By Mihail Evans, Cambridge University Press, 5/2/25

Abstract

When the European Union was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2012, the citation stated that military conflict on the continent was “virtually inconceivable” owing to its action. This article will examine what role its acts and omissions played in the origins of the Ukraine crisis. The tensions stoked by potential NATO membership have been well aired. However, this article will argue that the treatment of minorities and particularly of the Russian language was equally important. The EU’s failure to address these questions by insisting Kjiv grant substantial linguistic rights, or even regional autonomy as foreseen by the second Minsk agreement, was a significant cause of the conflict.

1. Introduction

Ten years ago, John Mearsheimer attributed blame for what was then merely a crisis in Ukraine to the West on account of the reckless expansion of NATO. He also considered “the European Union’s expansion eastward” to be an aggravating factor.

While accepting his core argument, I think it underestimates the extent to which non-strategic considerations have also been a major provocation. Putin has repeatedly made quite clear that it is not just potential accession to NATO that is unacceptable to Russia but also the nature of recent Ukrainian regimes and their policies.

It was Putin’s decision alone to send his troops across the Ukrainian frontier on 24 February 2022, but the EU is blameworthy for failing to address the militant nationalist policies of recent regimes while loudly trumpeting itself as bringing a new democratic culture to the region.

2. War in Europe: “Virtually inconceivable”

The EU was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace a little over a decade ago – something now almost forgotten – because it had “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy, and human rights in Europe.” The citation specifically remarked that the post-1989 “enlargement did away with the division between east and west and settled many ethnically based national conflicts.”

After reciting the events following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the award commendation concluded: “in an era of major economic difficulties and social unrest, the Union had played a stabilising role. Crises of that nature had previously triggered political and military conflicts in Europe. This was now virtually inconceivable, largely on account of the EU.”Foo

What then did the bloc do – or fail to do – that resulted in Russia’s invasion on 24 February 2022? It did nothing to encourage Ukraine to institutionalise the rights regime that was necessary to prevent Putin’s feeling that he needed to intervene. Even with the east of the country in open conflict it was neither involved in negotiating a settlement nor in ensuring that the regional autonomy envisaged by the second Minsk agreement was enacted in practice.

The Venice Commission has declared Ukraine a “multi-ethnic country,” noting the figures from the last census, taken just after the millennium: “Ethnic Ukrainians make up 77.8% of the population. Other ethnic groups are Russians (17.3%), Belarusians (0.6%), Moldovans (0.5%), Crimean Tatars (0.5%), Bulgarians (0.4%), Hungarians (0.3%), Romanians (0.3%), Poles (0.3%), Jews (0.2%), Armenians (0.2%), and Greeks (0.2%)” as well as Karaites, Krymchaks, and Gagauzes.Footnote ³ A study on the eve of the invasion by a leading Ukrainian sociologist concluded that the country was “ethnoculturally diverse” and that “Ukrainian citizens differ greatly in their ethnocultural practices and ethnolinguistic identifications.”F

The fact that there has not been an official census since 2001 suggests an attempt to officially conceal or deny this reality. Although the percentages of minorities are relatively small, they are often found in relatively dense geographical clusters. That ethnic identity and linguistic usage are not conterminous is a notable feature of the situation in Ukraine. Almost fully one-third of the population (geographically concentrated in the south and east) declared themselves to be native Russian speakers, many coming from other minorities. Many who identify as ethnic Ukrainians speak better Russian than Ukrainian.

In the independence period, language policy was governed by a language law adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR in 1989. This made Ukrainian the only state language, a situation that was considered dissatisfactory in many quarters and that regularly became an issue during election campaigns.Footnote ⁵ After a number of failed attempts, a new language law was passed in 2012. This would have allowed “regional or minority languages” (a term taken from the Council of Europe’s European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages) official status on a regional basis. A rather modest measure by European standards, it provoked a nationalist backlash that led to political polarisation.

The EU failed to forestall conflict by not challenging the chauvinist language policy that followed. In pursuit of privileged access to Ukraine’s markets, the EU arguably fatally destabilised the country.Footnote ⁶ The signing of an Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU, which would have established a free trade area, provoked a crisis. It meant that Ukraine would not be able to take up an alternative offer from Russia of joining a customs union with it, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Public opinion in Ukraine was very divided about which course to pursue. The Association Agreement entailed embarking on a massive programme of legislative alignment with profound economic, social, and political consequences. When at the Vilnius summit in 2013 the EU refused to offer compensation for the loss of significant existing trade with Russia, President Yanukovych refused to sign the Association Agreement.

This sparked the much-mythologised “Maidan” protests (often prefixed “Euro”), which culminated in over a hundred deaths. Exhaustive investigations by University of Ottawa academics have now demonstrated that these protests were perpetrated by far-right nationalist elements within the protestors” ranks.Footnote ⁷ However, in narratives promoted at the time and since by the EU and widely promulgated by the Western media, the shootings were blamed on state forces. Following a procedurally irregular vote in parliament, Yanukovych was deposed as President and replaced by Poroshenko, an oligarch with a support base in the nationalist west of the country. His new government was notoriously hand-picked in advance by American officials. The illegitimacy of this government led to spiralling unrest in eastern regions of the country where ethnic Russians predominate. In an admission of its inability to lead, the EU largely fell silent diplomatically as attempts were made to find a solution to what was turning into a civil war. Russia became involved but “was slow to send weapons” and, unlike Crimea, did not at this time seek to incorporate these territories.Footnote ⁸ The bloc is profoundly culpable, given that it was in a very powerful position and had significant leverage, notably the carrot of progress towards accession, which could enable it to get Kjiv to do many things that, as we shall see, it would rather not.

3. The trigger

The widespread claim that Russia is a neo-imperialist state does not bear close scrutiny. Putin’s oft-cited regrets about the collapse of the USSR notwithstanding, his actions can be understood as a reaction to circumstances rather than a part of a neo-imperial plan to recreate the USSR. His essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is often mentioned, but it is rarely noted that it ends with his comparing Russia and Ukraine to Germany and Austria or the United States and Canada, two separate countries with much in common who should respect – a significant choice of word that deserves more attention than it has received – one another.F

After seizing Crimea, Putin drew a line and did not attempt a full-scale invasion until 2022, allowing Ukraine ample time to build up its forces. He placed his hopes primarily in non-military courses of action. Following the incorporation of Crimea, he declined to support those who wished to establish a “Novorussiya” in eastern Ukraine.Footnote ¹⁰ Putin may well have anticipated a less confrontational status quo emerging again in Kjiv, as it had on occasions in the past. Zelensky’s election in 2019 on a platform of negotiating a solution to the conflict in the Donbass likely encouraged him in this.

He might also have imagined that a native Russian speaker – who has spoken of his struggles to learn Ukrainian – might be able to find a durable solution to the long-running language problem. If so, he could not have been more mistaken. The nationalist policies of Porshenko’s government were maintained and extended by the new government.Footnote ¹¹ The 2021 law on the native peoples of Ukraine has been almost entirely unreported, but a strong case can be made that it was a significant trigger for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

This piece of legislation made manipulative use of an idea from international law that had been developed to recognise aboriginal peoples in colonial situations. The statute made an entirely novel distinction between “indigenous peoples” – who on this occasion alone are uniquely defined as those who have no governmental organisation outside the state of Ukraine – and “national minorities” who do. The necessity of this distinction is far from clear.Foo

Practically, it was a pointless statute, given that only Crimean Tatars and two small Jewish sects in Crimea were designated as indigenous. It is hard to avoid the impression that this law was rather a goad to Putin on the question of rights, legislating for tiny fractions of the population in a territory he controlled while passing over the situation of Russian speakers, a focus of acute concern. He certainly took it as a provocation, declaring that “the division into indigenous, first-class categories of people, second-class, and so on – this is definitely completely abhorrent, reminiscent of the theory and practice of Nazi Germany.”Footnote ¹³ Yet his famous essay stressing the shared historical origins of Russia and Ukraine published less than a fortnight after the law was formally enacted, still recognised Kyiv’s sovereignty. Its closing plea for respect might be taken as a final and urgent request for diplomatic engagement.

However, no significant response was forthcoming, least of all from the EU. It has become well recognised that a dynamic of escalation and counter-escalation around NATO alignment occurred in the immediate run-up to the invasion. The signing on 20 November 2021 of a “strategic partnership” with Ukraine by U.S. Secretary of State Blinken was perhaps the final straw. This committed the United States to Ukraine’s full integration into NATO and stressed Ukraine’s claim to Crimea. However, as a vague statement of a distant aspiration, it can seem puzzling that Putin acted so swiftly and decisively. Certainly, the academic literature on the causes of the war frequently struggles to account for Putin’s invading exactly when he did.Footnote ¹⁴ However, if we take into consideration the law regarding the native peoples of Ukraine and the language question more widely, we can see that, for Moscow, the cultural threat was imminent.Footnote ¹⁵ As Dominique Arel pithily remarks, “By 2022, Russian schools were virtually gone.” Putin may well have felt that he had waited too long and put too much hope in diplomatic solutions.Footnote ¹⁶

4. Minority rights and the origins of the conflict

The failure of successive Ukrainian governments to instantiate satisfactory linguistic rights for minorities is especially egregious given that the USSR gave, and Russia still gives, a remarkable degree of recognition to them. Constitutionally, the USSR was an ethno-territorial federation based on a four-tiered set of national territories, each endowed with varying degrees of autonomy, comprising an elaborate system of political and administrative institutions.

More than half of the territory of the Russian Soviet Republic itself was allocated to non-Russian nationalities as their national homelands. Overlaid onto this was a system of personal nationality based on descent, not residence, which had no territorial component whatsoever.Footnote ¹⁷ Russia itself did not abandon this framework with the demise of the USSR. The 1993 Constitution is very much a continuation of the structures of the Soviet period in regard to languages and minorities.

Will Kymlicka, a noted theorist of multiculturalism, has remarked that this arrangement “may have important lessons for Western democracies.”Footnote ¹⁸ As with much under socialism, realities did not always fully meet aspirations but against such a background, it was inevitable that Russia would have more than minimal expectations about how an independent Ukraine would treat its Russian-speaking minority.

This was the situation the EU needed to address. The Nobel citation specifically mentioned the dissolution of Yugoslavia and implied that it had internalised the lessons of that conflict. The reality was that while recognising the problem the EU failed to develop a substantive solution.

The EU has announced its aspirations while failing to make good on them in practice. Most notably, in June 1993, the European Council laid down a new set of conditions – the Copenhagen criteria – that any candidate state must meet to join. These require candidate countries to achieve “stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities.” These were entirely new stipulations that had not been demanded of previous applicants. There has been considerable discussion and much angst around Poland and Hungary’s backsliding after accession regarding questions of the rule of law and democracy. In contrast, minority rights have not been raised with the same urgency and, despite proposals, were never incorporated in the aborted Constitution or its functional replacement, the Lisbon Treaty of 2007. No mechanisms were ever created to manage how states, once members, treated their minorities.Foot

As a result, the fate of Ukraine was already decided by decisions made by the EU during the first wave of post-communist accessions. Hungarian minorities outside Hungary, Roma populations, and Russian speakers in former Soviet republics that became members or candidates of the EU were identified as the major challenges. A rush to incorporate the Baltic states, the most economically advanced areas of the former USSR, led to concerns for fundamental rights that had been trumpeted so loudly being hastily swept under the carpet.Fo

On independence, about one-third of the population of Latvia and Estonia were native Russian speakers, largely owing to the immigration of Russians during the Soviet period. But citizenship was conferred only on those residents or their descendants who had been living in the state before the annexation of 1940. In both cases, a linguistic qualification for naturalisation was introduced and citizenship could not be obtained without demonstrating linguistic competence in the only official language.

This left 700,000 Russians stateless in Latvia, out of a population of 2.5 million. Nic Craith, a leading authority on European minority rights, concluded that Russian speakers “were effectively deprived of certain key rights.”Footnote ²¹ The granting of citizenship to all those born since independence – the so-called “stateless children” – became almost the sole issue around which pressure was focused by the EU. After securing this goal, it would appear that the bloc had no further ambitions, despite it having the powerful tool of membership conditionality at its disposal.Foo

The extent to which Russia attempted to constructively engage with the pertinent international structures over a lengthy period is remarkable. As late as January 2015, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov asked only for compliance with the recommendations of the OSCE, the Council of Europe, and relevant UN committees concerning non-citizens, “nothing more nor less.”Footnote ²³ To observe this is not to claim Russia as an international paragon but to note that it was for a long period willing, for the most part, to work within a rules-based international order to achieve its goals. Mark Galeotti, a leading academic observer of Russia has described Putin as “a rational actor, and even a cautious one” and contended that “failed Western diplomacy” turned “a potential pragmatic ally” into a confrontational opponent.Fo

5. Militant nationalism in Ukraine

The first major attempt to address the linguistic rights situation in independent Ukraine came in July 2012 when the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, passed a law that would make any language spoken by more than 10% of a region’s inhabitants into an official “regional language.”Footnote ²⁵ The response was explosive, with physical violence in the parliamentary chamber being just the start. Yet this legislation aligned with European values and drew in particular on the concepts of the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The law was similar to reforms which resolved tensions over the use of Hungarian in Romania, albeit having a lower 10% rather than 20% threshold. While the EU failed to back these new linguistic rights, it threw itself behind the Maidan demonstrations the following year, not seeming to pay close attention to their composition. As John Mearsheimer has remarked, the new government that came to power after Euromaidan had four high-ranking members who could legitimately be called neo-fascists, drawn from the far-right groups who had risen to prominence during the “Euromaidan.” Another factor making the administration after 2014 increasingly nationalist was that the most Russian regions of the east were embroiled in conflict. As a result, where previously the Ukrainian parliament was roughly balanced between east and west, now nationalist regions had the upper hand.

A joint-authored survey concluded that “between 2014 and 2019, the Ukrainian government passed a number of new laws that significantly restrict the right and possibility to use minority languages.”Footnote ²⁶ An education statute of 2017 mandated that all education be conducted in Ukrainian with the exceptions of permitting the use of minority languages in primary education and English or other EU languages in higher education. In response, the governments of several EU member states with kin populations inside Ukraine – including Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Greece – raised objections. The EU itself not only failed to act publicly at a high level but institutionally appears to have been willing the issue away. It did not shy from declaring “the rights of the Crimean Tatars … have continued to be gravely violated through the shutting down of Crimean Tatar media outlets” but had no firm statements to make concerning Kjiv’s new law.Footnote ²⁷ The following year, a report on the implementation of the Association Agreement by the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament, which might be expected to take a critical stance with regard to the Commission, mentioned under human rights only the situations of the Roma and LGBT communities. Hungary achieved public action only by addressing NATO rather than the EU. After threatening to use its veto, the NATO Secretary General obtained the rather minimal statement that Ukraine would comply, at least formally, with the Venice Commission’s recommendations.Foo

It might be suspected that once the EU had admitted members who failed to give their Russian speakers citizenship, let alone substantive minority rights, it would not be in a position to insist that Kyiv meet higher criteria. But, even beyond this, the impression that the EU has persistently been less than full-throated in its advocacy of minority rights is hard to avoid. Indeed, the Copenhagen criteria only addressed the issue in the wake of the Council of Europe’s “Charter for Regional or Minority Languages” (adopted 1992). The Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU of 2014 does not mention linguistic rights at all; “non-discrimination of persons belonging to minorities” is included under Title II Political Dialogue and Reform, but there is no further specification. This vast document of more than 20,000 pages gives minute attention to such details as the permissible duties on passenger cars while effectively ignoring what should have been seen by the EU as a vital issue.

In gauging whether the Copenhagen criteria had been met, the bloc largely did so secondhand, relying on assessments made by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission on the implementation of the Charter. It can be argued that there is a fundamental problem – beyond even its particular failure to uphold the rights of Russian-speaking inhabitants of the new aspirants for membership – that prevents the EU from establishing and enforcing a rigorous standard on minority rights. This fatal obstacle is France’s objections to special treatment for minorities. Stipulations of the first article of the constitution concerning equality have come to be understood to mean that distinctions among citizens should not be recognised by the state. France has signed the Charter but never ratified it. Given that France and Germany habitually act as the principles of the EU, it might be suspected that this stance has posed an insuperable impediment to the bloc effectively enforcing linguistic or minority rights.

In 2019, Hungary’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs objected that the “Law on Supporting the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language,” which mandated that business must be conducted in Ukrainian with a hotline established to report firms for not switching to Ukrainian upon request, “strongly violates the rights of the Hungarian minority.” Hungary insisted that “it is shameful that a country that is striving to develop an increasingly close relationship with the EU has made a decision that is in complete opposition to European values.”Footnote ²⁹ Other legislation enacted in this period required all printed mass media in Ukraine to be published in Ukrainian, with the exception of publications which were simultaneously published in it and another language, a particularly onerous demand for the smaller languages.

On all these matters of express concern to the governments of a number of member states, the EU failed to make official statements while pouring much diplomatic energy into repeatedly and loudly condemning the occupation of Crimea. Often appearing self-righteous in its rhetoric, it fell into an oppositional dynamic and was unable to practically engage substantive Russian concerns. In a significant development that largely went unreported in the West, Putin signed an order simplifying the procedure for obtaining a Russian passport for residents of eastern Ukraine’s rebellious regions. Ominously, no longer was Russia making statements about pursuing matters through international structures, perhaps the first hint that he was anticipating violating the sovereignty of the post-2014 borders.

It is not that the question of rights more widely has not been raised in relations between the EU and Ukraine. In 2015, the EU refused to implement a new visa regime unless sexual orientation and gender identity anti-discrimination legislation were put in place, an entirely new normative demand on any potential member state. After much resistance, legislation to this effect was passed. Yuriy Lutsenko, the Verkhovna Rada’s majority leader, commented that “it is better to have gay parades in Kiev than Russian tanks.” There was apparently no recognition that forestalling the latter development might also necessitate avoiding antagonising their larger neighbour by the repression of the Russian language in Ukraine.

The extent to which extreme nationalist ideology had taken over in Kyiv is evidenced by Ukraine’s first language ombudsman – of all people – declaring: “The dream was always to cultivate, build or construct a powerful homogeneous Ukrainian monolith – a society of the like-minded, who speak the state language, having no disagreements on major issues of state.”Footnote ³⁰ The very least that must be said is that this is not a statement that in any way aligns with the broad principles on which the EU is based. Whether such a declaration is totalitarian or not would require a longer discussion. It is especially troubling in a situation where many of the most extreme nationalist organisations in Ukraine see themselves as ideologically continuous with groups that fought with the Nazis during the Second World War. The “fascism” of elements of the political scene in contemporary Ukraine is not a fantasy “talking point” of Putin but a matter in plain view that has been amply documented by Western journalists.Foo

6. The EU abscondus and the Civil War in the east

The EU’s push to expand its markets was a proximate cause of the conflict in Donbass. After it broke out, talks in Geneva proceeded without it. The OSCE was a signatory to the first Minsk Accord and France and Germany to the second, effectively a stunning admission of its inability to act. While a civil war raged in eastern Ukraine, the EU – whom the Nobel Committee had named the guarantor of continental peace only two years previously – appeared powerless to take the initiative.

The last high-level meeting between Russia and the EU was a summit in January 2014, more than eight years before the invasion. That a proposal to meet in 2021 collapsed after objections from the Baltic states and Poland suggests why the EU was ultimately unable to act effectively in relation to Ukraine. How could a bloc that contained two member states that were denying fundamental rights to their own Russian speakers insist on minority rights there? Putin likely felt that with hindsight it was a fatal error to allow the Baltics to join NATO without resolving the language question. Certainly, as we have seen, over a period of years, diplomatic approaches to addressing it proved unavailing. The deep historical links between Ukraine and Russia, which he himself emphasised on numerous occasions, would make it especially important that Russian speakers not be denigrated there.

There are a number of liminal regions in Europe that are or have been the site of significant contestation: Alsace-Lorraine, Southern Jutland, South Tyrol, Ulster, and Transylvania are among the most notable. Donbass and other eastern regions of Ukraine also stand out as potential flashpoints and should have been the focus of careful and attentive diplomacy. Merkel declared on a visit to Kyiv in August 2014 that federalism was the only solution in Ukraine.Footnote ³² If the EU had used its membership conditionality to insist on giving the region autonomy as firmly as it pushed for gay rights, Putin would arguably have never invaded. Yet it sat on its hands when, as Dominique Arel puts it, “radical right groups used violence in August 2015 to prevent parliament from passing a constitutional amendment that would have allowed autonomy for Eastern Donbas and facilitated implementation of the Minsk Accords.”Footnote ³³

The costs of the bloc’s failure to act have been massive and go far beyond the estimated cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine of $500 billion. The total number of casualties on both sides is now thought to exceed more than a million, a staggering figure. Whether Russian or Ukrainian, the reality of the deaths of young Europeans is the same. This is precisely the scenario, a war between two states on the continent, costly in lives and materially, that the EU has long claimed was its founding raison d’etre to prevent.

Yet it has not only proved completely incapable of preventing the conflict in Ukraine, but at crucial points, the EU has significantly enflamed the situation with its aggressive push for markets and reckless encouragement of the deposition of an elected head of state. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, the EU recognised the principled and pragmatic importance of minority rights. However, when it came to the crunch, they failed to push new members to implement them for Russian speakers. In particular, had the EU resolutely reined in nationalist regimes in Kjiv and helped resist NATO expansionism, it is probable that Putin would never have considered invading Ukraine.

By Larry C. Johnson, Substack, 9/16/26

I am back in Moscow for the first time in ten months, and the first thing that strikes you is the distance between the city in front of you and the city as it is described five thousand miles away. Moscow and St. Petersburg are thriving, modern, and — this is the word I keep reaching for — vibrant. The streets are clean and safe. They are not lined with the homeless or the begging. In two weeks I saw exactly one man asking for money, on a stoop in St. Petersburg, and he stood out precisely because he was such a rarity. Set that against New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta — name any major American city — and the contrast is not marginal. It is an order of magnitude.

I start with the streets because they are the simplest test of the claim the West has been pushing for three years: i.e., that Russia is an economy on the edge, its people pulling their cash out, its cities sliding toward crisis. That story does not survive contact with the pavement.

Vladimir Putin is not paying me to post a sunny story. I am reporting what I see and what I hear from ordinary Russians going about their lives — and what I see is an economy that, sanctions and all, is doing better than the Western economies it is measured against. The shelves are full. The restaurants are full. People are working, spending, building. There is none of the visible distress the West insists is just around the corner. Ask the people who actually live here and you will not find a nation bracing for collapse. You will find one that has absorbed everything the West could throw at it and kept moving.

That is the part the Western press cannot bring itself to say. For three years it has forecast a Russian financial crisis that never arrives, and the reason it never arrives is visible from any café window on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg or Tverskaya Street in Moscow. There is no bank run here, no ruble in freefall. The sanctions were supposed to break this country. They did not. Compare the mood on these streets to the anxiety in London or the decay in America’s great cities, and the question is not whether Russia is surviving the sanctions. The question is why the West ever assumed it would not.

Dinner with Lavrov

A week ago Monday I had dinner with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. I was in the company of John Mearsheimer, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and Alastair Crooke. The dinner was informal and genuinely candid, and Lavrov answered questions directly — and anyone who has sat with Mearsheimer knows he does not ask soft ones.

I came away with two clear impressions.

The first is that Russia’s negotiating position toward the West has not moved an inch since Putin addressed his foreign ministry on June 14, 2024. In that speech he made the terms explicit, and they are the terms still on the table: the West must recognize Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, along with Crimea, as permanent Russian territory. These former Ukrainian oblasts are not going back. In Moscow that is treated not as an opening bid but as a settled fact. Beyond it, Russia is building buffer zones through its advances in Sumy, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk. Those territories could, in time, be incorporated as well — though officials frame that as something that would follow a vote or plebiscite rather than a foregone conclusion. It is not formally on the menu. But it is, in my read, very much in the cards.

The second impression is that the space for a negotiated settlement is extremely narrow — narrower than Western capitals want to admit — because Russia is simply not willing to make the concessions the West requires, and does not believe it has to. My own assessment, after listening to how officials here talk, is that the war effort will not stop until Odessa and Kyiv are firmly under Russian control. I hold that as a judgment, not a certainty. But nothing I heard this week moved me off it.

What “root causes” actually means

Putin talks constantly about the “root causes” of the conflict having to be addressed, and Americans are rarely told what the phrase means. So I asked directly, in a conversation in Moscow with Alexander Babakov, a Duma member and a senior figure in the International Unity Club.

The simplest way to translate it for my fellow citizens is this: the American project of pulling Ukraine into NATO’s orbit and using it as a battering ram against Russia has to end. Not be paused — ended. There will be no more tolerance of NATO activity in Ukraine, and Ukraine’s foreign and military policy has to be severed from that Western embrace for good. From Moscow’s chair, that is the non-negotiable core, and everything else is detail.

It helps to remember how old this really is. Ukraine joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace in 1994, and from that point the Western military relationship with Kyiv grew steadily, whatever the absence of a formal membership card. The Yavoriv military base in western Ukraine became a recurring venue for Western exercises through the 1990s and, from 2015, hosted a standing US-led training mission. Over the years Ukraine became one of the most frequent hosts of NATO exercises of any country outside the alliance — drills whose scenarios never named Russia as the adversary but left no doubt, from their structure, who the target was. By Trump’s first term these were running to several a year, some with a submarine component that had nothing to do with chasing pirates. Through all of it, Moscow’s read is that Putin showed a patience the West mistook for weakness.

You do not have to accept every element of that account to grasp its force. This is the realist reading of the war — the one Mearsheimer has argued about as well as it can be argued — and it is the frame through which the men I dined with see the entire conflict. It is contested in Washington, obviously. But you cannot understand why the Russian position is so immovable unless you understand that in Moscow it is not seen as aggression at all, but as the closing of a wound the West spent thirty years opening.

The view from here

The war is not what occupies the average Russian. It is still, in daily life, a “special military operation,” and the streets of the two great cities carry on as if it were happening on another continent — which, from Moscow, it nearly is. That gap between the fixed, maximalist position of the state and the near-normalcy of civilian life is itself the story: a country settled enough at home to wait, and convinced enough of its terms not to bend.

What the officers told me

I spoke this week with three Russian military men, retired and serving — Colonel Eduard Basurin, retired; General Evgeny Buzhinsky, retired; and, on active duty, Lieutenant General Apti Alaudinov, the commander of the Akhmat special forces. Different men, different vantage points, and one message held across all of them: Russia is not going to attack Europe. It has no military designs on Europe, none, and no intention of starting that fight.

What Russia does see, they told me, is a Europe preparing to attack it — and not merely in the rhetoric coming out of the mouths of leaders like Germany’s Chancellor Merz and the British prime minister, though Moscow takes that rhetoric seriously enough. It is the concrete steps behind the words: the weapons systems, the missiles specifically, being built to be used against Russian territory. The officers were blunt about where that leads. If those activities continue, Russia will have no alternative but to deal with the threat, and the prospect of a war with Europe becomes real. That is not an imaginary danger conjured to frighten anyone. It is how these professionals read the trajectory. Russia is not looking for the fight. But it is neither deaf nor blind to what is being prepared against it.

They also confirmed something I had already sensed on my own: Russia has entered a decisive new phase in the war with Ukraine, a deliberate push to bring it to a faster end than anyone previously anticipated. For the first four years, Russia fought to hold down its own casualties. That is why it did not throw mass formations against fixed positions, where the losses would have been severe, but relied instead on small-unit tactics. That restraint is over. The new phase closes Ukraine’s Black Sea coast to trade in both directions, subjects logistics hubs in Kyiv and other cities — western Ukraine especially — to sustained targeting, and steps up ground advances all along the line of contact. This is a considered shift by the Russian general staff, and it is already paying off: the moves to encircle Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and key gains in Zaporizhzhia. My own read is that by the end of November, Donetsk will once again be wholly under Russian control, and Zaporizhzhia — a major industrial city and regional capital on the Dnipro — will be under direct threat of occupation.

A vibrant democracy on its own terms

The Russian people go to the polls this Sunday, and I will be there to observe it. There are at least five parties are contesting seats in the Duma. Russia is not the monolith it is made out to be. It is, despite the Western caricature, a vibrant democracy — one built according to Russian culture and Russian ideals rather than a copy of anyone else’s, and it is long past time the West set aside its prejudice and took Russia as it actually is. This is not a regime run by international communists, whatever the popular meme of the 1960s and 1970s held. It is now, deservedly, the fourth-largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity, innovative in its technology and richly endowed with resources.

That is my update for now. I will be back with further insights as my journey continues.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 9/22/26

Last July, Kit Klarenberg of the Grayzone, writing in Eurasia Review ((Eurasia) told how a notorious British MI6 agent had infiltrated the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on London’s behalf. Nicholas Langman, apparently, claims credit for helping engineer the West’s economic war on Iran. Langman is cited as saying he “worked to prevent WMD proliferation through… support for the [IAEA] and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW] and through high level international partnerships,” and claimed a major role in organizing the sanctions regime on Iran by “[building] highly effective and mutually supportive relations across government and with senior US, European, Middle and Far Eastern colleagues for strategy” between 2010 and 2012.

Western intelligence penetration of UN agencies was discussed yesterday Col Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in interview with Judge Napolitano. Wilkerson highlighted that international regulatory and monitoring bodies are heavily compromised by Western and Israeli intelligence agencies, and stated that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been heavily penetrated by the CIA, MI6, and Mossad. He argued that UN and IAEA inspection teams have historically been used as covers for espionage. Operatives use their access to map out physical infrastructure and identify target personnel. A specific point of contention raised was how the IAEA insisted on interviewing top Iranian nuclear scientists. Wilkerson noted that this directly allowed foreign intelligence to identify, track, and ultimately target those scientists for assassination. The discussion focused on how recent IAEA resolutions and reports regarding Iran’s nuclear stockpile were “stage-managed” by Western powers. This provided the political justification and legal pretext for military strikes against Iranian facilities. Wilkerson emphasized that while the U.S. and Israel relied on this deep intelligence penetration to decapitate Iranian leadership and map out nuclear sites, it has resulted in a total collapse of trust in international diplomacy. As a result, nations like Iran and Russia now view the IAEA not as an independent watchdog, but as an extension of Western intelligence apparatuses.

Given this context it is hard to escape the conclusion that some form of intelligence penetration accounts for the discrediting of the OPCW In April 2018 over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, which killed dozens of civilians. In response, the US, UK, and France launched retaliatory airstrikes against the Syrian government. The OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) released its final report a year later, concluding there were “reasonable grounds” that a toxic chemical containing chlorine was used as a weapon, likely dropped from aircraft. Because the rebels had no airforce, this pointed directly to the Syrian military. But two OPCW inspectors (referred to as whistleblowers by critics, later identified as Ian Henderson and Brendan Whelan) raised significant concerns. An unreleased internal assessment by Henderson suggested that the chlorine gas cylinders found at the scene were more likely “manually placed” on the ground rather than dropped from an aircraft. The leaked emails accused OPCW management of introducing intentional bias and omitting alternative explanations in the final public report to align with Western political objectives. Critics argued that the conclusions of the investigation were pre-ordained by Washington, London, and Paris to justify their illegal military strikes, the OPCW leadership was pressured to suppress dissenting scientific and engineering data that contradicted the Western narrative, and that the expansion of the OPCW’s powers in late 2018—allowing it to actively attribute blame for chemical attacks rather than just confirming their occurrence—was a Western-driven political maneuver. The OPCW claimed that the two disgruntled employees only had minor, supporting roles and lacked access to the full repository of evidence—including comprehensive medical reports, witness testimonies, and chemical analyses. A 2026 International Labour Organization (ILO) tribunal ordered the OPCW to pay compensation to Brendan Whelan over procedural aspects of his dismissal. For much fuller details of this scandal, refer to the Berlin Group 21’s incomparable investigation (Berlin Group).

By Marta Havryshko, Substack, 9/17/26

President Zelensky has made The Jerusalem Post’s list of the 50 Most Influential Jews of 2026. The paper introduces him as “The Jewish president who became the face of Ukraine’s resistance.”

The newspaper notes that Putin has “repeatedly framed Zelensky as a disgrace to Jewish people and has called his government a ‘Nazi regime.’” It then immediately sets about dismantling those attacks by invoking Zelensky’s family history: his grandfather fought the Nazis in the Red Army, while numerous relatives were murdered in the Holocaust.

“Zelensky’s paternal grandfather was the only member of his immediate family who survived the Holocaust,” The Jerusalem Post emphasizes.

Yet in portraying Zelensky as a “good leader, and just so happens to be Jewish,” and praising his “impressive political agenda, pushing the country to join the EU, fighting corruption, and seeing the country through a nearly five-year invasion,” The Jerusalem Post somehow neglects to tell its readers that Zelensky has become the face not only of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression, but also of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis.

The Azov Commander

When Zelensky came to power in 2019, his relationship with Azov was fraught. Azov commanders, including Andriy Biletsky, publicly declared that they would not obey his orders to withdraw troops in the Donbas under the terms of a ceasefire with Russia. Some even threatened him openly. Biletsky said he would never accept a decoration from Zelensky’s hands.

A few years later, the picture could hardly be more different.

Biletsky accepted the title of Hero of Ukraine from Zelensky, along with a string of other high state honors, and became commander of the Third Army Corps, which today numbers roughly 50,000 personnel. Another Azov celebrity, Denys Prokopenko, likewise rose to command a corps and became a Hero of Ukraine.

Azov, founded by neo-Nazis and fanatics and numbering barely 1,000 fighters in 2022, now has two army corps regarded as elite formations. While Azov has gone to considerable lengths to rebrand, the Third Assault Brigade, formed from the Azov milieu, absorbed some of its most radical elements.

Command positions there have been held, for example, by Russian neo-Nazi Artem “Uragan” Krasnolutsky, who annually celebrates Adolf Hitler’s birthday; Aleksei “Kolovrat” Kozhemyakin, who has Hitler and swastika tattoos on his chest and fled Russia after facing prosecution for racist and antisemitic crimes; and Sasha “Martyn” Martynenko, whose body is covered in swastikas, an SS motto, and antisemitic tattoos.

Aleksei “Kolovrat” Kozhemyakin, the commander of the 1st assault battalion of the 3rd Assault Brigade (Azov), is visiting the opening of the photo exhibition of his brigade at the Kyiv History Museum on 27 Sept. 2023.

The Third Assault Brigade’s ideological foundations draw on the integral nationalism of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)—an ideology whose historical trajectory included collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, mass ethnic cleansing of Poles, and collective terror against Ukrainians deemed politically or nationally “wrong,” with entire families among its victims.

On top of this, some senior figures associated with the Third Assault Brigade, such as Dmytro Kukharchuk, openly voice anti-Muslim, racist, homophobic, and misogynistic views.

Sasha “Martyn” Martynenko, an officer of the Azov-rooted Third Assault Brigade.

Zelensky’s Jewishness poses no obstacle whatsoever to the Azov formations. Why should it? Zelensky has presided over their expansion and their growing influence—everything they need to accumulate military and, potentially, political power in a country at war. His government now relies on precisely this radical wing: a milieu that brands virtually any peace negotiations “capitulation” because it has every incentive to preserve the status quo—a permanent war in which its power, prestige, and influence continue to grow.

Commander of Foreign Neo-Nazis

It is precisely under the presidency of Zelensky—Ukraine’s Supreme Commander-in-Chief—that, for the first time in the country’s post-independence military history, entire formations of foreign neo-Nazis and far-right militants have emerged: the Russian Volunteer Corps, the German Volunteer Corps, and the Belarusian Volunteer Corps.

Neo-Nazis from France, Spain, and elsewhere have also fought in Revansh, under the command of Ukraine’s military intelligence. They have come to Ukraine to acquire combat experience, build transnational networks, and prepare for the racial war they envision in their respective countries.

Gwendal Delange (aka “Kenneth”), a neo-Nazi from France, is fighting in Ukraine under Military Intelligence. He initially served in Azov, later collaborated with the 3rd Assault Brigade, and now serves with Revanche International, led by HUR.

For all their antisemitic and white-supremacist politics, Zelensky’s Jewishness appears to trouble them remarkably little. Why would it? Ukraine offers them something infinitely more valuable than ideological consistency: extraordinary opportunities to strengthen their extremist nationalist movements, gain battlefield experience, forge international connections, and acquire military credentials.

Ukraine also freely hosts concerts by so-called National Socialist Black Metal bands such as M8l8th (Hitler’s Hammer), drawing crowds of more than a thousand people. Why? The band’s frontman, Alexey Levkin, is a deputy commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps.

Yule Night II in Kyiv on Dec. 25, 2025.

These concerts are not merely places where young people can throw Nazi salutes and sing about the white race with impunity. They are networking hubs for the far right.

Yule Night II in Kyiv on Dec. 26, 2024.

The contrast with contemporary Russia is striking. There, such concerts are relatively small, driven underground, and frequently subjected to police raids. In wartime Ukraine, meanwhile, they can be openly advertised and staged on a large scale, with prominent commanders from far-right military formations in attendance.

Under Zelensky, Ukraine has also become an ideological laboratory for Europe’s far right. Neo-Nazi and neo-fascist conferences can take place openly in the country. One example is Nation Europa held in Lviv in August 2024, to which Italy’s CasaPound, Germany’s Der III. Weg, and other European far-right movements were invited.

And here an obvious question arises: in a country at war, where the security services wield enormous powers and where public events operate under wartime restrictions, how could a gathering of this kind take place without at least the knowledge and permission of the relevant authorities?

It is difficult to imagine that it could.

Such gatherings also offer an obvious recruitment opportunity. With Ukraine facing an acute shortage of manpower and a deepening mobilization crisis, foreign far-right networks constitute a ready-made pool of ideologically motivated men with an appetite for combat.

The paradox could hardly be more grotesque: a Jewish president celebrated abroad as the living refutation of Putin’s “Nazi” propaganda presides over a wartime state in which foreign neo-Nazis can acquire combat experience, build international networks, hold conferences, stage concerts, and embed themselves in military formations.

For them, Zelensky’s Jewish ancestry is not the problem. Ukraine is the opportunity.

Betraying His Grandfather’s Legacy

The Jerusalem Post’s invocation of Zelensky’s grandfather, who fought the Nazis in the ranks of the Red Army, is particularly ironic.

Because Zelensky has betrayed his grandfather’s memory.

How? By kneeling recently at the graves of Nazi collaborators—the very political milieu whose members participated in the persecution and murder of Jews like Zelensky’s own relatives and neighbors during the Second World War.

It was under Zelensky, a Jewish president, that the remains of Nazi collaborator Andriy Melnyk were brought back to Ukraine for the first time in the country’s history. The state conducted his reburial with honors, and Zelensky attended. Men subordinate to Melnyk’s nationalist movement served in police formations under the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. They guarded ghettos, hunted down Jews in hiding, escorted Jews to execution sites, and participated in killings.

Could some of those victims have been Zelensky’s own relatives? And now he honors Melnyk, their political leader?

Under Zelensky, Kyiv also held, for the first time (2021), a march honoring the Waffen-SS Division “Galicia,” formed in 1943 to fight as part of Nazi Germany’s war effort. Members of formations connected to the division were implicated in wartime atrocities, while the division later fought in Slovakia and Yugoslavia on the German side.

Today, within the Third Army Corps commanded by Andriy Biletsky, the Waffen-SS Galicia Division is commemorated as a heroic military tradition and does not commemorate 8 May – Day of Victory over Nazism. This, too, represents something extraordinary: under a Jewish Supreme Commander-in-Chief, a formation of the Ukrainian military openly celebrates the legacy of a Waffen-SS division – Nazi collaborators.

The Third Assault Brigade also produced an exhibition devoted to the Waffen-SS Galicia Division. It was unveiled with considerable fanfare at the Museum of Kyiv and was later shown in Lithuania and Estonia with support from Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture.

Again: under Zelensky.

A Jewish president.

What we are witnessing, then, is not merely an argument over historical memory. Under Zelensky, the meaning of the Second World War itself is being rewritten in Ukraine, while figures and formations associated with Nazi collaboration are being rehabilitated and incorporated into a new national heroic canon.

So why did The Jerusalem Post omit these profoundly uncomfortable facts while celebrating Zelensky as a leader?

Why have so many media outlets stopped asking Zelensky uncomfortable questions about neo-Nazis and far-right extremists whose military and institutional power has expanded under his presidency—and whose transnational networks could pose dangers far beyond Ukraine?

And how exactly does any of this square with the endlessly repeated mantra of “freedom and democracy” that Ukraine, under Zelensky, is supposedly defending?

At what point do we finally start asking uncomfortable questions of the “Jewish face of Ukrainian resistance”?

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Buy Me a Cofeee

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 9/24/26

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski out did himself yesterday on the doom and gloom story, telling a reporter that he has been spending the weekends at the dacha laying in supplies of rice and making jam out of the garden fruits in preparation for the presumed nuclear winter that will follow Russia’s invasion.

The rhetoric is getting extreme, although to be fair he said this to a Polish journalist and there is a very long and much beloved tradition of making homemade jam (varenye) at this time of the year. It features in Chekov’s play, The Cherry Orchard I think, so it has serious cultural credits and will play well with a general audience; the Polish equivalent of: “I like a pint in the pub” for the Brits. Still, I don’t believe he made extra jam so he will have something to eat when the fighting starts, but of course comments like this just tick the tensions up a notch.

The main event yesterday were the speeches at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and Zelenskiy introduced a new meme: “patient zero,” referring to Putin. As in the index patient you need to find when a new epidemic breaks out so that you can make a vaccine more quickly.

I don’t think it will catch on, but a nice try and colourful image. The nuts and bolts of his meetings in New York didn’t go well at all. He looked nervous and twitchy in his meeting with Trump unlike the Ankara Nato summit on July 8 where he was brimming with confidence.

At that meeting Trump promised him a Patriot missile license, but at this meeting Trump has totally walked that back after the likes of Boeing refused to share their tech with Ukraine, afraid they would out produce, out innovate and undercut the US firms (which they probably would).

In fact, there was no talk of missiles at all. Previously, Trump was badgered into promising “some” missiles “every month.”

Zelenskiy was asking for 300. But even the “some” talk has disappeared.

What Zelenskiy did get was an order to stop hitting Russian refineries because of the growing diesel shortages. He refused.

And there was some vague talk about an “energy ceasefire” but that was pointless, as there were no Russians in the room. Any “plans” to stop targeting energy don’t mean anything without the Russians and presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov made it clear Russia is not going to stop calling the talk “rhetoric” – which is exactly what it is.

This was probably Bankova’s last chance to get some real help from the West before the winter started and Zelenskiy made no progress.

Even more damning than Trump’s rebuff – I think its fair to say that the US participation in this conflict is now definitely over – was the tongue lashing that Zelenskiy got from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen who told him “no more money until you pull your reform sock up” (but with whatever the German equivalent of that is: Sockenhochziehpflicht?)

This is a very serious problem indeed and is not getting enough attention. At his Independence Day speech in August, Zelenskiy said that there is a $27bn hole in the defence budget (and a $32bn hole in the overall budget) and with the US out of the game the only place MinFin can find this money is from the EU. VDL did send €6.1bn the day after Zelenskiy speech and this morning the Danes signed off on another €3bn to tide Ukraine over, but Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko said that the government will be unable to pay wages as soon as next month.

Zelenskiy also met with IMF director Kristalina Georgieva, who promised a little help too, but that is after she cancelled the second tranche of the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) and wrapped it into the third tranche in December for the same problem – foot dragging on pushing through reforms.

Everyone has a long list of reforms that need to be made and aren’t (details in our story here) but the bottom line is both the IMF and EU are demanding real progress on anti-corruption reforms. The reason is obvious: the metastasizing Energoatom corruption scandal which has now implicated pretty much everyone who works in Bankova.

The funding issue has not been resolved. Indeed, no remedy has even been suggested. Bankova has asked for next year’s tranche of the €90bn to be brought forward but VDL said a definite “no” to that unless reforms are put through and soon. Even the €6.1bn she did send is almost the last bit of this year’s tranche and there is little left in the pipeline without remaking the whole support plan.

So, the headline on Zelenskiy’s trip to New York should be something like: “No new support for Zelenskiy as Ukraine faces economic collapse.”

Or something like that.

As we reported in April, Ukraine was facing a macroeconomic collapse in April before the €90bn deal was approved, and it is back there again. Plus it has no defence ammo. Plus Putin is clearly about to bomb the last of Ukraine’s power sector flat. Plus his own party looks increasingly rebellious as it won’t pass the needed reforms. However, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) Operation Vivaldi is looking good and making real progress in pushing the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) back from the Fortress Belt cities, so there is that.

But support for Ukraine seems to be fading fast. Another story to come out of the UNGA is 51 countries signed a statement condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine, presented by EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas (who else?) to show the world is “united” behind Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian people. Except no one in Africa signed it. No one from Latin America signed it. Even the US didn’t sign it. If you remember the first motion to condemn the war in Ukraine in March 2022 only five countries rejected it and the bulk of the other 193 countries went along with it.

Most of the Global South sat on the fence in that vote. In this vote most of the Global South have come down on Russia and China’s side. It’s only the Global North that is behind Ukraine, and even then only half heartedly. It’s telling that in the same week of the UNGA that France chose to cut a bargain with Baku to get two of their spies out of jail (because that is what they are) in exchange for lifting sanctions on Russian tycoon Alisher Usmanov. That turns the whole sanctions regime into a bargaining chip where national interests are more important than geopolitical principles. And Macron has been one of the most vocal and active of the EU’s Ukraine champions until now.

***

Russia Could Make An Energy Truce Conditional On Resuming Pipeline Exports To Europe

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 9/25/26

Zelensky recently proposed a partial truce with Russia that would include, among other things, eschewing attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure. The strategic context concerns Russia’s ramped-up systematic strike campaign against Ukrainian power plants, gas stations, ports, and most recently, locomotives, all of which aims to cripple its military logistics by winter for achieving a Russian breakthrough. The Kremlin therefore doesn’t have any interest in accepting this lopsided arrangement.

That could change, however, if Russia makes at least the energy dimension of Zelensky’s proposal conditional on resuming its pipeline exports to Europe. It’s not just Ukraine that’s poised to experience its must difficult winter in years but the EU as a whole too according to the European Commissioner for Energy and Housing in a recent interview with the Financial Times. This is due to the global fuel crisis brought about by the Third Gulf War and Ukraine’s spree of attacks against Russian refineries this year.

Ukraine desperately needs relief from Russia’s systematic strikes against its energy infrastructure this winter, the EU desperately needs more energy amidst the global fuel crisis during the same season, and Russia is unlikely to turn down the influx of revenue even if the windfall is only for several months. A deal could take the form of resuming gas exports to Germany via the one undamaged Nord Stream pipeline possibly together with oil and gas exports to Poland (and beyond) via the Druzhba and Yamal pipelines.

The resumption of Russian pipeline exports to Europe, even if only for the winter, would restore some of their pre-2022 complex mutual interdependence for raising the odds that the energy truce is respected. The EU will still survive the winter even without Russian pipeline imports, and Russia can continue funding its military operations even without pipeline exports to Europe, but Ukraine might not survive without relief from Russia’s systematic strikes against its energy infrastructure.

Accordingly, the EU could sever its imports from Russia if Russia violates the energy truce, while Russia could sever its exports to the EU if Ukraine does so instead. While skeptics might suspect that Russia has more to gain from violating the energy truce due to Ukraine’s increasingly desperate military-strategic situation, Russia has a greater interest in jointly building the new continental security architecture with European NATO (E-NATO), which it can’t do without a relative normalization of ties. All of this is sensible.

If an energy truce is agreed to on the condition of Russia resuming at least its Nord Stream exports to Europe, then the “snowdrop diplomacy” formula proposed here could be advanced, which might see the mutual drawdown of E-NATO forces from the Baltic States in parallel with Russian ones from Belarus. The US might then purchase Nord Stream from Russia as has been floated, and perhaps also the Belarusian parts of Druzhba and/or Yamal, for upholding this new order and facilitating a grand deal over Ukraine.

The resultant security architecture could have partial buffers in the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine, while the western flank of the “cordon sanitaire” would have a US-backed Polish-led Intermarium counterbalance a German-dominated militarized EU. Poland would also still be the US’ LNG hub in Europe since the US would probably raise the price of the Russian pipeline gas under its control to keep its own gas competitive. This balance of interests is realistic and should thus be seriously considered.