By Ted Snider, The American Conservative, 8/28/25

The attempt to isolate Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, has never been a smashing success. Nevertheless, it has been a key component of the West’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it’s proved out of touch and unaligned with the emerging multipolar reality. Outside the West, America’s arrogant attempt to enforce its hegemony did the opposite of isolating Russia, pushing it into closer and firmer relations with China, India, Africa, and the broader BRICS+ community. Within the West, the isolation of Putin and Russia was much more successful.

But on August 15, that isolation was shattered. Putin’s plane landed on American soil for the first in-person talks between the leaders of Russia and the U.S.—indeed, the first major talks between Putin and any Western leader—since the war in Ukraine began.

The summit, held in Alaska, seems to have been a success, assuming realistic expectations of a first “feel-out meeting,” as Trump called it. Going into the summit, Trump offered some metrics for evaluating whether it was going well. The president said he would know how it would go in the first minutes. After Putin arrived, Trump looked him in the eye, laughed, warmly shook Putin’s hand, and invited him to ride in his presidential limousine. Trump also said that if the summit went well, he would talk to the press with Putin; if it went badly, he would address them alone. The leaders spoke together. Trump added that if it wasn’t a success, there would be severe consequences for Russia. After the summit, the threatened sanctions were off, for now (though secondary tariffs targeting India remained).

Putin, for his part, said they had reached an understanding that he hoped could help bring about peace. Trump insisted the meeting was “extremely productive” and that “many points were agreed upon with only a very few left unresolved.” One unnamed point of disagreement, Trump said, was significant, but there was “a very good chance of getting there.”

Putin seems to have won an important diplomatic victory on the structure of negotiations. Trump came out of the summit saying that the best course of action was “to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement” and that now “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.” 

Russia has consistently refused the unconventional idea, pushed by the U.S. and Europe, of a ceasefire coming before negotiating the war’s underlying disputes. Years after Ukraine and Europe had used the Minsk accords with Russia as a deception to buy time to build an army for a military solution instead of the diplomatic solution the accord purported to guarantee, Russia resolved to put the ceasefire after the agreements. Before the Russians gave Ukraine time to restock weapons and raise troops, they were going to settle the issues that led to the war, whether on the battlefield or at the negotiating table. 

There were other important points that Trump and Putin agreed upon, too. The one significant point that remained unsolved may have been the complicated question of security guarantees for Ukraine.

Trump’s reversal on an immediate ceasefire was a major takeaway for Putin, but the U.S. president is not the only one who made concessions. Though largely ignored by the western media, Putin also seems to have made significant concessions to keep diplomacy alive. A source close to the Kremlin told Reuters that “Putin is ready for peace—for compromise. That is the message that was conveyed to Trump.” Any compromises that Putin has made pertain to Western demands that, though approaching Moscow’s red lines, do not cross them. Conversely, he has not compromised on the fundamental issues that cross the very red lines over which Russia went to war.

The most significant concession by Putin regards territorial demands. Back in 2022, Putin redrew the map of Russia to include the Crimean peninsula, the eastern Donbas region, and the southern provinces Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Moscow has insisted that this new reality be recognized. In the summit with Trump, Putin offered the compromise that Russia would agree to freeze the current lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for Ukraine giving up the Donbas, including parts it still hangs on to. Moreover, in return for the parts of the Donbas that Kiev still holds, Moscow would return small areas of Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk provinces.

This compromise is consistent with Moscow’s red lines because the Donbas provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, matter more to the Kremlin than the other provinces it has occupied, due to the threat to ethnic Russians’ lives and rights there beginning in 2014 and the military threat to the Donbas since the days before Russia’s invasion in February 2022. Plus, completing the capture of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson would require either a very long, difficult war or significantly escalating the current one.

Putin has not, and will not, abandon Moscow’s reddest of red lines. He will not compromise on the demand that NATO never expand to Ukraine. And, after the broken promise of no NATO expansion eastward at the end of the Cold War, Russia will not settle for a gentleman’s agreement. This time, the guarantee that Ukraine can never join NATO will have to be delivered in a legally binding form.

Though Putin cannot compromise on NATO, he seems to have compromised on Ukrainian–Western relations by greenlighting Kiev’s joining the European Union. Though this concession is a compromise by Putin on Russia’s original position, it is not a recently won compromise: Moscow was open to EU membership for Ukraine at the Istanbul talks in the weeks following the invasion.

The third compromise is less certain. While some sources report that Putin is holding to his original position that Ukraine must agree to limits on its armed forces, other sources report that Putin has allowed this demand to slip away. This point may be one that Moscow is willing to negotiate. As long as there is a prohibition against long-range weapons that are capable of reaching Russia, Putin could feel that Moscow’s red lines can accommodate this concession. First, such limits would be nearly impossible to enforce, especially with Ukraine producing some of its own simpler weapons. Second, with Ukraine not in NATO and NATO not in Ukraine and the Donbas safely protected within Russia, Moscow may feel it can compromise on the size and capabilities of Ukraine’s armed forces.

This thorny question of post-war security for Ukraine—and for Russia—may be the significant one to which Trump was referring when he talked about issues that have not yet yielded agreement. Still, the Trump administration has signaled that some progress was made on the issue. After the Alaska summit, Trump said that Putin had “agreed that Russia would accept security guarantees for Ukraine” and said that this concession was a “very significant step.” The White House even said that Putin was open to “Article 5-style” security guarantees for Ukraine, referring to the collective defense provision of the NATO charter.

If this is true, this would be a very significant compromise by Putin. But there is a caveat. Moscow and European capitals differ critically on who would provide that Article 5-like guarantee. Europe and Ukraine insist that the security guarantee would be backed by Europe. In one proposal, if Russia attacked Ukraine again, European leaders would have 24 hours to decide if they would provide military support to Ukraine. In Russia’s version, that security guarantee must come, not only from the UK, France, and the United States, but also from China and even Russia itself.

Kiev and Europe object that this is an absurd proposal designed to give Moscow an effective veto over whether the guarantors would come to Ukraine’s defense and is intended to kill the negotiations. They also see it as a poison pill intended to doom negotiations.

But there may be a more charitable way of reading Moscow’s demand. The five countries that Moscow included are the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Moscow seems to prefer that the UN, and not the anti-Russian Western bloc, oversee the security guarantee.

Russia insists that it not be excluded from decisions on how a security guarantee for Ukraine would be enacted and enforced. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says that security cannot be “unilateral,” that Russia cannot be excluded from the security arrangement, and that the final arrangement must be based “on the principles of indivisible security.” That means the West cannot advance its own security at the expense of Russia’s, which Putin argues the West has been doing since the end of the Cold War with NATO’s encroachment to its very borders. 

Though Trump originally suggested that the U.S. was prepared to send troops to Ukraine, he seems to have gone back on that decision, to the great disappointment of Europe and Ukraine. The U.S. increasingly has little appetite for challenging this Russian red line. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, told European military leaders that the U.S. will play only a minimal role in any security guarantee for Ukraine.

Vice President J.D. Vance has been clear on the subject. “I think that we should expect, and the president certainly expects, Europe to play the leading role here,” Vance told Fox News last week. The vice president explained that Europe would “carry the burden” and take the “lion’s share” of the responsibility for guaranteeing Ukraine’s security.

The White House has been emphatic that the U.S. will not put boots on the ground. Trump has said that “European nations are going to take a lot of the burden” and provide the “first line of defence,” while the U.S. was “going to help them.” Trump said this help will come not from NATO and that it will come “by air,” leaving vague whether that means fighter jets, surveillance drones, intelligence, or air-defense systems.

Though the Western media consistently reports that Putin has been uncompromising and is not truly interested in a diplomatic end to the war, he has made some compromises, including a significant concession on Russia’s territorial demands. He has also made concessions on EU membership for Ukraine and thus its ability to reorient itself to the West. And perhaps he has made, or is willing to make, concessions on the strength of the Ukrainian armed forces. Crucially, Moscow also seems to have agreed to security guarantees for Ukraine, so long as those guarantees are not just NATO in disguise. The Kremlin insists: There can be no European or American troops on Ukrainian soil. But there are lots of non-European countries, including in BRICS+ and elsewhere in the Global South, who have an interest in a fair diplomatic conclusion to the war and who could act as peacekeepers. Russia wants those peacekeepers to be keeping a peace that is part of a broader security arrangement that embraces all of Europe, including Russia. The U.S., too, should seek to replace the security arrangement that has isolated and threatened Russia since the missed opportunity provided by the end of the Cold War.

***

Kim Iversen Interviews Jim Jatras on the Current Status of the Ukraine War and Negotiations

YouTube link here.

***

Scoop: White House believes Europe secretly undoing Ukraine war’s end

By Mike Allen & Barak Ravid, Axios, 8/30/25

Senior White House officials believe some European leaders are publicly supporting President Trump’s effort to end the war in Ukraine, while quietly trying to undo behind-the-scenes progress since the Alaska summit, Axios has learned.

-The White House has asked the Treasury Department to compile a list of sanctions that could plausibly be imposed by Europe against Russia.

Why it matters: Two weeks after the summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, there has been little clear progress toward ending the war. Frustrated Trump aides contend the blame should fall on European allies, not on Trump or even Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Behind the scenes: White House officials are losing patience with European leaders, whom they claim are pushing Ukraine to hold out for unrealistic territorial concessions by Russia.

-Axios has learned that the sanctions the U.S. is urging Europe to adopt against Russia include a complete cessation of all oil and gas purchases — plus secondary tariffs from the EU on India and China, similar to those already imposed on India by the U.S.

-“The Europeans don’t get to prolong this war and backdoor unreasonable expectations, while also expecting America to bear the cost,” a top White House official told Axios. “If Europe wants to escalate this war, that will be up to them. But they will be hopelessly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

What they’re thinking: The Europeans are said to be pushing Zelensky to hold out for a “better deal” — a maximalist approach that has exacerbated the war, Trump’s inner circle argues.

-The U.S. officials believe British and French officials are being more constructive. But they complain that other major European countries want the U.S. to bear the full cost of the war, while putting no skin in the game themselves.

-“Getting to a deal is an art of the possible,” the top official said. “But some of the Europeans continue to operate in a fairy-tale land that ignores the fact it takes two to tango.”

The big picture: After his summits with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump repeatedly said the next step must be a Putin-Zelensky summit. So far, the Russians have refused.

-At the same time, the Ukrainians have rejected any discussion on possible territorial concessions unless the Russians come to the table.

-Trump was visibly frustrated about the situation during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. “Everybody is posturing. It’s all bullshit,” he said.

-Russia’s massive air strikes on Kyiv, plus Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries, further signaled that peace wasn’t getting any closer.

What they’re saying: “Perhaps both sides of this war are not ready to end it themselves. The president wants it to end, but the leaders of these two countries need it to end and must want it to end as well,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday.

-A senior White House official told Axios that Trump is seriously considering stepping back from the diplomatic efforts until one or both parties begin to show more flexibility.

-“We are going to sit back and watch. Let them fight it out for a while and see what happens,” the official said.

-Some U.S. officials have begun to see European leaders as a major obstacle, despite the fact that Trump held a friendly meeting with them and Zelensky less than two weeks ago.

The other side: A senior European official involved in the talks with the U.S. over the Ukraine-Russia war expressed surprise about the U.S. criticism.

-The official was puzzled by the suggestion that European leaders were playing one game with Trump and another behind his back, saying no such gaps existed in reality.

-The official also said European countries are already working on a new set of sanctions against Russia.

The latest: On Friday, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak met in New York.

-They discussed the potential Zelensky-Putin meeting and Yermak invited Witkoff for a first visit to Kyiv, but no significant progress was made, a source with knowledge of the meeting said.

By Eva Bartlett, Website, 8/20/25

Grok is a crock of…

Published on Revers: Is it possible to trust Grok? Let’s explore it using the example of Donbass

Increasingly on X, people are relying on Elon Musk’s “Grok” algorithm for verification of information in posts. However, while to some this may seem a useful tool, what it is doing is reinforcing Western and allied regimes’ positions and whitewashing their crimes.

Grok draws information from dominant narratives—usually established by legacy media with its very long track record of pro-Western lies and war propaganda—to conclude whether information in a particular post is true. When it comes to matters in which the West and Israel (among others) have a vested interest in controlling the narrative, Grok sides with the claims purveyed by legacy media. Instead of providing objective, truthful, answers, it creates a propaganda loop of actual disinformation.

Thus, as was the case some days ago, Grok determined that a post of mine on Ukraine’s use of internationally-banned PFM-1 “Petal” mines against Donbass civilians was “pro-Russian disinformation” and that, “Evidence suggests PFM-1 use in Donetsk (2022) was likely Russian false flag, not Ukraine…”

This is in spite of the fact that I was back in Donetsk in late July 2022 when Ukraine fired rockets containing hundreds of these mines on Donetsk and surrounding areas. On July 30, at 9:23 pm, I wrote on my Telegram channel about a strong explosion I’d just heard in central Donetsk. An hour later, DPR journalist Georgy Medvedev wrote on his channel warning civilians not to go near the mines and not to walk on grass or areas where they could have landed. In fact, for weeks after, I walked constantly looking down at my feet and avoiding anything that was visible pavement, so tiny and difficult to see are the mines.

They are the size of an average lighter, brown or green, and blend in very well wherever they land. Even when I saw a sign warning of a mine, it was difficult to initially see them.

These high-explosive pressure mines mutilate or tear off feet and legs up to the knees, but also explode hands or animals. According to Konstantin Zhukov, Chief Medical Officer of Donetsk Ambulance Service, a weight of just 2 kg is enough to activate one of the mines. Sometimes, they explode spontaneously. If they aren’t disturbed, they can lie dormant for years.

As I wrote at the time, according to DPR Emergency services, Ukraine fired rockets containing cluster munitions, with over 300 Petal mines inside. The cluster explodes in the air, disseminating the mines widely. Due to their design, most land without exploding.

Even after sappers had cleared an area of the mines, a strong wind or rain could, and did, dislodge mines which landed on rooftops or in trees.

The mines are indiscriminate weapons which pose great danger to civilians. Ukraine signed the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, under which Ukraine was obliged to destroy its 6 million stock of the mines. However, reportedly, it still has over 3.3 million such mines.

I documented the mines, and the Emergency Services sappers’ clearing and destruction of the mines, in various regions of Donetsk and Makeevka (east of Donetsk). I wrote about them, then wrote a follow up article three weeks after the late attacks, highlighting that by that point 44 civilians had been maimed by the mines, 2 of whom died of their injuries.In November 2022, I met a 14 year old boy being treated in a Donetsk hospital after he stepped on a mine in a playground, losing his foot to the explosive.It should be noted that Ukraine first deployed these mines in March 2022, during the battles for Mariupol.As of July 9, 2025, 186 civilians have been maimed by the mines (including 11 children), three of whom died of their injuries.

*Video HERE

Grok’s dubious, very partial, Western sources

Grok’s determination that my reporting is false reads like one of the many smear campaigns I and colleagues have been subjected to, with the usual insertion of the “Kremlin disinfo” qualifier meant to discredit my writings. In fact, Grok drew from the Wikipedia smear entry on me, citing Wikipedia’s incorrect claim that I’ve lived in Russia since 2019, when in fact I moved to Russia in 2021.

Who did Grok deem credible? The very partial Western NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), which in February 2023 surprisingly issued a report about Ukraine’s use of the mines in Izium, but (unsurprisingly) not on Ukraine’s use of the mines in the Donbass.

Grok cherry picked aspects of the HRW report to whitewash Ukrainian culpability in the Donbass, adding claims from various Western media agencies (DW, France 24, Reuters) to accuse Russian forces themselves of dropping the mines on Donbass cities.

An admission buried in the HRW report—which Grok did not highlight—was that it,“has not verified claims of Russian forces using PFM mines in the armed conflict.”None of Grok’s sources were anywhere near Donetsk to investigate Ukraine’s deploying of the mines. 

Similarly, some months ago I came across and refuted Grok’s repeating of the legacy media 2022 claims of alleged “mass graves” outside of Mariupol. I had actually gone, in April 2022 and in November 2022 to each of the three sites named in media reports and found no mass graves, but normal, functioning, cemeteries, with individual plots and in the case of the largest, Stary Krim, a chapel and a funeral ongoing at the time I was there, a recently-deceased elderly man being buried in the cemetery.

None of the sources cited in the media’s baseless accusations were anywhere near the three cemeteries which they dubbed mass graves.

The issue is not even about this algorithm’s discrediting of my reports (reports which other journalists find credible), but that it is using the same clearly partial sources that legacy media uses to justify or whitewash NATO and allies’ crimes.

As I’ve written previously, HRW is one of many Western-funded NGOs with a history of downplaying or ignoring crimes committed by Western governments or proxies. HRW, Amnesty International, and many more oft-cited supposedly neutral bodies have very clear ties and allegiance to Western governments.

Citing them as credible, as noted previously, creates a propaganda loop of disinformation that aligns with Western objectives around the globe. This isn’t accidental, it is by design.

Some on X posit how Grok functions not actually AI, not independent. For example:

“Grok barely resembles AI, fwiw. It’s essentially a Google-like search engine (similarly perverted by the security state) filtered through an LLM (large language model)
to give it the veneer or gloss of AI. It is not independent, and its results can be predetermined. It only mimics intelligence.”

While Grok does seem malleable, if enough people contribute non-Western talking points (as was the case on the thread in question, with Grok eventually admitting my reporting was factual), its go-to programming is to recycle Western narratives, particularly anti-Russian ones, including parroting Western think tanks calls for regime change in Russia.

There is some room for hope: increasingly more people are calling out Grok as the algorithm mouthpiece for the West that it is.

Note: Typos are in the original article.

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 8/25/25

Something has changed in the war in Ukraine. Kyiv hit the Soviet-era Druzhba oil pipeline that ships the black stuff from Siberia to Budapest – and they hit it three times in two weeks. The pipeline is now out of action for at least five days, according to the Russian side.

This is new on two counts. The first is that while Ukraine has been hitting Russian energy assets since the drone war started in 2023 with drones that have ever increasing range, due to fuel constraints they have been able to carry much more than 50kg of explosives. As most of Russia’s refineries were hard-topped in the Cold War and more recently have been covered with netting, all these drones could do is start some superficial fires that were usually put out in a day.

Now they are doing serious damage. The fire at the Novoshakhtinsk refinery has been blazing for five days now and the Russians are unable to put it out. The key Baltic oil terminal port at Ust-Luga was also hit by what looked like a very big explosion this weekend, according to video posted on social media.

Some 10% of Russia’s refining capacity has been hurt according to reports and production has plummeted while petrol and diesel prices have soared fuelling a growing fuel crisis. Ukraine has never been able to do this much damage before.

What is going on? The second thing is have started to see reports that these refineries are being hit by drones “and missiles”. I don’t recall reports of Ukrainian missiles being used that are that powerful or could fly that far before. There has been a lot of reports about the new FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile in the last week after an AP camera crew were shown the factory that makes them.

These are what Ukraine has been calling for since the start of the war. They can fly 3,000km which would put even the Omsk refinery in range, one of Russia’s biggest refineries, and carry around 1,250kg of explosives. That will do the job.

Where did these missiles come from? According to the AP report they have been developed in only nine months and Ukraine will be able to make seven of them a month by October. That is still a tenth of what Russia is producing missile-wise, but you only need one of them to land on Omsk to cause Russia a major headache.

Personally, I think it’s highly likely that the Flamingo was developed with EU help, or even that the parts are being manufactured in the EU and shipped to Kyiv for assembly, but this is pure speculation at this point. The previously announced Ukrainian new missile, the Palyanytsia, is a hybrid drone-missile, took 1.5 years to develop, is still not in serial production and can only fly about 700k with a payload of 20kg of explosives. The Flamingo is in an entirely different league.

It shouldn’t be surprising if the Ukrainians have had some covert help from the Europeans as that would also fit with the general drift away from simply supplying Ukraine with arms and money and instead helping them build up their own defence sector that is already well under way with the so-called Danish model.

Also, the timing is suspicious. Nine months ago, is when Trump took over and it was clear from the start that he would wind down US support. In facto anyone that took over was going to winddown Ukraine’s support, as long as the Republicans control the House. This weekend US Secretary for Defence Pete Hegseth said that he was putting a de facto ban on Ukraine using long-range missiles, which he can do as all the Western-supplied ones, including the Franko-British Storm Shadows, use US satellites for guidance.

Ukraine’s western partners have never liked the idea of Kyiv hitting Russian oil assets. The Biden administration refused to grant permission until last November and even then with many caveats. German has refused point blank to send its powerful Taurus missiles which are very similar in profile to the Flamingo thanks to the West’s “some, but not enough” policy of managing any escalation with Russia.

But as the West begins to walk away Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has reached a “screw it” moment and Bankova appears to be increasingly taking things into its own hands and started to blow up refineries.

Interestingly, Kyiv played with the idea of targeting Druzhba last August when it sanctioned Russian oil company Lukoil effectively barring it from sending Hungary oil via Druzhba. But it was done very delicately in an effort not to piss off the European Commission (EC). Only Lukoil was sanctioned, allowing the state-owned Rosneft to replace its quota so the volume of oil flowing was not affected. The move was as much a signal to Brussels as well as testing the water.

This August’s attacks are much more serious and also come at the peak of Russia’s driving season. There are no half measures here. Kyiv is trying to destroy Druzhba and screw what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban or European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen think.

The attacks – three in a row – have sparked a war of words with a bunch of letters and snarky comments being traded on social media over the weekend between Budapest, Brussels and Kyiv. It remains to be seen what comes out of this, but the European fuel market could be as hard hit as the Russian. And what if oil prices spike to over $150? That will also cause problems for Trump and the Republicans that face midterm elections next summer and will not be happy with gas at over $5 at the pump then. In fact they will do everything they can to avoid that, which bodes ill for Washington’s relationships with Bankova.

Final point is that China has offered to send peacekeepers to Ukraine if there is a UN mandate. This comes on top of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying very clearly that Russia has to be involved in the security guarantees if any are offered. Zelenskiy himself also said that Russia needs to offer “ironclad” security guarantees to Ukraine if there is going to be a ceasefire – using Russia’s own words who demanded “ironclad guarantees” of Ukraine never joining Nato just before the war started.

So far only France and Britain have offered to send troops, but as we reported this idea is unworkable. The main problem is: what will the rules of engagement be? There is no way you can allow British troops shoot at Russian troops and if they can’t shoot what use are they? However, bringing in non-Nato peacekeepers is a viable option. And BRICS nations would be acceptable – to Russia at least.

More interestingly, Lavrov (and implicitly China) are suggesting a wider deal that goes beyond the Ukraine. Lavrov gave his famous “new rules of the game” speech in February 2021 that called for the West to stop treating Russia like a child and “punishing” it for its “bad behaviours” with sanctions – something that the Developed World doesn’t do to each other. (Israel’s current unpunished genocide in Gaza being a glaring example.)

Lavrov has also obtusely called for a general reset in pan-European security arrangement, which can be included in Putin’s vague references to dealing with the “root causes” of the war. That is generally assumed to mean no-Nato for Ukraine, but in 2008 aft4er Dmitry Medvedev was made president, the first thing he did was travel to Brussels and propose negotiating a new pan-European security deal. It would have created a council to manage relations and both Russia and the West would have offered each other new post-Cold War security deals. Ironically, this would have included Ukraine and would have prevented the war that started in 2022. The whole thing would have been done under the umbrella of the UN, which has just come up again.

Personally, I think that this is what Putin is holding out for, in some form. The Kremlin has already made it crystal clear that it wants to restart all the Cold War missile agreements, which is part of the same new global security guarantees that Russia is looking for. But we are still a long way from even broaching any of these topics. Lavrov is complaining loudly that Russia is being excluded from the current security guarantees talks and is suggesting any meeting between Zelenskiy and Putin is dead in the water before it starts without this conversation.

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 6/26/25

Everyone thinks they understand the Budapest Memorandum. Almost no one actually does.

In the manner of things that get loudly misremembered in the trenches of modern discourse, the documents have acquired the aura of a sacred covenant. It’s promoted as a solemn, signed promise by the United States and the United Kingdom to leap to Ukraine’s defence, guns blazing, should its borders be crossed. It never was. And if we are to speak of memory, we might as well begin with the facts.

When the Soviet Union folded like a tired accordion, three newly independent states awoke to find themselves the accidental custodians of nuclear warheads: Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. But these were warheads without a trigger. The launch codes remained in Moscow. The rockets could no more be fired from Kiev or Minsk than from Kansas or Manchester.

The Budapest Memorandum—actually three documents signed individually in December 1994—was not a mutual defence pact. It was not NATO-lite. It was an exchange: these three post-Soviet states would join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear nations. In return, the US, UK, and Russia would respect their independence and existing borders. That was the word. Respect. Not defend. Not fight for. Political assurances were given, not legal guarantees. There were no clauses demanding action. No provisions for retaliation. It was a gentleman’s agreement in an age increasingly short of gentlemen.

This point matters. Because nearly every time a public figure invokes the Budapest Memorandum—be it a billionaire with a Twitter account or a former diplomat with a selective memory—they speak as if it were a treaty inked with blood. It was not. There was no enforcement clause. No punishment for violation. No military obligation. And the very countries now waving the memorandum as a banner have, at times, treated it with the same ceremonial reverence we might reserve for a cocktail napkin.

By 2006, the United States and Britain had already sanctioned Belarus in response to its elections—a move that, strictly speaking, ran contrary to Article 3 of the memorandum, which called for non-interference in economic affairs. Washington later admitted in 2013 that the document was not legally binding, after another round of penalties were imposed on Minsk. The memorandum was a political understanding, not a military contract. The sanctity of the agreement, such as it was, had already been punctured before Crimea ever came into the frame.

There’s a detail the television panels never quite get round to. Back in ’93, when the Soviet state was being smashed into 15 pieces, Moscow did something no accountant would recommend. It gathered up every rouble of the USSR’s foreign debt—its own share and everyone else’s, too—and said, “We’ll carry it.” That meant Ukraine’s bills, Belarus’s, Kazakhstan’s, the lot. Even the tsarist IOUs from before the First World War were hoisted on to Russia’s back. Call it vanity, call it house-proud tidying after a drunken party, but it was a staggering assumption of liability.

The consequences were brutal. The load nearly crippled the new federation. By the summer of ’98, with oil in the doldrums and the bond traders circling like gulls over a trawler, Russia defaulted. Kiev, Minsk and Almaty, starting life debt-free, kept their credit intact; Moscow, having traded the launch codes for a mountain of invoices, got a pat on the head, a permanent seat in the Security Council—and, soon enough, sermons about economic virtue from the same capitals that had watched it sink.

No one’s hands are spotless here. The Budapest handshake was handled casually by every signatory long before tanks ever entered the conversation. Each party saw in it what suited them, and discarded the rest.

This isn’t to diminish Ukraine or hold Russia as beyond reproach. We’re not here to litigate the rights and wrongs since 2014. The Budapest Memorandum was never a shield. It was a handshake struck in the afterglow of the Soviet collapse. But time, as ever, proved the harder bargainer. The story, if we’re going to tell it at all, should be told straight. It was a Cold War coda—a quiet understanding among powers eager to close one chapter and get on with writing the next.

It has since been twisted into a rallying cry. Invoked by those who haven’t read it—or hope you haven’t. Misunderstanding and misrepresentation have done the rest

The Budapest Memorandum was a diplomatic accommodation, not a promise to fight. All parties have breached it, to varying degrees. And those who cry foul today might do well to examine how the ground was prepared, not just how it was trampled.

In the end, it may be fitting that the document is so widely misunderstood. It was born of ambiguity, signed with smiles, and upheld only so long as it was convenient. That, too, is a kind of legacy—not of honour or law, but of geopolitics.

Geopolitics, like football, is rarely won by the pretty pass—but by who’s still kicking shins and hacking clearances in the ninety-fifth minute. But myths endure for a reason—and the Budapest Memorandum is now less history than incantation.

Russia Matters, 8/29/25

1. A U.K.- and France-led “coalition of the willing” has pledged postwar protection for Ukraine, but European officials admit to Financial Times that European troop deployments would require support by the U.S.The latter has already agreed to provide “strategic enablers,” including intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, command and control and air defense assets, but its consent is contingent on commitments by European capitals to deploy tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine, according to the officials interviewed by Financial Times. Even with fighting showing no signs of subsiding, Western capitals have sketched out a rough post-war plan that would involve a demilitarized zone, patrolled by neutral peacekeeping troops from a third country agreed by Ukraine and Russia. A far more robust border behind that would be defended by Ukrainian troops armed and trained by NATO militaries, according to the plan as reported by Financial Times. However, European plans to send thousands of troops into Ukraine¹ post-peace deal face skepticism from the public and parliaments, especially in Germany, where 56% oppose such deployments, according to The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, French support for sending troops to Ukraine hinges on a formal peace accord, and most Britons favor peacekeeping, but not direct conflict, according to The Wall Street Journal.
2. Russia is demanding Ukraine cede all of Donbas in the east, but would be willing to freeze the conflict in the south along current front lines, Turkey’s top diplomat Hakan Fidan said in an interview with TGRT Haber on Aug. 28. At peace talks in Istanbul earlier this year, Russia’s negotiators demanded Ukraine pull out of not only the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, which comprise the Donbas, but also from the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts² entirely as a precondition to ending the conflict, according to AFP. However, during the latest, third round of negotiations in Istanbul on Aug. 23, the Russian and Ukrainian parties presented concrete positions for the first time, according to Fidan as reported by RBC.ua. These positions were then brought up for discussion during the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and following this summit, Moscow scaled back its demands, Fidan claimed. “That was when we saw the beginning of the end,” Fidan said, according to Korrespondent.net. Fidan acknowledged it would be difficult for Ukraine to give up its territory, including heavily fortified terrain in the east that could leave Ukraine vulnerable, according to AFP.³ Interestingly, responding to Fidan’s revelations, Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov did not explicitly reject them, but called for negotiations to be discreet. Such a reaction could be interpreted as a confirmation of Fidan’s claims.*
3. Trump has privately fumed in recent days that his high-profile attempts at Ukraine diplomacy have yielded nothing, one senior administration official and one former official who stays in close touch with the White House told The Atlantic. Trump has also directed some frustration at Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders, believing that they are being unrealistic in their demands and need to accept that Ukraine has to lose some territory to end the conflict, the current and ex-officials told the magazine. “He just wants this over,” the senior official told the Atlantic. “It almost doesn’t matter how.”
4. In the period of July 29–Aug. 26, Russian forces gained 180 square miles of Ukrainian territory, which marks a 24% decrease from the 237 square miles these forces gained in the period of July 22–Aug. 19, 2025. Comparing shorter periods, such as the past week to the preceding week, shows that in the period of Aug. 19–26, Russia gained 48 square miles of Ukrainian territory (roughly two Manhattan islands), which marks a 92% increase from the 25 square miles Russian forces gained in the period of Aug. 12–19, according to the Aug. 27, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. This week saw Russian troops capture two villages in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time, according to The New York Times and DeepState.  
5. A Russian attack on Kyiv overnight on Aug. 27–28 caused what Ukrainian media described as record damage across the Ukrainian capital, leaving at least 23 dead and affecting 33 locations with nearly 100 buildings damaged. Zelensky said the strike was the second-largest attack since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, Reuters reported. “We have an anti-record—damage in all districts of the city,” head of the Kyiv City Military Administration Tymur Tkachenko told media. During the attack, Russian forces launched 629 drones and missiles against Ukraine. Ukrainian air defense and electronic warfare units managed to destroy or suppress 589 targets—including 563 drones and 26 missiles. Nonetheless, two of the missiles struck within 50 meters of the EU mission, according to The Washington Post, Financial Times, Euronews, RBC.ua and Korrespondent.net.
6. With a nod from the White House, U.S. and Russian officials have recently discussed potential energy deals, including Exxon Mobil’s return to the Sakhalin-1 project and U.S. purchases of Russian LNG and nuclear icebreakers, according to The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Meanwhile, Russian fertilizer giant Acron increased U.S. sales by 1.7 times to $380 million in early 2025, making the U.S. its fastest-growing market, according to Kommersant. These developments, alongside ongoing U.S. imports of Russian HEU, raise questions about Washington’s efforts to justify secondary sanctions on Russian trade. Despite these questions, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said this week that India needs to stops buying Russian oil if it wants newly-enacted U.S. tariffs on Indian imports to drop from 50% back to 25%. Data by the U.S. Census bureau shows that U.S.-Russian trade in January-June 2025 totaled $ 2,780 million compared to $ 2,117.5 million in the same period last year, rising by 31.3%.