Russia Matters, 3/28/25

1. Russia and Ukraine are in a war of attrition, which “will lead to a gradual but steady erosion of Kyiv’s position on the battlefield, regardless of any U.S. or allied attempts to impose new and greater costs on Moscow,” according to the U.S. intelligence community’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment presented this week. The document, which as its predecessor, refers to Russia as America’s adversary, predicts that Vladimir Putin “will be unable to achieve … total victory” in spite of having sacrificed 750,000+ in killed and wounded Russian soldiers, but acknowledges that “Russia in the past year has seized the upper hand in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is on a path to accrue greater leverage to press Kyiv and its Western backers to negotiate an end to the war that grants Moscow concessions it seeks.” It also follows from WTA-2025 that both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin “for now probably still see the risks of a longer war as less than those of an unsatisfying settlement.” For a more detailed review of WTA-2025’s Russia-related propositions, see this blog post.
2. “Our troops have the strategic initiative along the entire contact line. Only recently, I said that we would squeeze them into a corner, but now we have reason to believe that we are set to finish them off,” Putin claimed while visiting the Russian Northern Fleet’s Arkhangelsk nuclear submarine on March 27. During the visit to this Project 885M Yasen-M vessel, Putin claimed that the Russian armed forces had captured 99% of the Luhansk region and over 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. Putin’s estimate regarding the four provinces is close to a March 23 estimate provided by the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War to RM. According to the ISW estimate, Russian forces have captured 73.6% of Kherson Oblast; 73.3% of Zaporizhzhia Oblast; 70.2% of Donetsk Oblast; and 99.3% of Luhansk Oblast. It also follows from the interactive map maintained by Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT team that Russian forces had captured 46 square miles (118 square kilometers) in the 30 day period from Feb. 21, 2025, to March 23, 2025. It follows then that if Russia were to focus only on these four regions, advancing at this rate of 46 square miles per 30 days (or some 1.5 miles per day), then it would take Russian forces more than 15 years to “finish off” the takeover of these four regions, ceteris paribus.
3. In the past month (Feb. 25–March 25, 2025), Russia gained 73 square miles of Ukraine’s territory, an area roughly equivalent to about 3 Manhattan islands, according to the March 26, 2025, issue of RM’s Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. Meanwhile, in Russia’s Kursk oblast, Ukraine currently controls just 32 square miles, or 4%, of the 470 square miles it controlled in early autumn 2024, according to the card.  
4. The separate talks U.S.officials held first with Ukrainian officials, then with Russian officials, then with Ukrainian officials again, in Saudi Arabia on March 23–25, failed to either usher in a ceasefire in the Black Sea or prevent violations of an earlier moratorium on Russian and Ukrainian attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure. The three sides produced competing accounts of the outcomes of the talks, from which it could be inferred that the biggest obstacles to the Black Sea ceasefire are the conditions Russia has added to its account of the talks. The Kremlin said the agreement can enter into force only after Western sanctions impacting its agricultural exports are lifted, which the EU has rejected. That Russian-U.S. talks, which lasted for 12 hours on March 24, failed to produce any breakthrough was stated openly by one of the Russian negotiators on March 28. One of Russia’s negotiators and former deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin said U.S. proposals at the talks were “unacceptable” and predicted that negotiations may drag on into next year. While keen to refrain from antagonizing Trump, who has invested political capital into the effort to end the war, the Kremlin didn’t expect a breakthrough at the talks in Saudi Arabia. This follows from Putin’s choice of Karasin and Sergei Beseda, who had lost high-ranking posts in the MFA in 2019 and FSB in 2024, respectively, some time ago, and whom Russian commentator Georgii Bovt described as “elderly retirees,” as the two lead negotiators for the March 24^th talks. If that signal was not strong enough, then Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s preview of the talks, in which he said, “we are only at the beginning of this path,” was.
5. This week has seen U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reject the notion of setting any deadlines for the Russian-Ukrainian peace talks, even though his president has earlier promised to end the war in a day, or in 100 days. When asked on March 28 how long he anticipated the negotiations would take, Rubio responded: “We’re committed to trying to achieve peace as long as it takes. That doesn’t mean that I can guarantee you that there’s going to be an agreement in a week or a month. I just can’t put a timeframe on it because it doesn’t depend on us. It depends on the Russians, and it depends on the Ukrainians. It also depends on our partners in Europe who have sanctions that will have to be taken into account, I believe, as part of any final deal.” During his campaign for presidency last year, Trump claimed he could end the Russian-Ukrainian war within 24 hours of taking office. Upon beginning his term on Jan. 20, however, Trump designated retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg as his special envoy for Russia and Ukraine and tasked him with ending the war within 100 days, which put the deadline by or on April 30, 2025. More recently, “people familiar with the planning” of the Trump administration’s Ukraine peace efforts told Bloomberg they hope a broad ceasefire in Russia’s war in Ukraine can be reached by April 20, which this year is Easter in both the Western and Orthodox churches. That Rubio now refuses to offer a deadline for completing talks might be an indication that his evaluation of prospects of success at the negotiating table in the near future has evolved.
6. Even as European leaders rejected this week the possibility of easing sanctions on Russia per its demands as a precondition for implementing the Russian-Ukrainian Black Sea ceasefire, some European majors have begun to eye returning to Russia. Vitol, Trafigura and Gunvor are all weighing when to re-enter Russia’s markets, according to FT. In addition to these European oil traders, South Korea’s Samsung, LG Electronics and Hyundai are weighing whether to re-expand their presence in Russia, according to Korea Times. This week has also seen Putin welcome a Western consumer flagship, Italy’s Ariston, back by canceling the temporary nationalization of its Russian unit, according to AFP. Last week saw Putin tell the Russian Cabinet of Ministers to create a procedure for Western businesses to return to Russia. It has also been reported by Reuters earlier this month that the Trump administration is working on a plan that would ease sanctions against Russia, which is under more sanctions than the next six targets combined, according to The Economist. More recently, Rubio said on March 26 the United States will evaluate Russia’s aforementioned demands for easing sanctions.
7. Ending the war in Ukraine will be on Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s agenda  when he holds talks with Russian leaders during his visit to Russia on March 31–April 2. Meanwhile, North Korea, which has reportedly sent an additional 3,000 troops this year to fight against Ukrainian forces, is already in talks with Russia on potential visits by Kim Jong Un to Moscow and by Sergei Lavrov to Pyongyang.

Intellinews, 3/14/25

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to enjoy the trust of 83% of the Russian populace, according to a poll by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), conducted between March 7 and 9, TASS reported on March 14.

The trust rating was up 2% increase from the previous survey. Similarly, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) reported that 79.3% of participants affirmed their trust in the president, reflecting a 0.6% uptick.

In terms of job performance, 83% of those surveyed by FOM approved of Putin’s actions, while VCIOM’s data showed a 77.2% approval rating, a 0.5% rise.

The Russian government’s management of the country received a 57% approval rating in the FOM poll, with 59% endorsing Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s performance. VTsIOM findings were slightly lower, with 52.4% approving of the government’s handling of affairs and 53.1% supporting the prime minister’s efforts.​

Support for political parties also showed notable improvements. FOM’s research indicated that backing for the ruling United Russia party increased by 2%, reaching 46%. Conversely, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) experienced a 2% decline, settling at 7%, while the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) saw a 1% decrease to 8%. The A Just Russia-For Truth party maintained steady support at 3%, and the New People party observed a 1% rise to 3%.

VTsIOM’s data presented a slightly different picture: support for United Russia stood at 34.9%, a 0.4% decrease; the KPRF’s backing increased by 0.4% to 10.4%; the LDPR experienced a 0.7% decline to 10.5%; A Just

Russia-For Truth saw a 0.4% increase to 4.4%; and the New People party’s support remained constant at 6.6%.

By Craig Murray, Consortium News, 3/14/25

There is a logical fallacy that dominates European neoliberal “thinking” at the moment. It goes like this: 

“Hitler had unlimited territorial ambition and proceeded to attempt conquest of all Europe after annexing the Sudetenland. Therefore Putin has unlimited territorial ambition and will proceed to attempt conquest of all Europe after annexing Eastern Ukraine.”

This fallacious argument gives no evidence of President Vladimir Putin’s further territorial ambition. For evidence of Putin’s threat to the U.K., Prime Minister Keir Starmer risibly refers to the Salisbury “novichok” affair, perhaps the most pathetic propaganda confection in history.

But even if you were to be so complacent as to accept the official version of events in Salisbury, does an assassination attempt on a double agent credibly indicate a desire by Putin to launch World War 3 or invade the U.K.?

Hitler’s territorial ambitions were not hidden. His desire for lebensraum and, crucially, his view that the Germans were a superior race who should rule over the inferior races, was plain in print and in speeches.

There is simply no such evidence for wide territorial ambition by Putin. He is not pursuing a crazed Nazi ideology that drives to conquest — or for that matter a Marxist ideology that seeks to overthrow the established order around the world.

The economic alignment project of BRICS is not designed to promote an entirely different economic system, just to rebalance power and flows within the system, or at most to create a parallel system not skewed to the advantage of the United States.

Neither the end of capitalism nor territorial expansion is part of the BRICS project.

There is simply no evidence of Putin having territorial goals beyond Ukraine and the tiny enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It is perfectly fair to characterise Putin’s territorial expansion over two decades as limited to the reincorporation of threatened Russian-speaking minority districts in ex-Soviet states.

[See: Russian Imperialism?]

That it is worth a world war and unlimited dead over who should be mayor of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking city of Lugansk is not entirely plain to me.

Secessionists barricade in Luhansk in June 2014. (Qypchak / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)

The notion that Putin is about to attack Poland or Finland is utter nonsense. The idea that the Russian army, which has struggled to subdue small and corrupt, if Western-backed, Ukraine, has the ability to attack Western Europe itself is plainly impractical.

The internal human rights record of Putin’s Russia is poor, but at this point it is marginally better than that of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine. For example the opposition parties in Russia are at least allowed to contest elections, albeit on a heavily sloped playing field, whereas in Ukraine they are banned outright.

Still less convincing are the arguments that Russia’s overseas political activities in third countries require massive Western increases in armaments to prepare for war with Russia.

Western Meddling & Destruction  

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Jan. 22 in European Parliament addressing Ukraine, EU-U.S. relations and the EU’s global role. (European Parliament, Flickr, CC-BY-4.0)

The plain truth is that the Western powers interfere far more in other countries than Russia does, through massive sponsorship of NGOs, journalists and politicians, much of which is open and some of which is covert.

I used to do this myself as a British diplomat. Revelations from USAID or the Integrity Initiative leaks give the public a glimpse into this world.

Yes, Russia does it too, but on a much smaller scale. That this kind of Russian activity indicates a desire for conquest or is a cause for war, is such a shallow argument it is hard to believe in the good faith of those promoting it.

I have also seen Russian military intervention in Syria put forward as evidence that Putin has plans of world conquest.

Russian intervention in Syria prevented for a time its destruction by the West in the same way that Iraq and Libya were destroyed by the West. Russia held back the coming to power of crazed Islamist terrorists, and the massacre of Syria’s minority communities. Those horrors are now unfolding, in part because of the weakening of Russia through the Ukraine war.

For those nations that destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to argue that Russia’s intervention in Syria shows Putin to be evil, is dishonesty of the highest degree. The United States has had a quarter of Syria under military occupation for over a decade and has been stealing almost all of Syria’s oil.

Pointing at Russia here is devoid of reason.

Strangely, the same “logic” is not applied to Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not argued by neoliberals [neocons] that his annexations of Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon mean he must have further territorial ambitions. In fact, they even fail to note Netanyahu’s aggressions at all, or portray them as “defensive” — the same argument advanced much more credibly by Putin in Ukraine, but which neoliberals  [neocons] there outright reject.

[Related: Israel’s Threatening Colonialism]

A Transformed EU

The economies of Western Europe are being realigned onto a war footing, led by the utterly transformed European Union. The enthusiastic proponents of genocide in Gaza, who head the EU, are now  channelling an atavistic hereditary hatred of Russia.

The foreign policy of the EU is propelled by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen [Germany] and Vice President Kaja Kallas (Estonia). The fanatical Russophobia these two are spreading, and their undisguised desire to escalate the war in Ukraine, cannot help but remind Russians that they come from nations which were fanatically Nazi.

To Russians this feels a lot like 1941. With Europe in the grip of full-on anti-Russian propaganda, the background to Trump’s attempt to broker a peace deal is troubled and Russia is understandably wary.

The U.K. continues to play the most unhelpful of roles. They have despatched Morgan Stanley’s Jonathan Powell to advise Zelensky on peace talks. As former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Powell played a crucial role in the illegal invasion of Iraq. 

Wherever there is war and money to be made from war, you will find the same ghouls gathering. Those involved in launching the invasion of Iraq should be excluded from public life. Instead Powell is now the U.K.’s national security adviser.

I am not a follower of Putin. The amount of force used to crush Chechnya’s legitimate desire for self-determination was disproportionate, for example. It is naive to believe that you get to be leader of the KGB [sic] by being a gentle person.

But Putin is not Hitler. It is only through the blinkers of patriotism that Putin appears to be a worse person than the Western leaders behind massive invasion and death all around the globe, who now seek to extend war with Russia.

Here in the U.K., the Starmer government is seeking actively to prolong the war, and is looking for a huge increase in spending on weapons, which always brings kickbacks and future company directorships and consultancies for politicians.

To fund this warmongering, New Labour are cutting spending on the U.K.’s sick, disabled and pensioners and cutting aid to the starving overseas.

Labour Friends of Israel has published a picture of Starmer meeting with Israeli President Herzog, six months after the International Court of Justice’s interim ruling quoted a statement by Herzog as evidence of genocidal intent.

The Starmer government was voted for by 31 percent of those who bothered to cast a vote, or 17 percent of the adult population. It is engaged in wholesale legal persecution of leading British supporters of Palestine, and is actively complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

I see no moral superiority here.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. 

YouTube link here.

By John Wight, Consortium News, 3/13/25

The real enemy of any government or regime, in the last analysis, is its own people. They are who rulers fear most.

That is accordingly why so much effort is devoted by rulers to propaganda, primarily designed to sustain the myth there exists a national interest to which all are bound, regardless of socioeconomic status or one’s actual life experience. 

In truth there is no such thing as a  “national interest.” Only the interests of the dominant class of rulers matters.  Thus heavy lies the crown, and lightly is tread the line between legitimacy and illegitimacy.

This dynamic is most pronounced in time of war. Men with guns sent to fight other men with guns are never more dangerous than when the initial, warm glow of patriotism, responsible for them readily marching towards their own demise, is replaced by the grim reality of suffering and slaughter. 

It is then when that most dangerous of all things for rulers emerges:  a still-armed soldier who starts to reflect.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 is the historical example, tout court, of how poor soldiers, thrown into the maw of combat, develop a revolutionary consciousness which supersedes the national one they’d set out to defend. 

Civil unrest also erupted in France and Germany after this war to end all wars, though in both cases capital’s forces proved strong enough to overcome the threat from below.  

A Turning in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin talking with Alexei Smirnov, acting governor of Kursk, on Aug. 8, 2024, about the Ukrainian incursion. (Kremlin.ru / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

Ukraine has lost the First World War of our time. Kiev’s Kursk offensive and occupation of Russian territory has at this writing turned into a disastrous rout.  Further still, Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached critical mass. No amount of European Union and U.K. financial and material support will be able to salvage or alter the reality on the ground without the deployment of European troops. 

The governing regime of any country reduced to literally kidnapping young men off the street, as the Ukrainians have been, to send into combat  can be said to have relinquished any claim of legitimacy.

Ukraine, after three years of unremitting conflict, is no longer a sovereign state.  It is a proxy of NATO and Brussels.  It is a failed experiment in ethno-nationalism and ethno-fascism. It is the Israel of eastern Europe and equally reactionary. The country’s president, Volodomyr Zelensky, when viewed in this light, has been nothing more than a convenient agent of Western imperialism.

Zelensky with President Donald Trump in the White House on Feb. 28. (White House / Flickr)

To witness him being dressed down by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office was to see how power operates. The khaki-clad, diminutive leader of this corrupt state was by that point used to being feted like some touring rock star in Western capitals across the world. Now, suddenly, there he was being reduced to his “actual” status as Washington’s footstool, useful only until his usefulness has expired.

To Trump’s credit at least, he comes to the table shorn of illusions as to the machinations of the warmongering, Western security establishment that would apparently prefer WWIII to peace in our time. 

From the very same establishment flows the sordid and squalid values of the mortuary. The deaths of a million young men is for them a sacrifice worth paying in the name of hegemony and legacy.

It is why EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron et al. are the worst possible leaders in place at the most critical time.

In every bombastic speech that von der Leyen delivers — during which she relentlessly attempts to paint Russia as the repository of a Mongol Horde intent on global domination — you are left with the indelible impression of a woman who has never forgiven the Red Army for storming the gates of Berlin in 1945. 

“Raising a flag over the Reichstag” May 13, 1945. (Yevgeny Khaldei/ Adam Cuerden / mil.ru / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Starmer has made a virtue of lacking any. This pumped-up, local bank manager is Tony Blair — without the laughs. He is a tragedy middle England produced, a man so wooden he doesn’t put his suit on in the morning. His suit puts him on.

As for Macron, this centrist popinjay is a king without a throne. To watch him bestride Europe like an aspiring Colossus is to be reminded of Napoleon’s observation that “In politics stupidity is not a handicap.”

Russia under President Vladimir Putin has never been forgiven, and will never be forgiven, for the “crime” of recovering from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. 

A weak and pliant Moscow has long been the default position of those in the West who view geopolitics as a struggle for domination, no matter the consequences, instead of the need for co-operation with the desire to forestall such consequences in mind.

Ukrainian men and women have been sacrificed on the chopping block of NATO expansionism. They have been fed into the meat grinder fashioned in the name of the zero sum game of power politics, with the bastards responsible for so much death and destruction in need of being held to account, and soon.

The Bolsheviks understood this need and acted upon in it in the context of the killing fields of WWI. 

Indeed, Ukraine has its Alexander Kerensky in the shape of Zelensky. In other words, a failed leader doing his utmost to continue a losing war in the name of power for power’s sake.

Ukraine, as things stand — and with the former historical comparison in mind — is in desperate need of its Vladimir Lenin.  But there is none in sight. Nor any organized revolutionary party. There are some Ukrainian soldiers furious with Kiev, however.  

In 2025, the guns of the Ukrainian soldiers, shivering and freezing in the trenches, are pointed in the wrong direction. As the man said: “War happens when the government tells you who the enemy is. Revolution happens when you figure it out for yourself.”

The sooner the long suffering troops of the Ukrainian armed forces figure it out for themselves, the better it would be for all of us.

John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else.  Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.