Fading Hopes for Negotiation
Ukraine, Iran, Gaza
Even the New York Times is now acknowledging Russia’s advantages on the battlefield in terms of weapons, and notes its current advances around Kostiantynivka (well to the northwest of Russia’s major success last year, Avdiivka), and its entry into the Dnipropetrovsk region of eastern Ukraine, but strangely saying nothing about the imminent danger for Ukraine that the main battle for Pokrovsk has already started and will be won, by Russia. There are fairly reliable reports that Russian reconnaissance troops have entered the center of the city, and that Russian forces are in the process of almost completely surrounding it and taking the peripheral settlements and communication and transportation hubs that are vital for supplies into the city. If and when Pokrovsk falls, this development will have at least as dramatic an impact on the course of the war as did the fall of Avdiivka and, before that, Bakhmut and, before that, the fall of Mariupol.
The Times correctly observes the much sharper frequency of Russia’s mainly nighttime drone and missile attacks throughout Ukraine (whose purposes, though various, include the exposing and elimination of Ukraine’s remaining air defenses) and also correctly acknowledges that Moscow will soon be in a position to launch more than 1,000 drones a day. Already, Russia’s large numbers of Geran drones, fired at Ukrainian supply trains and vehicles behind the front lines, are making it increasingly difficult for Ukraine to sustain the fronts. Russian ballistic missiles can only be shot down by Patriot interceptors, and it is doubtful that Patriots are any match for Russian hypersonic Kinzhals. And as everyone knows, there are very few Patriot batteries to be had, and far too few Patriot interceptor missiles, and even if one or two more actually do arrive in Ukraine they are likely to meet the same fate as their predecessors - being blown up by Russian Iskanders or Kinshals.
The Times places its diminishing hopes (for Ukraine) on the prospects that the Russian economy may implode. Western media analysts have been lusting for Russia’s economic collapse ever since the West voluntarily cut itself off of Russian energy exports in 2022, the constant imposition of new waves of US and European sanctions and the departure, under pressure from the West of many Western businesses from Moscow, measures that the Western countries all expected would bring the Russians to their knees within months. Precisely the opposite happened. Russia found new clients for its exports; it found that it could earn additional revenue per unit of energy through the sale of ENG (originally not sanctioned) than from pipeline delivery; it found new suppliers (China, India, North Korea, Iran among them); the boost to its armaments industry was positive for the economy; tighter labor conditions and inducements for voluntary military service pushed up salaries and brought the economy to sizzling point; and it consolidated ties with other powerful nations and with fellow members of the BRICS - countries such as China, India, Brazil and Iran.
So, yes, with extra money in the economy, high demand for labor as hundreds of thousands of young men were mobilized or volunteered, higher tax revenues from increased oil sales to China and India, and increasing demand from industry for additional investment funds, Russia returned to a period of higher inflation and with higher rates of interest - in other words, routine economic challenges which Russia is addressing effectively by classic fiscal management through tighter control of money supply. Meantime, much of Europe (some exceptions, notably Poland) transitioned to economic stagnation or, like Germany, the UK and France, actual recession and deindustrialization. Why? Because they were paying far more for energy, giving away grotesque amounts of their national wealth to Ukraine (on the false premise that Russia posed a threat to Europe beyond eastern Ukraine) and are now meekly complying with US demands that they shoulder most of the burden of paying for NATO, even while the US slaps them all with heavy tariffs on their exports to the US.
Rather than focus on these domestic problems the worst generation of European leaders since the invention of Europe prefers to gabble on about Ukraine and Russia, and comforts itself with fantasies about Russia’s economic demise.
Tomorrow there is scheduled to be a further round of negotiations in Istanbul between Russia and Ukraine. Most reports I have seen say that this is at Ukraine’s request. Ukraine was likely pushed to this by the US, which was alarmed when Zelenskiy dismissed Ukraine’s chief negotiator, Umerov, from his position of Defense Minister in a radical Zelenskiy government reshuffle which also replaced the prime minister. This is “democracy,” Zelenskiy style. As a result of US intervention, Rustern Umerov remains chief negotiator. Zelensky had also irritated Washington by reducing the powers of two anti-corruption agencies that Washington had supported and controlled - NABU and SAP.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peshkov is discouraging high expectations of tomorrow’s talks and warns that this may be the end of the negotiation cycle. One practical outcome may be a further prisoner exchange. Significantly, Russia generally has far more Ukrainians to hand back to Ukraine than Ukraine has Russians to return, and the same is doubly true when it comes to bodies. (On a sad side-note, the reputation of veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has taken a nosedive after he has apparently fallen for some extremely unlikely bullshit fed him from US Washington ‘insiders’ about Russian casualties now approaching two million. But Hersh may be on stronger ground when he writes that Zelenskiy is due to be toppled). Zelenskiy keeps raising the issue of what he describes as the problem of kidnapped children, a wonderful propaganda label which is also a grossly misleading description of the problems of displaced children, a matter on which Russia has demonstrated great and professional responsibility, although I do not have the time to fully unpack this now.
Zelenskiy has also repeatedly expressed his interest in a one-on-one summit with Putin but cannot explain why he thinks this would be fruitful. Zelenskiy himself is a media creation and a media/PR professional who thinks in cheap Hollywood terms and has vainly tried to fight a war on that basis. Nobody who has watched Zelenskiy drive Trump even crazier than he already is can seriously imagine that a tete-a-tete between Putin and Zelenskiy could bring about anything good.
The reality is that Ukraine’s hand right now is at the weakest it has ever been. On the battlefield there is plenty of evidence of Russian advance and little evidence of effective Ukrainian defense. Yes, at the current rate of progress it would take Russia a very long time to take all of Ukraine, assuming Russia wanted to do that - and I doubt that it does - but that misunderstands the nature of the war to date. To date, this has been a war of attrition in which territory is not important; what is important is to weaken the enemy and force him to deplete his resources. And then, at that critical moment when the enemy is so weakened that he can no longer offer meaningful defense, then that is the moment when a slow advance becomes a very rapid advance and the whole show is over in days.
Is Ukraine approaching that point now? I suspect so. Sure, the US has said it will resume the flow of arms, but these are the last of the arms that were committed by Biden, and it looks as though any new arms will have to be paid for by Europe. In some cases they will be arms that Europe already has in its diminished stockpiles and that Europe will refurbish by buying afresh from the US.
Well, that is all very good, but assumes that the US even has sufficient arms to sell, and we already know that this is not the case with certain categories of weapon such as Patriot batteries and interceptors and THAADs. We also know that the whole prospect of having to pay much more for the war is one that is dividing Europe, and that Europe’s economy is looking increasingly that it cannot sustain this additonal pressure. And we should suspect that the aggressive noises coming from some of the stronger European powers are mainly the hissing of hot air from a balloon that can longer carry in its basket the burden of growing popular unease and of the pain of economic stagnation or recession. Further, we know, at this time, that Russian weapons production across the board exceeds that of the entirety of NATO itself, and that Russian allies including China and Iran and North Korea are more than capable of adding further substance to Russia’s growing industrial capacity for making weapons whereas, in the US, manufacturing capacity has been diminishing for nearly every month since the war began and I would be surprised if the figures are very different for Europe.
My final thought on the prospect of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations at this time is that not only will they be limited to things like prisoner swaps but there is a great deal that they cannot resolve. They simply cannot produce a new security architecture for the Asian continent, which is what is required if the current conflict is traced back to its root causes, as Russia demands, and one of those root causes is US/Europe’s shutting Russia out from their cliquey little neoliberal “rules-based order” security architecture. Perhaps now, when Europe is finding that the US has actually shown it its fangs, and has become its determined enemy, that the US has helped Europe destroy itself by abandoning its cheapest and most copious and easily-delivered source of energy, that the US gloats while Europe deindustrializes and the US giggles at Europe’s pathetic kow-towing to totally unreasonable and undemocratic tariff impositions…perhaps now, you might think, people of sense within European elites would look eastwards and turn away their westwards gaze to the pompous, self-proclaimed Beacon on the Hill.
But European elites are fearful of what European elites may have to lose in this brave new, but vastly more productive, growing world. They are quite content to see their middle and working classes reduced to serfdom, divided and weakened as they are from forced immigration by the hordes fleeing wasted cities of the South, tortured by western regime change chaos). They conjure up grotesque punishments for their discontents, those who protest their lords’ determination to suck up to the US and its gruesome ally, Israel, threatening to jail them if they so much as show an anti-genocide placard at some totally peaceful protest or other.
So, no meaningful negotiation between Russia and Ukraine. Who could possibly trust Zelenskiy or anyone appointed by Zelenskiy? Isn’t Zelenskiy illegitimate? Of course he is illegitimate. What could possibly be the point in sitting down with Zelenskiy or anyone accountable to Zelenskiy? This is madness.
And the prospects of meaningful negotiation between Russia and the US? About the same, zero. The US has been unable to make progress even on the relatively simple stuff like returning Russia’s embassy properties in the US and approving Russia’s ambasssadorial nomination. With threats swirling around like Lyndsey Graham’s risible “bone-crushing” sanctions Bogeyman - totally ridiculous threats whose actual function will be to consolidate Russian-Chinese-Indian-Brazilian resistance to Trump’s tariff lunacy, reduce the supply of energy products and increase their prices, adding to US inflationary pressures, unemployment, popular discontent, the further rise of the police state (even without Trump, the elites, having enjoyed their first strange juices of sadism, have yet to be sated) amidst growing economic and political fissures of US hegemony.
What about China? China only has to wait for the US to deplete itself further and for its economy to dive southward. Who knows? One day the US may be knocking at the door of the BRICS, looking for loans from the Development Bank, or at least begging entry to the effort of serious negotiation for global reconstruction. In the meantime, Israel pursues its genocide unhindered, even at the very hour of fatal exhaustion from over-extension in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Gaza and the West Bank, moral rot, external migration, economic collapse, social dysfunction.
Well, we can but dream. Iran? Iran is sounding a lot more tough-minded even as it politely offers the US a face-saving pathway to reason, along the lines of acknowledging Iran’s right to uranium enrichment even if at the price, for Iran, of a deal on the extent of the enrichment permitted. Personally, I think that too is far, far too generous a stance, but I take some comfort from growing evidence of Russian determination to support Iran, of Iranian inclination to accept help from Russia (which was, after all, a signatory to the dreadful and original colonizing JCPOA agreement in 2015, in the days when Russia and China still thought it was smart to be among the big boys at the neo-liberal poisoned banquet), and of Chinese resolve to stop being a wallflower at the dnce and show its muscle to the world.
You are spot on about the UK, your can’t chant or show a placard to stop the genocide of Palestinians without being arrested.