By Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension, 2/13/25

In December 1990, Serbian rebels declared independence in the Croatian region of Krajina. A year and a half of war followed, ending in a ceasefire in May 1992 that left Krajina under Serbian control. The Croats, however, refused to recognize the loss of the territory, rearmed, and in August 1995 attacked Krajina and rapidly reconquered it.

In a similar vein, in May 1994, a ceasefire brought an end to the First Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, leaving the contested province of Nagorno-Karabakh and a large amount of surrounding Azeri territory under Armenian control. But the ceasefire did not resolve any of the underlying issues that caused the war. While Armenia enjoyed the spoils of its victory, Azerbaijan rebuilt its army and in September 2020 launched the Second Karabakh War, the result of which was a decisive Azeri victory and the restoration of Azeri control of its lost territories.

And in a more recent example, after the Syrian National Army had driven anti-Assad rebels into a small corner of Syria around the town of Idlib, a ceasefire was agreed that left the Idlib area under rebel control. In the years that followed, the rebels built up their forces with Turkish help while the Assad government sat back and did relatively little. This year the rebels struck, speedily crushed the Syrian National Army and drove Bashar al-Assad from power.

These examples demonstrate that ceasefires that fail to settle the political differences underlying a war often prove to be temporary. Often the side that came out worse in the original war takes the opportunity to revive its military and then, when the time is right, renews the war in an effort to retake what it has lost.

Knowledge of this possibility can persuade political leaders not to make peace even when it would make sense otherwise to do so. In studies of war termination, this is known as the “credible commitment problem”—warring parties will not make peace as they do not believe that the commitments others make in peace negotiations are credible. Overcoming this problem is one of the most important tasks of would-be peacemakers.

As the war in Ukraine reaches the end of its third year, the credible commitment problem provides a useful lens through which to determine the prospects of US President Donald Trump’s efforts to bring the conflict to an end. These efforts have now moved firmly beyond talk into the realm of action. This Wednesday Trump announced that he had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone and that the two had agreed to commence peace negotiations “immediately.”

The timing is propitious as the military situation provides incentives to both sides to cease fighting. This is particularly true of Ukraine whose army steadily gave ground during 2024 and whose efforts to mobilize its population have fallen flat. Despite draconian conscription methods, recruitment to the army is insufficient to replace losses and desertion is increasingly common. A continuation of the war almost certainly means further losses of land, people, and infrastructure with no gains in return. Ukraine’s best option at this point is to cut its losses and make peace.

This does not mean, however, that Russia is close to what it might consider victory. The pace of its advance is painfully slow and there are currently no indications that the Russian army is capable of a major breakthrough. Given its superior resources, the attritional process favours Russia and may lead eventually to Ukraine’s “debellation.” But we do not as yet appear to be anywhere close to that. At least for the coming year, Russia faces the prospect of costly war for relatively few gains. It too would benefit from peace.

In theory, therefore, this is a good time for Trump to step forward with his peace plan. Press reports suggest that the first step would be a ceasefire, followed by a Ukrainian withdrawal from the land it holds in Russia’s Kursk province, and the introduction of a European peacekeeping force. Ukraine would be prohibited from joining NATO and would recognize Russian sovereignty over captured territories, but would continue to receive military support from the Western states and would be promised an accelerated process towards membership of the European Union.

Further clues about American thinking came on Wednesday with a speech in Brussels by the new US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. In this Hegseth declared that “we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.” Hegseth added that “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” and that “any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops. If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. … There will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine.”

Importantly, Hegseth showed himself to be aware of the credible commitment problem, noting that “A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again.” The question then arises of whether his government’s plan can convince the two warring parties that this is indeed the case.

This is by no means certain due to the fact that neither side trusts the other to stand by its commitments. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for instance, has repeatedly expressed his fears that Russia will exploit any pause in the fighting to its own advantage, declaring that “A pause on the Ukrainian battlefield will not mean a pause in the war. A pause would play into [Russia’s] hands. It might crush us afterward.”

This is why the issue of security guarantees has acquired such salience. Zelensky is unlikely to make peace if he believes that the war will later resume in circumstances that are even less favourable than today. But he could perhaps be persuaded if outside powers provide guarantees that the Russians will be forced to obey the peace treaty’s terms. For Zelensky, the most solid guarantee is NATO membership. Hegseth’s rejection of this is therefore a serious blow to the Ukrainians’ ability to trust in the permanence of any ceasefire. It is not clear whether the possibility of some non-NATO peacekeeping force will be a sufficient guarantee to overcome this problem. The US government needs to be ready to do some serious diplomatic arm twisting to get Kyiv to acquiesce.

As for the Russians, their experiences with the Ukrainians have also left them with reasons to doubt whether any peace will be permanent. In August 2014, the Ukrainian army suffered a serious defeat at the battle of Ilovaisk in Donetsk province. Had Russian-backed rebel forces continued their advance, it is possible that Ukraine would not have been able to offer serious resistance. Instead, the Russians agreed to a ceasefire under the terms of an agreement signed in Minsk.

The ceasefire, however, failed to hold. Fighting continued, eventually resulting in another Ukrainian defeat in early 2015. Again, Russian president Vladimir Putin refused to exploit his advantage and agreed to another ceasefire, this time according to the terms of the Minsk II agreement. But this ceasefire also failed to hold. Meanwhile, the Russians accused the Ukrainians of not fulfilling the political terms of the Minsk agreement, above all granting autonomy to the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. At the same time, the Ukrainians rebuilt their broken army, aided by Western weapons and trainers. The final conclusion drawn by the Russians was that the ceasefire was a mistake and that the Ukrainians could not be trusted to abide by another.

Due to this, there is an extreme reluctance on the Russian side to agree to peace proposals that do not ensure that Ukraine abides by its commitments. Trump’s peace plan does address this problem to some degree, first by ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine and second by requiring that Ukraine formally recognize Russian sovereignty over its captured territories. This last point is particularly important, as if the war ends in such a way as to leave a territorial dispute between Russia and Ukraine, the possibility that it will eventually resume is much greater. The prospect of Western weapons continuing to flow into Ukraine and of European troops being deployed there may well disconcert Moscow and discourage it from accepting what is on offer, but the offer is still one that gives it considerable gains. If it is wise, it should not dismiss the offer out of hand.

One of the difficulties here is that anything that reassures Ukraine that the Russians will not break the terms of any peace treaty (for example, promises of future weapons supplies) almost certainly has the opposite effect on the Russians, increasing their fears that Ukraine might eventually renew the war. The Trump peace plan goes some way towards squaring this particular circle by providing some guarantees to both sides, albeit far fewer than both would like. As such it is a reasonable compromise and a good starting point for further talks. There will be some hard diplomatic work ahead, but at least the long process of negotiation is finally about to start.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

By David Stockman, Antiwar.com, 1/27/25

This is the third part of a four-part article.   Read part one here. Read part two here.

The evidence from the Soviet archives shows that Stalin’s policy during the 1947 pivot to Cold War was largely defensive and reactive. But even that departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington.

We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to communists coming to power in France, Italy and elsewhere. The truth of the matter, however, is that even the worst case – a communist France (or Italy or Belgium) – was not a serious military threat to America’s homeland security.

As we pointed out in Part 2, the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles. Its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht and its Navy, which embodied but a tiny fraction of the US Navy’s fire-power, had no ability whatsoever to successfully transport an invasionary force across the Atlantic. Even had it allied with a “communist” France, for example, the military threat to the American homeland just wasn’t there.

To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for electorates who might have stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem, not a mortal threat to liberty and security on America’s side of the Atlantic moat.

Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs. These initiatives—aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan and then NATO—were clinically described as “containment”  measures by their authors, who averred that they were designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, and were not a prelude to intervention in eastern Europe or to an attack on Moscow itself.

But if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry, top communist party echelons and correspondence to and from Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane. To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta.

To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” from Stettin (Poland) on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues uneasy in the extreme. But as it happened, abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.

That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale and sustained effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left. Likewise, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.

So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed. Why did Washington plunge instead into deeply entangling alliances in western Europe and unnecessary confrontation and overt conflict with Soviet Russia for no good reason of homeland military security?

Part of the answer is embedded in the prevalent Keynesian theorem at the time which held that post-war demobilization would result in a collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression. So unless countered with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures, it would be the 1930s all over again.

However, most of Europe was fiscally incapacitated owing to the impacts of the war. The economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a substitute form of fiscal stabilization and safeguard against a relapse into 1930s-style depression.

Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard. During the very first year of demobilization (1946), in fact, the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% from 1945 and never looked back.

What in 1945 had been a private sector GDP of $1.55 trillion in today’s dollars had jumped to nearly $2.0 trillion by 1947 and to more than $2.3 trillion by 1950. Thus, even as the US was making the turn from a war economy to the booming prosperity of the 1950s, the private GDP growth rate clocked in at 7.6% per annum over the five-year period. So the American economy never came close to tumbling into the Keynesian abyss.

To be sure, the overall GDP accounts said otherwise because they simply weren’t designed for a full-on war economy. That is to say, by the reckoning of the Keynesian-designed NIPA accounts government sector GDP in 1945 had clocked in at $2.3 trillion in today’s dollars and accounted for 75% of total GDP. Thereafter, of course, the government sector GDP numbers tumbled rapidly downhill as demobilization proceeded apace, dropping by nearly 70% to $750 billion by 1948 and about 26% of GDP.

Of course, the bloated 1945 government sector GDP figures were mostly for items which got accounted in the NIPA tables as “investment” in ships, plans, tanks, artillery and machine guns – none of which had a market price or much peacetime consumer utility. Accordingly, the overall GDP numbers were a case of wholly incompatible cats and dogs, which did not even fully normalize until after 1950.

Still, when you peeled back the Keynesian accounting chimera the American economy in the late 1940s was actually blooming with good health. And there was no reason to believe that the European economies would not have similarly turned the corner to civilian prosperity in due course.

Indeed, that the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong was well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.

In short, Washington’s “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland security – the only valid basis for the foreign policy of peaceful Republic. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class and military contractors during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn. These European foundations, in turn, surely and inexorably formed the gateway to Empire and the fiscally crushing Warfare State that now plagues the nation.

The Soviet archives also make clear that the Soviet Union never had a plan to militarily conquer western Europe. In effect, the absolute absence of such offensive military plans amounts to the Cold War Dog which didn’t bark.

To the contrary, the Soviet leadership viewed themselves as relatively vulnerable and were well aware that their country was much weaker in industrial and military capability than the United States. Accordingly, their prime concern was consolidating the territory and security gains in Eastern Europe which the USSR had won in with blood and treasure in the war against Hitler.

In fact, during the early post-war period Stalin himself had constantly changed his mind even about the politics of western Europe, tacking inconsistently to and fro about the role communist parties should play in their respective countries. Even then, he had still pursued a variant of detente with the Western Powers, hoping to reach a negotiated settlement on most areas of difference, especially on the question of Germany’s future.

Indeed, for several weeks after Secretary Marshall’s June 5, 1947 speech at Harvard, the archives show that Soviet leaders hoped it might prove to be a source of capital for the reconstruction of the war-damaged USSR. As the details of the American plan unfolded, however, the Soviet leadership slowly came to view it as an attempt to use economic aid not only to consolidate a Western European bloc, but also to undermine recently-won, and still somewhat tenuous, Soviet gains in Eastern Europe.

They feared that the U.S. economic aid program might attempt to target Stalin’s new chain of Soviet-oriented buffer states for reintegration into the capitalist economic system of the West. Thus the Marshall Plan, conceived by U.S. policy-makers primarily as a defensive measure to stave off economic collapse in Western Europe, proved indistinguishable to the Kremlin leadership from an offensive attempt to subvert Soviet security interests.

At length, therefore, Stalin ordered Poland and Czechoslovakia to withdraw from planning meetings in late July that involved discussions with the west about joining the Marshall Plan—discussions he had initially blessed. Thereafter, all Soviet bloc participation in the Marshall Plan ceased and Stalin’s calculus shifted sharply from accommodation and towards a strategy of confrontational unilateral action to secure Soviet interests.

Yet even then, the archival documentation shows that in making this shift, the Soviet leadership was moved primarily by fear of its own vulnerability to American economic power, not by a plan of world conquest which became the ultimate justification for the post-war American Empire.

Nor were the Kremlin’s fears entirely an exercise in Stalin-style paranoia. As Scott D. Parrish, a leading scholar of the Soviet archives, concluded,

The Marshall Plan does appear to have been largely a defensive move on the part of the United States, as the orthodox scholars would have us believe. But the story hardly ends there. The plan had its “offensive” side as well, in that its authors did indeed hope to lure some of the Eastern European states out of the Soviet orbit and integrate them into the Western European economy.

In this sense, the revisionists were correct to focus on the economic motivations behind behind the plan, which was more than just a geostrategic move to counter Soviet expansionism. As for the Soviet response, as the new documentation suggests, it was indeed largely defensive and reactive, even if it often relied upon crude offensive tactics. What the new documentation helps us see more clearly, then, is that the real difficulty and source of conflict in 1947 was neither Soviet nor American “aggression.” Rather, it lay in the unstable international economic and political conditions in key European countries which led both sides to believe that the current status quo was unstable, and that assertive action was required to defend that status quo.

It was in this environment that the Western powers felt compelled to design the details of the Marshall Plan in such a way that it would stabilize Western Europe, but only at the cost of provoking a confrontation with the USSR. And it was this same environment that compelled Stalin to respond to the plan with a series of tactically offensive maneuvers which fanned the flames of confrontation even higher. This decisive moment in the emergence of the Cold War was thus more a story of tragedy than evil. Neither the West nor the Soviet Union deliberately strove to provoke a confrontation with the other. Instead, the fluid political and economic conditions in postwar Europe compelled each side to design policies which were largely defensive, but had the unfortunate consequence of provoking conflict with the other.

The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb one year later in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, it did not create a requirement for US air bases in Europe – just as the Soviets were never to have such bases in the Western Hemisphere, as ultimately confirmed by the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962.

To the contrary, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding a fringe of Dr. Strangelove types like Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.

This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally plausible and very highly certain.

In this respect during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US had this deterrence capacity early on – with long-range strategic bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union and returning with mid-air refueling. These strategic bombers included the B-50 Superfortress and the B-36 Peacemaker, both of which had impressive range capabilities, with the B-36 having a range of up to 10,000 miles without refueling.

However, it was the introduction of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in 1955 that removed any doubt. The B-52 could carry a heavy bomb load and had a range of approximately 8,800 miles without aerial refueling.

By contrast, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon the Tupolev Tu-4 to deliver their nukes, which was a reverse-engineered copy of the U.S. B-29 Superfortress. However, these bombers faced significant challenges, including limited range and payload capacity, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of A-bombs to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.

When the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Age (ICBM) materialized in the second half of the 1950s, the Soviets were the first to demonstrate a successful ICBM, the R-7 Semyorka. Yet not withstanding the vaunted “missile gap” charge by JFK during the 1960 campaign, the Soviet Union had only deployed 4 of these ICBMs by 196o.

The United States conducted its own first ICBM tests at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in October 1959. By the end of 1960, the United States had deployed approximately 20 Atlas ICBMs, which figure grew to about 129 ICBMs by the peak of the liquid fueled rocket era in 1962.

As the decade unfolded, both sides developed far larger numbers of more powerful, reliable and  securely-protected, solid fueled ICBMs, but neither the logic nor logistics of nuclear deterrence ever changed. To wit, the core national security policy of both sides remained based on the certainty of a devastating second strike retaliation delivered by ICBMs securely based in hardened underground silos in their home territories.

As technology evolved the same logic was extended to submarine based missiles, which were not only hidden even more securely in the deep ocean bottoms, but also required no allied partners to operate.

In short, by the time the Cold War reached it peak in the mid-1960s, two thing had been established. First, strategic nuclear deterrence was the heart of national security for both sides and was operated unilaterally from the home country of each.

Secondly, there was no risk of conventional military attacks on the US on the far side of the great ocean moats. So NATO was not any kind of useful military defense asset for the US.

As we will elaborate further in Part 4, NATO was actually about international politics. As such, it had actually and materially added to the cost of US military security. That’s because the nearly 300,000 US servicemen remaining in Europe and the scores of bases and facilities which supported them were stationed there for the purpose of defending European nations from a largely non-existent Soviet threat – but one which in any case should have been addressed by their own military capabilities from their own fiscal resources.

Ironically, in fact, Washington’s plunge into “entangling alliances” has had the effect of sharply lessening Europe’s Warfare State costs by effectively shifting them to American taxpayers per Donald Trump’s patented complaint.

But America didn’t get any extra homeland security in the bargain. What it did get was the privilege of indirectly footing the bill for Europe’s generous Welfare States and enslavement to the myth that global alliances, allies, bases, interventions and regime change adventures have kept the world stable and America safe.

But none of that is true. Not by a long shot.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

Russia Matters, 2/14/25

1. This week, Trump has confirmed earlier reports that he and Putin will meet in Saudi Arabia, while also revealing that the two leaders may then visit each other’s countries. “In fact, we expect that he’ll come here, and I’ll go there, and we’re gonna meet also probably in Saudi Arabia the first time, we’ll meet in Saudi Arabia, see if we can get something done,” Trump said, according to Politico. A date for the meeting “hasn’t been set,” but it will happen in the “not too distant future,” Trump said of the summit with the Russian leader, whom his predecessor refused to meet or directly negotiate with after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Last week saw senior Russian MP Leonid Slutsky reveal the meeting could take place sometime in February or March, while Russia’s Kommersant reported that Russia is reportedly considering Saudi Arabia as a potential location for the meeting. Meanwhile, Trump and Putin have already chosen officials that will negotiate on their behalf on ending the Russian-Ukrainian war, preserving strategic stability and other issues. “I have asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the CIA John Ratcliffe, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Ambassador and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to lead the negotiations, which, I feel strongly, will be successful,” Trump said on Feb. 12, thus excluding his own envoy on the conflict, Keith Kellogg. In his turn, Putin is assembling what Bloomberg has described as “a heavyweight team with decades of experience in high-stakes negotiation.” They include Yuri Ushakov, the chief Kremlin foreign-policy adviser; his top spymaster, Sergei Naryshkin; and Kirill Dmitriev, a financier educated at Stanford and Harvard.
2. The previously anemic process of key stakeholders in the Ukraine conflict slowly signaling their evolving negotiating positions has undergone a dramatic disruption by Trump and his team this past week.Trump personally launched the disruption by announcing on Feb. 12 an “immediate” start to negotiations to end the war after having a phone conversation with Putin. The Kremlin—which has previously been denying direct contacts between Putin and Trump—confirmed Trump’s claim this time, saying the Russian leader agreed with his U.S. counterpart to “work together” toward “a long-term settlement [that] could be reached through peaceful negotiations.” Speaking prior to the Feb. 12 phone call, Trump claimed to have developed a concrete plan to end the war. But even if he did have such a plan, Zelenskyy—whom Trump would refuse to grant the status of “an equal member” of the peace process and whom Trump didn’t warn of his call to Putin until after he’d made it—denied any knowledge of it on Feb. 14. Meanwhile, some of the statements made by Trump’ top aides also indicated that there is no firm plan yet. First, Hegseth announced on Feb. 11 that “we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine.” Then, JD Vance was quoted by WSJ as saying on Feb. 13 that the option of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate remained “on the table.”  In addition to pledging not to send troops to Ukraine, Hegseth called Ukraine’s desire for membership in NATO and a return to its pre-2014 borders unrealistic and illusionary this week. Hegseth’s remarks made some of America’s Europeanallies publicly wonder why the U.S. would “concede” on these issues ahead of negotiations rather than try to use them as bargaining chips. But even with Hegseth sending conciliatory signals to Moscow on Ukraine’s borders and NATO, it won’t be easy for Trump and his team to convince their Russian counterparts to first agree to a ceasefire and then, possibly, conclude a peace deal. For one, Putin has showed no signs so far of abandoning the conditions he has set for Russia to agree to a ceasefire.¹ Moreover, the Kremlin says it will agree to a ceasefire only if it is used to negotiate a legally-binding agreement, which would include guarantees of NATO’s non-expansion to the east. Whether such a commitment can be obtained from the alliance, which operates by consensus, is an open question. If Putin does agree to Trump’s proposal for the ceasefire, it could be secured by one of two significant upcoming dates, according to European and Ukrainian officials interviewed by FT: Easter on April 20 or May 9, when Russia celebrates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. The key to successful peace talks could be having China join the U.S. in the peace efforts, according to Harvard’s Graham Allison. “I believe this terrible [Russian-Ukrainian] war will soon come to an end. In fact, I would bet that we will have a ceasefire within the next six months… with the help of a powerful partner: China,” Allison told Der Spiegel.
   1. Chinese officials in recent weeks have floated a proposal to the Trump team through intermediaries to hold a summit between Trump and Putin and to facilitate peacekeeping efforts after an eventual truce, people in Beijing and Washington familiar with the matter told WSJ. The Chinese offer, notably, envisions a U.S.-Russian summit without the involvement of Zelenskyy. Part of China’s proposal to assist a Russia-Ukraine peace deal involves Beijing acting as a “guarantor” by sending peacekeeping troops to the region, according to WSJ.
3. Trump has proposed a three-way meeting with the Russian and Chinese leaders to discuss nuclear arms control, according to AFP. The chief motivation would be to find ways to save money, Trump said Feb. 13. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.” In response to Trump’s statement, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, depicted China as a much smaller player among nuclear powers, compared to the United States. “As countries with the largest nuclear arsenals, the United States and Russia should earnestly fulfill their special priority responsibilities for nuclear disarmament,” Guo said. Trump has called for a trilateral ‘denuclearization’ before and Putin responded to this call by stating readiness to discuss strategic stability. China has been, however, consistently rejecting trilateral reductions.
4. In the past month, Russian forces made a net gain of 151 square miles of Ukraine’s territory (6 ½ Manhattan islands), according to the Feb. 12, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. Meanwhile in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, Ukraine gained 2 square miles. According to the Ukrainian OSINT group DeepState, Russian military advances in eastern Ukraine have slowed significantly since November 2024. In November, DeepState reports Russian gains of 280 square miles, and these have declined every month since: 152 square miles in December 2024, and 126 square miles in January 2025.

YouTube link here.

“A coterie of elite military and foreign policy thought leaders in Europe have drafted a plan to reshape NATO to try to stay in Trump’s good graces. Among the insane ideas being floated in Brussels are placing nukes in post-1999 NATO states like the Baltics and creating a ‘NATO bank’ that they would make Russia pay for.”

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 2/13/25

12 February 2025 will go down in history as the day when the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine officially began to end. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth started everything off by declaring that: Ukraine won’t join NATO; the US doesn’t believe that Ukraine can restore its pre-2014 borders; the US won’t deploy troops to the conflict zone; the US wants the Europeans to assume some peacekeeping responsibilities there instead; but the US won’t extend Article 5 guarantees to EU forces there.

This was followed by Trump and Putin talking for the first time since the former returned to office. They agreed to begin peace talks without delay, which was followed by Trump calling Zelensky to brief him about this and likely coerce the concessions from him that he presumably promised Putin. Trump also suggested that he’ll soon meet Putin in Saudi Arabia and that each of them might then visit each other’s countries as part of the peace process. Here are some background briefings about the larger context:

* 3 January: “Creative Energy Diplomacy Can Lay The Basis For A Grand Russian-American Deal”

* 17 January: “The Merits Of A Demilitarized ‘Trans-Dnieper’ Region Controlled By Non-Western Peacekeepers”

* 3 February: “Territorial Concessions Might Precede A Ceasefire That Leads To New Ukrainian Elections”

* 4 February: “Trump’s Interest In Ukraine’s Rare Earth Minerals Might Backfire On Zelensky”

* 7 February: “Trump’s Special Envoy Shed More Light On His Boss’ Ukrainian Peace Plan”

The first analysis about creative energy diplomacy contains a dozen proposed compromises for each side that could help move their talks along. In fact, the one about the US not extending Article 5 guarantees to EU forces in Ukraine is now policy per Hegseth, so it’s possible that some others might follow. Additionally, Trump just remarked about how unpopular Zelensky has become, which suggests that he’s planning the “phased leadership transition” via new elections that was also proposed in that piece.

It remains to be seen which of these other proposals might soon become US policy, with the same being said for the ones that Russia might implement, such as agreeing to limited military restrictions on its side of the DMZ that’ll likely be created by the end of this process for example. What follows are the five main issues that’ll shape the Russian-US peace talks on Ukraine between their leaders, diplomats, and whichever of their experts might be invited to participate in this via complementary Track II talks:

———-

* Territorial Parameters

The most immediate issue that must be resolved is where the new Russian-Ukrainian border will fall. Hegseth’s claim about Ukraine’s inability to restore its pre-2014 border hints that Trump could coerce Zelensky into withdrawing from at least all of Donbass, which is at the center of the territorial dimension of their conflict, though it’s possible that his forces might fall back as far as Zaporozhye city. Letting Russia control that city and the parts of its new regions west of the Dnieper is unlikely at this time.

That’s because Trump might not want to take the flak that would follow giving Russia a city of over 700,000 whose residents didn’t vote in September 2022’s referendum. The same goes for the parts of Russia’s new regions west of the river. Instead, he might propose a UN-supervised referendum sometime after the fighting freezes to resolve this aspect of their territorial dispute, all while allowing Russia to continue to officially lay claim to those areas. That might be pragmatic enough for Putin to agree.

* DMZ Terms & Peacekeeper Roles

The next issue to address after the above are the terms of the DMZ along their interim border and the role of the peacekeepers who’d then likely deploy there to monitor it. Hegseth’s declaration that the US will not extend Article 5 guarantees to EU forces there could deter them from playing a major role, which Russia would have to authorize via a UNSC Resolution in any case per Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzia otherwise they’ll be legitimate targets. Non-Western ones are thus much more agreeable.

As it turns out, the vast majority of UN peacekeepers are from non-Western countries, so they could prospectively deploy there under a UNSC mandate per Nebenzia’s suggestion and possibly even result in the total exclusion of any Western peacekeepers if it’s agreed that none will contribute to this mission. Their terms would have to be acceptable to both Russia and the US in order for this resolution to pass, so it’s unclear exactly what they’ll be able to do or not do, but that directly segues into the next issue.

* Demilitarization & Denazification

Two of Russia’s main goals in the special operation are to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, which it initially sought to do by militarily coercing Ukraine into this per the terms established in spring 2022’s draft peace treaty, though that didn’t succeed due to the UK and Poland. It’s unrealistic to imagine that Trump will agree to let Russia deploy its armed forces throughout the entirety of Ukraine to implement this so it can only be accomplished through similar diplomatic means involving Kiev’s acquiescence.

Therein lies the possible role that UN peacekeepers can play in monitoring and enforcing whatever is ultimately agreed upon for demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine. This could take the form of inspecting suspected illegal arms sites and all of Ukraine’s cross-border traffic (including at its ports) while having the right to mandate changes to its media reporting and school curricula as need be. This is the only way to ensure that Ukraine remains demilitarized and denazified after the conflict ends.

* Sanctions Relief

Russia has repeatedly demanded the lifting of all Western sanctions, but the argument can be made that “deal-master” Trump wouldn’t ever agree to do this all at once, instead preferring to draft a plan for phased sanctions relief as a reward for Russia’s compliance with a ceasefire, armistice, or peace treaty. This could take the form of what was proposed in the creative energy diplomacy analysis whereby some Russian exports to the EU could resume during the first phase as a trust-building measure.

While Russia would prefer that they all be immediately lifted, its policymakers might conclude that it’s better to accept a phased plan if that’s all that Trump is comfortable offering instead of nothing at all. He’d do well though to engage in the goodwill gesture of lifting sanctions on Russia’s oil exports by sea too since that could convince those policymakers that he’s serious about relieving pressure on Russia. This would in turn make it easier for Putin to sell the compromise of phased sanctions relief at home.

* New Security Architecture

Russia envisaged creating a new European security architecture through mutual agreements with the US and NATO in December 2021 per the security guarantee requests that it shared with them at the time. These were in hindsight meant to diplomatically resolve their security dilemma, whose roots are in NATO’s continued eastward expansion after the Old Cold War and especially its clandestine expansion into Ukraine, in lieu of the special operation that Putin was secretly planning at the time if that failed.

So much has changed since then that separate comprehensive talks on this must start right after whatever agreement they reach on Ukraine. The new issues include NATO’s eastern military buildup, Finland and Sweden’s new memberships, Russia’s hypersonic Oreshniks, their deployment to Belarus, Russia’s deployment of nukes there too, the future of the New START that expires next year, and the new space arms race, et al. Agreeing on a new security architecture will therefore stabilize the world.

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As can be seen, the path ahead will be very difficult due to the sensitive issues that Russia and the US must resolve, but their leaders have shown that they have the will to negotiate in good faith. Neither side is likely to achieve their maximum objectives, but diplomacy is the art of the possible, so each will do their utmost to achieve as much as they can in this regard given the circumstances. The best-case scenario is a fair and lasting peace that truly resolves the root causes at the core of this conflict.