Putin’s Senior Aide Patrushev Made Some Predictions About Trump, China, & Eastern Europe
Andrew Korybko
Jan 21, 2025
The outcome of Trump’s continued struggle with the “deep state” will reverberate across the world.
Putin’s senior aide Nikolai Patrushev, who ran the FSB for nearly a decade (1999-2008) before chairing the Security Council for over 15 years till recently (2008-2024), made three predictions about international affairs in his latest interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda. The first concerns the continued struggle between Trump and the “deep state”, the latter of which can be described as US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, some members of whom are known to oppose him.
Patrushev expects Trump to implement domestic and foreign policies that are practically the opposite of Biden’s, which he characterizes as pragmatic and more aligned with the interests of the American people, but he’s unsure whether he’ll ultimately succeed due to internal resistance. The precedent from his first term bodes ill for his second, but the outcome of this latest struggle will reverberate for decades seeing as how the world is undergoing far-reaching systemic changes last seen since 1991.
On that topic, Patrushev assessed that one of Trump’s top foreign policy priorities is to ramp up pressure on China, including by artificially exacerbating bilateral tensions. He then reminded everyone that “For us, China has been and remains a most important partner, with whom we have relations of especially privileged strategic cooperation. These relations are not subject to the situation, they remain regardless of who occupies the Oval Office.” This can be interpreted as signaling that Russia won’t backstab China.
In other words, Trump’s declared goal of “un-uniting” those two will fail, thus meaning that no worsening of their relations will occur. This shouldn’t be misunderstood as suggesting that Russia will go out of its way to help China at the expense of provoking the US’ wrath, however, seeing as how China hasn’t done that for Russia. After all, the Chinese-based BRICS Bank and SCO comply with US sanctions against Russia as do some of its local banks, all of which is proven in the preceding hyperlinked analyses.
A Chinese company also pulled out of Russia’s Arctic LNG 2 megaproject under sanctions duress too while private drone companies sell their wares to Ukraine. At the same time, Russia continues arming China’s Indian rival to the teeth despite their nascent rapprochement, and it also authorized the shipment of jointly Indian produced BrahMos supersonic missiles to the Philippines a year ago. Accordingly, while Sino-Russo ties will remain strong, some differences will nevertheless still exist.
And finally, the last prediction that Patrushev made in his latest interview was that Moldova and Ukraine might cease to exist as a result of their anti-Russian policies, with the first possibly “becoming part of another state” in an allusion to joining Romania like some nationalists there want to have happen. As for the second, his ominous prediction was preceded by him remarking about how such policies “are destroying once prosperous cities in Ukraine, including Kharkov, Odessa, Nikolaev, and Dnepropetrovsk.”
While some might believe that he’s implying that Russian forces will sweep across both to the Romanian and Polish borders respectively, it’s much more likely that he simply wants Moldova, Ukraine, and their shared American patron to bear in mind the possibly existential stakes if the conflict further escalates. Of course, it’s also possible that one or both collapse under the weight of their anti-Russian policies due to a combination of domestic instability and Russian pressure, but that probably isn’t what he meant.
This take on his intentions stems from what else he said about the need for Russia to only negotiate with the US, not with the UK, the EU, or anyone else. He reaffirmed that Russia will achieve its goals in the conflict and won’t cede any territory, but the overall impression is that Russia is interested in compromising with Trump the pragmatist, though the potential failure to agree to a decent deal (perhaps due to “deep state” subterfuge) could doom Moldova and Ukraine (at least with time).
Reflecting on Patrushev’s predictions, all three are grounded in a solid understanding of their associated dynamics, which is to be expected from someone like him. What unites them all is whether or not Trump will succeed in overcoming “deep state” opposition to his policies, thus making this domestic aspect of his platform globally important. If he does, then the US will likely cut a deal in Ukraine in order to “Pivot (back) to Asia” pronto, while it’ll likely remain in Ukraine and possibly even escalate if he doesn’t.
Little Andy, in order to 'cut a deal' you've got to have something to deal with.
What commentators who poise the issue as 'Trump vs the Deep State' miss is that the so-called 'Deep State' cannot be separated from the will of the majority faction of the ruing class. Trump may delude himself that he can overcome the will of a majority of his peers but I don't think so.
And all this talk of Trump being a pragmatist ignores the fact that this pragmatism applies only to what affects Trump personally. Consider that much of his laundry list is anything but pragmatic.
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Why is Russiagate’s Origin Story Redacted? – Matt Taibbi Talks to Aaron Mate
January 20, 2025
By Matt Taibbi, Racket, 1/7/25
On January 11, 2019, at the peak of Russiagate mania and months before the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s deflating report, the New York Times for the first time made public a remarkable fact. In “FBI Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia,” a trio of Times reporters revealed that in the days after Donald Trump’s May 2017 firing of FBI Director James Comey, the Bureau “began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia.”
The country first learned the FBI was investigating “any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government” when Comey testified in Congress in March, 2017. Comey then was referring to the FBI’s much-ballyhooed Crossfire Hurricane probe, which was opened in July, 2016 and targeted the likes of George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.
This second FBI probe disclosed by the Times in 2019 carried far more explosive implications, making its delayed disclosure unusual. It’s one thing for the FBI to investigate possible “links” between foreigners and a presidential campaign. It’s another for Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe to open an investigation into whether a sitting president, i.e. his boss, is “working on behalf of Russia.”
“Imagine even opening this investigation up on just your average Joe,” says Aaron Maté of RealClear Investigations. “That would be crazy, unless you have some real predication. But this is the fucking president. Andrew McCabe decides that he can do this. On what basis?”
Either the FBI had evidence to start such an investigation, which would be damning to Trump, or it didn’t, which would be damning to the FBI. Which was it?
The 2019 Times story suggested the FBI probe was begun in part to determine if Trump’s “firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.” Beyond that, details were scant, and once the new investigation was folded into Robert Mueller’s inquiry, the reasons for its opening disappeared into the proverbial dustbin of history. Even when Special Counsel John Durham issued his report on the FBI and Crossfire Hurricane, he made just one mention of this second investigation, saying it was beyond his purview:
We also have not interpreted the Order as directing us to consider the handling ofthe investigation into President Trump opened by the FBI on May 16, 2017.
Nobody seemed to care what this second investigation was about, or what evidence was submitted to justify its opening, until Aaron and RealClear in December, 2022 sent a Freedom of Information request. They sought a copy of the original document explaining why the FBI opened a new “Sensitive Investigative Matter” on May 16, 2017. It took over two full years for the Bureau to respond. The answer was a middle finger: six pages, almost entirely redacted, with the exception of a few paragraphs.
THRILLING READING: From the FBI’s newly released document
The released documents weren’t entirely bereft of information. In fact, they should contain enough to pique the curiosity of any incoming officials looking for places to start unraveling the Russiagate mystery. Whatever’s underneath these redactions is embarrassing to someone. Aaron yesterday published a story on the subject at RealClear Investigations which I recommend everyone read. This document is one of a series of Russiagate-related revelations about to hit the public.
The memo is included below. Apart from the fact that it names former FBI Counsel James Baker and Counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap at the top, the most interesting section is probably this passage:
The FBI is opening [redacted] based on an articulabe factual basis that reasonably indicates that President Donald Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Russian government which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States.
The intro of the just-released memo on the second Trump-Russia investigation
If your first thought is, “How can a person ‘unwittingly’ be involved in activities on behalf of Russia that ‘may constitute violations of criminal law’?” you’re not alone. I reached out to multiple lawyers with experience working on the Hill to ask how one betrays the country criminally without intent. One sent back a “shrug” emoji, while another said this was the problem with the new generation of broad national security probes. The FBI often does investigations that are “not tethered to or bound by criminal law.”
“Unwittingly, without his knowledge, he’s being manipulated by the Kremlin,” laughs Maté. “It’s unbelievable.”
McCabe, now an author and sometimes contributor to CNN, said in 2019 that Trump’s “own words” prompted the investigation. Aaron attempted to reach him for his RealClear story, but he did not respond.
This is not a small issue. The FBI opening an investigation into a presidential candidate on the thinnest of pretexts, then continuing it despite repeated dead ends, then leaking word of an active investigation despite a total lack of results, and finally opening a second probe into a sitting president after their Director was fired, all speak to a law enforcement agency that was coloring way outside its lines, involving itself in unprecedented political interference. Whoever takes over the Bureau needs to unredact these and many other pages.
“It’s nuts,” says Maté. “Trump is in office, and they decide after he fires Comey to open a second investigation just of him, not his campaign but him, suspecting him of being a Russian agent. Why?” He pauses. “We know the pretext for the first investigation was George Papadopoulos. What’s the reason for this one? Probably the firing of Comey is in there in the redaction, but there’s got to be something else too.”
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi criticized the Russian side's decision to stop implementing intergovernmental memorandums and close Japanese centers, Sankei Shimbun reports .
"It is unacceptable for the memorandum to be suspended unilaterally ," Hayashi noted.
( Collapse )
He promised that the Japanese government would respond to this situation after receiving the necessary confirmation from the Russian side.
Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that Moscow would consider Tokyo's initiatives to resume dialogue after the country's practical steps to abandon its unfriendly policies.
First, we make territorial claims against Russia, impose sanctions against it, freeze its assets, help the Nazi regime in Ukraine, and then we are surprised by the closure of Japanese centers and the termination of intergovernmental memoranda. Japanese chutzpah is like that.
COST OF POTATOES, COST OF BLOOD – WHEN INFLATION IS LETHAL
by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
No government can survive when it fails to control the cost in blood on the battlefield and the cost of potatoes, butter and bread on the home front. The combination at the same time is politically lethal.
US President Lyndon Johnson learned this between 1965 and 1968, when the rate of domestic inflation was quadrupling and the Killed in Action (KIA) numbers in the Vietnam War jumped ninefold. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he was withdrawing from the presidential election later that year.*
President Vladimir Putin has managed the KIA half of the lethal equation by fighting a limited expeditionary campaign in the Ukraine, restricting the General Staff’s resources, plans, targets and operations; attacking with standoff, mostly airborne weapons; shifting the casualty burden of ground fighting to socially marginal groups; and keeping the majority of voters out of the line of fire. His success is in high and stable voter support.
For the time being, the president has escaped public blame for the inflationary surge in food prices over 2024. According to one report, beets were up by 71%; potatoes by 65.4%; eggs by 48.5%; garlic by 41%; salt by 27%; vegetable oil by 24%; butter by 22%. According to the AB Centre calculation, the price of potatoes jumped 65.2%; olive oil, 35.5%; butter, 35.2%; garlic, 24.7%; beets, 22.7%.
The state statistics agency Rosstat claims that the overall, official inflation rate for the country was 8.6% for 2024, while retail food price inflation, according to Rosstat was 9.5%. No one believes this, according to consumer polling and expert analyses. Consumer anticipation and expert forecasts are for the surge in food prices to continue this year at rates, depending on the food item, of between 50% and 100%.
Sergei Glazyev, a well-known public economist, presidential candidate in 2004, and a senior official of the Eurasian Economic Commission, is blunt on his attack. “Rising prices are hitting everyone’s pockets and making everyone poorer. Both citizens and businesses. Only banks are swollen with money.
“The Bank of Russia’s policy is driving the economy into a stagflationary trap, in which falling production, devaluation of the ruble and rising inflation are mutually reinforcing: an increase in the key rate [21%] compresses production lending, which leads to lower volumes and higher production costs, the technical level and production efficiency decline, the competitiveness of the economy decreases, which is offset by the devaluation of the ruble. That then causes a new surge of inflation, which the Bank of Russia is trying to pay off with another increase in the key rate. After ten years of ineffectual targeting of inflation, it is clear that the continuation of this insane policy has no prospects.” https://t.me/glazieview/6705
Mikhail Delyagin, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, is just as scathing. He says the official rate of inflation for 2024 was not 8.5%, as the government insists, but closer to 19%; he warns it may reach 29% this year. The Central Bank interest rate of 21% is to blame: “this, in my opinion, is more destructive than the use of tactical nuclear weapons. But there is some good news. If tactical nuclear weapons are suddenly used against us, it will certainly be a severe shock and many people will die, but for the economy as a whole it will not be a greater shock than the policy of Elvira Sakhipzadovna Nabiullina. And [Finance Minister] Anton Germanovich Siluanov, who should also not be forgotten.”
“However, as we know, at the December 20 [2024] meeting, the Central Bank did not raise the key rate to 23 percent once again, as many, including me, expected. This is probably a good signal, because by raising the key rate in conditions of a shortage of money supply, the Bank of Russia thereby accelerates inflation. So far, Elvira Sakhipzadovna has refused to further accelerate inflation, but there is no guarantee that she will not return to this practice at the beginning of next year.”
So serious has been the failure of Central Bank Governor Nabiullina to halt inflation, and so widespread is public suspicion of her competence and intentions, on January 13 the Central Bank issued a public release denying that Nabiullina is planning a freeze on Russian individual savings by blocking withdrawals from bank accounts. “It is quite obvious that in any market economy, of which bank lending is an integral part, such a step is unthinkable,” the Central Bank has announced on Telegram. “Firstly, it will immediately undermine confidence in the banking system and put an end to lending to the economy. Secondly, freezing deposits will not help reduce inflation. People will rush to invest money not in deposits, but in goods and real estate with the corresponding sad consequences for rising prices.”
National polling of public attitudes towards leading officials has never identified Nabiullina positively. In open-ended questioning of those whom voters trust, Nabiullina’s name has not come up. Instead, she appears fifteenth on the countrywide list of officials and politicians who are distrusted – she ranks equal to the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov; State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, and the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin.
No critic of the domestic inflation and Central Bank policy mentions President Putin. He is understood, however, to be Nabiullina’s protector against her domestic critics. In the past month, however, he has been pressed to qualify this.
At his press conference on December 19, the day before the Central Bank met to decide whether to raise the interest rate to 23%, Putin said: “Only yesterday, while preparing for today’s event, I talked to the Central Bank Governor, and Elvira Nabiullina told me that the inflation rate has already reached about 9.2–9.3 percent year-to-date. That said, salaries have increased by 9 percent, and I am talking about an increase in real terms, minus inflation. In addition, disposable incomes have also increased. So, the overall situation is stable and, let me reiterate, solid.”
The Kremlin record claims there has been no official meeting between Putin and Nabiullina since September 2019.
At his December press conference, Putin acknowledged “there are certain challenges with inflation and with the economy heating up. Therefore, the Government and the Central Bank have been seeking to ensure a soft landing.” Asked by a reporter what the interest rate decision would be, Putin added: “she does not tell me what the rate will be. Perhaps she does not know this yet, because they discuss it at the board meeting, their Komsomol cell, and make the final decision in the course of the discussion. I hope that it will be balanced and will meet today’s requirements.”
“Balance” is Putin’s term for satisfying each of his oligarch, military, and voter constituencies at the same time as they contradict and oppose each other.
For timely release of data on Russian inflation with accurate analysis, follow the Sovereign Economy Telegram platform:
The top chart illustrates runaway food price inflation which the Central Bank has been unable to control. The bottom chart shows the impact of the Central Bank’s key interest rate depressing new credit for all categories of borrowing except car loans.
The gap between the government’s inflation target and the year-end outcome is obvious. So too is the gap between the impact of the Central Bank’s 21% interest rate and food price inflation which is not responding to credit controls. The vigorous domestic debate on what and who is to blame, and what is to be done, has not been suppressed.
President Donald Trump tried to exploit this by announcing this week: “Russia is kinda in big trouble. You take a look at their economy, you take a look at their inflation in Russia. I got along with [Putin] great, I would hope he wants to make a deal.”
Nabiullina has blamed the rise of Russian incomes for stimulating demand faster than producers can supply their products. Her critics, including liberal market think tanks like the Gaidar Institute, point out that the food price explosion is responsible for about 40% of the rising inflation rate. For that reason, the Gaidarites acknowledge that consumer inflation is at least 40% impervious to the measures of the Central Bank because the latter aim at reducing credit-fuelled demand, when food is purchased from salary, not on credit from banks.
According to the data reported by RANEPA, a government economic policy think tank, “after utility tariffs were indexed by 9.9% in July, their contribution to annual inflation began to exceed the contribution of non-food products. Although if we consider the situation as a whole for 2024, the weight of non–food products in the consumer basket is still higher (34%) than services, about 28%. But both fall short of eating.”
Nabiullina was opposed to the Special Military Operation (SVO) from the beginning. Reportedly, she tried to resign in protest in March 2022 as the deadline for her retirement or reappointment approached. Putin then “balanced” her third-term reappointment with restrictions on the General Staff’s operations in the Ukraine.
Since 2022 Nabiullina and her supporters have blamed the war for the demand push on prices. This has turned the domestic policy debate on inflation into a fight over defence spending and the objectives of the war. In this fight, US warfighters in Washington view Nabiullina as a useful advocate of the end-of-war terms which Trump is proposing to Putin – she is one of the reasons for Washington’s confidence Trump will succeed.
A paper published on January 10 by Chatham House, the British warfighter, advises Trump to exploit the Nabiullina opportunity. “The consequence of such high interest rates is that the economy will slow, perhaps very sharply. Putin therefore faces an acute dilemma: to back the central bank’s effort to keep inflation low at the risk of a recession; or to keep the economy on fire and let inflation rip. It is this dilemma that gives leverage to the incoming Trump administration. By acting to restrict Russia’s access to foreign exchange, the US can heap more pressure on the rouble and make Putin’s choice a more painful one.”
At the State Duma, Nabiullina’s line that the war is the cause of inflation is repudiated by Delyagin. “The share of residents with incomes of 150-200 thousand rubles increased by only 1.1%, and with earnings over Rb200,000, by no more than 0.5%. At the same time, to the contrary, the number of the group which receives Rb100,000-Rb150,000 monthly decreased by 1.8%. At the same time, the majority of our compatriots — 66% of them — earn up to 40,000 rubles a month.”
“Generally speaking, people who participate in the Special Military Operation, as we are told, receive more than 150,000 rubles a month. With a small caveat. They use this money to buy the necessary equipment for themselves — let’s say it’s politically correct. In some cases, at least… In other words, many of them have significantly increased their expenses. Therefore, the increase in welfare in their case may not be so noticeable. These words are confirmed by many soldiers who are on the line of contact today: ‘We mainly buy generators, gasoline, tools, building materials, uniforms (it doesn’t always) happen — we burned out in position, literally and figuratively; we buy more food, cigarettes; we discount for battery needs every month. There are no canteens at the front, we get canned food and each squad cooks for itself…They probably tell you beautiful things on TV, but there’s not much that’s beautiful here,’ says one of the combat commanders.”
In Delyagin’s analysis, “in general, at least two-thirds of the country’s population does not have significant savings, and therefore they are completely defenceless against any negative development. And, of course, there will be more and more of them in the conditions of military operations. 5% of Russians are poor: they don’t even have enough money for food…16% is enough for food…even buying clothes is a problem. 40% have money for food and clothes, but face difficulties when buying durable goods. Both of these categories live in poverty: its level is 56%. Such data come from two years ago. And it seems that they are most likely still relevant. If the situation hasn’t worsened.”
A month ago, Delyagin escalated his attack on Nabiullina. “It is impossible to slow down the car by stepping on the gas. Similarly, it is impossible to stop inflation by actions which only accelerate it. Nabiullina herself admits that inflation is caused by non-monetary reasons which have nothing to do with the key interest rate. And raising the key interest rate to combat inflation today is the same as giving one person a pill to make another person’s headache go away. She herself admits the absurdity of her policy.”
“One of the government agencies has reported that a reduction in inflation to [the Central Bank target of] 4% was possible with a key rate of 52%. But then, then, of course, they denied all that. But this fully characterizes the Central Bank’s policy…it’s clearly about slowing down the economy, not inflation. The fact is that an increase in the interest rate in conditions of a shortage of money accelerates inflation, rather than slows it down. When the rate rises, inflation accelerates, which is statistically well confirmed. It is very difficult to slow down the car by accelerating it at the same time.”
“In order to really limit the growth of inflation, it is necessary to ensure the growth of business activity so that goods are produced in Russia, and not in China. To do this, we need to lower the interest rate by making credit available, as well as limit financial speculation.”
Left: Mikhail Delyagin; right, Sergei Glazyev.
Glazyev, who led and lost the fight to replace Nabiullina at the Central Bank in March 2022, has retained his post as the minister-level commissioner for integration and macronomies at the Eurasian Economic Commission. That too is a Putin appointment; it keeps Glazyev out of direct involvement in Russian economic policymaking.
Notwithstanding, Glazyev continues in speeches, papers, and social media appearances to target Nabiullina and exploit Putin’s worry at the rise of voter hostility. There have been multiple failures of state regulation and not only at the Central Bank, Glazyev has argued. Accordingly, he advocates much more state action than he knows Putin is willing to accept. Full mobilization of the war economy, in fact.
“The main factors of inflation,” Glazyev has written, “ranking them by their contribution, are:
1. Cost inflation due to faster growth of transport and energy tariffs (the area of responsibility of the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation) amounts to at least 60% of the growth in the consumer price index (CPI). Thus, the increase in the cost of freight transportation in 2022-2024 is more than 20% per year, the increase in the cost of fuel and electricity exceeds 12% per annum.
2. The devaluation of the ruble in 2024 is responsible for 30% of the CPI growth, as technological and consumer imports account for up to 40% of the turnover. It is estimated that a 10 ruble depreciation to the dollar leads to a 2% increase in inflation.
3. An increase in the key rate of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation by 1% leads to an increase in cost inflation (forced price and tariff increases) by 0.24%, reducing demand-side inflation by only 0.2%, that is, the net effect of a further increase in the key rate is negative. The increase in the rate from 7.5% to 21% led to an additional increase in prices of at least 0.6%.
The contribution of the consolidated budget deficit, which is within the generally accepted norm, is much less than these three factors.”
FIVE-YEAR TRAJECTORY OF THE CENTRAL BANK’S KEY INTEREST RATE, 2020-25
Glazyev’s analysis of the causes of rouble devaluation accuse Nabiullina of encouraging currency speculation and the drain of Russian capital offshore. “The main factors of devaluation (ranking by contribution):
1. The refusal of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation to protect the stability of the ruble, prescribed by Article 75 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The Bank of Russia has placed the ruble’s exchange rate in the hands of speculators, both our banks and Western players (Forex market). The manipulative nature of trading is proved by the difference between the Forex and interbank market rates, which reached 6 rubles (5%) on November 27, 2024.
The contribution of this factor is 60%.
2. Export of private capital (absence of currency control), first of all, reduction of external corporate debt (by $200 billion over three years). Reduction of the standard for the mandatory sale of foreign currency earnings. The contribution of the factor is 30%.
3. Valuing the savings of businesses and the public. The contribution of the factor is 10%.”
FIVE-YEAR TRAJECTORY OF THE ROUBLE-USD EXCHANGE RATE, 2020-25
Glazyev and Delyagin both advocate the state takeover of commercial banking by a new scheme of regulation and state bank operations: “To get out of the stagflationary trap, it is necessary to stabilize the ruble exchange rate and deploy targeted lending channels for the manufacturing sector, as well as suppress non-monetary causes of inflation by immediately taking the following measures:
1. Fix the currency position of commercial banks by blocking their speculative game against the ruble.
2. Restore the mandatory rule for 80% sale of foreign exchange earnings by exporters.
3. Cancel insurance of foreign currency deposits by the Deposit Insurance Agency, switching from the population’s demand for foreign currency to its sale.
4. Stop quoting the dollar and the euro by the Bank of Russia and the Moscow Stock Exchange, nationalize it, cracking down on speculative hype and manipulation of the ruble exchange rate.
5. To introduce a direct quotation of the ruble to the yuan and the currencies of other major partners, and to set the limits of fluctuations in the ruble exchange rate by the decision of the Central Bank. Create a distributed foreign exchange reserve in quoted currencies.
6. Resume the currency and credit swap between the central banks of Russia and China, and agree on the same with India.
7. Complete the transition to national currencies in foreign trade.
8. Include a special instrument for refinancing banks in order to lend exports at a rate of no more than 5%.
9. Block the channels of capital outflow for non-trading operations, including capital withdrawal in the interest of non-residents from unfriendly countries in accordance with the decrees of the President of Russia on the protection of the country’s financial system.
10. Fill the NWF [National Wealth Fund] with gold and other inflation-proof assets.”
“The launch of a refinancing mechanism for the manufacturing sector requires:
1. Deployment of special bank refinancing tools for lending purposes: investments provided for by national projects and state programs; expenses incurred by enterprises in order to fulfill government orders; expenses of the Russian Government for the purchase of goods of domestic production in the State Reserve; working capital of enterprises for the purchase of domestic equipment; leasing of machinery and equipment of domestic production; mortgages and housing construction; investments in the creation of import-substituting industries; investments in deepening the processing of raw materials; investments in infrastructure development;
investments under the SPIC and other investment agreements with the participation of the state;
innovative projects; investments in the creation of new technological industries; state development institutions.”
“The rate for final borrowers on these refinancing instruments should not exceed 2%, and for banks – from 0.5% to 1.5% – the administration by banks should apply the intended use of loans. Participating banks should be fully responsible for the targeted use of allocated loans and monitor their spending by borrowers.
2. The introduction of the digital ruble for foreign trade and credit transactions, including those carried out through the above-mentioned special refinancing instruments in order to automatically monitor the targeted use of loans.
3. Termination of the Central Bank’s deposit operations and issuance of bonds, which suck money out of the economy and cut off bank credit from the manufacturing sector.”
The Communist Party (KPRF), which currently holds most of the opposition seats (57) in the State Duma, has been more reluctant than Delyagin and Glazyev to attack Nabiullina directly, and also less capable of producing for voters an alternative plan for state action to cover the entire economy. Compared to the non-communist opposition, the KPRF is more timorous as nationalizers and state planners. In November, for example, Sergei Obukhov called for state price regulation for “essential products, such as bread, milk, sugar, and baby food.”
Left, source: https://kprf.ru/activity/prices/230255.html ;
right, KPRF deputy Dr Sergei Obukhov. He is Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on the Development of Civil Society, and Secretary of the Central Committee of the KPRF.
Obukhov has echoed Delyagin and Glazyev in attacking monopoly manipulation of the retail prices for foodstuffs, but he has directed his remedy at urging the government to intensify the efforts of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) to combat cartel pricing.
“A gentleman’s agreement has been concluded with the heads of the retail chains not to raise retail prices for bread too much. It would seem that the problem has been solved? Unfortunately not…Based on the same answer, it follows, literally, that ‘… the food retail markets are generally competitive with a large number of participants.’ In other words, in order not to be defeated in a tough competition, companies which have concluded such ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ can break them at any time. This is the macroeconomic landscape we currently have. Everything is more or less fine in it, except for inflation, which is a catastrophic situation.”
“Why the president considers the fight against inflation a priority and why he gave the regulator full carte blanche is understandable,” Obukhov says. “We don’t want to end up like in Turkey. Recall that after an unsuccessful experiment with low rates and high inflation, they have been keeping the rate at 50% for almost a year and have so far only been able to reduce inflation from 70% to 50% in annual terms. So Turkey still has a long period of extremely tough PrEP ahead of it.”
“It is also appropriate to recall the price that had to be paid for stopping inflation in the United States in the early 1980s. Inflation there was comparable to ours in terms of level, but it lasted longer, so high inflation expectations managed to gain a foothold (this has not happened in our country yet, but it is about to happen if inflation is not stopped soon)… It is clear that we certainly do not need to bring our inflation to the state of the USA in the 1970s or of modern Turkey: we do not want a 50% rate for years or a recession with 10% unemployment. The longer the decisive fight against inflation is delayed, the more costly it will be. But it’s not just that. Right now, the president has other reasons for resolutely fighting inflation, including political ones.”
“After all, in the near future – in the autumn of 2026 – we will have elections to the State Duma, and with such inflation, it will be very problematic for the ruling party to successfully participate in these elections. People feel inflation in their refrigerator, and economic growth figures, even if they are very impressive, are still a feature from the TV. No slowdown in economic growth or even a recession will worry the population if it is not accompanied by mass unemployment, but this certainly does not threaten us in the foreseeable future. So the authorities may well go to the polls with a high key rate and low economic growth rates, but not with such inflation as it is now. After all, in the end the refrigerator always wins over the TV in shaping public opinion.”
[*] The lead image is a cartoon by John Fischetti in the Chicago Daily News, September 9, 1969. Richard Nixon had won the election of November 1968, but a year into his term he was facing the same lethal combination as President Johnson the year before of mounting war casualties and rising consumer inflation.
NATO as the Fly in Russia’s Baltic Sea Soup
Posted on January 22, 2025 by Conor Gallagher
Last week NATO announced that it is increasing its presence in the Baltic Sea. The pretext is damage in recent months to undersea cables allegedly caused by ships associated with Russia’s “shadow fleet.”
Anonymous intelligence officials admit to Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post that there’s really nothing nefarious about the incidents; they were just accidents. Nevertheless the West is using it as an opportunity to check off three boxes: push ahead with more military encirclement of Russia, harass Russia’s oil trade, and gaslight the public in order to sell increased defense budgets with the corresponding social spending cuts.
The new NATO operation purportedly in response to the damaged cables involves more ships, surveillance planes, drones in the air and underwater, and other types of intelligence gathering. The U.K. — that AI superpower in the North Sea — is leading the charge on an AI-based system to track suspicious ships in the Baltic. The Commander Task Force Baltic Command Center in Germany’s Baltic port city of Rostock will take a lead role in oversight. The operation is called “Baltic Sentry.”
“If the Russians see that we are present there, the likelihood of such sabotage acts immediately decreases, because saboteurs can be caught in the act, and once caught, it’s much easier to deal with them,” Arjen Warnaar, commander of NATO’s Standing Naval Maritime Group 1, told the Estonian ERR news outlet.
The reason for NATO’s beefed up presence is predicated on a lie, however — at least according to some anonymous Western intelligence officials.
The Washington Post cited several from the US and Europe in a Sunday report highlighting that damage in recent months to underwater power and communications cables in the Baltic was more likely than not the result of simple maritime accidents rather than nefarious actions from Moscow. That would hardly be surprising. According to Telegeography, cables and other underwater infrastructure suffer minor damage all the time:
Submarine cables break all the time. On average, two to four break somewhere in the world every week. While damage is more common in some areas than others, these breaks—or “faults”—eventually happen to almost every cable…
Most come from fishing equipment, normal anchoring activity, and natural disasters like undersea earthquakes. Internal component or equipment failure causes another, smaller category of faults.
And in none of these cases are we talking about the sophisticated level of destruction like in the case of the Nord Stream pipelines. These are all relatively benign incidents that caused little disruption, were quickly repaired, and likely would have gone mostly unnoticed in absence of NATO hullabaloo and media attention.
Instead Western officials have seized on the cable damage to make escalatory statements and float the idea of closing the “NATO lake” to Russian ships. Some of the NATO Keystone Cops in the Baltics and elsewhere probably are crazy enough to try some funny business to effectively shut down a few of Russia’s busiest ports on the Baltic (which might help explain Bezos’ WaPo piece throwing cold water on the allegations of Russian sabotage).
Upon the announcement that Finland and Sweden would join NATO, former Secretary General of the military bloc Anders Fogh Rasmussen proclaimed it was a strategic victory because “If we wish, we can block all entry and exit to Russia through St. Petersburg.”
Estonia, which has a population smaller than Russia’s armed forces, has in the past made noise about causing problems in the Gulf of Finland with Estonian Minister of Defense Hanno Pevkur talking about how the integration of Estonian and Finnish coastal missile defense the two sides are working on will allow them to close the Gulf of Finland to Russian ships. That would effectively blockade Saint Petersburg, which Russia would consider an act of war. How would that integrated missile defense system handle Russian hypersonic missiles?
Roughly 60 percent of Russia’s total seaborne oil exports pass through the Danish straits on its way to international markets, and Moscow’s updated version of the Naval Doctrine of the Russian Federation lists the Baltic Sea and and the Danish Straits as “important areas,” in which the use of force will be available as a last resort after the other options have been exhausted.
It’s more likely that this is just another point in the tails-we-win, heads-you-lose game the West thinks it’s playing. On the one hand, ramping up the militarization of the Baltic — as well as everywhere else — is in line with the overall NATO racket. On the other hand, who knows, maybe this attempt to cause another headache for Moscow will, according to the wishful thinking in the West, finally lead to the implosion of the Putin government.
Despite the Washington Post report revealing that “intercepted communications and other classified intelligence” collected by NATO countries indicate that crews and poorly maintained ships were behind the accidents, I have yet to see NATO recalling its “Baltic Sentry. That’s hardly surprising because stopping damage to cables isn’t really the point.
The Financial Times noted as much after a similar incident in the Fall of 2023 when some NATO states were making noise about UN Convention on the Law of the Sea laws permitting states to to “institute proceedings, including detention of the vessel” given “clear objective evidence” that the vessel poses a threat of environmental damage.:
But officials briefed on the proposal say it relies on the capacity of Denmark’s naval authorities to stop and check the tankers, and raises the question of what Copenhagen would do if a ship refused to stop.
“Discussions appear to be centred on making life more complicated for Russia and the buyers of its oil,” said Henning Gloystein at Eurasia Group. “If you can make the bureaucracy and risk associated with trading Russian oil a lot more onerous the expectation is buyers will start to demand larger discounts again for their trouble.”
There you have it. It’s really about going after the ominously-named ghost ships or shadow fleet. NATO, at enormous cost to itself, will try to cause problems for ships transporting Russian oil, which might mean Moscow takes a small hit on revenue.
As Alexander Mercouris explains, the so-called “shadow fleet” are simply ships without Western insurance — freighters that are expanding the sale of oil and natural gas to much of the world in spite of Western sanctions and while eluding the insane $60-per-barrel price cap imposed by the West. As even the Associated Press admits:
The shadow fleet in fact isn’t all that shadowy. The ships don’t hide their stops at Russian oil terminals. Some have direct connections to Russia, as with the vessels owned by Sovcomflot. In other cases, it’s often unclear who exactly is behind the listed owners, and what kind of safety practices and insurance the vessels have. What sets them apart is that they transport Russian oil and operate outside the jurisdictions of the sanctioning G7 countries.
The intensifying effort to harass these ships, which are often registered to offshore firms, goes hand in hand with the recent sanctions on 183 shadow fleet vessels — an “unprecedented number.”
It’s a sign of increasing frustration as nothing has worked so far in choking off Russia’s oil sales. As Reuters reported last week, Russia’s oil exports fell in 2024, but revenue climbed by $3.8 billion.
By further militarizing the Baltic, however, NATO creates more opportunity for misunderstandings or mishaps that could dramatically escalate the conflict with Russia. Case in point:
French Navy Atlantique 2 maritime patrol aircraft has been reported to have been illuminated by the targeting radar of a RussianS-400 long range surface to air missile system on the night of January 15-16, at a time when the aircraft was flying over the Baltic Sea. The system is thought to have been located in Russia’s westernmost territory of Kaliningrad, where modern air defence systems are heavily concentrated to provide security against NATO forces that encircle it from all directions. The Atlantique 2 was reportedly conducting inspections near Swedish and Baltic waters at the time, and scanning around 200 ships. The aircraft carry heavy surveillance equipment, and can deploy both cruise missiles and torpedoes, providing them with a comparable role to the Russian Tu-142 or the American P-8. The S-400’s engagement of the French aircraft was condemned by French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu, and occurred at a time of particularly high tensions between Moscow and Paris primarily over the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian War.
The Narrative Build Up
The most recent much ballyhooed damage was to the Estlink 2 undersea power cable and four undersea communications cables between Finland and Estonia by the Eagle S, a 750-foot-long, Cook Island-flagged tanker carrying Russian oil. It isn’t the first in the Baltic to receive outsize attention. We’ve had a solid couple years now of horror stories over renegade ships and activities in the Baltic — not including the US destruction of Nord Stream of course.No, here we’re talking about nefarious actors like Russia and China. Just a few other recent examples:
In October of 2023 The NewNew Polar Bear, a Chinese vessel damaged — intentionally, the West alleged — the Finnish-Estonian Balticconnector gas pipeline. To add insult to injury in the West, the NewNew was the first Chinese-owned containership to use Russia’s Northern Sea Route to reach the Russian port in Kaliningrad after a six-week passage.
Telecom cables linking Finland, Estonia and Sweden were damaged allegedly inflicted by the Yi Peng 3 bulk carrier in November.
These were all relatively minor incidents that along with a few others received quite a bit of attention, and almost all stories didn’t question the allegations of some Russia-China plot to destroy Western infrastructure. Yet, the Washington Post now reports that the Estlink 2 incident, as well as those involving the NewNew Polar Bear and Yi Peng 3, have “clear explanations,” suggesting the damage was accidental.
Nonetheless, by using these incidents as an excuse NATO is well on its way to implementing the Center for Strategic and International Studies 2022 plan for NATO near-term actions in the Baltic:
Bring Sweden and Finland into NATO. The ratification of these two nations needs to move forward without delay. Elevating them from strong partners to alliance members changes the calculus of a Baltic conflict significantly. The alliance can immediately leverage these two nations to increase strategic depth.
Forward stage capabilities. Mines, anti-submarine capabilities, missile defense, and secure supply and logistics infrastructure should be forward staged across all domains, increasing deterrence.
Increase patrol. A whole-of-government approach from each Baltic nation and its allies is needed to ensure that energy, communications, and sea routes remain secure. This includes Baltic Air Policing, readiness to shift the balance of A2/AD, and the monitoring and protection of maritime infrastructure.
Strengthen command and control. Existing multi-domain command and control should be tested and ready for use. The need for effective command and control will be swift and will require resilient disaggregated nodes, though an eye should also be kept on future capability.
Baltic Sentry is a small part of the plan to encircle and pressure Russia. Perhaps more importantly it’s another piece of the ongoing dramatic overhaul of European society.
It’s another spot the fear mongers can point to and say more money must be spent on defense, and it comes as Trump and company all push for more military hardware purchases at the expense of all other social programs, which are being starved and privatized.
That restructuring and plundering of the social commons is probably a more accurate description of what “Baltic Sentry” is guarding.
THE OLIGARCHS’ PICNIC – WHAT’S ON THE MENU WHEN TRUMP’S OLIGARCHS NEGOTIATE WITH PUTIN’S OLIGARCHS
by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise
If you go down in the woods today, you’d better go in disguise
For every oligarch there ever was
Will gather there for certain because
Today’s the day the oligarchs have their picnic.
Every oligarch who’s been good is sure of a treat today
There’s lots of marvelous things to eat and wonderful games to play
Beneath the trees where nobody sees
They’ll hide and seek as long as they please
That’s the way the oligarchs have their picnic.
There’s not much difference, politically speaking, between the teddy bears of the old song, the oligarchs who believe they have just put Donald Trump in power, and the oligarchs who believe they have been keeping Vladimir Putin in power since 1999. They all want the same “treat today, marvellous things to eat, and wonderful games to play”.
In a word, money in billion-dollar tranches. And because they believe this, they have told Trump and Putin that once they get to the picnic they have planned on the Ukraine battlefield, they are bound to be able to agree on what they want to do together.
Of course, it will be in secret “beneath the trees where nobody sees”.
Between 1911 and 1915, during World War I, Robert Michels, an Italian sociologist, explained how commonplace this was. He not only described the inevitability that oligarchs would come to dominate the governments and opposition organisations on both sides of that war; this he called the “iron law of oligarchy”. He also reported that the war itself would accelerate the process by which this oligarch domination on both sides would dictate the outcome to suit the common interests of them both.
“Never is the power of the state greater,” Michels wrote, “and never are the forces of political parties of opposition less effective, than at the outbreak of war. This deplorable war, come like a storm in the night, when everyone, wearied with the labours of the day, was plunged in well-deserved slumber, rages all over the world with unprecedented violence, and with such a lack of respect for human life and of regard for the eternal creations of art as to endanger the very cornerstones of a civilization dating from more than a thousand years.”
The oligarch assembly at the Trump inauguration, January 20, 2025. For more on Michels’ iron law of oligarchy applied to Russia, read this.
Today we are at roughly the same point, but oligarchs think in commercial terms, not social or ethical ones. For the oligarchs, the point on both sides is that the sanctions war over the past three years has created the largest gap between true asset value and trade value which exists in the global market today – this is the gap between the pre-war bankable value of Russian commodities, resources, and corporate assets and their discounted price under sanctions. To the oligarchs on both sides, the point is how to make money out of closing this gap through the end-of-war negotiations.
A handful of Russian sources who are close enough to the Russian oligarchs was asked to predict what the end-of-war terms are likely to be that the Russian and American oligarchs will press their presidents to agree to. Here are the terms they are predicting.
Oil and gas. The Russians believe no agreement for relaxing the current sanctions is likely because the US oligarchs have convinced Trump to use the sanctions to raise the price, profitability, and international market share of US oil and gas. Trump’s latest threat is the evidence. “I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR,” Trump declared on January 22. “Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a “deal,” and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.” One Russian source believes that last phrase of Trump’s means he will target the principal beneficiaries of the current discount trade in Russian oil and gas – China and India. Trump’s objective, the Russian sources believe, will be to keep the oil price from rising above $80 per barrel or falling below $60. “This will backfire”, an oil industry source adds. “[Prime Minister Narendra] Modi is aiming to make India a petroleum superpower. The US sanctions war is helping him achieve this. There is no way Trump will have of preventing it.”
Boeing aircraft. Over the past five years the Boeing Corporation has lost almost half its market capitalization. Safety, management, logistical, and other factors have also been losing the company’s international aircraft market share and leading to speculation of an asset break-up.
A Russian source believes that a relaxation of the sanctions on Russian operation of its Boeing air fleet would be the type of rescue Boeing needs. It is comparable, the source reminds, to the attempt to save General Motors in bankruptcy by selling its Opel division to Oleg Deripaska’s Russian Machines group – a deal Hillary Clinton stopped in 2009.
Real estate. Russian oligarchs like Roman Abramovich and Oleg Deripaska own palatial real estate in the US in Manhattan, Washington, DC, as well as in resort areas of Colorado and Florida. Relaxing sanctions to allow these individuals to recover their access to their US properties, or allow them to sell their real estate for convertible cash, is the type of deal Trump and his family are believed to favour. The prospect that such a conversion will generate a large profit margin for Trump-connected buyers is a lawful bribe.
Re-dollarization. In his campaign speech to the Economic Club of New York last September, Trump argued that the sanctions war was bad for the US dollar because it will “ultimately kill the dollar and kill everything the dollar represents. We have to continue to have that be the world currency…I think that if we lose the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war. That would make us a third world country…you’re losing Iran; you’re losing Russia. China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant one…I want to use sanctions as little as possible.” Russian sources therefore expect a relaxation of the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT payment system and other measures to boost the influence of the Russian Central Bank and its governor, Elvira Nabiullina, in Kremlin decision-making.
Free skies. Overflight of Russia and other air route limitations were largely self-imposed by US, European and allied state airlines which then triggered retaliation by Rosaviatsiya, the Federal Air Transport Agency. The effect has been cost pressures on the western airlines and loss of market share. Trump is likely to claim credit for opening the skies by lifting US restrictions and pressing the European Union to do the same.
The Dubai hub, the Cyprus shutdown. The Biden Administration forced the shutdown of the tax evasion structures of the Russian oligarchs in Cyprus, and triggered their relocation to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), particularly Dubai. A source acknowledges: “they use the SWIFT system and everything they do is totally transparent to the Americans. The last three sanctions lists have so many UAE entities that we have to expect they share all the financial flow information the Americans demand. However, unlike the Cypriots, the Emiratis are not hitting at the Russians. Cyprus has been different in several ways. The Cypriots actively laundered money for the oligarchs through transfer pricing and other schemes for 25 years. They have been the primary offshore centre for Russian capital outflow without any real service to trade. By contrast, Dubai services trade and is more than an offshore centre for capital transfer — far more. The Cypriots sold passports to the oligarchs and pocketed a lot of money. The UAE has not done that. Under the US pressure, Cypriots sold all their Russians out and turned into one of the nastiest of the anti-Russian states in the EU. Trump may press on Dubai to follow suit, but he won’t succeed. The UAE will preserve its role – it is replacing Cyprus, London, even Antwerp for the diamond trade. This is because it is the perfect hub for the Russians to invest in their shipping, insurance, and trade settlement systems with India and China.
How will the bears pay for their picnic?
With memecoins and cryptocurrencies, a Moscow source adds. “I believe Trump will be very nice to the Emiratis, and to the Saudis as well. The likes of Justin Sun – he’s the brain and operator behind Donald and Melania Trump’s cryptocurrency schemes — and of Pavel Durov of Telegram protect the core of their businesses in UAE, and those are businesses Trump and his family are already profiting from. It’s where they may eventually accumulate their wealth. The Trump oligarchs and the Putin oligarchs, too.
It Is Becoming Downright Boring.
I understand media need to report something but next they will be reporting what Trump ate for breakfast and what he may have told to WH housekeepers.
US President Donald Trump has said he would “very much like” to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “soon” in order to end the ongoing Ukraine conflict. It is not just important from the standpoint of the global economy, but also to prevent further human suffering, he told the World Economic Forum in Davos via teleconference on Thursday. “Millions of lives are being wasted,” Trump claimed, referring to the ongoing hostilities and calling the conflict “horrible.” “I am not talking economy, I am not talking economics, I am not talking about natural resources, I’m just talking about so many young people being killed in this war,” he added. The source of the figures used by Trump is unclear. In December, Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov said Ukraine had suffered almost 1 million battlefield casualties in total since the start of the conflict in February 2022. Kiev has claimed that Moscow had lost over 800,000 troops as of January 15. Neither side has commented on its own losses for a long time.
Russian response was clear:
The Kremlin responded to the statement by saying that it saw “nothing new” in yet another threat of sanctions made by Washington. During his first presidential term, Trump had often resorted to sanctions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Thursday, adding that the US president “likes such methods.” Moscow is still ready for an equal and respectful dialogue, Peskov said, adding that Trump had engaged in that kind of exchange with Putin during his first term in office. Now, Russia is waiting for similar signals but has not seen any so far, according to the spokesman.
While Zakharova didn't mince words either.
Москва считает действия администрации Джо Байдена по многим направлениям, включая политику на Украине, преступлениями, а не ошибками, заявила Мария Захарова.
Translation: Moscow considers the actions of the Joe Biden administration in many areas, including policy in Ukraine, to be crimes, not mistakes, said Maria Zakharova.
This is correct definition of what Biden and cabal of his handlers were doing both domestically and internationally can only be qualified as crimes, ranging from war crimes to crimes against humanity. So, the SMO continues.
P.S. Yes, getting basic math of SMO would certainly help Trump when making any decisions.
In May 2017 the Russian president Vladimir Putin had an interview with Le Figaro. He explained his experience with policy preferences forwarded by U.S. presidents:
I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration.
It took only two days for that to happen with the second presidency of Donald Trump. Instead of seeking better relations with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, as he had promised during the campaign, Trump initiated a public 'dialog' with Russia that seems to make both of these aims impossible.
He posted on Truth-Social:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - Jan 22, 2025, 15:46 UTC
I’m not looking to hurt Russia. I love the Russian people, and always had a very good relationship with President Putin - and this despite the Radical Left’s Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX. We must never forget that Russia helped us win the Second World War, losing almost 60,000,000 lives in the process. All of that being said, I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a “deal,” and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries. Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with! We can do it the easy way, or the hard way - and the easy way is always better. It’s time to “MAKE A DEAL.” NO MORE LIVES SHOULD BE LOST!!!
One wonders what the people in dark suits were thinking when they fed such bullshit to Donald Trump.
Russia did not 'help' to win the Second World War. It did win it. It was the U.S. and others who were merely helpful in doing so.
As Kremlin spokesmen Dimitry Peskov rightly replied:
"The main burden in the fight against fascism and the biggest price for the victory in the fight against fascism was paid by our country, the Soviet Union." "The US did indeed help. It made a significant contribution. But there’s one caveat: America always makes money, for America it's always about business," Peskov emphasized.
The Soviet Union did not lose 60 million lives in that war but less than half of it - about 11 million soldiers and 15 million civilians.
Russia's economy is not falling.
Even Reuters, which has anonymous sources speculate about Putin's 'concerns' with the economy, has to admit:
Russia's economy, driven by exports of oil, gas and minerals, grew robustly over the past two years despite multiple rounds of Western sanctions imposed after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Russia currently has a somewhat higher than usual inflation. But a shortage of labor has let to wage growth beyond the inflation rate and to a spread of general prosperity:
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, when asked about the Reuters reporting, acknowledged "problematic factors" in the economy, but said it was developing at a high rate and was able to meet "all military requirements incrementally" as well as all welfare and social needs.
"There are problems, but unfortunately, problems are now the companions of almost all countries of the world," he said. "The situation is assessed as stable, and there is a margin of safety."
...
After contracting in 2022, Russia's GDP grew faster than the European Union and the United States in 2023 and 2024. This year, however, the central bank and the International Monetary Fund forecast sub-1.5% growth, although the government projects a slightly rosier outlook.
Trump threat to put "high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States" demonstrates his plain ignorance. The only valuable product Russia is still selling to the U.S. is the enriched Uranium needed to run U.S. nuclear power plants. Trump can tax, tariff and sanction that as much as he likes.
He could also try to sanction other Russian energy exports. But those are double-edged measures:
Trump’s proposed tariffs and sanctions could also backfire on the United States and its allies:
Energy Prices: A reduction in Russian energy exports could spike global oil and gas prices, hurting Western consumers.
Geopolitical Realignments: Aggressive sanctions might accelerate the creation of parallel financial and trade systems outside of Western control, weakening U.S. influence.
Economic Blowback: American industries reliant on certain raw materials from Russia, such as metals for manufacturing, could face higher costs and supply disruptions.
No one in Russia, for certain not Putin, will take such Trump's attempt to open negotiations seriously.
If Trump wants to achieve a peace agreement over Ukraine he will need to reject the neo-conservative dark suits' opinions and find people who know what they are talking about.
Senseless barking at Moscow, as Trump has done so far, will be responded to with a rather bored yawn:
The Kremlin is not impressed by United States President Donald Trump’s threat to impose new sanctions against Russia if it does not agree to strike a peace deal with Ukraine.
"We do not see any particular new elements here," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Russian media Thursday. Peskov added that Trump “liked sanctions” and used them often during his first presidential term.
“Russia is ready for an equal and careful dialogue with the United States, which we had during Trump's first term," Peskov said, according to Russian independent media outlet Meduza. "We are waiting for signals that have not yet been received."
Posted by b on January 23, 2025 at 15:44 UTC | Permalink
Doubt if it took people in dark suits to put that crap in Trump's head. Despite all of the advantages of wealth he is willfully ignorant and his 'wealth of knowledge' is derived from watching TV. And I believe this is why he communicates so well to our people who are programmed instead of educated.
******
‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 23 January 2025: What Putin Will Tell Trump
It was a pleasure as always to have a discussion with Judge Andrew Napolitano that focused on how the Kremlin sees the latest statements from Donald Trump on how the Ukraine war will be settled. Indeed, while the Russian talk shows may mock Trump’s ignorant remarks and ultimatum to Putin in his Truth Social message yesterday, Vladimir Putin held back and remained silent. His last message to Trump was one of congratulations over his inauguration.
Putin is biding his time, ready to meet with Trump at an opportune time, most likely following the decimation of the Ukrainian armed forces that may well occur in the coming several weeks.
About the situation with the port of Tartus
January 23, 21:00
Belarusian Foreign Minister Ryzhenkov met with HTS leader Julani.
The Belarusian delegation visited Syria to establish relations with the new authorities of the country.
On our affairs.
1. Negotiations on preserving Russian bases in Syria with the HTS leadership are ongoing. At the moment, no final version has been agreed upon. The termination of the lease agreement for the port of Tartus does not concern the issue of the logistics point in Tartus and the Khmeimim airbase - these are different issues.
2. Yesterday, two of our transports entered Tartus. They will load some of the equipment for removal (it is not yet clear where - either to Libya or to Mali). Due to the current situation in Syria, we currently have a huge surplus of equipment there that needs to be removed, since the participation of the Russian Armed Forces and the Russian Aerospace Forces in potential scenarios of the Syrian civil war is not expected.
3. From the ground, they report that the security situation in Tartus has improved somewhat in recent days. Our military is again going into the city, going beyond the base.
1. Last week, the new authorities in Syria canceled the 49-year lease agreement for the port of Tartus "in the interests of Syria."
2. The agreement was concluded under Assad between the Syrian government and the Stroytransgaz company in 2019.
3. According to the agreement, the company committed to invest $ 500 million in the port. Mainly in the modernization of the port infrastructure.
4. This agreement concerned only the civilian port and did not affect the logistics center of the Russian Navy in Tartus.
5. The agreement was never fully implemented due to Western sanctions against Syria and internal Syrian corruption.
6. In fact, the contract was concluded with the Security Directorate of the 4th Tank Division of the SAA. Bashar al-Assad's assistant Yashar Ibrahim supervised the agreement.
7. Control was implemented through a network of local security, customs and shipping companies.
8. There are no known penalties for early termination of the contract specified in the agreement.
How grant-eating media became victims of a prank
January 22, 2025
Rybar
There is another scandal in the liberal community: it suddenly turned out that in pursuit of reports about the “horrors in the Russian army,” the so-called opposition media were massively distributing fakes.
It all started when a girl with a good sense of humor offered a fictitious story to one of the publications, which they immediately swallowed. The grant-eaters were not even embarrassed that the journalist's name, Asiya Nesoevaya , contained a clear reference to a meme mocking the relocant opposition.
As a result, foreign agents in the form of “Important Stories” , “Novaya Gazeta. Europe” , “Kholod” , “Diskurs” and The Insider enthusiastically published Nesoeva’s works, such as stories about “women who hid their only man from the front and prison in an abandoned Tatar village”.
At some point, someone finally decided to question the credibility of stories bordering on farce. As a result, the foreign-agent media found nothing better than to simply delete all the articles, occasionally accompanying their actions with stupid explanations.
The funniest thing is that the so-called oppositionists nominated Nesoeva's work for the "Editorial Board" award four times , which they give to professional journalists.
Overall, what happened is not surprising, since publishing disinformation is a completely normal practice for them. There is nothing new in the reaction of foreign agents to what happened either - it is enough to remember how they avoid uncomfortable topics, blaming anyone for their troubles, but not themselves.
In general, this is another clear example of the need for vigilance and content filtering. Especially in light of the fact that right now other editorial offices are preparing to publish a dozen materials from such Nesoyevs.
Belarus: The “dictatorship” of stability and peace
Lucas Leiroz
January 24, 2025
While the West attacks Belarus with accusations of being a “dictatorship,” the local people support their president and his political choices.
When discussing Belarus, it is impossible to ignore how the country has been described by the Western media. Many label the Belarusian government as a “dictatorship” – a hasty and, most of the time, unfounded label. But, upon closer assessment, the reality of Belarus is more complex and reveals a country that, far from being an authoritarian regime, is a “dictatorship” of stability, security, order, and above all, peace. In an increasingly unstable world, with foreign powers imposing their agendas on smaller nations, Belarus represents an upholder of justice and sovereignty, seeking to preserve peace and protect its citizens from the political and military turmoil threatening Eastern Europe.
The recent call for the presidential elections, scheduled for January 26, 2025, is a clear reflection of the political maturity of the Belarusian people. With five candidates competing for the position, including the current President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the elections represent a unique opportunity for the people to assess the country’s progress and challenges and choose the leader who best represents their national interests. In a tense geopolitical scenario, with the constant threat of instability at the borders and external pressure from Western powers, the citizens of Belarus understand the importance of maintaining peace and stability. The election campaign has been conducted in a way that prioritizes the well-being of the people, focusing on the issues that truly matter: internal security, economic growth, and the preservation of a sovereign state, free from the interference of eurocrats or foreign governments and their egoistic interests.
Contrary to what many claim, Belarus’ “dictatorship” is not an oppressive regime, but a truly democratic political structure that places justice and stability at the center of its governance. Politics in Belarus is guided by the idea that the country’s stability must be protected at all costs, and that internal order is crucial to ensure peace. This is especially relevant at a time when violence and conflicts in several regions of Europe have been escalating. In Belarus, citizens can live their lives in tranquility, away from the violence affecting neighboring countries like Ukraine, and without the constant threat of coups or insurgencies sponsored by external powers.
One of Belarus’ great achievements in recent years has been the strengthening of political culture and the increase in legal literacy among its population. The Central Election Commission, with new powers since the amendments to the Electoral Code in 2023, has actively worked to inform and educate citizens about their electoral rights and duties. This is reflected in the high participation rate in elections. Although voting is not mandatory, more than 65% of the Belarusian population regularly participates in elections, understanding that their vote is not only a right but a fundamental privilege in the preservation of their sovereignty and national stability.
Elections in Belarus, therefore, are much more than a simple contest for power. They represent a test of political maturity, in which Belarusians have the opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to a peaceful future, free from the influences of external forces seeking to destabilize the country. Unlike many Western nations, where politics is increasingly polarized and dominated by empty promises, the citizens of Belarus are familiar to the real needs of their nation, willing to choose a leader who can continue to guarantee their security and prosperity without submitting to external demands.
While Western powers, such as the United States and the European Union, continue to pressure Belarus and accuse its government of violating human rights and political freedoms, the Belarusian people remain committed to defending their sovereignty. The Belarusian government, in turn, keeps its doors open to international observation, though it refuses OSCE missions and other forums biased by the West, recognizing the destabilizing role these organizations play in many countries around the world. With over 450 international observers from 49 countries accredited for the upcoming elections, transparency and commitment to a fair electoral process are evident.
In the end, Belarus prepares for a crucial decision on January 26, when the people will choose the path the country will follow in the future. In times of growing global turmoil, Belarus continues to be an example of stability and resistance to external pressure, standing firm in preserving its independence and sovereignty. While Western powers engage in a series of geopolitical conflicts, Belarus’ “dictatorship” remains a defender of order, justice, and a safer future for its citizens.
Can Russian Economic Difficulties Save Ukraine?
byGordonhahn
January 23, 2025
Numerous Western and some Russian economists are predicting a financial-economic crisis in Russia, resulting from the burdens of a ‘war economy’ and Western sanctions during the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. In fact, the evidence for this is contradictory, and the problems that exist are manageable for the foreseeable future. Moreover, there are various paths of development that do not include an inevitable crisis moving forward. No doubt the general burden of war and greater emphasis on military production largely for ‘domestic use’ instead of export hampers the Russian economy in many ways, as do sanctions. However, the difficulties are being exaggerated by the West as are their potential to produce economic and financial crises, no less a political crisis, and there are mitigating circumstances and opportunities that tend to reduce the weight of this burden.
Numerous Western officials, analysts, propagandists, and combinations thereof have been forecasting an economic or financial crisis in Russia that could cripple Russia’s war effort and perhaps destabilise Russian President Vladimir Putin’s so-called ‘system.’ Putin acknowledged with calm concern that inflation and interest rate hikes it made necessary were a problem in his December 17th annual marathon press conference. Reuters reports that the Russian president is more seriously concerned than those comments suggest and considers that his ‘special military operation’ (SMO) in Ukraine has “basically achieved its goals, in particular creating a land bridge between the Russian ‘mainland’ and Crimea (www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-grow ... 025-01-23/). The claim of achieved war aims, which implies Putin is being pushed to peace talks because of economic troubles, is based however, on just one source, creation of a land bridge has never been among Putin’s oft-declared four goals of the SMO: Ukrainian neutrality, annexation of four Ukrainian regions besides Crimea, Ukraine’s de-militarization, and its de-Nazification.
Former Morgan Stanley banker Craig Kennedy asserted that Russia’s economy is vulnerable, given the Central Bank’s massive printing of money and the growth of corporate debt now at $415 billion, marking a 71 percent increase since September 2022. One might counter that the US national debt of some $37 trillion should be of greater concern, but we can skip over that polemic for now. The Financial Times’ Martin Sandu called Russia’s “war economy” a “house of cards” because the “majority of credit has been devoted to military production, which can produce a credit crisis in the next few years (https://t.me/economica/5681). Bloomberg was bearish but more restrained, limiting the dangers to slow growth predicted for next year. It recently wrote: “President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine triggered an economic boom in Russia built on the back of government stimulus. Almost three years on, there are gathering signs the bill is about to come due. The mood in Moscow and other cities remains upbeat with packed restaurants and busy luxury stores, but a combination of record-high interest rates and persistent inflation is increasingly threatening forecasts for another year of slower, but still war-fueled growth” (www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01 ... py-landing).
There are certainly signals that there are problems in the Russian economy, and some may very well be related to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war, but none are prohibitively difficult to contend with. Russia’s Central Bank is forecasting a fall in growth from 3.5-4.0 percent in 2024 to as low as 0.5 percent in 2025, while the Economic Ministry sees a decline only to 2.5 percent (www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01 ... py-landing). Inflation is high but far from astronomically so, standing at 13 percent at year’s end in part due to significantly high levels of ruble printing, in part due to few goods supplies resulting from sanctions. To rein in the situation, Russia’s Central Bank (TsB) has raised the key interest rate several times since the war began, most recently to 21 percent in November, when Central Bank Chairwoman Elvira Naibiullina declared the hike’s purpose is to lower inflation to 4 percent. This move produced an unprecedented wave of criticism in some elite circles and even the upper and middle classes (www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01 ... py-landing).
Controlling inflation is a ‘populist’ move—that is, a politically motivated step intended to assuage everyday Russian consumers, who are far less interested in the exchange rate as compared to inflation. Nevertheless, the credit rate hike has both its economic and potential political costs. A credit crunch is evident in the rise of rejections of mortgages for new housing starts, reaching 59 percent in June 2024 and 72 percent in November as a result of the repeal of the Mikhail Mishustin government’s massive mortgage program (https://t.me/economica/4839). By December it was being reported that Russian families with two children were unable to get mortgages at the market rate in 98 percent of Russia’s 89 regions (https://t.me/economica/5341). The number of Russian debtors is rising rapidly, and the total debt attained record levels in December, reaching 38 trillion rubles, around $380 billion, with debt to banks amounting to a quarter of Russia’s GDP (https://t.me/economica/4541). Auto dealerships and the agricultural sector are facing a likely wave of bankruptcies (www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01 ... py-landing). Vice President of Russia’s Union of Shopping Malls (Soyuz torgovykh tsentrov) Pavel Lyulin said that the TsB’s harsh policies could lead to the closure of more than a thousand shopping centers or malls. Lyulin backed up his claim by noting that many banks are warning shopping center owners about a significant increase in the cost of previously issued loans and that tenants are beginning to leave the shopping malls in large numbers due to expensive rentals, loans and high taxes. If the Central Bank raises the rate even higher in December, he added, the owners of shopping centers will have no choice but to declare bankruptcy (https://t.me/economica/4299). GazProm recently announced it was planning mass layoffs, including a 50 percent cut in its central apparatus, which includes some 30,000 personnel (https://dzen.ru/news/story/daa85b41-2c4 ... er=dzen.ru). The Russia state’s railroad company ‘Rossiiskie zheleznyie dorogi’ (RZhD) has been forced to drastically cut its re-investment program and settle for mere maintenance as a result of high debts, which rose 50 percent in 2024, and the Central Bank’s high interest rates (www.epravda.com.ua/rus/news/2024/11/25/722256/). According to Harvard University’s Davis Center, the credit crunch already is forcing banks to make $250bn in off-budget soft loans to defence companies that could cause a crisis (https://lnkxtcdab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0 ... hnCpv4pA==). This claim, however, has been refuted by others (https://en.thebell.io/no-russia-is-not- ... ng-crisis/).
Overall, a general belt tightening is gripping the country and will be needed to continue the war effort at its present level. The rate of bankruptcies is worth watching closely, but such will have no chance to spark a political crisis for more than a year and likely several years.
Most recently, VTB First Deputy Chairman Pyanov asked Naibiullina, who he sarcastically calls ‘Snegurochka’ (a snow maiden for Russia’s version of Santa Claus, ‘Ded Moroz’ or Grandfather Frost) to actively stabilize the ruble exchange rate instead of raising the key interest rate in order to avoid economic hypothermia and recession. According to Pyanov, top managers were being “stunned” by the value of the dollar in the exchanges, and inflation expectations in the bank increased. Pyanov also asked the “Snow Maiden Department” to explain more clearly how precisely it will get to the 4% inflation target (https://t.me/economica/4433). Naibiullina has consistently responded to critics, saying the Bank’s various rate hikes have restrained inflation, which otherwise would be at 30 percent (https://t.me/economica/5069). The business community’s concern over exchange rates expressed by Pyanov is not misplaced. Alfa-Forex’s General Director has said in early December that the rate could reach 127 rubles around the New Year, taking into account US President-elect Donlad Trump’s plans to drive oil prices down (https://t.me/economica/4824). Pyanov probably has overstated matters, and his may represent lobbying and the somewhat exaggerated fears of instability extant in Russian culture, refracted through the business community lens. The ruble certainly has weakened since the February 24, 2022 invasion. In February 2022 the ruble-dollar exchange rate stood at 77 rubles to the dollar. Immediately with the invasion, the rate skyrocketed to a peak on March 11, 2022 of just under R134. But the CB quickly got things under control, and the economy began to adjust. By April 22, 2022, the rate had fallen to prewar levels and remained in that range until April 2023, when it reached R78. Since then it has peaked once at R101 in October 2024. Recently it has reached a new peak at just over 110 on January 4th and as of writing (January 14th) it is R103.24. Nevertheless, the 127 level was never reached, though it could be later in the year.
To the pressures or at least potential pressures on the Russian economy must be added the West’s war on Russian energy exports. This war includes: oil and gas related sanctions, the destruction of the Russo-German ‘North Stream’ natural gas pipeline for Russian gas exports to Europe, Ukraine’s discontinuation of transport of Russian gas to Europe, the failed January 12th Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian gas transit compressor station in Krasnodar through which natural gas is sent to the southern route Russo-Turkish ‘Turkish Stream’, and the Ukrainian attacks on the shadow fleet transporting Russian oil and gas to circumvent sanctions. Trump may be seeking to lift such sanctions in order to drive oil and gas prices down, further pressuring Russia’s budget and banks.
But crucially, the claim that Russia now has a ‘war economy’ is exaggerated, as the precent of GDP on military spending stands at an only slightly high 6 percent. NATO requires a minimal expenditure of 2 percent for its member-states but it is now moving to require 5 percent. There is nothing as yet surreal about the scale of the Russian economy’s emphasis on war-related production. Indeed, the shift to greater defense spending and production starts from a low point. Indeed, in 2016, despite the ongoing civil war in Ukraine and Kiev’s refusal to honor the Minsk 2 agreements, Russia cut defense spending. Moreover, unlike the West, Russia never fell to the delusion that conventional wars between states were a thing of the past and maintained its defense industry’s capacity to provide not only products for export but those for supplying its own military.
Thus, Russia’s economic woes are still manageable and far from politically explosive. Both inflation and interest rates are predicted by the Central Bank to decline this year, with inflation falling to 4.5%-5% by year’s end and returning to 4 percent in 2026 and an average key interest rate between 17%-20% for 2025 (www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01 ... py-landing). No economic-financial crisis appears imminent, certainly not in the coming year plus.
Russian budget deficits caused by the war and military spending hikes are run of the mill, indeed low by Western, particularly US standards. Moscow is spending RUB10 trillion ($100 billion) a year on the war, increasing its budget deficits, though 2024’s deficit has fallen from that of 2023. The Russian government recently approved its budget for 2025-2027, which raises military expenditure by nearly 25 percent to 33 percent of the federal budget and above 6.2 percent of GDP. Defense spending has more than doubles since Putin opened his ‘special military operation.’ Spending on all defence and security needs will amount to 17 trillion roubles, almost 41 percent of total expenditure and 8 percent of the country’s GDP.The federal budget’s defense spending increases by $28 billion in 2025 (https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024 ... the-budget; https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gov ... dget-value; and https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ru ... 024-09-30/). For comparison, U.S. spending on defense came to some 15 percent of the federal budget and 3.5 percent of GDP in 2023. On the key issue of the budget deficit’s hare of GDP, however, the Russian case does not seem a serious problem as of yet. The Russian government projects the 2024 budget deficit at 1.7 percent of GDP — up from the previous projection of 1.1 percent and the initial projection of 0.9 percent — and the 2025 budget deficit is seen at 0.5 percent of GDP. For comparison, the U.S. budget deficit sgare of GDP was 6.3 percent and in the EU it was 3.5 percent (www.statista.com/statistics/217428/us-b ... f-the-gdp/ and https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/produ ... 2102024-ap).
NATO member Turkey has had inflation rates three-four times those of Russia since the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War began. Moreover, mitigating circumstances and opportunities that can reduce the weight of this burden. That sanctions have led to new innovation in the Russian economy through import substitution, and old Western partners have been replaced by companies from the ‘global South’ and Asia. Similarly, new sanctions, such as those leveled against the 185 ships constituting the shadow fleet servicing Russian oil and gas export in ways that circumvent previous sanctions on said exports are themselves likely only to produce new innovation. Adaptation to the new sanctions will likely mean only a temporary disturbance of transport results from the fleet sanctions. Some may accrue to Russia’s benefit. For example, ship owners may turn to Russian insurance companies to obtain policies once purchased from Western companies now forbidden to conclude insurance contracts. They may turn to Russian rather than Western ports to get needed repairs. Similarly, the West or at least Ukraine is biting off its foot to spite its face by attacking Turkish Stream, which is important to Turkey, a member of the military alliance feeding Ukraine’s war effort—NATO. It appears that each side in the conflict is moving towards the limits they can bare.
A potential danger comes with cross-border payment limitations as a result of Western sanctions’ SWIFT access cut off to Russia, but Russia has been able to develop work-arounds in partnership with China in the past and is likely to be able to do the same sufficiently under any new sanction restrictions. For example, even Russia’s key partner, China, is at least to some degree plays along with the Western sanctions regime against Russia. According to ‘First Group’ General Director Aleksei Poroshin, Chinese banks recently have begun to decline working with Russian banks under American sanctions (https://t.me/economica/4427). But the scale and permanence of this refusal remain unclear and is likely limited.
Conclusion
Despite all the problems, there is no evidence of an extraordinary war effort collapsing the Russian economy. Russian economic growth is pegged to be about 4 percent for 2024. Even if the worse case scenario for 2025 — 1 percent — occurs, this is not even a recession. It would take a deep and long recession to spark any grumbling among the Russian elite or populace. A credit crisis is possible down the road a year, but not inevitable, since as inflation eases so too can the key interest rate. US sanctions on Russian and oil and natural gas are likely to raise their prices and thereby Russia’s key budget revenue sources’ contribution to the coffers, controlling deficits.
Even if the war, its attendant sanctions and war on Russian energy exports were to spark an economic crisis, Western leaders would be mistaken in delaying peace talks with Russia in the hope that a crisis could force a change in Russian policy or the regime itself. Russians are used to hardship and because of their security vigilance, especially vis-a-vis the potential of security and military threats from the West, most are willing to endure much for the nation’s defense before raising economic demands, no less political ones. The cultural value of national solidarity helps to cement this tendency. Although there is a significant portion of the Russian population that supports peace negotiations over the continuation of the war, they remain a minority. Moreover, any political opposition or radicalization, inside or outside the ruling elite, can be negated by a less soft, less surgical repression than is extant in Russia. So any game-changing economic or financial crisis will take at least two years (perhaps forever) from its onset to produce the scale of political backlash capable of ending Putin’s special military operation one way or another. By that time — given its crumbling economy, army, and state — Ukraine is almost surely to have ceased its existence. But it cannot be excluded that NATO or some of its European members (UK, France, and Poland in particular) will intervene directly militarily to reach some Russian crisis period, but that will provoke economic and political crises in the West. In that event, we will all be in a state of crisis politics. The West would be wise to begin negotiations with Russia. That is how to save some rump of a Ukrainian state and avoid a costly war for itself not hoping for an unlikely economic or political collapse.
2025 is not 1991. The USSR had a hyper-centralized economy with few sources of foreign income and a cumbersome Party apparat that knew ideology not economics. Putin’s Russia has a modern, largely Western-style economy, a rational-legal state bureaucracy, and a wealth of human and natural resources it has the ability to develop and deploy. There is no economic collapse, palace coup, or state disintegration by ‘decolonialization’ likely or even possible in the short- to mid-term, as many in DC and Brussels dream. In the long-term, we are all dead.
- The Russians have hypersonic weapons, we don't.
- Because under Obama they stole... Russia stole the designs...
- From us?
- From us. One very bad person (Editor's note: a radish) gave them the designs. And they were ours! I gave the order to create hypersonic weapons and now we are even creating turbo-hypersonic weapons, which are even more advanced. And soon we will have them. True, Russia has already created them and has them. Because they stole them during the Obama administration. Not under Biden, but specifically under Obama. Under Biden they most likely stole some other stuff too, but we will find out about that. And so... having stolen our hypersonic technology, they created hypersonic missiles!
That is why the US has still not been able to put hypersonic missiles into service. Because they stole all the designs. The Russians stole them. That is why it has taken so long. Because of Petrov and Boshirov.
In fact, Russian scientists simply creatively improved on the Soviet backlog of developments and were able to bring Russia to first place in the world in hypersonics, and we have long been talking not about prototypes, but about fully tested and put into service hypersonic systems. Unlike the United States, which is still stuck at the testing stage.
It must be understood that China also stole the designs. And Iran. And the DPRK. And the Houthis.
Black boxes of the plane that crashed in Aktau have been deciphered
January 24, 11:13
It is reported that the Brazilians (as the manufacturers of the plane) have finished decoding the black boxes of the airliner that crashed in Aktau and will publish the results next week. Then we will see how accurate the decoding of the previously published conversations between the airliner crew and air traffic controllers is and what happened on board according to the instruments. The main version at the moment is that the air defense system fired at the Ukrainian drone, which somehow caused damage to the airliner.
If the decoding of the black boxes confirms the leak of the conversations between the pilots and air traffic controllers, Aliyev and his claims will look very pale. As the publication of the decoding has already shown, the versions about the explosion of the cylinder and the birds came from the airliner crew itself. As did the decision to fly to Aktau. Actually, after that publication, Aliyev clearly slowed down sharply.
But, however, let's wait and see what the Brazilians will show.
What is the SVR of Armenia and what is the agency’s first report about?
January 24, 2025
Rybar
The Foreign Intelligence Service of Armenia has released a report on external risks for the republic in 2025.
Key points:
The risk of a military attack by Azerbaijan is low, but local tensions on the border are possible: delimitation and demarcation must continue.
It is unlikely that Armenia’s membership in the CSTO will be “unfrozen” , “therefore the authority of the structure will continue to be questioned.”
"Unbalanced energy dependence will be used as an instrument of external political pressure."
The risk of using Armenia’s economic and logistical dependence on external actors for political pressure, including on public opinion a year before parliamentary elections .
The Iran-Israel conflict poses risks to Armenia's security, economy and logistics. Tehran's nuclear program could create a "complicated security situation in the South Caucasus."
What is the SVR of Armenia?
It is important to note that the so-called “SVR” of Armenia was created only at the end of 2023, and this is the first public report of the structure.
Head - Kristinne Grigoryan , a lawyer with no experience in intelligence, a former human rights ombudsman, participated in the programs of the American USAID . Before creating the "SVR", Grigoryan was trained by the US CIA and the British MI-6.
Political context of the SVR report
The SVR was created as a parallel structure to the National Security Service of Armenia. A day before the publication of the first report, the agency, thanks to amendments to the law, received access to state secrets on par with the NSS.
At the beginning of the report, it is coquettishly stated that the SVR publishes only a general overview of external risks for Armenia, since more detailed information falls under the state secret regime . Let's omit the fact that the agency received it legally only a day before publication.
Some of the wording in the report clearly refers to Russia, as similar narratives were used by the previous American administration . First of all, about the “destructiveness” of Armenia’s energy dependence on Russian nuclear technologies . The West is seeking to oust Rosatom from the republic and replace the Armenian NPP with another project.
In the issue of “economic dependence,” we are, of course, talking about Armenia’s participation in the EAEU , which was also actively criticized in the United States .
The fact of the report is a claim for a new status of the "SVR" in the political life of Armenia. Considering that the structure was created from scratch under the control of British and American intelligence services, it is obvious that they will promote their interests. True, for now the new structure is noted to be understaffed, and leading positions are occupied by people who previously had no relation to work in Armenian intelligence.
Gilbert Doctorow: Ignorant and delusional: Trump proposes to continue the Biden policy of ramping up sanctions on Russia
January 24, 2025
By Gilbert Doctorow,
Ignorant and delusional: Trump proposes to continue the Biden policy of ramping up sanctions on Russia
In the past 24 hours, several leading voices in the Alternative Media have published information suggesting that Biden’s awful policy towards Russia over the Ukraine war is being overturned by the new President alongside the rest of the Biden ‘legacy.’
In his 21 January article on Sonar 21, Larry Johnson explains how the Pentagon ‘has reportedly fired or suspended all personnel directly responsible for managing military assistance to Ukraine.” Meanwhile the Pentagon’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, is said to have already resigned. But does this mark ‘the beginning of what some see as a strategic pivot’ as Johnson tells us?
On his substack platform, Simplicius76 makes the same point about firings and suspensions. To this he adds the following interesting news: “The US this morning in Washington, withdrew all applications to contractors for logistics through Rzeszow, Constanta and Varna. At NATO bases in Europe, all shipments to Ukraine have been suspended and closed.”
On the face of it, these dispatches are important and suggest light at the end of the tunnel of the Biden years. But then I wonder why the Russian news and analysis television programs have not said a word about all of this. Instead, they focused on Donald Trump’s remarks this morning on his Truth Social platform, which tells a very different story about the President’s intentions. And the Russians are not alone in ignoring the seemingly good news and directing all attention to the bad news that we find in Trump’s written statement. The Financial Times this evening has just published a lengthy article on this very subject.
Per the FT, Trump said he wants the Russians to enter into talks with the Ukrainians to end the war NOW, and if they do not agree he will punish them severely. He intends to impose still tougher sanctions on the Russian oil and gas industry and he will put very high tariffs ‘on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.’
Russia’s Sixty Minutes program this afternoon discussed all of the points of possible punishment that Trump put into his Truth Social text. They laughed aloud at the idea of raising tariffs on Russian goods sold in the United States, since the total volume of Russian exports to the USA in 2024 was 350 million dollars, and much of that was for uranium which US power stations badly needed to stay operating. Th also ridiculed Trump for some foolish and ignorant statements that he made to journalists this morning: that he didn’t want to hurt the Russian people, since ‘Russia had helped us to win WWII,’ and that Russia had lost 60 million of its citizens in that war. For Russians, the question of who helped whom to win WWII is precisely the inverse, and their war dead, bad as they were, amounted to 26 million.
As for coming to the negotiating table with Zelensky, whom they do not recognize as the legitimate president of Ukraine given that his term expired 9 months ago, that is a nonstarter. Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly that the war will end on Russia’s terms with or without a negotiated document.
Accordingly, what we see here is not the ignorant and delusional notions about how the U.S. will dictate the end to the war given to the public by General Kellogg or Michael Waltz or Marco Rubio, but ignorant and delusional notions from President Trump himself. As of today, Trump is the laughing stock of Russian elites.
January 24, 2025 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR Russia-Iran treaty signifies a ‘breakthrough’ in ties
Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, Moscow, January 17, 2025
Russia and Iran, as two immediate neighbours and great powers with a glorious history, had a difficult, chequered relationship through centuries. It goes to the credit of Iranian pragmatism that it learned to live with the consequences of Tsarist Russia’s expansionism rather than getting locked in eternal enmity. In some ways, it also shared the plight of China at the hands of predatory powers. Such bitter experiences inevitably get embedded in a nation’s psyche.
Therefore, the signing of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty between Iran and Russia on January 17 in Moscow is indeed a poignant landmark signifying the mutual acceptance as partners in an equal relationship. It is also an attempt to build guardrails so as to enable a new trajectory of relationship in mutual interests. The Russian President Vladimir Putin aptly called it a “breakthrough”.
The negotiations were protracted and the signing of the document by the two presidents Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian itself got postponed. But anyone who has negotiated with Iranians would know they often scramble at the last minute with fresh proposals and are at all times tough negotiators — especially, in strategic areas like energy.
On the other hand, both Russia and Iran are intensely conscious that this is a top-down relationship. Russians are quite aware that they are dealing with a new leadership in Tehran that prioritises the improvement of Iran’s relations with the West and focuses on its Gulf neighbours who are close allies of the US.
Although Putin approved the draft treaty as far back as last September, the signing of the document itself was deferred. Russia appreciates the rationality and self-restraint that Iran exercises in the development of nuclear programme and its brilliant achievement to attain deterrent capability without developing nuclear weapons. Conversely, Russians would certainly know that Iranians will never barter away their sovereign prerogatives and strategic autonomy with any country.
However, the transition in Tehran following the death of former president Ebrahim Raisi introduced created an element of uncertainty as the ensuing closely-fought election and formation of a new government turned out to be a “regime change” of sorts.
The foreign policy strategy of the new government led by Pezeshkian — improving Iran’s ties with Gulf neighbours (and the West) — is pivoted on the resolution of the nuclear question with the US, which holds the key to the lifting of western sanctions that is the pathway to Iran’s economic recovery.
That said, the political will at the leadership level for building a strategic partnership in a long-term perspective is not in doubt. Both Russia and Iran envisage tactical and strategic advantages in working together closely in the conditions under sanctions. Interestingly, Article 19 of the Treaty devotes much attention to the sharing of experiences on how to push back the draconian western sanctions.
Pezeshkian underscored that ahead of his visit to Moscow, he spoke with the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who emphasised “how important it is to develop comprehensive relations with Russia.” The warm, respectful and trustful interaction between Putin and Khamenei has been the lodestar of the relationship in the recent decade. Much will depend on the leadership position after Khamenei, 86, the Vali-e Faqih or supreme jurisprudent who exercises ultimate authority over all branches of the government, and is Iran’s commander-in-chief.
The salience of the treaty lies in the expansion and deepening of military cooperation, a big leap forward in energy ties with some mega projects on the anvil such as oil swaps and a brand new gas pipeline through Azerbaijan with a planned capacity of 55 bcm, joint efforts on de-dollarisation and clearing system in local currency and, on the whole, a qualitatively new level of coordination in the foreign policy strategies of the two countries in both bilateral and multilateral framework such as EAEU, BRICS and SCO.
However, integration into the Eurasian matrix may suit Iran only up to a point, since Tehran gives the highest importance to its strategic autonomy and historically lacked a “bloc mentality.” Curiously, Article 3 of the treaty painstakingly flags the maleficent activities that neither side should undertake against the other!
Iran doesn’t face the threat of foreign aggression and the agreement falls short of the mutual defence treaty Russia has with North Korea or the US has with over half a dozen Latin American countries and the Philippines (but not Israel.) Nonetheless, Pezeshkian has said that a full-fledged military cooperation with Russia is now possible. “The enemy should have no illusions that we can easily be defeated,” he remarked and left it at that.
The treaty does not obligate the two countries to come to the other’s defence if one is attacked; they agree, instead, not to provide military or other assistance to the aggressor!
Suffice to say, the treaty falls short of an alliance while it could, arguably, have the “butterfly effect” of an alliance on regional politics. Iran has experienced that Russia remained passive vis-a-vis the intensive and relentless Israeli air attacks against its deployments in Syria. Moscow even put in place a deconfliction mechanism in place bilaterally with Tel Aviv to prevent mistaken attacks on each other — although Russia and Iran were fighting on the same side as comrades-in-arms during the Syrian civil war.
The treaty will be severely tested if a US-Iran rapprochement gets under way during President Donald Trump’s presidency — however preposterous that might seem. But Iran’s dependence on Russia will only increase if Trump reverts to the “maximum pressure” strategy and works to undercut the growing Saudi-Iranian amity to persuade Riyadh to normalise with Israel in the spirit of the Abraham Accords and reset its foreign policy compass to the default position casting Iran in adversarial terms.
Prima facie, this is unlikely to happen, since a Middle Eastern conflict is not in Trump’s agenda. In fact, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s call to Trump on Wednesday highlighted an offer to invest $600 billion, underscoring the shift in the Kingdom’s regional priorities. The White House readout also stressed “efforts to bring stability to the Middle East, bolster regional security, and combat terrorism… and Saudi Arabia’s international economic ambitions over the next four years as well as trade and other opportunities to increase the mutual prosperity.” There was no reference to Iran.
Agreements per se do not change anything. The key lies in their implementation. The construction of Bushehr nuclear power plant got unduly delayed as Russians dragged their feet under pressure from the US and Israel forcing Tehran to file a case claiming damages. Of course, circumstances are different today but how far Russia will be willing to transfer advanced military technology to Iran remains an open question.
The prospects of the Russia-Iran treaty becoming a game changer in regional politics will also depend on the current transformation in Saudi-Iranian normalisation and the related trends in regional politics consolidating. Russia becomes a stakeholder in reinforcing such trends. There is no question that with growing uncertainties in Russian-Turkish relations and the rivalries in the Black Sea (which is no longer a “Russian lake”), Iran becomes a key partner in Russia’s regional connectivity. Unsurprisingly, the treaty acknowledges that cooperation in the Caspian Sea region is vital.
Russia’s keenness to get the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) fully operational is self-evident. The treaty (Articles 20 and 21) dwells on the transportation sector as a strategic area in the Russian-Iranian relationship. Iran stands to gain in its positioning as a dependable regional hub connecting Russia with some of the key countries in the Global South, including India and Pakistan.
Transcript of News X round table discussion of Ukraine-Russia war
Note: pay attentlon to the reasoning, arguments of my three fellow panelists. OK, one is a die-hard Zelensky regime supporter, but the Americans! Wow, folks who never pick up a mainstream newspaper to see how the war is really going, let alone look to alternative media. They are living in the post-factual world, a bubble of propaganda. Just a reminder: know the enemy!
Transcript submitted by a reader
NewsX: 0:00
Hello and welcome, I’m Joshua Barnes, and today we were having a insightful discussion on the actions and decisions to be made by US President Donald Trump to put an end to the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. It was believed that the raging Russia-Ukraine war will be significantly impacted by the US administration. The new President, Donald Trump, had claimed to put an end to the war in just a day as soon as he took over office. Now, with his victory, he seems to be working on a– cracking a peace deal between the warring countries. Trump has called for Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet him immediately.
He also talked about the willingness of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate a deal. Replying to Trump’s request, the Kremlin say that Moscow was ready for a dialogue with Trump. What now awaits is the meeting of the two leaders. Trump has also said the Saudi nations and OPEC plus to reduce oil prices which according to him will be able to end the war sooner. Resultingly the oil prices fell down by one percent. With Trump’s repeated warnings to Russia for a peace deal and increasingly aggressive behaviour of Russia on Ukraine, the future of the war remains uncertain.
1:12
Joining us today we have Professor Olexiy Haran, who’s joining us from the Kiev Mohyla University in Kiev. We have John Rossomando, president of the Viking Research Associates and a geopolitical analyst in Washington. We have Gilbert Doctorow, a Russian affairs expert joining us from Brussels and finally Adrian Calamel, a Middle East expert joining us from New York.
Trump’s comments relating to oil, Gilbert Doctorow: he said that if the prices drop, then Russia’s ability to fight in this war will end. But the Kremlin have hit back within the last hour and said that wars are not built off oil, they’re built off security. So looking at the statement that the Kremlin has made, do you think that there is still some friction there between Trump and Putin’s administrations?
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 2:02
It’s not a question of friction. It’s a question of whether Mr. Trump and his advisors read the records in the State Department to see where the United States has been previously. I was just going over my own notes from April 2021 in the period preceding the first and only summit between Biden and Putin.
And Mr. Biden’s State Department did the same foolish and counterproductive things that Mr. Trump is doing now, threatening Russia, trying to establish negotiations from a position of strength, which is utterly unacceptable to the Kremlin. Mr. Putin stated clearly that they look for fair treatment and equal treatment and equal respect of the parties as they meet.
2:57
Before Biden met with Putin, they introduced new sanctions. They introduced various punishments to show who was calling the shots and that they thought they would bring Mr. Putin to heel. That’s exactly the mistake, the utterly foolish and ignorant position of Mr. Trump today.
When he says what he did about how World War II was fought and how the Russians helped the Americans to win the war, he is committing sacrilege from the standpoint of Russian public opinion and Russian elite opinion. They know that they won the war, not the United States, that the Wehrmacht, three-quarters of its strength, was pitted against Russia, not against the United States.
3:46
Mistakes like this are unacceptable. Mr. Trump is utterly unprepared for a summit with Mr. Putin, and I don’t believe it will take place shortly. The Russians are very close to totally destroying the frontlines of Ukraine, and they have no intention of pausing for a ceasefire to allow Mr. Zelensky to restore his order, to bring in new mobilized forces, and to get further arms equipment from the United States and its allies. This is out of order.
What the Russians want to discuss with Mr. Trump, and they do want to meet with him, is a division of the world order. They expect that Mr. Trump’s emphasis on the Monroe Doctrine, on reestablishing American total hegemony in the Western Hemisphere is balanced by the recognition that the United States cannot keep its arms around the whole world and should be sharing, must be sharing responsibility for step for global stability with the other two superpowers, China and Russia.
NewsX: 5:00
Yes, Professor Olexiy Haran, we have heard Gilbert Doctorow’s response; I’d like your response to Trump’s comments.
Haran:
Well, first of all if we’re talking about the course of Trump well … there’s a lot of uncertainty and on the one thing Trump is saying importance of settlement, importance of stopping the war, but the question is how and what should be the concessions from different sides. For example, if I hear new state secretary, Mr. Rubio, he said very right that, I am quoting him, that we know who is aggressor, aggressor is Russia, Ukraine is a victim. That’s very good.
However, then he’s talking that both sides, it’s important for both sides to make concessions. So my question is what kind of concessions from Ukraine? As far as I understand, Mr. Gilbert, you are apologetic about Mr. Putin.
You are talking that the United States are guilty of what’s going on. I think this is a typical, this is a propaganda from Kremlin. We know who started the war. We know what were the reasons for the war. Putin is not close to crush Ukraine, No.
But he may deliver a lot of troubles and a lot of victims. He doesn’t care about people’s lives at all. And the next, the aim of Putin is not just Ukraine. He would like to change the whole world. Yes, you are right in this sense.
He would like to destabilize the whole world. He would like to create the acts of evil, which will include Iran, North Korea, China, and maybe some other states which are inclined to aggression. So that’s the real aim of Putin. He’s talking about crushing the whole Ukrainian nation. He’s saying Ukrainians don’t exist.
Ukrainians do not exist. Is it the right approach, or this is the approach of aggressor? So here we have very difficult actually question how to proceed. And we Ukrainians we don’t believe in the policy of appeasement of aggressor. You may remember Munich agreement of 1938 at the expense of Czechoslovakia. This was appeasement of aggressor and what happened later? World War II.
7:51
Because aggressor didn’t stop. So this is the whole problem how to react. Yes we think that economic sanctions are not enough but there should be a combined approach of the whole civilised world to stop this crazy total unjustified aggression.
NewsX:
Yes, Adrian Calamel, I want to bring it back to potentially ending a conflict. You of course are a Middle Eastern expert and we’ve seen Donald Trump’s influence in ending one sort of war and one series of fights and catastrophes going on. What do you think that the impact can be of Donald Trump in this conflict. He of course has said in his first day that the war would end. We’ve had his first day, it hasn’t, but his strong rhetoric clearly is leaning towards trying to get this done as soon as possible.
Calamel: 8:44
Thank you for having me. I think we need to take a pause. It’s only been four days since he’s been put in, you know, sworn into office here. He does have a plan going forward. Trump has a approach of playing probably good cop, bad cop in a lot of places in the world. But he’s putting out messaging there for Zelensky, for Putin.
I think from Zelensky he wants clear, defined outcomes. What are we looking for? What are the objectives? And can we meet those? With Putin, we know that he is unwavering. He is not going to sign any type of agreement.
9:24
He wants to recreate a quasi-Soviet Union. He was the one who actually said that the fall of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest travesties of the 20th century. So what Trump needs to do is realize he has enormous leverage right now because North Korea, I mean, Russia is suffering from a manpower problem and a firepower problem. Didn’t have a fire problem before, but now they have both. Manpower problem, they’re bringing North Korean troops onto the battlefield ill-equipped, untrained, and being swooped up.
10:02
And they have a firepower problem that they were bringing in drones, ballistic missiles from the Islamic Republic, which thankfully the Israelis took out those factories. So Trump has a couple of options here, and I don’t think he’s going to sit down and play a game of poker, such as the Blinken administration did, or Blinken State Department, where you sit down with a full house and you act like you got a pair of deuces in your hand when you actually have a full house. Play from a position of strength. And that’s what we have here is we have enormous economic leverage over the Russians. And at this time, they are, they’re pressed militarily.
10:42
And I think at the end of the day, we need to put a NATO blanket. I know this is the thing that Putin will cry about, call foul over and over, but NATO is a defensive alliance and if Ukraine had been in NATO, I highly doubt whether this invasion would have happened because it would have triggered Article 5, and that’s what Putin’s afraid of. That’s why he doesn’t want Poland, didn’t want Poland. That’s why Finland joined because World War II, who did the Soviet Union invade? Finland. NATO is there for a reason.
NewsX: 11:14
John Rossomando, I’d like to bring it back to Trump’s comments about oil. Do you think that there may be an ulterior motive here? Of course, we know a comment that he made during his inauguration speech, “We are going to drill, baby, drill.” Do you think Trump’s comments on oil could be continued, specifically with him looking to work with Saudi Arabia and other oil producing nations?
Rossomando:
Well, if we look back to history, Ronald Reagan went to Saudi Arabia, I think it was like ’85 or something like that, and got the Saudis to ramp up their oil production, which destroyed the Soviet economy, contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, because it couldn’t pay its bills. The number one thing that gave Vladimir Putin the wherewithal following the pandemic to not to second invasion of Ukraine, was the fact that oil and gas revenues started going up precipitously. And if you’re a country like Russia that has one major source of revenue, you know, it would really hurt the ability of the Russians to pay the Iranians, pay the Chinese, pay the North Koreans for whatever they’re getting for their arms and their weapons, and President Trump is hoping that this can be leveraged just as it was at the end of the Soviet period.
NewsX: 12:47
Gilbert, Doctorow, looking at the threats of sanctions that Trump has made and now the comments about dropping oil prices, how debilitating do you think this could be to Russia given the sanctions on other sectors in which they were generating funds and in a war that is depleting funds of the Russian nation?
Doctorow:
These sanctions will have no effect, and they have made Trump the laughing stock of Moscow elites in the last couple of days. The notion that raising tariffs on Russia’s sales of goods to the United States will cripple Russia — he’s failing to see that the total volume of sales in 2024 were 300 million dollars, mostly uranium, which the United States needs to keep its nuclear power plants running.
The United States has no leverage over Russia. Mr. Trump’s statement that “we have a lot of power over Russia” is totally misinformed. It’s bravado, and it hasn’t been researched, which makes him look like a fool. He is now repeating the same mistakes that Biden made only with a different personality and perhaps a more lively mind. But the end result is negative.
14:02
The United States has no leverage over Russia that it has not already exercised under Biden. And if there is more that it could do, it would have led to World War III. And that was perfectly well understood in Washington, which is why they held back. They don’t want to be killed. The only power the United States has over Russia is its nuclear missiles.
And Russia more than outdoes that in its hypersonic and other intercontinental ballistic missiles directed against the United States. So this notion of negotiating from strength is a non-starter and Mr Trump should step back, find some consultants who know something about Russia, which his do not.
NewsX: 14:48
Professor Haran, looking at any potential deal to end the war, if of course the frictions can be resolved and Trump can resume his promised role of mediator between the two warring nations, how do you think Zelensky might deal with a potential concession over land that has been taken by RussiaI
Haran:
I would like to throw the question back to you, Mr. Moderator. What will India do if it’s attacked and its territory is seized and next and the whole country is bombarded? What would be your position? I am sorry for this question. I hope it will never happen. But if it happens, what would you do? Will you agree, you know, to concessions to give part of your territory to other states?
NewsX:
Well looking at the situation where potentially Russia is advancing in Ukraine, there is potentially a thought that that could get worse and that appeasement as you’ve mentioned is not necessarily an option but ending the fighting ending the bloodshed. Do you think that’s something that Zelensky might lean towards if that does mean losing any territory at all?
Haran: 16:03
Look, the situation is difficult, definitely. Putin is moving very slowly and losing lots of Russians. That’s the story, but he is moving, though slowly. So what we need, we need support, we need more support. And it includes economic sanctions, and it includes also military support. If you are talking about economic sanctions, I would like to say the GDP of Russia, Mr. Gilbert do you know, it’s like the GDP of California or Spain or Italy, nothing else. So from economic point of view, Russia cannot compete with Western countries. The only thing Russia can do is nuclear blackmail. And this is what Putin is doing, and this is what you are repeating. Okay?
16:53
So, unfortunately, the West is afraid of nuclear blame, so here I should recognize that Putin’s strategy of blackmailing the West with nuclear catastrophe works. Now, and I think that the best approach should be, as I have said, from the very beginning of this war, you know, to stop Russian aggression. And it can, could be stopped by force, because Putin understands only the logic of force, and he is not a suicide. He doesn’t in reality want nuclear war because he would also die.
Now, regarding concessions, again, let me repeat. The situation is not easy. Now, so my prediction is no Ukrainian president as well as no civilized country would ever recognize annexations of part of Ukraine by Russia. Never ever. And you can see the results of voting in the General Assembly of the United Nations at the beginning of agggression. 140 countries in favor of territorial integrity of Ukraine. Only four countries actually supported Russia.
18:26
So, but there’s no question about legal recognition of annexation. But, you know, if there is approach to freeze the xxxx unfortunately it will mean de facto continued occupation of part of Ukrainian territory, and it would send wrong signals to any nuclear power. Because the signal would be that nuclear power can blackmail other countries and seize whatever territories they would like to seize. And this is true about China, this is true about Iran, even about North Korea. So unfortunately it will create huge precedent for the whole international [relations], not only in Europe, but also in other parts of the world. It would be very, very dangerous.
19:22
That’s why I think that we need to stick to international law, which is very clear. The international law is very clear about territorial integrity of Ukraine. Look, Russia recognized the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Russia had to be a guarantor of territorial integrity of Ukraine, of neutral Ukraine. And neutral Ukraine was attacked by Russia in a very [cynical] way.
So again there could be different scenarios, good ones, bad ones, some in the middle, but what is really important: to show to Russia as aggressor and to any potential aggression that their nuclear blackmail doesn’t work. That’s really important for the future of international relations.
NewsX: 20:13
Yes, and looking at that potential deal, I want to come back to the fighting, which of course is ongoing. The Ukrainian army, Ukraine themselves, the government have relied heavily on US support. Adrian Calamel, if Trump is, sort of wavers in that support, it could be devastating for Ukraine.
Whether a deal is struck within the next three to six months or not, the losses could be massive. So do you think that this is Trump trying to sort of end a conflict so he doesn’t have to fund it? And if he is looking at the financial implications for the US, what could him withdrawing those funds really do?
Calamel: 20:50
I think, great question, I think before Trump, the discussion withdrawing funds, etc., he needs to get some clear defined objectives. There’s been no end game to this war. There’s been counterattacks. There’s been counteroffensives. There’s been defensive measures taken. We see the American military aid that’s come in. It’s been the Ukraine asking for it six months before they actually get it. They’re begging for it. And it’s basically just been to stay in the fight. It’s not been to press the fight. Now, to press the fight, it’s going to be very difficult.
You know, there’s areas like Donbass, Crimea. I mean, the Russians have been embedded in there for years now. After they baloney-sliced– Putin has taken the Hitler version of foreign policy and baloney-sliced his way across Europe and waiting until someone stands up. Ukraine became the sort of Poland, I would say, in this case, where he went a step too far. So Trump needs clear defined objectives. He wants to find what Zelensky wants, what he needs.
21:55
And he needs to make sure at the end of the day, to end this war, it needs to be a type of outcome where Putin never feels like he can invade another sovereign nation again. And one of those ways to do that is for entrance into NATO and to make sure that he knows that he will be punished and he will be forced to pay for the damages, for the lives, and those types of things. Let’s look at the atrocities he’s committed. Why aren’t we talking about war crimes? You see all these things leveled against the Israeli government for their actions against a terrorist attack.
And then you have Putin invading another country and creating, using terrorist tactics, using these types of things. So this type of evil cannot be invited into the world. It needs to be stemmed off. And we also need to understand, Trump needs to understand that Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran and China all coordinate. And you can’t compartmentalize them because you take your foot off Russia, play nice with them. And all of a sudden China says, “Oh, this is a green light.” And I just want to pivot back to something Gilbert said before. We need to lose the false binary narrative that it’s either peace, give Putin whatever he wants, or you got World War III. That’s not the situation.
That’s not the situation. That’s fear-mongering. And the United States has enormous leverage. I think we need to remember that. So I object to the fact that we don’t have leverage. And the binary narrative, it just doesn’t work. That’s what we heard with the JCPOA. It’s give the Islamic Republic a nuclear weapon, or it’s going to be World War III.
NewsX: 23:42
John Rossomando, just to finish off quickly, We’ve seen Trump almost dangle the carrot of a meeting with Putin and potentially looking like their relationship is going to be closer than it was between Biden and Putin, but he continues a rhetoric which is very strong in terms of imposing sanctions. Do you think that that meeting will happen and what do you think the result will be?
Rossomando:
Well, I think that there eventually will be a meeting between Putin and Trump. However, the outcome of that meeting is to be determined. I think that President Trump should consider things like sanctions against Kazakhstan, which has become kind of the external battery resource of the Russian economy in a way that the Chinese have been able to clandestinely provide goods and services to the Russian economy, and where Russian companies have been able to go to continue their operations and evade sanctions. So I think that everything needs to be on the table, and I think that the biggest problem we have with Ukraine, as Adrian was pointing out, there’s no strategy for victory. We’ve been just fighting a stalemate for years without any goals, without any offensives.
25:06
I mean, the biggest example that comes to my mind is the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which the United States and its coalition kicked the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Russia’s using the same tactics, the same strategies, but no one has any strategy for the Ukrainians to knock the Russians out. The Russians aren’t leaving, So there needs to be some sort of pragmatic solution.
NewsX:
John Rossamando, thank you for your time. Thank you also to Professor Olexiy Haran. Thank you, Gilbert Doctorow. And finally, thank you, Adrian Calamel.
25:41
As this ongoing situation between Trump, Putin, Zelensky, and the ongoing war continues, we will bring you all of the latest from Russia, Ukraine, the USA and the rest of the world.
Prof. John Mearsheimer : Can US and Russia Have Enduring Peace?
January 25, 2025 natyliesb
I’m having flashbacks to when Obama was president and publicly said that Russia didn’t make anything and attracted no immigration – two claims that were false. It made me wonder if Obama was lying for propaganda purposes or if his advisors were just that incompetent. Recent comments from Trump are making me ask the same question. – Natylie
Russia expands its armed forces while West and Ukraine enter military crisis
Lucas Leiroz
January 26, 2025
Today, Russians want to defend their country – because they believe in their leaders – while Westerners and Ukrainians are disappointed and want to surrender.
A recent statement by Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, brought to light a significant figure regarding the country’s military mobilization in 2024: almost half a million citizens have enlisted in the Russian armed forces. The impressive figure of 450,000 contracted for regular military service and 40,000 volunteers for the special operation in Ukraine reflects not only the strengthening of Russia’s military capabilities, but also a clear message about the determination of the Russian people and their trust in their government and its strategic guidelines.
This number of enlistments, which amounts to more than a thousand people going to recruiting centers each day, is indicative of a successful mobilization that not only meets the government’s goals for the year, but also demonstrates Russia’s ability to mobilize vast human resources in the face of continued military escalation. The enlistment rate is undoubtedly a reflection of both Russia’s preparedness for the current tensions with NATO and the popularity of the government’s measures among the country’s citizens.
Medvedev, while stressing that the 2024 mobilization had achieved its goals, placed great emphasis on the continuation of this process into 2025. Moscow’s commitment to maintaining a robust and large military force is vital to ensuring that the country can sustain its operations in a protracted war. The battle for the New Territories has become a central strategic issue for Russia, not only in terms of territorial defense but also as a symbol of Russian resilience against external pressures, especially from NATO and the United States.
It is crucial to understand that, contrary to what Western propaganda claims, Russian recruitment policy is based on two distinct, yet related, realities: on the one hand, there is the voluntary system of conscription into the special military operation, which attracts an increasing number of people from all over the country, as well as foreign immigrants interested in acquiring Russian citizenship; on the other hand, there is Moscow’s official effort to expand its ranks in the face of growing tensions with NATO, already in the process of preparing for the possibility of a “worst case scenario”.
Voluntary recruitment for the conflict has been so successful that Moscow has already ruled out any discussion of a new mobilization. In the same sense, normal recruitment has been absolutely successful, as the country is expanding its regular military outside the conflict zone.
Contrary to the optimism and “short-termism” that has permeated Western analysis since Donald Trump’s election, Moscow appears to recognize that the war in Ukraine will not be resolved so easily and is likely to last for years. Instead, Russia’s strategy is one of resistance and gradual build-up of forces, which over time can wear down its adversaries’ resources and strengthen Russia’s position on the global chessboard.
The substantial increase in the number of enlisted personnel in Russia is not only a reflection of current military needs, but also an indicator that the nation is preparing for a future in which war, resistance, and continuous mobilization will become essential parts of its trajectory. Russia is demonstrating its willingness to toughen its stance in the face of external pressures and assert itself as a power capable of resisting any attempt at subjugation, reinforcing the idea that its identity and strength are anchored in an unbreakable national spirit.
All this is happening on the Russian side while in Ukraine recruiters hunt people on the streets to send them to certain death on the battlefield. The country is experiencing a true social catastrophe, with people tired of the conflict and taking desperate measures to escape the war, such as illegal immigration across Ukraine’s dangerous western borders. In addition, there are increasing cases of violent popular reaction, with people reacting to neo-Nazi tyranny.
At the same time, in the West, anti-military tendencies are growing. Anti-war candidates are winning elections, while pro-NATO politicians are facing protests and popular outrage. In fact, it seems that no one in Ukraine or in the West still believes in a “game-changing” possibility of defeating Russia, which makes any military measures extremely unpopular.
In practice, this scenario of the military’s unpopularity in the West and the natural and voluntary growth of the armed forces in Russia clearly shows the future of the current conflict. Neither side is capable of winning a war without popular support. The moral and psychological factor is as fundamental as the technical factor on the battlefield. Currently, Russians want to defend their country – because they believe in their leaders – while Westerners and Ukrainians are disappointed and want to surrender. The outcome of the war already seems clear.
Lukashenko Is Re-Elected With 87.60% of the Vote, According To Official Polls
Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko atended the final concert of the Marathon of Unity campaign as part of the presidential campaign at Minsk Arena. Photo: President of the Republic of Belarus Press Service
January 26, 2025 Hour: 2:43 pm
The president of Belarus, Alexandr Lukashenko, was re-elected this Sunday for a seventh term at the head of the former Soviet republic with 87.60% of the votes, according to the first official polls at the polls.
In this way, Lukashenko will remain in power until 2030, while the Vote Against All was the second most supported option by Belarusians at the polls with 5.1% of the votes, as reported by the Youth Organizations Committee on public television.
The Communist Party’s candidate Sergei Sirankov, who openly supported the Belarusian leader’s re-election and won 2.7% of the votes.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has claimed victory in the presidential election for the seventh consecutive time, securing 87.6% of the vote, according to exit polls. pic.twitter.com/qF9PEC90P0
— OSINTWarfare (@OSINTWarfare) January 26, 2025
Oleg Gadukevich, with 1.8%; lawyer Anna Kanopatskaya, with 1.6%; and Republican Alexandr Jizhniak, with 1.2%.
The Belarusians show appreciation for their leader, Aleksandr Lukashenka, to whom they attribute the credit of protecting the country from the neoliberal policies that affected Central Europe after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which has contributed to a relatively high standard of living compared with other European nations, despite the Western sanctions, according to the USSR’s correspondent in Belarus, Oleg Yasynsky.
In the most recent elections, turnout was notable in the morning, with a greater influx of older adults, while in the afternoon there was an increase in young voters and families at the polls.
Lukashenko, in relation to the new administration of Donald Trump, does not expect changes in US policy and advises not to pay too much attention to his statements, which he considers more focused on attracting media attention than on generating significant changes.
DUE NORTH – TRUMPS OPENS THE WAR AGAINST RUSSIA FROM GREENLAND
by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
Over-confidence in the face of the adversary can be the death of kings.
In the two great battles whose outcomes turned a small, defensive Anglo-Saxon island into an offensive global empire, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the Battle of Bosworth Field of 1485, the ruling English kings, Harold Godwinson and Richard III, launched downhill cavalry charges which almost overpowered the invading forces; almost reached the challengers William of Normandy and Henry Tudor; almost killed them. But Harold and Richard were killed instead; their kingdoms were captured.
The lesson of those two cavalry charges led from the front by Harold and Richard has been erased in the story-telling which followed their deaths by the propagandists of William and Henry.
In the present battles with the US and the NATO allies on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Russians could provide an object lesson to the Danes on what they should expect to be done to them by President Donald Trump as he rushes to capture Greenland, confident that the threat of his charge will be enough to force the Danes to surrender, the Greenlanders to capitulate
Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredericksen heard it for herself. “It was horrendous,” said one of the sources in Copenhagen after she and Trump had spoken by telephone last week. Another source has added: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious, and potentially very dangerous…It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs.” This was what was heard and reported to a London newspaper. Prime Minister Fredericksen was shy; she told the Financial Times she does: “not recognise the interpretation of the conversation given by anonymous sources”.
Officially, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman has declared Russia to be against both Fredericksen and Trump.
Their claims, Maria Zakharova said last Thursday, “neglect the crux of the issue.” That, she explained, is the concerted Danish campaign to destroy the indigenous identity, culture, and reproduction of the Inuit Greenlanders, combined with the theft and poisoning of their land by US nuclear bomber and submarine bases. “Given the extensive history of colonial exploitation by Denmark and the United States, it is unsurprising that Greenland seeks independence and the establishment of a sovereign state,” Zakharova said.
No Russian currently engaged in the serious fighting against the US believes in displaying enthusiasm for either the cavalry charge or the parley. Instead, the Russians are preparing to fight Trump’s Greenland move as the opening of a new front to attack Russia from the north.
The US plan of attack on the north front isn’t new with Trump. The recent history of that plan, retold from the Russian point of view, follows.
In the US Defense Department’s “2024 Arctic Strategy” paper, Russia is the principal target, along with Russian-Chinese cooperation in natural resource mining, trade and oil and gas shipping along the Northern Sea Route. “Major geopolitical changes are driving the need for this new strategic approach to the Arctic,” the paper declared, “including Russia’s full-scale [sic] invasion of Ukraine, the accession of Finland and Sweden to the NATO Alliance, increasing collaboration between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia, and the accelerating impacts of climate change. This increasingly accessible region is becoming a venue for strategic competition, and the United States must stand ready to meet the challenge alongside Allies and partners.”
In the Obama Administration prequels of this paper, issued in 2014 and 2016, Russia was not identified as a military target; Greenland wasn’t mentioned at all.
From 2022 on, Greenland was identified principally as the site for expanded American basing, firstly for vast new computer communications complexes, and then for projection of sea, air, and cyber weapons against Russia’s “excessive and illegal maritime claims along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) between the Bering Strait and Kara Strait. Russia claims the right to regulate Arctic waters along the NSR in excess of the authority permitted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), placing excessive requirements on foreign vessels transiting the route and threatening force against vessels out of compliance with Russian regulations.”
After the British and Germans have attempted North Front attacks on Russia – the British in 1919; the Germans in 1941-45 — Russia’s preparations to counter US strategy have a long history.
Under the pressure of the US and NATO sanctions war since 2014, the Russians have been accelerating the buildup of their defences. “In the Arctic, anything is possible,” reported the security analysis platform Vzglyad on January 15. “The United States has outlined its position and has taken a big step towards the Arctic…its step poses an immediate threat to Russia, because the Americans plan to go to the Arctic with all their weapons.”
“Trump raised the topic of the status of Greenland and Canada for several reasons”, Vzglyad added its interpretation. “First, it is about his political ambitions and the desire to repeat the achievements of Thomas Jefferson, who in 1803 bought Louisiana. Secondly, Trump acts in the interests of the capital behind him, primarily entrepreneur Elon Musk and other leaders of the ‘new economy’ (PayPal group [of Peter Thiel] for example.”
In October 2023 the Russian Government’s regional development minister, Alexei Chekunkov, announced a list of sixteen priority strongholds in the Arctic. The list included: the Murmansk cluster including the Northern Fleet base at Severomorsk; the Kirovsk-Apatity cluster; Monchegorsk; the Kemsky-Belomorsk cluster (Karelia); the Arkhangelsk cluster; the Naryan-Mar agglomeration (Yamalo-Nenets) including Novy Urengoy, Noyabrsk, and Salekhard; the Vorkuta agglomeration (Komi); Norilsk, Dudinka, and Dikson in the Krasnoyarsk Krai; Tiksi (Yakutia); Pevek and Anadyr (Chukotka).
According to Chekunkov, strategic factors, not population numbers, have dictated the listing. “Russia has every reason to develop its competencies and be the best country in terms of skills and planning for the development of life in the Arctic in settlements of any size. Dikson, with a population of 300 people, should also be a world-class model settlement in its category – it is a strategic point on the route of the Northern Sea Route. Only 300 people – compared with the Arkhangelsk cluster of half a million and the Murmansk cluster of 300,000. In Dikson, 300 people should receive the best solutions that the world’s urban planners and architects will then apply in their work.”
A few weeks later, at a meeting President Putin held in Arkhangelsk on December 11, 2023, the strongholds were described as “core cities”. “Russia’s Arctic which, as I have said many times, holds special, strategic importance for us,” Putin said. “I would like to emphasise once again that this is a region with enormous economic capacity. The strengthening of the energy potential of our country, the expansion of logistics capabilities, and ensuring national security and defence are largely associated with this region. For this reason, it is an indisputable priority to ensure the further comprehensive development and improvement of these territories. I have discussed this matter with the Government and instructed it to draw up a list of core cities.”
Eleven months following, on November 22, 2024, the Kremlin announced the first meeting of the newly established Council for Defending the National Interests of the Russian Federation in the Arctic, chaired by Nikolai Patrushev, the former secretary of the Security Council. The new council has been tasked with “analysing and identifying national security threats in the Arctic, assessing
the current state and development of international affairs in the Arctic, including the military and political landscape there, as well as efforts to gauge the social and economic situation in the Russian Arctic. Accelerating efforts to develop the Arctic economy and its infrastructure, while ensuring that Russia retains the ability to fully control its Arctic territory, the Arctic shelf and the Northern Sea Route are among the main priorities.”
Several weeks ago, the Moscow-based think tank, the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), published its most recent assessment of North Front threats from the US and NATO. RIAC is state funded with additional support from the two oligarch groups, Alfa of Mikhail Fridman and Severstal of Alexei Mordashov. RIAC describes itself as “a non-profit academic and diplomatic think tank that was established by the resolution of its founders pursuant to presidential decree No. 59‑rp dated 2 February 2010 “On the Establishment of the Non-profit Partnership “Russian International Affairs Council”. RIAC activities are aimed at strengthening peace, friendship and solidarity between peoples, preventing international conflicts and promoting conflict resolution and crisis settlement. RIAC operates as a link between the state, scholarly community, business, and civil society in an effort to find foreign policy solutions to complex conflict issues.”
The timing of RIAC’s paper is noteworthy – publication was dated November 18, 2024. At that point, Trump’s election victory was known. Also understood on the Russian side was the readiness of the US to act unilaterally in the Arctic without coordination with NATO. What was not anticipated in the RIAC analysis was that in accelerating its unilateral strategy for the Arctic, the new Trump Administration would commence with explicit attacks on NATO allies, Canada and Denmark.
The RIAC paper also displays the reluctance of the Russian foreign policy establishment to believe that Trump personally and his newly appointed officials are as intent on war against Russia as their predecessors, or that in their statements and plans they are as untrustworthy.
At a special press interview on the evening of January 24, President Putin claimed he had had “trust-based” interaction with President Trump and had accepted Trump’s version of his election defeat in 2020. Until now, Putin had repeatedly said he does not interfere in domestic US politics. “My first point is that Russia has never turned down contacts with the US administration, and it is not our fault that the previous administration chose not to establish such contacts. I have always had business-like, strictly business-like, but at the same time pragmatic and trust-based, I would say, relationships with the current President of the United States. I cannot but agree with him that if he had been President, if his victory had not been stolen from him in 2020, then maybe there would not have been the Ukraine crisis that broke out in 2022.”
The following discussion for RIAC by Dmitry Danilov and Natalia Vyakhireva has been translated verbatim without editing. A map and NATO document references have been added to assist the reader.
November 18, 2024
Is NATO really in the Arctic?
By Dmitry Danilov and Natalia Vyakhireva
Recently, one can often hear the thesis about the intensification of NATO’s activities in the Arctic. This raises several questions. For example, is the Alliance really ready for full-scale institutional activity in this area, or rather, are we talking about the strategies of its individual member states? Will there be any changes in the approaches of the North Atlantic Alliance and its members in connection with the accession of two Arctic Council countries, Finland and Sweden? What is the U.S. position on NATO’s Arctic and Northern agenda? Will the change of the Secretary General of the Alliance affect the level of NATO’s attention to the Arctic?
These and other questions were commented by the Candidate of Economics, Head of the Department. Dmitry Danilov, Director of the European Security Department of the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in an interview with Natalia Vyakhireva, Candidate of Political Sciences, Senior Researcher, and Head of the Canada Department at the Arbatov Institute of the USA and Canada.
Dmitry Alexandrovich, today there is a frequent thesis in the media about the intensification of NATO’s activities and strengthening its position in the Arctic. Is it possible to talk about the policy of the North Atlantic bloc in the Arctic today, or would it be more correct to raise the issue of the policy of its individual members in this region?
This is a very interesting research question for experts: is there really a NATO presence in the Arctic? Yes, the media often does identify the policies of NATO and its member states and say that NATO is becoming more active in the Arctic. It makes sense. We have witnessed how, in the context of internal disagreements, the North Atlantic bloc has been used in various situations as an organization that allows it to influence the positions of the participating countries within the framework of the “coalition of the willing” concept. Whether successfully or unsuccessfully is another matter. Initially, the issue of NATO’s activation in the Arctic and the development of its policy in this region was raised in the second half of the 2000s. In 2008-2009, when some countries of the NATO north, especially Norway, said that it was important to strengthen the presence of the North Atlantic Alliance in the Far North and in the Arctic. For example, a conference was held in Reykjavik, attended by senior or senior military and political leaders of NATO, to consider what prospects the bloc has in the Arctic. At that time, there was no previous consensus in NATO on the need to develop its Arctic policy. The political response from the bloc was the following: NATO is already present in the Arctic, at least because the Alliance’s member states are present there. In addition, the territory of the Far North is included in the operational responsibility area of the unit.
Why was such a position expressed?
This position was expressed in order to somehow limit the rather insistent desire of the military wing in NATO to move in this direction, since the military leadership believed that it was necessary to strengthen the collective defense system in the Far North. However, it didn’t work out then — there were too many obstacles. I would name the Arctic states of the United States and Canada as one of the main obstacles, because in general they were not interested in expanding the participation of international organizations in the Arctic agenda. This is not only related to military and political aspects. Any expansion of the competencies of international organizations in this region was seen as undesirable competition from the North American member States of the Alliance. This is the first point.
Secondly, let’s ask ourselves, to what extent are the United States and Canada interested in collective defence in the North? “Why does America need Europe?” is a question that is constantly being asked. However, it can also be formulated as follows: “What can NATO bring in terms of strengthening national security and defense to the United States of America and its ally Canada?” In principle, there is probably hardly any added value here, since North American defence is based on the United States and Canada’s own resources. First of all, this is the system of the Northern military space command NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD). Thus, there was little interest in collective instruments. I would like to emphasize once again that this question sounds a little different now. Nevertheless, it retains its importance, and it must be answered in the current conditions. If we recall the period of 2008-2009, then we must return to the question of how relations between Russia and the West, Russia and NATO, were generally built. It was the period of the American “reset” under the administration of Barack Obama. At that time, the United States was interested in reducing the level of conflict with Russia; convincing Russia that they were ready to strengthen partnership and cooperation along many lines, including those areas which were then fixed in the documents of the Lisbon NATO Summit in November 2010 and, accordingly, the Russia–NATO Council, which took place there at the same time.
Publicly, the concluding summit agreement of November 2010 identified twelve regions in the NATO area of coverage; the Arctic wasn’t one of them.
A closed document was adopted — a joint analysis of challenges and threats. The desire, or at least the declaration of the United States, to move in this direction, enshrined in the NATO documents, suggested precisely the restraint of NATO in advancing in areas of conflicting interests. The conflicts have already been formulated. The military stated that the Arctic is a zone of conflicting interests, and the bloc should prepare for this. It was not said what these conflicts might be. However, then the situation changed. The so-called “reset” ended very quickly, and the mood for including the Arctic in the NATO agenda began to intensify. Norway has never given up hope that it will be able to advance its position. However, I repeat, the main thing is that even at the preliminary stage it was impossible to count on a political consensus within NATO in this regard, and everyone took this factor into account.
In 2013-2014, there was a crisis in Russian-Western relations. The question was raised very sharply: “To what extent can the Ukrainian conflict be considered as a driver of NATO’s activity in a broader space and the expansion of Russia’s northern deterrent flank?” There were activists here, and their position was very clear. The line of the Nordic states, not only Norway, but also NORDEFCO (English: Nordic Defense Cooperation, Nordefco), was actively voiced in this regard. NORDEFCO is a northern cooperation organization that includes the Nordic states. At that time, of the 5 members of this organization, Finland and Sweden were not members of NATO, and this imposed significant restrictions on the Alliance’s presence as an organization in the Arctic. Nevertheless, this line was taken into account, but at that time the NORDEFCO was used as a format allowing to combine or increase the interaction and interdependence of the member states of the Alliance with the northern states that are not part of it. This format seemed and probably was indeed the most effective from a tactical point of view.
At the same time, the prospect of NATO’s expansion to the north was already being explored. The first serious attempts to analyze such possibilities were made already in 2016. That year, the Warsaw NATO Summit was held, at which fundamental decisions were made on the formation of a comprehensive system of deterrence of Russia, including strengthening operational and command structures. Against this background, the issue of the possibility of Finland and Sweden joining has begun to be explored. The prospect of the integration of these two countries into NATO has strengthened the positions of those in the Alliance who have traditionally advocated NATO’s involvement in the “northern affairs” and the operational strengthening of the organization in this area. However, there were significant limitations, which I have already mentioned.
Among other things, there were other priorities. As we understand it, it is impossible to change priorities and make important decisions overnight. This requires significant preparatory work, including political and diplomatic work, preliminary behind-the-scenes coordination, political coordination, and then political solutions. With the advent of the [first] Trump Administration, the main tasks of the American administration have become completely different in terms of using NATO and its mechanisms. As a priority, Trump saw an increase in the contribution of Europeans to collective defence, the one that had already been defined in the documents of the Warsaw NATO summit in 2016 (that one, not the future one).
“You have to comply with the decisions that we have made, and for that you have to pay more,” was his thesis. After all, Donald Trump managed to include cyberspace and outer space in the Alliance’s operational activities. In addition, for the first time, issues of relations with China were included in the official political agenda of the North Atlantic Alliance. These were the priorities of the Trump administration. Therefore, the Arctic agenda was pushed aside. And although some countries said that the Arctic region should be included in the NATO agenda one way or another, nevertheless, even the term “Arctic” itself did not appear in the documents of the bloc either conceptually or doctrinally.
Will something change in connection with the accession of Finland and Sweden to the North Atlantic Alliance?
Yes, of course, it will change. And a lot will change. First of all, even before Finland and Sweden joined NATO, but with this perspective in mind, NATO went to the lengths to include climate and climate change issues on its agenda as challenges to which the Alliance should respond. This is a direct path to the Arctic agenda, since climate change is largely tied to it. While not directly articulating its desire to raise questions about NATO’s presence in the Arctic to a new level, the Alliance nevertheless states that the climate agenda is now a very important agenda item in terms of challenges. Moreover, as an organization, NATO must play a crucial, if not a key role in solving these problems.
Following the NATO summit of 2021, this summary of action plans was issued. The Arctic is mentioned 27 times; Greenland not one. Russia was also unmentioned. Source: https://www.nato.int/
The question is an interesting one. I would like to emphasize that this was done taking into account the prospects of Finland and Sweden joining NATO. I am focusing on this because in 2022 after the start of the special military operation, both Finland and Sweden very clearly stated the thesis that it was Russia that pushed them on this path, and Sweden and Finland had no choice. Well, that’s not true. The process had been going on for a long time. It was taken into account and calculated as part of strategic planning in NATO, at least the prospective possibility of Finland and Sweden joining was calculated. In 2022, Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO. The question arises: “What will it change?”. This changes a lot, as NATO has new political opportunities to gain a foothold in the Far North, including, most importantly, strengthening NATO’s northern flank in order to build a full-layered front to contain Russia. The point is not just geographically to secure this line from south to north on the eastern flank, but to implement very specific operational measures that the bloc could not have carried out before. Thus, we are talking about planning collective defense and deterrence measures, taking into account the membership of Finland and Sweden in NATO.
If we look at a number of NATO analytical materials, back in the mid-2010s, NATO openly talked about the existence of so-called Anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) zones. This American concept means that a potential adversary or military opponent can create conditions unacceptable for the active deployment of enemy forces and for subsequent operational maneuvers. The two main such zones at that time were considered to be the Black Sea zone and the North Baltic Region (in fact, the Baltic Sea). After Finland and Sweden joined NATO, the situation “turned upside down.” In 2023, NATO openly declared that the Baltic Sea is now an internal sea of NATO. Thus, the situation has not just changed, it has “turned over” in the opposite direction. For Russia, the North Atlantic Alliance now has this no-deployment and maneuver zone. Now Russia is facing the same problems, and NATO plans to strengthen this system. Look at Estonia’s latest proposals, which almost involve mining the passage in the Baltic Sea in order to limit, so to speak, the echelons for Russian maritime transport in the Baltic Sea.
MAP OF ANTI-ACCESS/AREA DENIAL (A2/AD) ZONES, NATO AND RUSSIA
If we consider the strengthening of NATO’s northern flank, it becomes clear that it built a deterrence system according to the following scheme: first, Central and Eastern Europe, that is, the Baltic States and Poland; then Southeastern Europe, primarily Romania, and the creation of new multinational battalion groups in this zone as part of the rapid reaction forces; now the same task actually stands in the North to strengthen the northern flank. And therefore, the vectors of NATO’s operational planning are inevitably strengthening precisely in the northern direction. It is in the northern direction that NATO needs to decide how to strengthen its borders. This is quite difficult for the organization, because they need to include Finland and Sweden in the integrated defence system, and the integrated defence system includes the work of the nuclear planning group, which means that nuclear planning is also involved.
The United States in the Arctic against the risks from Russia and the looming China?
And so Finland and Sweden are joining NATO. You and I met together in 2022 with the diplomatic representatives of Sweden and Finland in Moscow, and they said very clearly that after joining, there would be no NATO bases on the territory of their countries, and also that they did not plan to deploy nuclear weapons on their territory.
Now let’s look at what is happening in terms of Finland and Sweden’s inclusion in the NATO collective defence and security system. The space of these states is currently being explored. Finland is deciding to build a NATO ground forces base on its territory 140 km from the border with Russia. A decision is being made to re-equip the aviation component of both Finland and, incidentally, Sweden with new aviation systems. I would like to emphasize that Finland buys F-35A aircraft (“A” means that these aircraft are capable of carrying nuclear weapons). To say that we will not deploy nuclear bombs of the United States of America on our territory, since they already exist in Europe, so Finland does not need them, especially not close to the borders, and at the same time, as if not to notice that the airforces of these countries are being retrofitted with American fighter-bombers that can to carry nuclear weapons, is in my opinion, very frivolous. Therefore, initially, Russia had to take into account the risks associated with the ongoing changes.
The question arises about these restricted access or deployment and maneuver zones. I have already mentioned the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. In foreign military analytics, we are talking about the fact that Russia has such capabilities virtually around the entire perimeter of its Arctic territory. That is, the opportunities for NATO there are minimal. On the one hand, this is a deterrent to NATO’s activity in this direction; on the other hand, to the contrary, it motivates the countries of the North Atlantic bloc, at least a number of its countries, to overcome these operational and strategic limitations. In this regard, we are asking the question that I posed at the beginning: how interested will the United States of America and Canada be in activating the Arctic agenda of the North Atlantic Alliance?
So far, I have formulated the answer to this question in the category of one possibility. It seems to me that the United States is creating a kind of “window of opportunity” so that, if necessary and with its own serious motivation and new resources related to strengthening NATO’s northern flank, it can use the organization precisely as an organization so that NATO is useful and, I would say, involved in the implementation of the new American Arctic strategy. In July 2024, the US Department of Defense announced a new Arctic strategy. The document is very interesting. It talks about Finland and Sweden. The answer to your question is that their joining the Alliance increases the opportunities for strengthening cooperation and interaction with the United States within the bloc.
However, there is no mention of any other NATO activity in the Arctic. Until now, the United States of America has focused on developing an interstate system of military-political and military cooperation with the member States of the Alliance, that is, with European allies. If we look at the legal relations of the United States with the Nordic countries, be it Norway, Finland, Sweden, etc., we will see that they are built on an interstate basis. Even the largest military exercises that are held in the north are the NORDIC response. We’re talking about this being a NATO exercise. However, this is not entirely true. When operational training and even combat training events take place in this region, they are conducted and conducted according to the formula — the host country invites its allies to participate in the event. This should not be misleading. In the last exercises in March 2024, 90,000 people from all 32 NATO member states took part, including Finland and Sweden, of course. Therefore, this is a window of opportunity. It turns out to be a game of variable geometry: here we act like NATO, and here we do not act like NATO. In this sense, it seems to me that the United States is now looking for opportunities for fine-tuning within the bloc in order to use it as a reliable tool in implementing its new strategic objectives. If NATO is needed as an organization, then such decisions will be made. If this is difficult, including due to the difficulty of reaching consensus within NATO, then it is quite natural to use this network of intra-NATO interactions.
How can NATO be used as an organization?
This can be done very simply. In this regard, the example is illustrative when Trump insisted at the NATO summit in 2017 that NATO, as an organization, join the US-led coalition in Syria. The French and Germans really did not want this, they had their own very serious problems, including problems related to ensuring intra-European balances. However, there was nothing left to do, and they accepted this ultimatum. The decision was made. Yes, it was quite limited back then. The outgoing Secretary General Stoltenberg said that NATO would participate as an organization, but would not carry out combat activities, it would have auxiliary tasks that it would solve. However, a political decision was made.
In the Arctic case, the decision-making formula may be the same. The next question is: how to implement or not to implement this political decision? That is, is it really possible to direct NATO’s activity in this direction, or is this political platform still sufficient to be flexible in terms of decision-making in the future? This is another window of opportunity for the United States. Therefore, for Finland and Sweden, their membership in NATO has changed a lot — this is a serious factor. I would like to emphasize once again that previously there were very significant restrictions related to US policy that hindered NATO’s progress in the Arctic, but now the situation has changed, and the United States is inclined to create a window of opportunity in order to be able to institutionally use NATO in the future to achieve its strategic goals in the North Arctic region, and, probably in the geopolitical containment of Russia and China. It is important to understand how useful this NATO toolkit will be in terms of solving Washington’s broader geopolitical tasks.
You mentioned the climate agenda, the Lisbon Summit document, and the documents of the Russia–NATO Council. Is there a documented element of Arctic policy somewhere else, specifically within the framework of NATO?
It’s fixed. We are talking about certain terminological references to the Arctic. The NATO 2030 concept mentions the Arctic, which is listed in inverted commas in terms of the increasing activity of China and Russia. The wording should be clarified in the document itself. If you look at the official concepts of NATO, including the Madrid Strategic Concept of 2022, there is no Arctic in them. At the same time, this region is present in the speeches of officials, especially the military. This once again confirms what I am talking about. Yes, the agenda is kept afloat, but it is not included in the official policy of NATO. If this happens, then this area must inevitably be included in NATO’s operational planning. So far, the United States does not see the need for this, and the Europeans probably do not have such potential and opportunity. From the point of view of the Alliance’s agenda, the Arctic issue will remain in limbo.
Britain's rapid deployment troops are "ready" to board and seize Russian ships off the coast if there is evidence they are damaging undersea pipelines and cables. The prospect, described as a ‘worse case scenario’ response, follows renewed US warnings that Russia is secretly and systematically mapping the UK’s undersea cable and pipelines using electronic markers in a secret operation to prepare 'target plans’. Last week defence secretary John Healy was forced to send a clear warning to Putin, stating: “We know what you are doing and we will not shy away from robust action to protect this country.” He revealed that military chiefs had ordered the Royal Navy to intercept Russia’s Yantar spy ship in the English Channel in November - sending the frigate HMS Somerset and the UK’s new underwater surveillance ship Proteus, which carries sub-sea robots. Yantar is one of more than 50 vessels operated by Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, Gugi, and has the capability to deploy robots deep into the English Channel and North Sea Though not officially part of Russia’s navy. Gugi draws personnel from the 29th Separate Submarine Division and answers directly to Moscow's MoD.
Yes, those ships also carry marines' special forces, just in case some cretin in UK MOD decides to try to "board" such a ship, plus, of course, Royal Navy should keep in mind that what passes in UK for Navy has about how many combat ships ready? Russia can greatly reduce that number and that will be done really fast. As per Yantar, as I stated recently--it was surveying the wreck of Ursa Major which, it looks like, was sunk by those unknown guys who are now very worried that they will be not just accused but charged in absentia with maritime terrorism--the only activity London is capable of. After all, three consecutive explosions in engine room, almost instantaneous listing ... tsk, tsk, tsk. The lady doth protest too much (c). UK should simply fade away and turn already what it is turning into--a third world shithole with some nice football stadiums and pastoral landscapes.
Larry C. Johnson: Russian Casualties and the Russian Economy — A Memo for President Donald Trump
January 27, 2025
By Larry C. Johnson, Substack, 1/23/25
Larry C. Johnson is Managing Partner of BERG Associates, and a former CIA Officer and State Department Counter Terrorism official.
Mr. President, I believe that the CIA is providing you inaccurate, false intelligence about Russia’s casualties and the condition of its economy. If you hope to realize your goal of opening negotiations with President Vladimir Putin to bring an end to the war in Ukraine, you must be equipped with the best information available.
You have been briefed that Russia has suffered devastating losses — as many as 800,000 casualties — and that Russia’s economy is weak and fragile. Data from open sources paint a diametrically opposite picture.
One of the best open sources for information about Russian casualties is Mediazona:
Mediazona (Russian: Медиазона) is a Russian independent media outlet focused on Anti-Putinist opposition that was founded by Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who are also co-founders of the protest group and band Pussy Riot. The outlet’s editor-in-chief is Russian political journalist Sergey Smirnov.
Mediazona is an independent organization that is ideologically opposed to Vladimir Putin. It is the antithesis of a Russian propaganda outlet. Mediazona employs a multi-faceted methodology to track Russian casualties in the Ukraine war, which includes:
1. Open-source intelligence gathering: They monitor publicly available information from news agencies, social media platforms, official military reports, and local residents’ groups.
2. Collaboration: Mediazona works closely with the BBC Russian Service to track and verify casualty reports.
3. Comprehensive database: They maintain a regularly updated casualty list, which currently contains over 44,600 names of Russian soldiers killed in action.
4. Probate Registry analysis: Mediazona combines their casualty list with data from the Probate Registry database to estimate the true mortality rate among Russian men.
5. Statistical modeling: They use a method that accounts for all excess male mortality up to age 50, considering factors such as social composition, delays in notary consultations, and death registration delays.
6. Cross-referencing: The team verifies information by cross-checking multiple sources and databases.
7. Volunteer network: A team of volunteers assists in data collection and verification.
8. Continuous updating: The database is regularly updated to reflect the most current information available.
According to Mediazona’s latest data, there are 88,726 confirmed Russian combat deaths since February 2022. Mediazona estimates, using probate registry data, that the number may be as high as 120,000. This is a far cry from the numbers claimed by Ukrainian intelligence, which forms the basis of CIA estimates.
It is essential that you understand that Russia views this war as vital to its continued existence. Russia is not fighting to reconstitute the Soviet Empire. It sees Ukraine as a Western-proxy being used to attack Russia with US and NATO supplied weapons and intelligence, with the ultimate goal of destroying the current government. Accordingly, the only satisfactory outcome for Russia is to end this threat. President Putin is willing to accept a negotiated settlement provided that Ukraine is stripped of its capacity to launch future attacks on Russia and that NATO ends any consideration of making Ukraine a member of NATO.
According to the latest IMF projections, Russia’s economy is expected to grow by 1.4% in 2025, a slight increase from their previous forecast of 1.3%. This represents a slowdown from the estimated 3.8% growth in 2024. The IMF attributes this slowdown to several factors:
1. Transition from a “war economy”: Russia’s economy has been running hot, fueled by substantial public spending on the war effort.
2. High inflation: The IMF reports inflation in Russia at 8.3% in 2024, with sequential inflation even higher at above 9%.
3. Monetary tightening: In response to high inflation, the Central Bank of Russia has raised interest rates to 21%, which is expected to weigh down economic activity.
The IMF’s forecast for Russia in 2025 is lower than the Russian Economic Development Ministry’s baseline forecast of 2.5% growth. However, it falls within the Central Bank of Russia’s current forecast range of 0.5-1.5%.
It’s worth noting that some Russian officials, including Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov, have criticized the IMF’s forecasts as overly pessimistic, arguing that they don’t account for measures taken by Russian authorities to support the economy.
Here is the critical point: Despite the projected slowdown, the IMF’s forecast suggests that Russia’s economy continues to show resilience in the face of Western sanctions, largely due to factors such as robust oil and commodity exports to countries like India and China, and the expansion of its military-industrial complex.
The Russian government view of its economy remains upbeat, with officials highlighting strong growth figures and resilience in the face of Western sanctions. The Russian government points to several key indicators to support this optimistic view:
1. GDP growth: The economy grew by 3.6% in 2023 and is expected to grow by around 4% in 2024, making Russia one of the fastest-growing major economies.
2. Low unemployment: The unemployment rate dropped to 2.6% in 2024, a historically low level.
3. Rising global economic status: According to the World Bank, Russia has overtaken Germany and Japan to become the fourth-largest economy in the world when measured by purchasing power parity.
4. Increased investment: Fixed capital investment grew by 9.8% in 2023 and 14.5% in the first quarter of 2024.
5. Trade surplus: Russia enjoyed a surplus of $50.2 billion in 2023 and $40.6 billion in the first half of 2024.
President Vladimir Putin uses these economic indicators to argue that Western sanctions have been ineffective and to showcase Russia’s economic model to partners in Asia and Africa. His message is resonating with the leaders of the Global South.
If you consider Russia’s perspective on the war in terms of casualties and the economy, Vladimir Putin is under no pressure to reach a negotiated settlement that does not address Russia’s strategic concerns that it will no longer face a military threat from NATO. If you fail to understand this and adjust your strategy to make a deal, your efforts to negotiate an end to war in Ukraine will not succeed.
I have no doubt that the spooks would feed bullshit to any prez. And I have no doubt the Trump only hears what he wants to hear. The results are the same.
******
27 January 2025: Collective Memory in Russia and Collective Amnesia in the West
Yesterday’s state television programming in Russia highlighted the visit of President Vladimir Putin to the Piskaryovo Memorial Cemetery on the outskirts of Petersburg to lay a bouquet in honor of his brother who died in the Great Patriotic War (WWII) and is buried there, and to pay his respects to the 420,000 civilians and 50,000 soldiers of the Leningrad Front who died in the Siege of Leningrad and lie in mass graves at Piskaryovo. There were no speeches. Putin stood to attention during the minute of silence that was accorded to the dead.
As every Russian and some in the West recall, the Great Siege that Nazi Germany and its ally Finland maintained from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944 was intended to starve to death the city’s population, while the city itself was to be razed to the ground if all went to plan. It was not called genocide until recently, but that is precisely what it was in today’s definition of the word. Germans and Finns. The Wehrmacht enforced the siege, that is to say it was the German nation in arms, not merely Nazi zealots.
Following his visit to the cemetery, President Putin officiated at an awards ceremony in the city, bestowing medals on survivors of the siege and on their armed defenders, now all in the 90s, who were seated on the dais. In the audience were both descendants of the blokadniki and newly designated ‘Heroes of Russia’ who have earned their medals in the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. At the President’s mentioning the presence of these new heroes in the hall, the audience rose as one in applause. This was spontaneous celebration of the continuous tradition of self-sacrifice for the nation.
Meanwhile, 1356 kilometers away, in Auschwitz (Oświęcim), Poland dignitaries from across Europe and America were gathered to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the surviving inmates of the Nazi death camp there on 27 January 1945.
Members of royalty were in attendance, including King Charles of Britain, Felipe of Spain, Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands, Philippe of Belgium, Frederik of Denmark, Haakon of Norway and Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden.
Among the presidents there were Emmanuel Macron of France, Sergio Mattarella of Italy and Alexander van der Bellen of Austria. Prime ministers came from Canada, Croatia and Ireland. Chancellor Olaf Scholz from Germany and Volodymyr Zalensky of Ukraine also were honored guests.
Who was not there? The Russians, who, after all had overall responsibility for the liberation of Auschwitz, constituting as they did the single largest contingent of the USSR’s Red Army that did the job on the spot. They were pointedly not invited, because as we all know, they are the aggressors in the ongoing bloody war in Ukraine.
I note that it was not easy to find a list of attendees, because Western media have given remarkably little coverage to what happened yesterday at Auschwitz. The online edition of The Financial Times today has not a word about the Holocaust Day event. Its biggest article of the day is dedicated to how the Chinese company DeepSeek ‘disrupted the global race in Artificial Intelligence, sinking the value of Nvidia. Today’s online New York Times also offers no articles yet about Auschwitz, instead publishing a fine gastronomy feature entitled ‘It’s dumpling week.” Was that ‘All the News that is fit to print”?
To its credit, Britain’s The Guardian does post a substantial article. The facts I cite above come from there. It also remarks on the generalized ignorance about the Nazi death camps among the young generation.
“Memories of one of humanity’s worst atrocities are fading.”
“A recent poll found that proportions of young European adults sometimes running into high double digits had not heard of the Holocaust, could not name Auschwitz or any other camp and had encountered Holocaust denial or distortion, mainly online.”
The article has a heavy editorial content, not just facts. It selects testimony from Auschwitz survivors carefully to give us the following essential point:
“With nationalist and far-right parties gaining support across Europe and disinformation increasingly distorting the history of the Holocaust, this year’s anniversary carried special weight.”
The Guardian associates the rise of far-right parties with the rise of antisemitism in Europe. It goes without saying that their reporters do not link in any way the new antisemitism with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
By the way, the largest color photo accompanying The Guardian article shows Volodymyr Zalensky placing a lighted candle at the Auschwitz museum.
From other sources, we know that on his way to Poland Zalensky made a stop in Baby Yar, a ravine near Kiev where 33,731 Jews were killed by the Nazi SS, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the Wehrmacht on 29-30 September 1941. Wikipedia tells us that this was the ‘largest mass-murder by the Nazi regime during the campaign against the Soviet Union, and it has been called “the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust to that particular date.”
Nota bene that this is the same Zalensky whose regime has made heroes of Stepan Bandera and Ukraine’s Nazi collaborator movements in WWII. I find Zalensky’s visit to Babi Yar important in another way. It brings out the fundamental mistake in the widely held view that the Holocaust took place in specially engineered gas chambers of Auschwitz and other German factories of death. Yes, Auschwitz accounted for over one million deaths and was the largest operation of its kind. However, most of the other five million deaths in the Holocaust took place in ravines and open fields of East Central Europe and Western USSR, in what the historian Timothy Snyder called The Bloodlands, his very well documented book by that title. This means that murders were perpetrated by vast numbers of participants, both in uniformed army ranks and from among non-combatants in an age-old savage manner.
That Snyder went on from that landmark research to become a leading voice among Russia-haters before and during the Russia-Ukraine war is an entirely separate issue.
*****
Late yesterday, the first segment of the Vladimir Solovyov talk show on the Rossiya 1 channel provided extensive and at times eloquent discussion of the headline issue of this essay.
Of course, panelists addressed the scandalous fact that Olaf Scholz and Volodymyr Zalensky were honored guests in Auschwitz while the actual liberators of the death camp were not invited. By its very nature such a guest list reveals the ongoing rewriting of the history of the Second World War that amounts to denial of what the Russians call historical memory (историческая память) and that we might better call ‘collective memory.’ Donald Trump’s recent ‘favor’ to Russia in acknowledging that Russia ‘had helped’ America to win the war was also brought up as a demonstration of sacrilegious revisionism that is held in contempt by Russians of all political stripes.
Solovyov’s panelists called attention to the reasons for Vladimir Putin’s speaking of a Nazi regime in control of Ukraine since 2014: Nuremberg style torchlight parades in Kiev with Nazi symbols on display and the renaming of streets and monuments in honor of Bandera. From this they went on to mention the similar annual marches of SS descendants through the streets of Riga, Latvia which never attract any critical notice by other EU Member States.
Finally, one panelist brought up the shocking statement that Elan Musk made earlier in the day: that Germany should ‘move beyond Nazi guilt.’ That damning statement has not elicited the discussion it merits in Western media, whereas his Nazi Siegheil straight-arm salute at the rally celebrating Trump’s inauguration last Monday did raise questions in Western major media.
Musk’s call for selective amnesia in Germany aligns perfectly with his support in word and deed (financially) to the Alternative for Germany party. The AfD was the original voice in the country saying that today’s German nation has no collective guilt for the horrors of the Nazis and should step out confidently to restore its sovereignty. This was later adopted by the whole German political establishment and made it possible for the Greens party leader Annalena Baerbock in her position as German Foreign Minister to stand on a soapbox and denounce Russian aggression and violation of European values.
Sovereignty is one thing, and I fully support it. Air brushing out the past, is something else, and in the German case is utterly unacceptable, considering what yesterday was commemorating in Auschwitz and at Piskaryova.
Former judge of the Krasnodar Regional Court Elena Khakhaleva was detained at the Baku airport at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation. This was reported by Izvestia, citing a source.
In July 2020, the High Qualification Collegium of Judges of the Russian Federation stripped Khakhaleva of her powers and first qualification class due to absenteeism. According to the HQCJ, the former judge was absent from work for a total of 128 working days. A special commission identified instances of absenteeism and established that since 2017, Khakhaleva had hardly participated in the consideration of cases as a speaker or chairperson. In 2019 alone, the judge took part in the consideration of over a hundred cases.
A criminal case was opened against the former judge in May 2022 under articles on fraud and official forgery. The High Qualification Collegium of Judges (HQCJ) gave its consent to initiate a criminal case against Khakhaleva in December 2021. On December 8, 2021, Khakhaleva left Russia, flying to Yerevan.
Khakhaleva became widely known in the summer of 2017 as the "golden judge" after the scandal surrounding her daughter's wedding, at which Russian show business stars performed. It was reported that the organization of the event cost the ex-judge's family $2 million. After this information appeared, the council of judges conducted its own investigation and found out that the cost of the event was about 4.5 million rubles.
Earlier, RBC Krasnodar reported that the Leninsky District Court of Rostov-on-Don chose a preventive measure for the former judge of the Krasnodar Regional Court. She was arrested in absentia for two months. The reason for the arrest in absentia was that Elena Khakhaleva is currently not in Russia.
The story with Khakhaleva has been going on for many years, but they still haven't put her in jail.
Aliyev, as compensation for his attacks on the crashed airliner in Aktau, can improve his karma by extraditing Khakhaleva to Russia. They are eagerly awaiting her there now. In theory, she could get 5 to 8 years for all the good things and fleeing justice.
And I remember there were times when Khakhaleva was defended here, calling the charges against her "the machinations of enemies." They slandered, so to speak, an "honest judge." But time has put everything in its place and law enforcement agencies now have to hunt for Khakhaleva abroad.
Removal of equipment from Tartus
January 28, 13:07
Excess equipment from Tartus was removed by the transport ships Sparta I and Sparta II.
Most likely they will appear in one of the African countries, probably in Mali or, as an option, in Libya, where they have recently begun to modernize an airfield in the southwest of the country in the zone controlled by Haftar's LNA.
No one is withdrawing the bases themselves yet and negotiations about them with the HTS militants are still ongoing. Most likely, clarity on this issue will be in February 2025.
High-ranking Russian delegation visits Damascus
January 28, 2025
Rybar
Information is gradually leaking onto the Internet about the imminent visit of a high-ranking Russian delegation to Damascus for official negotiations with the country's new authorities - the first since the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
The agenda is easy to guess - the fate of the bases in Tartus and Latakia, as well as economic assets. As we have already written, the new inclusive government has a certain interest in maintaining Russia's presence, which opens up opportunities for bargaining.
Are there any reasons to hope that "everything can remain as before"? Alas, there are none.
On the one hand, HTS is well aware of the current balance of power, so they can demand a higher price.
On the other hand, nothing prevents HTS from agreeing and doing something completely different, shifting responsibility to other jihadists. For example, in the matter of ensuring the security of Russian bases on the coast.
As colleagues have rightly noted, there is no reason to expect any loud statements. The press conference will feature standard phrases about cooperation, and the results can be judged by subsequent orders.
Nevertheless, negotiations with the new Syrian authorities are not without meaning, as an element of Realpolitik. But this does not prevent other scenarios from being worked out in parallel in case it is not possible to come to an agreement on acceptable terms.
And even though the “window of opportunity” has become much smaller with the fall of Assad, there are still options for responding to the changed situation (especially in light of the problems of the new authorities) . And they are already being considered, aren’t they?
Energy crisis in Transnistria: is gas returning to the region?
January 28, 2025
Rybar
In Chisinau, they agreed to allocate three million cubic meters of gas for Transnistria - almost a month after requests from the authorities in Tiraspol in connection with the halt in the transit of "blue fuel" through the so-called Ukraine.
However, this only happened after the EU announced that it would allocate €30 million to Moldova to overcome the energy crisis. Which again illustrates the complete lack of independence of the Moldovan authorities.
Currently, Transnistria needs three million cubic meters of gas to fill the network, the pressure in which is falling. According to some information, the PMR may sign an agreement with the Hungarian companies MOL and MVM, and then the fuel will be available as early as the beginning of February.
Once again, the Kyiv regime also tried to take advantage of the current situation.
At the end of last week, Maia Sandu held talks with Volodymyr Zelensky . The latter promised to supply the Moldovan State District Power Plant with coal and “ send Ukrainian specialists there” so that the station could supply electricity to Moldova and the so-called Ukraine.
However, this turned out to be speculation: the Kiev regime can supply gas coal, while the station needs anthracite. Rebuilding the Moldavskaya GRES to such an operating mode will require a lot of time, so it looks unrealistic.
Despite the potential return of gas to the PMR, the energy crisis is still beneficial to Moldova and the so-called Ukraine. Their goal is not only the liquidation of the PMR, the Russian peacekeeping contingent, but also the seizure of the Moldovan State District Power Plant, which is a key energy asset in the region.
"There are two chairs": how Armenia drifts between the EU and the EAEU
January 28, 2025
Rybar
Less than a week has passed since the visit of the head of the Armenian MFA Ararat Mirzoyan to Moscow and the first bilateral negotiations in a long time, when Armenia decided to remind about the pro-Western and anti-Russian vector.
Thus, a meeting of the delegation of speakers of the parliaments of the Nordic-Baltic Eight , which includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the Baltic countries, was held in Yerevan . The meeting was organized by the Chairman of the National Assembly Alen Simonyan , who is responsible for public anti-Russian rhetoric.
Against this background, the interview of the Speaker of the Finnish Parliament Jussi Halla-aho with the state news agency Armenpress looks indicative : he directly stated that the Armenian authorities are ready to fulfill the EU’s demand to completely sever relations with Russia on the path to European integration.
"We have made it clear that we fully support Armenia's economic, trade and military integration into the EU. However, there are problems that need to be resolved along the way : Armenia's membership in the CSTO, the EAEU, Russia's military presence in Armenia, etc. How far the EU is ready to go in terms of integration depends on what Armenians are ready to do," Halla-aho said.
According to the Finnish politician, during the summit, the Armenian authorities allegedly expressed their readiness to “liberate themselves from Russian dependence” in all areas.
In the issue of the Azerbaijani-Armenian settlement, the Europeans also adhere to maintaining the EU monitoring mission on the Armenian border, which they will discuss with regional players, but only with Azerbaijan and Turkey. Thus, Russia and Iran , Armenia's natural allies, are immediately excluded from the negotiation process in Brussels .
While the Nordic-Baltic Eight was meeting in Yerevan, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the Davos Economic Forum to discuss “the possibility of developing cooperation . ”
As we wrote, the Armenian authorities will try with all their might to hold on to two chairs, but at the same time continue the pro-Western course and submit to the political will of Brussels. The visit to Moscow was organized only when one of the "chairs" in the form of trade and economic cooperation with the EAEU began to wobble ,
However, after receiving short-term guarantees from the Russian Federation, Yerevan continued its usual policy, including in the information field, publishing openly anti-Russian statements by Western politicians in the media.
THE REVOLUTIONARY MOMENT FOR RUSSIA — PODCAST WITH NIMA ALKHORSHID
by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
In our first appearance together on Dialogue Works, Nima Alkhorshid opens the discussion of how Russia is taking its fight to President Donald Trump – the best enemy Russia has ever had in the long US war because he is imperialist in ideology, pathological in mentality, and altogether predictable. (He is also 15 centimetres taller than Adolf Hitler.)
As this phase of the war comes out in the open after months of secret negotiations, President Vladimir Putin is obliged to address the revolutionary moment for the country — a 100-year war with the US, according to former president Dmitry Medvedev; the General Staff consensus for a campaign of acceleration, decapitation, and mobilization; and the efforts of the domestic oligarchs to block nationalization and capital controls, and to preserve their economic dominance and political power.
For follow-up and long reads of the Russian and other sources mentioned in the discussion:
Dmitry Medvedev: December 27, 2024: “…ignore the USA. It’s simple: we don’t expect friendship in the next 100 years, and it’s expensive to fight America – a direct conflict will obviously escalate into a global nuclear war.” January 19, 2025: “If Biden’s problem is his inadequacy, then his Administration’s fault is that it deliberately left a very difficult legacy of crisis to its successors on the Russian track. The malicious bookmarks of Biden’s decisions will remain visible for a very long time. Therefore, it will be extremely difficult to communicate. The full normalization of Russian-American relations will take decades. Although, in my opinion, it is basically impossible in the current realities. And quite frankly, it is unclear whether it is needed at all.”
“In the first week of his second term in the White House, Donald Trump tried to confuse the whole world. But he can't fool us!” Source: https://t.me/s/medvedev_telegram
Russian public opinion in the alt-media: Comrade Artyom – “It so happened that for the last 2 days I’ve been talking to new people who are mostly apolitical. I’m shocked by what’s in their heads. Their main message is that Trump will come, restore order, imprison the entire deep state and end the war. Okay, [they are] ordinary people, but our top leadership of the Russian Federation in the main thinks about the same thing.
In general, some of the people I talked to absolutely don’t know on what terms Trump will end the war. They are confident that the fighting on the current borders will stop, and this is quite enough for us. Others are confident that Trump will give Russia all of the so-called Ukraine. I’m listening to this and I understand that the citizens of the Russian Federation need a collective psychiatrist.
The West is a bloody rabid dog. They have been climbing over Russia for the entire known history. First, Byzantium imposed its colonial ideology on Russia, then all sorts of crusaders, Polish interventionists, British proxies in the form of Turks and others, the French, the Germans. A little over 100 years ago, a sect of Ukrainians was created with the aim of destroying and completely capturing Russia. Russian Russians are being subjected to a gigantic experiment to turn millions of Russians into Russophobes, whose purpose in life is to kill Russians and destroy Russia. Can you imagine how much the West has invested in this sect? How many institutions have studied the peculiarities of one or another part of the Russian ethnic group in order to find contradictions within one nation, divide it and pit one part against another? Can you imagine how much work has been put into this? Can you imagine the amount of salaries paid to thousands of specialized specialists over the decades? And our citizens who believe in Trump believe that the United States will voluntarily abandon its Bandera sect? Are you guys out of your mind?
The West needs a break. They need to restart their military industry, make changes in tactics and strategy of warfare under the influence of new realities (drones, thermal imagers, etc. — modern types of weapons and intelligence), recruit, train, equip and motivate new cannon fodder, etc. And they will do it systematically, scrupulously, with German pedantry. And what will the Russian Federation do at this time? It will rot just as it did during the 8-year Minsk agreement. Excellent reports will be written to the top (especially knowing that grandpa doesn’t like negative news very much), propagandists will fire regular materials about ‘there are no analogues’, the new Shoigu will climb into the ears of ordinary people about combat robots, etc…
And then the West will strike again. Prepared and strong. And again, it turns out that the propaganda reports are fake, and the army is fucked up. And once again, the ordinary Russian peasant will pay for the wonderful years of paradise and resting on his laurels with his blood. And when sane people say that ‘we warned you’, they will hear the moronic phrase in response: ‘This is Russia. That’s how we’ve always had it, the mentality, it just can’t be otherwise.’ No, comrades, this is not a mentality and not Russia. These are specific people who are not qualified and whose motivation has nothing to do with Russia’s national interests. And these are ordinary people who get bored when you start telling them the truth that runs counter to the information messages of the federal channels. In general, if a truce is signed now, in a couple of years the Russian people will soak themselves in such blood, compared to which today’s losses are scratched knees on children’s feet.” https://t.me/t_artm/4675
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s roadmap terms for non-aggression and mutual security in Europe, December 17, 2021.
President Putin’s remarks to Pavel Zarubin. At a special press interview on the evening of January 24, Putin claimed he had had “trust-based” interaction with President Trump and had accepted Trump’s version of his election defeat in 2020. Until now, Putin had repeatedly said he does not interfere in domestic US politics. “My first point is that Russia has never turned down contacts with the US administration, and it is not our fault that the previous administration chose not to establish such contacts. I have always had business-like, strictly business-like, but at the same time pragmatic and trust-based, I would say, relationships with the current President of the United States. I cannot but agree with him that if he had been President, if his victory had not been stolen from him in 2020, then maybe there would not have been the Ukraine crisis that broke out in 2022.”
Moscow sources debate what this episode reveals about Kremlin thinking of Trump. According to one source, “I think they have made the mistake of anticipating Trump positively. They’ve placed bets on him. Thankfully, Trump has brought Putin down to earth. I believe he had come to expect a good dialogue and a sympathetic hearing. On the advice of his many advisors and in his own self-confidence, he has read Trump all wrong. He does not understand that US exceptionalism – with or without race hatred — is still incurable and has afflicted the US left and right beyond cure. So he was kind of crestfallen, as if he was a teenager who had just been stood up by his date at the last minute. Still, he is not going to abuse or insult Trump, and he is not going to walk away from talks.”
Another source: “Public television is the last channel of communication they have with the Americans. During the Obama-Biden years the US Embassy has stopped reporting back anything of what Putin, the Kremlin and the General Staff think, believe, say and do. Their job has been to promote regime change and they spent all their energy on Navalny and the like. So Kremlin now believes — rightly so — that the way to talk to Trump for the time being is through his confidants in the media. They understand that Trump listens to the people his voters listen to. When he gets the CIA, State, DOD, and FBI all cleaned up, the proper channels can start working. But that may or not happen. So the only channels left are Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Judge Napolitano to some extent – they then feed the message to the Fox anchors and podcasters Trump listens to.
Kremlin has decided that Putin talking to camera is the best way to send messages not to confuse Trump. So a very tightly controlled messaging is being done — Putin is talking to Trump through Trump’s court.”
Next week’s discussion. Here is Oleg Tsarev, the leading Ukrainian figure for the future, currently based in Crimea, spelling out what he sees coming from Trump for Zelensky and his successors.
Even if Trump doesn’t help Zelensky, Biden has already secured two years of war – my interview
Despite the fact that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are retreating, they have not abandoned the front anywhere; the defence has not crumbled anywhere; and we still have not been able to squeeze them out of the Kursk region. They have money, they have weapons. With UAV [drones] they compensate for the shortage of manpower. The speed of the Russian army’s offensive has increased, but it’s still not enough for the front to crumble.
– Oleg Anatolyevich, even before his inauguration, Donald Trump announced a personnel purge at the State Department. How will this affect the part of the Ukrainian elite that was guided by the Democratic Administration of the United States?
In fact, the Republicans have no ties with Ukraine at all. [By contrast] Soros has consistently expanded his assets. There is the [Ukrainian] oligarch Viktor Pinchuk; there are the piglets; there are such publications as Ukrainian Pravda, Mirror of the Week [Зеркало недели], which are fixed on Soros. The Republicans only had the political strategist Paul Manafort, who at one time worked in the Party of Regions. But a criminal case was opened against him, he was received in the United States, and was pardoned by Trump. There are no such contacts now. There was also former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who pursued a thieving policy in Ukraine. But Pompeo is not on Trump’s team now — he betrayed him — so Pinchuk shouldn’t have courted him and paid him a salary. Therefore, this is a disaster for the Ukrainian elites. They have no ties to Trump and his entourage.
– What are the political prospects of the former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny, who was previously called an alternative to Zelensky?
The [Kiev] president’s office shows in every possible way that Zaluzhny is on their team. When Andrei Yermak flew to the United States [December 4, 2024], he met with J.D. Vance, Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz, and the US special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg. After that, Yermak flew to London ostensibly to meet with Zaluzhny.
I think that the conversation in the US was so devastating for Yermak that he flew to his English supervisors to report and consult. And since I [Yermak] couldn’t get a picture with Vance, I [Yermak] took a picture with Zaluzhny. It is possible that during the last visit of the British Prime Minister to Ukraine, there was an open and closed part of the agreements [they signed]. Zaluzhny is controlled by the British, and as long as Zelensky fulfills his obligations, Zaluzhny will not run. But these are just conversations in Ukrainian politics which I can neither confirm nor deny.
– Will the Trump team push for elections in Ukraine?
That’s why Trump took a break, as he has declared, for six months to figure out what to do with Ukraine. And before leaving, the Democrats pumped Ukraine with weapons and money, so there are not many levers of pressure on Ukraine – these still need to be found. I think they will look for Zelensky’s personal money and try to put pressure on him through that. Zelensky will block their investigation inside Ukraine. But they will try to conduct at least some kind of external audit to discover how the money was stolen. And maybe even impose sanctions. In Ukraine, they also say that Trump may impose sanctions against Zelensky’s entourage if he does not listen.
– According to CNN, Trump instructed his assistants to arrange a telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Will this conversation take place?
There is no doubt that negotiations between the entourages of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are underway 24/7. But a lot depends on Ukraine, on Zelensky. The conversation between Putin and Trump will be significant. But I would like to see real agreements reached. I’m not sure if everything is ready for such a conversation.
– It is important for Zelensky to keep Pokrovsk until the inauguration of Trump. The same is said about the retention of the bridgehead in the Kursk region. What advantages does Kiev have now?
Pokrovsk is a city the size of Mariupol. There are no other comparable cities except for Mariupol. We haven’t taken it since the beginning of the Special Military Operation, so taking Pokrovsk will be significant; and Kursk is important because Zelensky is looking for a reason to disrupt the negotiations. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that while the Ukrainian Armed Forces are in the Kursk region, there can be no talk of any negotiations. Therefore, Zelensky is sending the best troops there and hanging on to a foothold so that there are no negotiations. It would be strange to freeze the border with Ukraine along the front line when it runs through the Kursk region. Or the procedure will be more complicated in the form of exchanging territories, and this is not always easy to negotiate.
– How will events at the front develop in the coming months? At the end of the year, some experts spoke about the collapse of the defence of the VSU [Ukrainian Armed Forces] in the Donbass.
The collapse is still very far away. Despite the fact that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are retreating, they have not abandoned the front anywhere, the defence has not crumbled anywhere, and we still have not been able to squeeze them out of the Kursk region. They have money, they have guns. Yes, they have fewer people, worse motivation, but they have more drones. With them they compensate for the shortage of manpower. The speed of the Russian army’s offensive has increased, but still not enough for the front to crumble. In order to win against Ukraine, it is necessary to defeat their troops somewhere. We haven’t even been able to encircle any major groups. They always escape.
– What will help the Russian Armed Forces conduct larger operations?
It is necessary to multiply the number of drones. Preferably on optical fiber, so that they are not covered by electronic warfare stations.
– Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said Ukraine could become Trump’s second Vietnam. As an example, he cited the American President Richard Nixon, who inherited the Vietnam War from his predecessor. Do you agree with this assessment?
In Vietnam, the Americans died, and it is the Ukrainians who are dying in Ukraine. Therefore, the loss in Ukraine will be extremely unpleasant for Trump, but not fatal. So when it became clear that Trump had won the election, Biden shipped weapons to Ukraine, and the United States and other countries allocated $20 billion to Kiev. The money was transferred to them for two years of the war. Even if the United States does not continue to help.
Who has the latest news on the coming peace in Ukraine? India’s WION. Not CNN, not the Financial Times!
This morning at 8am I got a phone call from India’s largest global television broadcaster in English, WION, requesting an interview to discuss points made by Vladimir Putin yesterday in a remarkable interview which he gave to his ‘shadow,’ reporter Pavel Zarubin of state television channel Rossiya 1, while traveling in his Aurus limousine from Moscow to Samara, where he had several speaking engagements.
Putin elaborated in his chat with Zarubin on the circumstances surrounding the nearly consummated negotiations in April 2022 to end the war on mutually acceptable terms a little more than a month following the start of hostilities and thus to avert the carnage and destruction that has occurred since. He also commented on the obstacles to be overcome now if a cessation of hostilities and start of peace talks are to be undertaken again, as Donald Trump has been insisting. The single biggest obstacle is the continuation in office of Volodomyr Zelensky, per President Putin.
If this position statement by Putin is not newsworthy this morning, what is? Have Putin’s remarks been reported by The New York Times, by The Financial Times, by CNN so far? No!
Here and now, let us go over the points made by Putin yesterday. When the video of my interview with WION is sent to me, today or tomorrow, I will post it separately.
*****
Firstly, Vladimir Putin yesterday gave a more detailed timeline of what preceded the peace talks at the very end of March and start of April, 2022. As we know, Russian forces had fought their way south from Belarus, where they were stationed before the 24 February invasion, to the very outskirts of Kiev. Zelensky told the Kremlin that this threat to the survival of his government had to be moved back for negotiations to begin. Accordingly Russian troops were withdrawn completely by 4 April. Some were returned to Belarus. Others went back to the Russian Federation. This concession was made as a calculated risk in the knowledge that the Ukrainians might trick them and not go through with negotiations.
In fact, the talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations did begin in Istanbul and within 10 days a lengthy draft treaty was agreed and was initialed by the heads of the respective delegations. As we know, this document provided for the neutrality of Ukraine, for its never joining NATO or allowing foreign troops and military installations to be located on its territory. It set limits to the Ukrainian armed forces such as would ensure it could not renew a war with Russia. It left Kiev in control of its Eastern provinces to the point of separation of forces at that time, meaning that negligible further territory would be lost compared to the situation at the start of the invasion. Only one condition was not agreed, said Putin, and this was to be negotiated directly between the two presidents before signing.
The documents were thus ready for signing on 15 April 2022. However, at this point Kiev asked for a one week ‘time out’ in order to consult with their allies. During this period, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrived in Kiev and persuaded Zelensky to scrap the draft treaty and to continue the war with support from its NATO friends until achieving the complete restoration of the country’s 1992 borders.
Yes, commented Putin, we were deceived. But we came to understand exactly with whom we were dealing. So be it.
Why would Putin have related this story now? My interpretation is that he is justifying his own insistence going back to his speech to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff in June 2024 that before ceasefire talks can begin Ukraine must withdraw its troops from the four oblasts which Russia has incorporated into its Federation though they were only partly in its possession: Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhie. Today, this would also mean Ukraine’s withdrawal of its remaining forces in Russia’s Kursk oblast.
The second part of the interview which Putin gave to Pavel Zarubin yesterday concerned the question of with whom Russia can negotiate and sign cease-fire and peace agreements today. First, Putin raised the issue of a decree Zalensky promulgated six months after the April 2022 draft treaty was scrapped: this decree forbade any negotiations with Russia so long as Putin was in office. This decree is still in effect and given that Zalensky’s constitutionally set term in office expired many months ago, he does not have the power to revoke it. However, even if a legal solution could be found to that standing prohibition on negotiations, there remains the illegitimacy of Zalensky, so that his signature on any agreements which Russian and Ukrainian negotiators might reach would be worthless.
The logic of these arguments set out by Vladimir Putin yesterday is that Zalensky has to go and either the head of the parliament (Verkhovna Rada) or a newly elected president must be installed for any negotiated texts of a cease-fire and peace treaty to be consummated.
The points discussed above are not the totality of what Vladimir Putin said to reporter Zarubin that was broadcast on Vladimir Solovyov’s talk show last night. He also remarked that should the United States halt its shipment of arms to Ukraine now, the war would end in one or at most two months because the Ukrainian forces would not have the military materiel to continue.
*****
In closing, I offer a suggestion to Donald Trump and his entourage on how to react to these latest statements on the way forward: to just keep silent! What the President has been saying about the Ukraine war these past several days has been ill-informed and has only undermined his credibility as a potential peacemaker. It would be far better just to shut up and allow diplomats or some new personal emissary (not General Kellogg!) to pick up the loose ends from Vladimir Putin’s latest interview for talks behind closed doors.
Is Trump capable of such discretion? Yes, the way he is proceeding in great secrecy with outreach to Teheran with a level-headed and capable emissary is a model for how he should proceed now with Moscow.
Postscript: Russia’s new RN channel on youtube has just published the interview with Vladimir Putin by Pavel Zarubin to which I allude above. I am pleased to see that the Russian news organization has finally decided to put its own domestic content up on the internet in English voice over and subtitles.
Ukrainian Military Intel Chief Warns of Threat to Ukraine’s Existence if Negotiations With Russia Don’t Start
By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 1/27/25
Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, has warned that if negotiations to end the war with Russia don’t begin by this summer, Ukraine’s “very existence” will be threatened.
According to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, Budanov issued the warning during a closed-door meeting of Ukraine’s parliament.
A source who attended the meeting told the media outlet that Budanov was asked how much time Ukraine has, and he replied, “If there are no serious negotiations by the summer, dangerous processes could unfold, threatening Ukraine’s very existence.”
Describing the response to Budanov’s comments, the source said, “Everyone exchanged uneasy glances and fell silent. It seems like everything depends on things going right.”
Budanov’s comments come as the new Trump administration has declared that its official policy is to seek the end of the war in Ukraine. But so far, there’s been no sign that negotiations have started.
In the meantime, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been floating ideas for a potential peace deal that would be non-starters for talks with Moscow, including a proposal for 200,000 Western troops to be deployed to Ukraine to enforce a ceasefire.
Budanov’s comments reinforce the fact that time is on Russia’s side, meaning Moscow is unlikely to agree to any deals that don’t include its core demands: Ukrainian neutrality and continued Russian control of the territories it has captured in Ukraine.
James Carden: Getting Russia Wrong: A Quarter Century of Putin
January 28, 2025
By James Carden, The American Conservative, 1/16/25
It started out rather differently than we now sometimes imagine it. When Vladimir Putin took over the Russian presidency from Boris Yeltsin 25 years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1999, he was seen as a man with whom Washington could do business.
President Bill Clinton lauded Putin’s accession to the presidency as a “democratic transfer of executive power,” which it certainly was not. Clinton administration officials hailed Putin as “one of [Russia’s] leading reformers” who, according to the New York Times, “clearly has an intellectual grasp of democracy.” The “prospects for meaningful reform in Russia,” opined another journalist, “are now excellent.” Administration officials also dismissed worries over Putin’s KGB background as “psychobabble.”
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, a Carnegie Endowment expert who has since become one of Putin’s most public critics wrote that, in his view,
U.S.–Russian relations offer one bright counter to this otherwise gloomier international picture. Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first foreign leaders to speak directly to President Bush. In that phone call, he expressed his condolences to the president and the American people and his unequivocal support for whatever reactions the American president might decide to take. He then followed this rhetorical support with concrete policies.
Expectations for an era of heightened U.S.–Russian cooperation began to unravel in the mid-2000s. Indeed, future historians (should there be any) will likely come to see the period between 2007 and 2012 as crucial to explaining why U.S.–Russian relations went so terribly wrong.
The milestones are by now familiar to those with even a cursory interest in this Great Power rivalry. These include Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, where he declared Russia would pursue a foreign policy independent from that of the West, and the six-day war in neighboring Georgia in August 2008, during which the Republican nominee for president made the fatuous and equally unlikely declaration that “we are all Georgians now.” It was, however, the grisly rape-murder of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 that did more than most to poison Putin’s view of Washington and the way it does business.
Briefly, then: The Obama administration was able, under false pretenses, to obtain a promise from the Russian government not to veto UN Security Council resolution 1973 “to take all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack” in Libya. The deal was that the Russians would abstain from using their veto as long as the establishment of a “no-fly zone” didn’t morph into a regime change operation.
Yet after Gaddafi’s very public execution and the American secretary of state’s tasteless celebration of it, Moscow felt that Washington welched on the deal. For Putin, then waiting in the wings as prime minister, this was the likely point of no return.
If that was his, what was ours?
By 2011–2012, the unelected U.S. foreign policy establishment (which basically calls the shots regardless of whom we Americans send to Washington) had decided that Putin was a man with whom we could not and should not do business. Any sort of diplomatic relationship ended, not with the Maidan coup and subsequent Ukrainian civil war in the spring of 2014, nor with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. No, it essentially ended when Putin decided to return to the Russian presidency for a third term.
The resulting anti-government protests that took place in Moscow after Putin made his intentions clear encouraged the media’s supposedly best-informed Russian analysts to indulge in fantasies of their own devising. And throughout, they were proven wrong. Masha (now “M.”) Gessen declared in the pages of the Guardian that the Russian media had turned on Putin and predicted that the Putin regime was about to “come tumbling down.” The American Enterprise Institute’s Leon Aron, writing in the pages of Foreign Policy magazine, declared, in an article titled “Putin Is Already Dead,” that
as the Russian protest movement expands and radicalizes in the lead-up to the March 4 presidential election, the key question is not whether Vladimir Putin—and Putinism—will survive. They will not.
In an analysis somewhat further down the sophistication curve, the New Republic’s Julia Ioffe tweeted, “Putin’s fucked, y’all.”
At just this time, during a brief, unhappy stint over in Foggy Bottom, I learned of a cable sent in by U.S. law enforcement agents who had taken a Russian national with expired papers in for questioning at an airport out in California. With a great, breathless urgency the agents described that they, in the process of interrogation, had learned that Vladimir Putin would, in the view of the man in custody, be coming back to serve as president of Russia for a third term. I thought, What were these Masters of the Obvious so worked up about? Of course he was. Yet my reaction was a bit unfair—after all, what was understandably news to these agents out West also came as an unwelcome surprise to our superiors in the White House.
Some might recall that around that time the sitting vice president, Joseph R. Biden, was dispatched to Moscow to advise the sitting Russian prime minister, Putin, that if he were in his position, he would not run for a third term. The White House was perhaps unaware that the serious tend to disregard advice proffered by the unserious. By this time however, the president and his comically egotistical chief Russia adviser had convinced themselves that the sitting (and, alas, very temporary) Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, would be back for a second term, largely, it was assumed, on the strength of his personal relationship with the American president.
The personal connection between Obama and Medvedev was thought to be real. It was also, for some reason, assumed to somehow matter in the calculus of the man who held the actual power in Russia.
New to Washington in the summer of 2010, I, at the invitation of a friend from my time as a lowly paper-pusher at Goldman Sachs, was given a tour of the West Wing by an Obama speechwriter. The speechwriter, touted then as the second coming of Ted Sorensen, could not have been more gracious to this stranger from New York, and in the course of the tour, stopped at a picture of his boss and the Medvedev chowing down at Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington.
“POTUS,” he said, “really loves this guy.”
I thought, but didn’t say: Oh. Trouble. When U.S.–Russia relations are overly (as they were in that period) reliant on the personal relationship between the two principals, nothing (much) good comes of it. In this case, some good did come of it: the New START Treaty. But Putin’s return to the presidency for a third time dashed widely held expectations that Obama would have four more years with which to work with the seemingly pro-Western Medvedev (and note what a long way in the other direction Medvedev has traveled since then).
So when Putin did what every serious person knew he was going to do and return for a third term, a decade’s worth of bitter recriminations—from the White House, from Capitol Hill, and from our government-supervised media—followed.
80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference: more relevant to today’s geopolitics than ever before
We each have our own preferred topics for research and publishing, and I am no different from my academic and journalist peers in this respect. However, I am on frequent call from one or another media outlet from a variety of countries requesting interviews which interrupt my personal agenda and compel me to take a look at issues that had not been on my ‘to do’ list.
Thus it was earlier this morning when I went to my computer to do a quick preparation for an interview with the Russian commercial television station NTV later today that will be included in the documentary video on the Yalta Conference they have scheduled to air on the weekend.
Why Yalta? Why now?
Last Friday, 27 January, Russians commemorated the 81st anniversary of the lifting of the Blockade of Leningrad. On the same day, Europeans and invited guests from North America were commemorating in Auschwitz (Oświęcim, Poland) the 80th anniversary of the liberation of survivors of that death camp by the Red Army of the USSR, albeit without any representative of the Russian Federation having been invited.
Meanwhile, on 4th February, less than a week from now, the Russians will be ‘celebrating’ the 80th anniversary of the opening of a Conference in the Crimean city of Yalta between the Allied leaders Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. The end of the war in Europe was approaching. Soviet (Russian) troops were just 65 kilometers from Berlin after rolling back the German Wehrmacht from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. This Conference decided the allocation of spheres of influence and control in post-war Europe….and not only in Europe insofar as this was also when the entry of the USSR into the war against Imperial Japan was decided, together with what territorial concessions Moscow would get in the Far East for its participation. For those with an appreciation of irony, please note that at the time, the Crimea was still an integral part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic; its transfer to Ukraine came later, under Stalin’s successor Khrushchev.
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The Wikipedia entry on the Yalta Conference tells us in its summary of the points in the ‘Declaration of Liberated Europe,’ the closing document signed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, that “Germany would undergo demilitarization and denazification.”
My reading of the Declaration shows that those precise words do not appear there, though the overarching principles they represent surely are there in the conditions for dismemberment of Germany, for payment of reparations and for trying Nazi war criminals. Why is this important? Because it is perfectly clear that Vladimir Putin had in mind the timing of Yalta in the final days of Europe’s deadliest war to that time; who participated in Yalta, namely the leaders of the principal military powers of the time; and what they agreed to, namely a geopolitical solution based on the national interests of the victor(s).
What I am saying is that Vladimir Putin clearly had in mind a Yalta type conference as the wished-for outcome when in December 2021 he presented his demands to the United States and to NATO for revising the security architecture in Europe. It is also highly likely he had in mind negotiations going still further with Washington to take in Eurasia as a whole, all the way out to the Pacific Region.
“Demilitarization and denazification.” These were the stated objectives of the Special Military Operation which Vladimir Putin delivered his televised address to his nation just ahead of launching his invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Why are the above observations important? Because of their relevance to the coming discussions between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump over the end of the Ukraine war. From the standpoint of the Kremlin, the war with Ukraine is already over, just as effectively the War in Europe was already over in February 1945. The Russians have won. What they want to talk about with Trump is precisely the security architecture of Eurasia, and this gives the American president the opportunity to bury the rubble of the disastrous, failed campaign of the Biden Administration to impose a strategic defeat on Russia under the edifice of a new global age of peace within the terms of a Yalta 2.0 agreement in which everyone wins.
Logically this Yalta 2.0 agreement should go further than allocation of spheres of influence, just as Yalta 1.0 did when it set out guidelines for implementing plans to establish the United Nations. The additional dimensions today should cover the outstanding issues on global strategic stability that restore prohibitions on deployment of medium range ballistic missiles and ensure that no country enjoys the illusion of having a first strike capability against competitors or adversaries. For these talks, just as with respect to spheres of influence in the Far East, it is obvious that the People’s Republic of China should be a party to the talks.
Needless to say, all of these issues cannot be resolved in a single Summit meeting, just as Yalta was not the first or the last meeting to establish the contours of the post-WWII world among the victors. But the coming Putin-Trump meeting can lay down the principles of the way forward and set up working groups to deal with the details.
The question of the moment is who will describe this path to the Nobel Prize for Peace to the occupant of the Oval Office.
Bloomberg: Russia’s Budget Revenue Surges to Record in December Despite Sanctions (Excerpt)
January 29, 2025
Bloomberg News, 1/21/25
Russia’s budget revenue rose to a record high last month even after the US targeted the banking sector with a new round of sanctions aimed at disrupting foreign trade payments and curbing proceeds from exports.
Total revenue in December reached more than 4 trillion rubles ($40 billion), up by 28% compared with the same month of the previous year, according to Bloomberg calculations based on Finance Ministry data published late Monday. That’s the highest level recorded in ministry data that starts from January 2011.
The US and its allies have been seeking to stop the Kremlin’s war machine by limiting export revenues and imposed more sanctions on Russia’s energy industry and banks that service it late last year. That triggered a collapse in the ruble and depressed Russia’s foreign trade in December. Exports dropped by 19% last month compared to the previous year, and imports shrank by about 8%, according to central bank data published on Tuesday.
Still, oil and gas income spiked by a third in December from the previous year and increased by 26% for 2024, according to the Finance Ministry, while other sources of revenue posted a similar advance for the full year due to taxes and dividends amid robust economic growth.
“The volume of non-oil and gas revenues in 2024 significantly exceeded estimates in the 2025-2027 budget law, including from the largest tax sources,” the Finance Ministry said in a statement….
Four former Rusnano top managers have been detained in Moscow, including three former deputies of Anatoly Chubais. The reason is the theft of 45 billion rubles, of which Chubais himself is suspected.
Among those detained are executive director Boris Podolsky and managing director of finance Artur Galstyan. The former top managers and businessmen who are associated with the state corporation are being searched.
It is scary, very scary, a new 1937, the best are being imprisoned... Half of the Rusnano management is in jail, half of the Rusnano management has fled. It seems he has not forgotten anything.
The Bell: The Kremlin view on Putin-Trump talks
January 30, 2025 natyliesb
The Bell, 1/28/25
Putin-Trump talks: What to expect
Following Donald Trump’s inauguration as U.S. President, the prospect of Washington brokering a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine has shot up the global agenda. A source with contacts inside the Kremlin told The Bell that a deal is possible — but with many caveats.
Trump’s signals
In his election campaign, Trump promised to stop the war in 24 hours. He missed that deadline, but has made public overtures to Vladimir Putin in which he urged a quick resolution to the conflict, while threatening sanctions if Moscow does not comply. Trump has also been keen to talk up his good relationship with Putin and repeatedly said that he wants to meet as soon as possible.
The new US president has so far issued two key statements. First, Trump called on Putin to end his war in Ukraine, threatening to impose harsh “taxes, duties and sanctions” on everything that Russia sells to the US and “other countries involved.” This threat is hard to take seriously — tariffs on imported goods would not impact Russia in any way due to the microscopic size of its sales to the United States ($2.9 billion in the first 11 months of 2024), while sanctions against third countries were mentioned too briefly to constitute a meaningful warning to China or India to stop buying Russian oil.
Second, following a phone call with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump said that he would ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to reduce oil prices. In Trump’s mind, that should stop the war by “cutting off” Russia’s vital export revenues. However, it is likely Trump has different motives. He would probably be demanding lower oil prices regardless of the war, just as he did in his first term. The Saudis are already planning to boost supplies to the global market, which would push down prices, but have yet to follow through.
The Kremlin reaction
Putin has twice responded publicly to Trump’s signals and his call to stop the war. First, the Russian president deliberately postponed a Security Council meeting to coincide with the inauguration in Washington when the president used the occasion to formally congratulate Trump on taking office (we discussed it here). Then, late last week, in a more substantial intervention, the Russian president told a state TV reporter that he was ready to meet his American counterpart, whom he called “pragmatic”, to “talk calmly.”
Once a meeting gets arranged, the question is what position the Kremlin will adopt — both in Putin’s first meeting with Trump and in any further wider talks on a ceasefire. Putin stated his current official position in June 2024, which has been dismissed by Volodymyr Zelensky as an ultimatum. Putin demanded the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from four regions that Russia has claimed to have annexed, despite holding only partial control of them (and, in the cases of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, without having seized the regional capitals). He also insisted that Ukraine renounce its desire to join NATO (enshrined in Kyiv’s constitution since 2019), demanded recognition that Crimea and the territories occupied since 2022 are Russian, and called for the lifting of Western sanctions.
These demands are clearly unfeasible and cannot be accepted by any Ukrainian government. The Kremlin’s real negotiating position will likely be more modest, albeit still unacceptable to Ukraine. A source close to the Kremlin told The Bell which issues are most crucial to Putin, and how an acceptable solution could be found:
A ceasefire could be established along the current front line. As for the territories that Russia has annexed but does not control, neither side would recognize an official border, but they could agree to resolve this through diplomatic means. Putin may not be against exchanging small areas occupied by Russian troops, such as in the Kharkiv region, in return for something else.
Ukraine will be expected to announce a status of permanent neutrality (as proposed in the failed Istanbul peace talks in 2022). Putin is absolutely opposed to Ukraine joining NATO and any deployment of a NATO military base there would also be a red line, the source told The Bell. In mid-January a source told Bloomberg that Russia would insist on a sharp reduction in Ukraine’s ties with NATO. At the same time, NATO countries can continue to supply Ukraine with weapons, but these must not be used against Russia or in any attempt to regain control over the “disputed territories.”
Security guarantees for Ukraine, which should form part of any deal, remain a difficult area. The Bell’s source does not believe the strong peacekeeping force described by Trump and Zelensky will come about: no country is willing to face down a nuclear power over the fate of Ukraine, they said. “This means that Ukraine will have to accept there can be no meaningful guarantees. The negotiations would have to come up with some kind of formula that at least resembles a guarantee.”
Russia may also pursue some of the demands from its full “wish list”, particularly in respect of limiting the size of Ukraine’s army, lifting some sanctions and restoring the Central Bank’s frozen assets in the west.
In general, according to The Bell’s source, Putin is prepared for any eventuality. If he needs to fight another year, or five, he is ready. If he sees a chance to reach a favorable settlement, he will take it. In this sense, the success of any negotiations will depend on the Americans, and how far they will push Ukraine to agree to terms acceptable to Putin, The Bell’s source summarized.
Why the world should care:
Trump’s inauguration has brought a radical turn in Washington’s attitude to the war. The United States is now seeking a swift resolution, and endless prolongation via ongoing military aid to Kyiv is off the agenda. There is a good chance that Russia will be able to keep, de facto if not de jure, a large part of occupied Ukrainian territory, if not all of what it has seized. If that is the general shape of the deal, then Putin and Russia’s propaganda machine will be able to hail a glorious victory not just over Ukraine, but over the “collective west.”
****** Democracy and Sovereignty: the pillars of Belarus’ electoral process – special report
Lucas Leiroz
January 30, 2025
International observers witnessed how democratic and fair the electoral process was in Belarus.
The recent presidential elections in Belarus have once again demonstrated the resilience of the country’s political system and the trust its citizens place in their leadership. Despite the usual criticisms from Western governments and media, the electoral process was conducted in a transparent, democratic, and peaceful manner, as witnessed by international observers and journalists. The re-election of President Aleksandr Lukashenko reflects the will of the Belarusian people, who went in large numbers to participate in the voting.
From January 23 to 26, I had the privilege of serving as an international observer in Minsk, invited by the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This experience allowed me to witness firsthand the enthusiasm and commitment of Belarusian citizens to their democratic process. Contrary to the narratives propagated by Western outlets, the elections were marked by fairness, transparency, and a genuine sense of civic duty among the population.
One of the most striking aspects of the electoral process was the early voting period, which allowed citizens who might be unable to vote on the official election day to cast their ballots in advance. During this period, I visited several polling stations and observed hundreds of citizens exercising their right to vote. Many explained that they wanted to ensure their participation in the election, even if personal commitments might prevent them from voting on January 26. This proactive attitude underscores the importance Belarusians attach to their political system and their role within it.
It is worth noting that voting in Belarus is not compulsory, being up to every citizen to decide about this matter. Yet, the turnout is usually remarkably high, with nearly 70% of eligible voters participating. This level of engagement is a testament to the population’s commitment to shaping their nation’s future. Both young and elderly voters expressed a strong sense of responsibility, viewing the election as a crucial moment in the country’s political existence.
On the official election day itself, the mood at polling stations was festive and welcoming. Volunteers and staff worked diligently to ensure a smooth process, offering snacks and small gifts to voters – following a well-known Soviet tradition about voting days. The sense of community and shared purpose was evident, as citizens of all ages and backgrounds came together to exercise their democratic rights. This stands in stark contrast to the Western portrayal of Belarus as a nation under authoritarian rule, where elections are supposedly staged and meaningless.
The results indicated that President Lukashenko secured almost 87% of the vote. While Western critics were quick to dismiss this outcome as “unfair” or “rigged,” such claims are not supported by the observations of international envoys on the ground. The reality is that Lukashenko enjoys broad support among Belarusians, particularly for his role in maintaining stability and guiding the country through challenging times.
It is no secret that the European Union and the United States had preemptively condemned the elections, revealing their bias and lack of interest in an objective assessment. Their criticisms are rooted not in facts but in geopolitical agendas aimed at undermining Belarus’ sovereignty. As an observer, I can attest that the elections were free from state coercion, with citizens freely expressing their support for Lukashenko’s leadership.
The West’s skepticism toward leaders with high approval ratings, such as Lukashenko and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the political dynamics in these nations. Both leaders emerged during periods of significant turmoil and have since managed to create stability and progress. It is natural for their citizens to reward such leadership with continued support, especially in the face of external pressures and geopolitical challenges.
Another notable aspect of the elections was the absence of unrest or protests, contrary to the predictions of many analysts. Minsk remained calm and orderly throughout the voting period, which can be considered further evidence of the population’s satisfaction with the process. Additionally, the nationalist militias based in neighboring countries, which have long threatened to destabilize Belarus, refrained from any actions during the elections. This can be attributed to Belarus’ strengthened military capabilities, including its nuclear deterrence and strategic partnerships with Russia.
In conclusion, the Belarusian elections were a clear demonstration of democracy in action. Without foreign interference, the people of Belarus freely chose their leader, reaffirming their trust in the political system and Lukashenko’s ability to navigate the complexities of the current geopolitical landscape. The West’s attempts to delegitimize this process only highlight its disconnect from the realities on the ground. Belarus has once again shown that it is a sovereign nation capable of determining its own future, guided by the will of its people.
Transcript of ‘Dialogue Works’ edition of 30 January
I strongly urge the community of subscribers to this web platform to read attentively this transcript because in the ample time that was given to me by host Nima Alkhorshid I had the opportunity to go well beyond anything I have said in my recent essays about the skeletons that the Russians have taken from their closets to show the massive participation of ordinary Europeans from France, from Belgium, from elsewhere in the armies that Hitler directed against the USSR, as well as the key role that Finns played in enforcing the murderous, genocidal Blockade of Leningrad. My remarks here regarding Yalta and its relevance to the forthcoming Summit between Trump and Putin also are more explicit than my last essay and amount to essential reading.
To ease the task, I have cleaned up the transcript in a modest but I think effective way to improve the grammar while removing dilatory or repetitive words.
Transcript submitted by a reader
Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:05
Hi everybody, it is Thursday, January 30th, 2025, and our friend Gilbert Doctorow is back with us. Welcome back, Gilbert.
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, thanks. Good to see you.
Alkhorshid:
Let’s get started with your piece on your blog, on your website, in which you’re talking about the collective memory in Russia and the collective amnesia in the West. What are the main points of this new piece on your part?
Doctorow:
Well, let me explain. My role, as many of your viewers will know, is to communicate what Russians are saying. Some of these points I agree with, some of them I don’t, but it is essential that they get adequate and representative coverage for discussion in our own debates, on our side. And what I’m saying here in that essay is what I have heard from very authoritative, serious Russians looking at the proceedings that took place last Friday in Oświęcim or Auschwitz in Poland, to commemorate the liberation of those remaining inmates, prisoners, in the death camp when the Red Army came through and freed them. This is 80 years ago.
1:32
Of course, the exceptional nature of this event, which is in contrast to all preceding round-number remembrances of the anniversary — five years ago, for example, the Russians were invited, which is logical. To be exact, the Red Army, not the Russian Federation, liberated Auschwitz and the other camps, but they liberated all of the death camps of the Nazis, most of which were in Poland, in fact.
2:13
But the day’s commemoration was precisely for Auschwitz, which coincides with Holocaust Day, an internationally recognized day of remembrance for the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi crimes.
And of course, there were many others. Reportedly, 1.5 million were killed in Auschwitz, people that is, of whom 1 million were Jews. That means 500,000 were not Jews. There were others, they were gypsies, they were political opponents of the regime, of the Nazi regime, they were other minorities that were considered to be Untermenschen by the Nazis. Well, one million Jews.
3:02
In the big order of things, this is how we all think, the general public, the mainstream media in the West, and everywhere, who spoke about Holocaust Day and Auschwitz. They remembered in terms of this scientifically engineer-designed rooms for gassing and for very efficient, effective destruction of people and whatever remained of them.
The reality of course is a subject of discussion, I wouldn’t say dispute, but at least of active discussion among academics in what was launched several years ago by a certain Timothy Snyder, who is a Yale history professor, who did a lot of research in Poland and in Ukraine for his masterwork. It’s called “The Bloodlands”, which gives an additional understanding of what happened. Maybe a few million died in these, all of the concentration death camps put together.
4:15
But six million is the overall number, and the vast majority of those people were killed in the killing fields across East Central Europe and Western Soviet Union or Russia today, Belarus today. And that is not a minor detail, which if you allow me to explain how this fits into our understanding of the Holocaust day and of what it was commemorating. The point is that you could have a few criminals, relatively few criminals, who would run these death camps that were engineered, as I say, by good German engineers using state-of-the-art technology to destroy people. And they could be run by relatively few people. And these relatively few people were criminals of one sort or another who were placed into these positions.
5:16
That gives you an interpretation of the Holocaust and of Germany’s role in it, which is wrong. The fact is that a vast number of Germans were involved in the destruction of Jewry in Europe, by the Wehrmacht, in the regular German army, not in SS units as such, yes, they played a big role, but [it] was ordinary Germans who were the murderers in the fields of Eastern Europe and Western Soviet Union. And Timothy Snyder’s research changed completely our understanding of the Holocaust to those of us who care to know facts and not just to repeat glib generalizations.
6:06
In any case, the commemoration on the 27th of January of the liberation by the Red Army of these remaining prisoners in Auschwitz was marred by the treatment of Russia, which was excluded from invitations. Because as everyone knows– and I’m being ironic here, because some people have missed my irony in that essay that you’re referring to– we all know that Russia is the aggressor and is violating all laws of human rights and civilized conduct.
6:52
Well, in any case, for reasons that were particular to the EU and to Poland as the most outstanding, egregious promoter of Russia hatred in Europe, Russia was excluded from the invitation list, whereas they had regularly been present. In fact, Putin himself was present at one of the commemorations, early in his presidency after the turn of the millennium. They were excluded. And so the Russians on television had good reason to analyze and discuss what’s going on, why they were excluded, and the leader of a country that is ruled by neo-Nazis from their perspective, I’m speaking about Zelensky and his regime in Kiev, he was invited. He was not just invited, but he was celebrated.
7:50
The article in British newspapers– “The Guardian” is the one who had the longest and most detailed article on the events in Auschwitz– their biggest photo, and a color photo, was of a very contrite and concerned Mr. Zelensky placing one of these candles, a Jahrzeit candle to be precise. This is wax in a glass so that it burns for 24 hours. He was placing one of these memorial candles, among others placed by other dignitaries. And he was captured in a photograph in the British newspaper.
What was he doing there? There’s still more. What was Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany doing there, when the people who liberated Auschwitz are absent and the people who perpetrated Auschwitz are present. This is a very interesting presentation. And the Russians find it interesting in the sense that it colors their appreciation of the world order today, that the world order in the West is standing on its head. That values have been turned upside down. That the ravings of the Russophobes in the Baltic States and Poland in particular have become the narrative of the European Union and also the United States.
9:34
What ravings am I talking about? This goes back to the question of who was really responsible for World War II. And the revisionist position that countries like Poland and the Baltic states have been promoting is that Stalin’s Russia was at least as guilty of the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated before, during, and after World War II, as guilty as Nazi Germany was.
So the guilt that they want to lay at the door of Russia is part of the overall project which America initiated, and Europe has very happily continued, to portray Russia as a pariah state, as a state that cannot be invited to civilized events like the memorial services in Auschwitz.
10:37
That was one event last Friday, which caught the attention of the thinking, the talking classes in Moscow and Russia. The other event was their own event. This is the commemoration of the 81st anniversary of the liberation of, the breaking the blockade on Leningrad, which cost the lives of one million or more, nearly all civilians, and was in terms of the present-day definition of the word “genocide” was a genocide. It was the intentional starving to death of the civilian population of the city and the plans to raze the city to the ground if the German armies were successful in their venture. Again, I use the word German army.
11:39
The murder of a million or more Russian civilians in Leningrad was the work of the German army, which means the nation in arms. This means that there were hundreds of thousands of ordinary German citizens who were participating in these atrocities. And it has to influence our understanding of a question that is very timely today, thanks to our loud mouth, close advisor to Mr. Trump, Elon Musk, who spoke in this very same time period about Germany moving on and moving past its war guilt from the Nazi era.
This is a question which was also raised on television by the same program that I’m referring to, this happened to have been the “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov”, one of the two or three most important talk shows or news and analysis shows on Russian state television. So these issues are topical in East and West.
12:48
On the Russian side, they were highly critical of the forgiving or forgetting. They prefer to call it forgetting, in the sense of amnesia: “we, the generation today, cannot be answerable for the crimes of our ancestors.” This is a certain issue which I have discussed with readers of my essays, who have questioned this and have every right to question it. Who wants to be held responsible for the sins of grandfathers, or still earlier?
13:37
But the issue cannot be resolved with that little magic wand, “we aren’t responsible”. Let me just remind everyone that for Americans in particular, this is highly topical, because it’s all about woke, which has been a kind of ideological mantra of the Democrats in their vote-gathering efforts among the black and other minority populations in the States — woke that we are responsible and answerable for crimes committed by two or three generations before us.
So this issue on Russian television also should resonate with audiences in places like England, which has its own woke and the United States, where it went very far and found expression in legislative acts and programs that Biden instituted and which Trump is now busy dismantling for inclusiveness, preference to minorities of every imaginable variety, and so forth, at the expense of the majority of the population.
14:52
So the Russian commemoration of the 81st anniversary of the liberation of the city of Leningrad, today’s Petersburg, from a stranglehold siege that was mainly carried out by the Germans, but also carried out by the Finns. And I bring this up to those who have not paid attention to it.
The Russians in the present state of open confrontation with virtually the entire West, have finally put up on the screen and shown to their population facts, documentary films that never ever left the archives in the proceeding 70 years, 80 years, 100 years, because they worked against the overriding principles of brotherliness, of forgive and forget, which was the Soviet position on these matters, and which the Soviet Union could afford because it politically controlled those countries which otherwise would be deeply offended by the truth coming out.
16:15
The truth about the Finns’ participation in the strangling of Petersburg or Leningrad was never ever shown to the Russian people. It was a deep secret, because the Finns were quiet. The Finns were friends. The Finns had learned their lessons and were no longer a threat to the Russians.
Well that’s all been turned on its head. The Finns are now trying as best they can to be the biggest threat and security risk to Russia that they can be. And the Russians have now let loose the facts that were in their archives. I can say at the same time, this goes back six months or a year, that the documentary films in the Soviet archives about the participation of all of Europe on the Hitler side in the armies attacking the Soviet Union, those documentary films have been put on television and we find for example that the Russian figures show that there were more French participating in Hitler’s armies attacking Russia than there were French resistance fighters fighting Hitler. They have put on television, films showing that there were vast numbers of Belgians, and particularly Flemish, who were gladly taking part in Hitler’s armies in his attack on the Soviet Union.
17:53
So these difficult facts from the past, which were kept in the archives, not to upset relations with now-friendly countries, have– in the course of the special military operation and in the course of the evolving open hatred for Russia that the European countries have allowed themselves to engage in– well, the Russians have started opening the door, opening the boxes and showing who was who when, and who has a right to speak, and who should just shut up.
And I close this remark by pointing to the hideous statement by the acting, and I say acting because he lost his ruling position last June when his parties were voted out. The acting Prime Minister of Belgium, Mr. De Croo– at the gathering, this is about 10 days ago, of the Europeans, for European members present in the Davos Economic Forum– De Croo from the dais said, “Mr. Putin is our enemy.” May he hang his head in shame for making that outrageous remark. But unfortunately, he was only joining the general mood of 25 of the 27 European member states.
Alkhorshid: 19:29
And if they believe that Russia is their enemy, then are they going to continue the fight? Are they going to change their strategy? Because this sort of strategy on their part is harming Europe more than Russia.
Doctorow:
Nima, in several months, I will publish volume one of a two-volume collection of my essays since the spring of 2021 under the title “War Diaries”. And the overriding picture, which I will describe on the back cover of volume one is that I am writing history looking forward, when we’re all in a state of confusion, whereas academic [historians] of the war are writing them looking backwards, when everything that happened is known.
20:19
No, we don’t know today how Europe will break up, but break up it will. It’s in the process of breaking up. We have all been caught out in making predictions about how close the end of the Ukraine war was. I am looking at things that I wrote in the spring of 2121, and I say, “My goodness, how wrong you were.” But so was everybody else, on the Russian side, that is.
20:50
On the United States side, everybody predicted a war would come, and they should have known, because they were doing everything possible to precipitate one. On the Russian side, they were doing everything possible to avoid it, And the general talk was about no war. In any case, answering your question, how will Europe proceed? Nobody knows. I’m in an active discussion with my close colleague and the translator of my works, my essays in Germany, about what’s going to happen on February 23rd.
21:25
The overall consensus in mainstream is that Mr. Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats who had at last polling 32% popular vote, that he will be victorious, he will put together a governing coalition from the center, of the centrist parties, and that things will get even worse, because Merz’s position on Russia is even less realistic and, shall we say, insane, very much in line with the absurd statements that come out of people like Lindsey Graham, whereas Scholz will look like a peacenik if Mr. Merz takes over.
22:09
But we don’t know. Thanks to the help from Elon Musk, the leader of the Alternative for Germany, Frau Weidel, her ratings rose from 19 to 31%. At the same time– that’s on the right. On the right, which is for peace and for normal relations with Russia, among many other things, but our interest on this show is what do they think and what are they saying on international affairs. The other side on the left, formerly from Die Linke and having formed her own party, is Sahra Wagenknecht. And she had at last polling 11%. If you add 31% and 11%, my goodness, that’s a bigger block than Mr. Merz can easily put together. So how Germany will move is an open question.
23:14
Which part of Germany, which part of Europe is going to collapse first is unpredictable. We all can make a guess, but let’s acknowledge that we’re all making educated guesses, not based on concrete facts that we can rely on.
Alkhorshid: 23:37
And, Gilbert, do you see that the way that Donald Trump is dealing with Russia is helping to build trust between the two nations, between the two governments in order to go after some sort of solution in Ukraine?
Doctorow:
Well, it’s good you raise that question, Nima, because it is very topical, and it is widely discussed, and I’d say disputed, among well-informed experts, both in mainstream and in alternative media. There are those who say that “watch what Mr. Trump does, not what he says”. There are those who say that Trump is just creating this fog, repeating the absurdities that Blinken and Sullivan were disseminating for three years, because he wants to keep his enemies off guard, not to allow, give them material that they could use to attack him and to throw off course his domestic program in Congress, which is his first and most important consideration.
24:47
This is all possible. I don’t deny that this is an explanation, although I would say it’s a terrible way to run a railway. My point is that I don’t see a need for that. He is also conducting another very important policy initiative. And of this, there can be no doubt that this is going on, that he has a secret diplomacy with Iran, with Tehran going on, to resolve the fundamental issues of the Iranian nuclear program and other issues between the States and Iran that have been the justification for very cruel sanctions on the Iranian economy that had cost them very dear and which they would like to overturn.
And there is every reason to expect that a deal will be done with Iran, despite the fact that a war with Iran has been the greatest ambition of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is now on his way to Washington to confer with his great friend Donald Trump. So do we hear anything about the secret diplomacy? Is Mr. Trump walking around and talking about how many nuclear bombs Iran is about to deploy. No, he has had the good sense to keep his mouth shut about Iran.
26:27
And I ask, why doesn’t he keep his mouth shut about Russia and Ukraine? I don’t see the purpose of his making inane statements which only undermine his credibility among Russians and undermine the chances for a successful meeting and negotiations to end the war and to resolve other issues of a much greater scope for the security of the world that are within reach of the United States, Russia and China, if they can be persuaded to do something constructive as opposed to destructive.
Alkhorshid: 27:07
It seems that the way that Netanyahu and the administration in Israel are seeing the situation between Iran and Russia and the way that Russia is helping in negotiations and they have been helping the negotiations, JCPOA, they were part of that, of those negotiations. It seems that doesn’t feel good for Israelis. That’s why they’re not happy with Russians. They don’t want Russians to be part of that. They don’t want Russians to facilitate the process of negotiations. Do you see that’s the main reason, the way that they’re behaving toward Russia?
Doctorow:
Well, the Russian relations with Israel are very complicated. They’re also very secretive, and none of us knows the full picture, to give an evaluation of them. There are many factors, including the ones that you just mentioned. But there was the unanswered question, why the Russians did not provide air cover to Syria. Why they didn’t provide advanced air defense systems to Syria. Why they allowed Israel over years to freely bomb various towns and arms caches in Syria.
28:29
So that just as an example of the peculiarities, why was Russia going easy on Israel when it could have, and perhaps many will say should have, been on the other side, on the side of Iran and Syria and Iraq in combating forces that were supported by the United States to the detriment of Russia in the Middle East?
These are questions that we cannot answer. There are many other questions about Mr. Putin’s time in office. He has many detractors, particularly, I won’t name them, you know them, you’ve interviewed one of them recently, who are saying that he’s weak and pusillanimous and he’s not really defending Russia’s interests. I can’t answer that question. Nobody can. But I do admit freely that there are questions why he tolerated, for example, the reign of corruption and bleeding of Russian interests, and I would say sabotage that people like Chubais did for 20 years. And this was open knowledge in Russia that the man was a threat to Mr. Putin and to his government.
29:57
And nothing happened to him. He was allowed to sneak away and to rejoin some of the billions of dollars and euros that he had stolen from the Russian treasury in various scams relating to the very high offices that he occupied over the course of decades as the head of Rosnano, which was a completely fake organization, which was as you remember, the nano business was in its own time, which is going back a little more than a decade, as widely promoted as the artificial intelligence nonsense, sorry, is today. That was where you placed all your bets. Well, Mr. Chubais was sitting on all those bets and taking out his commission.
30:49
Everyone knew that and nothing happened to him. So there are a lot of questions about Mr. Putin’s time in power, which will only be answered in due time, certainly after I’m gone and possibly after a lot of other people who are watching it are gone.
Alkhorshid: 31:07
You mentioned the way that Donald Trump is treating Russia today and the perception on the part of Russians. But do they really feel that even Keith Kellogg and the way that he’s talking is just not the main objective of Donald Trump? Because that could be so much unconnected to the reality.
Doctorow:
Well, Russians are not paying so much attention to each of these personalities. They’re not even paying that much attention to the personality of Donald Trump. The underlying principle, point of analysis, is that the United States foreign policy and much else is directed by the deep state and it’s almost a matter of indifference who sits in the Oval Office. Or least of all, is it a matter of indifference who is advising or pretending to advise the man who sits in the Oval office.
32:01
I’m not sure I agree with that. I do think that the American president has a good deal of latitude to influence and shape events. And whether he succeeds depends on his ability to manage in general, whether or not he can get people who are nominally subordinate to him to actually do what he tells them to do. So that remains to be seen. There are people who say that during his first administration, Trump performed very badly in that respect, and that his efforts, his instructions, his direct executive orders were being subverted by his deputies. We’ll see how he does this time.
The Russians, as I say, they’re looking at the big picture in which they see the deep state and much less interested in the personality quirks. In America in particular, a great deal is made about the personality of people in power and people who are not in power. Personalities tend to take precedence over issues, over political issues and political causes and interest groups. The Russians are more likely to focus on the interest groups behind events than they are on the personality flukes of one person or another.
Alkhorshid: 33:19
The other move on the part of Donald Trump, which was so interesting to watch, is that he said that he’s going to put pressure on Saudi Arabia to reduce the price of oil, which was, it seemed, that rejected by Saudis so far.
But on the other hand, it seems that he’s trying to get closer to Chinese, to Xi, and in order to, the same sort of policy that the Biden administration tried to manage, but they were not successful in those attempts. Do you think that Donald Trump would do better than Joe Biden? He thinks that he can put pressure on Russia this way?
Doctorow:
Well, I think it’s too early to reach conclusions as to whether what Donald Trump is saying and even some of the things he’s doing are indicative of his overarching plans for the future. He has his own notion of how deal-making goes on.
Part of it is bluff and bullying and saying things and doing things which are not his intentions and which are to keep his talking partners and the rest of us off guard and clueless. What he really has in mind, we don’t know. We’ll find out in the fairly near term. But I would like to touch upon one other aspect of this. To what extent the utterly ignorant and incorrect statements that Trump has been making about Russia and about the state of its economy, about the state of its military, about the number of casualties it has suffered.
35:13
I have heard some of my peers attribute this to disinformation coming from the highly corrupt CIA and other intelligence agencies. That is possible, but I would like to ask a simple question that nobody seems to be asking or even considering. Doesn’t this guy ever open a newspaper? If you just, all right, I admit, I don’t expect that Donald Trump is reading “Financial Times”. Okay.
Maybe that’s too high-brow for him. But I was considering how this “New York Times” has descended over 20 or 30 years into a newspaper featuring more cuisine and gastronomy articles than news, than world news. He might just dip into the “New York Times”. And every day now, the truth about the state of combat on the ground between Russia and Ukraine is being fairly, accurately reported. It is clear that there’s been a decision in the editorial offices, “Enough is enough. We know we’re going to lose the war, so let’s prepare the public for it.”
36:35
And they are reporting fairly accurately what’s going on. So Donald, open “The New York Times” and throw away the scrap of paper you’re getting from the CIA.
Alkhorshid: 36:48
Maybe that’s why Vladimir Putin recently sent a video message to the people in the West — the main reason was on Trump. The other thing, Gilbert, with the 80th anniversary of the Yalta conference, that you believe that it’s more relevant to today’s geopolitics than ever before. What’s the main point of that?
Doctorow:
Yes, on the 4th of February, that’s to say next Tuesday, the Russians will be celebrating, they’re not commemorating but celebrating, the Yalta Conference, which opened in the Crimea, by the way. And the Crimea, when it opened, was part of the Russian Federation, by the way. The Yalta Conference was a meeting of the big three, there was Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, in February of 1945, when the end of the war, the victory in Europe was already very clear to everyone, everyone except Adolf Hitler. The outcome on the battlefields was clear. The Russians were 65 kilometers from Berlin. And they met, three met to discuss and to reach agreement on the post-war map of Europe. Territorial map, political map.
38:24
These were all realist thinkers. There was also this humanitarian overlay, the values-based overlay of a United Nations, which already had been agreed and certain points in how it would operate were hammered out in the Yalta conference. So that aspect of the post-World War I order was also furthered and defined at Yalta. But the main thing was in the realm of realpolitik, of national interests and recognition of the principle of spheres of influence.
How Russian or Soviet, properly speaking Soviet, control over Eastern Europe would evolve was not entirely clear. It may not have been entirely clear even to Stalin. The principle though was that Russia needed a buffer. It would not allow the neighboring states to be such easy ramps for a West European invasion of its country. And the principle was defensive, for Russia’s interests not to undergo this terrible catastrophe that they were just barely surviving in February of 1945.
39:52
And so the principle was spheres of influence. The principle was that the major military forces in the world would gather and resolve issues about how the post-war world would be operated. That was three countries, actually it was two countries, the United States and Russia, and Britain was there for the ride, because Britain’s glory days were already long past. But nonetheless, France was, could just as easily have been inserted, but it wasn’t. France was barely mentioned when it came to the partition of Germany and what little slice it would get as one of the victors.
40:48
Now why is it interesting to bring up Yalta now? Other than the fact that the 80th anniversary is rolling around, and people should say something about it. I believe that the Yalta Conference was closely re-examined by Vladimir Putin in the days before he issued the ultimatum to the United States and a separate ultimatum to NATO to revise the security architecture in Europe, essentially to roll back the NATO military installations and deployment, temporary or otherwise, of NATO personnel in the area that was formerly the Warsaw Pact countries, and also that was included, countries that had been part of the Soviet Union, that is the Baltic States, to roll this back.
42:03
So he was looking in December of 2021 for an overall agreement with Washington about the rollback of the NATO expansion that had been a violation of agreements that were reached, oral agreements to be sure, that were reached between Russia, well, the Soviet Union, under Gorbachev, and United States, and Germany and other interested parties in Europe before Russia agreed to withdraw its forces from the Warsaw Pact countries. And this whole experience of Yalta was seen by Putin as highly relevant, what he wanted next.
43:05
The means of reaching agreement diplomatically failed. They failed as we saw by the middle of January [2022], after there were several meetings, separate meetings by the way, between Russian representatives and representatives of the NATO powers, the OSCE. These were involved in meetings in Europe, and they all led to nothing. Jens Stoltenberg had been the first and the quickest to say that these were non-starters, that they would not negotiate. Washington was slower and never said no, but it never said yes either.
And it went beyond the time limit that the Russians set for getting a definitive answer to their request for review of the security architecture. And the next step was that Russia moved on to “military technical means”. That was how they called it. We all were confused and I have to admit with or without my knowledge of Russian, I was also confused. I’d say it was more appropriately what they meant is what the Americans call kinetic warfare.
44:23
It was very simple, in which you use a lot of military hardware. Yes, that’s the technical part. So the start of the special military operation was the consequence of the failure of the American interlocutors and of the EU member states to deal seriously with Mr. Putin’s demand for revision of the architecture, which would ensure that Russia has some genuine security and is not facing American missiles at its borders and facing a five- or seven-minute time before it is annihilated at any time of choosing of Washington.
45:06
So these were the issues. And I believe that they are still uppermost in the mind of Mr. Putin as he is considering what he’ll be talking to Donald Trump about. The Russians have already made it perfectly clear that they consider the war is over, just as all the parties to Yalta considered the war was over. It wasn’t over. We all know it wasn’t over until May 9th, but in February they considered the war was over, and they were deciding what comes next.
So it is today with the situation on the ground in Ukraine. From the Russian standpoint, the war is over. Yes, of course, there are still fighting soldiers on the front lines. There are still what is estimated now to be 30,000 of Ukraine’s best elite forces still deployed in the Kursk province of Russian Federation. But the denouement, the end game is perfectly visible.
46:12
All of these Ukrainian forces will be destroyed, destroyed or surrender. And if it happens in two weeks, if it happens in two months or longer, is a matter of indifference to Moscow. It will happen. And increasingly, our major media are saying the same thing. And so it is timely to reflect on what happened in Yalta and what does it mean for the prospects of Mr. Trump when he finally meets with Mr. Putin.
Just remember, as I said, Yalta was a very complex agreement. Yes, it was about the settlement in Central Europe, the areas that were under Russian occupation because they had beaten back the Wehrmacht in all of Eastern Europe. But it was also about Eurasia. This is, we’re forgetting, this is a term that came up months and months ago, that what is needed is a settlement not just for the peninsula at the western end of Eurasia that’s called Europe, but also for the eastern parts of Eurasia, for the Pacific basin countries of Eurasia.
47:37
And let’s remember that that was also dealt with at Yalta. Nobody talks about it very much. Certainly, we tend to forget that at Yalta, the United States and Russia agreed on Russia’s entering the war against Japan, which was scheduled to take place several months after the end of the war in Europe. And the Russians were going to deploy very important forces, and they were going to make available to the United States air bases. First, it was talked about Vladovostok and then I think you went further up to the interior of Russia along the Amur River, they would allow Americans, Air Force bombers to be based there for their bombing raids over Japan.
48:28
The cost of that, which was also set down in writing, and not just in oral agreements, was that the Russians would receive certain territorial compensation. They would receive once again territory that had been taken from them after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, which they lost. And that meant Kamchatka, that meant southern Sakhalin, that meant the Kurile Islands, which are a very topical subject today, since the Japanese refuse to acknowledge the settlement terms of Yalta as it pertains in their territories. In any case, there was this aspect of Yalta which concerned the eastern part of Eurasia. And so it also is topical.
49:15
The logic of this, of course, is that any meeting that Trump has with Putin has the opportunity to go beyond the wreckage of Ukraine, which can only look like a debacle for the United States if it is the whole and total sum of their points for discussion, to an area of win-win, which is defining in terms that a person like Trump understands perfectly, territorial division of the world, since he’s working hard on that in the Western hemisphere with his pretensions vis-a-vis Greenland, Panama, and so forth. So this is the kind of talk that could really appeal to a man like Donald Trump.
50:04
And there are many, of course, listeners who will find this terribly offensive. But for the peace of the world, that is a much better approach to dealing with the other global players than anything that the Democrats under Biden were trying to do.
Alkhorshid::
Thank you so much, Gilbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.
Doctorow:
Well, thanks for the opportunity to discuss these things.
‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 30 January: Does Putin Trust Trump?
This discussion is notable especially for the material on the situation in Kursk, where the Ukrainians perversely have been topping up their fighting forces with their best prepared and equipped units every time that the Russians hammer them down and exterminate large numbers of their men. Russian intelligence experts now estimate that there are 30,000 Ukrainian fighters in Kursk at this moment. The reinforcements to Kursk are coming at the expense of the front lines in the Donbas, which are crumbling.
Moreover, the Ukrainian troops in Kursk are torturing and murdering civilians and this is being recorded by Russian investigators who are preparing to put the offenders on trial in Nuremberg type proceedings in Moscow when the war ends. They say it is precisely the British, namely MI6, that is inciting the Ukrainians to do this in the expectation that it will outrage the broad Russian public and destabilize the government in Moscow.
U.S. Missile Defense Plan Won’t Ease Tensions With Russia: Zakharova
X/ @GElefteriu
January 31, 2025 Hour: 12:05 pm
The ‘Iron Dome’ initiative essentially reaffirms the U.S. intension to pursue the militarization of space.
On Friday, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that Washington’s latest decisions on the development of a new missile defense system won’t help reduce tensions with Moscow.
Earlier this week, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the development of a new missile defense system for the country. The Iron Dome missile defense shield would protect against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles and other aerial attacks.
Zakharova said that this initiative essentially reaffirms the U.S. intension to pursue the militarization of space, noting that the decision involves a significant expansion of the American nuclear arsenal.
“It directly envisages a significant strengthening of the American nuclear arsenal and means for conducting combat operations in space, including the development and deployment of space-based interception systems,” she said.
“Zakharova claimed the plan would expand Washington’s missile deterrence to a scale ‘comparable to Reagan’s Star Wars,’ which she called ‘odious. She said the move was primarily aimed at “devaluing Russian and Chinese strategic deterrence capabilities,” the Moscow Times reported.
“We consider this as yet another confirmation of the U.S. focus on turning space into an arena for armed confrontation,” Zakharova further said.
The Russian diplomat warned that the initiative would also hinder potential dialogue on strategic offensive arms, noting that this measure is the first sign of Washington’s destabilizing plans for the development of its military-technical programs.
