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

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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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YouTube link here.

Note that this presentation was given before the European Parliament in November of 2025. Approximate first half of the video is Mearsheimer’s presentation and second half is Q&A.

By Jeffrey Sachs & Sybil Fares, CommonDreams/Consortium News, 7/21/26

In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations.

What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points.

The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States.

The instruments used for regime control include:

• the imposition or removal of trade barriers;
• the access to or denial of technologies;
• the introduction or removal of economic sanctions;
• the ownership and manipulation of foreign media;
• electoral interference of varying extent;
• political assassinations, color revolutions, C.I.A.-backed coups;
• the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit;
• the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets;
• the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping;
• and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war.

The U.S. wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots & American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor.

Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power.

Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power.

He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region.

It is no surprise that U.S. wars rage in both places.

This is important to understand the decisions of five seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy.

Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object.

He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the U.S. to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.”

George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later C.I.A. director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite.

Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO.

Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the U.S.-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas.

Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war.

And so the war continues to this day.

Trump’s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises 

Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.

The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had “no cards,” and in March a week-long suspension of U.S. intelligence sharing with Kyiv.

That week proved two things.

First, this is an American war: Deprived of U.S. intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded.

Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The U.S. military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.

In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon “must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.”

In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to “unleash” military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.

From midsummer 2025, the U.S. supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself.

In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying.

By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow.

Through it all, C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign.

The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the C.I.A. throughout.

Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.

The Laboratory

Eisenhower’s warning that U.S. policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason that the U.S. sustains the Ukraine war.

Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.

At the center of this sits Palantir, born of C.I.A. seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 U.K. officials hired or contracted by the company.

Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs “most of the targeting” done by Ukraine.

In January 2026 Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced that Palantir was building the “Brave1 Dataroom” to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to “transfer the war onto Russian territory.”

Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga.

Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot.

Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf.

Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.

Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US

Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the U.S. would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

Ukraine is dying at American hands.

Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues.

This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelensky dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the “key partner;” and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem.

A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.

The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the U.S. in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect and indivisible security.

Yet the U.S. does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris.

Peace in Ukraine requires only that the U.S. relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia.

Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy: it defines it.

Until the American people reclaim their democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.

Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

This article is from Common Dreams

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 7/13/26

The “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and their militant “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA) wing, which genocided Poles and others in pursuit of an ethnically pure state, are the founding fathers of post-“Maidan” Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists thus assumed that their fight against Russia from 2014, and especially after the start of the special operation in 2022, would advance this goal. Kiev’s banning of the Russian language, elements of Russian culture, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gave them hope.

This fantasy was just shattered by his Chief of Staff Kirill Budanov, who reaffirmed in late June what he said earlier in spring about the country’s need to attract more migrants since “There are significantly fewer of us now. I don’t want to scare anyone, but significantly fewer.” Around six weeks prior in early May, Minister of Social Policy Denis Uliutin revealed that only 22-25 million people still live in Ukraine. Of them, at least 10 million are pensioners per the Pension Fund of Ukraine’s estimate in early April.

To make matters even more concerning, UNICEF estimated last year that there are 6.6 million children under the age of 18, so taken together, that leaves just 6-9 million working-age adults left in the country. The World Bank’s latest data from 2024 estimates that males comprise 46% of the population, so that would roughly mean that Ukraine has only 2.76-4.14 million working-age males, a non-insignificant but unclear percentage of whom were either killed or permanently handicapped by the ongoing conflict.

If one accepts the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (likely lowball) early 2026 figure of 500,000-600,000 Ukrainian casualties, then this means that Ukraine only has between a little more than 2 million and 3.5 million working-age males at most. Budanov therefore wasn’t exaggerating when he said that “There are significantly fewer of us now.” Of the 4.3 million Ukrainians in the EU, only 26% are adult men, so slightly over 1 million, and not all of them will return even after the conflict ends.

Ukraine will correspondingly have to promote the mass migration of civilizationally dissimilar foreigners, whether for economic and/or population replacement purposes, and they’re not expected to assimilate if the Western European precedent is anything to go by. Moreover, Ukraine can’t realistically ban their languages since they don’t speak Ukrainian and might not be fluent in English, which a 2024 law incidentally mandated across the state bureaucracy in a move that must have flustered the nationalists.

Far from becoming the ethnically pure state that they fantasized would follow the end of the conflict, Ukraine is on pace to become as multicultural as the most extreme cases in Western Europe, with English also likely replacing Ukrainian in everyday life as the lingua franca among its diverse population. Just as bad from the nationalists’ perspective was Zelensky offering his Western partners “patronage over a particular region of Ukraine, city, community or industry” at May 2022’s World Economic Forum.

The end result is therefore that Ukraine lost both its identity and sovereignty throughout the conflict unlike how the nationalists expected it to preserve both through their “sacrifice”. A split between them and the state is thus likely, though given how predictable this is, the SBU is probably already monitoring them to preemptively avert any manifestations of dissent, especially those that could take violent forms. The irony is that Ukrainian nationalists ended up building a liberal dystopia instead of a “fascist utopia”.

***

Ukrainian Drone Attacks in Russia Target Wildberries, Oil Refineries, and Kill at Least Three People

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 7/29/26

Ukrainian drone attacks were launched against multiple Russian regions overnight, targeting the Russian online retailer Wildberries, oil refineries, and killing at least three people. The operations, which are supported by US intelligence, came after President Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington.

Photos from social media show a fire at a Wildberries warehouse in Russia’s Ryazan Oblast following a drone attack, and Russian officials said that the facility was evacuated. At least six people were wounded in the region, though it’s unclear if they were hurt during the attack on the Wildberries facility.

Wildberries, which has been compared to the US online retailer Amazon, has become a frequent target of Ukrainian drones in recent weeks. A July 18 attack on a Wildberries warehouse in Russia’s Tambov Oblast killed six people.

Ukrainian officials claimed that drone attacks on Wednesday hit an oil refinery in Ryazan and one in Russia’s Perm Oblast, more than 900 miles from Ukraine, but while attacks were reported in both regions, Russian officials haven’t confirmed that oil facilities were hit.

Local officials said that a woman was killed in Taganrog, southern Russia, by drone debris and that one man was injured. In Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, officials said that two civilians were killed by Ukrainian drone attacks.

As Ukraine has escalated its drone attacks in Russia, Russian forces have escalated missile and drone strikes on Ukraine, leading to a spike in civilian casualties on both sides. According to The Associated Press, Russian glide bombs targeted Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region on Wednesday, wounding at least 11 people.

By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 7/19/26

The US Geopolitical Strategy Since WW2

At the end of World War 2 the US emerged as the unrivaled global military and economic power. The war left US cities and manufacturing plants untouched while the war destroyed most of the developed world. The US dollar became the world’s reserve currency giving the US financial system de facto control over global finance including the global messaging payment system SWIFT, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

In 1992 after the dissolution of the USSR, the Wolfowitz Doctrine emerged. The Wolfowitz Doctrine declared the US to be the world’s sole superpower, and established the strategic objective of preventing the emergence (or re-emergence) of any global or regional competitor. This strategic objective included preventing any hostile power from dominating any important region whose resources could generate global power.

A review of US foreign policy since 1992 clearly shows that the Wolfowitz Doctrine of maintaining US global hegemony and preventing the rise of a peer competitor, has remained the central US strategic objective. Examples include; NATO expansion under Clinton, the Balkan wars and the attack on Serbia under Clinton, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush, the wars on Libya and Syria under Obama, the drone campaigns under Bush Obama Biden and Trump, the propaganda campaign against the Russian Federation and President Putin under Obama and Biden, provoking the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia under Obama Biden and Trump, the blockade and takeover of Venezuela under Trump, and the war on Iran under Trump. The clear objective of these wars has been to confront, weaken and destroy any potential US (or Israeli) adversary, and to prevent the emergence of any potential competitor. The doctrine also seems to guide current actions against Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, as well as threats against Greenland and Canada, as the US attempts to exercise control over the resources of these and other counties.

In an essay written on March 25^th this Substack discussed the potential geopolitical strategy of the Trump Administration as reflected in recent events including the war on Iran and concluded “a strategy of “full spectrum energy dominance” was in effect “… as part of an effort to maintain US global hegemony. The components of this strategy include: 1–global dominance over energy production including liquid natural gas (LNG); 2–controlling the energy and resources of Western Hemisphere, and excluding rival powers from having access to those resources; 3–controlling all the global pinch points critical to global trade; 4-insuring access to arctic resources; 5-working to encircle, weaken and dominate countries seen as potential rivals, including Russia, China and Iran.”

In an essay written on June 4, 2025, this Substack discussed the rise of Military Keynesianism i.e. the use of military spending and war to stimulate the domestic economy. The essay discussed how military spending had been used to end the Great Depression, and how the US economy continues to be highly dependent on military spending. From the essay: “World War 2 and the adoption of military Keynesianism is credited with ending the Great Depression and providing the economic stimulus for several decades of economic growth after WW2. Militarism and military Keynesianism is a powerful economic and political force in the US. The policy of militarism and war is supported by both political parties and has persisted, election after election, for decades…”

“Military Keynesianism has been used as an economic stimulus and a jobs program ever since. The production of weapons and equipment is one of the largest remaining manufacturing industries in the US. Congress has been careful to locate bases and production facilities in each district, spreading the funding and the jobs around the country. US militarism is an economic stimulus program, a jobs program, and a source of lobbying and campaign cash. This means that militarism, and the wars that support it, has enormous economic and political power in the USA, even though maintaining it requires perpetual war.”

“For military Keynesianism to work its economic and political magic, the United States needs to use up the military equipment it produces so the arms manufacturers can keep busy. This is why the US is the world’s largest seller of weapons, and why every US president is an arms dealer. Even with these arms sales, military Keynesianism requires the US to fight a war every two, or three years, or to be continuously at war.”

The Expansion of NATO reflects Military Keynesianism

Even the incentive to expand NATO can also be traced to the promotion of Military Keynesianism here in the US because every new country that joins NATO must purchase billions of weapons and other war material from the US.

This means that NATO expansion has been one of the most profitable foreign policy decisions in US corporate history. Every new NATO member must replace Soviet-era equipment with NATO standard weapons, primarily manufactured by US defense contractors. NATO has 32 member states, and everyone is required to achieve interoperability with US equipment, all 32 are buyers of US weapons.

Here are just a few recent examples: Poland: $3.5 billion for F-16 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin; Romania: $4 billion for Patriot missile systems from Raytheon. The same is true for the Finland, Sweden, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria – each one a new market, locked in by treaty obligations.

NATO expansion was not debated as a market expansion strategy. It was debated as a security strategy. But the money told a different story. The New York Times noted that defense industry executives saw NATO expansion as “the ultimate market opportunity.” The Wall Street Journal described it as “a bonanza for Western arms merchants.”

As QINTELPRO noted: “The revolving door between NATO policy and defense industry profits was not subtle. Bruce Jackson: Lockheed Martin’s vice president for strategy and planning → chairman of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO → chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Dick Cheney: Secretary of Defense → CEO of Halliburton → Vice President of the United States. James Jones: NATO Supreme Allied Commander → board of Boeing and Chevron → Obama’s National Security Advisor. Wesley Clark: NATO Supreme Allied Commander → board of several defense companies. The same people who made the policy profited from it. The same people who profited from it then returned to make more policy. The revolving door doesn’t just create conflicts of interest. It creates a permanent class of people whose personal wealth depends on perpetual military expansion.”

Military Keynesianism and the Ukraine War

It should be very clear by now that wars do not happen by accident, most require decades of planning, propaganda campaigns and outright lies and disinformation to persuade the US public to go along. The Ukraine war is no exception. Several studies have discussed how the CIA seized the opportunity to penetrate the Soviet Union through Ukraine and began organizing covert activities at the end of World War 2, laying the ground work for future conflict.

More recently, the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon think tank, published a study in 2019 titled “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground.” The study was very explicit in recommending that Ukraine be used as a tool to weaken Russia. Here’s QINTELPRO again: “Its recommendations read like a pre-war checklist: Provide lethal military aid to Ukraine. ✓ Done. Increase support for Syrian rebels to bleed Russia. ✓ Done. Promote regime change in Belarus. ✓ Attempted. Exploit ethnic tensions. ✓ Done. Undermine Russia’s energy exports. ✓ Nord Stream destroyed. Expand NATO. ✓ Finland and Sweden added. RAND published this on its website. It was not classified. The blueprint for the war was available to anyone who bothered to read it.”

The conclusion: “When the architects of a war publish their plans three years before the war begins, and then the war proceeds exactly as planned, the word ‘unprovoked’ becomes difficult to sustain.”

Although the war has continued for almost 5 years costing thousands of lives, billions in weapons, and more billions in damage to Ukraine and Russia, the Ukraine war has been very profitable for the US defense industry. Here’s QINTELPRO again: “Lockheed Martin’s stock price rose 37% in the first year of the war. Raytheon’s rose 17%. Northrop Grumman’s rose 41%. General Dynamics rose 19%. Total U.S. military aid to Ukraine exceeded $50 billion by mid-2024. But the money doesn’t go to Ukraine. It goes to American defense contractors who manufacture the weapons that are shipped to Ukraine. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes explained this on CNBC with remarkable transparency: ‘We don’t actually write a check to Ukraine. We write a check to the United States defense industry.’ The aid packages are essentially transfer payments from American taxpayers to American defense corporations, laundered through a foreign war. Ukraine gets the weapons. The shareholders get the profits. The taxpayers get the bill. The Ukrainians get the casualties.”

“In January 2023, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet told investors the company was ramping up production to meet demand created by the Ukraine war. He said the conflict had created ‘long-term tailwinds’ for the defense industry. Tailwinds. A sailing metaphor. The war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people is wind in the sails of Lockheed Martin’s revenue projections.”

“This is an observation about incentive structures. When the most powerful corporations in America profit from war, and those corporations fund the think tanks that recommend war, and those think tanks staff the administrations that start wars, the result is a system that produces war as reliably as an assembly line produces missiles. You don’t need a conspiracy when you have an incentive structure. The machine runs itself.”

How will the Quest for US Global Hegemony End?

These wars by the US along with disruptive covert activities by the CIA and US Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) have been going on for 80 years leaving a trail of carnage and destruction across the globe. The Church Committee exposed some of this, but US wars and meddling continue unabated. Meanwhile, the US goes deeper in debt and conditions in the US continue to deteriorate for most people.

The impact of these policies can be seen not only in the current war on Iran and the vast support provided to Ukraine by the US and the EU to fight Russia, but in US policy towards Venezuela, Cuba, and Iraq. Cuba is under a complete US embargo–Venezuela does not have control over her funds from the sale of oil and gas, which have been placed in an account under the control of the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio– See this astonishing article: “How Marco Rubio is Running Venezuela From Afar”–Iraqi funds are in the custody of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, giving the US the leverage to select who runs Iraq and, recently, to force Iraq to distance herself from Iran and to invest in a new pipeline to avoid the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. extraterritorial claims to Greenland, Canada, Cuba, and the Panama Canal also express the strategic aim of US foreign policy. In the past 24 months, the U.S. has directly attacked or materially supported bombings in Ecuador, Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Caribbean–including a full blockade of Cuba. Meanwhile, the Gaza genocide and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon continues unabated with full US support.

This is even though the US public continues to vote for peace and an end to these foreign wars. The fact that US public opinion has little impact of US foreign policy shows why net approvals of “U.S. leadership” are at a record low (-15 percent) while most Americans (59 percent) reported in April 2026 that “America’s best days have passed.”

Meanwhile, the proxy war on Russia is also at a boil. The US supports Ukraine by providing intelligence and guidance instructions for drone attacks on Russian energy facilities and grain exports. According to Glenn Diesen; “Moscow considers itself to be fighting a defensive war against a NATO determined to use Ukrainians to destroy Russia. …Sadly, our freedom of speech is in free fall, and our populations have been indoctrinated to squeal ‘Russian propaganda’ whenever an argument deviates from NATO-approved narratives.”

According to Ian Pound there is no functional way to end the war in Ukraine. This is based on the observation that NATO and the EU have stolen the sovereignty of their members, refuse to talk to Russia and see no interest for their citizens in peace-making. He concludes: “Only a popular uprising against globalist leaders in Europe and their proxy in Ukraine” will change this reality.

As Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism recently pointed out situation in the Middle East (and elsewhere) continues to spiral out of control. Here’s Yves: “The world is moving into a major and potentially catastrophic change in our geopolitical and economic order. Yet normalcy bias reigns supreme. Too few are taking seriously the risk of a global depression due to the US refusing to make concessions to Iran and Iran continuing to choke in the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz to a close to zero level for a protracted period. And the global economy gets there faster if the US and Israel hits critical Iran infrastructure like energy production and Iran starts destroying Gulf State petrochemical assets or desalination plants.”

So long as the Wolfowitz doctrine of global domination continues to form strategic basis for US foreign policy, the following outcomes are possible; 1) Countries like Iran, Russia and China capitulate and, like Venezuela and Iraq, the US assumes control over their economies and resources; 2) A serious economic collapse or a catastrophic defeat renders the US unable to continue the policy of global domination; or 3) Countries refuse to be dominated and the US quest for global domination results in a global war. Obviously, something must be done to change the outcome.

The Global Cost of Militarism

As the last Substack discussed the current NDAA for the US military requests $ 1.1 trillion for DOD operations in 2027. In addition, the DOD has requested an additional $65 billion for the US war on Iran, along with an additional $350 trillion for unspecified activities. The current DOD budget is $921 billion. The cost of militarism and war is a major reason why the US budget deficit is almost $40 trillion.

In 2025, NATO countries collectively spent approximately $1.63 trillion on defense. This figure reflects a significant increase in defense spending among member nations, with all allies exceeding the previous target of 2% of GDP. NATO budget is Eu 5.3 billion

The US and NATO countries have funded the Ukraine government and the Ukraine war — the US as of 12/31, $188 billion; NATO countries as of 12/24 EU 132 billion; Total 320 billion. An additional EU 90 billion was promised at the recent NATO meeting in Turkey for the rest of 2026 and for 2027

Meanwhile Russia spends $186 billion, and China spends $251 billion.

Excluding the US NATO Russia and China the rest of the world spends around $1.2 trillion

This is madness!!

Adendum:

Here are a few charts for your consideration. I will publish another essays on the global economic situation.

US Dollar share of global foreign currency reserves have fallen to its lowest level this century

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The crack spread

Inventories of refined products are very low compared to oil. With refineries in Persian Gulf and Russia down, 16% of world total, the shortage is in refined products.

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