By David C. Hendrickson, The National Interest, 1/24/24

Links embedded in original. – Natylie

The Istanbul Accords have reached a mythic status in segments of the non-interventionist commentariat with whom I usually agree. Numerous thinkers whom I greatly esteem—Alexander Mercouris, Alastair Crooke, Branko Marcetic, Ivan Katchanovski, Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald, David Sachs, and Doug Bandow—have held that Ukraine and Russia were on the brink of an agreement in Istanbul in spring 2022, only to have the settlement vetoed by the United States. I disagree. I think the Istanbul Accords were a phantom.

The critics enlist as evidence for their view people who were close to the negotiators—mediators like Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor and confidant of Russian president Vladimir Putin; Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who played an essential early role in starting negotiations (and obtained Putin’s pledge that he wouldn’t kill Ukrainian resident Volodymyr Zelensky); and Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. Each mediator has presented a similar narrative: there was an agreement in hand that was rejected under U.S. pressure. “The Ukrainians did not agree on peace,” Schröder argued, “because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans.”

As Mercouris has argued, “What we almost got on the 29th of March and thereafter was an armistice agreement, a cessation of hostilities, followed by a substantive negotiation between the Russians and the Ukrainians sorting out the accumulated problems that had emerged between them and which had led to the war. And what we got instead was the abortion of that entire process, the cancellation of the all-but-agreed armistice and cessation of hostilities.” The abortion was performed by the United States, whose emphatic rejection of negotiations was delivered by then-British prime minister Boris Johnson on April 9, 2022. “The result was months, and years, of war, which have brought Ukraine to the brink of military defeat,” said Mercouris.

This account misses the central elements of what actually happened in the peace negotiations. Much evidence shows Russia and Ukraine were never on the brink of an agreement at any point in their negotiations. Although the course of the talks revealed surprising points of consensus, large and intractable differences remained. Consequently, there was no prospect of an immediate ceasefire. This impasse had emerged well before Johnson’s April 9 trip.

These contentions, in my view, do not absolve the United States of responsibility for inciting and prolonging the war in other respects—that is a separate question—but they do attest to the intractability of the differences existing, then as now, between the parties. Most critically, the aforementioned critics present a false picture of Ukrainians longing for peace, pulled back from that happy outcome only by Anglo-American pressure. The truth is that the Ukrainians didn’t want peace on terms anywhere close to what was on offer by the Russians. A few seers apart, they wanted to fight. A review of the negotiations will make these points clear.

Breakthrough at Istanbul?

Peace negotiations commenced in Belarus a week after Russia’s invasion on February 24. Russia wanted Ukrainian recognition of the independence of the Donbas republics and Crimea’s incorporation within the Russian Federation, together with the demilitarization and “denazification” of Ukraine. Ukraine demanded “legally verified security guarantees; ceasefire; withdrawal of Russian troops.”

The first inkling of a breakthrough came in mid-March 2022 when the FT reported progress on “a tentative peace plan including a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal if Kyiv declares neutrality and accepts limits on its armed forces.” Ukraine would promise “not to host foreign military bases or weaponry in exchange for protection from allies such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Turkey.” As negotiations proceeded, the Russians reportedly dropped “denazification” as a war aim. They also accepted that Ukraine could join the EU but not NATO.

Then came the Istanbul Communique of March 29, 2022, drafted by Ukraine. It built on the tentative peace plan previously disclosed. Ukraine presented this at the first and only meeting of the parties in Istanbul. Subsequent negotiations were conducted by video conference. Oleksiy Arestovych, then a close aide to Zelensky, said that Zelensky shut down negotiations on April 3 or thereabouts after learning of alleged Russian atrocities at Bucha—the theme also of Yaroslav Trofimov’s reporting in the Wall Street Journal—but negotiations of some sort continued, perhaps with a reshuffled Ukrainian negotiating team. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on April 7 spoke of a Ukrainian draft treaty being delivered on April 6, though he didn’t like what he saw.

Russia responded warmly to certain propositions in the Istanbul Communique. “For the first time ever,” said Lavrov, “the Ukrainian side has put on paper that it is prepared to declare Ukraine a neutral, non-aligned and non-nuclear state, and to refuse to deploy weapons from foreign states on its territory or to conduct exercises on its territory with the participation of foreign military personnel, unless they are approved by all guarantors of the future treaty, including the Russian Federation.”

On March 29, the Ukrainian delegation thought they had achieved “completely successful negotiations.” Arestovych recalls that they celebrated with champagne on their return from Istanbul. But they misread the Russian response as total acceptance of their propositions. Vladimir Medinsky, who led the Russian delegation, greeted the Istanbul Communique as “a constructive step” from the Ukrainian side “towards reaching a compromise” and promised “an appropriate response” after due consideration. Alexander Mercouris noted in his March 31, 2022, broadcast that Russian officials had “made it perfectly clear that these are only tentative moves by the Ukrainians. They do not in any way approximate to the kind of offer that the Russians could accept, and they all predict long, tough negotiations continuing and going forward.”

On April 4, 2022, Mercouris emphasized the rancor of the negotiations after March 29: “The Ukrainians yesterday were making all kinds of claims that the Russians have retracted most of their demands and accepted Ukrainian proposals almost in their totality. The Russians very quickly came out and said that this was simply untrue and that Russian demands remained as they were.” The negotiations after Istanbul were marked by heated accusations of bad faith. Both sides, it seems, thought they had agreed on something, but they did not agree on what that was. Rather than being on the brink of an agreement, they quickly discovered that their positions remained far apart.

These points of disagreement can be traced in Lavrov’s commentaries on the negotiations. On April 7, Lavrov held that “a glint of realism” had informed Ukraine’s March 29 Istanbul Communique but insisted that the Ukrainian draft agreement of the previous day (April 6) departed in signal respects from it. It lacked clarity regarding the status of Crimea and Sevastopol. It demanded that there be a cessation of hostilities before a meeting of Putin and Zelensky, which was unacceptable to Russia. Ukraine also insisted that the provisions regarding military exercises by external powers on Ukrainian territory could be executed with the consent of the majority of the guarantor states, eliminating the veto that Russia thought it had gotten on March 29.

The gap between the parties on the meaning of neutrality is especially pronounced if we examine Zelensky’s explication of Ukraine’s proposals on March 28. These envisaged security guarantees from the permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) and a coalition of other states: Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, Israel, and any other nation that wished to join. In Zelensky’s view, the purpose was to substitute for the security guarantee that NATO was then unwilling (and remains still unwilling) to give. The security guarantees would mandate a no-fly-zone within seventy-two hours of a Russian infraction of the treaty, far in advance of anything that NATO had offered. In his view, the movement of these forces in aid of Ukraine would not be subject to a Russian veto.

The security architecture Zelensky envisioned meant guarantees that were more emphatic than those offered in NATO’s Article 5. His conception was much more like the 1839 Treaty of London guaranteeing Belgian neutrality (whose violation by Germany in 1914 helped provoke British intervention in the European War) than the kind of neutrality Finland had enjoyed during the Cold War, which is what the Russians wanted for Ukraine. Zelensky insisted that getting these external guarantees—a potentially lengthy process—was a condition for Ukraine’s ratification of the treaty, as was a national referendum. In the meantime, he wanted a ceasefire paired with a Russian withdrawal to the February 23 lines.

The Istanbul discussions over neutrality, often seen as a conceptual breakthrough, were something of a conceptual muddle, as the parties entertained sharply conflicting notions of what that would or could practically entail. Russia thought it got a veto on international military exercises in Ukraine, as stated in Proposal 3 of the Istanbul Communique; Ukraine later backpedaled on that point. The initial offer probably didn’t reflect Ukraine’s bottom line, as the negotiators never intended that their security would be subject to a Russian veto.

These were not the only disagreements to emerge after March 29. The Ukrainians had proposed that the issues of Crimea and Sevastopol be left to bilateral negotiations for fifteen years. Arestovych still seems to be under the impression that the Russians had agreed to that proposal, which he thought was highly advantageous to Ukraine. But the Russians rejected that approach publicly in the first days of April. “Among our non-negotiable demands,” Medinsky later recalled, “were the recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea [and] the recognition of the independence of the Donbass republics.” There was no prospect that Ukraine could have kept its eastern territories by agreeing to neutrality.

At that time, as later, this “land for peace” deal was stoutly opposed by some 80 percent of Ukrainians, so Zelensky’s ability to accept it was constricted even if he wanted to agree. Russia’s insistence on this point contradicts Gerhard Schröder’s idea that the Russians were prepared to give the Donbas a status like South Tyrol in their peace plan. The last thing that Putin could accept was the revival of Minsk II. Even Medinsky’s cautious acceptance of the framework Ukraine offered on March 29 was greeted with derision in domestic Russian opinion: “Medinsky did more damage in three minutes than all the Ukrainian propaganda in a month,” said one critic.

On April 5, Lavrov expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the state of the negotiations. “If the Ukrainian delegation is going to continue to talk about the need for additional steps on the part of the Russian Federation, vehemently refuse (as it is doing now) even to discuss the goals of denazification and demilitarization and restoring Russian language rights, and insist that there are no problems with the Russian language or the rights of the Russian-speaking people and Nazification reaching all areas of that country’s life, I do not think this will be helpful in advancing the negotiating process.”

Russia never signed on to the Istanbul Communique in its entirety. Russia’s own statements at the time contradict Putin’s recent assertion that “in Istanbul we agreed on everything.” Russia accepted the Ukrainian demarche as a positive first step that required further discussion and clarification. On April 7, Lavrov promised that the Russian answer, when it came, would spell out “all the key positions and demands very clearly and in full.”

The Russian draft treaty was presented to Ukraine on April 15, 2022. This was the document that Putin waved in the air in his speech to African leaders in June 2023. Medinsky told the New York Times in May 2022 that Russia had submitted its own treaty draft at that time, so the existence of this document was known. Still, Putin’s intervention gave it a name—“The Treaty on the Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine.” Putin also inadvertently disclosed important details previously unknown.

When the draft treaty was submitted to the Ukrainians, ironically, the peace process had already broken down. On April 12, Putin himself declared the talks at a dead end. Russia never received an answer to its April 15 propositions. That the head of the Ukrainian delegation initialed the Russian draft, a fact on which Putin now lays great emphasis, meant only an acknowledgment that Ukraine had received it.

The most important revelation in Putin’s June 2023 speech came in the military annex, a separate one-page memorandum that recorded stark differences in the military forces to be allowed in Ukraine under the agreement (250,000 in the Ukrainian version, 100,000—of which 15,000 were reservists— in the Russian.) This showed that the parties were far apart on one of Russia’s key criteria for peace: demilitarization. At the time, too, Ukraine was mobilizing vast numbers of volunteers and reservists, with over 500,000 forces either in or soon-to-be-in arms. In his March 28 interview outlining Ukraine’s negotiating posture, Zelensky rejected demilitarization as unthinkable. Russia, in its draft treaty, continued to insist upon it.

Neither party has published nor leaked the April 15 draft treaty, which Putin claimed contained eighteen sections. Both sides may have been embarrassed by its contents. Putin said Russia “never agreed with the Ukrainian side that this treaty would be confidential,” but he didn’t release it. Lavrov, however, had promised on April 7 a complete statement of the Russian position; the draft treaty doubtless fulfilled that promise while also incorporating those elements of the Istanbul Communique—Ukrainian neutrality, non-alignment, renunciation of nuclear weapons—that were to Russia’s liking.

We must assume that the Russian draft treaty included an acknowledgment of Crimea’s membership in the Russian Federation and of the independence of the Donbas republics, with the territorial boundaries the DPR and LPR claimed in their 2014 referenda (only half of which they controlled before the war). We must also assume that the treaty included language mandating both demilitarization and denazification, which Zelensky had previously called deal-breakers and which were not part of the Istanbul Communique. How these propositions were framed is unknown, but the predominant sentiment among the Ukrainians likely saw them as intolerable infringements on their sovereignty. That’s one of the reasons they walked away from the Russian offer. They had others.

The Elusive Ceasefire

The Russians and the Ukrainians were also sharply divided over when a ceasefire would take place. For the Ukrainians, it was to happen immediately. It would entail the retreat of Russian forces to the February 23 lines, after which the two presidents would meet and agree to a treaty. For the Russians, a ceasefire would happen once the treaty had been executed to Russia’s satisfaction. This Russian posture set onerous but inherently ambiguous conditions for halting the fighting. The conditions, of course, never came close to being fulfilled. During the negotiating process, there was never a point when a ceasefire was “all but agreed.”

On April 5, Lavrov rejected any notion of an imminent ceasefire; Russia wouldn’t play “the cat-and-mouse game” in which a ceasefire was given in exchange for nonbinding commitments. As Mercouris reported the Russian position on April 6: “The Russians intend to keep their troops in Ukraine beyond the borders, the territories of Donbas, in places like Kherson, Zaporozhye, and wherever until Ukraine not only signs but ratifies this treaty—which is one which the Russians insist must make fundamental concessions on the state of Crimea and Donbas and on the issues of demilitarization and denazification— and put those provisions fully into effect.”

A ceasefire put off until the treaty went into effect meant that Ukraine had to demilitarize before Russia agreed to a truce or withdrawal of its forces. According to the military annex, Ukraine would have to reduce its troops to 100,000 instead of increasing them to 500,000 or 1,000,000 (as it was furiously trying to do). The likelihood of such demilitarization in April 2022 was just about nil. Neither party could trust the other to fulfill its obligations. The danger that the other party would use a pause in fighting to augment its forces weighed on both sides.

These factors point to the truism that it is much easier to stop a war from starting in the first place than to stop it once it has started. There is no evidence, in any case, that the parties had even begun discussions on the military deconfliction (across a 1200-kilometer front) that would need to occur in the event of a ceasefire.

Given these manifest obstacles, it is difficult to see the basis for the claim that an agreement and a ceasefire were imminent at any point in April 2022. Valeriy Chaly, the Ukrainian diplomat who served on Ukraine’s delegation at the peace talks, recently claimed that the parties were very close to an agreement in mid-to-late April. Still, the assumption on which he rests this judgment is very questionable.

A week into the war, says Ambassador Chaly, Putin had concluded he had made a big mistake and, hence, was ready to reverse course. Was that really Putin’s view? If it was, it was not reflected in Putin’s subsequent conduct or public statements at the time, which displayed a steely resolution that Russia’s war aims would be achieved. Just when Chaly said that Putin was feeling defeated, Russian military spokesmen were claiming to have Ukraine on the ropes and to have destroyed a tremendous amount of its military capacity.

The logic of Chaly’s position is that Putin thought he was losing the war and would have to make critical compromises. Arestovych believed a similar dynamic was at work, with Russia retreating in late March on its diplomatic positions regarding demilitarization and denazification just as it withdrew from outside Kyiv. It is likely, however, that the treaty Russia presented on April 15 was based on the opposite calculation: that Ukraine was losing and would have to appease Russia or face continued war. These opposing understandings nixed any possibility of a ceasefire.

Johnson’s Visit and the U.S. Role

Critics of the U.S. role have emphasized the importance of Boris Johnson’s visit to Kyiv as the decisive event that turned Ukraine against a peace agreement. Western spokesmen, by contrast, have vehemently denied that the United States played any role in sabotaging the accords. “Utter bullshit,” a senior administration official told Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal. “I know for a fact the United States didn’t pull the plug on that. We were watching it carefully.” Boris Johnson, interviewed by the Times of London, agreed. “This is nothing but total nonsense and Russian propaganda.” In his April visit to Kyiv, Johnson recalled expressing deep skepticism of any Russian offer. He pledged “1000 percent” support for aiding Ukraine’s military resistance but didn’t tell Zelensky what to do.

I am inclined to minimize the significance of Johnson’s visit, in part because stark differences over the peace deal had already emerged and in part because the message Johnson conveyed in Kyiv had already been repeatedly communicated before his arrival.

Immediately after the outbreak of war, Western governments declared a total economic and financial war against Russia. Western authorities froze $300 billion of Russian reserves and expected a withering blow against Russian financial and military power. Defense ministries were gearing up for large-scale arms transfers to Ukraine. In his speech in Warsaw on March 26, 2022, President Joe Biden called for Putin’s removal, saying that his invasion of Ukraine stemmed from a “craving for absolute power and control.” Biden called for “swift and punishing costs” that would be “unprecedented and overwhelming.” There was no hint of compromise in the Biden administration’s approach.

The hardline approach, suffused with anger, that arose after February 24 in the United States and Europe ruled out any negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine. How could Zelensky make peace with Putin if the West did not do so? A separate Russian-Ukrainian peace, absent a larger peace between Russia and the West, was inconceivable then because it would require Ukraine to entrust its fortunes to the Russians. It is also the case, however, that Zelensky encouraged a stiff Western response and wished the West to go much further. He was still angling for a no-fly-zone on April 10, having asked for that from the war’s outset. He wanted his partners to cosplay Winston Churchill, not Neville Chamberlain. Boris Johnson obliged him.

The Western attitudes precluded a Russo-Ukraine agreement, but the West didn’t put the squeeze on Zelensky to reject the Russian treaty. He had reasons of his own to disown it. He was hankering for Western support and would have gone ballistic had the Americans, reversing their decade-old policy, told him to suck it up and make a deal with the Russians.

The narrative under consideration—the Ukrainians wanted to accept Russia’s offer, but the Americans wouldn’t allow it—ignores the existence of a potent Ukrainian nationalism that refused concessions on points the Russians considered vital.

In his most recent statement, Davyd Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, denied that a peace agreement was possible with Russia in the war’s first months. Many observers misread his earlier remarks about the Istanbul peace talks. They heard him say that there was a simple deal on the table, conceding Ukrainian neutrality in exchange for an end to the war, whereas, in fact, Arakhamia was explaining why the deal didn’t happen. In his latest interview, Arakhamia also downplayed the significance of Johnson’s visit, which he had previously mentioned as a factor in Ukraine’s decision to reject the treaty: “Neither then nor now do any of our [Western] partners give Ukraine instructions on how to build its defenses or what political decisions to take. This is the sovereign right of the Ukrainian leadership.”

Those assertions seem credible. Critics suspect that U.S. power is being brought to bear behind the scenes to tell its dependents what’s what, but in our weird empire, it often works the other way around. Allies get 100 percent support and lots of green lights. Just tell us what you want, and we’ll support you as long as it takes.

Ivan Katchanovski believes that Johnson’s visit was decisive in sabotaging an accord. The abandonment of negotiations did not come after Bucha, he argues, but after Johnson’s visit. He cites Zelensky on April 9, the day of Johnson’s visit, when he said, “We don’t want to lose opportunities, if we have them, for a diplomatic solution.” However, the fact that Zelensky would not publicly declare the negotiations at an end does not show that he was ready to accept the Russian position. He was not. He said he favored a diplomatic solution but did not say he was willing to surrender Donbas or Crimea. He did not say he was ready to accept Ukraine’s demilitarization. He did not say that he had abandoned his quest for a substitute NATO via security guarantees from outside powers. He did not accept Russia’s interpretation of when a ceasefire would take effect.

A Tangled Web

There is much we don’t know about the course of the spring 2022 negotiations; historians and polemicists will undoubtedly argue about their crooked path for a long time to come. Naftali Bennett recalled that the parties exchanged seventeen drafts, of which there is little to no public record. Ukrainian negotiators said at the time that the Russians were shifting their positions almost daily. The Russians said the same about the Ukrainians. A tangled web, indeed.

However, the public record does disclose far-reaching differences between the parties that persisted throughout the negotiations. Though Russia’s terms preserved Ukrainian sovereignty in most of its territory, it did amount to an effective Ukrainian capitulation on the points that had brought about the war. The Ukrainians were in no mood to do that. That made any peace agreement a remote prospect in the spring of 2022.

It’s sad that a man died at such a young age and left behind a wife and children, regardless of what one thought of his political opinions or allegiances. So I’m not going to gloat like I’ve seen some critics of the west do. However, it’s not lost on me the utter double standard with which western media and officials are treating Navalny’s death compared to the death of Gonzalo Lira in a Ukrainian prison recently or the imprisonment and consequent ongoing slow death of Julian Assange. The comments of Volodymyr Zelensky are particularly nauseating. – Natylie

Euronews, 2/16/24

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has died in prison, Russian authorities announced on Friday. He was 47.

A statement from the prison service of Yamalo-Nenets, where Navalny was imprisoned, said he “felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness.” 

It detailed that medical workers arrived “immediately” and “all necessary resuscitation measures were carried out,” but they did not “yield positive results.”

“Emergency medical doctors confirmed the death of the convict,” the statement added. 

Navalny was a lawyer turned blogger, YouTuber, protest organiser, anti-corruption activist and face of Russia’s opposition. 

The 47-year-old gained notoriety by criticising President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle whom he accused of vast corruption and opulence.

According to a statement cited by Russian state news agency TASS, Putin has been informed of his foes’ demise, though has no additional information about his death. 

Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov is also quoted by TASS as saying that the federal prison service is making all necessary checks regarding his death.

‘No confirmation of this yet’

Navalny’s team, however, said that they have not had confirmation of the politician’s death.

“Alexei’s lawyer is now flying to Kharp. As soon as we have information, we will report it,” Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh wrote on X.

Navalny’s chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, described the prison services’ announcement as “a confession that they have killed” him, cautioning however that they have not yet had confirmation. 

Russian newspaper editor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov told Reuters on Friday that the opposition figure’s death was “murder”, claiming that harsh treatment had caused his demise.

“My sincere belief is that it was the conditions of detention that led to Navalny’s death … His sentence was supplemented by murder,” Muratov said, offering condolences to his family.

Navalny was arrested in 2021 upon his return to Russia from Germany where he had been treated for a suspected assassination attempt by poison. He was immediately incarcerated and sentenced to 19 years in a penal colony on charges of extremism.

Navalny had initially been serving his sentence in the Vladimir region of central Russia, about 230 kilometres east of Moscow. 

But he was transferred late last year to a “special regime” penal colony – the highest security level of prisons in Russia – above the Arctic Circle.

‘Killed by the Kremlin’s brutality’

Leaders around the world have condemned his death. 

Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy said it was “obvious” Putin was behind Navalny’s death, during a meeting in Berlin with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Zelenskyy said the Russian president does not care who dies so long as his position as the head of the state is secure. 

“Whatever story they tell, let us be clear: Russia is responsible,” said US Vice President Kamala Harris at the Munich Security Conference.

Writing on X, UK foreign secretary and former Prime Minister David Cameron said Putin should be held accountable for what had happened. 

“Navalny fought bravely against corruption. Putin’s Russia fabricated charges against him, poisoned him, sent him to an arctic penal colony & now he has tragically died,” Cameron added.

Several EU leaders also pinned responsibility directly on Putin’s Russia.

“This terrible news shows once again how Russia has changed and what kind of regime is in power in Moscow,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

French President Emmanuel Macron added: “In today’s Russia, free spirits are sent to the Gulag and condemned to death. Anger and indignation.”

Condemnation and condolences also flooded in from the Belgian, Czech, Dutch, Polish, Spanish and Swedish capitals, as well as from Russia’s neighbouring Baltic countries.

Alexei Navalny had a few health scares since he voluntarily returned from Germany to Russia in 2021.

He had been treated in Germany for what tests showed as nerve agent poisoning, with Navalny saying at the time he was poisoned in Siberia in 2020. 

The Kremlin denied trying to kill him. 

In 2011, Navalny was asked by Reuters if he feared whether Putin would come after him. 

“That’s the difference between me and you: you are afraid and I am not afraid,” he said. “I realise there is danger, but why should I be afraid?”

Scores of Kremlin critics, journalists and turncoat spies have died over the years in suspect circumstances. 

Attacks range from the exotic — poisoned by drinking polonium-laced tea or touching a deadly nerve agent — to the more mundane of getting shot at close range.

Read Racist or Revolutionary: The Complex Legacy of Alexey Navalny here.

***

RT, 2/16/24

Jailed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny has died, the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets Region, where he had been serving his sentence, reported on Friday afternoon.

The 47-year-old began to feel unwell after a walk, and lost consciousness, according to a statement. Russian media outlets have indicated that doctors pronounced Navalny dead after 2pm local time.

“All the necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, but they failed to achieve a positive result,” the authorities outlined.

The cause of death is being established. However, according to an RT Russian service source, the opposition figure had a blood clot.

Navalny was jailed in early 2021, over a long-standing fraud case involving French retailer Yves Rocher. The previous summer he attracted major international attention after an alleged poisoning in Siberia, which led to his transfer to Germany. Upon returning, he was sentenced to the first of several prison terms.

Initially, he was placed in a high-security facility in Vladimir Region. In 2023 he was sentenced to 19 years “special regime” for “extremism.” Late last year he was transferred to the ‘Polar Wolf’ colony in Yamalo-Nenets, located 40km above the Arctic Circle. 

The Kremlin said that President Vladimir Putin has been informed of Navalny’s death. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred questions to the Federal Penitentiary Service, adding that the cause was currently unclear.

Navalny’s lawyer, Leonid Solovyov refused to comment, but explained that his client had held a meeting on Wednesday. “Everything was normal then,” he insisted. 

Navalny joined a court session via videolink on Thursday, TASS reported, citing the court press service.

A former Russian nationalist activist, Navalny first came to attention as one of the leaders of the “Russian march,” a far-right rally previously held annually. He subsequently took a prominent role in the liberal-driven 2011-12 protests in Russia, which centered on Moscow’s Bolotnaya square. In 2013, he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral election.

Later, he established a broader movement – which produced reports on alleged corruption – and attempted to take part in the 2018 presidential contest.

Navalny, a native of Moscow, was married, with two children.

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 2/13/24

Amongst the condemnations that were hurled at Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin even before their interview was aired, was this gem from an unnamed European foreign affairs spokesman to The Guardian: 

“A spokesperson for the European Commission said it anticipated that the interview would provide a platform for Putin’s ‘twisted desire to reinstate’ the Russian empire.

‘We can all assume what Putin might say. I mean he is a chronic liar,’ said the EU’s spokesperson for foreign affairs. …

‘[Putin] is trying to kill as many Ukrainians as he can for no reason. There is only one reason for his twisted desire to reinstate the now imperialistic Russian empire where he controls everything in his neighbourhood and imposes his will. But this is not something we are able to tolerate or are willing to tolerate in Europe or the world in the 21st century.’” [Emphasis added.]

The article warned that Carlson’s interview could actually be deemed “illegal” under last year’s European Digital Services Act.  The Guardian says:

“The law is aimed at stamping out illegal content or harmful content that incites violence or hate speech from social media. All the large platforms, bar X, have signed up to a code of conduct to help them accelerate and build their internal procedures in order to comply with the law. …

The onus is on platforms to ensure content is lawful, said a spokesperson for the digital tsar, Thierry Breton. … If a social media platform does not comply with the new EU law it can be sanctioned with a hefty fine, or banned from operating in the EU.”

The Russians Are Coming … Again

Military parade on Moscow’s Red Square, May 2017. (kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

After the interview, the Western media predictably dismissed it for a variety of reasons, including that it promoted Russian “imperialism.”  The Economist wrote that Putin’s

“obsession — Russia’s historical claim to Ukraine — is backed by a nuclear arsenal. … He denied any interest in invading Poland or Latvia (though he previously said the same about Ukraine).”  

Western rhetoric about a resurgent “Russian imperialism” dates back to 2014, when Russia assisted Donbass in resisting the U.S.-backed unconstitutional change of government in Kiev. Western officials sought to characterize Russia’s action as an “invasion” that was part of a grand scheme by Putin to reconstitute the Soviet Empire and even threaten Western Europe. 

In March 2014, a month after the coup without making any reference to it to explain Russian actions, Hillary Clinton compared Putin to Adolf Hitler.  The Washington Post reported:

“‘Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s,’ Clinton said Tuesday, according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. ‘All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people, and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.’” 

March 19, 2010: U.S. Secretary of State Clinton, Ambassador Beyrle and Under Secretary Burns with Russian Prime Minister Putin during a meeting at the Novo-Ogaryovo just outside Moscow. (State Department, Public Domain)

Clinton later tried to talk down any comparison to Hitler beginning his conquest of Europe by saying Putin was not that irrational. But the notion that the Russian president is trying to reconstruct the Soviet Empire — and then threaten Western Europe — is often repeated in the West. 

The Atlantic Council has been in the forefront of keeping this idea afloat. 

Reconstituting the Soviet Empire would involve bringing the Central Asian Republics, Azerbaijan and Armenia, let alone the Baltics and the former Warsaw States, now part of NATO, under Moscow’s control. 

A slew of articles since Russia’s 2022 invasion have harped on this theme, for example, in The Hill: “The US Has a Chance to Defeat Russian Imperialism for Good;” Foreign Policy: “The Inevitable Fall of Putin’s New Russian Empire;” and Salon: “How Russian Colonialism Took the Western Anti-Imperialist Left for a Ride.”

The absurdity of the notion of a threat to the West by Russian “imperialism” is underscored every time many of these same Western leaders and media ridicule how disastrously Russia has performed on the Ukrainian battlefield and how, in the words of Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, Russia must resort to washing machine parts to keep its military going.

How can Russia be so weak and incompetent and yet be such an imminent and menacing threat at the same time? 

The late Russia specialist Stephen F. Cohen dismissed these fears as a dangerous demonization of Russia and Putin. Cohen repeatedly explained that Russia had neither the capacity nor the desire to start a war against NATO and was acting defensively against the alliance.

“How can Russia be so weak and incompetent and yet be such an imminent and menacing threat at the same time?” 

This is clear from the decades-long Russian objection to NATO expansion (which Putin raised with Carlson), coming in the 1990s when Wall Street and the U.S. dominated Russia, asset-stripping the formerly state-owned industries and impoverishing the Russian people, while enriching themselves.

It is clear from Russia backing the Minsk Accords, which would have left Donbass as an autonomous part of Ukraine, and not rejoined to Russia.

And it is clear from the treaty proposals to NATO and the United States offered by Russia in December 2021 intended to avert Russian military intervention. The West rebuffed Russia on all three diplomatic initiatives. 

Dec. 7, 2021: U.S. President Joe Biden, on screen during video call with Putin. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

While realists in Washington and Europe increasingly admit Ukraine is losing the war, neocon fantasists, desperate to keep it going, have revived the theme of the Russian threat to the West to counter congressional reluctance to throw away more money and more lives.

Trumped-up fear of Russia has served U.S. ruling circles well for more than 70 years. The first three National Intelligence Estimates of the C.I.A., from 1947 t0 1949, reported no evidence of a Soviet threat, no infrastructure to support a sustained threat, and no evidence of a desire for confrontation with the United States.

“Trumped-up fear of Russia has served U.S. ruling circles well for more than 70 years.”

Despite this, in 1948 a war scare was drummed up to save the U.S. aircraft industry, which had nearly collapsed with the end of the Second World War.

Then came the 1954 bomber gap and 1957 missile gap with the Soviet Union, now accepted as deliberate fictions.  In 1976 then C.IA. Director George H.W. Bush approved a Team B, whose purpose was again to inflate Soviet military strength. 

George Kennan, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and America’s foremost expert on the Soviet Union tried to counter such exaggerations, including late in life when he opposed NATO expansion in the 1990s. 

Now we are being asked again to believe another fictional story of a Russian threat to the West in order to save U.S. and European face — and Joe Biden’s presidency. 

It is instead a projection to cover up its own authentic imperialism and the West’s perceived threat to Russia, a big part of what Putin was trying to get across in the Carlson interview. 

Revanchism & Imperialism

The Donbass status referendums in May 2014. (Andrew Butko, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The issue at hand is the fundamental difference between imperialism and revanchism. Western critics purposely or ignorantly confuse the two to serve their interests.

Succinctly, the difference is this:  imperialists take control of a country that does not want them there and resists.  A revanchist wants to absorb former imperial lands where the population is largely the same ethnicity and welcomes the revanchist power to protect them from an outside threat.

Yes, Hitler was being revanchist in his defense of the German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. But it was a first step in an imperial design to conquer countries that ultimately resisted him.  Clinton’s effort to roll back her comments to say Putin is not as irrational as Hitler was her attempt to tamp down a suggestion that Putin wanted to conquer Europe as Hitler did. 

“The issue at hand is the fundamental difference between imperialism and revanchism. Western critics purposely or ignorantly confuse the two to serve their interests.”

To call Putin’s move on Ukraine “imperialist” is to say Russia had never conquered those lands before and that he might indeed keep going to conquer lands Russia has never controlled: i.e., Western Europe.

Russian imperialism in Ukraine took place nearly 250 years ago under the reign of Catherine the Great. That was when the Russians defeated the Turks and occupied what came to be known as Novorossiya.  Putin went back further than that to make Russian claims and he has been open about his feeling that those lands and Russia are one.  He spoke at length about it in his interviews with Oliver Stone in 2017.

Despite these revanchist or irredentist positions on Ukraine, Putin did not act on them until 2022. Carlson asked Putin twice why he didn’t move on Ukraine earlier if he held these views and twice Putin evaded the question.  The Western media is saying that Putin is lying about acting to defend the Russian speakers of the Donbass; that he was motivated by territorial expansion.  

Putin was acting both to defend Donbass’ Russian speakers (who were under imminent renewed attack in February 2022) and also saw the opportunity to reunite the old imperial lands with Russia. That opportunity was seen in the Kremlin as a necessity because of the West’s rejection of Moscow’s diplomatic efforts to avoid conflict. 

Given the results of the four regional referendums in 2022, plus the one in Crimea in 2014, it is clear the people of those regions wanted to rejoin Russia after the coup and the revival of Ukrainian extremism.  

One can condemn or criticize revanchism, but one cannot call it imperialism. 

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

By Tarik Cyril Amar, RT, 1/26/24

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has caused a stir. But this time not by haranguing the West on how much it owes Ukraine (in short: everything and then some). Or because prominent Ukrainians (former presidential adviser Aleksey Arestovich, for instance) are plausibly accusing Zelensky of missing a real and favorable opportunity for peace with Russia almost two years ago – two long years of devastating war.

Rumors of intrigues surrounding the military leadership of General Valery Zaluzhny – and perhaps even coups – or accusations of authoritarianism leveled by, for example, the mayor of Kiev, Vitaly Klitschko, are not the reason either. By now, that sort of thing is just Kiev background noise.

Instead, this time Zelensky has managed to get attention by issuing a decree ‘On Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’. Much of this fairly short document, which officially came into force on Ukraine’s Unity Day (January 22) is unsurprising. First, there is a rehash of weaponized/nationalized ‘history’ narratives that would make any serious historian blush, painting Russia (including during the Soviet period) as an evil empire that has ‘systematically’ sought to ‘destroy’ Ukrainian national identity for centuries. In Zelensky’s own words, the decree is meant to “restore the truth about the historical past for the sake of the Ukrainian future.”

But the document itself offers not truth but a silly and crude caricature. In reality, modern Ukrainian identity emerged comparatively late, and the Russian-tsarist authorities did try to curtail and restrict it, while the Soviet authorities attempted to shape it by both attacking it and promoting one version of it (as well as fighting alternatives, including a fascist version that allied with Nazi Germany). As you would expect, beyond politics, the even greater complexity of Russian-Ukrainian interactions – across the realms of (mixed) identities, beliefs, and culture, for instance – finds no reflection either.

Clearly, Zelensky decreeing history is not the place to look for an intellectually adequate, useful discussion of the fact that many more Ukrainians fought for the Soviet Union and against Nazi Germany than for Nazi Germany and against the Soviet Union. Or of biographies where Russian and Ukrainian facets were inextricably interwoven, such as that of the writer Nikolai Gogol and the even more complex cases of the painters Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky.

But let’s be fair, Ukraine and Russia have been openly at war – and on a large scale – for almost two years now. (The causes of this avoidable war are, fundamentally, the West’s reckless, shortsighted, and cynical strategy of expanding NATO come-what-may; the Ukrainian leadership’s unforgivable decision to let the West use Ukraine and its people as a proxy to weaken Russia; and last but not least, great miscalculations on all sides.) Against that background, a Ukrainian president – even one less ill-educated than Zelensky – can hardly be expected to deliver a sophisticated lecture on the discontents of national identity. So, let’s not believe the caricature he is offering us, but let’s not get worked up about it either.

What is more intriguing is another feature of the decree. Its central explicit purpose is to protect the national identity and rights of Ukrainians living in the Russian Federation, including but not limited to six named regions, which the decree labels as “historically inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians.” The list of measures to be taken to do so is predictable and, frankly, not interesting. It is a mix of lawfare, international lobbying, and instrumentalization of academics and experts that you would expect (again with a special mission for those historians eager to let themselves be used as information warfare foot soldiers). The Ukrainian World Congress, Ukraine’s Academy of Science, and the Foreign Ministry, for instance, are all charged with making their contribution to what the decree promises will be a “truthful history” – apparently without irony. Pro tip: Truth in history, insofar as possible, never comes from a government decree.

Of greater interest is the question of what this decree is really supposed to accomplish. It is, after all, a strange document to issue now. Zelensky’s regime is facing a serious, potentially fatal decline in Western backing. The situation on the front lines – think Avdeevka, the crucial fortress town in eastern Ukraine about to be taken by Russia – is so dire that the common Western euphemism of ‘stalemate’ has simply become silly: This is not what a stalemate looks like, this is what being on the verge of losing looks like. Moscow, meanwhile, has signaled no hurry in making peace, especially after recent Ukrainian attacks inside Russia, some with major civilian casualties.

Belgorod plane attack: Why did Ukraine shoot down an aircraft carrying dozens of its own soldiers?READ MORE: Belgorod plane attack: Why did Ukraine shoot down an aircraft carrying dozens of its own soldiers?

Zelensky’s decree, it is true, does not lay any direct claims on Russian territory. Yet it does, of course, imply the possibility of such claims. This seems an odd moment to up the ante in this manner.

Did Zelensky feel that he needed something uplifting to offer for Ukrainian Unity Day? Is the decree meant to confirm that the president wants to continue the war, by hinting that as bad as things may look now, in the future, Ukraine will turn the tables? If so, it seems a risky gamble. Among Ukrainians abroad, especially in the so-called ‘diaspora’, such gestures may still play well. (And maybe that is why the Ukrainian World Congress received separate mention.) It is intriguing, in this regard, to watch Zelensky’s public address on the occasion of Unity Day. Produced in his signature high-stagecraft style (complete with a dramatic score that seems to come out of a Hollywood melodrama), it climaxes in a long sequence highlighting Ukrainians abroad. But those Ukrainians actually in Ukraine could feel alienated. For them, this decree at this time may come across as a gimmick, and worse, as revealing (or confirming?) that Zelensky is no longer attached to reality.

But what if the motives behind the decree are more complicated? Could it be an attempt to create a bargaining chip (weak, certainly, but perhaps better than nothing) for a future settlement with Russia? If that is the case, it is most likely to come across as a sign of despair, a case of clutching at straws. For it is difficult to see why future Russian negotiators would care. If Zelensky – and those around him – really still believe that yet another narrative offensive can compensate for real defeat on real battlefields, then they have learned nothing.

There is yet another possibility. And it is the most unsettling one. Recall that, just before the large-scale escalation of late February 2022, many in Ukraine and abroad did not expect the country to be able to fight for a long time. Against that backdrop, there were signals, promoted by the US, that a quick Russian victory would be followed by a shift to insurgency.

That was an awful idea. But it never went away. While most of the war has unfolded more conventionally, as a clash between large armies, there have also been infiltration, sabotage, and assassination campaigns. With the war going badly for Ukraine, some irresponsible strategists in both Washington and Kiev are bound to consider a plan B – namely, answering a Russian victory with an attempt to launch an extended insurgency.

The guerrilla-style operations undertaken up until now have one feature in common with Zelensky’s strange decree – the targeting of areas inside Russia. It may appear far-fetched, and it is a matter of speculation, but we should not rule out the possibility that Zelensky is trying to hint that Ukrainians inside Russia could become an asset in this type of warfare. If so, then the true intention of the decree would be to promote paranoia inside Russia. And the best response is to absolutely ignore it.

YouTube link here.