By Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft, 5/1/25

The U.S.-Ukraine minerals agreement is not a diplomatic breakthrough and will not end the war, but it is a significant success for Ukraine, both in the short term and — if it is ever in fact implemented — in the longer term.

It reportedly does not get Ukraine the security “guarantees” that Kyiv has been asking for. It does not commit the U.S. to fight for Ukraine, or to back up a European “reassurance force” for Ukraine. And NATO membership remains off the table. Given its basic positions, there is no chance of the Trump administration shifting on these points.

But since the Ukraine peace process appeared to run out of steam, and Trump threatened to “walk away” from the talks, Kyiv and Moscow have been engaged in an elaborate diplomatic dance of semi-proposals and hints to try to ensure that if Trump does walk away, he will blame the other side for the talks’ failure.

This agreement makes it far more likely that he will blame Russia, and therefore that he will continue military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. He may also, as threatened, try to impose additional sanctions on Russia — though given the resistance of most of the world to these sanctions, and tensions over tariffs between the U.S. and Europe, it is not at all clear how effective new sanctions would be.

Continued U.S. military and intelligence aid will not win the war for Ukraine, nor allow it to drive the Russians from occupied territory. It will however help the Ukrainian army to slow down Russia’s advance on the ground and impose heavy casualties on the Russian army. This should not be taken by the Ukrainians or their European supporters as an excuse to maintain impossible conditions for peace that will make a settlement impossible; because the military and economic odds are still strongly against Ukraine, and a collapse of Ukraine’s exhausted troops is a real possibility.

However, it will make it more likely that Russia will abandon or heavily qualify its impossible demands, for example for Ukrainian disarmament and withdrawal from additional territory.

As far as the deal itself is concerned, it is clearly far more favorable for Ukraine than Trump’s original — and grotesque — proposal that Ukraine should essentially hand its entire reserves of minerals to the U.S. in compensation for U.S. aid. Under the new agreement, the profits of mineral extraction will be equally shared.

As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said: “This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term. … President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine. And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”

Nor under this deal will any U.S. money go to develop mineral extraction in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.

According to Trump, “The American presence will, I think, keep a lot of bad actors out of the country or certainly out of the area where we’re doing the digging.”

Despite Western rhetoric, absolute Western security guarantees for Ukraine after a peace settlement have never really been on offer, because the Biden administration and almost every other NATO government stated repeatedly that they would not fight to defend Ukraine. This deal, if implemented, will however ensure a strong continued U.S. interest in Ukraine. It greatly reduces the risk that in the event of future Russian aggression, the U.S. would simply look away and not respond as it has in this war, with military supplies and extreme sanctions.

But the deal won’t be implemented until the war comes to an end. Thereafter, it will depend on the willingness of U.S. private companies to invest in this sector — and that will depend on their assessment of both the risks and the profits involved. For it is vital to note that this agreement does not commit the U.S. government to invest in Ukraine; and to judge by the present profitability of minerals extraction in the world, it is not certain that private investors will see major benefits from doing so.

China has developed its rare-earth sector on such a scale mainly through huge state-directed investment; and no-one has so far done a thorough analysis of the actual profitability and scale of most of these Ukrainian resources. So, only a tactical success for Ukraine and one over which there hang many questions; but nonetheless one that hopefully will lead Moscow to respond with some serious and acceptable peace proposals of its own.

By Jeff Childers, Substack, 5/3/25

Jeff Childers is an attorney and conservative commentator based in Florida.

Another corporate media narrative has been wadded up and thrown away now that its usefulness has expired. This week, the Wall Street Journal ran an astonishing bit of narrative turnabout, in a new limited hangout headlined, “The Russian Military Moves That Have Europe on Edge.” Ukraine-flag-in-bio types cried themselves to sleep last night.

For Portland readers, who may have missed the last four years of Proxy War narrative spinning, the media has constantly assured everyone that Russia has only gained ground in Ukraine through mountains of dead soldiers and piles of droned military equipment. According to media, Moscow’s mad dictator only progressed by irrationally shoveling Russian bodies into a Gettysburg-style sausage-grinder of his own creation, while the plucky Ukrainian defenders pick enemy soldiers off by the dozens.

But now they tell us that Russia’s army is bigger than ever. “Putin has ordered the military to expand its ranks,” the Journal admitted, “to as many as 1.5 million troops, up from around one million before the Ukraine invasion.” It pointed out that, before the invasion in 2021, Russia had built only about 40 total of its flagship T-90M battle tanks. But now, explained the story, “it is producing nearly 300 a year.”

“Russia’s recent production of military equipment,” it added flatly, “has more than made up for what it is losing in Ukraine.”

That was an astonishing narrative pivot. But the irony got even thicker. According to the Journal, most of Russia’s new tanks and other equipment aren’t even being deployed to Ukraine. Russia is stockpiling them. “Almost none are being sent to the front line in Ukraine, but are staying on Russian soil for later use,” said one Finnish official.

In other words, Russia hasn’t yet committed its best effort to the fight. Behold this stunning admission: “Most of what is being sent to the front line in Ukraine is old and refurbished Soviet-era arms.” The Russians are battling Ukraine with one arm held behind their back.

The article did not explain how Ukraine can possibly win if Russia decides to start trying.

🚀 If NATO fought the Proxy War to starve Russia through a war of attrition, it failed. “The Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated,” General Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, bluntly told a Senate committee this month. “In fact, the Russian army, which has borne the brunt of combat, is today larger than it was at the beginning of the war.”

Weird. Russia is winning by losing so much. Media somehow holds an irresolvable logical conundrum, one posed by simultaneously believing that “Russia is throwing all its men and material at the war” but also that “Russia’s army is getting bigger by the minute.”

🚀 The new narrative pivot isn’t accidental. It is a feeble and obvious attempt to scare Western officials into doubling down on the Proxy War, based on the insane notion that doing even more of the same failed military strategy will somehow bring the Russian bear to heel, instead of just making its army swell even bigger and become even more well-equipped, or possibly leading to a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine when Russia decides to finally get down to business.

Also omitted by the article was any discussion of how Biden’s idiotic policy of letting Ukraine fire anti-personnel missiles over Russian beaches may have contributed to the buildup. Nor did it speculate about what the Russian people might be thinking of constant European threats to send armies of EU “peacekeepers” to help Ukraine kill more Russians.

Speaking of those threats, what is even more bizarre about all the bellicose European braggadocio is their utter inability to follow through with the threats. Consider this remarkable headline from this week’s Times of London:

Compare that puny 25,000 best-case estimate to Russia’s experienced 1.5 million-man army.

The 25,000 figure emerged from a series of “emergency” EU meetings to counter the Russian Menace. “The discussions,” the Times reported without a scrap of irony, “expose how reliant Britain and Europe are on the US when it comes to providing a serious deterrent to Russia.”

🚀 In a related story, this week the Times also ran another limited hangout story, this one describing how deeply Great Britain is up to its stiff neck in the Proxy War. It was headlined, “The untold story of British military chiefs’ crucial role in Ukraine.” The sub-headline explained, “The extent of the UK’s involvement in the 2023 spring offensive against Russia — the last-minute dashes to Kyiv, battle plans and intelligence — has remained largely hidden. Until now.”

Thanks, media. Now you tell us.

Combined with the similar revelations about the U.S.’s critical role in basically running the Ukraine side of the Proxy War, one begins to wonder exactly what the Ukrainians bring to the table, apart from service as patriotic cannon fodder? That’s not nothing; the Ukrainians and their odd mercenaries are the ones doing the dying.

But whose war is it, really?

For reasons that remain imperfectly understood, Ukraine —long the deep state’s crack house— is ground zero of the globalist project. Maybe it’s because Ukraine, with its actor president, is not just a proxy war, but a proxy country. What if corruptocratic Ukraine has no real government at all, but it is only a faux state, a disposable extension of WEF’s global leaders, the EU Commission, U.S. neocons, and their jointly shared fantasies of one-world, Soros-style unified government?

It would explain a lot.

But thanks to having no functioning media at all, we starve for reliable data; we lack the information necessary to understand what, exactly, are the stakes? But it is becoming more and more clear that the West bet the farm on Ukraine’s bread basket, and it backfired spectacularly.

What happens when the Russians finally get aggravated enough and commit their vast and growing reserve forces and brand-new hardware to the battle? I hate to say “We told you so,” but … we told them.

ACURA, 4/18/25

Just The News has exclusively obtained and released nearly 700 pages of declassified FBI documents from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, following President Trump’s order and FBI Director Kash Patel’s delivery to Congress.

https://www.theohiopressnetwork.com/news/us/breaking-read-the-russia-collusion-memos-president-trump-declassified-and-fbi-director-patel-handed-to/article_050ffa82-7273-4874-b8b1-aab036cba2ad.html

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 4/30/25

Russia has long warned that any unconditional ceasefire in Ukraine of the 30-day sort that Zelensky has proposed could create an opening for NATO to expand its military influence in that country. Hitherto dismissed as a conspiracy theory by the West, Radio Liberty just let the cat out of the bag. The unnamed officials who they cited in their recent article confirmed that they envisage this “buy[ing] the Europeans time to assemble a ‘reassurance force’ in the Western part of Ukraine” and organize “air patrols” there.

Their reported game plan is “keeping the Americans onboard” the peace process, “sequencing” the conflict by clinching a ceasefire that’ll later lead to a lasting peace, and using the aforesaid interim period to carry out the abovementioned military moves for pressuring Russia into more concessions. What’s omitted from Radio Liberty’s article is that Russia has threatened to target Western troops in Ukraine, who Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth earlier said wouldn’t enjoy Article 5 guarantees from the US.

Even if Putin agrees to this concession that’s assessed to be among one of the five significant differences between him and Trump that prompted Trump’s angry post against Putin, Radio Liberty reported that this still wouldn’t lead to de jure European recognition of Russia’s territorial gains. The same goes for them lifting sanctions or returning any of its €200 billion of seized assets. More sanctions might even soon be imposed and the windfall profits from those assets will “bankroll Ukraine’s military needs”.

Given what Radio Liberty revealed, Russia can therefore expect nothing in return from the EU if Putin concedes to allow their troops and aircraft to deploy in and patrol over Western Ukraine. Any hopes of restoring Ukraine’s antebellum buffer state status would be crushed, and it can’t be ruled out that the EU’s zone of military activity could later expand to the Dnieper or beyond. One of the special operation’s goals was to prevent the West’s eastward military expansion so that would be another major concession.

Putin’s decades-long close friend and influential senior aide Nikolay Patrushev just told TASS earlier this week that “For the second year in a row, NATO is holding the largest exercises in decades near our borders, where it is practicing scenarios of offensive actions over a large area – from Vilnius to Odessa, the seizure of the Kaliningrad region, the blocking of shipping in the Baltic and Black Seas, and preventive strikes on the permanent bases of Russian nuclear deterrent forces.”

Secretary of the Security Council Sergey Shoigu told the same outlet several days prior that “Over the past year, the number of military contingents of NATO countries deployed near the western borders of the Russian Federation has increased almost 2.5 times…NATO is moving to a new combat readiness system, which provides for the possibility of deploying a 100,000-strong group of troops near the borders of Russia within 10 days, 300,000 by the end of 30 days, and 800,000 by the end of 180 days.”

When the EU’s prioritization of the Baltic Defence Line and Poland’s complementary East Shield are added to the equation, coupled with plans for expanding the “military Schengen” to speed up the eastward deployment of troops and equipment, the trappings of Operation Barbarossa 2.0 are apparent. Putin can’t influence what NATO does within the bloc’s borders, but he has the power to stop its de facto expansion into Western Ukraine during a ceasefire, which could partially hinder its speculative plans.

Conceding to them, which he might agree to do for the five reasons mentioned in the second half of this analysis here from early March, would lead to Russia’s mutual defense ally Belarus being surrounded by NATO along its northern, western, and then southern flanks. That could make it a tempting future target, but Western aggression might be deterred by the continued deployment of Russia’s Oreshniks and tactical nuclear weapons, the latter of which Belarus has already been authorized to use at its discretion.

Conceding to Western troops in Ukraine in exchange for the economic and strategic benefits that Russia hopes to reap from the US if their nascent “New Détente” takes off after a peace deal would therefore entail conventional security costs that could be managed through the means that were just described. At the same time, however, hardliners like Patrushev, Shoigu, and honorary chairman of Russia’s influential Council on Foreign and Defense Policy Sergey Karaganov could dissuade him from such a deal.

Putin must therefore decide whether this is an acceptable trade-off or if Russia should risk losing its post-conflict strategic partnership with the US by continuing to oppose NATO’s de facto expansion into Western Ukraine, including via military means if EU forces move into there without Russian approval. His decision will determine not only the future of this conflict, but also Russia’s contingency planning vis-à-vis a possible hot war with NATO, thus making this the defining moment of his quarter-century rule.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 4/16/25

Ukraine extended martial law until 6 August following Zelensky’s request earlier this week, which will prevent elections from being held over the summer like The Economist claimed late last month was a scenario that he was considering in an attempt to give himself an edge over his rivals. This move therefore exposes his fear of losing re-election. It’s not just that he’s very unpopular, but he likely also fears that the US wants to replace him after his infamous fight in the White House.

To that end, the Trump Administration might not turn a blind eye to whatever electoral fraud he could be planning to commit in order to hold onto power, instead refusing to recognize the outcome unless one of his rivals wins. As for who could realistically replace him, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service claimed last May that the US had reportedly entered into talks with Petro Poroshenko, Vitaly Klitschko, Andrey Yermak, Valery Zaluzhny, and Dmytro Razumkov.

The New York Times (NYT) just ran a feature article on Poroshenko, who took the opportunity to propose a government of national unity (GNU) almost 18 months after this idea was first floated by Politico in December 2023, but even the article’s author felt obligated to inform readers that he’s unlikely to return to power. Citing unnamed political analysts, they assessed that “Mr. Poroshenko may be angling for an electoral alliance with General Zaluzhny…[who] has remained mostly silent about politics” till now.

Nevertheless, Poroshenko’s NYT feature article succeeded in raising wider awareness of the GNU scenario, which the Trump Administration might seek to advance over the summer. Zelensky continues to irritate Trump, most recently by alleging that Russia has “enormous influence” over the White House and accusing his envoy Steve Witkoff of overstepping his authority in talks with Putin. This comes as Ukraine continues dragging its heels on agreeing to the latest proposed mineral deal with the US.

From the US’ perspective, since the increasingly troublesome Zelensky can’t be democratically replaced through summertime elections, the next best course of action could be to pressure him into forming a GNU that would be filled with figures like Poroshenko who’d be easier for the US to work with. This could also serve to dilute Zelensky’s power in a reversal of the Biden Administration’s policy that saw the US turning a blind eye to his anti-democratic consolidation of power on national security pretexts.

The pretext could be that any Russian-US breakthrough on resolving the Ukrainian Conflict requires the approval of a politically inclusive Ukrainian government given Zelensky’s questionable legitimacy after remaining in power following the expiry of his term last May and the enormity of what’s being proposed. In pursuit of this goal, the US could threaten to once again suspend its military and intelligence aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky speedily assembles a GNU that’s acceptable to the Trump Administration.

The purpose would be to push through a ceasefire for lifting martial law, finally holding elections, and ultimately replacing Zelensky. The GNU could also help prevent the fraud that he might be planning to commit if he decides to run again under these much more politically difficult circumstances, especially if they invite the US to supervise their efforts, both before and during the vote. Through these means, the US could therefore still get rid of Zelensky, who might think that extending martial law will prevent this.