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By John Wight, Consortium News, 3/13/25

The real enemy of any government or regime, in the last analysis, is its own people. They are who rulers fear most.

That is accordingly why so much effort is devoted by rulers to propaganda, primarily designed to sustain the myth there exists a national interest to which all are bound, regardless of socioeconomic status or one’s actual life experience. 

In truth there is no such thing as a  “national interest.” Only the interests of the dominant class of rulers matters.  Thus heavy lies the crown, and lightly is tread the line between legitimacy and illegitimacy.

This dynamic is most pronounced in time of war. Men with guns sent to fight other men with guns are never more dangerous than when the initial, warm glow of patriotism, responsible for them readily marching towards their own demise, is replaced by the grim reality of suffering and slaughter. 

It is then when that most dangerous of all things for rulers emerges:  a still-armed soldier who starts to reflect.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 is the historical example, tout court, of how poor soldiers, thrown into the maw of combat, develop a revolutionary consciousness which supersedes the national one they’d set out to defend. 

Civil unrest also erupted in France and Germany after this war to end all wars, though in both cases capital’s forces proved strong enough to overcome the threat from below.  

A Turning in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin talking with Alexei Smirnov, acting governor of Kursk, on Aug. 8, 2024, about the Ukrainian incursion. (Kremlin.ru / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

Ukraine has lost the First World War of our time. Kiev’s Kursk offensive and occupation of Russian territory has at this writing turned into a disastrous rout.  Further still, Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached critical mass. No amount of European Union and U.K. financial and material support will be able to salvage or alter the reality on the ground without the deployment of European troops. 

The governing regime of any country reduced to literally kidnapping young men off the street, as the Ukrainians have been, to send into combat  can be said to have relinquished any claim of legitimacy.

Ukraine, after three years of unremitting conflict, is no longer a sovereign state.  It is a proxy of NATO and Brussels.  It is a failed experiment in ethno-nationalism and ethno-fascism. It is the Israel of eastern Europe and equally reactionary. The country’s president, Volodomyr Zelensky, when viewed in this light, has been nothing more than a convenient agent of Western imperialism.

Zelensky with President Donald Trump in the White House on Feb. 28. (White House / Flickr)

To witness him being dressed down by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office was to see how power operates. The khaki-clad, diminutive leader of this corrupt state was by that point used to being feted like some touring rock star in Western capitals across the world. Now, suddenly, there he was being reduced to his “actual” status as Washington’s footstool, useful only until his usefulness has expired.

To Trump’s credit at least, he comes to the table shorn of illusions as to the machinations of the warmongering, Western security establishment that would apparently prefer WWIII to peace in our time. 

From the very same establishment flows the sordid and squalid values of the mortuary. The deaths of a million young men is for them a sacrifice worth paying in the name of hegemony and legacy.

It is why EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron et al. are the worst possible leaders in place at the most critical time.

In every bombastic speech that von der Leyen delivers — during which she relentlessly attempts to paint Russia as the repository of a Mongol Horde intent on global domination — you are left with the indelible impression of a woman who has never forgiven the Red Army for storming the gates of Berlin in 1945. 

“Raising a flag over the Reichstag” May 13, 1945. (Yevgeny Khaldei/ Adam Cuerden / mil.ru / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Starmer has made a virtue of lacking any. This pumped-up, local bank manager is Tony Blair — without the laughs. He is a tragedy middle England produced, a man so wooden he doesn’t put his suit on in the morning. His suit puts him on.

As for Macron, this centrist popinjay is a king without a throne. To watch him bestride Europe like an aspiring Colossus is to be reminded of Napoleon’s observation that “In politics stupidity is not a handicap.”

Russia under President Vladimir Putin has never been forgiven, and will never be forgiven, for the “crime” of recovering from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. 

A weak and pliant Moscow has long been the default position of those in the West who view geopolitics as a struggle for domination, no matter the consequences, instead of the need for co-operation with the desire to forestall such consequences in mind.

Ukrainian men and women have been sacrificed on the chopping block of NATO expansionism. They have been fed into the meat grinder fashioned in the name of the zero sum game of power politics, with the bastards responsible for so much death and destruction in need of being held to account, and soon.

The Bolsheviks understood this need and acted upon in it in the context of the killing fields of WWI. 

Indeed, Ukraine has its Alexander Kerensky in the shape of Zelensky. In other words, a failed leader doing his utmost to continue a losing war in the name of power for power’s sake.

Ukraine, as things stand — and with the former historical comparison in mind — is in desperate need of its Vladimir Lenin.  But there is none in sight. Nor any organized revolutionary party. There are some Ukrainian soldiers furious with Kiev, however.  

In 2025, the guns of the Ukrainian soldiers, shivering and freezing in the trenches, are pointed in the wrong direction. As the man said: “War happens when the government tells you who the enemy is. Revolution happens when you figure it out for yourself.”

The sooner the long suffering troops of the Ukrainian armed forces figure it out for themselves, the better it would be for all of us.

John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else.  Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

By Aaron Mate, Substack, 3/24/25

…At home, Zelensky faces the traditional obstacle of Ukraine’s radical and heavily armed far-right, which remains steadfastly opposed to any negotiated solution with Russia. According to a 2024 survey, fifteen percent of soldiers and veterans would join an armed revolt if Ukraine and Russia reached a peace deal on unfavorable terms.

As the Financial Times noted last year, Zelensky’s “biggest domestic problem… might come from a nationalist minority opposed to any compromise, some of whom are now armed and trained to fight.” Entering “any negotiation” with Russia, a Ukrainian official said, “could be a trigger for social instability. Zelensky knows this very well.” Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of Zelensky’s political party, was even more blunt. “There will always be a radical segment of Ukrainian society that will call any negotiation capitulation. The far right in Ukraine is growing. The right wing is a danger to democracy,” Merezhko said.

The view that Ukrainian extremists pose an obstacle to peace has newly been confirmed by an unlikely source. In a recent interview, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson acknowledged that Zelensky was undercut by radicals who stood in the way of the Minsk Accords, the UN Security Council-endorsed pact for ending the post-2014 Maidan coup civil war. Zelensky, Johnson explained, “was elected as a peacenik,” and “in 2019, he tried to do a deal with Putin.” But “his basic problem was that Ukrainian nationalists couldn’t accept the compromise.” That compromise was predicated on granting the Russian-backed Donbas rebels limited autonomy inside of Ukraine and effectively abandoning hopes of joining NATO…

Read the full article here. This article is behind a paywall, but I highly recommend paying the $5/month subscription for Aaron’s Substack, if you’re not already. His articles are worth it. – Natylie

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 3/26/25 (Excerpt)

The principal outcomes of the negotiation process so far (which is primarily taking the form of extensive talks between US and Russian teams and then providing a Ukrainian team some opportunity for comment) are still shaky. They mainly have to do with a partial and very temporary ceasefire that covers attacks on energy installations and energy infrastructures of either side, and an extension of this ceasefire to the Black Sea in a measure that is routinely described as the reinstatment of the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

If successful, then this measure should work in the interests of all parties:

• providing security for commercial shipping in the Black Sea,
• providing additional revenue to Ukraine for its Black Sea exports;
• providing additional revenue to Russia for grain and fertilizer exports; reducing the weight of Western sanctions on Russia;
• improving Russian access to Western agricultural hardware;
• reopening Russian markets to US agricultural corporations; increasing supplies of Russian grains at lower prices to China – which accounts for half of all Russian export sales of grains;
• lowering food prices worldwide and reducing inflationary pressures.

At this stage there are significant disagreements as to when the ceasfire begins, with Russia saying it began on March 18 (in which case Ukraine has violated the ceasefire in multiple instances) and Ukraine saying it begins whenever the White House formalizes the date (which I believe the White House now has done, for March 25). This disagreement would open up the possibility that Russia would renew attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities after March 18, attacks that Ukraine would then denounce as violations.

The Black Sea grain initiative refers back to a deal that was brokered by Turkey in 2022 whereby Russia undertook to allow safe passage to ships from Ukrainian ports for the export of grains to what at the time were believed to be very needy Global South destinations. Turkey was supposed to have inspected ships to ensure that the free passage was not being abused to cover for the flow of Western weapons into Ukraine. Turkey failed to live up to this important obligation.

Further, the majority of grain deliveries went not to the Global South, but to developed countries in the West. In addition, and most importantly, European countries did not live up to their undertaking to lift all measures in place to restrict the flow of Russian exports of grain and fertilizer. This last could have had the effect of limiting the overall volume of global trade in grain and, because of constrained supply of fertilizer and higher prices, the productivity of crops worldwide. It probably did have these effects even though Russia’s grain export earnings have continued to climb (see below).

The Black Sea grain initiative still needs to be thought through before it can be said to have taken effect, even though both sides have apparently agreed to it in principle. One major issue is who will do the inspecting. Turkey is clearly not a candidate. It is unlikely that relations between Russia and Turkey are as robust today as they were in 2022 (and they were always fragile, contingent on Erdogan’s notorious slipperiness in his balancing of Turkey’s interests between the US, Europe, Russia and the Arab World pressures).

Gilbert Doctorow has helpfully itemized some of the other measures that need to be resolved or executed. The initiative will take place only after:

(1) the US ends sanctions on Russian banks engaged in export of agricultural products, fish products and fertilizers;

(2) Rosselkhozbank is reconnected to SWIFT and correspondent accounts are opened with U.S. and other banks to handle the respective transactions;

(3) limitations on insurers for Russian flag vessels, restrictions on port services to these vessels are lifted;

(4) sanctions are lifted on producer and exporter companies in the sectors of agricultural, fish and fertilizer products. Russia will have to be allowed sanction-free access to purchase abroad agricultural machinery and equipment needed for its fish and fertilizer production.

Doctorow cites figures supplied by the The Financial Times showing that the sanctions have not actually prevented Russia from establishing alternative export routes and other work-arounds, and that Russian fertiliser exports hit a record 40mn tonnes last year and are expected to increase by up to 5 per cent in 2025.

TASS Summary of the Black Sea Initiative

1. In accordance with the agreement between the Presidents of Russia and the United States, the Russian and American sides agreed to ensure the implementation of the “Black Sea Initiative,” which includes ensuring the safety of navigation in the Black Sea, non-use of force, and prevention of the use of commercial vessels for military purposes while organizing appropriate control measures through inspection of such vessels.

2. The United States will help restore access for Russian agricultural and fertilizer exports to the world market, reduce the cost of shipping insurance, and expand access to ports and payment systems to conduct such transactions.

Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall come into force after:

Lifting sanctions restrictions from Rosselkhozbank and other financial organizations involved in ensuring operations on international trade in food products (including fish products) and fertilizers, connecting them to SWIFT, opening the necessary correspondent accounts;

Lifting restrictions on trade finance transactions;

Lifting sanctions restrictions on companies producing and exporting food (including fish products) and fertilizers, as well as lifting restrictions on the work of insurance companies with cargoes of food (including fish products) and fertilizers;

Lifting restrictions on servicing ships in ports and sanctions against ships under the Russian flag involved in the trade of food products (including fish products) and fertilizers;

Lifting restrictions on the supply of agricultural machinery to the Russian Federation, as well as other goods used in the production of food (including fish products) and fertilizers.

3. Russia and the United States agreed to develop measures to implement the agreements between the presidents of the two countries on a ban on strikes on energy facilities in Russia and Ukraine for a period of 30 days, starting on March 18, 2025, with the possibility of extension and withdrawal from the agreement in the event of non-compliance by one of the parties.

4. Russia and the United States welcome good offices from third countries aimed at supporting the implementation of agreements in the energy and maritime sectors.

5. Russia and the United States will continue to work to achieve a strong and lasting peace.

By Geoffrey Roberts, 3/24/25

Below is a translation of the Kommersant’ report of Putin’s private remarks to Russian businessmen on Russia’s retention of the four incorporated territories of Lugansk, Donets, Kherson and Zaporozhe. This section comes at the end of a very long report by the journalist of the public proceedings of the businessmen’s congress – at which Putin also spoke.

Andrei Kolesnikov

Kommersant’

18 March

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7586520

In the closed part of the meeting, some participants told me, Vladimir Putin did not talk to the businessmen about business. He said he was leaving that to the Deputy Chief of the [Presidential] Administration, Maxim Oreshkin, with whom they could resolve all the issues.

Then he talked to the elected congress delegates of about what he had been thinking about preparing for conversation with Donald Trump.

First off, they had to sit through the traditional historical digression. From the beginning there could have been very little bloodshed, said Vladimir Putin. They just needed to hear him, Vladimir Putin, and start talking. First, about recognising Crimea. Then, when it became clear that they did not want to listen, about recognising the autonomy of the Lugansk and Donetsk republics. Finally, about recognising them, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhe regions, as part of Russia. And the further point at which Russia could be stopped, be pushed back, the less chance there was to reach an agreement. And in the end, it turned out that Russia could no longer be stopped…

“They don’t have time to dig in,” said Vladimir Putin…

Now, according to my interlocutors, the talks at the negotiations are about the fact that what has been achieved cannot be taken away from Russia and that Crimea, Sevastopol and the four known territories should be recognised as part of Russia: the Lugansk and Donetsk republics, the Kherson and Zaporozhe regions.

If this happens in the near future, the meeting participants told me, Russia will not lay claim to Odessa and other territories that currently belong to Ukraine.

But this point may also shift, because “they don’t have time to dig in.”