Kiev to Damascus via Moscow and Istanbul

Trump-Kellogg

The Trump-Kellogg strategy on Ukraine may be to lure Russia to the table with promises of reduced US sanctions on Russia, and greater freedom of trade in Russian oil and gas with Europe and the West.

If this is the negotiating methodology to be employed, it would certainly be accompanied by both conditions and openings related to concessions on territory and Ukraine’s membership of NATO (either immediately or eventually), among other things.

I don’t believe that anything that is supposedly being considered along these lines is going to work because (1) Russia is winning on the battlefield, depleting US and European weapons stockpiles, and hurting European economic substance faster than the West is depleting Russia; (2) Russia has already indicated fairly convincingly that it rejects the idea of giving up territory that it already occupies, and cannot accept anything other than a truly neutral Ukraine; (3) however much Western economists want the world to believe in the Western power of sanctions, this tool no longer works or, at least, no longer works for a country as powerful as Russia.

That is to say (4) Russia and the Russian economy are far healthier under US sanctions than they were without them, notwithstanding certain challenges for Russia in 2025, far less serious, I would say, than the debt-loads that may yet fatally cripple the Western world. The US and Europe, in other words, look a lot sicker. The Russian economy has recovered very well. Russia is now more independent and autonomous. It retains more of the wealth of its own domestic market. It has greatly expanded its markets in the Global South. Militarily, it is far stronger than it was. And it has very powerful alliances, especially with China, and also with fellow members of the BRICS.

US manipulation of the sanctions weapon may have been good for a while. But the victims wise up. They resent being treated like the conditioned rats in Pavlov’s famous experiment. That is no way to live: behaving according to the inducements of others yields up far too much power to the hegemon. And the hegemon can never be trusted to fulfill his promises or not to find new pretexts for the reintroduction of sanctions at any time of his choosing.

The Iranian Calculus

Trump’s betrayal of Iran by pulling out the rug beneath JCPOA would be a good example only, in this case, there seems to be a wing of the Iranian political system that even now, having been thoroughly betrayed and deceived, seems to believe that it can negotiate with Trump to its advantage.

This may be indicative of some real weakness in Iran’s military situation - even if Iran is backed up firmly by Russia as it is - given that it still has not retaliated, as it promised it would, against Israel for the Israeli strikes on Iran on October 25.

Iran’s dilatory response may simply reflect a willingness on the part of the Iranian leadership to at least give Trump until his inauguration to see what his regime will really look like. Why risk the end of the planet with nuclear war for the sake of waiting just a few weeks? Yet, given the number of pro-Zionists who have been fingered for the Trump cabinet, any other eventuality is beginning to seem an indulgent hope.

Or, Iran’s delay in responding may reflect cultural factors such as a lingering inclination to believe Western propaganda about itself. A good outcome would be an Iranian response, now, sufficient to badly undermine the credibility and viability of the Israeli military and Israel’s apartheid social system and to stop the Trump team in its tracks.

Syrian Complications

But now, the Iranian calculus has been greatly complicated, and not in a good way, by the sudden reactivation in Syria of Jihadists (especially their al-Qaeda/al-Nusra offshoot, HTS) who have seized a half to three-quarters of the nearby Syrian city of Aleppo, in an assault which has met with little resistance (certainly betraying a lack of Syrian preparedness and possibly even a Syrian army collapse).

This sudden development would appear to be of benefit, mainly, to the US and to Israel. Idlib, following an agreement reached with Damascus during the height of armed conflict in the fighting of the so-called civil war, had been consigned to Jihadi forces under the protection of Turkish army invaders. These had been permitted by Russia and Damascus to establish a buffer zone between Turkiye and the forces of the Syrian army and its allies.

Turkish involvement was motivated in good measure by its fear of Kurdish fighters in the north east of the country that had been operating under the umbrella of US occupying forces. These latter were supposed to have been withdrawn on Trump’s orders in Trump’s first presidency but many were kept on in Syria by the Pentagon, apparently in disregard of Trump’s order.

Since the overall “victory” of Assad in alliance with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the US had kept the war-battered Syrian economy in a very debilitated state, owing to US passage of the so-called Caesar Act, which applied heavy sanctions. These were imposed on the basis of what was likely to have been a false pretext of US allegations of Syrian human rights abuses. Thereafter and in these conditions of general misery, Israel regularly bombed groups that it claimed were Iranian revolutionary guards or Hezbollah militants in Syria (whose help, along with Russian airpower, was solicited with very good effect by the Assad regime in Damascus in 2015 and whose presence in Syria was perfectly legal).

Israel (already occupying part of the Syrian Golan Heights) claimed that Hezbollah militants in Syria provided a route for the supply of weapons from Iran to militants in Lebanon, weapons that could be used against Israel. Russia appeared to have struck a covert deal with Israel not to retaliate for these bombings. In effect, Israel has been fighting an attritional war against Hezbollah and with Iran, perhaps with a view to helping Israel out in the event of the kind of uprising staged by Hamas (conceivably with Israeli foreknowledge or even participation) in October 2023.

It is too soon to assess with strong confidence the implications of the reactivation of HTS-style Jihadism in Syria.

Considering Turkiye

It seems very likely that Turkiye had foreknowledge of this. If it did not, then Turkish Intelligence has been incompetent, to say the least. It has long been assumed that Erdogan has wanted to exit Turkiye from the Syrian mess, a mess to which it had been a major contributor and which counter-productively pushed over a million Syrian refugees into southern Turkiye. But Assad did not respond to occasional Turkish diplomatic openings that seemed to promise a possible final settlement.

Perhaps Assad has found Turkish pressure an acceptable price for keeping anti-Turkish, pro-Western Kurdish fighters under control. And perhaps he did not want to have to handle the reintegration of Syrian refugees back from Turkiye, many of whom may have been sympathetic to the HTS. If Turkiye is in some way involved in the assault on Aleppo then it may have collaborated with Israeli and US interests, even as Erdogan was criticizing Netanhayu’s Gaza genocide (but while Turkiye continued the flow of oil to Israel uninterrupted), and in a manner that would be counter to Russian interests. The possibility of a Turkish betrayal of Russia over Syria would constitute a major threat to the always rocky relationship between Turkiye and Russia, potentially tilting Ankara in the direction of Washington and impacting the war with Ukraine by enhancing NATO access to the Black Sea via Turkish gatekeeping in the Bosphorus, something that many of Turkiye’s erstwhile friends in the BRICS would likely resent.

The threat to stability in Syria is a dangerous distraction for Russia which is still heavily engaged in the fighting in Ukraine. Russia almost certainly has the weapons and the manpower to assist the Damascus regime against Turkish, US and Israeli expansionism. But this is a highly volatile situation, even as Israel, notwithstanding its so-called recent “ceasefire” with Lebanon and Hezbollah to the west, is still reportedly encroaching further into southern Lebanon and while the region waits with suspended breath for a likely conflagration between Israel and Iran. Such a conflagration will commit the US to fight Iran (and, therefore, most likely, with Russia and China), all before Trump is inaugurated in January. Iran will be more likely to man-up to the Israeli threat if it sees Syria fall to a regime that represents a mixture of jihadi, Turkish, Israeli and Western interests.

Ukraine Offensives

In Ukraine, meanwhile, Dima of the Military Summary Channel cites Russian MoD sources in support of his fairly firm conviction that Ukraine is gearing up for a further offensive, which could take place on Belgorod or Briansk, or, in the south, towards Tokmak and the Zapporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Dima discerns a pattern in western media coverage of talking up Ukrainian army weaknesses just ahead of new Ukrainian offensives.

Speculation about a Ukrainian offensive in Zapporizhzhia sounds strange in the light of equally strong chatter of a Russian offensive towards the city Zapporizhzhia something which we have seen played out unambiguously in recent weeks. It is also difficult to conceive of a major Ukrainian offensive in the context of Russian missile attacks that have severely debilitated Ukrainian energy resources.

Ukraine has not reacted to Western pontificating about the need for Ukraine to reduce the age of military conscription from 25 to 18, a measure that would take quite some time to organize and train for (and which would further deplete its diminishing workforce and its diminishing economy), although Kiev sources have reportedly discussed the possibility of requiring military training for 18 year-olds and above even if these are not immediately mobilized. The issue of manpower constraints is certainly connected to NATO talk (revealed in a recent report from Russian intelligence) of establishing a 100,000 NATO “peace-keeping” force (involving Ukrainian, German, French and Romanian troops), distributed across a Ukraine divided into different zones.