The Era of Impetuosity
New readers should know that my Substack posts are dedicated to surveillance of matters related to a central premise, and that premise, put at its simplest, is that the collective West, made ever more desperate and ruthless because of its unsustainable debt load, is attempting to beat back the multiple forces of multipolarity. It is currently doing this on three main fronts: against Russia over the proxy excuse of defending Ukraine; against Iran over the proxy excuse of defending Israel; against China over the proxy excuse of defending Taiwan. But there is no limit to the number of fronts that the West will entertain.
Cramping Trumpian Impetuosity
I have reported in recent posts on the immense agitation ignited by one of Trump’s first executive orders that demanded the shutting down for 100 days (pending review) of many if not most channels of US foreign aid.
A great deal of the consternation related to how this might impact Ukraine. Although it was broadly accepted that the order did not directly interrupt the flow of weapons, there were, nonetheless, numerous ways in which the order would negatively impact both non-military and military dimensins of US participation in NATO’s proxy war against Russia over Ukraine.
Furthermore, the order would clearly impact the activities of non-government organizations (NGOs; funded, of course, by governments and, in particular by the US and Western governments), including those involved in Western electoral interference in the affairs of any country that the collective West does not like.
As it happens, a federal judge yesterday imposed a brief injunction on the order, and earlier today the OMB rescinded the stops on foreign aid activities. However, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that all President Trump’s executive orders halting foreign assistance, terminating DEI and other programs (including USAID programs) remain “in full force and effect and will be rigorously implemented.”
Serbia
On the related issue of the activities of NGOs in US-funded regime-change shenanigans, I yesterday mentioned the resignation of the prime minister of Serbia. Al Jazeera reports that Serbian Prime Minister Milos Vucevic has announced his resignation amid large protests against corruption.
“Vucevic said at a news conference on Tuesday that he had decided to step down to reduce tensions. Student-led demonstrations have been taking place since the deadly collapse of a train station canopy in the northern city of Novi Sad in November”.
I strongly suspect that here as elsewhere there are regime-change agencies at work, either instigating acts of public defiance against a democratically elected government or exploiting public dissatisfaction for alien purposes.
My personal sources in Serbia lead me to conclude that the public dissatisfaction is real, and that it is justified. Much the same could have been said of the Maidan protests in Ukraine in 2013-2014. There were genuine grounds for dissatisfaction (that were then expropriated by the US and the Banderite neo-Nazis as pretexts for the effective overthrow, amidst the street violence of a minority demographic, of a democratically elected government.
That some people are dissatisfied with their government is an eternal condition of human governance. Dissatisfaction is not in itself sufficient ground for unconstitutional and undemocratic rejection of due process.
Matters have not yet reached that stage in Serbia but they may soon get there.
Guantanamo
Another Trumpian order makes Guantanamo available for the Department of Homeland Security to detain up to 30,000 supposedly illegal foreign migrants to the US. Some of these will be migrants whose countries of origin refuse to repatriate them. The legal (or rather lawless) implications of all this will occupy many of us for many years to come.
Ukraine Corruption
Euronews reports today that Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau is investigating Defence Minister Rustem Umerov for alleged abuse of power after he overruled a board decision on procurement.
The story may yet link to concerns that arms flows from the US to Ukraine during the Biden administration were sometimes expedited by irregular means when legitimate funds were exhausted or had been stopped. For example, in 2024, Yahoo News reported that the U.S. Defense Department had identified $2 billion worth of accounting errors in its estimations of military aid sent to Ukraine, as revealed by a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. In June 2023, the Pentagon said it had overestimated the value of arms sent to Ukraine over the previous two years by over $6 billion.
Ukrainian media source Meduza explains that the case was launched following a complaint from the Anti-Corruption Action Center, which accused Umerov of possible abuse of power over his decision not to renew the contract of Maryna Bezrukova, the head of the Defense Procurement Agency. The agency is an autonomous body within the Defense Ministry and oversees weapons procurement for Ukraine’s armed forces. It was established in the summer of 2022 after a series of corruption scandals at the ministry, with the goal of making military procurement as transparent as possible.
This development comes hot on the heals of concerns in Ukraine and at the G7 reported in the Financial Times (Financial Times) that suspicions of corruption in Ukraine’s military supply chain could further exacerbate Trump’s disaffection with the war. Most western diplomats and analysts in Ukraine have backed Bezrukova. There are worries in Kiev that Umerov’s actions undermine anti-corruption efforts. Umerov had expressed his concern that arms procurement was too transparent. In 2023 Ukraine created the weapons procurement agency to sit outside of the defence ministry after a series of corruption scandals, and Bezrukova, a supply-chain expert, was appointed to head the weapons procurement agency at the start of 2024. She is said to have succeeded in reducing Ukraine’s reliance on intermediaries in defence procurement from 81 per cent in 2023, to 12 per cent in 2024.
Assassinating Putin
Tucker Carlson has accused the former Biden administration of trying to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin, BPR reports (BPR). In his podcast interview with Matt Taibbi, Carlson claimed that Tony Blinken was pushing so hard for a real war, “trying to kill Putin, for example — which the Biden administration did, they tried to kill Putin…
“If like [Putin was assassinated]… okay, so who takes over Russia? And what happens to the nuclear arsenal in a country that’s, like, so complex outsiders can’t even understand? That’s demented that you would even think of something like that. So why were they? Because chaos is a screen that protects them.”
So far as I am aware, no independent confirmation of Carlson’s claim is available. Plausible? Certatinly.
Zelenskiy’s Brutal Folly
In his most recent interview with Kremlin-friendly journalist Pavel Zarubin, President Putin claimed that at the very beginning of Russia’s SMO into Ukraine, Russia had offered a deal to Ukraine whereby Russia would pull out of Ukraine if Ukraine withdrew its forces from the two self-declared independent republics of Donbass - Donetsk and Luhansk.
According to Putin’s narrative, Ukraine declined the Putin offer but did suggest talks, which eventually took place in Minsk and then Istanbul in March and early April of 2022. The overall thrust of Putin’s narrative is that Zelenskiy came very close to an agreement that would have left the Donbass republics as components of a federal Ukraine. This would have been pretty much along the lines of the Minsk accords, giving the republics due representation, of course, in the RADA in Kiev which, and, at the same time and by the same token would have strengthened Russia’s presence in Ukraine, quite possibly as a stabilizing factor. The discussions at this time would have required a commitment from Ukraine not to join NATO, and to reduce the scale of its armed forces (or enter into discussions towards this end). Crimea would have continued to be Russian.
Parts of this agreement, perhaps the whole of it, were initialled by the respective parties. Advised by the West, Ukraine suggested that Russia should withdraw its troops from around Kiev as an indication of good faith prior to the completion of a formal resolution. But Zelenskiy was under pressure from NATO in the form of Boris Johnson (UK), who flew to Kiev for a consultation with Zelenskiy, Tony Blinken (US), and virtually all European leaders, not to sign the agreement. Zelenskiy himself used what he claimed was the atrocity at Bucha as pretext for withdrawing from the talks. It is pretty clear that the real reason was the pressure he was under from the West, coupled with what was probably his own conviction that the West would supply Ukraine with sufficient money and weapons for it to win the war.
None of this history, if we can take it on its own terms, is particularly flattering to Putin who seems (as explicitly stated last year by Ukrainian intelligence chief Budanov) to have been lured into talks that may never have been taken seriously by Zelenskiy or the West but that, like the 2015 Minsk agreements, were merely ruses to buy time for the West and for Ukraine to build up the forces they considered would be sufficient to defeat and “extend” Russia.
Further, it would seem that Putin was tricked into withdrawing Russian troops from Kiev before an agreement was signed, an agreement which, it turned out, was not signed. I think it should be accepted for the time being that the exact details of the Istanbul accords, as they are sometimes called, and of what they may mean, remain mired in controversy (see, for example, this article by David Henrickson for The National Interest (Henrickson).
The one certain conclusion we can draw that is relevant to the current phase of the conflict is that Russia, in the light of this history, must surely be extremely skeptical about proposals to resolve the conflict that are emanating from the US, Ukraine or from almost any other source. In recent posts I have looked at many of the reasons why the details that have surfaced about the thinking of people like General Kellogg or that have appeared in the document recently revealed to Strana.uk fall far short of anything that Russia could reasonabl be expected to consider sufficiently responsive to Russian security interests. We can also now be certain that Zelenskiy, whatever he may say from one minute to the next, is implacably opposed to Russia.
The chances of a negotiated settlement at this time are fast receding.
Ukraine Battlefields
Ukraine regularly mounts counter-attacks in an effort to stall the relatively steady Russian advances along almost the entirety of the front lines of the conflict between Ukrainian and Russian forces. But these are rarely successful for long. The pace of Russian advance has eased of late, as unseasonably warm weather has exacerebated the declining integrity of road surfaces and made fields too muddy for most armed vehicles.
Nonetheless, the recent Russian victories in Vremivka and Velyka Novosilka, southwest of Russian-held Vuhledar and directly north of Russian-held Staramaiorske and Urozhaine, have prepared the way for a Russian adance to Novopil and Zelene Pole to the immediate west, one that is intended, eventually and perhaps after several months, to link up with a Russian advance on Huliapole, much further to the west.
A little further north, west of Russian-held Kurakhove, Russian forces are in the process of taking Dachne, from which they will likely press on westwards towards Ulakly and Kostiantynopil. Russian forces are well into the process of establishing a defense line that will run from Kostiantynopil in the south to Yasanove to the north.
North of Yasanove, Russian forces have complete control over Novoitlyzavativka and are advancing on Nodezhidinka which will put Russia on a trajectory towards Dnipro.
The city of Pokrovsk is surrounded by Russian forces to its east, south and southwest. To the east, there are heavy clashes ongoing between Udachne and Kottyne. From Kottyne, Russian forces will likely proceed towards Molodetske and Novopidhrodne. Russian forces appear to be headed into the high-rise center of Pokrovsk itself, advancing from Novoukrainke, near Shevchenko.
Russia has taken most of Toretsk to the north (Ukraine still struggles to retain control of a major mine to the city’s north), and has taken much of Chasiv Yar yet further north. Russian progress is least in evidence in the region of Siversk, but further north there is evidence of daily Russian movements towards Lyman and Kupyansk with the possibility of a link-up by Russian forces moving northwards from west of the Oskill with those moving south from Vovchansk direction.
West Asia
The EU, like the US, continues to sanction Syria, perhaps with a view to using the carrot of future sanctions relief as a way of disciplining the Western-supported but otherwise pro-terrorist regime of Turkish-backed HTS.
With this approach in mind, apparently, the EU is telling HTS that it will not be lifting sanctions for as long as Russia maintains its naval base in Tartous or its air base in Khmeneim. Recent reports suggest there is little activity going on at Khmeneim and the BBC today reports that Russia is removing vehicles and containers from its key Tartous port.
A Russian delegation is currently in Syria. The indications are that HTS and Turkiye, its principal sponsor, would like Russia to stay and may be suggesting to Russia that it retain the bases in return for a payment (in the form of new Russian investment in Syria that might compare or at least provide some compensation for the losses Syria incurs from EU sanctions). The Assad government was hostile to foreign investment for fear that it might lead to large foreign countries exercising excessive influence over the political system and exercising unfair advantage over local enterprise.
The Trump administration is reported to be preparing to withdraw US forces, numbering around 2000, from Syria. This would undermine the position of the Kurdish SDF, perhaps forcing the SDF to come to terms with the Turkish-backed SNA forces with whom they are clashing in the north and northeast. Or, given that this in turn would be a threat to the Israeli forces that have expropriated a large strip of territory in the south of Syria, and who would have expected a friendly alliance with the SDF along Syria’s eastern border with Iraq, the SDF may concretize its alliance with the IDF. While the US would have avoided going to war, through its proxy SDF forces, with another NATO member, Turkiye, US ally Israel could find itself more quickly involved in a war against Turkiye and, therefore against the new Syrian regime presided over by al-Jolani and HTS which is principally backed by Turkiye.
A peaceful outcome for Syria, this is not.