It seems unlikely that the handful of Russian drones that entered Polish air space did so accidentally.

There have been previous incidents, but they involved individual drones very close to the Ukrainian border. Yesterday there were over a dozen, according to reports, with debris landing in several cities, including hitting one house, after NATO was scrambled to shoot them down.

While on the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of being elected and before he even arrives in office. Peace has proven more difficult. Blame has frequently shifted from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Russian President Vladimir Putin and back. But as a settlement has become more and more elusive, blame has begun to fall on more unusual suspects.

The spread of the Munich and Hitler analogies in international political discourse has undermined opportunities for negotiation by encouraging moral absolutism and posturing.

Among Europe’s most powerful states, France and Britain have so far seemed the most keen to participate in a “reassurance force” that could train and advise Ukraine’s military while stationed in the country.

In front of camera, when asked about an acerbic aside by Trump in a Truth Social post on September 3 wondering whether Putin was “conspiring against the United States of America,” Putin gave this extraordinary explanation: 

“The President of the United States has a sense of humour. It is clear, and everyone is well aware of it. I get along very well with him. We are on a first name basis.

“I can tell you and I hope he will hear me, too: as strange as it may appear, but during these four days, during the most diverse talks in informal and formal settings, no one has ever expressed any negative judgment about the current US administration.

“Second, all of my dialogue partners without exception – I want to emphasise this – all of them were supportive of the meeting in Anchorage. Every single one of them. And all of them expressed hope that the position of President Trump and the position of Russia and other participants in the negotiations will put an end to the armed conflict. I am saying this in all seriousness without irony. 

“Since I am saying this publicly, the whole world will see it and hear it, and this is the best guarantee that I am telling the truth. Why? Because the people whom I have spoken with for four days will hear it, and they will definitely say, “Yes, this is true.” I would have never said this if it were not so, because then I would have put myself in an awkward position in front of my friends, allies and strategic partners. Everything was exactly the way I said it.” 

After more than three years of war, during which time DC has backed Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars, sophisticated weapons, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance and a parallel economic war on Russia, and Russia has inflicted hundreds of thousands Ukrainian casualties, an autocratic Nazi is poised to become the next president (or fascist dictator) of Ukraine.

Lost amid the focus on summit pageantry, land swaps, and security guarantees last week was an issue even more central to a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine war: whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to accept Ukraine’s membership in the EU as part of a settlement deal.

A recent CBS News headline blares:

Suspect arrested in shooting death of pro-Western Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy, Zelenskyy says.

Well. That’s one way of describing Parubiy.

WASHINGTON — If a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine ever comes together, the United States could take the lead role in monitoring a large buffer zone inside Ukraine envisioned as a way to protect the country from Russia, according to four people familiar with a plan that military officials from Ukraine’s allies, including the United States, have been discussing.

The choice of Paris as the venue for a summit of the European “coalition of the willing” to discuss a “reassurance force” for Ukraine this week has turned out to be deeply unfortunate; for five days after the summit, France may well not have a government. Then again, it’s not clear that any other European capital would have made for a better choice.

More than 25 national leaders and heads of 10 international organisations are meeting in the Chinese coastal city of Tianjin to talk about security, the global economy and regional issues. Hosted by China’s Xi Jinping, participants include Vladimir Putin of Russia, Narendra Modi of India (on his first trip to China for seven years), and the leaders of Iran, Indonesia and Turkey. Together, their countries account for a quarter of the world’s GDP – and growing – and almost half of the world’s population. Standby for the group photo: if you wanted an illustration of a large part of the world’s future, here it is.

Ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House, a key question has been what kind of support the US would continue to provide to Ukraine. Surprisingly for some, the US President has broadly followed Joe Biden’s strategy of giving Kyiv the weapons and ammunition it requests.

In a recent interview with the Sunday Times, Serhii Sternenko—a leader of the paramilitary group Right Sector, which was founded by neo-Nazis—warnedZelensky that if he ceded any territory to Russia in a peace deal, “he would be a corpse—politically, and then for real.”

If you wanted to create a classic recipe for political crisis, you could well choose a mixture of a stagnant economy, a huge and growing public debt, a perceived need radically to increase military spending, an immigration crisis, a deeply unpopular president, a government without a majority in parliament, and growing radical parties on the right and left.

The U.S., Ukraine, and Europe are inching closer to a security guarantees package to be presented to Russia as part of a settlement to end the Ukraine war. According to a Financial Times report today, the U.S. is already pledging “intelligence assets and battlefield oversight” to any Ukrainian-European plan for a post-war peacekeeping force.

The Western punditariat’s commentary on Russia is spectacularly ill-informed. This should be expected from mainstream journalists whose employment relies on the very ignorance they so readily espouse, but there is no excuse for those who promote themselves as “experts” and use this alleged expertise to help craft Western policy towards Russia.

The Trump-Putin Alaska summit was about far more than Ukraine. Since long before the meeting in Anchorage, the Arctic has been recognized as a setting for U.S.-Russia cooperation.

The​ official justification for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was set out by Henry Stimson, the former US secretary of war, in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s.

Too much of the talk about the recent Alaska summit meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin focuses on the wrong issue.  The key question is not whether an eventual peace accord ending the fighting in Ukraine will require Kyiv to accept Moscow’s continued possession of Crimea and at least a portion of Ukraine’s Donbas region.  Anyone with a modicum of realism understands that such territorial concessions are unavoidableif the bloody war of attrition is to end.  The real issue involves the demand of Ukraine and of its fan club in NATO that Kyiv be given “security guarantees” in exchange for accepting that reality.  Agreeing to such an open-ended commitment could ultimately prove fatal to the United States.