By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 4/16/25

Ukraine extended martial law until 6 August following Zelensky’s request earlier this week, which will prevent elections from being held over the summer like The Economist claimed late last month was a scenario that he was considering in an attempt to give himself an edge over his rivals. This move therefore exposes his fear of losing re-election. It’s not just that he’s very unpopular, but he likely also fears that the US wants to replace him after his infamous fight in the White House.

To that end, the Trump Administration might not turn a blind eye to whatever electoral fraud he could be planning to commit in order to hold onto power, instead refusing to recognize the outcome unless one of his rivals wins. As for who could realistically replace him, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service claimed last May that the US had reportedly entered into talks with Petro Poroshenko, Vitaly Klitschko, Andrey Yermak, Valery Zaluzhny, and Dmytro Razumkov.

The New York Times (NYT) just ran a feature article on Poroshenko, who took the opportunity to propose a government of national unity (GNU) almost 18 months after this idea was first floated by Politico in December 2023, but even the article’s author felt obligated to inform readers that he’s unlikely to return to power. Citing unnamed political analysts, they assessed that “Mr. Poroshenko may be angling for an electoral alliance with General Zaluzhny…[who] has remained mostly silent about politics” till now.

Nevertheless, Poroshenko’s NYT feature article succeeded in raising wider awareness of the GNU scenario, which the Trump Administration might seek to advance over the summer. Zelensky continues to irritate Trump, most recently by alleging that Russia has “enormous influence” over the White House and accusing his envoy Steve Witkoff of overstepping his authority in talks with Putin. This comes as Ukraine continues dragging its heels on agreeing to the latest proposed mineral deal with the US.

From the US’ perspective, since the increasingly troublesome Zelensky can’t be democratically replaced through summertime elections, the next best course of action could be to pressure him into forming a GNU that would be filled with figures like Poroshenko who’d be easier for the US to work with. This could also serve to dilute Zelensky’s power in a reversal of the Biden Administration’s policy that saw the US turning a blind eye to his anti-democratic consolidation of power on national security pretexts.

The pretext could be that any Russian-US breakthrough on resolving the Ukrainian Conflict requires the approval of a politically inclusive Ukrainian government given Zelensky’s questionable legitimacy after remaining in power following the expiry of his term last May and the enormity of what’s being proposed. In pursuit of this goal, the US could threaten to once again suspend its military and intelligence aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky speedily assembles a GNU that’s acceptable to the Trump Administration.

The purpose would be to push through a ceasefire for lifting martial law, finally holding elections, and ultimately replacing Zelensky. The GNU could also help prevent the fraud that he might be planning to commit if he decides to run again under these much more politically difficult circumstances, especially if they invite the US to supervise their efforts, both before and during the vote. Through these means, the US could therefore still get rid of Zelensky, who might think that extending martial law will prevent this.

Russia Matters, 5/2/25

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

By James Carden, Substack, 4/14/25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 4/12/25

​On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princeps, a Bosnian-Serb radical, shot and killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Princeps did not act alone.

He was one of at least six principals in an organization called Young Bosnia, and his group and others were seeking independence from the Austro-Hungarian empire. He also received help from a secret organization, the Black Hand, that provided training and weapons, including bombs and pistols.

The assassination of the Austrian Archduke, the immediate successor to emperor Franz Joseph I, was a provocation that a month later caused the so-called July crisis that culminated in a July 23 ultimatum to Serbia. By then, Germany had pledged support for Austria, and Russia and France would mobilize in support of Serbian nationalism.

World War I could have been avoided, but it was not. The perpetrators of the crime in Bosnia were tried, some jailed (because they were too young for execution, including Princeps) and others executed. The Austrians vastly overestimated their military capabilities. For them, at the end of the war, the Austro-Hungarian empire would cease to exist.

Are we in a similar situation today? There have been countless provocations by Ukraine and some of its supporters, including Joe Biden, who authorized long-range ATACMS strikes deep inside Russia, some aimed at Russia’s early warning radars and nuclear bomber bases.

Not to be outdone, the Ukrainians on May 3, 2023, launched drone attacks on the Kremlin, targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office.

Such attacks are inconceivable without technical help from NATO, especially as long-range drones need satellites for communications and targeting. The White House has denied allegations it was involved recently in attacks.

At the same time, Ukraine and its supporters have promoted and carried out a cultural war against Russia. One of the top provocateurs is Estonia.

Estonia is the most northern of the Baltic states. It fronts on the Baltic Sea where its capital city, Tallinn, is located. Estonia’s town of Narva is just next to the border with Russia. About half of Narva’s population is Russian.

Estonia has a population of 1.37 million, based on data from 2023. Between 20-25% of Estonia’s population are Russians, depending on how the count is made.

For a number of years, Estonia has been waging a cultural war against Russia while at the same time utterly depending on NATO for its security. The Estonian army has only 7,700 active duty personnel, of which 3,500 are conscripts.

It has a reserve force that is significantly larger, but it does not have the equipment to support its reserves, so it is largely a paper force. Estonia has no air force to speak of, only two Czech-made (Aero Vodochody) L-39 trainers and two small M-28 Polish transports.

One would think that Estonia would not want to create trouble for itself, but it seems that the reverse is true, largely deriving from the Estonian belief that NATO is there to back it up and that Russia would not attack a NATO state.

Provocations are not something new for the Estonians, whose hate for Russians borders on the extreme. By practically denying citizenship to their Russian inhabitants to attacking the Russian Orthodox Church in Estonia through legislation, Estonia has made it clear it will do whatever it can to humiliate its own Russian population and Russia itself.

In April 2007, the Estonians decided to move the monument there known as the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. That monument also was the site of a number of graves of Soviet Russian soldiers who were killed fighting against the Nazis.

The graves were dug up, their families in Russia notified they could collect the remains or they would be relocated in the Tallinn military cemetery along with the monument.

Now, in 2025, we have another round of monument-busting, as the Estonians are tearing down Russian war memorials once again. This includes defiling Russian graves in the Tallinn military cemetery and damaging and destroying war memorials.

If there is one single unifying principle these days in Russia it is the great importance given to Russia’s decisive role in the defeat of Nazi armies in World War II. Each year, on May 9, Russia holds its annual Victory Day celebration, which focuses on a show of military power.

It is followed by a more somber but clearly important citizen’s march known as the Immortal Regiment. In this march, families proudly carry posters and photos of family members who perished in the Great Patriotic War (Russia’s terminology for World War II.)

Estonia’s show of contempt for Russia’s World War II victory, along with its spotty, some would say, compromised behavior supporting the Nazis, is increasingly irksome to the Russians.

One can add attempts to keep Russians living in Estonia from achieving citizenship or even voting in elections. Estonia has now stepped that up by adding new legislation to make it even more difficult for Russian residents to be treated equally.

Estonia is also trying to block out any relationship between Russian Orthodox Churches in Estonia to the Moscow Patriarchate. It is not surprising that Estonia’s actions parallel and were perhaps inspired by Ukraine, which is doing the same thing.

The Estonian action against the Moscow-led church would create revulsion and horror elsewhere if, for example, European or American Catholics were not allowed to communicate with the Pope in Rome.

Among the pro-war advocates in Europe, Estonia is at the forefront. Its former Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, is now the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

She is now a major voice in promoting a massive European defense expansion and sending troops to Ukraine. Of the six nations who have apparently pledged to send troops to Ukraine, Estonia is leading the list even though it does not have anyone to send.

The trouble with provocations is that they can cause wars. The hysteria now apparent in official channels in parts of Europe (for example, France, UK, Germany and Estonia) reflects huge anxiety that Ukraine will not survive the Russian onslaught.

Instead of helping US President Donald Trump find a peaceful solution to the conflict, the French and British, in particular, have done their best to undermine his efforts.

While some of this can be explained as a bailout for Europe’s economic issues by substituting military production for civilian manufacturing, deficit spending of this kind will never be enough to salvage Europe’s economic and industrial problems.

Meanwhile, small countries such as Estonia can cause big problems and an escalation leading to conflict in Europe.

RT, 4/29/25

Moscow’s victory in the Ukraine conflict will lay the groundwork for a more just world based on mutual respect and stable development, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said, adding that this vision is supported by most of the world’s population.

The senior official, currently serving as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, outlined Moscow’s foreign policy priorities and recalled the history of the West’s confrontational approach to Russia during a public lecture in Moscow on Tuesday.

Here are the key points of Medvedev’s speech.

1. Ukraine Conflict

Medvedev stated that the Ukraine conflict stems from decades of Western hostility toward Russia and the fostering of neo-Nazism in Ukraine by the “Anglo-Saxon crowd.” He argued that Russia’s military response was necessary to address these provocations, stating that even US President Donald Trump acknowledged that Washington, Brussels, and Kiev are responsible for the Ukraine crisis which has nearly triggered World War III.

The former president also stressed that Russia’s ultimate goal is to destroy the “Kiev neo-Nazi regime,” not the Ukrainian state itself. He emphasized that Russia would not allow hostile regimes to re-emerge on its borders and called for a complete denazification of Ukraine, as well as Europe. 

He also warned that all foreign fighters and any future foreign contingents in Ukraine are legitimate military targets under international law, and promised that war criminals would face justice.

Commenting on Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, Medvedev described him as a “pathological figure” and suggested he would “end very badly.”

He predicted that after the conflict ends, Russia would establish a new national holiday to commemorate its victory in Ukraine which, according to Medvedev, is essential to ensure lasting security.

2. Russia and the West

Medvedev has described Russia’s relationship with the West as a long history of confrontation, rooted in persistent efforts by ”Anglo-Saxon powers” to weaken Russia. He recalled that even during World War II, Britain and the US considered plans to attack the Soviet Union, referencing ”Operation Unthinkable,” which was secretly developed under Winston Churchill’s orders in 1945. Medvedev argued that after the war, the West squandered the chance to build a fair international order, instead creating a system based on double standards, cynicism, and attempts to isolate Russia.

Medvedev stated that while Russia had always sought peaceful coexistence, it now faces a situation where it must counter the West’s ”peace through strength” strategy with its own doctrine of ”peace through fear,” asserting that only the threat of strong retaliation, including nuclear deterrence, can keep the West from taking hostile actions.

At the same time, he rejected claims that Russia might attack Europe, calling them ”nonsense” designed to frighten European populations and justify rampant militarization.

The former president also concluded that Russian-EU relations have passed the ”point of no return,” arguing that there are no independent, strong leaders left on the continent, only ”spineless Russophobic figures” and ”cowardly marionettes.” Medvedev expressed little hope for meaningful dialogue with current EU governments, and suggested that future interaction would be limited or nonexistent. At the same time, he claimed that many ordinary Europeans are growing disillusioned with their leaders’ policies toward Russia.

3. EU’s decline

Medvedev described today’s Western Europe as suffering from “feeblemindedness without courage.” He argued that the continent has abandoned its traditions and fallen under the control of radical, Russophobic leaders.

He claimed that Western Europe is increasingly embracing extremist ideologies and must also undergo a process of denazification alongside Ukraine. Medvedev pointed to the decision by European authorities to invite Ukrainian nationalists – whom he linked to WWII-era Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera – to the 80th anniversary celebrations of the end of World War II, while deliberately excluding representatives from Russia, calling it an act of profound cynicism.

Medvedev went on to state that the EU is not only politically weak but also morally degraded, lacking any real leadership or strategic independence, and on the verge of collapse. He predicted that the bloc would continue to oppose Donald Trump and traditionalist forces in the US, reflecting a deep ideological split between globalist elites in Europe and rising conservative movements elsewhere in the West.

4. Just world order

The former president suggested that Russia is fighting with “truth and justice” on its side, positioning itself as the defender of genuine international law against Western hypocrisy.

He argued that Russia’s victory in the Ukraine conflict would mark the first step toward the creation of a fair, multipolar world order.

Medvedev claimed that the Western “rules-based order” is illegitimate and called for its replacement with a true international system grounded in mutual respect and real international law. He noted that most of humanity, particularly the Global South, already supports this vision, while acknowledging that creating such a multipolar world would likely take many years.

Medvedev also stated that despite their geopolitical rivalry, Russia and the US do not have to be permanent enemies and argued that pragmatic cooperation between the two countries is crucial for global stability, especially given their roles as the largest nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council. He expressed cautious hope that dialogue with Washington could resume on a more pragmatic basis, while dismissing the EU as an increasingly irrelevant actor.