Russia Matters, 4/4/25

1. Donald Trump is “running out of patience” with Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine ceasefire, FT reported, citing Finland’s president Alexander Stubb, who spent seven hours with Trump on March 30.¹ In fact, Trump himself said on that day that he was so “pissed off” at Putin over his call for a temporary U.N. administration in Ukraine that he was considering secondary 25%–50% tariffs on buyers of Russian oil. Trump—who has been advised by his staff not to talk to Putin until he commits to the broad ceasefire—was echoed by Marco Rubio, who insists that the White House needs to “begin to see real progress” from the Kremlin soon, asserting that “we will know soon enough—in a matter of weeks, not months—whether Russia is serious about peace or not.” To increase the Trump administration’s leverage vis-à-vis the Kremlin on this issue, some 50 Republican and Democratic senators introduced a bill that would slap a 500% tariff on imports from countries that buy Russian oil if Putin refuses to engage in good-faith ceasefire negotiations or breaches an eventual agreement, according to Bloomberg. However, these thinly veiled threats appeared to have produced no immediate impact, at least publicly. While a Kremlin spokesman declared on March 31 that Putin remains open to talks with Trump, Russia’s deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov asserted on April 1 that Moscow cannot accept U.S. proposals for a ceasefire without addressing what Russian leaders describe as the “root causes” of the war.² Nor did Kirill Dmitriev indicate any radical change in Russia’s position on conditions for the ceasefire when this week he became the most senior Russian official to visit Washington since the start of the Ukraine war. The U.S. is now waiting for Dmitriev, who met with Steve Witkoff and other senior U.S. officials, to report to Putin before the two sides move forward with any next steps, according to Bloomberg.³ Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced Beijing’s readiness to mediate in the Ukraine conflict during talks in Moscow with Sergei Lavrov, according to AFP.
2. Import tariffs, which Trump slapped on about 90 countries, had some surprise omissions, and one of them is Russia. That Russia was spared made many wonder why, prompting U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to claim that Russia was spared because the sanctions imposed on the country after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine mean that U.S.-Russian trade had effectively stopped. Yet, low levels of trade didn’t prevent Trump from slapping tariffs on other countries. For instance, the U.S. exported $526 million worth of goods and services to Russia in 2024, while importing $3,007 million, with America’s deficit in this bilateral trade totaling $2,481 million that year. In comparison, the volume of Angola’s trade with the U.S. ($2.6 billion in goods last year) was lower than America’s trade with Russia, as was the deficit ($1,000 million), but this African country still found itself with a 32% import tariff. So, low levels of trade don’t quite explain why Russia was spared. Perhaps the structure of U.S. imports does? As NYT’s Anatoly Kurmanaev has reminded us, Russia is a Top 3 supplier of fertilizer to the United States. However, Russia’s share in U.S. imports of this commodity has not exactly been game-changing; Russia accounted for 16% of $9.97 billion worth of fertilizer that the U.S. imported in 2023. Perhaps there has been another factor in the confluence of drivers of Trump’s decision to spare Russia from the tariffs. It could be that Trump continues to harbor hopes that, despite having stalled so far in the negotiations on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Putin may eventually agree to implement Trump’s vision of first embracing a temporary but full ceasefire, and then using that halt to negotiate a permanent cessation of hostilities.
3. Ukraine is holding strong defensively and improving its ability to reinforce its positions, though a full Ukrainian victory is unlikely, as is a collapse, according to NATO SACEUR Gen. Christopher Cavoli’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 3. Cavoli warned that U.S. aid to Ukraine is vital, especially for missile interception and intelligence. “It would obviously have a rapid and deleterious effect on their ability to fight,” the general said when asked what would happen if the Trump administration were to refuse to provide military aid to Kyiv. Cavoli also acknowledged that Russia’s defense industry is outproducing the U.S. in categories such as tanks and shells. Russia is expected to roll out 1,500 tanks and 3,000 armored vehicles (as well as 200 Iskander ballistic and cruise missiles) this year, while the U.S. produces only 135 tanks per year and no Bradley’s, DefenseScoop quoted Cavoli as telling U.S. senators. “Additionally, we anticipate Russia to produce 250,000 artillery shells per month, which puts it on track to build a stockpile three times greater than the United States and Europe combined,” Cavoli said. Thus, while the Russian military is estimated to have lost an estimated 3,000 tanks, 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems and over 400 air defense systems in Ukraine in the past year, Moscow is on pace to replace those losses, according to Cavoli.
4. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reoriented the U.S. military to prioritize deterring China, while leaving it to Europe to defend itself from potential Russian aggression, according to a secret internal Pentagon guidance memo signed by Hegseth earlier this month. “Hegseth’s guidance acknowledges that the U.S. is unlikely to provide substantial, if any, support to Europe in the case of Russian military advances, noting that Washington intends to push NATO allies to take primary defense of the region,” WP’s Alex Horton and Hannah Natanson reported March 29. The U.S. will support Europe with nuclear deterrence against Russia, and NATO should only count on U.S. forces that are not required for homeland defense or China deterrence missions, according to the two journalists’ description of the memo.⁴
5. As if to punctuate the Russian president’s disinterest in a peace deal, Putin this week moved to expand the size of his military, issuing a spring call-up for 160,000 men ages 30 and younger from April to July—the highest number of conscripts since 2011, according to WP’s April 4 editorial. The Kremlin and Defense Ministry insist conscripts are not sent into combat and that the draft is unrelated to the war in Ukraine. However, Ukraine has repeatedly claimed to have captured Russian conscripts, according to AFP. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict has depleted Russia’s military personnel so much that the Kremlin has been relying on prison inmates and North Korean soldiers, according to the WP editorial. Importantly, while the bulk of conscripted soldiers are not sent into combat while serving for 12 months unless they agree to sign contracts to become professional soldiers for several years, their conscription frees up more professional soldiers in units inside Russia to be sent into combat.
6. Russia gained 99 square miles of Ukraine’s territory (about 1 Nantucket island) in the past month, and overall picked up the pace of its advance. Last week’s gain of 47 square miles by Russian forces is a threefold increase over the previous week’s gains, according to the April 2, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. As of April 3, 2025, Russian forces occupied 112,487 square kilometers (43,431 square miles), which constituted 18.63% of Ukrainian territory and which is roughly equivalent to the state of Virginia, according to Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group’s map.
7. A New York Times investigation has revealed that the United States’ involvement in the Ukraine war was far deeper than previously understood. Here are the newspaper’s five takeaways from the investigation led by its journalist, Adam Entous.
   1. A U.S. base in Wiesbaden, Germany, supplied the Ukrainians with the coordinates of Russian forces on their soil.
   2. U.S. intelligence and artillery helped Ukraine quickly turn the tide against the Russian invasion.
   3. The Biden administration kept moving its red lines.
      1. In October 2022, U.S. intelligence overheard Russia’s then Ukraine commander, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, talking about indeed doing something desperate: using tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the Ukrainians from crossing the Dnipro and making a beeline to Crimea. Until that moment, U.S. intelligence agencies had estimated the chance of Russia’s using nuclear weapons in Ukraine at 5 to 10%. Now, they said, if the Russian lines in the south collapsed, the probability was 50%.
   4. Ultimately, the U.S. military and CIA were allowed to help with strikes into Russia.
   5. Political disagreements in Ukraine contributed to the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive’s collapse.
8. A new study by BOFIT has revealed that the level of Russians’ satisfaction with their household and personal circumstances has hit its highest in a decade. In more good news for the Russian workers, real wages in their country grew by a solid 6.5% year-on-year in January, according to preliminary Rosstat data cited by BNE. Some of their richest employers have also been enjoying an increase in income. The number of Russian billionaires grew from 110 in 2024 to a record high of 125, despite Russia’s enduring status as the most sanctioned country in the world, according to Forbes’s Russian edition. The sanctions must have played a role, however, in the fact that 24 former “Russian” billionaires in Forbes’ updated ranking are now listed as citizens or residents of other countries, according to MT.

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 3/19/25

[Transcript of Congress: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/76474]

Russian President Vladimir Putin told the country’s leading oligarchs that Western companies that “slammed the door” on Russia when they left the country after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine will not be allowed to repurchase their assets cheaply or regain their former market positions.

Speaking at the annual Congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) in Moscow, he said that businesses would not be allowed to exercise option agreements with their partners to buy back companies. These agreements were widely signed as part of a raft of takeovers and MBOs.

“If the niche of a Western company is already filled by a Russian business, then … as we say, that train has left,” Putin said.

Nevertheless, the climate is warming and the Kremlin has said it is open to restarting cooperation with international firms and the Russia market is open to them again thanks to the positive attitude of the Trump administration to restarting commercial ties with Russia.

The RSPP meeting was held on the same day as Putin held a 1.5-hour phone call with Trump where the two presidents explicitly talked about restarting business relations.

Trump and Putin share a “mutual interest in normalising relations” thanks to “the special responsibility of Russia and the United States for ensuring security and stability in the world,” the Kremlin’s statement reads, The Kyiv Independent reported.

“In this context, a wide range of areas in which our countries could establish interaction was considered. A number of ideas were discussed that are moving towards the development of mutually beneficial cooperation in the economy and energy sector.”

“A future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside,” including “enormous economic deals” and “geopolitical stability,” the White House added.

Putin has already instructed the government to monitor potential buyback deals and scrutinise each case carefully. While companies such as Renault, McDonald’s and Henkel had negotiated exit terms that included buyback options, the details of these agreements remain undisclosed.

Renault famously sold its stake for a nominal one ruble but has a buy-back option for the same amount. However, the AvtoVAZ president Maxim Sokolov, the Russian partner in the joint venture, said last month that if Renault wants to return it will have to pay $1.3bn to regain its stake, as that is the cost of the excess investment the Russian company had to make following the French carmaker’s exit.

McDonald’s will more than likely not be able to retake control of its extensive franchise at all. Its business was completely taken over by the copycat franchise Vkusno I Tochka (Tasty. Period), which has continued to roll out restaurants across the country and claims to have surpassed the American chain’s financial results after the first year of operation.

Putin’s comments are motivated by the expectation that even if Trump offers sanctions relief the process will be slow and protracted. Sanctions imposed on Russia and its businesses are unlikely to be lifted entirely.

“We should not hope for complete freedom of trade, payments and capital flows,” he said, adding that even if some restrictions were eased, Western countries would find alternative ways to create obstacles. He argued that the global economy was entering a “new spiral of economic rivalry” and that Russian businesses must be prepared for further challenges.

The Russian economy, Putin said, would inevitably experience a slowdown as a result of sanctions and the high and sticky inflation it has caused, but should remain stable. Inflation control and maintaining low unemployment levels would be key priorities. “The Russian economy should become a “safe haven.” A dramatic decline in growth rates of the national economy should be prevented,” he said.

Putin asserted that Russia had adapted to sanctions, which earlier this month he argued were actually a boon for the Russian economy as they have stimulated investment and innovation. The exit of multinationals handed entire business niches over to Russian entrepreneurs, fully formed for kopecks on the dollar, in one of the biggest asset transfer events in Russia’s history.

“The Russian business skilfully used the exit of Western companies and took the niches earlier held by them,” he said. While some foreign firms wished to return, Russian companies would be given priority. Those that had continued operating in Russia under different brands would be “treated with respect.”

The Kremlin has tasked the Cabinet with establishing a framework for Western firms wishing to re-enter the Russian market, ensuring fair commercial conditions that will be judged on a case-by-case basis. However, Putin made clear that returning companies would not receive financial advantages.

“The Western businesses will not be able to repurchase their Russian operations for modest amounts of money. That train has left for Western companies, whose niches were occupied. There will be no privileges and preferences for the ones returning,” he said.

Discussing global trade, Putin claimed that “it will not be as it has been before,” and warned against reliance on Western legal frameworks for investment protection. “Only fully sovereign countries are capable of dynamic and progressive growth in the interests of their people. The majority of European countries lost their sovereignty and faced serious problems in the economy and the security sphere as a result,” he said.

Meanwhile, Russian business representatives held talks with Robert Agee, President and CEO of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, regarding the potential easing of sanctions in specific sectors. Trump’s special envoy, Richard Grenell, also met officials in Switzerland to discuss possible Russian gas exports to Germany via Nord Stream 2. Additionally, Moscow and Washington are exploring economic cooperation in the Arctic, including natural resource development and trade routes.

YouTube link here.

“In his youth, Mr. von der Schulenburg escaped communist rule in East-Germany, then studied in Berlin, London and Paris, after which he started working for the United Nations, including as UN Assistant Secretary-General. He served in many of the world’s trouble spots, such as in Haiti, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and many more. He also wrote the formidable book “On Building Peace: Rescuing the Nation-State and Saving the United Nations”. Unsurprisingly, he is also an outspoken critic of the belligerent politics the EU and its member states are currently engaged in.“

By Big Serge, Substack, 3/28/25

The Russo-Ukrainian War is now three years old, and the third Z-Day, on February 24, 2025, was marked by a substantively different tone than prior iterations. On the battlefield, Russian forces stand significantly closer to victory than they have at any point since the opening weeks of the war. After reversals early in the war as Ukraine took advantage of Russian miscalculations and insufficient force generation, the Russian army surged in 2024, collapsing Ukraine’s front in southern Donetsk and pushing the front forward towards the remaining citadels of the Donbas.

At the same time, 2025’s Z-Day was the first under the new American administration, and hopes were high in some quarters that President Trump could bring about a negotiated settlement and end the war prematurely. The new tenor seemed to be made abundantly clear in an explosive February 28 Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vice President Vance, and Zelensky, which ended in the Ukrainian president being ignominiously shouted down and evicted from the White House. This followed an abrupt announcement that Ukraine was to be cut off from American ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) until Zelensky apologized for his conduct.

In an information sphere rife with rumors, inscrutable diplomatic maneuvering, and heavy handed posturing (clouded further by the distinctive style and personality of Trump himself), it is very hard to figure out what might actually matter. We’re left with a bizarre juxtaposition: based on the explosive vignettes of Trump and Zelensky, many might hope for an abrupt course change on the war, or at least a revision of the American position. On the ground, however, things continue much as they have, with the Russians grinding forward along a sprawling front. The infantryman entrenched near Pokrovsk, listening for the whirring of drones overhead, could be forgiven for not feeling that much has changed at all.

I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump’s self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia’s war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.

The Great Misadventure: Front Collapse in Kursk

When the history of this war is laid out retrospectively, no shortage of ink will be lavished on Ukraine’s eight month operation in Kursk. From the broader perspective of the wartime narrative, Ukraine’s initial incursion into Russia filled a variety of needs, with the AFU “taking the fight” to Russia and seizing the initiative, albeit on a limited front, after months of continuous Russian advances in the Donbas.

Notwithstanding the immense hyperbole that followed the launch of Ukraine’s Kursk Operation (which I facetiously nicknamed “Krepost”, in an homage to the 1943 German plan for its own Battle of Kursk), in the months that followed this was undoubtedly a sector of great significance, and not only because it brought the distinctive of Ukraine holding territory within the prewar Russian Federation. Based on a perusal of the Order of Battle, Kursk was clearly one of the two axes of primary effort for the AFU, along with the defense of Pokrovsk. Dozens of brigades were involved in the operation, including a significant portion of Ukraine’s premier assets (mechanized, air assault, and marine infantry brigades). Perhaps more importantly, Kursk is the only axis where Ukraine has made a serious effort to gain initiative and go on the offensive in the last year, and the first Ukrainian operational level offensive (as opposed to local counterattacks) since their assault on the Russian Zaporizhia line in 2023.

With all that being said, March brought about the culmination of a serious Ukrainian defeat, with Russian forces recapturing the town of Sudzha (which formed the central anchor of Ukraine’s position in Kursk) on March 13. Although Ukrainian forces still have a presence on the border, Russian forces have crossed the Kursk-Sumy border into Ukraine in other places. The AFU has been functionally ejected from Kursk, and all dreams of some breakout into Russia have faded. At this point, the Russians now hold more territory in Sumy than the Ukrainians do in Kursk.

This would seem, then, to be a good time to conduct an autopsy on the Kursk Operation. Ukrainian forces achieved the basic prerequisite for success in August: they managed to stage a suitable mechanized package – notably, the forest canopy around Sumy allowed them to assemble assets in relative secrecy, in contrast to the open steppe in the south – and achieve tactical surprise, overrunning Russian border guards at the outset. Despite their tactical surprise and the early capture of Sudzha, the AFU was never able to parlay this into a meaningful penetration or exploitation in Kursk. Why?

The answer seems to be a nexus of operational and technical problems which became mutually reinforcing – in some respects these problems are general to this war and well understood, while in some ways they are unique to Kursk, or at least, Kursk provided a potent demonstration of them. More specifically, we can enumerate three problems that doomed the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk:

The failure of the AFU to widen their penetration adequately.

The road-poor connectivity of the Ukrainian hub in Sudzha to their bases of support around Sumy.

Persistent Russian ISR-strike overwatch on Ukrainian lines of communication and supply.

We can see, almost naturally, how these elements can feed into each other – the Ukrainians were unable to create a wide penetration into Russia (for the most part, the “opening” of their salient was less than 30 miles wide), which greatly reduced the number of roads available to them for supply and reinforcement. The narrow penetration and poor road access in turn allowed the Russians to concentrate strike systems on the few available lines of communication, to the effect that the Ukrainians struggled to either supply or reinforce the grouping based around Sudzha – this low logistical and reinforcement connectivity in turn made it impossible for the Ukrainians to stage additional forces to try and expand the salient. This created a positive feedback loop of confinement and isolation for the Ukrainian grouping which made their defeat more or less inevitable.

We can, however, go a little deeper in our postmortem and see how this happened. In the opening weeks of the operation, Ukraine’s prospects became severely untracked by two critical tactical failures which threatened from the outset to spiral into an operational catastrophe.

The first critical moment came in the days from August 10-13; after initial successes and tactical surprise, Ukrainian progress stalled as they attempted to advance up the highway from Sudzha to Korenevo. Several clashes took place throughout this period, but solid Russian blocking positions were held as reinforcements scrambled into the theater. Korenevo always promised to be a critical position, as the Russian breakwater on the main road leading northwest out of Sudzha: so long as the Russians held it, the Ukrainians would be unable to widen their penetration in this direction.

With the Russian defenses jamming up the Ukrainian columns at Korenevo, the Ukrainian position was already pregnant with a basic operational crisis: the penetration was narrow, and thus threatened to become a severe and untenable salient. At the risk of making a perilous historical analogy, the operational form was very similar to the famous 1944 Battle of the Bulge: taken by surprise by a German counteroffensive, Dwight Eisenhower prioritized limiting the width, rather than the depth of the German penetration, moving reinforcements to defend the “shoulders” of the salient.

Blocked at Korenevo, the Ukrainians shifted their approach and made a renewed effort to solidify the western shoulder of their position (their left flank). This attempt aimed to leverage the Seym River, which runs a winding course about twelve miles behind the state border. By striking bridges over the Seym and launching a ground attack towards the river, the Ukrainians hoped to isolate Russian forces on the south bank and either destroy them or force a withdrawal over the river. If they had succeeded, the Seym would have become an anchoring defensive feature protecting the western flank of the Ukrainian position….

The Art of the Deal

Any discussion of the diplomatic sphere and the prospects for a negotiation peace must begin by noting the guiding animus of the American stance: namely, that President Trump is a practitioner of personal politics, with a fundamentally transactional view of the world. By “personal politics”, we mean that he places great emphasis on his own interpersonal dynamics and his self-conception as a dealmaker who can maneuver people into agreement, provided he can just get them to the table.

Trump is hardly alone in this; to take one example, we could look at his long-dead predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. FDR, much like Trump, took great pride in the idea that he was exceptionally skilled at managing, soothing, and charming people. A guiding principle of American policy during the Second World War was FDR’s sense that he could “manage” Stalin in face to face interactions. In one infamous letter to Churchill, FDR told the British Prime Minister:

“I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”

Trump shares a similar sensibility, which postulates personality and transactional acumen as a driving force of world affairs. To be perfectly fair to President Trump, this has largely worked for him both in business and domestic politics, but it may not port over so well to foreign affairs. Nevertheless, this is how he thinks. He expressed it succinctly in his explosive February 28th meeting with Zelensky:

“Biden, they didn’t respect him. They didn’t respect Obama. They respect me… He might have broken deals with Obama and Bush, and he might have broken them with Biden. He did, maybe. Maybe he did. I don’t know what happened, but he didn’t break them with me. He wants to make a deal.”

Whether or not this is true, it is an important bedrock in the framing of the situation to remember that this is how Trump sees himself and the world: politics is a transactional domain mediated by personalities. With that in mind, there are two different issues to consider, namely the mineral deal between Ukraine and the United States, and the prospects for a negotiated ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

The mineral deal is somewhat easier to parse, and the central motif that emerges is just how badly Zelensky bungled his meetings with Trump. It’s helpful first to examine the actual contents of the mineral deal – notwithstanding the enormous $500 billion price tag, it is actually a very scant agreement. The agreement, as it currently stands, seems to essentially give American companies the right of first refusal on the exploitation of Ukrainian mineral resources, with 50% of the proceeds from state owned resources going to an “investment fund” for the reconstruction of Ukraine under joint US-Ukrainian management.

The mineral deal ought to be understood as a manifestation of Trump’s immense aversion to acting at economic disadvantage. He is a fundamentally transactional man who complained at great length about the costs of American support for Kiev, and mineral rights are the easiest way for him to extract promises of “repayment” from a Ukrainian government that cannot actually afford to repay anything in the near term.

For Ukraine, entangling America in Ukrainian mineral wealth might seem like an opportunity to ensure ongoing American support, as it would potentially create direct stakes for American companies. It’s important to note, however, that the mineral deal does not contain any security guarantees for Ukraine, and is in fact explicitly tied to *past* support, rather than future aid. In other words, Trump wants to present the mineral deal as a way for Ukraine to repay the last three years of American assistance, and not as a deal guaranteeing American support in the future.

Given this, it ought to be obvious that Zelensky badly fumbled his encounter with Trump. The optimal strategy for Ukraine was to draw as close to the Trump administration as possible – sign the mineral deal, say thank you, wear a suit, and commend Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war. Trump’s negotiations were guaranteed to run into a wall once the Russians themselves were brought into the discussion, but in this scenario (one where Zelensky came across as supportive and compliant towards Trump), Trump’s personal ire would be directed at Moscow, rather than Kiev. This might have enabled Zelensky to play Trump and Putin off of each other, parlaying the situation into more American support once Trump became frustrated at Russia’s unwillingness to quickly negotiate a ceasefire.

The operating principle is that Trump is a mercurial, personal politician who places primacy on the deal. Inability to solidify the deal breeds irritation, and Zelensky’s best play was to do everything possible to ensure that it was Russia that became the irritant in Trump’s attempted deal making. Unfortunately for Ukraine, a valuable opportunity was wasted by Zelensky’s inability to read the room. Instead, Ukraine was put in an ISR timeout and Zelensky had to come crawling back with an apology to sign the mineral deal.

This parlayed directly into tenuous diplomatic feelers, including a long phone conversation between Trump and Putin and a diplomatic roundtable in Riyadh attended by American, Russian, and Ukrainian delegations.

Thus far, the only outcome from these discussions has been the sketch for a climbdown in the Black Sea, which in its essence would end attacks on commercial shipping (presumably including Russian attacks on Ukrainian port infrastructure in Odessa) in exchange for American moves to rehabilitate Russian agricultural exports by reconnecting Russia to shipping insurance, foreign ports, and payment systems.

For those that have been following along, this is more or less a revival of the defunct Turkish-negotiated grain deal, which collapsed in 2023. There are still sticking points here: Ukraine is bristling at the promise to loosen sanctions on Russian agricultural exports, and Russia will want a robust inspection regime to ensure that the Black Sea ceasefire does not provide cover for weapons to be shipped into Odessa, but things appear on the whole to be returning roughly to the lines of the 2022 grain deal. Whether the rerun will last remains to be seen.

All of this is preliminary and perhaps even irrelevant to the main question, which is whether it is possible to negotiate a meaningful peace in Ukraine at this time, or even a temporary ceasefire. This, however, is a much larger hurdle to climb. As I see it, there are four structural obstacles to a negotiated peace which Trump has little or leverage to overcome:

1. Russian disillusionment with negotiation and the credibility of western promises

2. Climbing Russian confidence that they are on track to win a decisive victory on the battlefield

3. Mutual unwillingness between Moscow and the extant Kiev regime to engage in direct negotiations with each other

4. The status of Russian-claimed territories in the Donbas which are still under Ukrainian control

Many of these issues dovetail, and are ultimately linked to the trajectory of the battlefield where the Russian Army continues to advance. So long as Russian leadership believes they are on pace to capture the entirety of the Donbas (and beyond), Putin’s team is highly unlikely to accept a truncated victory at the negotiating table – the only way out would be for Kiev to cede objectives like Kramatorsk and Slovyansk. In many ways, Ukraine’s current possession of these cities are its best cards in any negotiation, but for cards to be useful they must be played, and it’s difficult to imagine Zelensky’s regime simply giving up cities that it has fought for years to defend.

Furthermore, Putin has made it extremely clear that he does not consider Zelensky to be either a legitimate or credible figure at all, arguing that because Zelensky has suspended elections under the pretext of martial law, there is in fact no legitimate government in Kiev. This is obfuscation by the Kremlin, of course: Zelensky is the President of Ukraine, and within the parameters of Ukraine’s laws, conditions of martial law do allow him to stay in office. But this is rather beside the point: what matters is that the Kremlin has more or less categorically ruled out negotiating with the current government in Kiev, and has even suggested an internationally supervised provisional government as a replacement.

A generous assessment is that, for there to be reasonable prospects for a negotiated settlement from the Russian perspective, at least four conditions have to be satisfied:

1. Regime change in Kiev to bring in a government more acquiescent to Russian interests.

2. Russian control of all annexed territories (either through the actions of the Russian Army on the ground or by Kiev withdrawing from them)

3. Broad sanctions relief for Russia

4. Credible pledges that western troops will not be stationed in Ukraine as “peacekeepers” – since, after all, one critical strategic objective for Russia was to prevent the consolidation of NATO on its flank, they will hardly accept a peace that features the deployment of NATO troops into Ukraine.

So long as Russia continues to advance on the battlefield, they have no incentive to (as they would see it) rob themselves of a full victory by accepting a truncated and premature settlement. Putin expressed this view very cogently and explicitly on March 27:

“We are gradually, not as quickly as some would like, but nevertheless persistently and confidently moving towards achieving all the goals declared at the beginning of this operation. Along the entire line of combat contact, our troops have the strategic initiative. I said just recently: We will finish them off. There is reason to believe that we will finish them off.”

Fair enough. Ultimately, Trumps’ transactional view of politics runs into the more grounded reality of what negotiations actually mean, in wartime. The battlefield has a reality of its own that is existentially prior to negotiations. Diplomacy in this context does not serve to transact a “fair” or “balanced” peace, but rather to codify the reality of the military calculus. If Russia believes it is on a trajectory to achieve the total defeat of Ukraine, than the only acceptable sort of peace would be one that expresses such a defeat through the fall of the Ukrainian government and a Ukrainian withdrawal from the east. Russia’s blood is up, and Putin seems to be in no mood to accept a partial victory when the full measure is within reach.

The problem for Ukraine, if history is any guide, is that it is not actually very easy to surrender. In the First World War, Germany surrendered while its army was still in the field, fighting in good order far from the German heartland. This was an anticipatory surrender, born of a realistic assessment of the battlefield which indicated that German defeat was an inevitability. Berlin therefore opted to bow out prematurely, saving the lives of its young men once the struggle had become hopeless. This decision, of course, was poorly received, and was widely denounced as betrayal and cowardice. It became a politically scarring watershed moment that shaped German sensibilities and revanchist drives for decades to come.

So long as Zelensky’s government continues to receive western support and the AFU remains in the field – even if it is being steadily rolled back and chewed up all along the front – it is difficult to imagine Kiev acceding to an anticipatory surrender. Ukraine must choose between doing this the easy way and the hard way, as the parlance goes, but this is not really a choice at all, particularly given the Kremlin’s insistence that a change of government in Kiev is a prerequisite to peace as such. Any successful path to a negotiated piece runs through the ruins of Zelensky’s government, and is therefore largely precluded at the moment.

Russian forces today stand significantly closer to victory in the Donbas than they did one year ago, and the AFU has been decisively defeated in Kursk. They are poised to make further progress towards the limits of the Donbas in 2025, with an increasingly threadbare AFU straining to stay in the field. This is what Ukraine asked for, when they willingly eschewed the opportunity to negotiate in 2022. So for all the diplomatic cinema, the brute reality of the battlefield remains the same. The battlefield is the first principle, and the ultimate repository of political power. The diplomat is a servant of the warrior, and Russia takes recourse to the fist and the boot and the bullet.

By Tarik Cyril Amar, RT, 3/16/25

A sure sign that a news item inconvenient for Zelensky-regime Ukraine and its (remaining) Western supporters is important is that the Western mainstream media will do their best to ignore it. That rule has now held true for more than a decade. At some point in the future, it may stop operating, namely, if the West fully abandons its proxy war regime in Kiev.

Then, and only then, will the Western media heed a new “party line” by dumping that regime as well. But we are not there yet. Indeed, if it is up to the NATO-EU Europeans it may still be a long time before we will see Western mainstream media treating Ukrainian regimes truthfully and critically.

Exhibit A that the kid-gloves-for-Kiev rule is still in force: The way in which Western mainstream media audiences are not getting to hear much about a clearly momentous and, in its political implications, far-reaching finding by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR): A few days ago, the court decided an extremely important case against the Ukrainian authorities of both the major port city of Odessa and the capital Kiev.

The essence of the case and the court’s findings, which are available on its website, is not complicated. The Ukrainian authorities abysmally failed to avoid or respond adequately to severe street violence and killings that took place in Odessa in May 2014 between supporters and opponents of the regime change operation commonly known as “Maidan.”

Subsequently they also obstinately failed to investigate the incident. In other words, they first messed up criminally – or worse – and then engaged in a cover-up for over a decade. Not a minor issue if you consider that hundreds of victims were injured and 48 killed on that day.

Twenty-eight plaintiffs from Ukraine had challenged these failures of Ukraine’s current regime before the EHCR. After too many years of deliberation the court has now finally recognized – unanimously, including a Ukrainian judge – that the Ukrainian authorities committed “violations of Article 2 (right to life/investigation) of the European Convention on Human Rights, on account of the relevant authorities’ failure to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them to prevent the violence in Odesa on 2 May 2014, to stop that violence after its outbreak, to ensure timely rescue measures for people trapped in the fire, and to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events.”

In addition, in one case, a “violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life)” was also found because of a delay in handing over a victim’s body for burial.

Take a step back and just consider the bare essentials: Unrest and mass killing have occurred, in a major city, too. And the public authorities of the state concerned have never provided a remotely adequate investigation or legal redress: Victims and their relatives were left without justice, perpetrators without punishment. In any country that is not content with being a failed state, an authoritarian swamp, or both, the above alone would be a scandal rocking and toppling governments.

But not in post-Maidan Ukraine. There, instead, major media, such as Ukrainska Pravda, for instance, are performing acrobatic mental contortions to protect their regime from the fallout of the ECHR decision. And how do they do so? By blaming the big bad Russians, of course. Because the very mature first principle of Ukrainian “agency” still is: If it succeeds, it was us; if it’s a fiasco, it was the Russians’ fault. So much for Ukraine’s “free” media and “civil society.” Yes, that’s sarcasm; yes, it’s richly deserved.

Those few Western mainstream media that have not entirely ignored the ECHR decision have, unsurprisingly, employed a similar tactic of obfuscation. Thus, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung does acknowledge that the ECHR “has condemned the Ukrainian authorities,” but reverts to common places about alleged Russian involvement to cushion the blow.

In reality, the court did go out of its way to find something negative to say about Russia, vaguely but demonstratively pointing to Moscow’s information warfare and intentions to “destabilize” Odessa. Yet when you read the ECHR’s press release on its decision honestly, one thing is perfectly clear: the gesturing toward Russia is unspecific and, in essence, rhetorical. It reads as if the judges felt they had to keep up appearances.

If anything, what we learn from these obligatory swipes at Russia is only one thing, namely that the ECHR is biased against it. Big surprise. And the real take-away point then is, of course, that the judges still found massively, comprehensively against the Ukrainian authorities. Even an anti-Russian bias could not sway them – to their credit – from acknowledging reality.

On May 2, 2014, that reality was gruesome: in clashes between pro-Maidan and anti-Maidan protesters, some died from gunshot wounds, but the preponderant majority, 42, of the victims died in a fire in the Odessa House of Trade Unions that broke out during and because of the fighting. While some of the fire’s victims received help from outside, others were deliberately blocked up in the burning building or beaten savagely when they escaped it.

The fire, in other words, may have been the result of deliberate arson or it may have started semi-accidentally when Molotov cocktails were deployed by both sides. But the key point is that it was not merely an accident. At least once it was blazing, it was a weapon because that’s how it was used. How do we know this? In case of a genuine accident, everyone helps put a fire out. Yet that was not at all the case here. Even police and fire services deliberately refrained from intervening.

Both sides fought, but the victims of the fire and thus almost all victims on May 2, belonged to the anti-Maidan side, which was far inferior in numbers and systematically demonized as “pro-Russian,” that is, smeared as “traitors.” And that is, of course, the reason why their relatives cannot receive justice in Ukraine and why those who killed or helped kill these victims are not prosecuted: they belong to the side which was in power then and is still in power now.

The West has its own reasons to ignore this ECHR finding: its whole narrative of why it went to proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is shot through with lies: beginning with the Maidan Massacre of February 2014, which was blamed on the old regime but really committed by pro-regime change, pro-Western snipers, as Ivan Katchanovski has long shown in painstaking detail.

Think about it: This was a false-flag operation that greatly helped catalyze a large regional war, pitting Ukraine and the West against Russia, with a clear potential of escalation to World War III. And the West will still not correct the record.

And in this enormous Western information war offensive, misrepresenting the Odessa killings of May 2014 has been almost as important as covering up the true nature of the Maidan Massacre in Kiev just over two months before.

Now, with the proxy war being lost for Ukraine and its Western supporters, an honest reckoning with these deceptions would expose how we were lied into it. And that is precisely why it cannot happen. At least not yet: Too many American, European, and Ukrainian politicians, generals, experts, journalists, and academics have too much to lose.

This absence of truth and justice can lead to more killing. In Odessa, one of the pro-Maidan street fighters of May 2014 has just been gunned down in broad daylight: Demyan Ganul was an open and proud far-right extremist and neo-Nazi, tattoos and all. He led his own outfit, called the Street Front and made a habit out of mocking the victims of the Trade Union House fire by having barbecue parties in front of the building on the fire’s anniversaries. He was generally violent, allegedly not only beating but also raping victims, including males. He terrorized others into fighting in the war. In his spare time, he toppled Russian monuments.

The Ukrainian authorities have announced that the investigation of Ganul’s end is now under the personal supervision of Interior Minister Igor Klimenko. The priorities of the Zelensky regime are ugly and unsurprising.