Link to full interview on Rumble here.

Link to excerpt of interview on YouTube here.

You can watch Papadopoulos’ interview with Ukrainian parliamentarian in exile Andreii Derkach on Twitter here.

By Connor Echols, Responsible Statecraft, 2/16/24

Roughly 70% of Americans want the Biden administration to push Ukraine toward a negotiated peace with Russia as soon as possible, according to a new survey from the Harris Poll and the Quincy Institute, which publishes Responsible Statecraft.

Support for negotiations remained high when respondents were told such a move would include compromises by all parties, with two out of three respondents saying the U.S. should still pursue talks despite potential downsides. The survey shows a nine-point jump from a poll in late 2022 that surveyed likely voters. In that poll, 57% of respondents said they backed talks that would involve compromises.

The new data suggests that U.S. government policy toward the Ukraine war is increasingly out of step with public opinion on the eve of the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“Americans’ strong support for U.S. diplomatic efforts to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stands in stark contrast to Washington’s reluctance to use its considerable leverage to get Kyiv and Moscow to the negotiating table and end this war,” said George Beebe, the director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute.

The Biden administration has publicly rejected the idea of negotiating an end to the war with Russia, with U.S. officials saying that they are prepared to back Ukraine “as long as it takes” to achieve the country’s goal of ejecting Russian troops from all of its territory, including Crimea.

Just this week, Russian sources told Reuters that the U.S. declined a Kremlin offer to pursue a ceasefire along the current frontlines in conversations held in late 2023 and early 2024, including a round of unofficial talks in Turkey.

U.S. officials denied the claim, saying there was no “official contact” between Moscow and Washington on the issue and that the U.S. would only agree to negotiations involving Ukraine. Reuters’ Russian sources claimed that American officials said they did not want to pressure Kyiv into talks.

The Harris/Quincy Institute poll involved an online survey of 2,090 American adults from Feb. 8 to 12. The results are weighted to ensure a representative sample of the U.S. population. The margin of error is 2.5% using a 95% confidence level.

As the House weighs whether to approve new aid for Ukraine, 48% of respondents said they support new funding as long as it is conditioned on progress toward a diplomatic solution to the war. Others disagreed over whether the U.S. should halt all aid (30%) or continue funding without specific conditions (22%).

This question revealed a sharp partisan divide on whether to continue Ukraine funding in any form. Fully 46% of Republicans favor an immediate shutoff of the aid spigot, as compared to 17% of Democrats.

Meanwhile, 54% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans favored conditioning aid on diplomatic talks. “The American people seem more clear-eyed than Washington in recognizing the urgent need to pair aid for Ukraine’s defense with a diplomatic offensive,” Beebe argued.

The poll also showed that most Americans expect the war to drag into at least 2025. Only 16% of respondents thought the war would end this year. Others were evenly split on how long the war might last, with 46% expecting it to be resolved before the end of 2026 and 38% saying there is no end in sight.

YouTube link here.

Rumble link here.

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 1/30/24

For over a decade, experts have noted that Russian political culture has been drifting away from the pragmatic, technocratic authoritarianism that characterized the first stage of the Vladimir Putin era, which was open to all sorts of cooperation with the West.

Now, it is taking a more ideological stance that sees the West as not merely a geopolitical foe but also the source of destructive moral and cultural contagion.

Russia is considering a law that will require any foreigners entering the country to sign a “loyalty agreement,” pledging not to defame Russia’s history or state institutions, nor to advocate for any “nontraditional” sexual ideas while visiting the country. Under the proposed legislation, which is being prepared by the Kremlin, there will be legal consequences for violators.

Another bill presently before the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, would target foreigners and Russians living abroad for statements and actions deemed “Russophobic” – expressing hatred or contempt toward Russia or things Russian. Punishments could include confiscation of property within Russia or a ban on entering the country.

In Soviet times, there was a coherent state ideology strictly curated by the Communist Party. But Russia’s emerging order seems a mix of tough but often vaguely worded laws designed to limit critical speech and public protest, strengthen military preparedness, and ban “deleterious” Western influences such as gender-affirming care and public homosexuality. At the same time, the government is pushing an ill-defined campaign to celebrate Russia’s distinctly conservative civilizational qualities, historical greatness, and adherence to “traditional” moral values.

“This is a way of consolidating the ‘good Russians,’ the patriotic ones, around [President] Putin and the Kremlin,” says Maria Lipman, co-editor of the Russia Post, a journal of Russian affairs published by George Washington University. “The government is the main trendsetter, but there are many public actors who put forward their own initiatives, sometimes a bit too much. But in the present atmosphere, it’s unacceptable to come up with any progressive proposal, but perfectly OK to float any socially conservative idea.”

An anti-progressive atmosphere

The Duma has erected a legislative fortress aimed at blocking the penetration of Western influence, beginning in 2012 with laws against foreign-connected civil society groups. Those laws have since led to the banning of most big, internationally connected organizations and the extension of the “foreign agent” label to hundreds of groups and individuals that are critical of authority.

The pace of anti-Western measures has intensified amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has convinced most Russians is a struggle for survival against a West united in its hostility.

While the Kremlin’s legal campaign is sweeping, lower-level officials are often eager to push further with their own socially conservative proposals, says Ms. Lipman. Some regional officials have suggested measures to prohibit young women from wearing pants, while a leading Duma deputy recently suggested the restoration of traditional shop classes in which girls learn to make borscht and boys learn to use tools.

“Some of these ideas are too much, and not likely to get official support,” she says. “But they have the effect of changing the atmosphere, and driving public moods further in the same direction.”

For example, growing calls to ban abortion, despite having support of the Russian Orthodox Church, will probably not go far in a society in which women tend to be better educated than men and have been part of the workforce, with full rights to control their private choices, for about a century.

But the mounting campaign against the “propaganda of nontraditional sexual identity” is another matter. Experts say that LGBTQ+ people enjoy very little public support in Russia, and hence the intensifying measures against them have received no pushback over the past decade. Any open expression of gay identity has been criminalized, gender transition has been legally prohibited, and depictions of any “nontraditional” behaviors have been banned from social media as well as from movies and TV.

Late last year, Russia’s Supreme Court branded the “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organization,” a move that suggests authorities believe gay identity isn’t a native trait but must be a destructive import from abroad.

“This would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” says Boris Vishnevsky, a liberal deputy of the St. Petersburg city council. “They banned an organization that doesn’t exist, so no representatives were able to come forward and speak on its behalf. The effect of this absurd decision will just be to further silence the voices of anyone who has what they call a nontraditional orientation. Now they will be associated with that nonexisting extremist organization, and face criminal prosecution.”

Winning converts

Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, which tracks extremist trends, in Moscow, says that much of the official worry over “woke” ideas is, ironically, inspired by Western right-wingers whom the Kremlin sees as a simpatico force.

“There are a lot of connections between Russian conservatives and especially those in the U.S.,” he says. “It seems they adopt some of their issues, such as opposing abortion and [gender-affirming care], even though these do not have very much relevance for Russian society. But it becomes part of the toolbox for propaganda and indoctrination.”

Opinion polls show that the Kremlin has been steadily winning its argument that the West is an implacable enemy whose malign influence needs to be resisted by means of strong laws, tougher social control, and vigorous propaganda.

“There is no longer a disbelief among the public when the government says the West is an enemy, as there used to be in the past,” says Ms. Lipman. “Most pro-Western liberals have left Russia since the war began and are no longer part of the internal discussion. Meanwhile Western leaders are sanctioning Russia, helping Ukraine, and openly saying their goal is to weaken Russia. Not surprisingly, Putin’s anti-Western stance has never been so convincing to the broad Russian public as it is today.”

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 2/18/24

Russia finally captured the Ukrainian fortress town of Avdeevka following a protracted battle that ended in Kiev’s chaotic retreat and the abandonment of its wounded troops. The timing took place as the Western elite met in Germany for this year’s Munich Security Conference over the weekend, which conveniently enabled them to plan their next moves in this proxy war. No significant financial or military aid is expected, however, despite Ukraine’s newly clinched security pacts with Germany and France.

Rather, as was explained here earlier in the month when analyzing the latest Biden-Scholz Summit in DC, the West’s focus will be on the long-term containment of Russia in Europe beyond the borders of that former Soviet Republic. To that end, Germany’s role as the US’ preferred “Lead From Behind” partner in the EU will become more prominent, which will take the form of connecting the “military Schengen” with the revived Weimar Triangle in order to accelerate the construction of “Fortress Europe”.

The preceding three hyperlinked analyses explain these concepts more in depth as well as their relationship, but they can be summarized as Germany exploiting its comprehensive subordination of Poland to resume its long-lost superpower trajectory after a nearly eight-decade-long hiatus. The reason why the West’s attention will turn towards accelerating this geostrategic shift instead of clinging to its proxy war on Russia via Ukraine after Avdeevka is because it’s now clear that the latter is a lost cause.

Russia already won the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with NATO that Secretary General Stoltenberg declared almost exactly one year ago as proven by the counteroffensive’s failure and the subsequent reversal of this conflict’s dynamics whereby Ukraine is now once again on the defensive. Former Command-in-Chief Zaluzhny’s replacement Syrsky explicitly admitted this last week before the disastrous retreat from Avdeevka, which is regarded as Kiev’s last major fortress in Donbass.  

The stage is now set for a forthcoming Russian offensive that could steamroll through the rest of this region in the best-case scenario from Moscow’s perspective and the worst-case one from the West’s. That’s not to say that this will indeed happen because the so-called “fog of war” makes it impossible to accurately discern Ukraine’s full defensive capabilities behind the Line of Contact (LOC), but it’s not without reason that the West is panicking and Zelensky decided to blame them for his latest defeat.

He complained that a so-called “artificial lack of weaponry” was responsible in an allusion to the congressional deadlock over more Ukraine aid, which Biden agreed with to pressure his political foes. Navalny’s unexpected death on Friday was taken advantage of by anti-Russian hawks to demand that the House pass the Senate’s proxy war funding bill when it resumes its session later this month, but even if it’s approved, the problem is that the US has already expended its stockpiles.

While it’s possible that it could dip into those reserves that it’s saved for meeting its national security needs and coerce its vassals into doing so as well, the fact of the matter is that the counteroffensive’s failure in spite of much larger aid given to Kiev up until then suggests that this won’t make a difference. Whatever might be sent would be used solely to hold the LOC as long as possible and prevent a Russian breakthrough in order to perpetuate the stalemate that Zaluzhny was the first to admit had set in by fall.

Truth be told, that description was inaccurate since the LOC continues gradually moving westward and the pace might speed up after Russia’s capture of Avdeevka. President Putin already signaled that he won’t stop until his security guarantee requests are met through military or diplomatic means after recently regretting that he hadn’t ordered the special operation to begin sooner and saying on Sunday after the fall of that Ukrainian fortress town that victory is “a matter of life and death” for Russia.

It remains unclear when and on what terms the conflict will end, but the writing is on the wall and it clearly reads that Russia’s security guarantee requests will be met to some extent or another, ergo why the West is now planning for a decades-long “confrontation” with Russia per Stoltenberg’s own words. Therein lies the significance of the geostrategic shift that was identified earlier in this analysis regarding Germany’s role as the US’ top “Lead From Behind” partner for containing Russia in Europe.

In furtherance of that goal, NATO’s continental-wide “Steadfast Defender 2024” drills – the largest since the end of the Old Cold War – will be aimed at optimizing the partial implementation of the “military Schengen” between Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands, which France is expected to soon join. The Baltics will likely also participate as well given that they require support for building their so-called “Baltic Defense Line”, which could extend up to the Arctic if Finland gets involved too as expected.

The revived Weimar Triangle comes into play since Germany requires French backing because Berlin can’t realistically do all of this on its own, which in turn necessitated Poland’s military subordination to its western neighbor via the abovementioned logistics pact between them. A military corridor from France to Estonia, which could reach Finland via Denmark-Sweden (the second of whom is a NATO aspirant and expected to join this new “Schengen”), is therefore taking shape before the world’s eyes.

Russia’s capture of Avdeevka will therefore reverberate across Europe by accelerating the implementation of these long-term containment plans seeing as how NATO’s proxy war on it through Ukraine is obviously a lost cause after the fall of that former Soviet Republic’s latest fortress town. It’s this geostrategic dynamic that observers should pay more attention to than anything else since the resumption of Germany’s long-lost superpower trajectory is a development of global significance.