By James Carden, Substack, 9/14/25

The recent assassination of the Ukrainian neo-fascist politician Andriy Parubiy are a grim reminder of the far-right origins of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution — a revolution which eventually gave way to the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022 and a war that has decimated the Ukrainian state.

At two key moments over the past 20 years, during 2004’s Orange Revolution and, a decade later, during the Maidan uprising, Ukraine’s nationalist political elites, at the urging of the American foreign policy establishment, sought to marginalize, stigmatize and eventually disenfranchise the substantial bloc of ethnic Russian citizens living in the country’s east and south.

That such an eventuality was possible (if not likely) was foreseen some 35 years ago by the last decent foreign policy president we’ve had, George H.W. Bush, who crafted a post Cold War policy based on (1) a refusal to rub Russia’s diminished fortunes in its face and (2) a wariness of re-awakening the poisonous sectarianism that so marked the politics of Eastern and Central Europe at mid-century.

Bush’s emphasis was on avoiding creating unnecessary crises within the post-Soviet space rather than provoking new ones (as subsequent Republican and Democratic administrations have chosen to do). As Bush’s secretary of state James A. Baker later wrote: “Time and again, President Bush demanded that we not dance on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. He simply wouldn’t hear of it.”

The nature of the Cold War had changed with Mikhail Gorbachev’s UN Speech of December 7, 1988. Gorbachev announced that the USSR was abandoning the class struggle that for decades served as the basis for Soviet foreign policy. In place of that, Gorbachev declared that Eastern European states were now free to choose their own paths, declaring that “the compelling necessity of the principle of freedom of choice” was “a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions.”

Gorbachev continued:

“…The next U.S. administration, headed by President-elect George Bush, will find in us a partner who is ready – without long pauses or backtracking – to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness and good will, with a willingness to achieve concrete results working on the agenda which covers the main issues of Soviet-U.S. relations and world politics.”

Initially, Bush and his team were skeptical of Gorbachev. In his memoirs, Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft dismissed Gorbachev’s overture, writing that the speech “had established, with a largely rhetorical flourish, a heady atmosphere of optimism.” Scowcroft, echoing the analysis offered to him by the CIA, worried that Gorbachev would then be able to “exploit an early meeting with a new president as evidence to declare the Cold War over without providing substantive actions from a ‘new’ Soviet Union.”

The caution with which Bush and his team treated Gorbachev likewise was extended to the newly or soon-to-be independent states in Eastern Europe.

There was to be no dancing on the ruins of the Berlin Wall.

The diplomatic historian James Graham Wilson writes that Bush realized that a triumphalist approach on the part of the Americans might backfire. “Ok, so long as the programs do not smack of fomenting revolution,” Scowcroft wrote on a paper proposing ‘democratic dialogue’ in Eastern Europe.

***

Eventually, Bush accepted that Gorbachev was serious about reform and came to see him as a partner in ending the 40 year division of Europe. What changed?

September 18th marks 5 years since the death of the acclaimed Princeton University scholar Stephen F. Cohen, a leader of the “revisionist” school of Soviet history and author of a biography of Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin that Gorbachev admired.* As such, it is appropriate to recount for future historians a little known episode that took place at Camp David in November 1989, a month before the first summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachev. The meeting played a role in convincing Bush to overcome the skepticism of his advisers displayed toward Gorbachev.

A young National Security Council aide named Condoleezza Rice (who became, a decade later, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under Bush’s son) invited Cohen and Harvard University scholar Richard Pipes, a Polish-born anti-Soviet hardliner, to consult with the President. Pipes and Cohen were no strangers to one another, they were frequent sparring partners on television and radio.

As Cohen recalled in an oral history interview with Columbia University’s Harriman Institute in 2017,

I got a call from the White House from Condi [Condoleezza] Rice saying, “We want you to come to Camp David next week and we’re going to stage a debate between you and Dick Pipes for the president’s entire team,” Secretary of State, head of CIA, everybody, the vice president, “about Gorbachev and what we should do. Is this a trick by Gorbachev or should we seize this as an opportunity to end the Cold War?”

Cohen continued,

“I mean this was ridiculous. [Ronald W.] Reagan already thought he’d ended the Cold War, and when he left office in January 1989 he said so: “we ended the Cold War.” But there was this so-called long pause by the Bush administration.

“I had talked to Bush privately…about this. But Bush decided on a Camp David debate—because his administration was really split on this. Was Gorbachev an opportunity or a dangerous hoax? In 1989 they’re still debating this. So I went to Camp David. They obviously invited us because of this idea that there was the Princeton school and the Harvard school. Pipes was probably the leading American “hard-line” scholar of Russia. He’d been head of the B team, he’d been on Reagan’s national security council. He was really connected to the conservative movement in America. I, I guess, had the reputation of being sort of the left liberal position…

“But this event at Camp David was fascinating. Pipes and I each were given fifteen minutes, then we were interrogated by all these guys. I felt like Zelig. I’d seen these people only on TV— except for the President.”

Cohen had for years been wondering how it was that so many within the US establishment got Gorbachev wrong. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 1987, Cohen noted that most American commentators had “maintained that Gorbachev represented nothing significantly new. Now they seem baffled. Such foggy perceptions prevent the United States from considering the equally historic possibility of a new kind of relationship with the Soviet Union.”

As it happens, Cohen’s concerns were shared by Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, who also wondered how it was that top CIA Russia analysts such as Robert Gates got Gorbachev so wrong. Many years later, Cohen told me that at the meeting at Camp David, Bush directed Cohen to sit next to him at lunch, and, having seemingly rejected Pipes’ advice, told the group, “Steve is my kind of Russianist.”

Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union was reformable, and that, some form of Union would and could go forward along social democratic lines. As the USSR teetered on the brink of collapse, Bush recognized the combustible reality on the ground. The most well-known expression of Bush’s policy towards the emerging post-Soviet states was made on August 1, 1991, during a speech to the Ukrainian Rada where he pledged that the US would take a ‘hands off’ approach. Bush told the audience that the US “cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America.”

Bush also warned he would “not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” (Andriy Parubiy was the embodiment of this brand of nationalism).

Not everyone at Bush’s State Department was pleased with Bush’s not-terribly-implicit criticism of Ukrainian nationalism—a nationalism, one hardly needs reminding, that reared its head in alliance with a rather rabid brand of German nationalism during the Second World War.

Jon Gundersen, then serving as US Consul General in Kiev, said in a 2012 interview with the Association for Diplomatic Training and Studies that,

“…I have a letter from Paul Wolfowitz, who was at the time the Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security policy.

“He was using our cables [Gundersen and his team in Kiev were pushing against Bush’s more cautious policy] against some at State who would say, “Well, we have to work with the Soviets and Gorbachev. Let’s not push it too much.” The Pentagon’s thinking, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, was driven by military, not political objectives. If Ukraine becomes independent, the thinking was, Soviet forces would have to retreat a thousand miles from NATO and it would no longer be a strategic threat.

“And so they looked at it from a military perspective; they were less involved with arms control or other considerations. There were some in S/P , State’s Policy Planning Council, who agreed. However, most at State and the NSC [National Security Council] wanted to stick with the existing policy toward the Soviet Union.”

Bush, beset by neocons like Wolfowitz in the Pentagon and diplomats at State who had ‘gone native’ was also targeted by neocons in the media such as Robert Novak and William Safire. Safire was a Madison Avenue ad-man turned speechwriter for the disgraced Spiro Agnew, who later was to become the in-house neoconservative for the New York Times, derided Bush’s speech as “Chicken Kiev.”

Writing on August 29, 1991, Safire took a victory lap while panning Bush’s address. “Communism is dead,” declared Safire.

“…The Soviet empire is breaking up. This is a glorious moment for human freedom. We should savor that moment, thanking God, NATO, the heroic dissidents in Russia and the internal empire, and the two-generation sacrifice of the American people to protect themselves and the world from despotic domination.”

Needless to say, for Safire and his neocon brethren, not all despotic dominations were created equally.

The very nationalist impulses that Bush warned against were those that drove Kiev, in both 2004 and 2014, to attempt to nullify the votes of the Russian-speaking citizens in the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine. And more dangerously, political elites in Kiev (with close ties to the United States and Canada) embarked on a mission to join the NATO alliance. The US Ambassador to the USSR under President Reagan, Jack Matlock, says that he was “quite convinced that if Bush had been reelected he would not have [expanded NATO].”

But we will never know, because on Tuesday, November 3, 1992, Bush lost the presidency to Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

Ukraine’s embrace of nationalism and NATO had begun.

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 9/17/25

The announcement came on Tuesday with the matter-of-factness of a budget line, but the scale of it was closer to a civilisational wager. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin sat at a rudimentary government meeting and said that President Vladimir Putin had signed off on what will be Europe’s largest ever high-speed rail project: more than 4,500 kilometres of new track, criss-crossing the country from Moscow to St Petersburg, Minsk, Yekaterinburg, Rostov, Krasnodar, Sochi, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan. These trains will be built at home and capable of reaching up to 400 kilometres an hour, he added.

It’s obviously tempting for Russia’s passionate legion of detractors to dismiss such plans as a Potemkin promise, the sort of grandiose scheme floated in Moscow only to sink beneath its own concrete. And that’s especially true in today’s divisive climate, but look closer and the outlines are sharper than the cynics understand. What’s more, construction on the first leg (Moscow to St Petersburg) has already been underway since last year with completion targeted for 2028, so this clearly isn’t the stuff of long fingers.

The full scheme imagines four main arteries with the northern line from Moscow to St Petersburg the easiest to visualise, shrinking the journey from an already pretty fast four hours to barely two. The southern route is longer and more ambitious and will run from Moscow down through Ryazan, Lipetsk, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don and into Krasnodar, before the hardest stretch of all… tunnelling to Sochi. Anyone who has sweated through the current circuitous crawl, four and a half hours to cover less than 200 kilometres as the crow flies, knows what a transformation this would be for the region’s potential. After all, the Kuban is the closest thing Russia has to a California or Andalusia but (much like its Spanish counterpart) it still remains relatively underdeveloped.

Then there’s the western branch to Minsk in Belarus, passing through Smolensk and Vyazma; a line that, in a very different political climate from today, could potentially plug directly into Western European networks via Warsaw to Berlin. And finally add the proposed eastern leg to Yekaterinburg, passing Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, and a journey that today swallows 26 hours could be cut to around five. When you tie it all together, you’d be linking roughly 60 million people by high-speed transit, which in terms of sheer connectivity would be the most ambitious transport project ever attempted on the European continent.

That said, it would hardly be the first time that Russians dreamed big on the rails. Tsarist-era engineers once carved the Trans-Siberian across 9,289 kilometres over seven time zones, while the Soviets drove the Baikal-Amur Mainline through permafrost and mountains at enormous cost to reach Sovetskaya Gavan on the Sea of Japan. Russians have long measured their modernisation in these terms; in a country this vast, the tracks are understandably as much a symbol as a means of travel.

Many will naturally ask, “but why now?” Well, the easy answer is a desire for prestige, but this alone won’t shift earth by the tonne or finance kilometres of track and the deeper explanation here is providing employment given Russia has currently mobilised hundreds of thousands of men on wartime salaries. Quite obviously, in peacetime, many will not be needed in uniform and nor would it make sense to keep paying them to stand idle so a labour-intensive project like high-speed rail provides an obvious soft-landing pad… absorbing veterans, keeping unemployment down, and maintaining relatively high salaries while keeping them useful.

There’s also the question of stimulus, given that a scheme of this size would help to stave off recession by adding a few percentage points to GDP growth annually and in a best-case scenario, if sanctions ease, it could even drive a late Putin-era boom, so the political logic is as plain as the economic.

Furthermore, on the face of it, it appears Moscow can readily afford it, bar some unexpected ‘Black Swan’ event and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov reminded us only last week that Russia’s national debt is around 15% of nominal GDP. Even if he borrows another $200 billion it would still sit under 25%; a figure that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in Western Europe, where governments gorge themselves on credit merely to keep welfare payments moving. Almost everything, too, will be built domestically, making the largesse an internal multiplier rather than a drain and where Russia lacks technical know-how, China can supply it given Beijing has already laid down some 50,000 kilometres of high-speed rail.

In reality, the ghosts that haunt projects like this are related to corruption rather than engineering and the spectre of the Sochi Olympics, with billions skimmed and the Western press laughing at the excess, hangs overhead. Yet many of the leading culprits of that debacle were jailed, a clear signal that theft on such a level won’t be shrugged off in future; and in fairness the city itself has been transformed with its population doubling in fifteen years. The Crimea Bridge (the longest in Europe, whatever your thoughts on the politics of it) was built quickly and serves as another reminder that Russia can, when pressed, deliver complex infrastructure feats.

The open question, of course, is whether the new rail scheme will follow the same discipline, and only time will tell. Realistically, the obstacles are formidable and temper any certainty: sanctions will complicate financing, the tunneling in the southern mountains will be technically punishing and total costs could run far beyond official estimates.

What makes the plan more striking is the vacuum elsewhere. Western Europe once thought in terms of ‘grands projets,’ linking peoples and economies with real vision but now it thinks in terms of expensive subsidies and empty slogans. Spain, for example, boasts a large and impressive high-speed network, but it’s fragmentary and underused while France long ago rowed back on its TGV ambitions and Germany’s infrastructure is falling apart, with visitors to last year’s European Football Championships left stunned at the decrepitude.

Moscow, by contrast, is sketching a line that could, if there’s sufficient Eurasian rapprochement, one day run all the way from London to Hong Kong. Today that sounds fantastical, but link Berlin to Warsaw, Warsaw to Minsk, Minsk to Moscow, Moscow to Yekaterinburg, and from there into Kazakhstan or Mongolia and down into China and the map begins to look possible. Politics would have to change beyond recognition, of course, but the geometry is already getting there.

So, is Russia really about to build Europe’s largest high-speed rail network? The sceptics will say no, while the realists will say: the first part of it for sure, and let’s see how the rest goes. The political need to absorb demobilised soldiers, the economic need for stimulus, and the strategic need to tie together a vast country… well, all these factors suggest it may well happen.

This is about more than a railway, it’s a bet on whether Russia can still dream big in an era when its Western European rivals no longer even dare to dream.

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 9/25/25

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has ordered hundreds of US military generals and admirals stationed around the world to an urgent meeting, scheduled to take place at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia, next week, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

There are approximately 800 generals and admirals in the US and at US bases worldwide, and sources told the Post that Hegseth’s order applies to every senior officer with the rank of brigadier general or rear admiral and above. The directive has been described as highly unusual and possibly unprecedented.

“None of the people who spoke with the Post could recall a defense secretary ever ordering so many of the military’s generals and admirals to assemble like this,” the Post report said.

The reason for the meeting is unclear, and even the generals and admirals are reportedly unaware of the purpose. The meeting may be related to Hegseth’s recent orders for major changes at the Pentagon, including a directive to reduce the number of four-star officers by 20%.

Another possibility is that Hegseth is ordering the meeting to prepare the senior military officers for a new war of major military escalation. A congressional aide speaking to CNN said that unless Hegseth planned to announce “a major new military campaign or a complete overhaul of the military command structure, I can’t imagine a good reason for this.”

There are several areas around the world where the US could potentially launch a new war, including Venezuela, as the US has deployed a fleet of warships to the Caribbean and has begun bombing boats in the area under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking, though US officials have told The New York Times that the real purpose of the deployment is regime change.

The US and Israel could be preparing to launch another war on Iran, as the US has maintained a hardline policy against the Islamic Republic since the ceasefire that ended the 12-Day War, and tensions are soaring in Eastern Europe between Russia and NATO. President Trump has also recently floated the idea of retaking Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, an idea that would require military force since it has been rejected by the Taliban.

The War Department may also be looking to turn military operations inward, as President Trump recently declared that Antifa is a “domestic terrorist organization.”

Later on Thursday, both President Trump and Vice President JD Vance downplayed the meeting. “It’s not particularly unusual that generals who report to the secretary of War and then to the president of the United States are coming to speak with the secretary of War,” Vance said. “It’s actually not unusual at all and I think it’s odd that you’ve made it into such a big story.”

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 9/25/25

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) published a report warning about the EU’s plans to occupy Moldova, which holds its next parliamentary elections on Sunday. According to their sources, large-scale protests are expected after the ruling liberal-globalists falsify the vote, following which President Maia Sandu will request help to put down what she’ll frame as a Russian-backed revolt. SVR also repeated last winter’s warning about threats to Russian troops in Transnistria independent of the aforesaid scenario.

On that topic, they revealed that “A NATO ‘landing’ is being prepared in Ukraine’s Odessa region to intimidate Transnistria. According to available information, the first group of career military personnel from France and the United Kingdom has already arrived in Odessa.” This bombshell comes less than a week after Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed during an ambassadorial roundtable discussion that Russia would consider any foreign troops in Ukraine to be “legitimate military target[s].”

While rumors have abounded since the beginning about Western troops in Ukraine and not just “mercenaries” (even if the latter are active servicemen on leave and out of uniform), Russia hadn’t hitherto confirmed this, ergo its repeated threats to target them if they deploy there. The context within which SVR reported the presence of French and UK troops in Odessa concerns Europe’s, Ukraine’s, and US warmongers’ efforts to manipulate Trump into escalating US involvement in the conflict.

That led to Trump flip-flopping on Ukraine and even approving NATO downing Russian jets if they’re accused of violating the bloc’s airspace, which risks emboldening them to stage a provocation for pulling him into mission creep even if it’s really all just “sarcasm” or “5D chess” on his part like some believe. All the while, reports have swirled about the Western security guarantees he (or at least his team) envisages for Ukraine, which could include a “no-fly zone” and even Western troops over and in at least parts of it.

All of this is relevant with respect to the Romanian-Moldovan flank of this conflict, which as this analysis here from over the summer explains, can be used as NATO’s launchpad for the aforesaid scenarios. Given what SVR just revealed, and there’s no reason to doubt their sources nor SVR’s sincerity in publicly reporting what they just discovered, some uniformed Western troops (French and UK) are already in Ukraine. To make matters even more sensitive, they’re in Odessa, which Russians consider their own.

Even though it’s not in the Kremlin’s crosshairs, Russians still hold it close to their hearts for historical reasons after their ancestors built that city from the ground up, thus making it all the more provocative that the French finally began acting on their speculative plans from early 2024. Putin must now decide whether to treat them and the Brits there as legitimate targets exactly as Lavrov said Russia might do or hold back for now to avoid the escalation that those two want for pulling Trump into mission creep.

The dilemma is that striking Western troops in Odessa could spark a crisis for manipulating Trump into escalating the US’ involvement in the conflict, while holding back for now could create facts on the ground that become even more difficult (and possibly more dangerous) for Russia to reverse later on. It was warned in late August that “Direct NATO Intervention In Ukraine Might Soon Dangerously Turn Into A Fait Accompli”, which is now arguably unfolding, it’s just a question of how Russia will respond to this.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 9/23/25

Developments today [9/23/25] from Moldova and Transnistria as reported by Dima on the Military Summary Channel seem significant and I will briefly summarize them as he has reported them, with a view to amending, adding or correcting in the light of subsequent evolution over the hours and days ahead.

Dima starts by noting that there has been another significant Ukrainian drone attack over the past 24 hours on targets in or close to Moscow. There were many explosions, and many drones were brought down: Moscow says 70+ were destroyed.

In Kiev, Zelenskey has adopted a new bill by which he can send Ukrainian forces abroad. Specifically, the bill would allow him to send troops to Turkey and to the UK for national security purposes, to receive complex military equipment and to master its use. Additionally he has proposed sending the Ukrainian navy to Turkey and to the UK. Dima refers to the “remnants” of the Ukrainian navy. Russian naval drones have apparently chalked up significant (and grossly underreported, if true) success in attacks on Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea so that Ukraine wants to protect its remaining ships by sending them to Turkey (and the UK?) and having them sail under different flags.

If the above is true, then this strikes me as incredibly dangerous, inviting all kinds of mischevous false flag shenannigans. Dima says, more specifically, that Ukraine plans to move its fleet from the Odessa region. This manouver may also be related to developments in Moldova.

There will be elections this coming weekend in Moldova. These are structured to favor pro-European votes since there are polling booths available throughout Moldovan diasporic Europe but none available in Moldovan diasporic Russia The current Moldovan president, the highly pro-European Sandu, has said that a victory for pro-Russian forces in the coming elections would be dangerous for pro-European interests given that Moldova has been seen as a springboard for an attack by European forces against Russia in the region of Odessa, something that Sandy presumably favors. Russian intelligence has issued a statement that claims that Europe is preparing to occupy Moldova. There is already a concentration of European forces nearby in Romania.

The transfer of troops from Romania into Moldova is intended to intimidate pro-Russian Transnistria. British and other European forces are already in Odessa in preparation for this operation, timed for after the Moldovan elections on September 28. There have already been significant pro-Russian protests in Moldova that are allegedly backed by a pro-Russian exiled Moldovan oligarch, Ilan Shor and there have been multiple arrests of Russian demonstrators over the past day or so. It is rumored that Russia plans to instigate riots on Sunday in the event that the elections do not go their way (i.e. if the current President is voted back into power), presumsably in a bid to dissuade European powers from occupying the country.

A further complication is that the new president of Romania – in power only because the EU on highly dubious grounds and in collaboration with a western-shaped Romanian intelligence institution, thwarted an election that would otherwise have been won by an opponent to the war with Russia – favors the absorption of Moldova into Romania.

This may be the real reason why Zelenskiy wanted RADA’s approval for moving Ukrainian forces abroad. In the event that things do not run in European or Ukrainian favor in Moldova, Zelenskiy plans to participate in a small war designed to destabilize Transnistria. In this event, reports Dima, Russia would most likely respond with the use of Oreshnik missiles.

In conclusion, therefore, we may rightly worry that European determination to lure the Trump administration back into the “defense” of Europe, even at a time when Ukraine is on the verge of economic collapse and many if not most European economies are economically stagnant if not, as in the case of Germany, in actual recession, has reached such a paroxysm of fanaticism and recklessness that Europe would rather push the world into World War Three than …. than, what?

This – the “what” – is the great mystery, really, and I see few commentators who express who demonstrate convincing confidence that they really have the answers. Do the Europeans really believe their own paranoia about Russian intentions? If so, is this because of secret evidence unreleased to the rest of the world? I doubt it. Very much. Are European leaders brainwashed by neocon ideology and an anti-Russian propaganda campaign initiated principally by Great Britain in the nineteenth century and that has persisted through Tsarist, Bolshevik and post-Soviet periods? Perhaps, or perhaps leaders are exploiting the brainwashing of their publics in order to puruse a long-established wet-dream of destabilizing Russia, dividing it and robbing it, one way or another, of its mineral wealth. Or is it all about the “defense” industry pushing for more war, as much war as possible, so as to profit from arms sales. Or is this just a pantomime enacted for the benefict for darker, deeper and certainly much richer forces as part of some as yet articulated (for public benefit) and substantiated agenda?

The US has ignored Russian proposals to at least extend the START treaty for another year to allow time for it to be renegotiated. Putin has consequently just told his National Security Council that the START treaty is effectively dead. Scott Ritter has warned us today that this will lead inexorably to the US tripling or quadrupling the number of its warheads on its missiles, and transforming denuclearized B52s back into nuclear-delivery vehicles. This of course will prompt Russia to respond likewise.

Trump propels the proxy war with Russia over Ukraine the the war forward. He does not do this by commiting unlimited wealth, which had been the US playbook until Trump called a halt to the flow a few months ago in favor of US weapons that Europe has ordered and paid for, but he has just said he will recommence the flow of US weapons through NATO, and has told Ukraine that it can continue the war, win the war, and regain all the territory that it has lost. So, for today, Trump is encouraging Ukraine to kill many more of its young men, and calling an end to a peace process that was going absolutely nowhere, in any case – fundamentally because the West cannot bring itself to admit that Russia too has security concerns.

It would be better and safer if Trump simply abandoned Ukraine to its and to Europe’s own devices, which would be followed by a Russian victory and an end to the war on Russian terms and a possible start to talks for a new global and regional security architecture. Well, that is not going to happen, not for a while.

With the US continuing to supply weapons on its own account, the war will continue for longer; there will be many more deaths, Europe and Ukraine will together drive themselves into economic oblivion and pathetic dependence on expensive US LNG, of which the US cannot guarantee a continuing supply nor the price at which it is supplied. The pressures on Europe will further split the continent apart. China will breathe a sigh of relief because it will not be the sole or even the prime target of fruitless US obsession to sustain its own hegemony giving it more time to build up its armed and nuclear forces to quite a different level of threat, in preparation for a time, should it ever return, that the US feels ready to continue the game. Russia will continue to be a major supplier of energy to China and India and, almost certainly, and indirectly through Chinese and Indian vessels, to Europe too. In a world of artificially constricted energy supply, Russia and its allies, with the potential support of a more Russian-friendly Saudi Arabia and, of course, Iran, and of the BRICS generally will grow richer and more independent than ever of Western markets.