By Tarik Cyril Amar, Website, 6/24/24

On 21 June, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin gave an important speech, which, as so often, has been badly under-reported in Western media. That is especially regrettable for two reasons: First, because what Putin had to say concerned two issues that observers and leaders in the West should care about, namely, the ongoing confrontation with what he – plausibly – calls “the collective West” and the way in which Russia’s leaders (and many other Russians as well) see their country’s place in the world. [http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/74363]

Second, as it happens, Putin’s statements were soon followed by two violent events that will inevitably lead to Russian responses, namely, on 23 June, the Ukrainian attack with American cluster munition-carrying ATACMS missiles (and, of course, vital American assistance) on Sevastopol in Crimea that ended with at least 4 dead and over 150 injured civilians on a beach and, on the same day, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in the region of Dagestan.

While these are different events, major Russian politicians see them as linked. The speaker of Russia’s parliament (the Duma), Viacheslav Volodin, for instance, has spoken of them in the same breath, calling both “inhuman crimes” and stating that their “master minds” may turn out to be the same.” It takes no guessing at all to understand that Volodin is referring to the West and its intelligence agencies, in particular to the USA, and perhaps the UK as well.

Whether you agree or disagree with this suggestion, what matters at this moment is that we can be certain that it is shared by the Russian leadership – and, again, many Russians outside it as well – more generally: Moscow sees a pattern connecting the attacks on Crimea and in the Caucasus, and, worryingly, it also sees the West as involved in both.

Formally, Putin’s speech on 21 June was an address to the best graduates (those obtaining either a gold medal or a distinction) of various military academies as well as institutions that train police and security forces, including, for instance, the National Guard, the FSB, and the penal and prison service. According to tradition, as Putin stressed, these elite graduates – the future cadre backbone of the Russian state’s international and domestic hard power – are received in the Georgievsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. In that sense, it was, if you wish, a routine event. Yet Putin used the occasion to go beyond its official purpose. (That, by the way, is an ordinary technique among political leaders. Think, for instance, of Churchill delivering his now famous “Iron Curtain” speech on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.)

Putin began by reminding his listeners of a historical fact, but not – as could have been expected the anniversary of the German 1941 attack on the Soviet Union (22 June) but that of the start of Operation Bagration, a massive Soviet summer offensive of 1944 that, in essence, shattered what was left of the German armies, extending the Soviet reach over most of what was to become Cold War Eastern Europe, and prepared the final phase of the war that culminated in the Soviet capture of Berlin in the spring of 1945.

Bagration – “this bold, large-scale” enterprise, in Putin’s word – was, of course, named after a Russian commander (of Georgian descent) in the 1812 war against Napoleon, as the president also underlined, highlighting the traditions of both the first Fatherland War (against the French and their many European auxiliaries) and the second one (the “Great Fatherland War”) against the Germans and also their many European auxiliaries: talk about a decisive summer offensive and two wars won against, taken together, Paris and Berlin plus various other Europeans…

You cannot say, Putin scrimped on symbolical layers or contemporary allusions there. For one thing, it sounded almost as if he wanted to remind his listeners in the Georgievsky Hall, at home more broadly understood, and abroad (for instance, in Kiev) that, while Russia has done well with its current strategy of aggressive attrition and slow gains, there is another side to its military tradition, namely, sweeping “big-arrow” operations, when the time is ripe.

Putin’s direct statements about the present were no less intriguing Unsurprisingly, he singled out “perseverance” as one of the key virtues of the Russian military (a clear hint to those, in the West, who still hope to see Russia tire of the war in Ukraine before they do – or Trump wins in the US). He also stressed the cohesion of front and rear and national unity in general (a way of telling the West to finally let go of another favorite piece of wishful thinking, namely that – somehow – it can pressure and disintegrate Russian society into regime change). He made it very clear that he considers “Donbass” and “Novorossiia” (yes, that term was back as well) Russian by praising the current Russian military for defending their citizens and emphasizing that for the domestic security forces as well the newly “liberated,” that is, annexed territories are a “priority.”

Putin also offered several remarks on the world beyond Russia and Ukraine, insisting that his country “consistently pursues the strengthening of stability on the planet, for a just and democratic multipolar world order,” with a particular emphasis on creating a stable security structure for Eurasia. In this context, Putin reiterated Russia’s readiness to cooperate even with EU and NATO countries – “once,” he said, “they are ready for it.”

Especially in the context of his recent visit to Asia (he had virtually just returned from there, when delivering the Georgievsky Hall address), the message to the West was clear: Russia – and its partners – will build this new Eurasian structure one way or the other; the question for NATO/EU-Europe is if it wants to be part of it or be excluded. As for the USA, the whole concept is about reducing, marginalizing, and, finally, removing its influence: Make the US dispensable again, so to speak.

Meanwhile, as long as the West shows no signs of being ready to talk on Russian terms, Putin went into remarkable detail – for a short speech – on measures that will be taken to arm Russia more and more effectively, in the conventional and nuclear domains. He stressed cutting-edge technology as well as “effective economic and financial solutions” (a clear hint, again, that Moscow does not have the slightest intention to let the West exhaust its mobilization of reserves through a greatly expanded military-industrial complex, even if there are signs that it makes the national economy overheat). Putin’s new Minister of Defense, Andrei Belousov, who was in attendance and also delivered a speech (more uncompromising than Putin’s, if anything), is, of course, the skilled, incorruptible, and strict technocrat who is tasked with seeing to those “solutions:” Putin’s Witte, so to speak, except that Putin is much better at making good use of talent than Nicolas II. Putin also noted the experience that the Russian military has gained from the war in Ukraine.

Where does all of that leave us with regard to the Ukrainian – really US-Ukrainian, as Russia rightly claims – ATACMS attack on Sevastopol?

A perhaps counter-intuitive aspect of the immediate Russian reaction to the attack has been noted far too little: Russian authorities were quick to publish a short but precise sketch of what had happened: Of 5 incoming ATACMS missiles, Russian air defense had neutralized 4, but the fifth had hit the beach. Very importantly, the Russian authorities added that the fifth missile had also been hit by air defense fire, which made a difference to its trajectory or, perhaps, led to an explosion so close to the ground that it affected the beach.

Yet that does not mean that Russian media and officials have not been crystal clear about their condemnation of the assault and who they are holding responsible for it: On Russia’s most important news show, the Sunday edition of Vesti (which airs at primetime for two hours every week), one of the country’s most prominent media figures, Dmitry Kiseliov, dedicated several segments to the attack, condemning it, unsurprisingly, in harsh terms and stating that a Russian response was inevitable, but would be “asymmetrical,” to be delivered at the frontline of the war in Ukraine as well as via strikes at Kiev’s energy infrastructure and “decision-making centers.”

One day later, the spokesman of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the “direct involvement of the USA in combat activities, as a result of which Russian civilians die, cannot not have consequences.” Despite the careful double negative, the message is clear: Moscow will not let Washington off the hook. There will be some price to pay for going too far with its attacks on Russia, even while they are shoddily camouflaged as “merely” coming from Ukraine. By now, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has publicly characterized the attack as a “terrorist crime” and presented the American ambassador in Moscow with its official assessment that the US is as responsible as Ukraine for “the missile strike on civilians.”

Hence, it is already clear that Moscow will not choose to “overlook” or even downplay American responsibility and that it is classifying the attack as terrorism. But we also know that Russian authorities have chosen to be explicit about the fact that the course of the fifth missile, the one that hit the beach, was influenced by air defense intervention. That says nothing about the original target of that or the other four missiles: it may still have been criminal in the sense of being entirely civilian or so close to civilians that the attack was disproportionate. Anyone who has any awareness of the real (no, not the Kiev-NATO information war version) record of a decade of Ukrainian targeting, especially in the Donbass area, cannot simply assume that the Ukrainian intent was to strike a legitimate military target.

At the same time, we know that Russia has signaled at least the possibility that the beach that was actually hit was not the original target. Likewise, Peskov has also stated that Putin’s peace proposals, as formulated just before his trip to Asia, remain in force, another significant signal that points to Moscow’s intention to control and limit any escalation that may emerge from this event.

And thank God for that: As some commentators have correctly pointed out – including on social media – if the shoe were on the other foot, that is, if Russia had provided arms and essential operating assistance for a bloody missile strike on, say, a Florida beach, we’d be on the brink or in the middle of World War Three already.

But fortunately, the Russian leadership is very different from that of the US. Hence, the question of how Russia will respond remains complicated: What Kiseliov has announced on Vesti – military strikes against Ukrainian targets – will certainly happen. Indeed, it is possible that a large-scale Russian attack on Odessa one day after Ukraine’s Sevastopol strike was already part of that kind of retaliation.

Yet it is hard to tell because this type of retribution will not be principally different from attacks carried out by Russia before. At the same time, Russian investigators and prosecutors will treat the Sevastopol attack as a crime and seek to identify culprits and build cases. Just two days before, in his Georgievsky Hall address, Putin that part of the “priority” tasks of the security forces in the annexed territories continues of “the investigation of the crimes of the Neo-Nazis [yes, the war aim of “de-Nazification” is also in full force] and persecutors, who must answer for their evil deeds, for crimes against civilians, for the shelling of our towns and villages.” Will they do so for non-Ukrainians, too? In any case, these cases will remain on paper, at least for now and perhaps forever.

Yet what will the practical – as it were palpable – response to US involvement look like? Here we should remember Putin’s already famous comment made in Hanoi just before his return to Russia: that the “strategic defeat” that the West wants to inflict on Russia would amount to the “ending of Russia’s statehood”; and, in that case, as Putin put it, “why not go to the end?” Since an existential threat to that statehood is, according to Russia’s current nuclear doctrine, one explicit reason for the use of nuclear weapons, many observers – this author included – have interpreted this statement as a reference to potential nuclear war. Peskov, subsequently, clarified that his president had really meant fighting the war in Ukraine to the end. Kiseliov, however, who also hardly says things that run counter to what the Kremlin wishes to have said, referred to the Hanoi statement in the context of the Sevastopol attack and qualified Putin’s declaration as “mnogoznachitelno,” that is, ambiguous in multiple ways.

Make of that what you will, but, on balance, what Putin conveyed in the Georgievsky Hall address seems more important, even if it may be counterintuitive: It is true that the speech did not give an inch. One plausible way of reading it, is as a condensed list of all the reasons why Russia will not make concessions to the West in general and to the USA in particular. But there was a larger point hidden in some deceptively simple phrases: Russia has a well-developed strategy aiming at the eventual expulsion of US influence from Eurasia, and, if that should prove impossible, its literal marginalization in a weak EU-NATO Europe facing everyone else.

It is that fact that gives weight to the signals of Russian restraint on the Sevastopol issue. Impatient natures may interpret this restraint as a lack of follow-through or even resolve. But arguably, the opposite is true: It bespeaks the fact that Moscow now intends to win a much larger game and will not be distracted or baited to over-escalate where such an escalation would disrupt its own plans. If this is true, and if it is this long game that keeps us all from tumbling into World War III, then, once again, thank God some people still have the brains to play chess.

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 6/3/24

bne IntelliNews invented the despair index in a piece entitled “The poverty of nations” in 2011 as a way to better compare the pain of transition. The index is a rough measure of the amount of pain the more vulnerable parts of society in emerging economies feel during crises. Based on the more widely known “misery index”, the addition of inflation and unemployment, bne IntelliNews added poverty levels to the indicator to better reflect the hardships that many emerging markets suffer.

As a result, the index is especially good at indicating the amount of pain felt by the bottom third of a society in, for example, an oil-rich country such as Russia, where the billions earned from exports artificially push the aggregate indicators up to make them look richer than they are at street level.

An ideal despair index should score below a value of ten if residual indicators are taken into account: inflation (2%) + residual unemployment (4%) + poverty (0%). Unfortunately, while 2% inflation and 4% unemployment are regularly reported, no countries have ever managed to eradicate poverty, which runs at least 12% in the developed world and averages in the mid-teens or above in most developing countries.

Of course, where you set the bar for poverty makes a big difference and each country has a different level, making direct comparisons between countries problematic. And what constitutes poverty is a subjective measure, as a poor man in Britain would be considered a rich man in India, but the perceived level of poverty has important political consequences for the government of each country, making the despair index relevant and cross-country comparisons useful, especially in countries in roughly the same development bracket.

Russian despair

Ukraine’s despair index spiked following the start of the war just over two years ago, driven up by soaring inflation, rising unemployment and increasing poverty levels, while the metric for Russia peaked in April 2022, but then rapidly fell again to normal levels.

Russia posted a despair index of 21.1 in 2021, which surprisingly put it ahead of all of Western Europe countries in bne IntelliNews’ despair index survey in May 2020, where all the EU countries were reporting results in the high-20s to mid-30s thanks to soaring inflation and high post-Covid levels of poverty as the cost-of-living crisis got underway.

The poverty line in Russia is set at RUB12,916 ($221.26) against the national average income of $765 per month in 2021 and Russia had a poverty ratio of 14.5% before the war in Ukraine started. The poverty line was adjusted up to RUB14,339 ($158.92) per month in 2023, but the weakening ruble has reduced it in dollar terms.

The initial months of the war were difficult for Russia after inflation took off, increasing the index to just over 30 in the first quarter of 2022 after inflation briefly hit 20% in May of that year and a jump in unemployment, taking Russia’s despair index up to briefly touch 42.5, but it soon fell back again after the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) took drastic action to stabilise the economy.

As Moscow’s military spending-fuelled boom got underway the number of Russians living below the poverty line began to fall and numbered 20.9mn people by the end of 2022, according to RosStat estimates.

Despite the reporting, poverty in Russia has always been relatively modest and on a par with the lower end of most EU countries, which had a poverty level of 21.7% in 2020 according to Eurostat before the various crises hit the globe and increased it.

In 2023 the economy began to boom as Putin put Russia on a war footing and all these indicators have come down dramatically. Inflation is still high, but a much more manageable 7.8% in April. Poverty has also fallen to 9.3%, Reuters reports. And it will fall further, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has tasked the new government with bringing it under 8% as part of the renewed National Projects 2.1 programme.

During Putin’s re-election campaign he said poverty was still an acute problem that directly affects 9% of the population, and with the rate among large families above 30%, but he set a goal for those rates to fall below 7% and 12% respectively by 2030. He promised the state would spend at least RUB10 trillion ($110bn) on the social sector as part of his guns and butter long-term plans to develop Russia’s economy.

In the meantime, the economy is already growing strongly and real wages are rising quickly thanks to the very tight labour markets, which have also driven down unemployment to a record post-Soviet low of only 2.8%. According to the latest World Bank data, the Russian economy overtook Japan to become the fourth-largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, behind China, the US and India, in that order.

Taken together, Russia currently has a despair index rating of 19.7, its lowest level since 1991.

Even in the pre-war boom years when inflation fell briefly to a record low of 2.7% and unemployment was 2.9%, poverty remained at a sticky circa 14%, which puts the current despair index on a par with Russia’s best ever despair index performance.

As bne IntelliNews has reported, one of the quirks of this war has been that Russia’s poorest regions have been the biggest winners, as that is where most of the military factories are located. The war in Ukraine has acted to undo some of Russia’s legendary income inequality, if the Kremlin’s poverty figures are to be believed.

Ukrainian despair

Ukraine has been a lot less lucky. In 2020 before the war Ukraine’s despair index was 42.7. Unemployment was stuck at 13% and with the second-lowest average incomes in Europe, the poverty level was 27%. The good news was the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) was one of the first central banks in Europe to anticipate the spiking prices that followed the coronavirus pandemic and smothered inflation to a remarkable 2.7% before the war started.

Assessing the situation in Ukraine today is hard, as many of the economic indicators are no longer being reported other than inflation, which was 15.5% in May but has been falling steadily for months.

No official unemployment statistics have been released since the war started and presumably Ukraine is in the same position as Russia, grappling with an acute shortage of labour thanks to the war. However, an unofficial estimate of the unemployment rate in April was 16.8%. More than a fifth of the adult population who were working before the war lost their jobs after the war started, according to the World Bank.

The labour force in Ukraine has decreased by 27% due to mobilisation, and personnel shortages are reducing productivity, which could have an impact on the country’s defence capabilities. “This is a political problem that cannot be resolved with the help of allies. Labour shortages provide Russia with a strategic advantage,” said Alexander Isakov, head of Russia and CIS macroeconomics at Bloomberg.

Poverty is likewise hard to measure and there have been no official data releases since Moscow’s invasion, but Ukraine was already the poorest country in Europe before the war started. In May the World Bank estimated that a third (29%, or about 9mn people) of the population is now living below the poverty line. The World Bank says 1.8mn more Ukrainians are now living in poverty since 2020, and while the situation is dire, it would be much worse if Ukraine had not received foreign aid to help pay for pensions and salaries.

Another proxy indicator of poverty – the proportion of people surveyed who have to save on food – was 17.9% in April 2024, according to the Info Sapiens research agency.

Taken together, that gives Ukraine a despair index of 61.3, a level comparable to all of the worst crises of the last two decades.

Comparing countries

None of the despair indices today are anything like those recorded in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. All of the countries in our sample have emerged from that chaos and are now simply trying to build on the progress made.

For example, life for Russians at the start of the 1990s was truly horrible. The International Monetary Fund-sponsored “shock therapy” introduced in 1992 freed state controls over prices overnight and sent the prices of staples to the moon: inflation reached a peak of 2,333% in December of the same year (that’s 6.4% a day, more than what most countries endure in a year). Unemployment was relatively mild at 5.7% in 1993, but the 27.9% of the population living in poverty gave a despair index score of 2,367, which is off the scale when compared with those of any and all other emerging markets, the worst of which saw their levels reach the lower hundreds at the worst.

The results for other former Warsaw bloc countries were an order of magnitude lower, but even countries such as Hungary and Poland had despair scores of well over 200. Poland’s proximity to Western Europe and economic reforms brought the despair index down to 37 by the time it joined the EU in 2003 but even Russia had wrestled its score down to 28 that same year.

Putting aside the danger of comparing apples and oranges, how does Russia’s despair index of 19.7 and Ukraine’s of 61.3 compare against the other countries of the world?

US: The poverty rate in the US was 11.5% in February – more than Russia’s poverty rate now – unemployment was 3.9% and inflation was 3.4% in April, giving it a despair index of 18.8 – slightly better than Russia’s result and better than almost all of the EU countries.

However, analysts worry that the US population is living on borrowed time, as the cost of living continues to climb and the increases are being financed by burgeoning credit.

Data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in April shows that people have never taken out loans so quickly as they are doing at the moment. At the end of the first quarter US household debt reached a record level: total debt has climbed to $17.69 trillion, a rise of $184bn, or 1.1%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2023, as people increasingly max out their credit cards; about one in six credit card users utilises at least 90% of their available limit.

In Russia’s credit cards are also fuelling a consumer boom that has worried the CBR. “This significant growth [in consumer borrowing in the first quarter] may be linked to increased household incomes, which have sustained high consumer activity. The primary driver of this growth is the credit card segment, where interest rates have traditionally been higher and thus less sensitive to changes in market rates,” the CBR said in its latest bank sector assessment. But the regulator has introduced new macroprudential limits that have tightened the borrowing conditions on credit card use in an effort to pop a potential credit card bubble before it forms.

China: Economic growth has slowed in China, which is grappling with several macroeconomic headaches, but it also has a modest despair index. Inflation was a very low 0.5% in April and unemployment was a modest 5%. Like elsewhere, measuring poverty in China is difficult, but the World Bank estimates China’s poverty rate will continue its rapid reduction in recent years thanks to the ongoing economic transformation, and it will fall to 15.3% this year before shrinking further to 13.6% in 2025.

Taken together, that gives China a despair index of 19, a shade better than Russia’s level and just behind the US level.

India: Indian poverty is also declining and was 11.3% in January, although the government claims that it has fallen to only 5% in the last month as part of a hotly contested general election. But with a poverty line set at only $12 a month, what passes for the middle class in India would be labelled as being in deep poverty for most of its emerging market peers. Unemployment was an average of 7.6 in March, and inflation 4.8%.

Taken together that gives India a despair index of 23.5, better than the majority of EU countries.

Europe and Eurasia: The picture varies widely in Europe and Eurasia but despair indices range between 20 and 40 for most of the countries in this region.

From the Western European leaders all of the big three of France, German and UK have despair indices of 24.3, 25.1 and 25.4 respectively.

In Central Asia Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have despair index values of 24.6 and 28 respectively, where none of the three variables are extreme but all are at elevated levels, as they are still in the earlier stages of transition.

In the Caucasus, oil-rich Azerbaijan is the outstanding leader with a despair index of only 12.1 – the lowest result by far in our sample group. What pulls the score down is the government’s claim that poverty is only 5.5%, also reported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), an extremely low level given that almost all countries in both the developed and developing worlds struggle to get the rate below 10%. But with a poverty rate of $3.65 and a government flush with oil revenues, social support is available for those that struggle. Georgia and Armenia have more typical scores of 29.9 and 36.7 respectively. Armenia has been reporting deflation in recent months, but it continues to carry the burden of a high level of poverty for 24.8% of the population that drags its result down.

Turkey is also a standout poor performer with a huge despair index score of 91.5 – usually a score only seen in the midst of a deep crisis and by far the highest result in our sample group. The problem in Turkey has been runaway inflation, which is currently 68.5%. Poverty and unemployment are both relatively modest. After ignoring inflation in recent years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has recently appointed a more conservative team to run the Central Bank and Finance Ministry, which are in the process of trying to tame inflation, with some success.

Amongst the Central European countries, Czechia is doing best, and with a despair score of only 18.1 this is the second-best result in our sample. Czechia boasts modest poverty and low inflation and unemployment, although the country is still struggling to recover from the shocks of the polycrisis. Poland would score in the low 20s, which is the result of the better performing economies report, but is suffering from high unemployment of 15.3%. The three Baltic states would do well but all three report worryingly high poverty rates of around 25%.

In Southeast Europe nearly all the countries post significantly higher despair scores of between 35 and 45. Earlier in the development cycle, all these countries suffered from similar problems of higher levels of poverty in the 20s, higher unemployment levels of up to 13%, although almost all these countries have tamed inflation in the last year.

YouTube link here.

By Matt Bivens, Substack, 6/25/24

Matt Bivens is a medical doctor and former editor of The Moscow Times.

The war in Ukraine is escalating now with terrifying rapidity.

This past Sunday, Ukrainian forces fired five U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles — carrying U.S.-supplied cluster bombs — at the Crimean city of Sevastopol. The exact target is unclear. But as Russian air defenses shot them down, one of the missiles with its multiple cluster bomblets accidentally rained down upon Russian families enjoying a day at the beach, killing at least four people (including two children) and injuring more than 150.

Earlier that same day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had been calling publicly, again, for permission to use those ATACMS to strike into Russian territory. Zelensky had cited the Ukrainian civilians killed this same weekend in Kharkiv by Russian airstrikes. (Yes, bombs rained down on both Russian and Ukrainian civilians this Trinity Sunday — also known as Pentecost, and the day on which both the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches say the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles of Jesus.)

Throughout the war until, apparently, this weekend, the United States had been refusing permission to hit Russian territory with long-range ATACM missiles. From The New York Times this same Sunday:

The Times reported that, while the U.S. government had lifted earlier restrictions on firing some of our missiles into Russian territory, so far that “does not apply to the use of Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS.”

Did we finally green-light such an attack this same Sunday that Zelensky again asked for it? And did Ukraine within hours immediately launch U.S. missiles, carrying U.S. cluster bombs, and guided by U.S. targeting satellites, at the Russians? (Or perhaps we don’t count Crimea as “Russian territory”?)

The U.S. government has not commented, other than to say Ukraine picks its own targets. But the Russian government says those missiles require active U.S. guidance to launch, and their anti-American rhetoric has soared. The Kremlin spokesman on Monday told reporters the United States is now implicated in “killing Russian children” at the beach with cluster bombs.

“The involvement of the United States, the direct involvement, as a result of which Russian civilians are killed, cannot be without consequences,” the Kremlin spokesman said, adding that “time will tell what these will be.” That same message was echoed by other top defense and foreign ministry leadership and is clearly a hardening, new Russian position.

Dmitry Medvedev — the only other living former president of Russia, by the way — wrote on Telegram: “Bastards from the U.S.A. are supplying [Ukrainian forces] with cluster munitions and helping guide them to their targets,” and expressed his hope that both the Americans and Ukrainians involved “will burn in hell” and, if possible, “even sooner — in an earthly fire.”

(Someday, Vladimir Putin will leave the Russian presidency. Who will take over for him? Someone like Medvedev?)

The Russians summoned the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow to tell her formally that Russia will now retaliate against the United States over this. The Russians told our ambassador that America is “waging a hybrid war against Russia and has actually become a party to the conflict,” and therefore, “retaliatory measures will definitely follow.”

And yet all of this has barely been reported in America. The New York Times buried news of this — of U.S.-supplied-and-guided missiles raining U.S. cluster bombs onto a Russian beach and killing children — in paragraph 21 of a report focused more on something else (on a similarly horrific — and possibly unrelated? — series of terror attacks this same weekend in Russian Dagestan).

So, here we are, on the eve of the coming long, hot summer of 2024. Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered peace negotiations — from a position of strength, by the way, with the Russian military forces in Ukraine now far larger than when the war began. The Russians are right now winning the war. U.S. President Joe Biden could accept that peace talks offer, and we could see a ceasefire and negotiations almost immediately.

Instead, our response has been to have our Ukrainian proxies escalate the war. The Russian public is now looking at videos of panicked families fleeing a beach, carrying injured or dead relatives on beach lounge chairs, and is being told, “America did this.”

By Jeffrey Sachs, Common Dreams, 6/19/24

For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S. over security arrangements, this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations in favor of a neocon strategy to weaken or dismember Russia through war and covert operations. The U.S. neocon tactics have failed disastrously, devastating Ukraine in the process, and endangering the whole world. After all the warmongering, it’s time for Biden to open negotiations for peace with Russia.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. grand strategy has been to weaken Russia. As early as 1992, then Defense Secretary Richard Cheney opined that following the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, Russia too should be dismembered. Zbigniew Brzezinski opined in 1997 that Russia should be divided into three loosely confederated entities in Russian Europe, Siberia, and the far east. In 1999, the U.S.-led NATO alliance bombed Russia’s ally, Serbia, for 78 days in order to break Serbia apart and install a massive NATO military base in breakaway Kosovo. Leaders of the U.S. military-industrial complex vociferously supported the Chechen war against Russia in the early 2000s.

To secure these U.S. advances against Russia, Washington aggressively pushed NATO enlargement, despite promises to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward from Germany. Most tendentiously, the U.S. pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia, with the idea of surrounding Russia’s naval fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea with NATO states: Ukraine, Romania (NATO member 2004), Bulgaria (NATO member 2004), Turkey (NATO member 1952), and Georgia, an idea straight from the playbook of the British Empire in the Crimean War (1853-6).

Brzezinski spelled out a chronology of NATO enlargement in 1997, including NATO membership of Ukraine during 2005-2010. The U.S. in fact proposed NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. By 2020, NATO had in fact enlarged by 14 countries in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia, 2009; Montenegro, 2017; and Northern Macedonia, 2020), while promising future membership to Ukraine and Georgia.

The White House is dead wrong to evade negotiations just because of disagreements with Russia’s proposals. It should put up its own proposals and get down to the business of negotiating an end to the war.

In short, the 30-year U.S. project, hatched originally by Cheney and the neocons, and carried forward consistently since then, has been to weaken or even dismember Russia, surround Russia with NATO forces, and depict Russia as the belligerent power.

It is against this grim backdrop that Russian leaders have repeatedly proposed to negotiate security arrangements with Europe and the U.S. that would provide security for all countries concerned, not just the NATO bloc. Guided by the neocon game plan, the U.S. has refused to negotiate on every occasion, while trying to pin the blame on Russia for the lack of negotiations.

In June 2008, as the U.S. prepared to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed a European Security Treaty, calling for collective security and an end to NATO’s unilateralism. Suffice it to say, the U.S. showed no interest whatsoever in Russia’s proposals, and instead proceeded with its long-held plans for NATO enlargement.

The second Russian proposal for negotiations came from Putin following the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, with the active complicity if not outright leadership of the U.S. government. I happened to see the U.S. complicity up close, as the post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about U.S. funding of the Maidan protest.

The evidence of U.S. complicity in the coup is overwhelming. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on a phone line in January 2014 plotting the change of government in Ukraine. Meanwhile, U.S. Senators went personally to Kiev to stir up the protests (akin to Chinese or Russian political leaders coming to DC on January 6, 2021 to rile up the crowds). On February 21, 2014, the Europeans, U.S., and Russia brokered a deal with Yanukovych in which Yanukovich agreed to early elections. Yet the coup leaders reneged on the deal the same day, took over government buildings, threatened more violence, and deposed Yanukovych the next day. The U.S. supported the coup and immediately extended recognition to the new government.

In my view, this was a standard CIA-led covert regime change operation, of which there have been several dozen around the world, including sixty-four episodes between 1947 and 1989 meticulously documented by Professor Lindsey O’Rourke. Covert regime-change operations are of course not really hidden from view, but the U.S. government vociferously denies its role, keeps all documents highly confidential, and systematically gaslights the world: “Do not believe what you see plainly with your own eyes! The U.S. had nothing to do with this.” Details of the operations eventually emerge, however, through eyewitnesses, whistleblowers, the forced release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act, declassification of papers after years or decades, and memoirs, but all far too late for real accountability.

In any event, the violent coup induced the ethnic-Russia Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine to break from the coup leaders, many of whom were extreme Russophobic nationalists, and some in violent groups with a history of Nazi SS links in the past. Almost immediately, the coup leaders took steps to repress the use of the Russian language even in the Russian-speaking Donbas. In the following months and years, the government in Kiev launched a military campaign to retake the breakaway regions, deploying neo-Nazi paramilitary units and U.S. arms.

In the course of 2014, Putin called repeatedly for a negotiated peace, and this led to the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 based on autonomy of the Donbas and an end to violence by both sides. Russia did not claim the Donbas as Russian territory, but instead called for autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II agreement, but the U.S. neocons privately subverted it. Years later, Chancellor Angela Merkel blurted out the truth. The Western side treated the agreement not as a solemn treaty but as a delaying tactic to “give Ukraine time” to build its military strength. In the meantime, around 14,000 people died in the fighting in Donbas between 2014 and 2021.

Following the definitive collapse of the Minsk II agreement, Putin again proposed negotiations with the U.S. in December 2021. By that point, the issues went even beyond NATO enlargement to include fundamental issues of nuclear armaments. Step by step, the U.S. neocons had abandoned nuclear arms control with Russia, with the U.S. unilaterally abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, placing Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania in 2010 onwards, and walking out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty in 2019.

In view of these dire concerns, Putin put on the table on December 15, 2021 a draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees.” The most immediate issue on the table (Article 4 of the draft treaty) was the end of the U.S. attempt to expand NATO to Ukraine. I called U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the end of 2021 to try to convince the Biden White House to enter the negotiations. My main advice was to avoid a war in Ukraine by accepting Ukraine’s neutrality, rather than NATO membership, which was a bright red line for Russia.

The White House flatly rejected the advice, claiming remarkably (and obtusely) that NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine was none of Russia’s business! Yet what would the U.S. say if some country in the Western hemisphere decided to host Chinese or Russian bases? Would the White House, State Department, or Congress say, “That’s just fine, that’s a matter of concern only to Russia or China and the host country?” No. The world nearly came to nuclear Armageddon in 1962 when the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. imposed a naval quarantine and threatened war unless the Russians removed the missiles. The U.S. military alliance does not belong in Ukraine any more than the Russian or Chinese military belongs close to the U.S. border.

The fourth offer of Putin to negotiate came in March 2022, when Russia and Ukraine nearly closed a peace deal just weeks after the start of Russia’s special military operation that began on February 24, 2022. Russia, once again, was after one big thing: Ukraine’s neutrality, i.e., no NATO membership and no hosting of U.S. missiles on Russia’s border.

Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky quickly accepted Ukraine’s neutrality, and Ukraine and Russia exchanged papers, with the skillful mediation of the Foreign Ministry of Turkey. Then suddenly, at the end of March, Ukraine abandoned the negotiations.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, following in the tradition of British anti-Russian war-mongering dating back to the Crimean War (1853-6), actually flew to Kiev to warn Zelensky against neutrality and the importance of Ukraine defeating Russia on the battlefield. Since that date, Ukraine has lost around 500,000 dead and is on the ropes on the battlefield.

Now we have Russia’s fifth offer of negotiations, explained clearly and cogently by Putin himself in his speech to diplomats at the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14. Putin laid out Russia’s proposed terms to end the war in Ukraine.

“Ukraine should adopt a neutral, non-aligned status, be nuclear- free, and undergo demilitarization and de-nazification,” Putin said. “These parameters were broadly agreed upon during the Istanbul negotiations in 2022, including specific details on demilitarization such as the agreed numbers of tanks and other military equipment. We reached consensus on all points.

“Certainly, the rights, freedoms, and interests of Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine must be fully protected,” he continued. “The new territorial realities, including the status of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions as parts of the Russian Federation, should be acknowledged. These foundational principles need to be formalized through fundamental international agreements in the future. Naturally, this entails the removal of all Western sanctions against Russia as well.”

Let me say a few words about negotiating.

Russia’s proposals should now be met at the negotiating table by proposals from the U.S. and Ukraine. The White House is dead wrong to evade negotiations just because of disagreements with Russia’s proposals. It should put up its own proposals and get down to the business of negotiating an end to the war.

There are three core issues for Russia: Ukraine’s neutrality (non-NATO enlargement), Crimea remaining in Russian hands, and boundary changes in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The first two are almost surely non-negotiable. The end of NATO enlargement is the fundamental casus belli. Crimea is also core for Russia, as Crimea has been home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet since 1783 and is fundamental to Russia’s national security.

The third core issue, the borders of Eastern and Southern Ukraine, will be a key point of negotiations. The U.S. cannot pretend that borders are sacrosanct after NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 to relinquish Kosovo, and after the U.S. pressured Sudan to relinquish South Sudan. Yes, Ukraine’s borders will be redrawn as the result of the 10 years of war, the situation on the battlefield, the choices of the local populations, and tradeoffs made at the negotiating table.

Biden needs to accept that negotiations are not a sign of weakness. As Kennedy put it, “Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.” Ronald Reagan famously described his own negotiating strategy using a Russian proverb, “Trust but verify.”

The neocon approach to Russia, delusional and hubristic from the start, lies in ruins. NATO will never enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia. Russia will not be toppled by a CIA covert operation. Ukraine is being horribly bloodied on the battlefield, often losing 1,000 or more dead and wounded in a single day. The failed neocon game plan brings us closer to nuclear Armageddon.

Yet Biden still refuses to negotiate. Following Putin’s speech, the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine firmly rejected negotiations once again. Biden and his team have still not relinquished the neocon fantasy of defeating Russia and expanding NATO to Ukraine.

The Ukrainian people have been lied to time and again by Zelensky and Biden and other leaders of NATO countries, who told them falsely and repeatedly that Ukraine would prevail on the battlefield and that there were no options to negotiate. Ukraine is now under martial law. The public is given no say about its own slaughter.

For the sake of Ukraine’s very survival, and to avoid nuclear war, the President of the United States has one overriding responsibility today: Negotiate.