Russia Matters, 3/14/25

1. In the past month, Russian forces made a net gain of 110 square miles in Ukraine (about 1 Nantucket island), according to the March 12, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. In addition, the Russian army appeared on March 14 to be close to driving Ukraine from all the territory it had seized in Russia’s Kursk region, according to NYT’s March 14 report. The elimination of this salient, which Vladimir Putin discussed during his surprise visit to the Kursk region on March 12, would deprive Volodymyr Zelenskyy of a major bargaining chip in direct negotiations with Moscow if and when they would occur. Based data from ISW, RM’s War Report Card of March 12, 2025 estimates that Ukraine controlled only 79 square miles of the 470 square miles it captured at the height of its Kursk incursion in Sept. 2024: an 83% drop.
2. During their March 11 meeting in Saudi Arabia, high-level U.S. and Ukrainian delegations endorsed the West’s proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict contingent on Russia’s consent to observe it. However, even before Steve Witkoff, a member of the U.S. delegation, could take the proposal for the unconditional ceasefire to Moscow, Vladimir Putin’s chief foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov spoke against it. “This is nothing other than a temporary time-out for Ukrainian soldiers, nothing more. Our goal is a long-term peaceful resolution,” Ushakov said March 13. Speaking later that same day, Putin gave a qualified approval of the proposal, conditioning its adoption on a number of Russian demands. “We start from the position that this cessation should lead to a long-term peace and eliminate the causes of this crisis,” Putin said. “Then there arise questions over monitoring and verification,” said Putin prior to meeting Witkoff, whom he reportedly kept waiting for eight hours. In the absence of Russia’s unequivocal support for the ceasefire proposal, both Putin and Trump took pains to avoid admitting a setback. Trump described Witkoff’s meeting with Putin as productive. “There is a very good chance that this horrible, bloody war can finally come to an end,” Trump claimed. A decision on a phone call or a meeting between Trump and Putin will be made once Witkoff has relayed to Trump the information from the talks, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Witkoff flew from Moscow to Baku upon completing his visit to the Russian capital, with Trump reportedly expecting his aide back in the U.S. so that Trump can “learn more” about the outcome of the talks with Putin on March 17.
3. In addition to Witkoff’s visit to the Russian capital, several more government-to-government contacts have been reported between America and Russia this week as Moscow and Washington continue to explore normalizing the bilateral relationship. The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, and U.S. CIA Director John Ratcliffe agreed to maintain regular contacts during a phone call March 11 to discuss cooperation between their agencies, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Russian and European officials say the U.S. is exploring ways to work with Russia’s energy giant Gazprom on global projects, according to Bloomberg. It has also been earlier reported that U.S. and Russian officials are already discussing issues ranging from the resumption of direct flights and the return of Russian diplomats’ missions in the U.S., to Russian-Ukrainian peace and Russian assistance to the U.S. in communicating with Iran over its nuclear program. Moreover, the Kremlin is exploring its options for a potential meeting between Putin and Trump in April or May in the Middle East, Russian officials told MT.

***

Negotiation Dance Between Trump & Putin

By Jeff Childers, Substack, 3/15/25

Yesterday, we looked at the public negotiation dance playing out between President Trump and President Putin. A new song has begun to play. Reuters ran an encouraging story yesterday afternoon headlined, “After Trump request, Putin says he will let Ukraine troops in Kursk live if they surrender.”

Appropriately (and surreally), it all started yesterday with a Trump tweet on Truth Social, requesting that President Putin spare the lives of Ukrainian troops surrounded in the doomed Kursk salient:

Later in the day, President Putin addressed his Security Council saying he’d read Trump’s appeal. “In this regard, I would like to emphasize that if [Ukrainian troops] lay down their arms and surrender, they will be guaranteed life and decent treatment under international law and the laws of the Russian Federation,” Putin informed his team in a part of the meeting that was publicly broadcast.

Tellingly, President Putin stressed the new policy was in response to Trump’s ask: “To effectively implement the appeal of the US president, a corresponding order from the military-political leadership of Ukraine is needed for its military units to lay down their arms and surrender.”

Bizarrely, Ukraine defiantly insisted its Kursk troops are not surrounded, so there is no reason to surrender. Media reported those crazy claims without criticism, but also without enthusiasm. Nobody seems to believe Zelensky.

As usual, witless corporate media completely missed the mark, clueless to the fact that Putin’s concession shows progress in the delicate peace negotiations. Most media framed the story as Putin’s “demand for Ukraine to surrender.” For example, here’s the Seattle Times’ take:

Media couldn’t see an elephant if it were sitting in the passenger seat. Here’s the actual timeline: yesterday, Putin graciously reviewed the US’s proposed cease-fire, and responded with a bunch of correct but complicating questions, including what happens to the surrounded Ukrainian troops in Kursk? Can they just walk away?

Trump indirectly responded to that question with his tweet. It coyly avoided actually asking for anything, but rather suggested Russia should spare their lives. And Putin, citing Trump’s request, agreed. He promised that if the Ukrainians lay down arms and surrender, he will guarantee their safety. It is a huge improvement —right now, they face imminent death— and more importantly, it resolved one of Putin’s most important questions about the proposed cease-fire’s terms.

🚀 President Trump masterfully deployed a well-known negotiating technique called incremental agreement. Rather than trying to get your adversary to agree to a large, complicated deal, you start by peeling off the easiest issues one-by-one. After your negotiating partner starts saying ‘yes,’ or ‘da,’ each subsequent incremental agreement becomes that much easier, and before you know it, Bob’s your uncle and you have a final deal.

It was a win for both parties. Putin handed Trump a highly visible incremental agreement that went to the heart of Trump’s stated goal: to stop the killing. For his part, Putin garnered points for being reasonable and for visibly working toward a deal—which blows the media’s stonewalling narrative to bits. And the Russian president skillfully jammed the Ukrainians into a painful crack: if they refuse to agree and lay down arms, he’ll then be fully justified in wiping them out.

And then the Americans can blame Kiev, for Zelensky’s stubborn intransigence.

That explains why the Ukrainians are pretending their troops are not surrounded. That unbelievable claim is the only remaining safe spot to hide in. Of course, everyone realizes they should order the troops to put down their weapons, rather than letting the Russians turn them into battlefield chum. But the Kiev regime has long showed a strategic choice of never surrendering. It’s the last thing they want to do.

And very soon now, somebody is going to ask Zelensky the obvious question, why not just order any surrounded troops to surrender? If no troops are surrounded, then asking them to surrender wouldn’t matter, would it?

See what just happened? Trump meaningfully convinced Putin to change Russian military policy—on Twitter. (I know, Truth Social.) Meanwhile, Ukraine’s government is reduced to incredulously denying the battlefield even exists. The game of peace-deal hide-and-go-seek is moving fast, and Zelensky is running out of hiding places. They’ve already chucked the dimunitive former comedian out of the negotiating room. Very soon, the inevitable and only question will be: does Ukraine want peace or not?

YouTube link here.

Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but I tend to think that some of this knowledge is likely to make certain people more complacent about nuclear war. What do you think?

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 2/25/25

The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.

A cartoon version has the conflict begining on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.

There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.

Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.  

The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.

Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin puppets.

It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.

Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.

But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded these same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts. 

THE UKRAINE TIMELINE

World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.

1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.

November 1990:  A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.

Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties,  enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.

1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the  leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.

1997 :: The only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be needless NATO Expansion Far East right till the border of Russia – Sen. Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/hRW47hLL5y

— Rishi Bagree (@rishibagree) June 17, 2022

1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

New Year’s Eve 1999:  After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.

Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.

Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.

He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.” 

Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance.  The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.

2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”

April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,

“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”

A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.

November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements. 

“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.

2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.

2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.

February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.

Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February 2014. (Wikimedia Commons)

March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turn out. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”

April 12, 2014: Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.

May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.

Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.

Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.

2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.

May 12, 2016: U.S. activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.

June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.

German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”

Instead Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”

December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe.  Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO reject them essentially out of hand.  

February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.

Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.

March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretarry of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

May 2023: Ukraine begins counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.

June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November. 

September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.

Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.” 

November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance in a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.

February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents, and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war. 

This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe 

YouTube link to analysis by The Duran.

RT, 3/13/25

Before I assess how I view Ukraine’s readiness for a ceasefire, I would first like to begin by thanking the President of the United States, Mr. Trump, for paying so much attention to resolving the conflict in Ukraine.

We all have enough issues to deal with. But many heads of state, the president of the People’s Republic of China, the Prime Minister of India, the presidents of Brazil and South African Republic are spending a lot of time dealing with this issue. We are thankful to all of them, because this is aimed at achieving a noble mission, a mission to stop hostilities and the loss of human lives.

Secondly, we agree with the proposals to stop hostilities. But our position is that this ceasefire should lead to a long-term peace and eliminate the initial causes of this crisis.

Now, about Ukraine’s readiness to cease hostilities. On the surface it may look like a decision made by Ukraine under US pressure. In reality, I am absolutely convinced that the Ukrainian side should have insisted on this (ceasefire) from the Americans based on how the situation (on the front line) is unfolding, the realities on the ground.

And how is it unfolding? I’m sure many of you know that yesterday I was in Kursk Region and listened to the reports of the head of the General Staff, the commander of the group of forces ‘North’ and his deputy about the situation at the border, specifically in the incursion area of Kursk Region.

What is going on there? The situation there is completely under our control, and the group of forces that invaded our territory is completely isolated and under our complete fire control.

Command over Ukrainian troops in this zone is lost. And if in the first stages, literally a week or two ago, Ukrainian servicemen tried to get out of there in large groups, now it is impossible. They are trying to get out of there in very small groups, two or three people, because everything is under our full fire control. The equipment is completely abandoned. It is impossible to evacuate it. It will remain there. This is already guaranteed.

And if in the coming days there will be a physical blockade, then no one will be able to leave at all. There will be only two ways. To surrender or die.

And in these conditions, I think it would be very good for the Ukrainian side to achieve a truce for at least 30 days.

And we are for it. But there are nuances. What are they? First, what are we going to do with this incursion force in Kursk Region?

If we stop fighting for 30 days, what does it mean? That everyone who is there will leave without a fight? We should let them go after they committed mass crimes against civilians? Or will the Ukrainian leadership order them to lay down their arms. Simply surrender. How will this work? It is not clear.

How will other issues be resolved on all the lines of contact? This is almost 2,000 kilometers.

As you know, Russian troops are advancing almost along the entire front. And there are ongoing military operations to surround rather large groups of enemy forces.

These 30 days — how will they be used? To continue forced mobilization in Ukraine? To receive more arms supplies? To train newly mobilized units? Or will none of this happen?

How will the issues of control and verification be resolved? How can we be guaranteed that nothing like this will happen? How will the control be organized?

I hope that everyone understands this at the level of common sense. These are all serious issues.

Who will give orders to stop hostilities? And what is the price of these orders? Can you imagine? Almost 2,000 kilometers. Who will determine where and who broke the potential ceasefire? Who will be blamed?

These are all questions that demand a thorough examination from both sides.

Therefore, the idea itself is the right one, and we certainly support it. But there are questions that we have to discuss. I think we need to work with our American partners. Maybe I will speak to President Trump. But we support the idea of ending this conflict with peaceful means.

By Tarik Cyril Amar, Website, 3/9/25

This is a text from my informal series trying to convey better information about Russian politics than can be found in Western mainstream media. I pay particular attention to statements, policies, or events that the latter either distort, neglect, or entirely ignore – that is, a lot. While I cannot possibly fill that gap, I hope my efforts help Western readers in search of better and more serious coverage.

Here, I address a recent meeting (on 6 March) between the president of Russia Vladimir Putin and about twenty representatives of the Defenders of the Fatherland Fund, all of them women. The Russian presidency’s website has posted a long (over two hours) recording and a full transcript of the meeting, which are the basis for this text. [http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76418]

The fund is an important institution that emerged from the war between Russia, on one side, and Ukraine and the West, on the other. It was founded by presidential degree in 2023 and has branches in all of Russia’s 89 regions. Its “principle task,” to quote the website of the Russian government, “is individual social assistance and support [сопровождение] of veterans of the Special Military Operation [that is, the war in Ukraine] and of the families of fallen soldiers.”

I had to select aspects that appeared most interesting to me. But those who know Russian will see that it is very well worth listening to the whole meeting.

Some of the meeting consisted of questions, requests, and answers that concerned the details of the assistance and services offered by the fund and Russian public authorities, at the general, that is, federal as well as the regional level, to veterans of the war in Ukraine – or, in the official parlance that was used here, the “special military operation” – and their families. Such issues included, for instance, the standardization of these measures, requests to routinely extend them to further categories of family members, and the status of former prisoners who have volunteered for military service.

Here, incidentally, Putin made clear that this policy – often distorted in the West – makes distinctions: Certain categories of crime, such as treason and terrorism, disqualify prisoners. In essence, only those who have committed more or less ordinary crimes can volunteer.

Another thread running through the meeting may surprise those in the West who rely on Western mainstream media for their (dis)information about Russia: With many of the women present either the widows or mothers of fallen soldiers, the losses and sacrifices of war were by no means avoided in this recorded discussion with the president that is now posted on the presidency’s website. That is a notable fact worth paying attention to.

If anything, the death of Russian servicemen was a central, recurring topic of the meeting, coming up time and again and at length. In a generally patriotic register, unsurprisingly – as, by the way, it would be on any similar occasion in, for instance, the US, the UK, or France. Yet the key point to note is that Putin and his government do not rely on silencing the memory of loss. It is true that Russia keeps its total casualties secret, as does Ukraine. That is what states at war often do. But anyone who things that the Russian public is not permitted to think about the fact that Russians die in this war, needs to watch this discussion: the opposite is true.

Putin also repeatedly took the opportunity to acknowledge the military service, heroism, and sacrifice of the soldiers fighting at the front. Addressing the case of a soldier who had sacrificed himself to protect his unit, the president sent a warning to those in the West, clearly especially French president Emmanuel Macron, who “want to return to the times of Napoleon and forget how that ended.” “Indeed,” he then generalized, “all mistakes of our enemies [yes, that’s the term he used], [our] opponents have begun with just that – with underestimating” Russia and, in particular, its unity.

Putin praised the contribution of, by implication, all civilians in the rear and especially women, to the war effort in terms that may, at first sight, appear rhetorical. But, as he underlined, he meant it: “Your work also brings victory closer […] It’s not hyperbole […] your work facilitates the unity of [our society] around our boys, who are fighting, around our motherland. That is the aim of your work and it accomplished this task. And that is a most important condition for achieving success, I say [that] entirely deliberately.”

What made this explanation particularly interesting was the reference point Putin chose, namely World War I. Not, let’s note, World War II or the Great Fatherland War, that is, the specific struggle against Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945. So much, again, for those in the West who cannot grasp that Putin is not obsessed with the Soviet Union. His horizon is Russia’s history as a whole and hence much wider.

Regarding his view of World War I, Putin revealed two intriguing facets of his thinking. He believes that, first, the Russian Empire of the day was merely months away from winning instead of losing (as it did in 1917, the year of two revolutions) and, secondly, that the decisive factor in its defeat was social disunity. In his own words, “in Russia [social unity] was not achieved during World War I, [instead, our] society began to break down, fall apart […] The fact that our country did not make it through to victory by merely a few months was linked to [that] disintegration of [our] society.”

Unsurprisingly, in that area, Putin sees a decisive difference with the, that is, his Russia of today: “And you,” he assured his audience, but surely also speaking about himself, “your position – that is the most important [thing]: that it unites the country. That is one of the elementary conditions of achieving success.”

Regarding the current search for a way to end the war by Russia and the US (under new management) – despite the Zelensky regime’s delusions and the NATO-EU Europeans’ best efforts to keep the bloodbath going – there were no surprises at this meeting. But there was a particularly and – most likely deliberate – signal that Moscow is not ready to make concessions on what it sees as its vital national interests and therefore indispensable war aims: It was the bereaved mother of a fallen (and highly decorated) 21-one year old elite soldier (from the legendary 810th Separate Guards Naval Infantry Brigade) who stressed that everyone was waiting for “victory” and that “we have to go through with this to the end; we must not make concessions to anyone.”

Unsurprisingly, the president agreed, confirming that concessions are not part of the plan. And that, to quote in full an important passage, “we [Russia] must select for ourselves […] a […] peace which will satisfy us and which will secure tranquility for our country in a long historical perspective. We need nothing from others, but we won’t hand over what is ours. And we need such a kind [of peace], precisely such a kind, which will secure the stable development of our country in conditions of peace and security.”

The phrase “We need nothing from others, but we won’t hand over what is ours” deserves special attention. Not only because it was widely reported in the Russian media. But also because it is important to be clear about what it implies: As Moscow now claims that both Crimea and four eastern oblast administrative regions in Ukraine now belong to Russia, it is crucial not to misunderstand its president here: For Russia – like or not – these regions are now formerly Ukrainian and currently part of “ours.” Putin’s statement was emphatically not about Russia’s border with Ukraine as of 2013.

Western observers and politicians would do very well to note at least three points from this meeting: 1) The above: Russia may be ready for a compromise but it will not compromise its key war aims, and that concerns, of course, not only territory but also Ukraine’s real neutrality. 2) Putin is confident – and probably with good reason – that Russia is united in pursuing these aims. If negotiations should lead nowhere, Moscow will not be afraid of continuing the war. 3) The Russian government sincerely believes – and I guess, so do many Russians – that this is a fight that is fundamentally defensive and that Russia must win it to secure a prosperous and independent future. That again means that Moscow will not agree to a peace – or truce – that does not reflect its de facto victory.