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.

Russia Matters, 5/2/25

1. In the week of April 22–29, Russia gained 14 square miles (the equivalent of just over half of Manhattan island)—a major slow-down as compared to the previous week’s 40 square miles gained, according to the April 30, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. As for Ukrainian forces, they controlled only 3 square miles of Russia’s Kursk region as of April 28, according to ISW’s data, compared to 482 square miles they claimed to have captured last August. Moreover, chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov claimed in his report to Vladimir Putin earlier this week that Russian forces had completed pushing the Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region¹ even though Ukrainian officials denied this claim.
2. Inferring lessons from the Russian-Ukrainian war, the U.S. Army is “embarking on its largest overhaul since the end of the Cold War, with plans to equip each of its combat divisions with around 1,000 drones and to shed outmoded weapons and other equipment,” according to Wall Street Journal’s April 30 report. One day after that disclosure by Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg reported that Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth wants the U.S. Army to increase its use of drones as part of a broad overhaul of the military’s largest service.
3. Confusion continued to reign this week with regard to whether Russia and Ukraine can be brought together to agree on a durable ceasefire,² to say nothing of a full-fledged peace deal, as the U.S. signaled a possible end to its mediation. On April 25, Trump wrote after Putin had hosted his envoy Steve Witkoff for talks that “they are very close to a deal, and the two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to ‘finish it off.’” On April 26, however, Trump appeared to have changed his tack, writing that maybe Putin “doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along.” To hear Trump’s deputy, JD Vance, tell Fox TV on May 1, there is a “very large gap” between the positions of Ukraine and Russia regarding the end of the war. Marco Rubio—who on May 9 may become the first U.S. government minister to pay a public visit Moscow in years—concurred with Vance’s assessment, acknowledging in an interview on the same day that “they’re still far apart.” It also remained unclear in what capacity the U.S. may continue to pursue peace. On May 1, the State Department’s Tammy Bruce told reporters that the U.S. “will not be the mediators” going forward.
4. On April 30, the Trump administration finally secured an agreement with Ukraine, giving the U.S. preferential access to the country’s contested natural resources—such as aluminum, graphite, oil and natural gas.³ The agreement establishes the “United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund” that Washington and Kyiv will pay into to fund development, infrastructure and natural resource extraction projects in Ukraine, according to ISW. The text of the agreement made no mention of the security guarantees that Kyiv had long sought, though part of the fund’s income will go to reimbursing the U.S. for future military assistance to Ukraine,⁴ according to Bloomberg. Neither does the deal cover Ukraine’s nuclear power producer Energoatom, which will remain in Ukrainian state ownership, Bloomberg reported.⁵ Accessing Ukraine’s minerals won’t be easy, according to experts interviewed by the U.S. press. For one, maps showing trillions of dollars of mineral deposits scattered across Ukraine are based largely on outdated studies, and proper surveys could take several years to complete, according to experts interviewed by Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Also, somewhere between 20% and 40% of Ukraine’s deposits are critical minerals located in areas of the country currently under Russian occupation, George Ingall of Benchmark Minerals Intelligence told Wall Street Journal.  

By James Carden, Substack, 4/14/25

Jonathan Mahler, a sportswriter who hit it big with his 2005 book Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, has turned his attention to something that he probably should have been advised not to: The tangled web of US-Russian relations. It’s hard to know who still bothers to read it, but for those who don’t, sportswriting has become yet another vehicle to advance liberal cliches and pieties; athletes are held up as exemplars of teamwork and social conscience in materialistic, lazy, and, yes, irredeemably racist, America.

Mahler is undeniably a successful writer. But with his latest offering for the New York Times Magazine, ‘How the G.O.P. Fell in Love With Putin’s Russia,’ he shows himself to be woefully out of his depth. Worse, his thesis, that Trump has embarked on a deeply un-American love affair with alien, authoritarian, far-Right Russia, is deeply unoriginal.

Seven years ago I pointed out in the pages of the journal American Affairs that the US foreign policy establishment had embarked on a “cold war culture war.”

“America’s growing animus towards all things Russia is,” I wrote, “characterized by the hostility borne of a frustrated project of liberal cultural imperialism.”

…Putin’s Russia—conservative and predominantly Orthodox Christian—today serves as a kind of all-purpose bogeyman for young journalists-on-the-make and for opportunistic politicians looking to cash in on the current hysteria. Over the course of the past several months, the American media has invariably painted Russia as a kind of dark bulwark of hardline Christian Right values standing athwart the forces of light and worldwide social progress.

Mahler’s screed in the Times is only the latest manifestation of this tendency among American liberals to blame every American shortcoming and problem at Putin’s door.

Generalities being the sportswriter’s stock-in-trade, Mahler paints with a broad brush. Advocates for better relations with Russia are—they must be (!)—unpatriotic. After all, in Mahler’s telling,

…Russia has long served as much more than a geopolitical rival for America. It has been an ideological other, a foil that enabled the United States to affirm its own, diametrically different values. In the words of the historian David S. Foglesong, Russia is America’s “imaginary twin” or “dark double,” the sister superpower that the United States is forever either demonizing or trying to remake in its own image. Or at least it was. Trump’s policies and rhetoric seem aimed at nothing less than turning America’s dark double into its kindred soul.

The scholar-diplomat George F. Kennan, from whose writings Mahler might learn something, long criticized the American habit of seeing in Russia a “dark double.”

In this regard, an interview Kennan gave to the Times in 1978 is instructive:

Q: Well, if, as you say, there are, in this country, these wildly erroneous impressions about. the Russians, where do they come from’? Why are the hardliners so strong today?

A: That’s a very good question, a very good question. You know, it sometimes seems to me that people have a need for the externalization of evil. They have the need to think that there is, somewhere, an enemy boundlessly evil, because this makes them feel boundlessly good. They can’t stand life without the image of an enemy somewhere. This is the nature of the militant mentality.

That this “militant mentality” has gained wide acceptance among liberals is only too obvious. It also helps explain why the Times no longer gives space to dissident opinions such as those once expressed by Kennan.

Mahler makes a further misstep when he attempts to lump the writer Christopher Caldwell in with a group of Putin-loving American “reactionaries” and “fringe ideologues” such as Ann Coulter. I know and like Christopher Caldwell; there is no American writer on the scene today with a deeper, more nuanced understanding of European politics. The idea that he is somehow representative of “far-right” influencers who mindlessly parrot Kremlin talking points would be laughable if it wasn’t so absurd.

***

This past Friday, I met with several Ukrainian women in Georgetown. They traveled to Washington to tell their stories; of the friends and family they have lost, of homes destroyed and hometowns abandoned, of husbands and friends fighting on the front lines—even now. And while their politics differed in a number of respects—a native of Donetsk will not, generally speaking, see completely eye-to-eye with a native of Lviv—they traveled to Washington with a message for American journalists and policymakers: They want the war to end, now. It seems to never occur to journalists like Mahler (and they are legion) that ending the war is also something that many Ukrainians want. Were these women also in the pocket of the Kremlin? Nothing could be further from the truth.

The late Russian scholar (and former colleague of Kennan’s), Stephen F. Cohen, once wrote that, “Patriotism is never having to say you didn’t know.” In that sense we critics of American policy in Eastern Europe can never fairly be accused of unpatriotic disloyalty, because taking the time to know and to understand what role our government played in bringing about the catastrophe that is modern-day Ukraine is the essence of patriotism. Patriotism is about more than slapping a yellow and blue flag on your bumper, dialing up the latest installment of Pod Save Whatever or voting BLUE no matter who.

Are there a few fringe characters on the American far-right who fetishize Vladimir Putin and all his works? Probably, yes. Does their influence explain Trump’s overtures to Moscow? That would be a stretch. In fact, Trump’s outreach to Russia is not dissimilar to the policies pursued by other Republican administration over the past 75 years.

Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the history of American foreign policy since 1950 (and it is clear Mahler does not) will recognize that it has been the Republicans that have acted as the party of dialogue and diplomacy when it comes to Russia, beginning with the first postwar Republican administration under Dwight Eisenhower. His Democratic successor, during an all-too-brief 13 month period following the Cuban Missile Crisis, attempted to put an end to what was then a decade and a half of Cold War. But, as it happens, Kennedy’s was the last Democratic administration that took seriously the imperative of establishing normal, reciprocal relations with Russia.

Presidents Nixon and Reagan, each in their own ways, pursued a policy of detente—a policy Nixon and Kissinger borrowed from the conservative French president, Charles de Gaulle, as well as from the social democratic German chancellor Willy Brandt.

George H.W. Bush warned against the danger of unleashing the demons of parochial nationalism (such as were unleashed during the 2014 Maidan revolution) in the post-Soviet space. After 9/11, Putin helped to facilitate both the establishment of US military bases in Central Asia and the Northern Distribution Network which provided US cargo planes overflight rights over Russia to supply American troops in Afghanistan. Such was the extent of Russia’s willingness to cooperate with Bush after 9/11 that Brookings Institution scholar Fiona Hill noted in June 2002,

…When Russian President Vladimir Putin picked up the phone to express his sympathy to President Bush in the aftermath of September 11 and then followed up by providing concrete assistance to the campaign in Afghanistan and quickly acquiescing to U.S. plans to establish bases in central Asia, Washington policymakers and analysts concluded Putin had made a strategic, even historic, choice to align Russia’s foreign policy with that of the United States. It was a reasonable conclusion to make.

From the beginning of his presidency in January 2000, Putin pushed the idea of a concerted campaign against terrorism with American and European leaders. He was one of the first to raise the alarm about terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and to warn of linkages between these camps, well-financed terrorist networks, and Islamic militant groups operating in Europe and Eurasia.

Bush’s approach to the 2008 Russo-Georgian war (set off by Washington’s client, then-Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, who shelled Russian peacekeepers in Ossetia—a fact confirmed by a subsequent EU report on the matter) was not to portray the Russian move on Georgia as a metastasizing cancer on the “Free World,” as Biden did with Ukraine. Instead Bush explicitly ruled out military support for Georgia—and Saakashvili was quietly, behind the scenes told to cool it—which is exactly what Obama should have told the Ukrainians during the Maidan coup.

So what changed in the intervening two decades? Part of the answer has to do with the cold war culture war (of which Mahler’s essay is a prime example) which has marginalized and stigmatized dialogue, diplomacy and cooperation with Russia.

Given what America is and what it is in the process of becoming (i.e. the world’s northernmost banana republic), the motive for normalizing relations with Russia has little if anything to do with culture. The administration’s parley with Moscow has to do with security. Mahler seems blissfully unaware that Russia is a nuclear superpower with 4,477 nuclear warheads; has an army of 1.5 million active duty soldiers; and has deep bilateral relations with China and Iran.

In the end, power is what matters. The US has it. Russia has it. China has it. Trump, whatever his faults, understands this—and his policy toward Russia isn’t some kind of aberration; it is a reversion to common sense.