YouTube link here.

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 1/27/25

The Kremlin said Monday that Russia is ready for contact between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Trump but hasn’t received any requests for such talks from the new administration.

“We haven’t received any signals from the Americans yet,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. “This is why we continue working according to schedule, maintaining readiness [for dialogue].”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov made similar comments, saying the only contacts between the US and Russia are being carried out at the embassy level. “As the Russian President has repeatedly said, we are open to dialogue and contacts, conversations and meetings,” Ryabkov said.

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, but fighting continues to rage across the frontlines. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump has given his envoy to the conflict, Keith Kellog, 100 days to reach a deal.

Trump recently criticized Zelensky, saying that he “decided to fight” Russia instead of making a deal. The comments signaled that the Trump administration might be willing to put pressure on Zelensky to get him to negotiate with Russia, but it’s unclear what sort of deal Washington will be willing to offer Moscow.

Trump’s State Department has paused foreign aid for 90 days, with exemptions for Israel and Egypt, but the freeze does not appear to impact US weapons shipments to Ukraine that go through the Pentagon.

***

Ukrainian Military Intel Chief Warns of Threat to Ukraine’s Existence if Negotiations With Russia Don’t Start

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 1/27/25

Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, has warned that if negotiations to end the war with Russia don’t begin by this summer, Ukraine’s “very existence” will be threatened.

According to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, Budanov issued the warning during a closed-door meeting of Ukraine’s parliament.

A source who attended the meeting told the media outlet that Budanov was asked how much time Ukraine has, and he replied, “If there are no serious negotiations by the summer, dangerous processes could unfold, threatening Ukraine’s very existence.”

Describing the response to Budanov’s comments, the source said, “Everyone exchanged uneasy glances and fell silent. It seems like everything depends on things going right.”

Budanov’s comments come as the new Trump administration has declared that its official policy is to seek the end of the war in Ukraine. But so far, there’s been no sign that negotiations have started.

In the meantime, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been floating ideas for a potential peace deal that would be non-starters for talks with Moscow, including a proposal for 200,000 Western troops to be deployed to Ukraine to enforce a ceasefire.

Budanov’s comments reinforce the fact that time is on Russia’s side, meaning Moscow is unlikely to agree to any deals that don’t include its core demands: Ukrainian neutrality and continued Russian control of the territories it has captured in Ukraine.

By James Carden, The American Conservative, 1/16/25

It started out rather differently than we now sometimes imagine it. When Vladimir Putin took over the Russian presidency from Boris Yeltsin 25 years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1999, he was seen as a man with whom Washington could do business. 

President Bill Clinton lauded Putin’s accession to the presidency as a “democratic transfer of executive power,” which it certainly was not. Clinton administration officials hailed Putin as “one of [Russia’s] leading reformers” who, according to the New York Times, “clearly has an intellectual grasp of democracy.” The “prospects for meaningful reform in Russia,” opined another journalist, “are now excellent.” Administration officials also dismissed worries over Putin’s KGB background as “psychobabble.”

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, a Carnegie Endowment expert who has since become one of Putin’s most public critics wrote that, in his view, 

U.S.–Russian relations offer one bright counter to this otherwise gloomier international picture. Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first foreign leaders to speak directly to President Bush. In that phone call, he expressed his condolences to the president and the American people and his unequivocal support for whatever reactions the American president might decide to take. He then followed this rhetorical support with concrete policies.

Expectations for an era of heightened U.S.–Russian cooperation began to unravel in the mid-2000s. Indeed, future historians (should there be any) will likely come to see the period between 2007 and 2012 as crucial to explaining why U.S.–Russian relations went so terribly wrong. 

The milestones are by now familiar to those with even a cursory interest in this Great Power rivalry. These include Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, where he declared Russia would pursue a foreign policy independent from that of the West, and the six-day war in neighboring Georgia in August 2008, during which the Republican nominee for president made the fatuous and equally unlikely declaration that “we are all Georgians now.” It was, however, the grisly rape-murder of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 that did more than most to poison Putin’s view of Washington and the way it does business.

Briefly, then: The Obama administration was able, under false pretenses, to obtain a promise from the Russian government not to veto UN Security Council resolution 1973  “to take all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack” in Libya. The deal was that the Russians would abstain from using their veto as long as the establishment of a “no-fly zone” didn’t morph into a regime change operation. 

Yet after Gaddafi’s very public execution and the American secretary of state’s tasteless celebration of it, Moscow felt that Washington welched on the deal. For Putin, then waiting in the wings as prime minister, this was the likely point of no return. 

If that was his, what was ours?

By 2011–2012, the unelected U.S. foreign policy establishment (which basically calls the shots regardless of whom we Americans send to Washington) had decided that Putin was a man with whom we could not and should not do business. Any sort of diplomatic relationship ended, not with the Maidan coup and subsequent Ukrainian civil war in the spring of 2014, nor with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. No, it essentially ended when Putin decided to return to the Russian presidency for a third term. 

The resulting anti-government protests that took place in Moscow after Putin made his intentions clear encouraged the media’s supposedly best-informed Russian analysts to indulge in fantasies of their own devising. And throughout, they were proven wrong. Masha (now “M.”) Gessen declared in the pages of the Guardian that the Russian media had turned on Putin and predicted that the Putin regime was about to “come tumbling down.” The American Enterprise Institute’s Leon Aron, writing in the pages of Foreign Policy magazine, declared, in an article titled “Putin Is Already Dead,” that 

as the Russian protest movement expands and radicalizes in the lead-up to the March 4 presidential election, the key question is not whether Vladimir Putin—and Putinism—will survive. They will not.

In an analysis somewhat further down the sophistication curve, the New Republic’s Julia Ioffe tweeted, “Putin’s fucked, y’all.” 

At just this time, during a brief, unhappy stint over in Foggy Bottom, I learned of a cable sent in by U.S. law enforcement agents who had taken a Russian national with expired papers in for questioning at an airport out in California. With a great, breathless urgency the agents described that they, in the process of interrogation, had learned that Vladimir Putin would, in the view of the man in custody, be coming back to serve as president of Russia for a third term. I thought, What were these Masters of the Obvious so worked up about? Of course he was. Yet my reaction was a bit unfair—after all, what was understandably news to these agents out West also came as an unwelcome surprise to our superiors in the White House. 

Some might recall that around that time the sitting vice president, Joseph R. Biden, was dispatched to Moscow to advise the sitting Russian prime minister, Putin, that if he were in his position, he would not run for a third term. The White House was perhaps unaware that the serious tend to disregard advice proffered by the unserious. By this time however, the president and his comically egotistical chief Russia adviser had convinced themselves that the sitting (and, alas, very temporary) Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, would be back for a second term, largely, it was assumed, on the strength of his personal relationship with the American president. 

The personal connection between Obama and Medvedev was thought to be real. It was also, for some reason, assumed to somehow matter in the calculus of the man who held the actual power in Russia. 

New to Washington in the summer of 2010, I, at the invitation of a friend from my time as a lowly paper-pusher at Goldman Sachs, was given a tour of the West Wing by an Obama speechwriter. The speechwriter, touted then as the second coming of Ted Sorensen, could not have been more gracious to this stranger from New York, and in the course of the tour, stopped at a picture of his boss and the Medvedev chowing down at Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington. 

“POTUS,” he said, “really loves this guy.”

I thought, but didn’t say: Oh. Trouble. When U.S.–Russia relations are overly (as they were in that period) reliant on the personal relationship between the two principals, nothing (much) good comes of it. In this case, some good did come of it: the New START Treaty. But Putin’s return to the presidency for a third time dashed widely held expectations that Obama would have four more years with which to work with the seemingly pro-Western Medvedev (and note what a long way in the other direction Medvedev has traveled since then). 

So when Putin did what every serious person knew he was going to do and return for a third term, a decade’s worth of bitter recriminations—from the White House, from Capitol Hill, and from our government-supervised media—followed.

The rest is history. None of it good.

By Larry C. Johnson, Substack, 1/23/25

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

Mr. President, I believe that the CIA is providing you inaccurate, false intelligence about Russia’s casualties and the condition of its economy. If you hope to realize your goal of opening negotiations with President Vladimir Putin to bring an end to the war in Ukraine, you must be equipped with the best information available.

You have been briefed that Russia has suffered devastating losses — as many as 800,000 casualties — and that Russia’s economy is weak and fragile. Data from open sources paint a diametrically opposite picture.

One of the best open sources for information about Russian casualties is Mediazona:

Mediazona (Russian: Медиазона) is a Russian independent media outlet focused on Anti-Putinist opposition that was founded by Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who are also co-founders of the protest group and band Pussy Riot. The outlet’s editor-in-chief is Russian political journalist Sergey Smirnov.

Mediazona is an independent organization that is ideologically opposed to Vladimir Putin. It is the antithesis of a Russian propaganda outlet. Mediazona employs a multi-faceted methodology to track Russian casualties in the Ukraine war, which includes:

1. Open-source intelligence gathering: They monitor publicly available information from news agencies, social media platforms, official military reports, and local residents’ groups.

2. Collaboration: Mediazona works closely with the BBC Russian Service to track and verify casualty reports.

3. Comprehensive database: They maintain a regularly updated casualty list, which currently contains over 44,600 names of Russian soldiers killed in action.

4. Probate Registry analysis: Mediazona combines their casualty list with data from the Probate Registry database to estimate the true mortality rate among Russian men.

5. Statistical modeling: They use a method that accounts for all excess male mortality up to age 50, considering factors such as social composition, delays in notary consultations, and death registration delays.

6. Cross-referencing: The team verifies information by cross-checking multiple sources and databases.

7. Volunteer network: A team of volunteers assists in data collection and verification.

8. Continuous updating: The database is regularly updated to reflect the most current information available.

According to Mediazona’s latest data, there are 88,726 confirmed Russian combat deaths since February 2022. Mediazona estimates, using probate registry data, that the number may be as high as 120,000. This is a far cry from the numbers claimed by Ukrainian intelligence, which forms the basis of CIA estimates.

It is essential that you understand that Russia views this war as vital to its continued existence. Russia is not fighting to reconstitute the Soviet Empire. It sees Ukraine as a Western-proxy being used to attack Russia with US and NATO supplied weapons and intelligence, with the ultimate goal of destroying the current government. Accordingly, the only satisfactory outcome for Russia is to end this threat. President Putin is willing to accept a negotiated settlement provided that Ukraine is stripped of its capacity to launch future attacks on Russia and that NATO ends any consideration of making Ukraine a member of NATO.

According to the latest IMF projections, Russia’s economy is expected to grow by 1.4% in 2025, a slight increase from their previous forecast of 1.3%. This represents a slowdown from the estimated 3.8% growth in 2024. The IMF attributes this slowdown to several factors:

1. Transition from a “war economy”: Russia’s economy has been running hot, fueled by substantial public spending on the war effort.

2. High inflation: The IMF reports inflation in Russia at 8.3% in 2024, with sequential inflation even higher at above 9%.

3. Monetary tightening: In response to high inflation, the Central Bank of Russia has raised interest rates to 21%, which is expected to weigh down economic activity.

The IMF’s forecast for Russia in 2025 is lower than the Russian Economic Development Ministry’s baseline forecast of 2.5% growth. However, it falls within the Central Bank of Russia’s current forecast range of 0.5-1.5%.

It’s worth noting that some Russian officials, including Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov, have criticized the IMF’s forecasts as overly pessimistic, arguing that they don’t account for measures taken by Russian authorities to support the economy.

Here is the critical point: Despite the projected slowdown, the IMF’s forecast suggests that Russia’s economy continues to show resilience in the face of Western sanctions, largely due to factors such as robust oil and commodity exports to countries like India and China, and the expansion of its military-industrial complex.

The Russian government view of its economy remains upbeat, with officials highlighting strong growth figures and resilience in the face of Western sanctions. The Russian government points to several key indicators to support this optimistic view:

1. GDP growth: The economy grew by 3.6% in 2023 and is expected to grow by around 4% in 2024, making Russia one of the fastest-growing major economies.

2. Low unemployment: The unemployment rate dropped to 2.6% in 2024, a historically low level.

3. Rising global economic status: According to the World Bank, Russia has overtaken Germany and Japan to become the fourth-largest economy in the world when measured by purchasing power parity.

4. Increased investment: Fixed capital investment grew by 9.8% in 2023 and 14.5% in the first quarter of 2024.

5. Trade surplus: Russia enjoyed a surplus of $50.2 billion in 2023 and $40.6 billion in the first half of 2024.

President Vladimir Putin uses these economic indicators to argue that Western sanctions have been ineffective and to showcase Russia’s economic model to partners in Asia and Africa. His message is resonating with the leaders of the Global South.

If you consider Russia’s perspective on the war in terms of casualties and the economy, Vladimir Putin is under no pressure to reach a negotiated settlement that does not address Russia’s strategic concerns that it will no longer face a military threat from NATO. If you fail to understand this and adjust your strategy to make a deal, your efforts to negotiate an end to war in Ukraine will not succeed.

By Glenn Diesen, Substack, 1/15/25

The international system during the Cold War was organised under extremely zero-sum conditions. There were two centres of power with two incompatible ideologies that relied on continued tensions between two rival military alliances to preserve bloc discipline and security dependence among allies. Without other centres of power or an ideological middle ground, the loss for one was a gain for the other. Yet, faced with the possibility of nuclear war, there were also incentives to reduce the rivalry and overcome the zero-sum bloc politics.

The foundation for a pan-European security architecture to mitigate security competition was born with the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which established common rules of the game for the capitalist West and the communist East in Europe. The subsequent development of trust inspired Gorbachev’s “new thinking” and his Gaullist vision of a Common European Home to unify the continent.

In his famous speech at the UN in December 1988, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would cut its military forces by 500,000 soldiers, and 50,000 Soviet soldiers would be removed from the territory of Warsaw Pact allies. In November 1989, Moscow allowed the fall of the Berlin Wall without intervening. In December 1989, Gorbachev and Bush met in Malta and declared an end to the Cold War.

In November 1990, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe was signed, an agreement based on the principles of the Helsinki Accords. The charter laid the foundation for a new inclusive pan-European security that recognised the principle of “the ending of the division of Europe” and pursuit of indivisible security (security for all or security for none):

“With the ending of the division of Europe, we will strive for a new quality in our security relations while fully respecting each other’s freedom of choice in that respect. Security is indivisible and the security of every participating State is inseparably linked to that of all the others”.

An inclusive pan-European security institution based on the Helsinki Accords (1975) and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (1990) was eventually established in 1994 with the foundation of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE Bucharest Document of December 1994 reaffirmed:

“They remain convinced that security is indivisible and that the security of each of them is inseparably linked to the security of all others. They will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States”.

NATO Expansion Cancels Pan-European Security

Yet, security in Europe came in direct conflict with America’s ambitions for global hegemony. As Charles de Gaulle had famously noted, NATO was an instrument for US primacy from across the Atlantic. Preserving and expanding NATO would serve that purpose as the US could perpetuate Russia’s weakness and reviving tensions would ensure that Europe’s security dependence could be converted into economic and political obedience.

Why manage security competition when there is one dominant side? The decision to expand NATO cancelled the pan-European security agreements as the continent was redivided, and indivisible security was abandoned by expanding NATO’s security at the expense of Russia’s security. US Secretary of Defence William Perry considered resigning from his position in opposition to NATO expansion. Perry also argued that his colleagues in the Clinton administration recognised NATO expansion would cancel the post-Cold War peace with Russia, yet the prevailing sentiment was that it did not matter as Russia was now weak. However, George Kennan, the architect of the US containment policy against the Soviet Union, warned in 1997:

“Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom”.[1]

NATO was continuously described as the “insurance guarantee” that would deal with Russia if NATO expansion would create conflicts with Russia. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained in April 1997: “On the off-chance that in fact Russia doesn’t work out the way that we are hoping it will… NATO is there”.[2] In 1997, then-Senator Joe Biden predicted that NATO membership for the Baltic States would cause a “vigorous and hostile” response from Russia. However, Biden argued that Russia’s alienation did not matter as they did not have any alternative partners. Biden mocked Moscow’s warnings that Russia would be compelled to look towards China in response to NATO expansion and joked that if the partnership with China failed to deliver, then Russia could alternatively form a partnership with Iran.[3]

Russia Continued to Push for a Greater Europe

When it became evident that NATO expansionism would make the inclusive OSCE irrelevant, President Yeltsin and later President Putin attempted to explore the opportunity for Russia to join NATO. They were both met with a cold shoulder in the West. Putin also attempted to establish Russia as America’s reliable partner in the Global War on Terror, but in return, the US pushed another round of NATO expansion and “colour revolutions” along Russia’s borders.

In 2008, Moscow proposed constructing a new pan-European security architecture. It was opposed by Western states as it would weaken the primacy of NATO.[4] In 2010, Moscow proposed an EU-Russia Free Trade Zone to facilitate a Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, which would provide mutual economic benefits and mitigate the zero-sum format of the European security architecture. However, all proposals for a Helsinki-II agreement were ignored or criticised as a sinister ploy to divide the West.

Ukraine was “the brightest of all redlines” for Russia and would likely trigger a war, according to the current CIA Director William Burns.[5] Nonetheless, in February 2014, NATO-backed a coup in Kiev to pull Ukraine into NATO’s orbit. As predicted by Burns, a war began over Ukraine. The Minsk agreement could have resolved the conflict between NATO and Russia, although the NATO countries later admitted that the agreement was merely intended to buy time to arm Ukraine.

The Collapse of Pan-European Security

Gorbachev concluded that NATO expansionism betrayed the Helsinki Accords, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, and the OSCE as agreements for pan-European security:

NATO’s eastward expansion has destroyed the European security architecture as it was defined in the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. The eastern expansion was a 180-degree reversal, a departure from the decision of the Paris Charter in 1990 taken together by all the European states to put the Cold War behind us for good. Russian proposals, like the one by former President Dmitri Medvedev that we should sit down together to work on a new security architecture, were arrogantly ignored by the West. We are now seeing the results.[6]

Putin agreed with Gorbachev’s analysis:

We have done everything wrong…. From the beginning, we failed to overcome Europe’s division. Twenty-five years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, but invisible walls were moved to the East of Europe. This has led to mutual misunderstandings and assignments of guilt. They are the cause of all crises ever since.[7]

George Kennan predicted in 1998 that when conflicts eventually start as a result of NATO expansionism, then NATO would be celebrated for defending against an aggressive Russia:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war… There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves…. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are —but this is just wrong.[8]

Within the West, it has been nearly impossible to warn against the predictable collapse of European security. The only acceptable narrative has been that NATO expansion was merely “European integration”, as countries in the shared neighbourhood between NATO and Russia were compelled to decouple from the largest state in Europe. It was evident that redividing the continent would recreate the logic of the Cold War, and it was equally evident that a divided Europe would be less prosperous, less secure, less stable, and less relevant in the world. Yet, arguing for not dividing the continent is consistently demonised as taking Russia’s side in a divided Europe. Any deviation from NATO’s narratives comes with a high social cost as dissidents are smeared, censored and cancelled. The combination of ignorance and dishonesty by the Western political-media elites has thus prevented any course correction.