By Big Serge, Substack, 3/28/25

The Russo-Ukrainian War is now three years old, and the third Z-Day, on February 24, 2025, was marked by a substantively different tone than prior iterations. On the battlefield, Russian forces stand significantly closer to victory than they have at any point since the opening weeks of the war. After reversals early in the war as Ukraine took advantage of Russian miscalculations and insufficient force generation, the Russian army surged in 2024, collapsing Ukraine’s front in southern Donetsk and pushing the front forward towards the remaining citadels of the Donbas.

At the same time, 2025’s Z-Day was the first under the new American administration, and hopes were high in some quarters that President Trump could bring about a negotiated settlement and end the war prematurely. The new tenor seemed to be made abundantly clear in an explosive February 28 Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vice President Vance, and Zelensky, which ended in the Ukrainian president being ignominiously shouted down and evicted from the White House. This followed an abrupt announcement that Ukraine was to be cut off from American ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) until Zelensky apologized for his conduct.

In an information sphere rife with rumors, inscrutable diplomatic maneuvering, and heavy handed posturing (clouded further by the distinctive style and personality of Trump himself), it is very hard to figure out what might actually matter. We’re left with a bizarre juxtaposition: based on the explosive vignettes of Trump and Zelensky, many might hope for an abrupt course change on the war, or at least a revision of the American position. On the ground, however, things continue much as they have, with the Russians grinding forward along a sprawling front. The infantryman entrenched near Pokrovsk, listening for the whirring of drones overhead, could be forgiven for not feeling that much has changed at all.

I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump’s self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia’s war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.

The Great Misadventure: Front Collapse in Kursk

When the history of this war is laid out retrospectively, no shortage of ink will be lavished on Ukraine’s eight month operation in Kursk. From the broader perspective of the wartime narrative, Ukraine’s initial incursion into Russia filled a variety of needs, with the AFU “taking the fight” to Russia and seizing the initiative, albeit on a limited front, after months of continuous Russian advances in the Donbas.

Notwithstanding the immense hyperbole that followed the launch of Ukraine’s Kursk Operation (which I facetiously nicknamed “Krepost”, in an homage to the 1943 German plan for its own Battle of Kursk), in the months that followed this was undoubtedly a sector of great significance, and not only because it brought the distinctive of Ukraine holding territory within the prewar Russian Federation. Based on a perusal of the Order of Battle, Kursk was clearly one of the two axes of primary effort for the AFU, along with the defense of Pokrovsk. Dozens of brigades were involved in the operation, including a significant portion of Ukraine’s premier assets (mechanized, air assault, and marine infantry brigades). Perhaps more importantly, Kursk is the only axis where Ukraine has made a serious effort to gain initiative and go on the offensive in the last year, and the first Ukrainian operational level offensive (as opposed to local counterattacks) since their assault on the Russian Zaporizhia line in 2023.

With all that being said, March brought about the culmination of a serious Ukrainian defeat, with Russian forces recapturing the town of Sudzha (which formed the central anchor of Ukraine’s position in Kursk) on March 13. Although Ukrainian forces still have a presence on the border, Russian forces have crossed the Kursk-Sumy border into Ukraine in other places. The AFU has been functionally ejected from Kursk, and all dreams of some breakout into Russia have faded. At this point, the Russians now hold more territory in Sumy than the Ukrainians do in Kursk.

This would seem, then, to be a good time to conduct an autopsy on the Kursk Operation. Ukrainian forces achieved the basic prerequisite for success in August: they managed to stage a suitable mechanized package – notably, the forest canopy around Sumy allowed them to assemble assets in relative secrecy, in contrast to the open steppe in the south – and achieve tactical surprise, overrunning Russian border guards at the outset. Despite their tactical surprise and the early capture of Sudzha, the AFU was never able to parlay this into a meaningful penetration or exploitation in Kursk. Why?

The answer seems to be a nexus of operational and technical problems which became mutually reinforcing – in some respects these problems are general to this war and well understood, while in some ways they are unique to Kursk, or at least, Kursk provided a potent demonstration of them. More specifically, we can enumerate three problems that doomed the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk:

The failure of the AFU to widen their penetration adequately.

The road-poor connectivity of the Ukrainian hub in Sudzha to their bases of support around Sumy.

Persistent Russian ISR-strike overwatch on Ukrainian lines of communication and supply.

We can see, almost naturally, how these elements can feed into each other – the Ukrainians were unable to create a wide penetration into Russia (for the most part, the “opening” of their salient was less than 30 miles wide), which greatly reduced the number of roads available to them for supply and reinforcement. The narrow penetration and poor road access in turn allowed the Russians to concentrate strike systems on the few available lines of communication, to the effect that the Ukrainians struggled to either supply or reinforce the grouping based around Sudzha – this low logistical and reinforcement connectivity in turn made it impossible for the Ukrainians to stage additional forces to try and expand the salient. This created a positive feedback loop of confinement and isolation for the Ukrainian grouping which made their defeat more or less inevitable.

We can, however, go a little deeper in our postmortem and see how this happened. In the opening weeks of the operation, Ukraine’s prospects became severely untracked by two critical tactical failures which threatened from the outset to spiral into an operational catastrophe.

The first critical moment came in the days from August 10-13; after initial successes and tactical surprise, Ukrainian progress stalled as they attempted to advance up the highway from Sudzha to Korenevo. Several clashes took place throughout this period, but solid Russian blocking positions were held as reinforcements scrambled into the theater. Korenevo always promised to be a critical position, as the Russian breakwater on the main road leading northwest out of Sudzha: so long as the Russians held it, the Ukrainians would be unable to widen their penetration in this direction.

With the Russian defenses jamming up the Ukrainian columns at Korenevo, the Ukrainian position was already pregnant with a basic operational crisis: the penetration was narrow, and thus threatened to become a severe and untenable salient. At the risk of making a perilous historical analogy, the operational form was very similar to the famous 1944 Battle of the Bulge: taken by surprise by a German counteroffensive, Dwight Eisenhower prioritized limiting the width, rather than the depth of the German penetration, moving reinforcements to defend the “shoulders” of the salient.

Blocked at Korenevo, the Ukrainians shifted their approach and made a renewed effort to solidify the western shoulder of their position (their left flank). This attempt aimed to leverage the Seym River, which runs a winding course about twelve miles behind the state border. By striking bridges over the Seym and launching a ground attack towards the river, the Ukrainians hoped to isolate Russian forces on the south bank and either destroy them or force a withdrawal over the river. If they had succeeded, the Seym would have become an anchoring defensive feature protecting the western flank of the Ukrainian position….

The Art of the Deal

Any discussion of the diplomatic sphere and the prospects for a negotiation peace must begin by noting the guiding animus of the American stance: namely, that President Trump is a practitioner of personal politics, with a fundamentally transactional view of the world. By “personal politics”, we mean that he places great emphasis on his own interpersonal dynamics and his self-conception as a dealmaker who can maneuver people into agreement, provided he can just get them to the table.

Trump is hardly alone in this; to take one example, we could look at his long-dead predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. FDR, much like Trump, took great pride in the idea that he was exceptionally skilled at managing, soothing, and charming people. A guiding principle of American policy during the Second World War was FDR’s sense that he could “manage” Stalin in face to face interactions. In one infamous letter to Churchill, FDR told the British Prime Minister:

“I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”

Trump shares a similar sensibility, which postulates personality and transactional acumen as a driving force of world affairs. To be perfectly fair to President Trump, this has largely worked for him both in business and domestic politics, but it may not port over so well to foreign affairs. Nevertheless, this is how he thinks. He expressed it succinctly in his explosive February 28th meeting with Zelensky:

“Biden, they didn’t respect him. They didn’t respect Obama. They respect me… He might have broken deals with Obama and Bush, and he might have broken them with Biden. He did, maybe. Maybe he did. I don’t know what happened, but he didn’t break them with me. He wants to make a deal.”

Whether or not this is true, it is an important bedrock in the framing of the situation to remember that this is how Trump sees himself and the world: politics is a transactional domain mediated by personalities. With that in mind, there are two different issues to consider, namely the mineral deal between Ukraine and the United States, and the prospects for a negotiated ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

The mineral deal is somewhat easier to parse, and the central motif that emerges is just how badly Zelensky bungled his meetings with Trump. It’s helpful first to examine the actual contents of the mineral deal – notwithstanding the enormous $500 billion price tag, it is actually a very scant agreement. The agreement, as it currently stands, seems to essentially give American companies the right of first refusal on the exploitation of Ukrainian mineral resources, with 50% of the proceeds from state owned resources going to an “investment fund” for the reconstruction of Ukraine under joint US-Ukrainian management.

The mineral deal ought to be understood as a manifestation of Trump’s immense aversion to acting at economic disadvantage. He is a fundamentally transactional man who complained at great length about the costs of American support for Kiev, and mineral rights are the easiest way for him to extract promises of “repayment” from a Ukrainian government that cannot actually afford to repay anything in the near term.

For Ukraine, entangling America in Ukrainian mineral wealth might seem like an opportunity to ensure ongoing American support, as it would potentially create direct stakes for American companies. It’s important to note, however, that the mineral deal does not contain any security guarantees for Ukraine, and is in fact explicitly tied to *past* support, rather than future aid. In other words, Trump wants to present the mineral deal as a way for Ukraine to repay the last three years of American assistance, and not as a deal guaranteeing American support in the future.

Given this, it ought to be obvious that Zelensky badly fumbled his encounter with Trump. The optimal strategy for Ukraine was to draw as close to the Trump administration as possible – sign the mineral deal, say thank you, wear a suit, and commend Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war. Trump’s negotiations were guaranteed to run into a wall once the Russians themselves were brought into the discussion, but in this scenario (one where Zelensky came across as supportive and compliant towards Trump), Trump’s personal ire would be directed at Moscow, rather than Kiev. This might have enabled Zelensky to play Trump and Putin off of each other, parlaying the situation into more American support once Trump became frustrated at Russia’s unwillingness to quickly negotiate a ceasefire.

The operating principle is that Trump is a mercurial, personal politician who places primacy on the deal. Inability to solidify the deal breeds irritation, and Zelensky’s best play was to do everything possible to ensure that it was Russia that became the irritant in Trump’s attempted deal making. Unfortunately for Ukraine, a valuable opportunity was wasted by Zelensky’s inability to read the room. Instead, Ukraine was put in an ISR timeout and Zelensky had to come crawling back with an apology to sign the mineral deal.

This parlayed directly into tenuous diplomatic feelers, including a long phone conversation between Trump and Putin and a diplomatic roundtable in Riyadh attended by American, Russian, and Ukrainian delegations.

Thus far, the only outcome from these discussions has been the sketch for a climbdown in the Black Sea, which in its essence would end attacks on commercial shipping (presumably including Russian attacks on Ukrainian port infrastructure in Odessa) in exchange for American moves to rehabilitate Russian agricultural exports by reconnecting Russia to shipping insurance, foreign ports, and payment systems.

For those that have been following along, this is more or less a revival of the defunct Turkish-negotiated grain deal, which collapsed in 2023. There are still sticking points here: Ukraine is bristling at the promise to loosen sanctions on Russian agricultural exports, and Russia will want a robust inspection regime to ensure that the Black Sea ceasefire does not provide cover for weapons to be shipped into Odessa, but things appear on the whole to be returning roughly to the lines of the 2022 grain deal. Whether the rerun will last remains to be seen.

All of this is preliminary and perhaps even irrelevant to the main question, which is whether it is possible to negotiate a meaningful peace in Ukraine at this time, or even a temporary ceasefire. This, however, is a much larger hurdle to climb. As I see it, there are four structural obstacles to a negotiated peace which Trump has little or leverage to overcome:

1. Russian disillusionment with negotiation and the credibility of western promises

2. Climbing Russian confidence that they are on track to win a decisive victory on the battlefield

3. Mutual unwillingness between Moscow and the extant Kiev regime to engage in direct negotiations with each other

4. The status of Russian-claimed territories in the Donbas which are still under Ukrainian control

Many of these issues dovetail, and are ultimately linked to the trajectory of the battlefield where the Russian Army continues to advance. So long as Russian leadership believes they are on pace to capture the entirety of the Donbas (and beyond), Putin’s team is highly unlikely to accept a truncated victory at the negotiating table – the only way out would be for Kiev to cede objectives like Kramatorsk and Slovyansk. In many ways, Ukraine’s current possession of these cities are its best cards in any negotiation, but for cards to be useful they must be played, and it’s difficult to imagine Zelensky’s regime simply giving up cities that it has fought for years to defend.

Furthermore, Putin has made it extremely clear that he does not consider Zelensky to be either a legitimate or credible figure at all, arguing that because Zelensky has suspended elections under the pretext of martial law, there is in fact no legitimate government in Kiev. This is obfuscation by the Kremlin, of course: Zelensky is the President of Ukraine, and within the parameters of Ukraine’s laws, conditions of martial law do allow him to stay in office. But this is rather beside the point: what matters is that the Kremlin has more or less categorically ruled out negotiating with the current government in Kiev, and has even suggested an internationally supervised provisional government as a replacement.

A generous assessment is that, for there to be reasonable prospects for a negotiated settlement from the Russian perspective, at least four conditions have to be satisfied:

1. Regime change in Kiev to bring in a government more acquiescent to Russian interests.

2. Russian control of all annexed territories (either through the actions of the Russian Army on the ground or by Kiev withdrawing from them)

3. Broad sanctions relief for Russia

4. Credible pledges that western troops will not be stationed in Ukraine as “peacekeepers” – since, after all, one critical strategic objective for Russia was to prevent the consolidation of NATO on its flank, they will hardly accept a peace that features the deployment of NATO troops into Ukraine.

So long as Russia continues to advance on the battlefield, they have no incentive to (as they would see it) rob themselves of a full victory by accepting a truncated and premature settlement. Putin expressed this view very cogently and explicitly on March 27:

“We are gradually, not as quickly as some would like, but nevertheless persistently and confidently moving towards achieving all the goals declared at the beginning of this operation. Along the entire line of combat contact, our troops have the strategic initiative. I said just recently: We will finish them off. There is reason to believe that we will finish them off.”

Fair enough. Ultimately, Trumps’ transactional view of politics runs into the more grounded reality of what negotiations actually mean, in wartime. The battlefield has a reality of its own that is existentially prior to negotiations. Diplomacy in this context does not serve to transact a “fair” or “balanced” peace, but rather to codify the reality of the military calculus. If Russia believes it is on a trajectory to achieve the total defeat of Ukraine, than the only acceptable sort of peace would be one that expresses such a defeat through the fall of the Ukrainian government and a Ukrainian withdrawal from the east. Russia’s blood is up, and Putin seems to be in no mood to accept a partial victory when the full measure is within reach.

The problem for Ukraine, if history is any guide, is that it is not actually very easy to surrender. In the First World War, Germany surrendered while its army was still in the field, fighting in good order far from the German heartland. This was an anticipatory surrender, born of a realistic assessment of the battlefield which indicated that German defeat was an inevitability. Berlin therefore opted to bow out prematurely, saving the lives of its young men once the struggle had become hopeless. This decision, of course, was poorly received, and was widely denounced as betrayal and cowardice. It became a politically scarring watershed moment that shaped German sensibilities and revanchist drives for decades to come.

So long as Zelensky’s government continues to receive western support and the AFU remains in the field – even if it is being steadily rolled back and chewed up all along the front – it is difficult to imagine Kiev acceding to an anticipatory surrender. Ukraine must choose between doing this the easy way and the hard way, as the parlance goes, but this is not really a choice at all, particularly given the Kremlin’s insistence that a change of government in Kiev is a prerequisite to peace as such. Any successful path to a negotiated piece runs through the ruins of Zelensky’s government, and is therefore largely precluded at the moment.

Russian forces today stand significantly closer to victory in the Donbas than they did one year ago, and the AFU has been decisively defeated in Kursk. They are poised to make further progress towards the limits of the Donbas in 2025, with an increasingly threadbare AFU straining to stay in the field. This is what Ukraine asked for, when they willingly eschewed the opportunity to negotiate in 2022. So for all the diplomatic cinema, the brute reality of the battlefield remains the same. The battlefield is the first principle, and the ultimate repository of political power. The diplomat is a servant of the warrior, and Russia takes recourse to the fist and the boot and the bullet.

By Tarik Cyril Amar, RT, 3/16/25

A sure sign that a news item inconvenient for Zelensky-regime Ukraine and its (remaining) Western supporters is important is that the Western mainstream media will do their best to ignore it. That rule has now held true for more than a decade. At some point in the future, it may stop operating, namely, if the West fully abandons its proxy war regime in Kiev.

Then, and only then, will the Western media heed a new “party line” by dumping that regime as well. But we are not there yet. Indeed, if it is up to the NATO-EU Europeans it may still be a long time before we will see Western mainstream media treating Ukrainian regimes truthfully and critically.

Exhibit A that the kid-gloves-for-Kiev rule is still in force: The way in which Western mainstream media audiences are not getting to hear much about a clearly momentous and, in its political implications, far-reaching finding by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR): A few days ago, the court decided an extremely important case against the Ukrainian authorities of both the major port city of Odessa and the capital Kiev.

The essence of the case and the court’s findings, which are available on its website, is not complicated. The Ukrainian authorities abysmally failed to avoid or respond adequately to severe street violence and killings that took place in Odessa in May 2014 between supporters and opponents of the regime change operation commonly known as “Maidan.”

Subsequently they also obstinately failed to investigate the incident. In other words, they first messed up criminally – or worse – and then engaged in a cover-up for over a decade. Not a minor issue if you consider that hundreds of victims were injured and 48 killed on that day.

Twenty-eight plaintiffs from Ukraine had challenged these failures of Ukraine’s current regime before the EHCR. After too many years of deliberation the court has now finally recognized – unanimously, including a Ukrainian judge – that the Ukrainian authorities committed “violations of Article 2 (right to life/investigation) of the European Convention on Human Rights, on account of the relevant authorities’ failure to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them to prevent the violence in Odesa on 2 May 2014, to stop that violence after its outbreak, to ensure timely rescue measures for people trapped in the fire, and to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events.”

In addition, in one case, a “violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life)” was also found because of a delay in handing over a victim’s body for burial.

Take a step back and just consider the bare essentials: Unrest and mass killing have occurred, in a major city, too. And the public authorities of the state concerned have never provided a remotely adequate investigation or legal redress: Victims and their relatives were left without justice, perpetrators without punishment. In any country that is not content with being a failed state, an authoritarian swamp, or both, the above alone would be a scandal rocking and toppling governments.

But not in post-Maidan Ukraine. There, instead, major media, such as Ukrainska Pravda, for instance, are performing acrobatic mental contortions to protect their regime from the fallout of the ECHR decision. And how do they do so? By blaming the big bad Russians, of course. Because the very mature first principle of Ukrainian “agency” still is: If it succeeds, it was us; if it’s a fiasco, it was the Russians’ fault. So much for Ukraine’s “free” media and “civil society.” Yes, that’s sarcasm; yes, it’s richly deserved.

Those few Western mainstream media that have not entirely ignored the ECHR decision have, unsurprisingly, employed a similar tactic of obfuscation. Thus, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung does acknowledge that the ECHR “has condemned the Ukrainian authorities,” but reverts to common places about alleged Russian involvement to cushion the blow.

In reality, the court did go out of its way to find something negative to say about Russia, vaguely but demonstratively pointing to Moscow’s information warfare and intentions to “destabilize” Odessa. Yet when you read the ECHR’s press release on its decision honestly, one thing is perfectly clear: the gesturing toward Russia is unspecific and, in essence, rhetorical. It reads as if the judges felt they had to keep up appearances.

If anything, what we learn from these obligatory swipes at Russia is only one thing, namely that the ECHR is biased against it. Big surprise. And the real take-away point then is, of course, that the judges still found massively, comprehensively against the Ukrainian authorities. Even an anti-Russian bias could not sway them – to their credit – from acknowledging reality.

On May 2, 2014, that reality was gruesome: in clashes between pro-Maidan and anti-Maidan protesters, some died from gunshot wounds, but the preponderant majority, 42, of the victims died in a fire in the Odessa House of Trade Unions that broke out during and because of the fighting. While some of the fire’s victims received help from outside, others were deliberately blocked up in the burning building or beaten savagely when they escaped it.

The fire, in other words, may have been the result of deliberate arson or it may have started semi-accidentally when Molotov cocktails were deployed by both sides. But the key point is that it was not merely an accident. At least once it was blazing, it was a weapon because that’s how it was used. How do we know this? In case of a genuine accident, everyone helps put a fire out. Yet that was not at all the case here. Even police and fire services deliberately refrained from intervening.

Both sides fought, but the victims of the fire and thus almost all victims on May 2, belonged to the anti-Maidan side, which was far inferior in numbers and systematically demonized as “pro-Russian,” that is, smeared as “traitors.” And that is, of course, the reason why their relatives cannot receive justice in Ukraine and why those who killed or helped kill these victims are not prosecuted: they belong to the side which was in power then and is still in power now.

The West has its own reasons to ignore this ECHR finding: its whole narrative of why it went to proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is shot through with lies: beginning with the Maidan Massacre of February 2014, which was blamed on the old regime but really committed by pro-regime change, pro-Western snipers, as Ivan Katchanovski has long shown in painstaking detail.

Think about it: This was a false-flag operation that greatly helped catalyze a large regional war, pitting Ukraine and the West against Russia, with a clear potential of escalation to World War III. And the West will still not correct the record.

And in this enormous Western information war offensive, misrepresenting the Odessa killings of May 2014 has been almost as important as covering up the true nature of the Maidan Massacre in Kiev just over two months before.

Now, with the proxy war being lost for Ukraine and its Western supporters, an honest reckoning with these deceptions would expose how we were lied into it. And that is precisely why it cannot happen. At least not yet: Too many American, European, and Ukrainian politicians, generals, experts, journalists, and academics have too much to lose.

This absence of truth and justice can lead to more killing. In Odessa, one of the pro-Maidan street fighters of May 2014 has just been gunned down in broad daylight: Demyan Ganul was an open and proud far-right extremist and neo-Nazi, tattoos and all. He led his own outfit, called the Street Front and made a habit out of mocking the victims of the Trade Union House fire by having barbecue parties in front of the building on the fire’s anniversaries. He was generally violent, allegedly not only beating but also raping victims, including males. He terrorized others into fighting in the war. In his spare time, he toppled Russian monuments.

The Ukrainian authorities have announced that the investigation of Ganul’s end is now under the personal supervision of Interior Minister Igor Klimenko. The priorities of the Zelensky regime are ugly and unsurprising.

By Larry Johnson, Substack, 3/30/25

Larry Johnson is Managing Partner of BERG Associates, and former CIA Officer and State Department Counter Terrorism official.

The New York Times article discussed below can be found here.

Adam Entous of the New York Times just published a lengthy article that pretends to tell the true history of the war in Ukraine. I can summarize the massive story in one sentence — Ukraine would have destroyed the weak, incompetent Russians if only the Ukrainian generals had followed the guidance from the US military. If you’re looking for a signal that the war in Ukraine is on its last legs, this article is it. This is a ridiculous attempt to burnish the image of the Pentagon and US European Command as strategic and tactical geniuses who could have beaten the Russians if only those damn Ukrainians had followed their advice.

The article opens with an admission — this should be no surprise to Russia — that the US was actively and heavily involved in equipping Ukraine with weapons, intelligence and plans to attack and kill Russians:

“On a spring morning two months after Vladimir Putin’s invading armies marched into Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked cars slid up to a Kyiv street corner and collected two middle-aged men in civilian clothes. . . . The passengers were top Ukrainian generals. Their destination was Clay Kaserne, the headquarters of U.S. Army Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany. Their mission was to help forge what would become one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war in Ukraine. . . . Its evolution and inner workings visible to only a small circle of American and allied officials, that partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order.”

Entous appears to have another objective in mind with his article — blame Trump.

“Today that order — along with Ukraine’s defense of its land — teeters on a knife edge, as President Trump seeks rapprochement with Mr. Putin and vows to bring the war to a close. . . . Now, with negotiations beginning, the American president has baselessly blamed the Ukrainians for starting the war, pressured them to forfeit much of their mineral wealth and asked the Ukrainians to agree to a cease-fire without a promise of concrete American security guarantees — a peace with no certainty of continued peace.”

Entous also makes sure to give the United States credit for any and all successes, whether real or not, while blaming Generals Zaluzhnyi and Syrsky for the failures. “Ain’t our fault the Ukrainians fucked this up,” is the implied lament that permeates the article. We, the US, were the backbone don’t cha know:

“But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”

In the following passage, you have another example of the blame game as well as the specious claim that Russia was suffering incomprehensible losses, only to be saved by fractious politics in Kiev:

“As the Ukrainians won greater autonomy in the partnership, they increasingly kept their intentions secret. They were perennially angered that the Americans couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give them all of the weapons and other equipment they wanted. The Americans, in turn, were angered by what they saw as the Ukrainians’ unreasonable demands, and by their reluctance to take politically risky steps to bolster their vastly outnumbered forces.

“On a tactical level, the partnership yielded triumph upon triumph. Yet at arguably the pivotal moment of the war — in mid-2023, as the Ukrainians mounted a counteroffensive to build victorious momentum after the first year’s successes — the strategy devised in Wiesbaden fell victim to the fractious internal politics of Ukraine: The president, Volodymyr Zelensky, versus his military chief (and potential electoral rival), and the military chief versus his headstrong subordinate commander. When Mr. Zelensky sided with the subordinate, the Ukrainians poured vast complements of men and resources into a finally futile campaign to recapture the devastated city of Bakhmut. Within months, the entire counteroffensive ended in stillborn failure.”

The Entous article, taken as a whole, celebrates the Ukrainian illusory victories while ignoring the facts about Russia’s actual military conquests. Not one word about Russia’s taking of Mariupol early in the war. Not one word about the small size of Russia’s initial force in February 2022, which was dwarfed by Ukraine. Not one word about Russia’s rejuvenated defense industry cranking out artillery, artillery shells, tanks, armored vehicles and drones. Nope. Russia is just a weak nation that Ukraine had on the ropes, and Ukraine failed to administer the coup de grace advocated by the same US military leaders who were driven out of Afghanistan.

While Entous admits that Biden and his team repeatedly crossed lines they had previously refused to penetrate, he fails to explain that Russian successes on the battlefield were the primary reason for Biden’s desperate moves.

‘Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting. Military and C.I.A. officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Finally, the military and then the C.I.A. received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.”

Entous also falsely reports the reason for Russia’s withdrawal of forces from Kiev in March of 2022. He insists the Ukrainians had fought Russia to a standstill. Yet, we now know, that Putin ordered the withdrawal of forces as a sign of good faith as part of the Istanbul peace negotiations, which were subsequently sabotaged by the United States and our blond-haired bitch, Boris Johnson.

“In March (2022), their assault on Kyiv stalling, the Russians reoriented their ambitions, and their war plan, surging additional forces east and south — a logistical feat the Americans thought would take months. It took two and a half weeks.”

By the summer of 2022, the United States military started playing word games. Even though USEUCOM was providing Ukraine with targeting intel that was used to hit Russian targets, the US military leaders opted to employ euphemisms.

“Inside the U.S. European Command, this process gave rise to a fine but fraught linguistic debate: Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”?

“Some officers thought “targets” was appropriate. Others called them “intel tippers,” because the Russians were often moving and the information would need verification on the ground.

“The debate was settled by Maj. Gen. Timothy D. Brown, European Command’s intelligence chief: The locations of Russian forces would be “points of interest.” Intelligence on airborne threats would be “tracks of interest.”

Entous’ article, after a long introduction, discusses Ukraine’s war in four separate sections. In Part 3 –The Best-Laid Plans — Entous recounts Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive in June of 2023, without calling it a failure. He tries to claim it as a lopsided victory, at least in Bakhmut, because Russia allegedly suffered more casualties than Ukraine, even though Russia enjoyed a decisive advantage in artillery and drones. At no point does Entous blame the US generals, who Entous claims planned the counteroffensive, for authorizing a plan that did not provide attacking Ukrainian troops with air cover.

“Though counts vary wildly, there is little question that the Russians’ casualties — in the tens of thousands — far outstripped the Ukrainians’. Yet General Syrsky never did recapture Bakhmut, never did advance toward Luhansk. And while the Russians rebuilt their brigades and soldiered on in the east, the Ukrainians had no such easy source of recruits. (Mr. Prigozhin pulled his rebels back before reaching Moscow; two months later, he died in a plane crash that American intelligence believed had the hallmarks of a Kremlin-sponsored assassination.)”

Entous, in the closing paragraphs of Part 3, grudgingly admits the counteroffensive was a clusterfuck, but refuses to assign any blame to the incredible US military leaders.

“But to another senior Ukrainian official, “The real reason why we were not successful was because an improper number of forces were assigned to execute the plan.”

“Either way, for the partners, the counteroffensive’s devastating outcome left bruised feelings on both sides. “The important relationships were maintained,” said Ms. Wallander, the Pentagon official. “But it was no longer the inspired and trusting brotherhood of 2022 and early 2023.”

You really should try to read the entire piece (I’ve linked to it above), but wear your hip waders, you’ll be walking through a massive pile of Male Bovine Excrement, aka BS.

***

Matt Taibbi: Biden Lied About Everything, Including Nuclear Risk, During Ukraine Operation (Excerpt)

By Matt Taibbi, Substack, 3/31/25

…The [New York Times] piece is also an extraordinarily comprehensive betrayal of Zelensky and Ukraine, exponentially worse than the “dressing down” by Trump. Authored by longtime veteran of controversial intel pieces Adam Entous, it’s sourced to 300 American and European officials who seem to be responding to their apparent sidelining via a shameless tantrum, exhibiting behavior that in the field would get military men shot. Not only do they play kiss and tell with a trove of operational secrets, they use the Times to deflect blame from their own failures onto erstwhile Slavic partners, cast as ignorant savages who snatched defeat from the jaws of America-designed victory. It’s as morally abhorrent a piece of ass-covering ever as I’ve seen in print, and that somehow is not its worst quality.

The people who quarterbacked the NATO side of the Ukraine war are so pleased with themselves, they can’t keep from boasting about things that will make the average American want to pitchfork the lot of them. Entous describes a tale told “through a secret keyhole” that reveals how America was “woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” (Translation: it was hidden from us.) Sources not only make it clear that the public was lied to on a continuous basis from the outset of the conflict, but they describe how we were lied to, apparently thinking the methods clever. Some are small semantic gambits the idiots wrongly believe exculpated their actions, but the main revelation involves one gigantic, inexcusable deception. From Joe Biden down, they all lied about the risk of World War III.

They risked our lives and our children’s lives, knowingly, repeatedly, and for the worst possible reason: politics. Afraid to admit a mistake, they planned individual excuses while letting bureaucratic inertia expand the conflict. Worse, as was guessed at on this site late last year, the Biden administration after last November’s election increased the risk of global conflict by “expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia,” in order to “shore up his Ukraine project.” If you check this “secret history” against contemporaneous statements of American and European leaders, you’ll find the scale of the lies beyond comprehension. Heads need to roll for this…

…If you’re wondering when we ever heard an American official acknowledge a non-zero threat of nuclear retaliation throughout this conflict, the answer is, never. In fact we were consistently told by Biden and everyone else that the opposite was true, that “World War III won’t be fought in Ukraine,” because the United States was not bringing its own troops into the theater of battle:

According to the Times, as Biden was saying these things, his administration “time and again… authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited.” This in turn forced us to “dispatch” advisers “to Kyiv and later… closer to the fighting,” out of concern of more line-crossing. The military and the CIA were then given permission to launch strikes “deep inside Russia itself,” which prompted thoughts from Entous:

In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later… It was also a grand experiment in war fighting, one that would not only help the Ukrainians but reward the Americans with lessons for any future war.

How many times were we scolded that this was no “proxy war,” and not a quagmire like Vietnam or Afghanistan? A hundred? A thousand? As early as April 28, 2022, right when this “partnership” run out of the Wiesbaden “warren” began, Biden explicitly denied we were in a proxy war, and said Russia was only making such claims to excuse their failures in defeating Ukraine:

Internally, concern along these exact lines was growing. American M777 howitzer batteries were effective at first against Russian troops, but soon they learned to pull material behind the 15-mile limit of those shells. Ukraine and some American and NATO officials began demanding the administration escalate by deploying “High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS, which used satellite-guided rockets to execute strikes up to 50 miles away.” This is the moment when the Biden administration passed the point of mass-deception no return:

The ensuing debate reflected the Americans’ evolving thinking. Pentagon officials were resistant, loath to deplete the Army’s limited HIMARS stocks. But in May, General Cavoli visited Washington and made the case that ultimately won them over… At the White House, Mr. Biden and his advisers weighed that argument against fears that pushing the Russians would only lead Mr. Putin to panic and widen the war. When the generals requested HIMARS, one official recalled, the moment felt like “standing on that line, wondering, if you take a step forward, is World War III going to break out?”

Unbelievable! The U.S. began delivering HIMARS missiles to Ukraine in June 2022, which means for almost two years a White House that claimed not to be worried about World War III or nuclear war was worried about exactly that, each time they took a “step forward.” There were many steps after HIMARS, all cataloged by Entous, who began short-handing the nuclear war concern by referring to “red lines.”

When we upgraded from HIMARS to ATACMS missiles, expanding the range to 190 miles, it was “a particularly sore subject for the Biden administration,” because Russian commander Valery Gerasimov had “warned General [Mark] Milley that anything that flew 190 miles would be breaching a red line.”

…To many watching from afar, it seemed like simple common sense that using American weapons and American support personnel to attack Russians in Russia risked drawing this country into a shooting war with a nuclear enemy at any moment. Those of us who said these things were dismissed as alarmist, Putin-loving fellow-travelers. Now we have Entous describing American officials feeling the same after the opening of “ops box” attacks:

With Wiesbaden’s points of interest and coordinates, as well as the Ukrainians’ own intelligence, HIMARS strikes into the ops box helped defend Kharkiv. The Russians suffered some of their heaviest casualties of the war… The unthinkable had become real. The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.

We never heard any concern of this type. Instead, we were told repeatedly that if anyone was risking World War III, it was Putin, and moreover that any nuclear risk would not involve Europe or the United States, but Ukraine. Former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul described nuclear combat as a “low probability event” at the outset of the war, noting Russia had no reason to strike at us, because “they are not under an existential threat. NATO is not going to invade Russia.” A little over a year later, America was “woven into” the killing of Russians on Russian soil….

By Ret. Royal Navy Commodore Steve Jermy, Responsible Statecraft, 1/29/25

(Ret.) Royal Navy Commodore Steve Jermy commanded warships in the 5th Destroyer Squadron and Britain’s Fleet Air Arm. He served in the Falklands War and in the Adriatic for the Bosnian and Kosovo campaigns, and retired after an operational tour, in 2007, as Strategy Director in the British Embassy in Afghanistan. He is the author of Strategy for Action: Using Force Wisely in the 21st Century and now works in offshore energy.

In 2024, reflecting a popular Western belief, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said: “NATO is the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” Yet just two years earlier in 2022, after a 15-year campaign, NATO was defeated by the Taliban, a rag-tag group of poorly armed insurgents.

How can NATO’s humiliating defeat and Austin’s view be reconciled?

Of course NATO was never the most powerful military alliance in history — that accolade surely goes to the World War II Allies: the U.S., Russia, Britain, and the Commonwealth nations. Nevertheless, after 1945, NATO did its job, did it well, and those of us who served in it were proud to do so.

Since the Berlin Wall’s fall, though, its record has become tarnished. Satisfactory in Kosovo. Humiliated in Afghanistan. Strategic failure looming in Ukraine. Are we really sure NATO is up to the job of defending democratic Europe from a supposedly expansionist Russia in the doomsday scenario of a conventional NATO-Russia war?

The doomsday NATO-Russia war scenario is the defining way to explore this question. “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics,” and our strategic analysis needs to start all the way back in NATO’s logistics rear areas, then work forward to a future line of battle on the continent of Europe.

First, unlike Russia, no major NATO nation is industrially mobilized for war, as evidenced by the fact that Russia is still outproducing NATO on 155mm shells for Ukraine. Which, incidentally, gives the lie to the view that Russia is poised to take more of Europe — if we in NATO truly believed this, we would all be mobilizing at speed.

More importantly, it is not clear that NATO could mobilize at the speed or scale needed to produce the levels of equipment, ammunition, and people to match Russia. And certainly not without a long build up that would signal our intent. This is not just about lost industrial capacity, but also lost financial capacity. Of the largest NATO nations, only Germany has a debt to GDP ratio below 100%.

Second, to have the remotest chance of success in this doomsday scenario of a NATO-Russia war, U.S. forces would need to deploy at scale into continental Europe. Even if the U.S. Army was established at the necessary scale — with a 2023 establishment of 473,000, under one third of the current Russian Army, it is not — the overwhelming majority of American equipment and logistics would have to travel by sea.

There, they would be vulnerable to Russian submarine-launched torpedoes and mines. As a former underwater warfare specialist, I do not believe that NATO now has the scale of anti-submarine or mine-warfare forces needed to protect Europe’s sea lines of communication.

Nor, for that matter, would these forces be able to successfully protect Europe’s hydrocarbon imports, in particular oil and LNG so critical to Europe’s economic survival. Losses because of our sea supply vulnerability would not only degrade military production, but also bring accelerating economic hardship to NATO citizens, as soaring prices and energy shortages accompanying an outbreak of war rapidly escalated the political pressure to settle.

Third, our airports, sea ports, training, and logistics bases would be exposed to conventional ballistic missile attack, against which we have extremely limited defenses. Indeed, in the case of the Oreshnik missile, no defense.

An Oreshnik missile arriving at Mach 10+ would devastate a NATO arms factory, or naval, army and air force base. As in Ukraine, Russia’s ballistic campaign would also target our transport, logistics, and energy infrastructure. In 2003, while I was working for the British MOD’s Policy Planning staffs, our post 9/11 threat analysis suggested a successful attack against an LNG terminal, such as Milford Haven, Rotterdam, or Barcelona, would have sub-nuclear consequences. The follow-on economic shock-waves would rapidly ripple across a European continent, now increasingly dependent on LNG.

Fourth, unlike Russia, NATO nations’ forces are a heterogenous bunch. My own experience, while leading the offshore training of all European warships at Flag Officer Sea Training in Plymouth, and later working with NATO forces in Afghanistan, was that all NATO forces were exceptionally enthusiastic but had very different levels of technological advancement and trained effectiveness.

Perhaps more contemporarily important, other than a handful of NATO trainers forward deployed in Ukraine, our forces are trained according to a pre-drone “maneuver doctrine” and have no real-world experience of modern peer-to-peer attritional warfighting. Whereas the Russian Army has close to three years experience now, and is unarguably the world’s most battle-hardened.

Fifth, NATO’s decision-making system is cumbersome, hampered by the need to constantly communicate from Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe to national capitals — a complexity made worse each time another nation is admitted.

Worse still, NATO cannot do strategy. Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan in 2007, I was shocked to find that NATO had no campaign strategy. In 2022, notwithstanding numerous Russian warnings about NATO expansion constituting a red-line, NATO was wholly unprepared, strategically, for the obvious possibility of war breaking out — as evidenced again by our inability to match Russia’s 155mm shell production.

Even now, in 2025, NATO’s Ukraine strategy is opaque, perhaps best summarized as “double-down and hope.”

In summary, NATO is positioning itself as Europe’s defender, yet lacks the industrial capacity to sustain peer-to-peer warfighting, is wholly dependent on U.S. forces for the remotest chance of success, is unable satisfactorily to defend its sea lines of communication against Russian submarine, or its training and industrial infrastructure against strategic ballistic bombardment, is comprised of a diverse mix of un-bloodied conventional forces, and lacks the capacity to think and act strategically.

An easy NATO victory cannot be assumed, and I am afraid that the opposite looks far more likely to me.

So what? Conventionally, we could now work out how to redress the manifest weaknesses revealed. Strategic audits to confirm the capability gaps. Capability analyses to work out how to fill the gaps. Conferences to decide who does what and where costs should fall. Whilst all the time muddling on, hoping that NATO might eventually prevail in Ukraine, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary.

But without unanimous agreement of the NATO nations to increase military investment at scale, we would be lucky to solve these capability shortfalls within ten years, let alone five.

Or we could return to consider — at last — the judgement of many Western realists that NATO expansion was the touchpaper for the Russo-Ukraine War. The Russians warned us, time and again, that such expansion constituted a red line. So too did some of our very greatest strategic thinkers, starting with George Kennan in 1996, Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock, even Bill Burns in his famous ‘Nyet means Nyet’ diplomatic telegram, and most recently John Mearsheimer with his 2014 forecasts. All ignored.

The truth is that NATO now exists to confront the threats created by its continuing existence. Yet as our scenario shows, NATO does not have the capacity to defeat the primary threat that its continuing existence has created.

So perhaps this is the time to have an honest conversation about the future of NATO, and to ask two questions. How do we return to the sustainable peace in Europe that all sides to the conflict seek? Is NATO the primary obstacle to this sustainable peace?

RT, 3/28/25

Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed placing Ukraine under a temporary international administration as one possible way of resolving the ongoing conflict. The idea, he said, draws on international precedent and would aim to restore legitimate governance before any peace deal could be finalized.

During his meeting with Russian nuclear submarine officers on Thursday, President Putin described a possible international mechanism for stabilizing Ukraine – placing it under temporary external administration coordinated by the United Nations.

Here are the key takeaways from Putin’s proposal:

Problem: Collapse of legitimacy in Kiev

Putin argued that Ukraine’s constitutional legitimacy has broken down due to the expiration of Vladimir Zelensky’s presidential term last year and the lack of elections since – rendering all of his government’s claims to authority invalid.

“Presidential elections weren’t held… under the constitution, all officials are appointed by the president. If he himself is illegitimate, then so is everyone else.”

Consequence: Power vacuum filled by radicals

Putin has warned that groups with neo-Nazi views, such as the notorious Azov battalion – which receive Western weapons and actively recruit followers – could increasingly exert de facto control in Ukraine, potentially replacing formal civilian authorities.

“Amid the de facto illegitimacy… Neo-Nazi formations are receiving more weapons,” and could take “the actual power in their hands.”

Putin argued that this makes negotiating with Ukraine’s current government even more unreliable and unstable: “It’s unclear who you’re even signing any documents with – tomorrow new people could come and say, ‘We don’t know who signed this – goodbye.’”

Suggestion: UN-led temporary external administration

Putin proposed the use of a UN-led transitional authority, referencing prior international missions such as in East Timor, Papua New Guinea, and parts of former Yugoslavia.

“In such cases, international practice often follows a known path – under UN peacekeeping, through what is called external governance, a temporary administration.”

Purpose: Restoring constitutional order and setting a legal framework for stable peace

The main goal, according to Putin, would be to organize democratic elections and install a functioning, legitimate government trusted by citizens and recognized globally. He stated that only such leaders could sign peace agreements that would be recognized worldwide and upheld over time.

“Why do this? In order to hold democratic elections, in order to bring to power a government that is capable and enjoys the trust of the people, and then begin negotiations with them on a peace treaty, sign legitimate documents that will be recognized worldwide and will be reliable and stable.”

Not the only option – but a viable one

Putin emphasized that this idea is not the only possibility, but an example drawn from historical precedent.

“This is just one option… I’m not saying other options do not exist, but it is hard right now, or maybe even impossible, to lay everything out clearly because the situation is changing so fast,” he said.

Multilateral cooperation beyond the West

Putin said such an initiative should involve not just the UN or the US, but a broader coalition, including BRICS nations and others Russia considers reliable.

“We will work with any partners – the US, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, BRICS countries… and, for example, North Korea.”

He also stressed that Russia remains open to working with the EU, even though Moscow’s trust in the Western European countries has been fundamentally undermined by their manipulation of peace efforts as a tactic to buy time and rearm Ukraine.

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Trump Says He’s ‘Pissed Off’ at Putin, Threatens ‘Secondary Tariffs’ on Russia

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 3/30/25

President Trump said on Sunday that he was “pissed off” at Russian President Vladimir Putin and warned he could hit Russia with “secondary tariffs” on its oil if a peace deal to end the Ukraine war isn’t reached.

Trump said he was unhappy with Putin questioning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s legitimacy. On Friday, Putin suggested replacing Zelensky with a “transitional administration” to prepare for elections in Ukraine.

Putin’s comments came after Zelensky said that he believes the Russian leader will soon be dead. “He will die soon, that is a fact, and everything will be over,” Zelensky said in an interview on March 26.

Trump has previously criticized Zelensky for not holding elections and even called the Ukrainian leader a “dictator,” but said in a phone interview with NBC News that he was “angry” over Putin’s comments about the Ukrainian leader.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump said.

“That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25% tariff on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil,” the president added.

It remains unclear if the current negotiations between the US and Russia will lead to a full ceasefire in Ukraine and a lasting peace deal. While both sides have nominally agreed to stop targeting energy infrastructure and halting attacks on the Black Sea, fighting continues to rage across the frontlines, Russian strikes are pounding Ukraine, and Ukraine is still launching drones into Russia.