By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 8/6/26

Big Trouble in Ukraine

The Disappearance of Air Defense

I mentioned in a recent post that Ben Aris of IntelliNews, who has generally shown himself sympathetic to the political West’s war on Russia via Ukraine, seems to be increasingly disillusioned with its prospects. His reasons largely align with developments that I have captured over recent weeks.

First of all is the crisis of diminishing US weapons stockpiles, which has severely reduced the supply of weapons to Ukraine. The absence of air defense missiles means that few, if any, Russian missiles fired at Ukraine, are being brought down.

“The skies are open and Russia now has free rein to destroy anything it wants with its vast and growing arsenal of cruise and ballistic missiles. We are moving into the end game as Ukraine is increasingly defenseless against the escalating Russian onslaught. And winter is coming. That will be harsher than last year’s already punishing campaign that left residents living in apartments where temperatures dropped to -10°C or less.”

In a separate article today, Aris (IntelliNews) records that Russia fired 24 ballistic missiles, four Zircon or Onyx cruise missiles and 115 drones at Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight on August 5, killing 17 people and injuring 44. Ukrainian forces shot down 98 of the drones but intercepted none of the missiles.

“The attack tore through the logistics backbone of Ukraine’s consumer economy, destroying or damaging distribution centers run by Rozetka, Epicentr, Fozzy Group, NOVUS, Intertop and several other major retailers, part of a wider pattern of strikes on Ukraine’s civilian economy that Kyiv itself has mirrored against Russian retail with its own Operation Wildberries.”

The Duran (Duran) comments that Russia can now combine ballistic missiles, drones, cruise missiles and electronic warfare in layered attacks designed to exhaust interceptors and overwhelm defensive systems while, at the front, Russian Su-34 aircraft are delivering large numbers of precision-guided FAB glide bombs against fortified positions, reportedly dropping more than 8,000 during July.

“Missiles and drones attack the network behind the front. Glide bombs dismantle defensive positions closer to it.”

An attack on power facilities in Dnipropetrovska oblast left 126,000 households without electricity. Several towns have water problems, with one without running water for four days.

Ukraine’s Strategic Response

Ukraine says that its response to the shortage of missiles will be to focus on Russia’s missile launchers. But in the case of Iskander-M launchers, these are in constant motion and launch from 140-150 km behind the front line – beyond HIMARS range. Production of these launchers occurs deep underground. The Iskander is largely immune to sanctions because it is built almost entirely from Russian-made components and electronics. These problems could be assuaged by satellite-guided targeting over Russian territory itself, if Starlink agreed to cooperate, but Elon Musk has not granted permission for it to be used to strike inside Russia.

Were Musk to do so, by the way, it is highly likely that Russia would employ its new Russvat satellite system to interfere with Starlink signals.

Aris cites Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as saying that the next 100 days could decide the outcome of this war, and the chances are 50/50, and that much depends on decisions taken by US President Donald Trump and by Musk over Starlink.

Ukraine’s drone and missile manufacturer, Fire Point, is already building ground-attack missiles designed to reach Moscow and which are due for first combat use in the fall. Fire Point is also the industrial lead on Freyja, a European-backed anti-ballistic missile system which is meant to combine Ukrainian-built interceptors with European sensors and infrastructure, with a target of the system’s first successful ballistic-missile interception by mid-2027. This is intended to be a much cheaper substitute for the Patriot system.

These developments will count for little if Russian missiles in the meantime are able to find their targets in Ukraine without any resistance and if Aris is right that Putin is looking to a Russian coup de grâce this winter.

And even if Ukraine does manage to get its new generation of missiles ready in time for them to be operational, reciprocity with Russian capability does not produce equilibrium. Rather, as the Duran notes today, it exposes the difference in scale and, on that score, it is clear that Russia has the decisive advantage.

And bear in mind the maxim that no system of air defense from the ground is likely to achieve a hit rate higher than .21%.

The Humanitarian Context

Even some influential sources inside Ukraine like Iuliia Mendel, Zelenskiy’s former press secretary, are calling for an end to what Mendel believes is an unwinnable war on the basis of the human suffering alone. She reports a mass exodus of Ukrainians for Europe although one must presume that this will be difficult if not impossible for anyone of military age.

There are worries that, in addition to continuing to target energy facilities (80% of Ukraine’s power generating capacity has been destroyed) Russia will turn its attention to the water system.

Ukraine has a chronic manpower shortage creating kilometer-long holes in the AFU’s defensive lines. In the Donbass, Russian soldiers are walking through the holes and then taking up position behind the defenders.

For the Duran, Alexander Christoforou today (Duran) reports on signs that Russia is preparing a major offensive toward Chernigov and even Kiev itself, as Ukraine’s front lines buckle under desperate new conscription targets and a total Black Sea port blockade. Even Ukraine’s most reliable resource, the drone, is now under threat from moves by China to cut off the drone components that fuel Ukraine’s offensive.

System Corruption

Aris has separately reported (IntelliNews) on the most recent instances of political corruption in Ukraine. Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) have charged Olha Stefanishyna, until recently Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, in a new illicit-enrichment case tied to the purchase of a Kyiv apartment, two days after she resigned her post.

Stefanishyna previously worked closely with former presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak. Stefanishyna denies wrongdoing. In another scandal (the Energoatom kickback), Tymur Mindich – once one of Zelenskiy’s closest associates – is accused of siphoning off $100mn from the utility that left Ukraine’s nuclear power sector defenseless against Russian missile attacks. Former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov was also charged with illicit enrichment and placed in pre-trial detention. A familiar pattern in these cases involves officials accused of buying property at a fraction of its market value rather than taking a straightforward bribe. Ukrainian media have suggested that Zelenskiy exploited the Stefanishyna scandal to conduct a government reshuffle that would distance him from a tainted inner circle.

Wilkerson and Diesen: Concepts for Understanding the World ((Diesen))

This conversation yesterday covered a number of conceptual aids for an understanding of the present global crisis.

What is this crisis? Well, for the past couple of years, I have articulated it mainly in terms of an increasingly desperate attempt by the US to protect itself from the growing strength of the Global South (now the Global Majority in population terms and perhaps in terms of overall wealth in purchasing power terms), seeking to restore its “unipolar moment” (achieved in the brief period between the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 which precipitated China’s economic growth into the stratosphere).

The US economic counteroffensive, as it were, has taken the form, primarily, of seeking to incite the fragmentation of the Russian Federation by means of a proxy war centering on Ukraine; destabilizing Chinese trade advantages by seeking to re-assert Western primacy with the assistance of Israel over West Asian oil and commodity trade routes involving Iran; and preparing for a broader war with China that would center on the use of Taiwan as proxy, in alliance with US-coopted regimes throughout southeast Asia including, most notably Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand as well as older imperial allies in Australia and New Zealand.

From these three central nodes of the US war against multipolarity we find numerous sub-branches: these involve conflicts – as examples only – from Moldova and Transnistria, Serbia, Kazakhstan, and Georgia so far as Ukraine is concerned, or Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan so far as Iran is concerned, and conflicts over islands in the China Sea or terrorist movements in Myanmar and Pakistan so far as China is concerned.

The following notes are somewhat disjointed, I have not had time to cover more than the first half of this discussion, and they may not altogether make sense, but I find them useful and some readers may do so too:

I continue to support the above formulation, but note the interesting application by Wilkerson and Diesen of the terms “maritime” and “continental” powers to describe a long-arc movement from the triumph of maritime powers like the United Kingdom over the global order from the 1600s to the triumph of continental powers like Russia and China in the 2000’s.

Central to the strategies of the maritime powers, and the power of the US during the Cold War, were tactics of divide and rule, splitting alliances, fomenting discord, as well as technological dominance.

For the United States, like the UK before it, this has led to considerable “imperial overstretch.” Wilkerson somewhat qualifies this by noting that nobody had really expected a phenomenon such as Trump and how this might impact on narratives about “what normally happens” in the cycles of imperial rise and fall.

Equally novel, perhaps, is the form of predatory capitalism that characterizes the late imperial stage of US power. This has brought into being a supreme form of something that a few decades ago we used to discern in the Soviet Union namely, a system of “state capitalism,” which now takes on gigantic dimensions as when Exxon-Mobile becomes the principal supplier to the Pentagon (likewise the top defense contractors). This system of predatory state capitalism is now being (even further) abused and misused by – to use Wilkerson’s sophisticated, scientific term – an “idiot” who is definitely not in control of the global dynamics.

The appropriate symbol for the end of the era of maritime powers, Wilkerson suggests, would be the destruction by a country like Iran of a US aircraft carrier, entirely forseeable given the reluctance of the US to put these monster vessels anywhere close to Iranian fire power.

Continental powers of today, and they include Russia, China and Iran, are not only vast but they stretch around the world. Amongst the maritime powers there is really only one strong member, even if it is bleeding wealth each day, and that is the USA. This is currently dismantling itself from within – illustrated in the obeisance of the political system to somebody whom Wilkerson clearly considers incompetent, malignant, if not demented.

That “somebody” is leading the US in its apocalyptic struggle with the forces of multipolarity, at a time when the US has punished so many people and countries, has destroyed so many civilizations, that it has become an object of hate and ridicule. The US cannot hope to exit this with even a sliver of the “dignity” which allowed the UK to slide back into mediocrity after World War 2.

That Trump is not in jail at this point is a consequence of the feebleness and atrophy of the US political structure. US founding fathers like Adams saw this coming two hundred and fifty years ago. Countervailing measure they recommended, such as education, have failed us (or we have failed to provide real education).

US globe-spanning power is over, and the only question that remains is how we will deal with this. Wilkerson reminds us of the US population at around 340 million, a modest fraction of the 1.5 billion people of China and the 1.5 billion people of India combined.

We have to accommodate ourselves to being a much less powerful entity. When Trump stood for his second period in office he sounded as though he wanted to scale back US empire, its forever wars and 800 military bases strewn across the planet but has ended up (fecklessly) trying to extend it.

The West had expected that it could sustain a two-legged hegemony (US plus Europe) but it is now all falling apart and we don’t know how to behave. Labelling our political systems as “liberal democracies,” we go about killing people on the high seas without due process, talking of our intended use of “military terror” to destroy a civilization like Iran and in other ways making a mockery of everything we said in the past that we stood for.

“We are the worst example of a great power going down, in history, in terms of the way we are doing it, and in terms of the damage we are doing to the good – and there was some good – that we did post-World War 2” offers Wilkerson, who can see no historical parallel, even the Roman.

We had a chance at the very beginning of the unipolar moment to convert that, husband that, into multipolarity, starting with a recognition of the new Russia as one of the “poles.” But we sacrificed that amazing opportunity for money – for backing NATO as a revenue-generating machinery for the benefit of US private defense contractors (thank you Bill Clinton).

So, we killed multipolarity in its cradle and ultimately, we will see multipolarity replaced by the triumph of the continental powers.

In the second part of this interview, Wilkerson considers the 20-30% chance, as he sees it, of a civil war in the US. But I shall have to leave that for another day.

By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, 7/23/26

It didn’t have to come to this, but you knew it would.

You just knew those doing Joe Biden’s thinking for him were eventually going to explain away how it was the Biden regime actively participated in Israel’s campaign of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. There are memoirs to be written, the historians await with beckoning fingers and… and we meant well. 

The indiscriminate daily bombing, the systematic starvation, the sniper killings of small children, the murder of aid workers and journalists: There were reasons for all of it if only people would understand. And now we are to understand.

“How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression in Gaza —and Iran” lays out the regime’s case, the grand apologia — the obscene apologia, as I may as well say straightaway — in the July 27 edition of The New Yorker. The digital version of this lengthy, revealing piece appeared Monday and is here.

Let’s have a takeaway, just as the big boys in corporate media have them — five takeaways, seven takeaways, four takeaways. Here is mine, just one: The Biden White House and the Blinken State Department could quickly have stopped the Zionist terror machine within two days of the events of Oct. 7, 2023, but they never had the guts or the integrity to face up to this responsibility.

They spent the remainder of Biden’s time in office dissembling in public, counting the weapons shipments and the casualty counts while professing their powerlessness to stop the Israelis’ Nazieqsue campaign to erase an entire population.  

I wrote “two days” just above with good reason. It was on Oct. 9, 2023, that Yoav Gallant, defense minister in the Netanyahu cabinet at the time, ordered “a complete siege” in Gaza. You may remember the savagery in Gallant’s imperative. “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel—everything will be closed,” he asserted very publicly. “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

All the crossings into Gaza were shut down by then — an open breach of the laws of armed conflict. The Israelis had already blocked the Red Cross from entry into Gaza — another breach of the Geneva Conventions. 

Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state and a key figure in the United States’ sustained complicity in Israel’s incessant crimes, flew to Israel a few days after Gallant spoke to confer with him and Bibi Netanyahu.

He got nowhere with either of them, and there is no surprise here: This was Blinken’s “I come as a Jew” journey, as readers may recall. Netanyahu more or less ignored him when he threatened to cancel a visit President Biden had in the works if the Israeli military did not moderate, at least cosmetically. 

There was no moderation and Biden made the visit. “As he left,” according to The New Yorker’s account, “Netanyahu bragged publicly that he’d defied the president. He declared that Israel ‘will not allow humanitarian assistance’ from ‘our territory into the Gaza Strip.’”

This is how it went for the duration of Biden’s term in office — Bibi’s defiance, his calculated insults, his constant blindsiding, more chutzpah than Alan Dershowitz ever dreamed of, and all along the Biden people took it supinely while keeping the weapons flow going smoothly.

“White House officials described themselves to me as almost powerless in the face of Israel’s emotional response to October 7th,” David Kirkpatrick reports. You read this again and again, indeed. “The administration gradually came to believe that it could not persuade Israel to alter its approach in Gaza,” Kirkpatrick reports later in his piece. 

Extravagant Self-Deceptions

You read this, and then you read that the Biden regime authorized $20 billion in arms sales after Oct. 7 and that, all in, the United States supplies 70 percent of Israel’s war matériel and almost all of its military aircraft, bombs and missiles.

And then you stop to marvel at the extravagant self-deceptions in which this regime indulged to dodge its duty to the Palestinians, to humanity altogether, to law — international and domestic. 

Kirkpatrick, for whom I have a certain amount of time, is very good at capturing this pitiful story in considerable granularity.

Parenthetically, it was as The New York Times’ bureau chief in Cairo during the Arab Spring that Kirkpatrick (and he alone) reported the telephone call during which Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, authorized the July 2013 coup against Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s freely elected president. Blinken was Rice’s deputy at the time.

There were endless debates and daily handwringing within the Biden regime’s counsels as to what to do as the Israelis prosecuted their campaign of terror, and Kirkpatrick gets deeper into these than anyone else I’ve read on the topic.

Nobody in the administration could quite believe what they were seeing. Here is an impressively “inside” passage in Kirkpatrick’s piece:

“Alarms about potential war crimes began ringing inside the Biden Administration soon after Israel began its counterattack on Gaza. … Israeli jets were conducting as many as eight hundred strikes a day on northern Gaza, and Administration officials who were closely tracking the war told me that Israeli military planners could not possibly have preselected or so quickly identified that many legitimate military targets, such as tunnel entrances, rocket launchers, and Hamas leaders.

Nor could the Israelis have carefully weighed whether the risk to civilian lives and infrastructure was proportionate to the military value of each target. Startlingly, the strikes appeared to move in a geographical line from the northeast to the southwest, flattening whole neighborhoods in a way that suggested little differentiation between civilian and military structures. 

Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, anxiously asked his staff how Israel could justify this scale of destruction. A senior State Department official told me, ‘We were all shocked at how aggressive and deadly it was, and asking, “What the fuck are they doing?” ‘ “

It is a good question, of course. As I have argued severally in this space and elsewhere, Bibi Netanyahu and his cabinet of Zionist freaks are by a sound definition clinically psychotic.

But it is when we turn the “what the fuck” question around that it is still more revealing. “Whether and how to use America’s military support as leverage to restrain the Israeli operation was debated for months inside the White House,” Kirkpatrick reports.

And believe it or not, this is the argument that won out: We must continue to supply the Zionist regime with weapons as they prosecute their genocide against Palestinians because that way we can force them to stop their genocide against Palestinians.

What the fuck are they doing? is precisely the question. This is sheer schizophrenia.

Regrets, Remorse, Etc.

As the months went by the Biden people descended into “grudging acceptance” of Israeli conduct, and “credulous capitulation.”

These are Kirkpatrick’s phrases — good but not strong enough, given he also reports Biden was up on Capitol Hill whenever needed to sell Congress on this or that new package of weaponry.

As to the White House’s repeated threats to insist on restraint, Kirkpatrick gives us this neat summation: “Biden’s bluster toward Israel, it turned out, was less fierce than it seemed.”

And so to the regrets, the remorse, the self-justifications and self-defenses that are to put the minds of liberals at ease and the historians are supposed to read:

From Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser:

“When you look back at it in the cold light of day, the trap in that kind of thinking is easier to recognize. I will say straightforwardly — we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.”

From Amos Hochstein, a Biden adviser (with dual American–Israeli citizenship): 

“We tried, but we had no chance of success, in retrospect, because Netanyahu wasn’t talking to us — he was talking to his own public.”

A few more takeaways, if I may.

I cannot get over the ineptitude on display in Kirkpatrick’s account of the Biden regime’s gross mismanagement of the Gaza criss from the day it began until Biden left office.

There is the shallowness of these people’s minds and understanding. No word seems ever to have been spoken of the true nature of Hamas, the various role it plays in Palestinian society, its intentions beyond the ridiculous propaganda casting it as “a terrorist organization.”

Nothing. Hamas, like all Palestinians, is a gathering of stick figures. 

What comes first, the policy paralysis or the cowardice? Both together help account for the Biden regime’s refusal to make that single phone call to Bibi Netanyahu so many have mentioned — the phone call that would have ended the savagery in a day.

Such a phone call would have required, if we think about it, courage, imagination, a willingness to strike new directions in policy. Not on, not remotely.

Given the hand of the Zionist lobbies, and all the money Biden took from them, prevarication was the best they could do.

Again, did the decades-long sclerosis among the policy cliques come first, or was it the gutlessness, the absence of any serious commitment to integrity? 

Legal Loopholes & Talking Points

Once the capitulation and grudging acceptance set in, Biden’s people turned to lawyers to parse the legal loopholes through which they could slither. How many civilian casualties could be counted “proportionate” to justify a given attack?

How genuinely did the Israelis distinguish between military and civilian targets? “That line could be blurry,” Kirkpatrick writes. And blur was the point, of course. 

Craven. Kirkpatrick’s piece confirms my judgment here, either way: If the Nuremberg principles applied, these people would be tried and, based on the available evidence, hung.

What damage the Biden regime did with all its equivocation and weakness and its “pretzels of logic,” as Kirkpatrick terms its incessant flinching.

Israel is now fully licensed to proceed on its rampage — indiscriminate bombing of civilians, etc. — elsewhere in West Asia; West Bank settlements and settler violence have escalated to sickening levels.

On the other side of the ledger (so far as I am concerned, in any case) Hamas’ credibility — and I read most of its fighting force — has survived; sympathy for Israel across the world is understood as sympathy for the devil.

The taker of the cake here is what the lawyers did after Biden was out of power and Kamala Harris defeated at the polls. 

Here is Kirkpatrick’s account of these roaring mice:

“A working group of Administration lawyers disseminated a forceful new set of talking points for U.S. officials to raise with their Israeli counterparts. Many of the points could have been written any time since the spring of 2024:

‘In light of the extensive destruction and damage in Gaza, as well as our understanding that Hamas has been devastated as an operational force . . . we in the U.S. Government do not see a clear military imperative for continued operations.’

Under the heading ‘Forced Displacement,’ the lawyers noted that ‘the displacement seems increasingly both clear and purposeful.’

Under ‘Starvation of Civilians,’ they wrote that ‘the facts on the ground’ raised ‘grave concerns’ about ‘intentional starvation of civilians to drive them from the area,’ and that aid restrictions by Israel were harming Palestinian civilians ‘well in excess of any further anticipated military advantage.’ ” 

Etc.

As Kirkpatrick nicely concludes,

“The talking points called for follow-up, within ‘days not weeks,’ about ‘plans for improvement.’ But by then surely nobody was listening. Trump was on his way back to the White House.”

By Ted Galen Carpenter, Antiwar.com, 7/24/26

U.S. and NATO leaders have waged a multi-year propaganda campaign to convince Western publics that Ukraine is a splendid democracy and that President Volodymyr Zelensky is an extremely popular elected leader who epitomizes those values.  Multiple aspects of that carefully crafted image are untrue.  Ukraine is a corrupt, autocratic state that maintains strict censorship and brutally represses political opponents.  When Zelensky’s term ended in 2024, he and his obedient followers in parliament simply postponed elections indefinitely.  Even absent adverse election result, though, there are ample signs that NATO’s much-lauded hero has alienated Ukraine’s public.

The systematic campaign to present Zelensky as a hero is crucial to NATO’s overall portrayal of the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war as nothing less than an existential struggle between freedom and dictatorship – a conflict with truly global implications.  New York Times columnist David French contends that “for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington.  It doesn’t beat in London or Paris or Berlin or Ottawa, either.  It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.”

Western leaders have redoubled their propaganda initiatives efforts in recent months to sell the proposition that underdog Ukraine is beginning to win the military contest against Russia.  Despite a few flashy Ukrainian military successes, however, the overall picture of an eventual Russian victory in a war of attrition remains essentially the same.

Domestic developments in Ukraine even more strongly suggest that Zelensky may be closer to the precipice of disaster than to the summit of victory.  Indeed, his position bears an eerie resemblance to that of an earlier U.S. client and political darling, South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem.  U.S. officials gradually soured on Diem, however, and in 1963 they quietly encouraged South Vietnamese military leaders to oust him.  Those generals did so on November 2, killing Diem as well as his brother and chief adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu.

The Diem episode highlights a broader theme.  U.S. foreign clients who become inconvenient to Washington have not fared well over the decades.  Given the recent adverse domestic developments with respect to Zelensky, he has ample reason to worry about his long-term survival prospects.

Major political fractures have occurred in Ukraine over the past year, and they are intensifying in both frequency and severity.  Zelensky’s actions even alienated some of his most reliable supporters and apologists in the West.  For example, the decision by Zelensky and his parliamentary allies in 2025 to curb the independence of anti-corruption agencies proved to be extremely unpopular.  Several rounds of anti-government demonstrations erupted in Kiev and several other cities.  Zelensky’s reputation throughout the West of being a noble leader dedicated to democracy and honest government was always unwarranted, but this time a good portion of Ukrainian public opinion became disillusioned as well.

Several new incidents indicate mounting political turmoil. General Oleksandr Syrskiy was once considered a national hero. During the early days following Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he masterminded the successful defense of Kiev against a much larger Russian force surging toward Ukraine’s capital.  He then planned the counteroffensive that helped his country regain some conquered territory in the east.  Zelensky made him commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces two years later.

By the summer of 2026, though, most Ukrainians no longer viewed Syrskiy as a heroic figure whom they wished to follow.  Moreover, Zelensky himself came under intense political fire and confronted waves of street protests throughout the country after siding with the 60-year-old general to fire the country’s charismatic young defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, in mid-July.  For only the second time since February 2022, thousands of people joined mass anti-government demonstrations. The goal was to pressure Zelensky to change course and reaffirm Fedorov’s vision of technology-driven warfare increasingly relying on drones and robots. (The first large protests, in the summer of 2025, denounced Zelensky’s purge of government anti-corruption agencies.)

Syrskiy also had faced criticism for the heavy loss of life incurred in the Battle of Bakhmut, which drew comparisons with trench warfare in World War I as Ukrainian troops fought for months to defend a town that many analysts considered to have little strategic value.

New York Times correspondents Marc Santora, Liubov Sholudko, and Stanislav Kozliuk conclude that “The current public anger threatens the national unity that has sustained Ukraine through nearly four and a half years of fighting.” They note that “after he was fired, Fedorov issued a scathing public indictment of the military high command.”  Other respected Western analysts note the growing bureaucratic turmoil in Ukraine’s government and Zelensky’s ever more perilous political position.

The emergence of such bitter divisions within the top ranks of any country’s military hierarchy is especially destabilizing and ominous.  However, the turmoil in Ukraine’s government continues to deepen, not recede.  On July 21, 2026, Zelensky capitulated to the demonstrators and fired Syrskiy, replacing him with Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi.  Santora asserts that “Drapatyi represents a newer generation of post-Soviet military leadership in Ukraine that has embraced more modern approaches to warfighting.”

An especially crucial question is how the Trump administration views the developments in Kiev.  How worried are U.S. policymakers about Ukraine’s continuing viability as a U.S./NATO security client and Zelensky’s status as Ukraine’s leader going forward?

Washington never likes turmoil in any of its client states.  Loyal political figures in those countries typically are courted only as long as they advance Washington’s international policy goals.  However, even clients who have outlived their usefulness to the United States but depart quietly tend to be treated well and enjoy a cozy retirement.  Conversely, clients who become uncooperative or attempt to remain in power beyond their “use by” date fare decidedly less well.  One need only consult the ghosts of Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Ngo Dinh Diem for confirmation of the latter point.

The recent political instability in Ukraine suggests that the time may have arrived when the Trump administration will “ask” Zelensky to step aside and enable a new, more popular and capable figure to take the helm.  If such a “request” is made, the Ukrainian leader would be wise to heed it.

YouTube link here.

By Kautilya The Contemplator, Substack, 7/15/26

Introduction: A Different Question

In an earlier essay, I argued that one of the most persistent misunderstandings of Russian foreign policy is the belief that Moscow negotiates because it trusts its adversaries. History suggests the opposite. From Alexander Nevsky to Sergey Lavrov, diplomacy has rarely reflected confidence in the goodwill of rival powers. Rather, it has been one of Russia’s principal instruments of statecraft used to preserve the state, shape the strategic environment and advance national interests alongside military power.

That essay (link below) answered one question: Why does Russia never stop negotiating? This essay asks another: Why does Russia continue investing diplomatic capital in Donald Trump? At first glance, the answer appears obvious. Trump has repeatedly spoken of ending the war and restoring dialogue with Moscow.

Why Russia Never Stops Negotiating: A Millennium of Strategic Statecraft

Kautilya The Contemplator

·

Jul 1

Read full story

The problem is that American policy tells a different story. The United States continues supplying Ukraine with weapons, intelligence and financial assistance, maintains sanctions, supports NATO’s strategy and backs Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities. Senior officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have argued that increasing military pressure on Russia will strengthen Washington’s negotiating position, while Trump himself has reaffirmed continued support for Ukraine despite his calls for peace.

Moscow almost certainly understands this reality. It is highly unlikely that Russian policymakers still believe Washington is preparing a fundamental strategic reversal. That is precisely what makes the puzzle so compelling. If Russia recognizes that American policy remains fundamentally adversarial, why does Vladimir Putin continue speaking with Donald Trump? Why does his spokesperson Dmitry Peskov consistently avoid personal attacks on Trump while criticizing Washington’s broader policy? Why has Moscow largely written off Europe’s leaders while preserving dialogue with the White House?

The conventional explanation that Moscow still believes Trump will suddenly transform American policy is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The more interesting possibility is that Russia continues negotiating for reasons that have little to do with immediate expectations of peace and much more to do with enduring traditions of Russian statecraft. This essay explores three hypotheses that may help explain why, despite deepening confrontation with the United States, the Kremlin continues to leave the diplomatic door open. They should not be understood as competing explanations. Rather, they describe complementary strategic functions that diplomacy may perform simultaneously. One, two or all three may therefore shape Moscow’s calculations at the same time.

Hypothesis I: Moscow is Negotiating with Washington’s Multi-Institutional System

One possibility is that Moscow no longer views the negotiations as a test of Trump’s intentions, but of the American political system itself. Trump may represent what Russia sees as the last realistic opportunity to determine whether any American president still possesses both the political instinct and the institutional authority to pursue a broader strategic accommodation with Russia. If even he proves unable to alter the trajectory of US policy, Moscow may conclude that the obstacles to a settlement are no longer political but structural, embedded within America’s national security establishment, alliance commitments and post-Cold War conception of European security.

The Soviet Union confronted a similar dilemma during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nikita Khrushchev deliberately sought direct communication with President Kennedy through private correspondence and the Robert Kennedy-Anatoly Dobrynin backchannel, despite intense pressure from influential military advisers advocating air strikes and invasion. Khrushchev understood that the central question was not simply whether Kennedy desired a peaceful resolution, but whether he possessed sufficient political authority to restrain the forces pushing the United States toward escalation.

Although the historical circumstances differ, the strategic logic remains remarkably similar. Moscow may not expect Trump to deliver peace. It may instead be asking a more fundamental question: does any American president still possess the authority to fundamentally redirect US grand strategy?

This school of thinking has deep roots in Soviet analysis of the United States. Georgy Arbatov, the longtime director of the Institute of the USA and Canada of the Soviet (Russian) Academy of Sciences (ISCRAN) and one of the Kremlin’s foremost advisers on American affairs, spent much of his career arguing that Soviet policy had to distinguish between the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, the intelligence community and broader political currents.

Arbatov’s work helped institutionalize three assumptions that arguably continue to shape Russian strategic thinking today: first, that the United States is governed by competing centers of power rather than a single decision-maker; second, that the preferences of the president must be distinguished from what the president is politically capable of delivering; and third, that negotiations are valuable because they reveal – and may sometimes influence – the internal balance of power within Washington. Under Brezhnev, this analysis helped defend détente and sustain arms-control diplomacy against critics in both countries. Under Andropov and Chernenko, it supported a dual-track approach of resisting American pressure while continuing to probe for divisions and openings inside Washington.

That legacy may illuminate Moscow’s treatment of Trump. It can recognize that American weapons, intelligence and sanctions continue while simultaneously distinguishing the president from the institutions and officials surrounding him. Continued dialogue need not reflect faith in Trump. It may instead reflect an older Russian conviction that negotiations reveal whether the American presidency still governs American grand strategy.

Hypothesis II: Russian Diplomacy Treats Negotiations as a Cumulative Strategic Process

A second possibility is that the Kremlin continues negotiating because Russian diplomatic practice has often treated negotiations less as isolated attempts to reach agreement than as successive stages in a cumulative strategic process. Viewed through this lens, every negotiation leaves behind diplomatic capital in the form of knowledge, precedents, personal relationships and institutional memory that strengthens Russia’s position in every negotiation that follows. Individual summits may fail, but the diplomatic capital they generate endures.

The Cold War offers the clearest illustration of this approach. Unlike many foreign ministries shaped by frequent political turnover, both Soviet and contemporary Russian diplomacy have displayed an unusual continuity of senior leadership, allowing diplomatic capital to accumulate across decades rather than electoral cycles.

Vyacheslav Molotov served as Stalin’s principal diplomat throughout the Second World War and the formative years of the Cold War. He was succeeded by Andrei Gromyko, who remained foreign minister for twenty-eight years, negotiating with every American administration from Eisenhower to Reagan across Berlin, Cuba, détente, strategic arms limitation and European security. Today, Sergey Lavrov has occupied the same office for more than two decades, becoming one of the longest-serving foreign ministers in the world. Their exceptional longevity allowed Soviet and Russian diplomacy to accumulate institutional memory, negotiating experience, personal relationships and procedural knowledge over generations, transforming diplomacy into a mechanism for accumulating strategic advantage.

Similarly, Anatoly Dobrynin’s own career illustrates how diplomatic capital was accumulated operationally. Serving as Soviet ambassador in Washington for nearly twenty-four years, he worked with six American presidents from Kennedy to Reagan and participated in every major phase of the Cold War, from the Cuban Missile Crisis and détente to renewed superpower confrontation in the early 1980s. His value lay not simply in longevity, but in the institutional memory, personal relationships and practical understanding of American decision-making that accumulated over decades of continuous engagement. Every crisis, summit, backchannel and negotiation added to the Soviet Union’s diplomatic capital, enabling Moscow to approach each new administration with a deeper understanding of its counterpart than the last.

From this perspective, President Putin’s continued engagement with President Trump may reflect less a judgment about Trump’s presidency than a judgment about the long-term strategic relationship between Moscow and Washington. Moscow may recognize that the current American administration is unlikely to produce a fundamental strategic accommodation. Breaking diplomatic contact would therefore mean discarding diplomatic capital accumulated over years – or even decades – of interaction. From this perspective, no negotiation is ever entirely unsuccessful. Even when agreements prove impossible, the diplomatic capital generated through sustained engagement strengthens Russia’s position in every negotiation that follows.

Hypothesis III: Moscow Negotiates to Demonstrate Its Indispensability in the Emerging Multipolar Order

A third possibility is that Russia’s diplomacy with Washington is directed as much toward the emerging multipolar world as toward the United States itself. Since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, Moscow has consistently presented itself as willing to negotiate while accusing the West of prolonging the war through sanctions, arms deliveries and the rejection of Russian security demands. Whether that account is accepted in the West is almost beside the point. The more important question is what Russia seeks from the states that have refused to join its isolation.

The answer may be less support than recognition that Russia remains one of the indispensable poles of the emerging international order. Moscow does not require China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or other non-Western powers to endorse every Russian action. It requires something more limited, but strategically more important, that they continue treating Russia as a great power whose exclusion would undermine any durable international settlement. Continued negotiations with Trump publicly reinforce that claim by presenting Russia not as a state rejecting diplomacy but as one whose participation remains necessary to resolve Europe’s largest security crisis since the Cold War.

This strategy has an important Soviet precedent. In a memorandum following the 1988 Moscow Summit, Georgy Arbatov acknowledged that “serious progress” with the outgoing Reagan administration was unlikely. Yet he did not conclude that diplomacy had failed. He argued that the summit had weakened the West’s entrenched “enemy image” of the Soviet Union and urged further initiatives that would “impress European public opinion” and improve the political environment for negotiations with the next American administration. His reasoning revealed a deeper principle: diplomacy could fail to produce an agreement and still succeed by changing how third parties understood the Soviet Union’s place in the international order.

The contemporary audience is no longer primarily Western Europe but the collection of states seeking greater strategic autonomy within an increasingly multipolar system. Many have resisted Western pressure to isolate Moscow not because they necessarily endorse Russian policy but because they reject the principle that one bloc alone may determine which powers are entitled to shape the international order. Maintaining relations with Russia therefore becomes less an endorsement of Moscow than a practical affirmation of multipolarity itself.

Every conversation with Trump therefore serves two simultaneous purposes. It explores the possibility of agreement with Washington while demonstrating to the wider international community that no durable settlement can be reached without Russian participation. Should negotiations fail, Moscow can argue that it remained prepared to negotiate while the United States chose continued escalation. More importantly, it reinforces the broader proposition that Russia cannot be isolated from the construction of the emerging international order because it remains one of the major powers upon whose participation that order ultimately depends. The immediate interlocutor may be Washington, but the larger negotiation concerns Russia’s role in the emerging international order. Every conversation with the United States therefore becomes simultaneously a negotiation over whether Russia continues to be treated as one of the indispensable architects of the multipolar system now taking shape.

Diplomacy as an Instrument of Statecraft

Much Western analysis treats diplomacy as the opposite of conflict. Negotiations imply moderation. Dialogue suggests compromise. Russian strategic thought has long rejected this distinction.

Whether one accepts none, some or all of the hypotheses presented here, they point toward a common conclusion: Moscow appears to judge diplomacy less by whether it produces immediate agreements than by whether it advances Russia’s long-term strategic position. Negotiations reveal the internal balance of power within an adversary, accumulate diplomatic capital across generations and reinforce Russia’s standing as one of the indispensable poles of an emerging multipolar order.

More than two millennia ago, Kautilya recognized this logic. In the Arthashastra, the dūta (envoy) was not merely a messenger but an instrument of statecraft who gathered intelligence, cultivated relationships and shaped the political environment in which military power would later be employed. Diplomacy and war were not opposing activities but complementary instruments serving the same strategic purpose.

As such, Moscow’s continued engagement with President Trump becomes far less paradoxical. Every conversation tests intentions, preserves strategic options, shapes international perceptions and prepares the political terrain on which future decisions will be made. Moscow is not negotiating because it expects peace. It is negotiating because it expects the strategic competition with the United States to continue long after the Ukraine conflict has ended. It is negotiating because, in the Russian tradition of statecraft – as in Kautilya’s realism – the negotiating table is itself one of the battlefields on which great-power rivalry is waged.

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References:

1. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)
2. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. XVI, Soviet Union, October 1973–May 1974.
3. Georgy A. Arbatov, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Times Books, 1992).
4. Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962–1986) (New York: Times Books, 1995).
5. Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994).
6. Alexei G. Arbatov, The Transformation of Russian Military Doctrine: Lessons Learned from Kosovo and Chechnya (Moscow: Carnegie Moscow Center, various publications)

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