostilities along a so called 28-point peace plan.

When it comes to the reported draft framework agreement between the U.S. and Russia, and its place in the Ukraine peace process, a quote by Winston Churchill (on the British victory at El Alamein) may be appropriate: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” This is because at long last, this document engages with the concrete, detailed issues that will have to be resolved if peace is to be achieved.

On any given day for the past quarter of a century, the United States was probably dropping bombs on a country somewhere.

On October 29, just before meeting with China’s President XI Jinping, President Trump posted on the right-wing social media network Truth Social that “because of other countries [sic] testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”

The U.S. stopped testing nuclear weapons in 1992 – that is, detonating nuclear warheads. It regularly tests “delivery vehicles,” the missiles that would be used to carry the nuclear weapon to its intended target. The most recent of these tests took place early on Wednesday, November 5, when an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the coast of California. It’s possible that Trump simply does not understand the difference between these two things.

In March 2014, the late Senator John McCain of Arizona stood on the Senate floor and declaredthat “Russia is now a gas station masquerading as a country.” He repeated this characterization the following year on CNN’s State of the Union, elaborating that Russia was merely “a nation that’s really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) echoed this sentiment, calling Russia “an oil and gas company masquerading as a country.” In time, public intellectuals would commonly describe Russia as “gas station with nukes” as a way to dismiss it as an economically hollow petrostate propped up only by natural resources and inherited Soviet nuclear weapons.

Under what conditions do you think the war in Ukraine can end?

Right now, Russia is moving slowly with its meat grinder towards Pokrovsk, the major city that would give it leverage to take over the rest of the Donbas, if it chooses to do so. If they stop there, then we might be able to get a ceasefire. But, in my view, they want to push forward. And Zelenskyy says: No, we’re not going to let them get it, and we’re going to fight for two to three years more. So I honestly can’t give you an answer, unless President Trump and China begin to put more pressure on both Russia and Ukraine to pull back, and they can do that if they really want to.

Question: It has been reported that Vladimir Putin’s next meeting with Donald Trump in Budapest did not happen because even the US Administration realised that you are not ready for talks on Ukraine. What went wrong after the Anchorage summit that inspired hope for the launch of a genuine peace process? Why does Russia remain adherent to the demands that Vladimir Putin put forward in June 2024 and on what issues сould you make a compromise?

Sergey Lavrov: The understandings reached in Anchorage was an important milestone in the search for a long-term peace in Ukraine through overcoming the consequences of the violent anti-constitutional state coup in Kiev organised by the Obama administration in February 2014. The understandings are based on the existing reality and closely bound to the conditions of just and lasting resolution of the Ukrainian crisis proposed by President Putin in June 2024. As far as we know, those conditions were heard and received, including publicly, by the Trump administration – mainly the condition that it is unacceptable to drag Ukraine into NATO to create strategic military threats to Russia directly on its borders. Washington also openly admitted that it will not be able to ignore the territorial issue following the referendums in Russia’s five historical regions whose residents unambiguously chose self-determination apart from the Kiev regime that labelled them as “sub-humans,” “creatures,” and “terrorists,” and chose reunification with Russia.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — European Union officials warned Ukraine on Thursday that it must keep cracking down on graft in the wake of a major corruption scandal that could hurt the country’s ability to attract financial help. But they also offered assurances that aid will continue to flow as Kyiv strains to hold back Russia’s invasion.