By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 2/5/23

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies “blocked” his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days.

On March 4, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which he said he coordinated with the US, France, Germany, and the UK.

Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort. For the Russian side, he said they dropped “denazification” as a requirement for a ceasefire. Bennett defined “denazification” as the removal of Zelensky. During his meeting in Moscow with Putin, Bennett said the Russian leader guaranteed that he wouldn’t try to kill Zelensky.

The other concession Russia made, according to Bennett, is that it wouldn’t seek the disarmament of Ukraine. For the Ukrainian side, Zelensky “renounced” that he would seek NATO membership, which Bennett said was the “reason” for Russia’s invasion.

Reports at the time reflect Bennet’s comments and said Russia and Ukraine were softening their positions. Citing Israeli officials, Axios reported on March 8 that Putin’s “proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty.”

Discussing how Western leaders felt about his mediation efforts, Bennett said then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson took an “aggressive line” while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were more “pragmatic.” Bennett said President Biden adopted “both” positions.

But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.

When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said, “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”

Explaining his decision to mediate, Bennett said that it was in Israel’s national interest not to pick a side in the war, citing Israel’s frequent airstrikes in Syria. Bennett said Russia has S-300 air defenses in Syria and that if “they press the button, Israeli pilots will fall.”

Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine didn’t stop with Bennett’s efforts. Later in March, Russian and Ukrainian officials met in Istanbul, Turkey, and followed up with virtual consultations. According to the account of former US officials speaking to Foreign Affairs, the two sides agreed on the framework for a tentative deal. Russian officials, including Putin, have said publicly that a deal was close following the Istanbul talks.

But the negotiations ultimately failed after more Western pressure. Boris Johnson visited Kyiv in April 2022, urging Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia. According to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, he said even if Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Russia, Kyiv’s Western backers were not.

Later in April, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said there were some NATO countries that wanted to prolong the war in Ukraine. “After the talks in Istanbul, we did not think that the war would take this long … But, following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that… there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine,” Cavusoglu said.

A few days after Cavusoglu’s comments, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted that one of the US’s goals in supporting Ukraine is to see Russia “weakened.”

Link here.

By Sumantra Maitra, The American Conservative, 1/20/23

Finland’s prime minister Sanna Marin recently went on record saying that the Ukraine war might only end with Russia completely out of the country. “The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine,” she stated. “That’s the way out of the conflict.” The video ended with a smug nod towards the obsequious press gaggle.

Marin is, needless to mention, not the only one. Kaja Kallas, the prime minister of Estonia, recently wrote, in an essay full of Wikipedia-level references to Churchill, Reagan, and FDR, that “as the prime minister of Estonia, a frontline NATO country that endured half a century of Soviet occupation, I know what peace on Russia’s terms really means. Russian peace would not mean the end of suffering but rather more atrocities. The only path to peace is to push Russia out of Ukraine.”

“Although the Soviet Union eventually collapsed, its imperialist ideology did not,” Kallas went on, adding that “in Estonia, our history books were rewritten after the end of Soviet rule, but the same did not happen in Russia.” One minor detail was missing from the admitted revisionism. Kallas is the daughter of Slim Kallas, the former deputy chief editor of the Communist Party of Estonia and the member of the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union—practically Soviet royalty.

Per Plato, a functioning republican polity depends on linguistic clarity. We must therefore untangle the euphemisms “peace on Russian terms” and “pushing Russia out” as we deliberate American foreign policy. The former phrase implies any concession or acknowledgment of a status quo in a situation where either side is unable to fully conquer or reconquer per the post-Soviet boundaries. Given the unlimited flow of Western weapons and cash, Ukrainian war aims continue to shift, from defending Kiev, to reconquering the Donbas, to marching on to Crimea. The latter euphemism is relatively simpler, it denotes pushing Russia out of all of Ukraine, including Crimea and the Donbas, by any means necessary.

Ukrainians and their lobbyists have already started to lay the rhetorical groundwork of persuading Anglo-Americans to take the war to Crimea. For example, former Ukrainian defence minister and current Atlantic Council fellow Andriy P. Zagorodnyuk recently argued,

Kiev and its allies must press on, battling until it can make Moscow hand over Crimea via negotiations or until Ukraine has forcibly pried the peninsula from Moscow’s grasp. Doing so is the only way to inflict the kind of major defeat Russia must experience if it is to abandon its imperial ambitions and start abiding by international norms and laws. The United States and Europe should understand that they, too, will benefit from a total Ukrainian victory. It could mark the permanent end of Russian aggression, breathing new life into the liberal world order.

But what about Russia’s nuclear redlines regarding Crimea? Zagorodnyuk: “The world can never rule out the chance that Russia will use nuclear weapons, especially when it is governed by Putin…other concerns about Ukraine’s ability to retake the peninsula and nuclear attacks are all at least somewhat overblown. After consecutive months of battlefield success, it is clear that Ukraine has the capacity to liberate Crimea.” Ah.

That idea suffers from a minor but notable disadvantage. It is insane. The war isn’t over, and Ukraine isn’t winning. The country cannot run a day without being supported by foreign backers, so much so that its government and pension fund are paid for by American taxpayers. Ukraine and Russia both desire to press on. Only one side of the two is, however, completely dependent on foreign generosity, thereby transferring escalation leverage to its great power donors. To translate that into non-academic international relations speak: Those who pay control the play.

At the time of writing, Ukraine and Russia are stuck in a meat-grinder of a town known as Bakhmut, with Russia aiming—so far as can be inferred without process tracing—to end the Ukrainian fighting male population, regardless of the cost. Russian military doctrine has reverted back to norm, and Russian strategic elite, in other words, are Russianing: throwing bodies to the pile. Muzzle-to-muzzle conflict is a disadvantage for Ukraine, simply because while Ukraine can have as much money and weaponry as it wants, for now there is no Western cavalry coming over the hill.

The Russians are already preparing another three hundred thousand conscripts, and if they decide to go for one more round of partial mobilization, they will end up having a million men in arms around the time for spring and summer offensives. British analysts are already concerned about weapons stockpiles, and Americans are concerned about flawed Ukrainian toe-to-toe strategy. And given that, despite repeated attempts of chain-ganging, Europe or America will not directly commit to the war, the long-term attrition rate in this case favors those with more men, i.e., Russia.

That simple cost-benefit analysis is, however, considered to be risky “around the corner for European and trans-Atlantic unity” by Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute for International Affairs in Rome. Jessica Berlin, another European analyst, channeled her inner Sanna Marin to a concern of a larger NATO–Russia nuclear war by adding “Yes, war between NATO & Russia would be a doomsday scenario—for RUSSIA. That’s why the Kremlin wants to avoid it at all costs. When their hyperventilating TV propagandists threaten to nuke Piccadilly Circus it’s to scare western voters into appeasement. Shame it works on you [shrug emoji]”

It escapes a normal mind what part of mutually assured destruction allows a shrug. Being deterred from a nuclear war isn’t appeasement. Deterrence goes both ways. The entire Cold War was predicated on mutual deterrence. Ukraine’s interest is to defend Ukraine, and, in order to do that, attempt to maximize Western involvement. Western interest is to avoid nuclear war, insolvency and overstretch, while bleeding Russia. Those interests are fundamentally incompatible, and at some point they will come into play in opposition to each other. That point is approaching soon. One doesn’t need to be pro-Moscow to claim that not all wars in peripheral theaters deserve a forward involvement. At the risk of innuendo, the effort to speak loudly and carry someone else’s big stick by figures such as Marin and Kallas is intolerable. It is a grating combination of sanctimony, arrogance, historical ignorance, philosophical ineptitude, and ceaseless demand. An astute analyst once referred to this phenomenon as Girl-Boss militarism, a combination of revolutionary globalism, feminism, and neo-conservatism, added to empty, catchphrase-filled “mic-drop” politics. It is toxic when Hillary Clinton does it. It is insufferable when done by leaders of American protectorates mimicking an overzealous but dependent foederati, often far more fanatical than Rome herself.

By Gordon Hahn, Russian and Eurasian Politics Blog, 1/30/23

We are entering the most dangerous phase of the NATO-Russian Ukraine war up till now. The West is undertaking a major escalation in the war by increasing the lethality of weapons it is supplying Ukraine to include tanks and the largest tranche of military equipment supplied to Kiev so far. Meanwhile, Russia is on the verge of an offensive on the background of slow but steady gains in the east, taking Soledar, moving into Vugledar (Ugledar) and the outskirts of Bakhmut (Atemevsk), threatening Ukrainian forces with operational encirclements in several areas. Russia now has available in and around Ukraine 5-600,000 regular troops, almost none of which have been used so far, with Moscow having been relying on the DPR and LNR forces, the Wagner troops, Chechens, and massive attacks from the air by artillery, rockets, drones and such in previous phases of the war.

The false myth that Russia is losing the war is being exposed for the propaganda lie it has always been, risking the loss of public support in the West. That exposure is leaving the ‘king even more naked’ as the Russian offensive gradually gains steam over the next two months. Russia was not militarily defeated in Kharkiv and Kherson when it retreated from those places. In the latter case, there seems to have been a tacit agreement between Moscow and Kiev that Russian troops would withdraw behind the Dnepr, and Kiev’s forces would not harass them much at all and the agreement appears to have held. In both cases, Moscow decided to withdraw forces because it was badly outnumbered and sought to avoid a fight and high casualties. Russian forces have been making steady progress over the last few weeks, recently taking Soledar. They are in the process of establishing operational encirclement around Bakhmut as well as Avdiivka and have moved deeply into Mariinka and Vugledar (Ugledar); all of which could trap 10,000s of Ukrainian troops. More importantly, the offensive that is slowly ramping up will consist of larger combined force operations that is most likely to more resemble actual all-out total war than the hitherto ‘special military operation,’ though I expect some considerable continuing restraint to preserve civilian and Russian military lives as much as is possible. Whether the offensive will include a ground and/or air assault on Kiev and an attempt to encircle and/or in intensive bombing campaign targeting Zelenskiy and the government infrastructure – thus far left to be – is impossible to know for sure, but is likely.

NATO is now openly at war with Russia and intensively escalating that war. This is not Russian propaganda; it has been a poorly held secret for months. NATO and the US provide: all of the kinds of lethal weapons; strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence; means of communications; and strategic and operational planning as well as tactical and weapons training. Polish and perhaps Rumanian and other state’s soldiers have been fighting out of uniform in Ukraine against Russia. NATO has also organized Belarusian and Russian opposition units that are fighting Russia and allied forces in Ukraine.

The ‘NATOization’ of the Ukraine war and the effort to organize opposition military forces against Moscow and Minsk is making it more likely that Russia will pressure Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka to bring Belarusian forces into the war along with Russia’s own units deployed there, if only as part of the Russian-Belarusian ‘joint Union force’. Lukashenka could put up little resistance, especially if it appears that Russia’s efforts are failing or, more obviously, if Ukrainian or Polish elements were to undertake some sort of operation on Belarus’s territory. Clearly, Lukashenka’s prospects for retaining his hold on power decline sharply should Russia lose this war, given the likely repercussions for Putin’s rule in the event.

Moscow may soon decide that since NATO countries are legally definable as combatants it has the right to respond in some way. Responses could include: financing terrorist attacks, sabotage, destroying non-Russian oil and gas pipelines, rejecting all international copyright law, targeting staging sites in Poland or Rumania from which supplies and newly Western-trained troops are transported to Ukraine—who knows, maybe all of the above. That could provoke open NATO-Russian warfare on European and Russian territory, which is already being hit by the Ukrainians using US missiles.

If the escalation stops with the new wave perhaps there will not be any such Russian responses, but Western ‘appeasement’ is unlikely. War is in the air from Washington to Warsaw to Moscow.

The always insightful Colonel Douglas McGregor is wrong when he says that in Washington they do not understand that Russia is a country that can and if need be will mobilize its entire population if its leadership perceives a threat sufficient to warrant it (www.youtube.com/watch?v=K74GonVNYO4&ab_channel=JudgeNapolitano-JudgingFreedom). They understand this full well in DC and hope to force Putin to engage such a mobilization and trap Putin in a quagmire – regardless of the costs to Ukraine — with everything else that will entail for Russia’s economic efficiency, residual freedoms, and political stability in the long-term. In other words, they hope to saddle Putin with a war that will ultimately destabilize the political system and lead to his downfall. The time frame in such thinking is probably connected with the next Russian presidential election scheduled for 2024. Elections are focal points that often spark ‘color revolutions’ such as Ukraine in 2004, Georgia in 2005, and the failed 2012 white ribbon protests in Russia. This is the idea driving the West’s foolhardy strategic escalation of the war and complete lack of interest in cultivating peace talks. The foundational drive is that any talks will fail if Washington and Brussels do not agree to end NATO expansion at least in the case of Ukraine; something the West is unwilling to do. This is why I have been calling the ‘special military operation’ or ‘Russia’s war in Ukraine’ the NATO-Russian Ukraine war.

The West now also is risking the great danger that what remains of the Ukrainian state will be destroyed for the goal of removing Putin from power. But any fall of Putin from power will change neither Russian resistance to NATO expansion and Western color revolutionism (regime change policies or ‘democracy promotion’) nor the startegies and tactics Moscow uses to carry out that resistance. Washington has a dearth of knowledge about or willingness to acknowledge and incorporate into policy Russia’s long history of being targeted by Western powers for political interference and manipulation and military intervention and invasion and the resulting centrality of security vigilance in relation to the West in Russia’s political and security culture. And destruction of the Ukrainian state will eliminate the prospect of stabilization through the transformation of Ukraine into a neutral buffer zone between NATO and Russia, a prospect that should be acceptable to all sides, including Kiev, after this terrible war.

The absence of American statesmanship – really, the presence of American anti-leadership, even international subversion – is bringing catastrophe. Washington should be pressing both sides to negotiate not just be sending more, more and still more lethal weapons to Kiev. This is a criminal abandonment of leadership that risks us all with World War III and nuclear conflagration. It is perhaps more and surely deeply disturbing – and certainly must be raising red flags in Moscow – that there is a senile, arrogant, corrupt American president threatened by congressional investigations and perhaps impeachment for crimes he and his son committed, who is deciding how far the West’s involvement in the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine should go. The possibility that Joe Biden is not in charge or is being profoundly manipulated by a coalition of Washington Democrat Party-state and globalist radicals is no more comforting.

Overall, the script is one that seems to have been written in Hollywood if not in Hell itself. Can Humankind or Heaven amend a happy ending? I am having my doubts.

How will 2023 play out? Aside from all that has been said above for the moment, 2023 is unlikely to see an end to the war. Russia’s offensive will be methodical and likely slowly grind down the Ukrainian army. The influx of large quantities of Western weapons — tanks, armored fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, and much more, including it seems also jet fighters — could stall that offensive but is not likely to prevent a Russian military victory on the ground. However, the costs to Russia (not to mention Ukraine!) in blood and treasure will be far greater than previously. This combination of Russia’s attainment of a position of strength on the battlefield and rising human, financial, and political costs could create a willingness in Moscow to more earnestly pursue ceasefire or a more general peace settlement at the year’s end.

2024 might see a settlement involving Moscow’s core demands: no NATO expansion to Ukraine, recognition of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, and at least part of Zaporizhe and Kherson Oblasts as Russian territories, and de-nazification of Ukraine. But Ukraine and the West would need a face-saving compensation. If Moscow’s forces drive to the Dnepr, then confining Russia’s territorial gains to the already annexed territories would constitute one Russian compromise. Kiev could receive Western security guarantees (imbedded in a new overall European security architecture) and war reparations in some form. But all this seems unlikely at the moment, and one senses it is more likely there will be escalation up to and including NATO’s direct involvement. After all, it is already a NATO-Russian war.

RT.com, 1/19/23

The extrajudicial execution of Denis Kireev in March 2022 was due to a lack of coordination between security services, a top aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said on Thursday. Mikhail Podoliak was responding to a Wall Street Journal feature describing the 45-year-old banker as an asset of Ukrainian military intelligence, who supposedly helped save Kiev from Russian attack.

Kireev was killed on March 2 last year. His body was dumped on a Kiev sidewalk “with a bullet hole in the back of the skull,” according to the WSJ. Ukrainian media reported at the time that the country’s security service, the SBU, had “clear” evidence Kireev had committed high treason. The military intelligence, however, said he “died protecting Ukraine.”

The 45-year-old banker’s violent end was brought into the spotlight again by the WSJ, which interviewed Kireev’s relatives and associates, as well as the man he died working for – General Kirill Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence (GUR).

The banker was loyal to Kiev, raising funds for Ukrainian “volunteer brigades” fighting in Donbass after 2014, and “enjoyed playing the 007 role,” according to his friends and associates. Budanov said he had recruited Kireev in 2021 because of his business contacts with Russia, and received useful information from him for months before the conflict escalated.

“If it were not for Mr. Kireev, most likely Kiev would have been taken,” Budanov told the WSJ.

Kireev came to Budanov on February 23 and said Russia would “invade” the following day, with the primary objective to seize the Antonov Airport in Gostomel, near Kiev. The tip “gave Ukraine a precious few hours to shift troops to counter the Russian assault” and ultimately disabled the airport, saving the capital, according to the general.

Budanov said he had asked Kireev to attend ceasefire talks in Belarus, because he personally knew two members of the Russian delegation. He was photographed at the talks, and the SBU got suspicious. The night before the second round of talks, Kireev received a call from the SBU’s top counterintelligence officer, Alexander Poklad. Poklad had asked for a meeting, Kireev’s security detail told the WSJ.

Kireev had told his bodyguards he might be arrested and instructed them to not intervene. They dutifully disarmed when the SBU surrounded them outside St. Sophia Cathedral. Kireev was bundled off into a SBU minivan. His corpse was found about 90 minutes later.

The GUR arranged for a hero’s burial and Zelensky posthumously gave Kireev a medal for “exceptional duty.” The WSJ also noted that the SBU leadership was purged in July 2022. During an interview with an Estonian outlet on Thursday, Podoliak commented on the WSJ story by blaming Kireev’s death on miscommunication.

“Those were the first days of the war. His killing is due to the fact that there was no unified coordination between security structures. There were certain claims against him, they did not have time to settle these claims in a dialogue format,” Zelensky’s aide said.

“ISIS are little children compared to the Kiev regime,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, commenting on Podoliak’s explanation and referring to Islamic State terrorists.