Politicizing Everything
It is quite clear that the only game in town is the Witkoff-Dmitriev 28-point framework. The rest is European-Ukrainian garbage whose only purpose is to scupper the possibility of a US-Russian understanding.
First question: can it be scuppered? Well, yes, quite easily. This is mainly because far from being consistent with so-called Russian maximalist positions, even the 28-point plan would have to be thoroughly developed to come close to something that Russia could live with. But Putin has said he regards it as a basis for an eventual agreement.
So you can forgeddaboud COW “peacekeepers” (war provocateurs) be they Brits, French, Germans or even Turks. And a lot else besides.
It does seem to me that the Kremlin at this point is willing to consider something along the lines of Putin’s June 2024 terms (“Istanbul Plus”). We dont totally know at this point whether Putin has Lavrov’s loyalty in this. There are grounds for wondering whether Lavrov has sided with those who suspect Putin’s persistent openness to continuing dialog with the “undialogable,” fearing of course that Putin may yet again allow himself to be bamboozled by Western duplicity as he was over Minsk 2015 and Istanbul 2022. His national security adviser Yuri Viktorovich Ushakov seems suddenly to be playing a much more important role. Still it is also possible, if not likely, that Putin recognizes that on a matter of such great importance as a potential peace deal it is necessary to appoint a special purpuse agent and to the leave Lavrov to the greater conduct of foreign affairs more generally.
I surmise that the Kremlin can reasonably hope that even if they give up positions in Kharkiv, Sumy, Cherniviv, Dnipropetrovsk, and forego Odessa dreams, they can still establish security on their borders by insisting on a neutral Ukraine so far as NATO membership is concerned (regrettably, in my view, leaving the door open to Ukraine for EU membership); new elections that will get rid of the Banderites; other denazification measures; very strict limits on the permitted size of Ukrainian forces; and prohibition against NATO military presence and arms in Ukraine.
US neocons, Europe and Ukraine are working hard to stop all this including, most recently, by leaking transcripts of peace talks that should be strictly confidential hoping to smear somebody of doing something. But in the meantime, Trump is relying on NATO/EU-embedded spoiler institutions (anti-corruption bureaucracies) to rid the map of top players in the Zelenskiy regime including, just a few hours ago, Zelenskiy’s closest associate (or minder?) Yermak - most likely to be followed by Zelenskiy himself or perhaps by a Zelenskiy capitulation to talks based on the 28-point plan. Trump’s positive comments on the competing 21 and 19 point plans may simply have been a ruse to distract Zelenskiy and Europe while the anti-corruption machinery is allowed to continue its work. Putin has pushed the process along by repeating his long-held position yesterday that Zelenskiy is no longer a legitimate president and that nothing of any consequence can be signed with him.
In territorial terms Russia would be better off advancing. But if it stops just on the basis of “Crimea and the 4 oblasts” then that may serve to convince European publics that Russia is not a threat to them. This could then allow European politicians to relax their absurd pretence that they ever seriously thought of Russia as a threat. It would also allow them to paper over the fact that they seem to have failed in their attempt to lay hands on Russia’s seized assets, something that may leave them with a bill for the money borrowed on the basis of these assets that has already been arranged or at least committed before they properly assessed the difficulties involving in overcoming barriers to accessing that money erected by Euroclear and the Belgium government.
Russia becomes a real threat to Europe only if and when Europe continues its war of threats and lies against Russia to the point of believing and acting on them, borrowing astronomical amounts of money to conscript armies of its unwilling youth and to send to US arms manufacturers for weapons that these will supply at equally astronomical prices, over long periods of time, and fueled with expensive US energy sources, wesapons that have already been overtaken in sophistication by Russia.
Can Europe be that stupid?
Mmmm.
As Canadian historian Mark Carley explained earlier today to Glenn Diesen, Russian foreign policy, like that of the Soviet Union before it, is driven by national self interest. Ideological commitments to a multipolar world will take second place to this. And “national” interests have a habit of aligning with the interests of domestic elites and their international networks.
I think China is even more likely to act in the same way.
So I do suspect that Putin’s interest in dealing with the US for economic advantages based on minerals and transport corridors and the like, regardless even of the US reputation for being agreement-incapable, may jeopardize its centrality to, and the perceived practicality of, the multipolar project.
Perhaps this will work to redeem the US so far as its staggering debt is concerned, a weakness that can put its fate at a par with Russia even though the size of US GDP nominally dwarfs that of Russia. Better to earn a dollar and spend no more than a dollar than to spend a dollar and earn only 99 cents. More likely, short term aggressions of US desperation in places such as Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Israel, Iran etc. will create new and ultimately suffocating entanglements.
Hold firmly in mind that the principal objective of US foreign policy is global dominance. The principal objective of US withdrawal from Ukraine (leaving it to Europe to sort out), is to focus on US preparations for war on China. On none of the fronts of US war to sustain its hegemony are things static. Here the recently elected, US-supported, right-wing government of Japan is warming things up nicely by provoking China towards a war with Japan with a view to heading off possible Japanese assistance to Taiwan and provoking a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Carley’s comments to Diesen touch on the crucially important topic of the politicization of history, of what we think we know, but do not know, about the Soviet Union, World War Two, contemporary Russia and China. Amongs other things. Never foreget the admonition of a former CIA director (said to be William Casey) who said the agency’s work would be finished when everything that Americans thought they knew was wrong. Ron Unz has been talking a great deal about such issues recently in his identification of powerful, mind-correcting, historical studies that have been strangled at birth by official and media indifference.
Suffice to say we are citizens of idioticized national consciousness, in the hands of whose leaders we have become putty and who do not wish us all well.
Exemplifying this theme is the context of Stalin’s pre-war nonaggression pact (Carley describes it as a very tense “dance of scorpions”) with Hitler, which is one of persistent attempts by Stalin 1933-1939 to secure an anti-Nazi pact with Britain and France and others, which they resolutely declined - even to the very eve of war in August 1939 when Britain was instructing delegates to a conference on such an alliance with the Soviet Union to move very slowly.
On a not entirely unrelated note Carley is very critical of Poland’s role of spoiler, fatally favoring Germany in this period over the Soviet Union, opposing Romania’s greater concern about the prospects of Nazi invasion, using Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia (beginning in September 1938) to grab a slice of territory for itself to enjoy before German, Slovak and Soviet invasion of Poland in October 1939.