Making Peace to Fight Nuclear War

Trump Putin Negotiations

Two days ago, NBC reported that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov had told a media conference that relations with Washington “are balancing on the brink of a breakup” and reiterated that the war in Ukraine would last until Kyiv drops its ambitions to join NATO and withdraws from the four regions occupied by Russian forces. He went on to say that unless the US understands and acknowledges that without resolving the problems that are the root causes of the crisis in Ukraine, it will not be possible to reach an agreement.

Now, today February 12, according to AP, President Donald Trump claims in a social media post that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed by phone to begin “negotiations” on ending the Ukraine war and would “work together, very closely” toward winding down the conflict. This follows a prisoner swap between Russia and the US. He claimed that the leaders also “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately” and would be alerting Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy about their conversation.

Abandoning Europe

Just how hopeful is this, really? I have not yet seen a Russian confirmation of Trump’s claims. Assuming it is true, it raises the possibility of an agreement between US and Russia without the direct or immediate involvement of Ukraine and Europe. There are calls in Europe for a closure of borders between the Baltic states and Russia, chatter about seizing Russian ships accused (I dont know with what, if any, degree of plausibility) of disrupting energy cables in the Baltic Sea, in relation to the upcoming departure of the Baltics from the Russian electricity grid, and worries about the outbreak of conflict in the Baltics at a time when major NATO powers including Germany and Britain are deeply unconvinced of their capacity to handle such a confrontation.

This may be a panic conjured into existence by EU members in a bid to convince that the US must stay in Europe. Which is the last thing that the US wants to do right now, given the increasing ascendancy within the Trump administration - strengthened by the likely confirmation of Colby Jenkins as undersecretary of defence for policy at the Pentagon - of those who want to move away from forever wars and focus on Asia. Colby appears to support these goals in common with some other members of the Trump team such as Tulsi Gabbard (future Director of National Intelligence) although most of these are also pro-Zionist, making assessments of the likely outcome of the crisis in West Asia more complicated.

Can There Be a Successful Outcome?

Putting these considerations to one side, we should ask ourselves what the likelihood is that there would a successful outcome to negotiations.

In previous posts I have expressed considerable skepticism on this score. This is mainly because all the signals that have emerged about the position of Trump’s peace envoy, General Keith Kellogg, from April 20 2024, and from supposed “leaks” published in dissident Ukrainian media outlet Strana (they possibly came from Ukraine’s intelligence chief Budanov) have suggested that the US is nowhere near meeting Russia’s minimum requirements. Also, bear in mind that Putin’s outline of these requirements may be described as “Istanbul Plus.” That is to say, the agreement already signed off in draft form by Ukraine back in March 2022, including Ukrainian neutrality plus Ukrainian withdrawal in full from the four regions that Russian has since absorbed within the Russian Federation.

All this assumes the continuation of Crimea as a part of Russia. But even the original Ukrainian concessions, in the Russian mind, would merely be the preface to broader negotiations which could extend now to absorption of other oblasts including those of Kharkiv, Kiev and Odessa, as well as the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.

Battlefield Reality

I don’t think that Russia is going to be persuaded to retreat from Istanbul Plus. There are some indications afoot that suggest that the US itself may be moving towards this position. For example, recent statements from the Trump administration suggest that Kellogg’s original April 2024 thinking had now been superseded by events. These “events,” by the way, include massive Ukrainian casualties on the battlefield to which the US so far is a long way from admitting, and continuing Russian advances. Advances are currently most notable in the Vuhledar/Velyka Novosilka corner and in Russian advances into Zapporizhzhia, perhaps in the coming days via Holipole and Orekhiv, which could soon bring Russian forces to the Dnieper and to the city of Zapporizhzhia. Counting from the north, Russia is making considerable advances in the areas of Vovchansk, Kupyansk, Lyman - Siversk, not so much - Chasiv Yar, Karakhove and Toretsk.

The situation around Pokrovsk appears to be in greater doubt than it was a couple of weeks ago when Russia had surrounded at least half of the city from the east and south. Dima of the Military Summary Channel has been sounding rather pessimistic about this over the past couple of days on the grounds that Ukraine has staged a fairly convincing counter-attack in the area between Kortnye and Pischanne to the southwest of Pokrovsk, something which Dima appears to believe significantly disrupts Russian logistic ability to furnish supplies to its forces further south and west.

I think this pessimism is overdone, given what we have seen of Russian persistence in taking such settlements throughout this war. Oftentimes, advances that at first seemed would require a few days or weeks have turned out to take many weeks and sometimes many months. But the point is that they are generally taken in the end. In addition, even as Russia may face logistic problems in Pishanne, it is at the same time making large strides further west from areas such as Andriivka and Ulanskiy.

In Kursk, the recent Ukrainian counter-offensive has been reversed, at the price of massive casualties for Ukraine. Zelenskiy appears to want to keep his men in Kursk (around Sudzja in particular), it seems, even at the considerable risk of them being encircled in a cauldron, because he wants to be able to do some kind of land swap with Russia (he seems to be particularly obsessed with the Zapporizhzhia nuclear power plant), that Russia has said it will definitely not contemplate. Or perhaps Zelenskiy worries that when Russia does finally resecure Kursk, as it will very likely do and quite soon, the full details of Ukrainian war crimes in Kursk will become available for broadcast around the world, a process that started recently with their documentation by Russia before the UN Security Council.

Once again, as over Gaza, the already highly contestable claims of the collective West to some kind of moral superiority over Russia, China and the Global South, will have received a crushing and hopefully fatal blow that will allow the world to redream itself in a fashion more in alignment with empirical reality.

The Stronger Hand

Russia has all along told the US that it is open to negotiations.

It is apparent to all serious contenders that Russia now has a very strong hand. The US has a much weaker hand. Russia’s war of attrition against Ukraine has also been a war of attrition against the collective West. So much so, that the Trump administration, while it it still maintaining some kind of weapons flow to Ukraine, as far as we know, is also beginning to investigate what happened to $100 billion of US assistance that Zelenskiy says has gone missing.

The tone of this interaction will be bad news for Zelenskiy. Nobody can pretend that Ukraine is other than one of the most corrupt nations in Europe if not in the world. Trump and Zelenskiy have been talking about potential payments in kind where Ukraine would pay for US assistance by means of the provision of rare minerals from Ukraine to the US. Trump has said that these payments would need to cover the expense of all aid so far given, which we can assume is roughly $200+ billion. Trump has talked about a total extraction from Ukraine of $500 billion.

This could suggest, therefore that the US might continue to support Ukraine with a further $300 billion in future arms and other assistance.

But, as I pointed out yesterday, it is questionable whether Ukraine itself actually still has control over this much of its mineral wealth (much of it having been transitioned to Russian control); whether Ukraine has already sold these assets to other interests, including Ukrainian oligarchs and hedge funds; and whether the assets can actually be mined (some are covered by very hard and deep rock), and whether there is anyone in Ukraine whose signature could be considered legal, given the failure of Ukraine to call for new presidential and RADA elections.

Besides, given that the US, under Trump, has already determined that it wants out of Ukraine in order to regroup and rebuild its military assets for a future foreign policy that will be more focused on what it believes, perhaps mistakenly, are actual US security interests (not ones that the neocon Biden team simply made up) which are in Asia, it seems improbable that it will be seduced by the thought of rare minerals that it can obtain from elsewhere (including, rather paradoxically, from China, but there are other possibilities, including places like Bolivia).

A critical feature of this “weaker US hand” is what some authorities would argue is the superiority of Russian weaponry over the entirety of the US and NATO put together, the more especially so given the closeness of the partnership between Russia and China. Of course, Russia has some weaknesses as well. These have less to do with economics (where Russia for the moment, with a GDP growth rate of 4% is quite sound) and more about demographics (falling population), but their impacts are not imminent.

This disparity between Russian and US positions right now might be sufficient to overcome what some have felt is the obstacle posed to Russia of what has been called US incapacity to reach agreements that can be trusted. This is certainly a big problem for Russia, as it will not want to be seen, yet again, to fall victim to US-European duplicity and dishonesty as has plagued the Russia question since the eastwards expansion of NATO, the insincerity of the Minsk agreements, and the Western-backed Ukrainian reneging on the Istanbul agreement.

The Benefit of Talk

But we are talking about an extremely complex package of issues ranging from the relatively minor (e.g. what will become of US chemical weapons laboratories in Ukraine or who will take possession of Odessa?) to the medium (e.g. what will happen to the US nuclear-capable anti-ballistic platforms in Poland and Romania?) to the maga or meta level (e.g. how can Russia and the US advance the cause of a new European or even global security architecture?).

Talk in itself can be valuable and informative: it can reveal what are the actual positions, ideas, aspirations of the various parties and, in doing so, these revelations may end up better informing the global audience, assuming a reasonably honest and competent mainstream media (yes, very big assumption, I know).

But also, as I have suggested just now, the issues themselves range enormously in terms of their scale, seriousness, urgency and so on. There will be some issues where the parties may be able to secure agreements that serve the interests of both or of all; and others towards which they can make partial progress. There will be some issues where the risk of bad faith or unreliability is considerable, but which, even if one party is not dependable, the other party will consider it useful to have achieved a settlement at least for a while.

As communication scholars will almost universally attest, the commitment to communicate is almost always a value in itself.

The most likely outcome that I can foresee is indeed a US withdrawal, in whole or in part, from the Ukraine conflict and, at least a partial abandonment of Europe, perhaps even of NATO.

What is not clear at this stage is whether that abandonment will be result of a structured agreement with Russia. Without an agreement it is possible that Russia will continue its advance to Lvov. Some say that even that far west Russia will be plagued by worries as to the security of its new borders. I am inclined now to reassess this fear because, if the US abandons Europe, then Europe - a Europe that has been militarily attrited, much of it in or close to recession, much of it experiencing depopulation, and a Europe which will need to re-establish (if it was ever broken at all), its energy dependence on Russia - will be in no position to mount a serious counter-offensive against Russia, and Russia - despite the mountains of European propaganda to the contrary - will not be incentivized to pose any threat to the security of Europe.

The Coming Reconnection of Russian Pipeline Gas

On the question of Russian gas, Intellinews reports that transshipment of Russian gas to Europe via Turkey hit a new all-time high this week as gas storage in EU tanks is running down faster than any time in the last five years. Prices are up to around $680 per thousand cubic metres – about three times higher than normal. There is simply not enough LNG in the world to satisfy both the EU and Asia, the main consumer. One strand of Nord Stream is still operational and could be turned on tomorrow: it could supply exactly the amount that Ukraine’s cessation of its pipeline supply of Russian gas took out of supplies to Europe. Intellinews considers it inevitable that Russian gas deliveries will resume. High energy prices come on top of Europe’s loss of competitiveness, as detailed in the Draghi report.

“Turning on Russian gas and replacing the expensive LNG imports with cheap piped gas would go a very long way towards solving a lot of Europe’s economic problems”.

But then Intellinews suddenly enters a very dark space:

Still, does it really matter? There is a new paper out in Nature this week arguing that not only have we missed the 1.5C Paris target – last year all 12 months were over 1.5C pre-industrial average – but the upper limit of 2C is also dead. The scientists are talking about a global population reduction that will run into the billions as a result of the changes to agriculture and inhabitability of large swathes of land, so there will be plenty of room and resources left for the survivors.

In short, forget about all the Ukraine nonsense and just focus on survival of the species.

Coming Nuclear War in West Asia

These considerations might seem something of a relief after our being for several months now on the knife-edge of having to seriously entertain the threat of an outbreak of nuclear war. Except that the nuclear threat now centers more strongly over West Asia.

The trigger is the anticipated refusal of Hamas, in retaliation for numerous, documented violations of the ceasefire, to return the remaining hostages to Israel (3 were initially foreseen; Trump is now demanding that all the hostages be released), and Trump’s likely greenlighting from this coming Saturday Israeli resumption along the path of annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza, as Israel is already doing in the West Bank.

Egypt and Jordan continue to resist Trump’s insistance that they can absorb displaced Palestinians. Jordan’s King Abdullah II did make a conciliatory concession to Trump in saying that Jordan would take in 2,000 injured Palestinian children.

A former security advisor to Trump, Lt. Col. Macgregor, has said today that he believes that Egypt is now preparing for war with Israel, a war that might break out within the next few weeks, and that could include other Arab and Muslim nations. Among these there might perhaps be Turkey, whose president Erdogan is described (I am not sure correctly) by Macgregor as the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran (which could jump into a collective war to defend Palestine as its opportunity to trash once and for all the perpetual harrassment and bullying to which it has been subjected by Israel), and Saudi Arabia that has said, repeatedly, that there is no solution for Palestine that does not include a two-state outcome.

If such a war does indeed break out (and I have to admit that I find Macgregor’s prediction a little difficult to absorb, since I don’t know what exactly are his sources), then it will be impossible to avoid the additional involvement of the US and the collective West (protectors of apartheid, and now genocidal, Israel), Russia (friend or ally to multiple Arab regimes and Iran), and China (the largest member of the BRICS and informal representative both of the interests of the Global South, and of a future, multi-polar world).

Israel’s Hannibal

Media Lens (Media Lens) has riveted attention on the important disclosure this week that Israel did indeed issue the Hannibal Directive on October 7th, 2023. Its intention was to prevent Israelis being captured alive and used as bargaining tools for the release of Palestinians held in Israel.

Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defence minister has admitted this. We already knew that Israeli forces had killed many Israeli civilians because of an Al Jazeera investigation in March 2024 which also thoroughly debunked Israeli propaganda myths about ‘beheaded babies’ and ‘mass rape.” All this was largely ignored by Western media. We now know, as a result of Israeli Channel 12’s interview with Gallant, that ‘the Hannibal Directive says to shoot to kill when there is a vehicle containing an Israeli hostage’.

“The original directive, which was kept secret and never published, was first implemented during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon in 1986. It allowed the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent Israeli soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory, even if such action would lead to those captives’ deaths. After being revised several times, the directive was dropped in 2016.

“However, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last July, it was once again implemented on 7 October 2023 and extended to the killing of Israeli civilians, if that was deemed necessary to prevent them from being abducted by Palestinian fighters.”

An Electronic Intifada investigation last October concluded that Israeli forces, including tanks and helicopters, may have killed hundreds of their own people.

Al Jazeera reported that 28 Israeli Apache helicopters used all their ammunition and had to be reloaded.

Nuclear Musk

For Mint Press News investigative reporter Alan MacLeod examines (MacLeod) Trump’s intention, with the help of Elon Musk, to build a gigantic anti-ballistic missile system, an Iron Dome, to counter Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons.

The Iron Dome would function as an offensive weapon, giving the United States the ability to launch nuclear attacks anywhere in the world without having to worry about the consequences of a similar response. With 1,000 microsatellites in continuous orbit around the Earth, the US can track, engage and shoot down, using tungsten slugs or hypersonic missiles projectiles that are launched from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China. Musk’s company Castelion is developing the system and has secured contracts with the US military. Russian scientists anticipate that the plan is a cover for the launch of nuclear weapons into space.

MacLeod notes that Musk has had a very close relationship with the U.S. national security state, particularly with Mike Griffin of the CIA who led In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capitalist wing. Griffin later became the chief administrator of NASA. In 2018, President Trump appointed him the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

“While at NASA, Griffin brought Musk in for meetings and secured SpaceX’s big break. In 2006, NASA awarded the company a $396 million rocket development contract – a remarkable “gamble,” in Griffin’s words, especially as it had never launched a rocket. National Geographic wrote that SpaceX “never would have gotten to where it is today without NASA.” And Griffin was essential to this development. Still, by 2008, both SpaceX and Tesla Motors were in dire straits, with Musk unable to make payroll and assuming both businesses would go bankrupt. It was at that point that SpaceX was saved by an unexpected $1.6 billion NASA contract for commercial cargo services”.

Today, the pair remain extremely close, with Griffin serving as an official advisor to Castelion. In 2004, Musk named his son “Griffin” after his CIA handler. SpaceX wealth comes largely from orders from Washington.

“SpaceX has become every bit as important to the American empire as Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Simply put, without Musk and SpaceX, the U.S. would not be able to carry out such an invasive program of spying or drone warfare around the world.”

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Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor Emeritus of Bowling Green State University in Ohio and of California State University. His books include The International News Agencies; Le Trafic des Nouvelles (co-authored with Michael Palmer), Contra-Flow in Global News (co-authored with Daya Thussu), The Globalization of News (co-editor with Terhi Rantenan, and contributor), Communications Media, Globalization and Empire (editor and contributor), News Agencies in the Turbulent Era of the Internet (editor and contributor); Hollywood and the CIA (with David Herrera and Jim Baumann); Media Imperialism; Interfax: Breaking into Global News; Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis; Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change (with Taneer Mirrlees, eds.); RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media; Conflict Propaganda in Syria: Narrative Battles; RussiaGate Revisited: Aftermath of a Hoax (with Stephen Marmura, editors, and contributors). In preparation for 2025 is Afghanistan: Occupation and its Aftermath (with Sumanth Inukonda and Lara Lengel, editors and contributors) and, for 2026, The Sage Handbook of News Agencies (co-editor with Pedro Aguiar and Christian Vukasovich).