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.

By Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism, 1/13/25

We’ll unpack why this looks to be the case in short order. But if that prognosis proves to correct, the question then becomes what solution, particularly in terms of territorial disposition, is least bad for Russia in security terms. We concur with Moscow-based analyst Mark Sleboda (who has reluctantly come around to this view, as he claims more and more Russians have), that as painful as an occupation of Russia-hating Western Ukraine would be, leaving it as a Banderite territory on Russia’s borders, to be funded and armed by NATO, would be worse. Note that Sleboda did not consider our preferred outcome, turning these strongly irredentist areas into de-electrified zones. That would greatly thin out population levels, reducing the cost of occupation.

We’ll turn finally to an issue of what it might mean for Russia to “impose terms” which is a formula some commentators (including yours truly) have used without considering what that might mean in practice.

Why the Trump “Negotiations” With Ukraine Will Go Nowhere

The short version, as we have said before, is that there is no overlap in bargaining positions. That means no deal. Indeed, based on what Putin and key officials have consistenly been saying, it’s very unlikely that “talks” will amount to more than preliminary feelers, even with a Trump-Putin face-to-face.1

Even with rumors via (per Alexander Mercouris, as of then only) Dima at Military Summary’s show, that Trump might try to engage Putin on a broad set of security interests, there’s not enough there there to budge Putin with respect to an unresolved threat on Russia’s border. Trump cannot provide what Putin has been seeking at least since 2007: a new European security architecture. In my humble opinion, this is the only sort of offer that might induce Putin to make concessions with respect to his current position on Ukraine, since it could solve the underlying conflict, and not the immediate bone of contention.

Putin’s position, as stated on June 14 and reiterated by Putin and various officials, Russia requires a firm commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO nor engage in NATO-boosting shenanigans like participating in NATO war games and will pull all forces out of the four oblasts that Russia regards as Russian territory. That means ceding territory not held by Russia.

Russia also insists that Ukraine de-militarize; Putin has suggested returning to the haggling over weapons levels that had begun in the spring 2022 Istanbul talks, and “denazifying,” which means among other things outlawing Banderite parties and symbols.

Asking Ukraine to give up areas Russia has not already taken is cheeky, but even more so is Russia’s demand for regime change in Ukraine.2

As we have said before, Trump cannot deliver anything of the kind. He cannot deliver NATO, which is a consensus-based body. He can’t even deliver a credible promise to keep Ukraine out of NATO via a US refusal to vote for its entry, since a later Administration would reverse that. EU leaders ex Orban and Fico were also implacably opposed to cooperating with Trump, and are even more so now that he’s taking an undue interest in Denmark’s Greenland. So they won’t cooperate out of general cussedness.

Similarly, as we have described, Trump cannot even deliver Ukraine. Even when the US was lavishing support on Ukraine, it often defied its paymaster, via flagrant corruption (such as failing to build defense lines around Kursk), terrorist acts, and continuing to pour men and weapons into trying to hold positions that the US urged Ukraine to relinquish. Now with Trump clearly inclined to cut Ukraine loose, what leverage does he have?

Let us also remember that conflicts regularly end without negotiations or meaningful agreements. As Lawrence Freedman pointed out in the New Statesman: [https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2024/06/ukraine-russia-negotiation-peace-ceasefire]

“Those that demand Ukraine and its Western supporters work out what concessions will be offered to Russia to cut a deal to end the war, often claim that this will have to be done at some point because ‘wars always end with a negotiation.’ Despite its regular repetition, and however the Russo-Ukraine War concludes, this claim is simply not true. Not all wars end with negotiations. Some end with surrenders, as was the case with both Germany and Japan in 1945, or regime change, as with Italy in 1943, or cease-fires, which might require some negotiation but leave the underlying dispute unresolved, as with Korea in 1953. Even when there are negotiations intended to end a war they often fail…

“Once a war has begun, compromises become much harder to identify let alone agree and confirm in treaty form. This will require intense bargaining over specific language in the full knowledge that any ambiguity will later be exploited.

“Trust between the belligerents will be in even shorter supply than before….

“Which is why remarkably few wars end with negotiations on the dispute which prompted the war.”

The last sentence above is important for the Russia-Ukraine war. Again, Putin has been insisting since 2007 of a “new European security framework.” That would mean at a minimum no NATO forever for Ukraine and better yet, a deal limiting other threats, like no nuclear capable missiles within X minutes of flight time to the Russian border. Putin almost got what he wanted when Ukraine had agreed to no NATO membership in the draft of deal terms in the March-April 2022 Istanbul negotiations. But Boris Johnson kicked that table over on behalf of the US and NATO, making it explicit that the conflict was a proxy war and Ukraine was not free to make decisions, despite occasional pious noises otherwise. That further, greatly complicates any resolution. It isn’t just that Russia is faced with a much bigger foe, despite its military ineptitude. It is also faced with a coalition (as Alex Vershinin pointed out) that often squabbles openly about what to do (see regarding weapons commitments, for instance).

Freedman’s article is very much worth reading in full. After the in-depth discussion of the Falklands War, the final section explores the elements that are needed to come to a durable settlement of a conflict via negotiations. They are notably absent here….

By Seymour Hersh, Substack, 1/23/25

…During his campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to end the Ukraine War even before taking office. It’s easy to mock those statements now, but in my reporting I have been told by someone with firsthand information that intense talks between Ukraine and Russia are ongoing and have moved “close to a settlement.”

Right now one of the main issues involves what I was told is “jockeying for territory.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr “Zelensky has to save face,” a knowledgeable American told me. “He never wants to kneel to the Russians.”

The war has been brutal, with enormous casualties to front-line soldiers on both sides. The issues boil down to how much territory Russia will retain in the provinces where it continues to make small gains in trench warfare against the undermanned and under-equipped Ukrainian forces. “Putin is the bully In the schoolyard,” the American said, “and we gotta say to the Russians: ‘Let’s talk about what you’re going to get.’” In some places in Ukraine, he said, a negotiating issue comes down to whether a specific smelting plant would be Russian or Ukrainian.

It was his understanding that Trump initially was on board with the negotiations, and his view was that no settlement would work unless Putin was left with “a way to make money” in return for agreeing to end the war. Trump, the American said, “knows nothing about international history,” but he does understand that Putin, whose economy is staggering under heavy sanctions and an inflation rate of 8.5 percent, is in urgent need of finding more markets for his nation’s vast gas and oil reserves.

The advanced state of the negotiations was being monitored, I was told, by senior US generals and Trump campaign aides, all to be fixtures in Trump’s government. Amid what seemed to be a path to the end of the war, came a little-noted announcement on January 8 by retired Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, a conservative who served in Trump’s first administration and now is Trump’s special envoy for the current peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg, publicly contradicting the president-elect, told Fox News that the war would not end with Trump’s arrival in office but could be resolved within one hundred days of his inauguration. “This is a war that needs to end,” Kellogg said, “and I think he can do it in the near term.” (Trump had made another timeline statement for ending the Ukraine war the day before in a chaotic press conference at Mar-a-Lago, but his words were lost amid his claim that he could end the Ukraine War in six months and would not have a summit meeting with Putin until after he took office.)

I was told by a person with access to current thinking in the Trump camp that the president-elect had come to understand that he had spoken too soon about the possibility of an agreement over Ukraine with Putin. Among the reasons for delaying serious talks was the belief that NATO countries will be persuaded by Trump to increase their annual payments to NATO, in some cases more than doubling their annual 2 percent contribution of gross annual income. I was further told that Trump wants the larger European countries to raise that number to 5 percent. If that came to pass, NATO funding would be increased by billions of dollars and a better financed NATO “would be seen as a threat to Putin.” The underlying point is that some of Trump’s advisers believe Putin “wants more of Ukraine than he will get.” And without more NATO support, it is believed that “Putin will not learn the folly of attacking the West.”

The hardline view sees Putin as an inevitable aggressor who has been successful: in Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008; in the seizure of Crimea in 2014; in the 2022 war in Ukraine; and in its continuing support of Iran, whose continuing enrichment of uranium—all under the camera monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. All this is viewed with alarm by many in the Trump administration.

Another issue is Russian support for BRICs—the alternative international trade and energy group that includes Brazil, Russia, Iran, China, and South Africa that is viewed as a potential economic threat to the West’s G7 community. The ultimate fear of some in the West, and in the White House, I was told, is that “Russia and China will try to infuse BRICs with a military component” along with creating an international alternative to the dollar…