Amongst Great Game theorists, one could easily predict the expected outcome of the current US – Russia conflict. Because it is an easy guess, even amongst those who have never read Lao Tzu’s masterpiece “The Art of War.”
You don’t need Carl von Clausewitz to answer for you, the rational, yet illogical question, of who would be the winner of the Ultimate Fight, conflict to the end, or at the very least to the last Ukrainian male, between the US and Russia, over Ukraine’s vast cemetery?
Because it does not take an adherent of the wisdom of the military sciences to know the answer.
It’s elementary my dear Watson…
Glory to China for having thrown us all into this debacle. Dr Fu Manchu would have been rather proud of this distinguished accomplishment of Diplomacy in action.
Brilliant and malevolent, yet at times benevolent, in his completely credible Dr Fu-Manchu evil genius impersonation — President Xi and his Politburo have brought all of us to the precipice of Nuclear war and total destruction of the Northern hemisphere.
Thank God we haven’t all totally fallen for it.
And maybe there is even still some time to escape the Thucydides Trap, that is awaiting at the other end of this catastrophic “tromp l’oeil” painted for us by great Chinese artists & authorities in the actual Art of War today as expressed in the greatest game on Earth — the geopolitical GREAT GAME of diplomacy, statehood and leadership.
Here is how the US could negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement with Russia ending the war in Ukraine and neutralizing Russia’s military alliance with Communist China.
Yet, as long as we breathe we hope…
Here’s something that Britons, the French, Germans and Americans have in common. All grouch about the rotten state of their economies. When Britain’s newish government delivers its first budget later this month, we know what to expect: only variations in misery. Just like in France, voters must get used to low (or no) economic growth, rising taxes and ever worse-funded public services. Germany’s economy is stuttering badly. That bodes ill for the rest of the continent.
Britain may indeed be broke, France flummoxed and Germany gloomy. But Americans? They carp aplenty too. Yet they face a vastly better big picture. America continues to be on an economic roll. In Pennsylvania, a couple of weeks back, I listened as lots of Republicans told me how the “Harris economy” supposedly spread misery. Yet those same Republican activists then bragged about their own booming companies and then drove off in trucks that would have cost $70,000 at least. The median income of Americans is steadily pulling ahead of that in other rich countries, though it has dropped in recent years. The influx of migrants to America reflects how the massive magnet of the American economy, which needs more labourers, is pulling people in. American tech firms, energy firms and others are doing far better than their peers around the world.
In the coming days, this dissonance in America, will decide the Election purely based on the state of our economy. There is no question that this contest will be a bloodbath for the Democrats, because even though the American economy overall is outperforming the rest of the world — ordinary Americans who are most affected by Biden/Harris stupid economic policy choices as reflected in the vastly rising prices over recent years, seem to suffer through the gas, food, & vital victual price hikes, and are going to take it out on the Dems with a vengeance.
Speaking of vengeance — Pennsylvania, remains the swing state to watch in this election. One presidential forecast model I checked today, gives Kamala Harris and Donald Trump an even Steven 50% chance of each taking its vital electoral-college votes in November.
But this election is proving too close to call, only for the pundits & the pollsters out there, but not for the people.
My clever data-journalist colleagues, meanwhile, have extended their election forecast model to account for every congressional race daily updates on the odds of Republicans taking the Senate (currently, you’d have to say that’s more likely than not), and of holding the House (it appears that the Democrats, by a whisker, could take this). I don’t need to tell you how this matters. After the election there’s a reasonable chance that either presidential candidate could find themselves in the White House while also controlling both chambers of Congress.
Recently, and during this mad Presidential race in the US, there were two signs of the great Game unfolding afoot, within these rather troubled United States.
President Trump got shot by a pimply school boy, a stupid yet bespectacled moron, a 20-year old Biden supporting crazed Antifa assassin, using a high-power rifle with long range scope. This faux-assassin who couldn’t shoot straight, chose to climb on a roof, line himself straight and shoot the former President — at a Trump speech rally in Butler, PA during Trump’s last rally before the Republican National Convention.
Trump suffered relatively minor injuries to his right ear, because he turned his head, right before the shot was fired. Had he not done that — he would be dead right now. This was a massive and perhaps intentional Biden administration Secret Service “failure to protect” if not “failure to execute” as they should have seen the shooter on top of the building, but didn’t look around, until it was too late, and after the shots were heard, the 45th President was shot, wounded and two spectators seated behind the 45th US President were killed, by which time the Secret Service sharpshooters finally zeroed-in and killed the errant pimply and lightly schooled stoner-boy.
So, this was a really dark day for America but thankfully the 45th President is now safe. May God bless President Trump and protect him from those who are trying to assassinate him for championing peace.
And the second most important event of this Great Game iteration of Geopolitical Supremacy, is still being played out now due to the foolish decisions of past U.S. leaders to expand NATO along most of the length of Russia’s western frontier for the first time in history…
Somewhere along the way Kamala Harris was thrown up like a vomit projectile to stand-in for the Democratic Party, alongside a crazed China-loving Minnesota school teacher who long ago lost his brain fluid and suffers from a lower IQ than even Kamala, who is competing with regular regurgitating Camels, on the intelligence frontier. Still, the funny thing is that both Bactrian and Arabian Camels, one humped and double humped camels, Asiatic and African camels — are way ahead of the laughing Camel, aptly named Kamala.
Yet, I digress, because I promised a conversation about the Grand Game as this has been going on for some time now, because it represents the long run chess game that has been called the Great game that has been as well fought as anything we choose to fight in decades long conflicts of unnecessary “wars of choice” in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Israel, and especially in Iraq, as well as in Ukraine, where the U.S. today finds itself seriously overextended both militarily and strategically.
Meanwhile Russia and its ally, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continue to engage in a massive nuclear missile buildup while the U.S. nuclear arsenal has remained stagnant in size and increasingly obsolescent, arguably insufficient to deter two allied nuclear superpowers with a much larger combined nuclear arsenal. This increasing nuclear imbalance between the U.S. and the Russian Federation, along with the reckless, provocative, and unnecessarily confrontational policy of the Biden administration against Russia has increased the risk of a nuclear war to a level not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis as President Joe Biden conceded in October 2022.
The war in Ukraine has now been going on for over twenty-eight months with no end in sight. Contrary to the liberal media disinformation narrative, it has proven to be an unmitigated geostrategic disaster for the West. Thus far, the PRC has emerged as the biggest winner of the war with Ukraine the biggest loser. While claiming to “support Ukraine”, the Biden administration has pursued a policy designed to veto all Ukrainian attempts to negotiate a fair peace with Russia and prolong the war indefinitely, exponentially increasing the death and destruction in that war-torn country in the process while threatening to transform Ukraine into a failed state. Since the war began, Ukraine has lost nearly thirty percent of its GDP and nearly one-third of its population to date including approximately 300,000 soldiers killed in action, hundreds of thousands more wounded and over 10,000 dead civilians. Supporters of the war in Ukraine refuse to recognize the fact that it is far worse off now than it would have been had it implemented its tentative peace agreement it reached with Russia at the end of March 2022 in Istanbul only five weeks after it invaded Ukraine.
Today marks the second anniversary of the outbreak of the tragic and unnecessary war in Ukraine. Given that the war continues to rage with no sign of abating due to the continuing refusal of President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Russia, it is worth examining the costs and consequences of the war thus far. When the Bucharest Declaration was issued in 2008 declaring that both Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO, foreign policy realists warned it was the worst of both worlds as it served as a huge provocation putting Russia on notice that the US intended to expand its sphere of influence into these two nations which Russia considered part of its ‘near abroad’ and in the case of Ukraine the most important neutral buffer states protecting Russia from NATO, while postponing indefinitely any perceived security guarantee bestowed by NATO membership.
Sixteen years later, we can take measure of the disastrous consequences of Ukraine’s fanciful and misguided dream of NATO membership has had for Ukraine pushed on it by US neoliberal internationalist Democrats and neoconservative Republicans who claim to care about Ukraine while their actions have proven they view Ukrainians as nothing more than cannon fodder in an indefinite NATO proxy war aimed at weakening Russia. In 2014, Dr. John Mearsheimer warned that NATO was leading Ukraine down “the primrose path” and that Russia would “wreck Ukraine” if it attempted to join NATO. Sadly, his prediction was proven prescient with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which took place two years ago this month.
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This week also marks the ten-year anniversary of the bloody CIA-backed Maidan coup authorized by then Vice President Joe Biden, that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych while this weekend marks the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The coup, which was wildly celebrated, by the Western power elite at the time, caused Ukraine to descend into a civil war that continues to rage today between Ukraine’s government and ethnic Russian separatists, who for the past two years have been backed by Russian military forces. In his February 6th interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Putin cited intercepted Ukrainian plans for a new military offensive to retake control of the Russian-backed separatists Donbass republics as one of the two main rationales for his invasion. As it was, the Ukrainian Civil War cost the lives of over 14,000 Ukrainians, most of whom were ethnic Russians and resulted in 1.5 million refugees before Russia intervened militarily on the side of the separatists. The coup caused Russia to feel threatened by a prospective NATO member all along its western frontier provoking it to invade Crimea to secure its nuclear Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol. This Russian move, in turn, caused the Western powers to implement severe sanctions which caused Russian hopes of becoming part of the economic and security architecture of the West to largely evaporate.
Staggering Ukrainian Losses
While Western leaders and regime media have been incessant in their claims that Ukraine is winning the war and only needs one more infusion of weapon systems to defeat Russia and liberate all its lost territories including Crimea, a closer examination of the facts exposes this Western war propaganda narrative as false. Since Biden provoked Russia to invade Ukraine by refusing Putin’s December 7th, 2021 guarantee Russian troops would not invade in exchange for a written pledge from the US that Ukraine would never join NATO, Ukraine, which was already the poorest country in Europe before the war started on a per capita basis, has suffered economic devastation not seen in Europe since the Second World War. It has lost nearly thirty percent of its Gross Domestic Product with half of its critical infrastructure destroyed and half of its businesses being forced to shut down. The World Economic Forum estimates the current cost of reconstruction would total $1 trillion which is a staggering figure considering that would take Ukraine nearly thirty years to pay off even if spent its entire pre-war (2021) government budget to pay for those costs but reconstruction cannot begin until a peaceful settlement ending the war has been finalized. The WEF also reported that, “Approximately 20% of the country’s farmland has been wrecked and 30% of land either littered with landmines or unexploded ordnance.” Ukraine’s unemployment rate is currently just above 18%.
The war in Ukraine has also resulted in other momentous changes as it has gone from the second largest country in Europe by territory to the fourth largest with the loss of eighteen percent of its territory to Russian annexation and from the fifth most populous to the sixth with the loss of over thirty-four percent of its population over the past decade from over forty-five million to approximately thirty million over the past decade. By way of comparison, Stalin killed 15-25 percent of Ukraine’s population during the Holodomor in the 1930s and after the USSR reconquered Ukraine near the end of World War Two. Reuters has reported that due in large part to the exodus of Ukrainian refugees into Eastern Europe, the population of Ukraine may have decreased to as low as 28 million. Either way, this represents a staggering proportion of their citizens that greatly exceeds the proportional losses in population by Poland, the USSR, or China during WW2. Only German postwar population losses even come close given Germany lost 34 percent of its territory and at least one-quarter of its population in two world wars.
Ukrainian refugee camp in Warsaw. Nearly one-quarter of Ukraine’s citizens, including an estimated 700,000 draft dodgers, have fled their homes as a result of Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine which could have been easily averted had he guaranteed to Russia that Ukraine would never be admitted into NATO.
Of the population reduction which has taken place since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, 57 percent have been due to refugees fleeing the country out of ten million refugees overall over the past two years of war or 24 percent of Ukraine’s prewar population. Another 41 percent of the reduction has been due to Russian annexations of the former Ukrainian oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson. Two percent of these reductions are due to Ukrainian war deaths which constitutes over 0.6 percent of Ukraine’s prewar population. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product has plummeted by nearly 25 percent since the Obama / Biden administration, authorized the nasty CIA backed and Hillary Clinton hatched Euromaidan coup, of February 2014, while Russia’s economy has expanded by 42 percent during the same period.
Ukraine’s security against Russia and its territorial integrity was always dependent, not upon NATO membership, but rather upon friendly relations with Moscow. Yet, and perhaps most importantly, its continued commitment to remain a neutral buffer state between Russia and the NATO alliance, which at one time was actually a laudable defensive alliance. An alliance that may have possibly saved western Europe from falling under Soviet domination during the Cold War, though it seems clear that Stalin had abandoned his World War Two-era dream of sending the Red Army westward all the way to the English Channel by 1952, with his offer of German reunification as a neutral buffer state between NATO and Soviet occupied Eastern Europe.
However, beginning with the NATO aggression against the former Yugoslavia in 1999 which effectively resulted in changing the borders of Europe by force for the first time in over half a century, NATO expansions to include all of the former Warsaw Pact countries and three former Soviet republics all the way to Russia’s borders for the first time ever and culminating with NATO aggression against Libya over a decade later, Russia understandably began to perceive as an inherently offensive military alliance directed against its territorial integrity.
A bit more than a year ago, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) gave an outstanding speech at the Heritage Foundation, rightly referring to NATO as part of America’s “liberal empire.” The rationale for the existence of the transatlantic alliance has always been to provide a collective defense against the perceived threat of future Russian aggression even after that threat largely disappeared for over three decades revived only by the Obama/Biden/Hillary administration’s continued push to add Ukraine to its list of nearly thirty of America’s imperial European dominions, subordinating its foreign and defense policy to the whims of US dictates in the process, as it has done for the past decade.
I refer to America’s NATO allies as imperial dominions because the relationship we have with them is very similar to the one the British had with their formal dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the early 20th century. When Britian told them to go to war and fight a British enemy they obediently did so. The US exerts substantial and oversized influence over the foreign and defense policy of our NATO allies not too dissimilar from that exercised by the Soviets over members of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. Sometimes the US pressures its NATO allies to pursue policies against their national interests as in the case of Germany given one of the purposes of NATO is “to keep Germany down” even when the US destroys its critical infrastructure causing an economic recession as in the case of our destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines which were jointly controlled by Russia and Germany. Furthermore, German aid to Ukraine has made it a Russian nuclear target once more, making Germany much less safe and secure.
Crossing Russia’s Biggest Redline
The outbreak of the war in Ukraine was not difficult to foresee. Russia and Ukraine were amicable and collaborative strategic partners from 1991 to Feb 2014 by virtue of their joint CIS membership CIS Free Trade Area agreement and 1997 Treaty of Friendship before Ukraine’s mad and self-defeating pursuit of NATO membership transformed them from friends with close ethnic, religious and economic ties to implacable enemies.
President Vladimir Putin spoke at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 warning that NATO must not be expanded into Ukraine and calling for Russia to be included in the security architecture of Europe. Two years later, Russia offered a mutual security agreement to the US and NATO resolve all major issues between them and the Russian Federation and prevent further NATO expansion which the US never seriously considered.
The origins of the Russo-Ukrainian War can be traced back to late 2007 when President George W. Bush began pushing for Ukrainian NATO membership. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel was adamantly opposed to the idea, later recalling: “I was very sure…that Putin was not going to just let that happen… From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.”
Former US Ambassador to Russia and current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, also warned President Bush not to include Ukraine in NATO in a since declassified memo stating:
“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” He added that expanding NATO into Ukraine would be seen as “throwing down the strategic gauntlet,” and that “Today’s Russia will respond.”
Fiona Hill also warned President Bush in February 2008 against pushing NATO membership for Ukraine suggesting it might provoke a Russian military response. Putin publicly warned that Russia would regard any effort to expand NATO into Ukraine “as a direct threat.” Privately, he is reported to have told Bush that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” Putin has since made good on that threat.
Germany and France were able to prevent Ukraine from being given an invitation to join NATO, but Bush pressured them to sign on to the Bucharest Declaration issued in April 2008, in which NATO informed the world that Ukraine and Georgia would become NATO members without providing a timeline for their accession to the Atlantic Alliance.
The NATO declaration that Ukraine would join NATO was in some respects a modern-day equivalent of Imperial Germany’s Zimmerman Plan, in which they offered to ally with Mexico if it went to war with the US causing us to declare war on Germany, because it provoked Russia to engage in a preventive war to ensure Ukraine did not become a formal NATO member.
Of course, there never was any chance of Ukraine joining NATO because its NATO membership was adamantly opposed by both France and Germany. Germany continues to staunchly oppose NATO membership for Ukraine joined by Hungary, Turkey, and Slovakia. Furthermore, since the Russian invasion of Crimea and Russian support for ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbass region in 2014, Ukraine has fallen well short of the requirements for ascension into NATO due to the fact that membership requirements include not having any territorial disputes with its neighbors and not having any foreign troops on its territory meaning that Ukraine would have to formally cede all of its occupied territories to Russia in order to meet these requirements. Even today, sixteen years after the Bucharest Declaration, NATO has refused to provide a path to membership for Ukraine, causing one to wonder why Biden felt it was worth the lives of half a million Ukrainians for him to refuse to guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would never join when he had no intention of allowing them to join in the first place.
Moreover, since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared martial law in March 2022 banned eleven opposition parties, forcing all opposition TV networks to broadcast Ukrainian government propaganda 24-7 and began imprisoning and assassinating his political opposition leaders, democracy in Ukraine ceased to exist, disqualifying Ukraine from joining NATO, on that basis as well. President Joe Biden’s claim that the US is fighting on the side of global democracy against autocracy worldwide has proven to be a farce, particularly in view of his own increasing authoritarian tendencies.
President Donald Trump gave a speech earlier this year in which he stated that if NATO members did not pay their fair share of defense spending, the US would not defend them from potential Russian attack. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton has said Trump told him on two occasions that he wanted to pull the US out of NATO. Trump is such a honey badger and a contrarian thinker that he just might do that, and that is why the NeoCons, aligned with the Deep State instruments tried to assassinate him once again with an American assassin hiding in the bushes of the perimeter of his Golf Course in Mar-A-Lago Florida. This person was an asset of the CIA who spent three years of dutifully fighting the Russians in Ukraine, as part of that elite regiment of the American division sent there by the Biden/Harris administration to be the American advisors that are supposed to not be there, and the US boots on the ground.
For this person to be sent back by Ukraine to perform this dirty deed on American soil — it comes as no surprise how deep the Ukraine corruption is intertwined with the Washington DC stink of death and rot emanating from that awful country’s leadership.
Now, however, the question must be asked, because even if Ukraine had become a formal NATO member before Russia invaded it in 2022, would the US have responded any differently than it has?
Would the US be able or even concerned by Russia’s invasion of this “ipso facto” NATO member state, with which we have no formal security commitment, situated not in the center of Europe but at the furthest fringe of Eastern Europe in a border dispute in which the US has no discernible security interest?
It is doubtful that it would have.
While, neoconservative Republican members of Congress are fond of misleadingly claiming that a Russian attack on NATO would require the US to go to war with Russia in response to any Russian aggression against a NATO member state no matter how small, the fact is that Article Five of the Atlantic Charter doesn’t actually require the US to go to war or require the US to send troops to defend a country under attack. It only requires NATO member states to engage in “collective assistance” as is “deemed necessary” to assist a NATO member under attack by a foreign power.
This could mean the US could send non-lethal military aid to the country under attack, as Obama did for Ukraine after Russia invaded Crimea, and still be technically in compliance with its Article Five commitment.
The truth is that it is one of the weakest alliance commitments in modern history on par with Britain’s Triple Entente, which was not a genuine military alliance until Britain made the decision to enter the war against Germany on France and Russia’s side in August 1914.
Perhaps in furtherance of this realization, President Donald Trump reportedly told the President of the European Union at a meeting in January 2020, that he would not defend Europe if Russia attacked them while threatening to have the US quit NATO entirely.
Thus, if Russia invaded the Baltic states tomorrow the only thing likely to embroil the US in a war with Russia would be the presence of thousands of US troops there, which serve as little more than a ‘speed bump’ as there are too few of them to defend against Russian attack, in the event hundreds of them were killed or injured.
The unstated truth is that the primary purpose of the 200,000 US troops spread across the globe in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia in America’s far flung imperial outposts, does not serve much as a deterrence or even a collective defense mechanism.
Yet these far flung US troops, serve, as a “nuclear tripwire” to “tie the hands” of US Presidents and force them to fight potential full-scale wars against nuclear adversaries, even if doing so is in opposition, to the overriding US clear security interest; that of national survival — even in the event of an all out Nuclear War.
The second purpose is for our troops and military bases to serve as symbols of America’s liberal empire and global reach, while enabling US leaders to unduly influence the foreign and defense policies of the nations in which they are stationed much as British troops were able to do located across their empire in the first half of the Twentieth Century.
In his landmark interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Russian President Putin declared he had no interest in invading Poland or the Baltics unless NATO attacked Russia first.
No Chance for Ukrainian Victory
For nearly two years, the Biden administration and its compliant state-controlled liberal mainstream media partners have propagandized Americans into believing that the $175 billion in taxpayer funding that the US has so far sent to Ukraine, has been well worth it, because Russian military losses both in terms of military equipment and personnel were far higher than Ukraine’s. However, as I have been saying since the war began, the truth is exactly the opposite.
Moreover, contrary to the collective, cognitive dissonance demonstrated by US leaders, media propagandists, and the generally well wishing but terribly misled American public, who have all expressed that belief since the unilateral Russian military withdrawal from northern Ukraine in April 2022 that Ukraine could defeat Russia — Ukraine never had any hope, let alone a single chance, of beating back Russia.
Just a month before Russia invaded Ukraine, I had already predicted that if Russia invaded Ukraine, it’s defeat would be inevitable, no matter how many weapons we sent them.
What crazy people in the Pentagon or Washington, really expect that the Ukrainian army could march on Moscow and get Putin to sign Russia’s unconditional surrender before trying him in an international war crimes tribunal at the Hague?
What crazy person thought that there was ever any chance of Ukrainian victory?
It is a simple fact that no matter how many weapons the West sent Ukraine — defeating Russia in war was a feat that the Poles, the Swedes, Napoleon, and most recently Hitler with the finest army in the world — German Wermacht with 315 army divisions and 200 iron tank divisions, consisting of the best trained troops in the world, could not accomplish.
All that apart from World War One, when the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 knocked Russia out of the war and forced it to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Any middle school student who looked at a map in February 2022 could have correctly predicted the outcome of this war given that Russia today is 35 times larger with an economy eleven times the size of Ukraine’s with a population five times larger with millions more reservists which it could mobilize. Ukraine is overmatched by Russia across the board militarily with Russia fielding five to twelve times more tanks, combat aircraft and artillery systems and over 8,000 more nuclear weapons (Ukraine having none). In addition, except for thousands of Polish volunteers, not a single country has sent troops to fight alongside Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression — except the errant American and French advisors due to Macron’s & Biden’s infertile & infebrile minds.
Today — Ukrainian Military Losses are easily Three to Four Times Higher than Russia’s
Ukraine has likely lost over a quarter of a million dead . An article late last year revealed that 50,000 Ukrainian troops, including thousands of female soldiers, had one of their legs amputated due to serious injuries sustained while fighting the Russians during the first seventeen months of the war which is about the same number of French military amputees during over four years of intense combat on the Western front during the First World War. Zelensky recently stated the Ukrainian armed forces was 600,000 strong. That’s down from 1.3 million during the first year of the war leading one to wonder whether Ukrainian losses may not just be 500,000 killed and seriously wounded as a top Ukrainian official recently admitted but may be as high as 700,000 killed and severely wounded. Ukraine’s prewar army has been completely destroyed, replaced by an army of conscripts. A recent article revealed that some Ukrainian battalions and regiments had been decimated by as much as 93% of their nominal manpower strength and were being commanded by Senior Lieutenants, who typically command Ukrainian army companies.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH), an ardent supporter of Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine who served as one of the authors of the neocon Republican Plan for Victory in Ukraine that, despite its name, provides no path for victory for Kyiv.
Even many Republicans in Congress fail to comprehend the fact that without US aid, Ukraine would have been forced to accept far more favorable peace terms from Russia than it could obtain today and that it is US aid over the past two years that has resulted in an unnecessary prolongation of the war leading to unprecedented death and destruction in Ukraine. Instead, they are continuing to double-down in their blind and naïve support of Biden’s unachievable and potentially suicidal policy of supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes” to retake all of its lost territory. Three House Republican Committee Chairman recently issued their so-called “Plan for Victory in Ukraine” but failed to provide a single relevant suggestion for how victory can be achieved. The only thing they recommend is to approve the US Senate’s $60 billion Ukraine aid bill and ramp up Biden’s continuing unilateral disarmament of the US military of tens of thousands of its advanced weapon despite Ukraine’s massive military losses which are likely three times higher than Russia’s which are estimated by US and UK intelligence to be around 70,000-80,000 dead. That is just a mindless regurgitation of the Biden strategy for defeat proving neocon Republicans and far left Democrats share the same hive mind mentality unable to accept the reality that Russia won the war back in 2022 and Biden and Zelensky are the only ones insisting on prolonging it unnecessarily by banning any peace negotiations with Moscow. Colonel Macgregor (USA Ret.) recently wrote an excellent article published in The American Conservative stating:
“The war in Ukraine is ending in catastrophic defeat for Ukraine and the United States. Washington confronts a world it does not know or understand. The House Republicans’ recent “Plan for Victory in Ukraine” exemplifies an acute lack of understanding. It seems certain that Russian forces will push forward to the Dnieper River and beyond. When the forward movement begins, U.S. space-based surveillance systems will detect the westward movement and sound the alarm. Yet Ukraine has no means of stopping the Russian advance.
Yuriy Lutsenko, former Ukrainian prosecutor general, appeared on Ukrainian television on January 7 and said that Ukraine had lost 500,000 dead in Washington’s proxy war with Russia. He added, “Ukraine loses 30,000 people a month in the war as killed and seriously wounded.” He further insisted that Ukrainian authorities should publish the real numbers of Ukrainian losses to show people the seriousness of the situation.
Washington’s foolish attempt to destroy Russia with the use of Ukrainian lives has produced a strategic victory for Moscow and revealed American weakness to the whole world. With the national sovereign debt approaching the threshold of default, and the progressive collapse of American societal cohesion, the potential for American military failure in action is an event Washington should avoid but seems incapable of doing so.”
We often hear the false claim parroted by the liberal mainstream media that Ukraine can beat Russia because they not only have better equipment, but they also have much higher moral than Russia. In fact, Ukrainian morale is far lower than Russian morale which has risen substantially since Russia’s victory over Ukraine in its counteroffensive and the recent Russian victory in capturing the heavily fortified Ukrainian stronghold of Avdeevka, which was a key steppingstone for Russia to reconquer the rest of western Donetsk, thus fulfilling the last of Russia’s territorial objectives. A report from late last year revealed that the life expectancy for Ukrainian troops sent to the front during the Ukrainian counteroffensive was between two-three days before they were either killed or rendered combat ineffective after being seriously wounded. Meanwhile, a US Marine fighting with the Ukrainians reported that the average life expectancy of Ukrainian troops during the battle of Bakhmut was just four hours.
While it is likely true that 750,000 Russian men who fled Russia to dodge Russian military service after Russia invaded Ukraine, a recent report reveals there have been 700,000 Ukrainian draft dodgers who fled Ukraine to escape compulsory military service from a country whose pre-war population was 3.5 times smaller than Russia’s. According to the report:
“Around 700,000 Ukrainians liable for military service have crossed the border since the war began on 24 February 2022. This is more than the number of Ukrainian soldiers at the front. These male refugees are not coming home any time soon. Germany, Poland, Estonia and other countries have stated that they will not deport them back to Ukraine.”
Older-looking Ukrainian soldiers standing in formation. The average age of Ukrainian army soldiers is fifteen years older than US soldiers due in large part to the fact that Ukraine’s pre-war army has been destroyed and that Ukraine is running out of men to draft to fight in its ongoing border dispute with Russia.
Another article reports that the average age of Ukrainian army troops has now increased to 43 years old whereas the life expectancy of Ukrainian men has dropped precipitously to 57 years. Assignment to the frontlines is viewed as a death sentence by Ukrainian troops due to massive Russian superiority in terms of airpower and artillery systems. It also states that according to leaked internal communications, Ukraine’s air force was basically destroyed by the Russians during the first year of the war contrary to Western propaganda.
Accusations of Russian War Crimes
Despite Biden’s claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal that should be tried by an international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, there is no evidence that Russia has targeted civilians for destruction as Israel has done in Gaza. Russia has not targeted apartment buildings or schools except when Ukraine has stationed its troops in them which they did during the urban fighting in spring and summer 2022 in violation of the rules and laws of civilized warfare. Of course, there have been civilian casualties resulting from collateral damage with Russian missiles missing their intended targets. We have done the same on countless occasions during the past two plus decades of war of bombing and invading countries in the Middle East. It’s not considered a war crime under international law unless a country deliberately targets civilians as we did during World War Two.
According to the UN Human Rights Commission, the war in Ukraine has cost the lives of over 10,000 civilians as of November 21, 2023, which extrapolated to today would be the equivalent of nearly 12,000 civilians killed in 23.5 months of fighting. By comparison, Israel has killed over 27,000 Gazans in nearly four months of fighting totaling over one percent of Gaza’s total population, two-thirds of whom according to Israel are civilians, most of which are women and children. Israeli officials have admitted that two-thirds of those are civilians so by Israeli admission 18,000 total. Accordingly, Israel has been killing civilians at an average daily death rate nearly nine and a half times higher than Russia.
Strangely, the Biden administration has refrained from publicly denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal while attacking him as a “bad f***ing guy” in private and refusing to speak to him for the past few weeks for failing to agree to a permanent cease fire, the very thing Biden has adamantly opposed in his war in Ukraine for the past nearly two years. Biden also reportedly blames Netanyahu for losing millions of liberal Democrat votes who have now resorted to denouncing Biden as ‘Genocide Joe’ for supporting Israel’s alleged genocide of Palestinian civilians when in fact it is Biden’s Middle East policy which is responsible for his propitious drop in popular support in a presidential election year. While nearly 27 percent of Ukraine’s pre-war population have had to flee their homes in the wake of Russia’s invasion, 80-85 percent of Gaza’s population has become refugees since Israel invaded Gaza over three months ago.
There have been a number of reports, many of them credible, of lower-level war crimes and atrocities, committed by both Russia and Ukraine military forces but no credible reports that would suggest systematic Russian attacks against civilians as the UNHRC Ukrainian civilian death count figures attest. Zelensky continues to escalate Ukrainian military strikes on civilians using banned cluster munitions supplied by the Biden regime killing hundreds of Ukrainians in Russian annexed regions of the Donbass. Western media refuses to report these deliberate Ukrainian attacks aimed at killing their fellow citizens of predominantly Russian ethnicity.
Biden Continues to Double Down on Supporting a Lost Cause
Western leaders pinned their hopes on Ukraine’s massive summer/fall counteroffensive last year in which Ukrainian forces committed all its most advanced Russian weapons provided by the US and other Western nations apart from M-1A1 SA Abrams tanks which it feared would be destroyed by the Russians, yet it only succeeded in liberating approximately 0.25% of its territory, reportedly losing 60,000-80,000 dead in the process. Despite massive Western military assistance to Ukraine with virtually every weapon system Ukraine requested, Russia ended up capturing more territory last year than Ukraine did. With the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, all hope of liberating the rest of Russian annexed Ukrainian territory has been lost. Ukraine is now teetering on the edge of collapse with some of its most elite units refusing to attack Russian forces.
General of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny, the most popular and effective of Ukraine’s military commanders, recently fired by President Zelensky from his position as Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian armed forces for daring to call for an armistice with Russia to prevent Ukraine from losing any additional territory after concluding the war was unwinnable for Ukraine
Meanwhile, recent news reports suggested Biden may have attempted to pressure Zelensky into holding Ukraine’s presidential election in March as required by the Ukrainian Constitution in the hopes he would be voted out of office and replaced by General Zaluzhny, commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, whom Zelensky fired earlier this month. Zaluzhny started a feud with Zelensky back in November when he called him delusional for believing Ukraine could still defeat Russia. He is believed to support the immediate negotiation of an armistice agreement with Russia to prevent Russia from overrunning large swaths of additional Ukrainian territory in the East. Biden has long had a frosty relationship with Zelensky because no matter how much money and arms the US gives to Ukraine it is never enough for him and he is always criticizing and attempting to guilt Western leaders into sending more.
A recent poll revealed that if the election were held today two and a half times more Ukrainians would vote for Zaluzhny than Zelensky for President. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Biden is willing to do what is necessary to pressure Zelensky to restore democracy to Ukraine anytime soon. There had been rumors that if Zelensky refused to change course and continue to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers to fight an unwinnable war against Russia, Zaluzhny might lead a military coup that could overthrow Zelensky. However, since he fired Zaluzhny, Zelensky has conducted a purge of Ukraine’s senior generals loyal to Zaluzhny replacing them with his own loyalists so it appears that the opportunity for such a coup to save Ukraine may have passed.
For the past two years, the Biden administration and its Democrat and neocon Republican allies have been claiming if you don’t support sending military aid to Ukraine, then you don’t care about the Ukrainian people. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite. President Biden, Ambassador Nikki Haley and neoconservatives in both major political parties have all but admitted that they are very happy to use hundreds of thousands of brave Ukrainians soldiers as cannon fodder to achieve their objective of weakening Russia falsely claiming it is a great deal because no Americans are dying when in fact upwards of a dozen American volunteers for Ukraine’s Foreign Legion have died fighting Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. However, Biden and his allies have never bothered to explain precisely why they believe it is in the US national security interest either to weaken Russia or destroy Ukraine in order to “save it” much as President Lyndon B. Johnson called for us to do in Vietnam.
Apart from the humanitarian, material and economic costs to Ukraine and economic and material costs to the US and its NATO allies sacrificing vast numbers of weapons to Ukraine weakening their own security, there have also been other strategic costs which are more difficult to measure. Those strategic costs include the failure of the US to negotiate a comprehensive peace with Russia that would transform it from an adversary to a strategic partner to help neutralize its military alliance with the People’s Republic of China that might successfully deter it from blockading and invading Taiwan sparking a conflict that could escalate into a nuclear war with the U.S and its Pacific allies. Last summer, I helped former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy formulate a Ukraine peace proposal and mutual security agreement with Russia that could very well accomplish that in recognition of the fact that only by including Russia in the security architecture of Europe as Russian leaders have been requesting for the past 34 years can peace in Europe be assured. Vivek, President Trump and arguably Gov. Ron DeSantis are the only strategic thinkers to run for President that demonstrated an understanding of the lamentable strategic trade-offs the US has been making to continue to subsidize Biden’s proxy war with Russia with a couple hundred billion dollars’ worth of US taxpayer funding.
As I have noted previously, great power alliances transformed two regional wars into unnecessary world wars costing 110 million lives. Now, US membership in the NATO alliance threatens to transform Russia’s border dispute with Ukraine into a Third World War, risking the destruction of both the US and its NATO allies and the loss of nearly a billion lives. President Biden would be wise to end NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine by cutting off all aid to Ukraine until Zelensky agrees to and implements a permanent cease-fire and armistice agreement, along the lines I have long advocated, ending the death and destruction in Ukraine and the immediate threat of Russian nuclear escalation so millions of Ukrainian refugees can return home and help rebuild Ukraine’s destroyed cities. He has a moral obligation to do so not only for the sake of the American people but to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives as well.
Because Biden / Harris administration’s policy of attempting to weaken Russia with massive economic sanctions, while America is fighting an indefinite proxy war to the last Ukrainian has backfired badly. Now it is widely recognized that this daft policy instead of serving American geopolitical interests, it is working hard to “Make Russia Great Again.”
And it is working so well, making Russian economy growing at its highest rate in decades, that the Russian people really love President Putin more than any other time in his career. In fact, just last month, the World Bank upgraded Russia’s rating from the sixth largest to the fourth largest economy in the world, vaulting ahead of Germany and Japan, while upgrading its per capita rating to “high-income” which is the same one it accords to the US. No longer can neoconservative politicians dismiss Russia as “a gas station with nuclear weapons” as the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) did years ago.
Indeed, far from weakening Russia militarily, Biden’s “war of choice” in Ukraine has caused Russia to increase the size of their armed forces by 50% from their prewar size to Soviet-era levels, expand the size of their army by nearly three times, and more than double the percentage of their GDP that they spend on their military to Cold War levels. Putin has fully mobilized Russia’s economy for war and Russian factories are on track to churning out 1,500 T-90M main battle tanks this year, thousands more armored fighting vehicles and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of missiles and combat drones as well as millions more heavy artillery shells for which Russia can now produce more a year than the US and its NATO allies combined. Moreover, Russia has broken out of the New START nuclear arms control treaty limits of 1,550 Treaty-accountable warheads with a recently leaked Ukrainian report estimating Russia has increased the size of its nuclear arsenal to 6,000 strategic and 10,000 non-strategic warheads, a level far in excess of America’s operational nuclear stockpile.
The war in Ukraine has served to accomplish Russia’s objective of “demilitarizing” and weakening, not just Ukraine by killing and wounding up to one million troops, but the US and its NATO allies as well, as the current Biden / Harris regime, has unilaterally disarmed the US military of vast amounts of our modern weapons and ammunition to give to Ukraine, making the US far less able to fight, let alone win a necessary war, against any great power, let alone Russia or China.
Today, the Pentagon, is estimating that it will take several years for the US to replenish these lost weapon systems and stockpiles, munition dumps, and vital military supplies — while a clash with China over Taiwan, could materialize much sooner. Biden’s decision to unnecessarily prolong America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, has been very much in furtherance of China’s interests.
Well done Mr Chinese Stooge in Chief.
This is due to the fact that Chinese President Xi Jinping may assess that conditions are right for the PRC to stage a blockade and/or invasion of Taiwan as early as this fall with US and NATO military resources tied up fighting a proxy war against Russia in Eastern Europe at the same time we are fighting a proxy war against Iran in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to provoke Russia by continuing to escalate the war by authorizing Ukraine to use long-range US missiles against any military target in Russia which Ukraine claims is necessary to forestall an attack bringing America and Europe closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis over six decades ago.
The administration’s actions are in flagrant violation of a reported pre-war bilateral agreement in which the US agreed not to directly attack Russia and committed not to provide Ukraine with any weapons enabling them to attack Russia in exchange for a Russian promise not to attack any NATO member states, meaning that Putin is now freed from his commitment and may attack NATO at will. In addition, the Biden administration just announced it will deploy 3,000 kilometer range, nuclear capable Long-Range Hypersonic Weapons to Germany in 2026 rather than to the Western Pacific where they are most needed to deter the PRC and the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Army, causing Russia to promise a military response. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Elbridge Colby, reportedly one of two front runners for National Security Advisor in a second Trump administration declared, “I am very worried about that and the possibility that we might get chain-ganged into a larger war with Russia by such imprudent steps.”
Earlier this week, French President Emannuel Macron revealed that the US was one of two major NATO countries opposing Ukraine’s membership in NATO which seems ironic given that it was the Biden administration decision to blow-up the Russian Nord-Stream gas pipeline to Germany & Western Europe, and the U.S. refusal to guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO
This was the state of affairs, before the war, that provoked Russia to invade Ukraine in the first place.
Notably, the administration has failed to explain why risking a thermonuclear war with the Russian Federation, which could result in the entire destruction of the United States, and the deaths of a quarter billion Americans, is worth fighting over a “war of choice” being fought over the NATO membership of a country on the furthest fringes of Eastern Europe, over lands for which the US has no discernible national security or strategic interest.
In truth, there is only one US vital national security imperative in Ukraine, and that is to do whatever is necessary to avert an unnecessary world war with Russia, which would likely include China and quickly escalate to the nuclear level, potentially ending with the destruction of the entire Western world.
Tragically, all the realist lessons of the Cold War practiced by US Presidents from Harry Truman to George HW Bush concerning peaceful co-existence, reciprocal agreements, and peaceful accommodations without adversaries the importance of providing a face-saving diplomatic exit for our enemies to avert nuclear confrontations have been thrown out the window by the increasingly irrational Biden administration. Rather than pursue an America First national security strategy, the Biden administration has opted to pursue a “China first” and “Ukraine first” foreign policy that puts the national security interests of foreign powers above our own, placing the lives of 327 million American citizens at an unprecedented, existential risk.
The pursuit of a failed strategy of liberal hegemony by the United States over the past few decades has provoked both opposing nuclear superpowers–Russia and China–to ally together against the United States, posing the greatest existential threat America has ever faced in its history far in excess of the threat we faced from the Axis Powers during World War Two. Russia and China now lead a military alliance that includes nearly seventy percent of the landmass of Eurasia, forty-three prevent of the world’s population, and nearly one-third of the world’s GDP with many times more operational nuclear weapons than the US. There has been a tremendous dearth of critical strategic thinking in US leadership circles in both major political parties in terms of how we might replace this disastrous national security strategy with one that serves to enhance US national security and make our citizens safer and more secure rather than serve to multiply the existential threats we are now facing and potentially invite nuclear conflict as the current one has.
As I have been arguing since the turn of the century, the foremost objective of US national security policy should be to pursue a strategy designed to divide and disrupt the Sino-Russian alliance and seriously weaken the People’s Republic of China without war to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. During a press conference on July 11th, President Biden was asked if he had a second-term plan to “disrupt the partnership” between Russia and China and whether he would be willing to hold a summit meeting with Putin presumably in furtherance of such a strategy. He replied he had a secret plan to do so but was not prepared to talk about it in public and that he was “not ready to talk to Putin unless Putin changes his behavior” continuing the administration’s nearly two and a half year long diplomatic temper tantrum against Russia for invading Ukraine. The administration has previously made clear their plan is to improve US relations with Communist China to stop supporting and allying with Russia when they should be doing the exact opposite by making peace with Russia to incentivize it to negate its increasing military alliance with China.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, America’s foremost realist foreign policy theorist, Dr. John Mearsheimer, has been calling for the US to align with Russia to balance against the much more pressing and existential threat posed by the People’s Republic of China rather than pushing it further into Beijing’s arms but to date no elected US leader has been wise enough to follow his admonition. Mearsheimer has denounced the US decision to build up China into the world’s strongest economic and industrial superpower over the past two decades as a major blunder that has backfired badly as the US and China may soon find themselves on the brink of war over Taiwan with the US at a severe disadvantage given the fact that we depend on the PRC for nearly all of the vital components we need to build advance weapon systems.
Strangely, there have been few US national security strategists that have given any serious thought to how disrupting the Sino-Russian Axis might be accomplished, generally dismissing it as an impossibility, given they are unwilling to revise America’s national security strategy to one that is based on foreign policy realism and far less maximalist and unachievable objectives. Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been the only major figure to articulate such a grand strategy which he did in an article he published in June 2023. With the People’s Republic of Chinas as the greatest threat to the US, the only way we can hope to neutralize this alliance between America’s two nuclear superpower adversaries would be to greatly improve relations with Russia. Doing so would minimally require the US negotiating an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, terminating all pre-2014 economic sanctions against Russia, restoring Most Favored Nation trade status as well as signing a mutual security agreement with Russia withdrawing all US and Russian military forces from Eastern Europe.
Ultimately, the US must replace its unnecessarily reckless and provocative strategy of liberal hegemony, which has resulted in imperial overstretch, with a strategy of offshore balancing in areas of secondary importance to US interests such as Europe and the Middle East allowing us to focus on discouraging Communist Chinese aggression. Such a strategy would be designed to minimize the risks of the outbreak of an unnecessary war with Russia and China while ensuring our vital national interests, foremost of which is America’s continued existence, are safeguarded.
To break America’s strategic ‘encirclement’ by the Sino-Russian Axis powers, there is a pressing need for a new detente, if not an entente, with Russia, like the “Entente Cordiale” of 1904 that ended centuries of great power competition between Britain and France, with a sphere of influence agreement clearly delineating the lines between both great powers to prevent unnecessary conflicts. Such a Russo-American entente might induce a grand strategic realignment that would leave China increasingly isolated without its nuclear superpower ally, potentially making it easier to dissuade it from attempting to unilaterally change the Taiwan status quo by military force.
In January 2022, President Donald Trump described the escalating Russia-Ukraine crisis as “a NATO problem” that President Joe Biden had turned into a potential “World War III,” rightly emphasizing the importance of our European allies taking the lead in helping to resolve it diplomatically. Since Russia engaged in its illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration has rejected all Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offers to negotiate a compromise peace settlement to end the war, including one which would have constituted a huge victory for a Ukraine in April 2022 opting instead to fight the war to the indefinitely with no achievable war aims and no plan for victory. Biden has also blocked all Ukrainian attempts to negotiate an end to the conflict preferring to fight the war indefinitely to the last Ukrainian, costing the lives of approximately 300,000 brave Ukrainian patriots to date. Thanks to the massive Chinese strategic industrial support to Russia in furtherance of their “no-limits partnership” as well as the fact that Russia greatly overmatches Ukraine in every category of military power, the war is unwinnable for Ukraine which is continuing to lose ground with appealing troop losses reportedly as high as 1,000-2,000 troops per day.
On June 14th, Putin offered a new peace offer demanding more Ukrainian territory as the price for Russia agreeing to a cease-fire for the first time ever. On July 4th, Putin doubled down at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit Meeting in Kazakhstan, when he demanded Ukraine’s “irreversible demilitarization” prior to any cease fire while peace negotiations are underway. Putin’s decision to harden his peace terms for the first time in nearly two years strongly suggest that his patience has grown thin with Ukraine’s continued refusal to return to the negotiating table since peace talks broke down in April 2022. This peace offer may be his last prior to a massive Russian northern offensive conducted with 200,000 troops that could overrun much of northern Ukraine and bring Russian troops back to the gates of Kyiv. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić warned earlier this week that we are three or four months away from the outbreak of World War Three between NATO and Russia as Putin’s patience with the West’s refusal to negotiate a diplomatic end to the war is running thin and Russia is approaching the point of no return. Accordingly, Ukraine appears to be running out of time to negotiate a compromise peace agreement enabling it to avoid being forced to capitulate following additional largescale territorial losses to Moscow. The longer Ukraine waits to make peace with Russia the worse the final peace deal ending the war will end up being.
During his June 27th CNN debate with President Joe Biden, President Donald J. Trump rightly stated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was provoked by Biden’s foolish push to expand NATO into Ukraine, which Biden knew to be one of Russia’s most major red lines. In December 2021, Biden rejected Putin’s offer to guarantee Russia would not invade Ukraine in exchange for the US issuing a written guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would never join NATO. Trump stated Russia would never have invaded NATO if he had been President implying that he would have guaranteed Ukraine would never join NATO. In contrast to Biden’s stated strategy of fighting an unwinnable war to the last Ukrainian, Trump has repeatedly argued for ending the administration’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine as quickly as possible both on national security and humanitarian grounds with his statements that “we have to stop the killing in Ukraine.” In September 2022, he even offered to serve as a Special Envoy to lead a US delegation to meet with the Russians to negotiate an end to the war to prevent the outbreak of a Third World War that would likely quickly escalate to the nuclear level. During the debate, Trump again promised he would end the war in twenty-four hours after becoming President by negotiating a peace deal in a face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Late last month, it was reported by Axios that two of President Trump’s top military advisors, Lt General Keith Kellogg (USA Ret) and Fred Fleitz, who served as Chief of Staff to National Security Advisor John Bolton, briefed him regarding a laud worthy, yet straightforward cease-fire proposal he could use to implement his pledge to end the war immediately after he is inaugurated President. The plan reportedly calls for the US to pressure Zelensky to agree to a permanent cease-fire agreement and begin negotiations for an armistice or peace agreement ending America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine with a just and lasting peace that would represent a “win-win” outcome for Ukraine, Russia, and NATO or at worst a Wilsonian “peace without victory” for all parties to the conflict. The aim would be to end the war on realistic terms along the current line of control. Notably, under this proposal, Ukraine would not cede a single square inch of its territory to Russia which would ensure Ukraine kept all its hard-won battlefield gains in largely Russian forces from half of the eight Ukrainian provinces it previously occupied. However, Ukraine would have to acknowledge continued Russian control of the annexed territories, including Crimea, in something resembling a Korean-style armistice/peace agreements, while leaving the door open to negotiating their future status. Trump appeared favorably disposed to the plan but made no commitments that he would implement it.
This proposal is very similar to the one Trump has implied with his response in a CNN townhall, that the US objective with regards to the war in Ukraine should not be for Putin to lose.
Rather, “our goal should be for America to win,” recognizing the fact that US and Ukraine’s national security interests are not the same and are in many ways divergent. The objective of Trump’s peace proposal was to use Putin’s long-expressed desire to end the war in Ukraine along the current line of control as leverage to induce Russia to effectively end its military alliance with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), thus enabling an end to America’s Cold War with Russia, that will free the US to focus on the threat from America’s most dangerous adversary, which is the People’s Republic of China. His proposal included various tradeoffs including a withdrawal of all allied troops from eastern Europe returning NATO to its pre-July 2016 Warsaw Summit status quo. Former NATO Supreme Commander, Admiral James Stavridis, responded favorably to Trump’s proposal, stating he is “all for creative ideas in international diplomacy” and “would love to be able to say that there is a chance of this type of settlement occurring.” I agree with Stavridis that the chances of persuading Russia to formally end its military alliance with Communist China would be slim. However, it would not be necessary to end the Sino-Russian military alliance to advance US strategic objectives, only to neutralize it, thus seriously weakening China without war.
The main difference between Trump’s peace plan and the Kellogg-Fleitz peace plan, is that while Trump’s comprehensive peace proposal is for a just, lasting, and permanent peace, the Kellogg proposal is essentially a plan for a temporary armistice only, with no incentive for Ukraine to agree to a peace agreement ending the war at all. One issue with their plan, is that Zelensky would have little incentive to negotiate a deal with Putin, so long as the US continues to provide large scale military and financial aid to Ukraine. The US should only threaten to suspend all aid to Ukraine if Zelensky refuses to agree to a permanent cease-fire or if he refuses to sign the peace agreement that Trump negotiates on Ukraine’s behalf. President Trump shouldn’t just mediate peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine as the Kellogg peace proposal suggests. He should negotiate directly with Putin to negotiate the best possible deal for Ukraine because if he leaves it to Zelensky a peace settlement could take many months whereas if Trump meets with Putin in a summit, and negotiates with him directly, they could reach a peace deal within a few days. President Trump is America’s best negotiator so it would be a mistake not to utilize his negotiation skills, to negotiate a better deal with Russia than Zelensky possibly could.
During his presidency, President Trump championed a Reaganite policy of peace through strength and proved to be a stalwart opponent of America’s forever wars in the Middle East, laudably seeking to withdraw all US troops from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. In 2016, he campaigned on negotiating a comprehensive peace agreement with Russia, potentially transforming Russia from an adversary to a strategic partner. When Trump first became President in 2017, he was only prevented from concluding a just and lasting peace with Russia by the Obama Deep State intelligence agencies which invented the fake Trump-Russia collusion narrative starting with the smear against America First conservative hero LTG Mike Flynn (USA-Ret), which the Mueller investigation proved to be a hoax. This was followed by his impeachment by House Democrats for essentially refusing to provoke World War Three with Russia. If Trump were to cleanse the FBI and US intelligence agencies of all their Obama-Biden-era appointees and with the US House of Representatives under continued Republican control, he would be free to proceed with his plan to put America First and negotiate a peace deal with Russia without fear of the Deep State, which might succeed in undermining him.
Just as Reagan ended the Cold War with the Soviet Union over three decades ago, sparing the world from an unnecessary nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a newly re-elected President Trump will have a unique and historic opportunity to end America’s Second Cold War with Russia as he sought to do when he ran for President eight years ago, with a comprehensive peace agreement with Moscow. Many forget that Reagan ended the Cold War, not with a crushing military victory and Russia’s surrender, but rather with a series of negotiated agreements and verbal assurances that gave Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev the confidence and trust to collapse the Soviet Union without fear that the US would exploit it, however misplaced that trust proved to be. Just like Reagan had with Gorbachev, Trump would find a willing partner for peace in Russian President Vladimir Putin, who despite engaging in an illegal invasion of Ukraine and annexing four Ukrainian oblasts in 2022, has proven sincere in his desire to end the war since March 2022 with his offer to withdraw all Russian troops to their pre-war positions in exchange for permanent Ukrainian neutrality outside of NATO which Biden unwisely rejected.
The question US leaders should be asking is how to transform Russia from an adversary into a strategic partner committed to the peace and stability of Europe and open to countering China’s growing global economic hegemony. Putin has long sought to have Russia accepted into the security architecture of Europe. The path to accomplishing that is relatively simple, though it might be politically challenging given the prevailing Russophobia in the West. Negotiating an immediate end to the war in Ukraine along the lines outlined below could serve as the centerpiece for a grand bargain with Russia as I have been advocating for over the past fifteen years to divide and disrupt the Sino-Russian alliance. Such a compromise peace agreement would serve to recognize Russia’s legitimate security interests, formally end NATO’s expansion eastward and normalize all diplomatic and trade ties with Moscow restoring our bilateral relationship to its pre-2014 level.
Here is an outline for a ten-point peace proposal which Trump could employ to end the war in Ukraine immediately after he is re-elected President:
Ten Point Peace Plan
1. In exchange for Ukraine pledging to never join NATO and to modify its constitution accordingly, Russia agrees to drop its demand for permanent Ukrainian neutrality and allow Ukraine to become a Major Non-NATO Ally of the United States. Russia recognizes Ukraine’s right to retain its security agreements with the EU and its bilateral security agreements with Western countries and continue its strategic partnership agreement with the U.S. In return for Russia accepting NATO’s existing borders, the US pledges that NATO will never expand eastward into any additional former Soviet republics.
2. Ukraine commits to prohibit the presence of any allied troops, aircraft, missiles, or bases, including those used for intelligence collection, on its territory for any period or purpose other than embassy security, except in the case of invasion of its territory by a foreign power. Ukraine may continue to have its army trained by NATO military trainers and engage in joint military exercises with NATO providing such training or exercises do not occur on Ukrainian territory. Furthermore, the Russian Federation agrees that Ukraine will be allowed to join the European Union.
3. Ukraine recognizes Russian control of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia along the current line of control as well as Crimea and renounces any attempt to retake them by military force while leaving the door open to negotiating their final status. In return, the Russian Federation pledges to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
4. A four-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone, policed by UN and OSCE peacekeepers, shall be created along the entire length of Ukraine’s border with the Russian controlled oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia to provide increased security for both parties against the possible resumption of military conflict. Both parties pledge to resolve any future disputes peacefully through international mediation if necessary. All Prisoners of War will be returned to their respective countries. Both Ukraine and Russia will terminate their claims of war crimes committed by the other side. Neither party to the conflict will be required to pay reparations of any kind to the other. Ukrainian reconstruction assistance shall be provided by its Western partners under subsequent agreements with them.
5. The number of active-duty Ukrainian military servicemen including National Guard shall be reduced to a level fifty percent lower than they were before the war began with a maximum of 500,000 reserve troops. The size of the Border Guards shall be reduced to its pre-war size. Both the National Guard and the SBGS may be equipped with armored personnel carriers but may not possess any heavy weapons such as tanks, combat aircraft and artillery systems.
6. Ukraine’s ‘strike systems’ including howitzers, heavy mortars, multiple rocket launch systems, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and combat drones shall be limited to a range of no more than forty kilometers while its air defense missile systems shall be limited in range to seventy-five kilometers. The number of Ukraine’s tanks, armored vehicles, ‘strike systems,’ and air defense systems shall not exceed the number of those weapon systems currently possessed by the German Army. The number of Ukraine’s combat aircraft (fixed and rotary wing) aircraft shall be reduced to 100 while the number of its combat ships shall be limited to 24 including up to four light frigates or corvettes. Furthermore, Ukraine commits to refrain from producing or possessing weapons of mass destruction and to close all its foreign biological labs.
7. Full diplomatic relations between the Russian Federation and Ukraine will be restored following the signing of this agreement along with the normalization of trade ties, ending all sanctions, prohibitions and restrictions imposed against each another since 2014. All US economic sanctions against the Russian Federation enacted from 2014 onward shall be immediately rescinded upon the execution of this peace agreement by both parties and all seized public and private Russian financial and economic assets from the US shall be restored to their proper owners. If any Russian financial assets have been liquidated, the government responsible for seizing them shall pay back the Russian government for the value of all assets which they have appropriated. The US shall encourage its western allies to lift all economic and trade sanctions against Russia and restore confiscated Russian assets as well.
8. All Ukrainian far right and ultra-nationalist political parties shall be permanently banned from participation in the Ukrainian government and all such militias shall be permanently disbanded. The Russian language shall be restored as one of the two official languages of Ukraine with equal status to the Ukrainian language. The rights of Ukraine’s Russian minority population as well as the rights of Ukraine’s Orthodox Christian church members shall be guaranteed.
9. The United States and the Russian Federation agree to begin negotiating a New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) II Treaty with a 3,500 operational strategic nuclear weapons cap based on never ratified START II Treaty levels. In exchange for Russia removing all its air and land-based nuclear weapons from Kaliningrad, Belarus and all territories previously controlled by Ukraine, the US will redeploy all its 150 B-61 nuclear gravity bombs from Western Europe to aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific. The US and Russia shall refrain from flying heavy bombers or deploying surface warships within two-hundred miles of the other’s territory, except for the Bering Strait.
10. The US shall ensure that NATO shall not establish military bases in any former Soviet republics which do not belong to the Western alliance, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them apart from the provisions of Article Two of this agreement. Russia agrees not to establish military bases in the Western Hemisphere, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them. In return for Russia withdrawing its troops from Belarus and agreeing to allow Ukraine to remain aligned with the West, all US troops shall be withdrawn from the territory of NATO member states which joined in 1999 or thereafter. Both sides agree to work towards implementing additional reciprocal troop reductions in Eastern Europe by both Russia and NATO as part of a Conventional Forces in Europe II Treaty. Furthermore, the US and Russia agree solemnly pledge to one another that neither side will go to war against each other in the event they are attacked by a third party.
Explaining the terms
Understanding the principal aims of the US and Russia in fighting the war in Ukraine, a workable peace could be realized that would satisfy the minimum requirements of both sides. The proposed peace plan above would serve to accomplish the primary US goal of keeping Ukraine as a US protectorate dependent on the US and its NATO allies for its security with Major Non-NATO Ally status while continuing to be independent from Russia with control of over four-fifths of its internationally recognized territory. It would also achieve Russia’s main goals of Ukraine pledging to never become a NATO member state, having all NATO troops withdrawn from Ukraine and eliminating all Ukrainian ‘strike system’ with ranges of over forty kilometers to establish a ‘sanitary zone’ to protect Russia from attack. Such a peace agreement would “recognize the reality on the ground” as Russia has outlined as being one of its requirements by ending the war along the current line of control.
As part of this agreement, Putin would have to give up his objectives of achieving neutrality for Ukraine and getting Ukraine to surrender additional territories in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts in exchange for achieving the other objectives of Russia’s limited invasion of Ukraine. A US military withdrawal from Eastern Europe would be a core part of the peace plan to reduce our perceived threat to Russia and greatly improve bilateral relations with Moscow. Russia would also achieve its objectives of obtaining a major reduction in the size of the Ukrainian armed forces and achieving “a sanitary zone” along its borders with a forty-kilometer range limit for Ukrainian missile, drone and artillery systems, thus satisfying its legitimate security interests.
If President Trump is re-elected, he would be wise to rescind the ten-year US security agreement with Ukraine as it infringes on his presidential prerogative to conduct foreign policy in the way he sees fit and obligates him to continue providing Ukraine with massive amounts of military assistance which would not be warranted under this peace agreement with the war ended and Ukraine agreeing to strict arms limitations on the quantity and types of various weapon systems. A Democratically controlled Congress could potentially impeach him a third time if he were to suspend aid to Ukraine even temporarily as they did in 2019 using our obligations under the security agreement as a pretext.
In return for Russia dropping its demand for neutrality, the US would replace its ten-year security agreement with Ukraine with a pledge to resume large-scale direct military aid in the event Ukraine were again invaded by a foreign power and agree to Russia’s insistence for a reduction in the size of the Ukrainian armed forces. However, the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership Agreements of August and November 2021 could remain in force as part of the compromise. The provision that neither the US, nor Russia may send heavy bombers or surface warships within two-hundred miles of the other’s territory, except for the Bering Strait given the eighty-five kilometer distance between our two countries would not only provide increased security to both sides but would significantly contribute to eliminating the chances of miscalculation leading to accidental war.
Benefits of this agreement
Before his tragic passing, Dr. Peter Pry, longtime Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, called for the US to negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement with Russia to split the Sino-Russian alliance using Russia’s December 2021 draft mutual security treaty as a starting point. This agreement would be historic as it would be the first time since NATO expansion began that Russia signed a treaty accepting NATOs current boundaries, limiting future NATO expansion and NATO troops deployments in Eastern Europe thus accepting Russia into the security architecture of Europe for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would be a mutual security agreement between the US and Russia that would accomplish the same purpose as what Russia proposed in December 2021–namely to reduce to the absolute minimum the chance that the US ever went to war with the Russian Federation by satisfying the legitimate security interests of both sides. Thus, this agreement would largely achieve Russia’s longtime goal of Russia being incorporated into the security infrastructure of the West in a way that would serve to greatly enhance rather than diminish the security of the US and its European allies.
This negotiated compromise peace agreement would also be very much in Ukraine’s interest to save it from further death, destruction, potential military collapse, and largescale territorial losses while ensuring its continued security and independence from Russia. Ending the war with a permanent peace settlement such as this would allow Ukraine’s 10.2 million refugees to return to their homes without fear of a resumption of military conflict with Russia. It would also allow the long, arduous process of reconstruction and restoration of essential services like electrical power to begin funded by the West.
The additional steps in the last two points of the above peace proposal, involving bilateral arms control agreements with reciprocal concessions, would serve to revolutionize US-Russian relations and bring a complete and final end to America’s Second Cold War with Russia. It would essentially eliminate the Russian conventional military threat to Europe and the Russian nuclear threat to both the US and its NATO, allies transforming Russia from an adversary into a strategic partner and effectively neutralizing Russia’s military alliance with China, thus enabling us to better discourage Communist Chinese aggression. The elimination of the Russian military threat would enable the US to finally implement its much-trumpeted national security pivot to Asia. Under such an agreement, Russia could remain part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization but the core economic and security aspects of its alliance with the PRC would be effectively neutered. Meanwhile, the provision for the US and Russia to negotiate a New START II Treaty with the same arms limitations as the START II Treaty of 1993 would serve as a powerful impetus for the US to rebuild its nuclear arsenal to a level sufficient to restore the credibility of the US strategic nuclear deterrent.
This agreement would commit the US to a policy of non-interference in non-NATO former Soviet republics while Russia committed not to interfere in NATO member states or the Western Hemisphere with an arrangement very much reminiscent of the Anglo-Entente of 1904. The last clause of the proposed peace agreement would serve much the same purpose as the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 did for Imperial Germany until it foolishly decided not to renew it in 1890 leading to the formation of the Franco-Russian military alliance four years later, leading to the outbreak of the First World War which proved so disastrous for Germany and the world. It would essentially be a non-aggression pact in which both the US and Russia would pledge to never attack or wage war against the other including via proxy wars such as the war in Ukraine. Russia would commit to remain neutral in the event China attacked the US. This would represent a major improvement to America’s strategic dilemma in the event of a war with the PRC over Taiwan that would otherwise be likely to be fought not just in the Indo-Pacific but likely in Europe and potentially the Middle East with Iran as well.
Without such an agreement and particularly without a negotiated end to the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Russia would be likely to respond to a US war with the People’s Republic of China by either conducting joint massive cyberattacks and counterspace attacks to disrupt US military operations and deployments. Alternatively, Russia could mass hundreds of thousands of troops in Belarus and Kaliningrad to threaten the Baltics and Poland with invasion, forcing the US to deploy additional military forces to Europe that could otherwise be used to fight China as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines recently warned in her testimony to Congress.
With Russia increasingly aligned with the West, it might be possible to get India, a longtime Russian ally, to join Russia in leaving the Chinese-led BRICS trade bloc, and join a Western trade bloc (perhaps modeled on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) potentially consisting of the US, Canada, the European Union, Japan and Australia as a counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). An incoming Trump administration would also be wise to consider would be to conclude a US-Russia Free Trade Treaty, greatly increase US investment in Russia including dual-use military technology sharing and cooperating with Russia to develop a joint missile defense system as Putin proposed over two decades ago. Such measures would serve to greatly solidify a US-Russia strategic partnership which would completely overturn Chinese assumptions of assured Russian military support in any potential future conflict with the US in the Indo-Pacific.
As part of his campaign’s “Agenda 47” platform, Trump said in a video posted in March that “we have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” One of the principle aims of this proposed comprehensive peace agreement with Russia would be to further Trump’s objective of restructuring NATO by implementing a proposal published in February 2023 by Sumatra Maitra, who serves as a Senior Editor at the American Conservative, for a ‘dormant NATO.’ Maitra describes how the US decision to carry most of the burden for its European allies’ defense has transformed them into US protectorates unwilling to invest sufficiently in their own self-defense from the presumed threat from a resurgent Russia. Like Elbridge Colby, he warns that with US troops positioned as nuclear tripwires along Russia’s borders in eastern Europe, the Baltic states, Poland or Finland could ‘chain gang’ the US into a direct war with Russia.
To resolve this security dilemma, Maitra recommends the US end NATO’s ‘out of area’ operations like the war in Ukraine, close the door on further NATO expansion eastward and then withdraw its troops from NATO’s frontline states while continuing its nuclear umbrella over NATO members, to force our European allies to assume the burden for their own defense. He also recommends that a German, French or British Supreme Allied Commander Europe be appointed to replace the American one to transform NATO into a European-led alliance as I have long advocated. Under his proposal, the US Sixth Fleet would continue to shoulder the burden of the defense of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, but the US would withdraw most of its ground troops and combat aircraft from Europe.
As Maitra notes, the population of the European Union is over 3.5 times higher than Russia’s and its Gross Domestic Product is nearly five times higher than Russia’s in terms of purchase power parity while its members have 515 nuclear weapons so there is no reason it shouldn’t be able to defend itself from potential future Russian aggression. It is time for the US to transfer primary responsibility for the defense of Europe to our European NATO allies to free up the US to focus its military resources for homeland defense and deterrence against the far more pressing threat of Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. As Vivek noted in his foreign policy treatise which he published in the American Conservative last year: “European manpower should be the primary defense of Europe’s frontiers, with America as a balancer of last resort. Since about 1960, the United States has averaged about 36 percent of allied GDP but more than 60 percent of allied defense spending.”
The best way to accomplish this objective would be to reach an accommodation with Russia to eliminate the Russian threat to NATO with a comprehensive, negotiated peace settlement along the lines I have outlined above which respects the vital interests of both our great nations and resolves all our outstanding disputes in a mutually acceptable manner that removes any incentives for Russia to ever resort to war against its neighbors in the future. In accordance with Trump’s reported plan to restructure NATO, all 20,000 US troops would be withdrawn from eastern Europe to their pre-July 2016 Warsaw summit positions with US military forces only remaining in the UK, Germany and Turkey. This withdrawal would force NATOs European members to take up the burden for Europe’s defense and take charge of military deployments along NATO’s eastern frontier with Russia.
Under this agreement, all 150 B-61 nuclear bombs would be withdrawn from Western Europe and redeployed to US aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific where they are needed most to restore our theater nuclear capabilities to enable us to deter Chinese aggression more effectively. The presence of these nuclear weapons in Europe constitutes the single greatest incentivize for NATO members to depend on the US for their security rather than upon themselves in the belief that the US will defend them under all circumstances in the event they are attacked regardless of whether they have spent sufficiently on their armed forces to enable them to contribute to their own defense. Furthermore, their presence in Europe would be unnecessary to deter Russia that is at peace with its neighbors, and which is welcomed into the security architecture of Europe under the terms of this agreement.
The net effect of this agreement would be to in Trumpian terms–‘Make Europe Great Again’–by forcing them to provide for their own defense. Encouraging our NATO allies to restore their ability to defend themselves while the US maintains its nuclear guarantee over NATO member states at the same time we negotiate an end to the Cold War with Russia to minimize the threat they face would serve to greatly enhance America’s strategic autonomy in terms of our ability to focus on dissuading Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region. What the US needs most right now are allies, not protectorates entirely dependent on the US for their security which contribute little to nothing to America’s own security and that is exactly what this proposed strategy would accomplish.
Even if Russia were to return to its former belligerent stance against NATO, US strategic nuclear weapons as well as British and French intermediate-range ballistic missiles would provide a hedge against such a contingency. Germany would be encouraged to build nuclear missiles to bolster NATO’s deterrent capabilities following the transfer of US non-strategic nuclear weapons from western Europe to the Western Pacific. The recent difficulties in getting Germany to increase its military spending to two percent of its GDPsuggest that only if it is welcomed into the ranks of the great (nuclear) powers will Germany have any real incentive to increase its defense spending to sufficient levels to return it to being a major contributor to the collective security of NATO member states.
Implementation of this comprehensive peace proposal would effectively serve to take Russia off the geostrategic chessboard in the ongoing great power competition being waged between the US and China by transforming it from a close Chinese military ally into a non-belligerent power. It would replace the bipolar international order in which the US is facing two allied nuclear superpowers with a tripolar international order in which none of the superpowers are allied against each other thus revolutionizing the geopolitical balance of power in America’s favor. By satisfying Russia’s legitimate security interests, it would also seek to transform Russia from a revisionist power to a satisfied power committed to upholding the new international order.
As previously noted, following the effective neutralization of its military alliance with Russia by the signing of this agreement, China might be more effectively deterred from risking war with the US over Taiwan without the assurance of Russian military support in such a nuclear superpower conflict. Furthermore, implementation of this peace plan could help us begin to replenish the huge number of advanced weapon systems we would need to deter Chinese aggression as we would no longer be supplying them to Ukraine.
While this proposal would not be without political risks, President Trump has made a name for himself as a renowned negotiator and skilled dealmaker and is exceptionally-well suited to negotiate such a comprehensive peace agreement with Russia that safeguards U.S. national security along with that of our allies. In so doing, he could secure his presidential legacy as one of the greatest transformational peace Presidents in US history, In addition, he could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, not just for ending the war in Ukraine and potentially saving the US and Europe from an unnecessary direct war with Russia, but for creating the necessary conditions for an enduring peace, for which future generations of Americans would be deeply grateful.
Virtually from the moment Russia invaded Ukraine, it began offering peace terms to Ukraine to end the war. The day after Russian troops crossed Ukraine’s border, it provided four conditions to Ukraine including a cease-fire, demilitarization (defined by the Russians as a reduction in the size of Ukraine’s active-duty troops and the number of weapon systems it possessed), denazification (banning right-wing neo-Nazi groups from further participation in the Ukrainian government and military) and an agreement to return to permanent neutrality outside of NATO. In exchange Russia promised an end to the fighting and a full Russian military withdrawal from all of Ukraine’s prewar controlled territory.
On February 26th, just two days after the war began, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accepted Russia’s offer to engage in peace negotiations aimed at swiftly ending the conflict. Putin’s desire to end the war quickly is underlined by his nearly successful attempt to end the war in early April 2022 with the Istanbul Agreement between Russia and Ukraine that was to be finalized at a summit between Russian President Vladmir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, committing Russia to withdraw from all eight Ukrainian oblasts it had invaded mere weeks earlier. Sadly, this outstanding peace agreement for Ukraine was subsequently vetoed by President Joe Biden for reasons that will detailed subsequently in this article. Russia has presented innumerable peace offers since yet the Biden administration has repeatedly claimed that Putin doesn’t want peace. The facts of history prove otherwise.
Putin Was “Salivating at the Prospect of Peace” with Ukraine in April 2022
On June 15th, the New York Times published a blockbuster news article including copies of draft Russo-Ukrainian peace agreements which served as the basis of their peace negotiations from March-April 2022. The article reported that a US official believed Putin was “salivating” at the prospect of a peace deal in which Russia would essentially agree to withdraw its troops to their pre-war positions mere weeks after they succeeded in partially surrounding Kyiv and occupying nearly thirty percent of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. In exchange, Ukrainia would agree to neutrality, demilitarization and its expulsion of Western forces to the point where Putin jumped the gun and withdrew all Russian troops from three northern Ukrainian oblasts, including Kyiv, causing Zelensky to abandon the deal entirely. It presents a very different picture of the Russian President whom the Biden administration has misleadingly claimed is bent on the conquest and subjugation of all of Ukraine as the prelude to an invasion of Poland and the Baltic states. Here is an excellent analysis of the article provided by one expert:
Russia’s bid for permanent Ukrainian neutrality was not an outlandish demand. It was a request to revert to Ukraine’s July 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty, which affirmed Ukraine’s “intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs.” This also happened to be the position of elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych before he was ousted in the US-backed Maidan coup of February 2014, as well as the plurality if not majority opinion inside Ukraine over many years. As F. Stephen Larrabee, a former Soviet specialist on the U.S. National Security Council wrote in 2011, “the main obstacle” to Ukraine’s ascension to NATO “is not Russian opposition… but low public support for membership in Ukraine itself.”
In seeking to override both Ukraine’s founding constitution and popular opinion, the Biden administration was therefore not “alarmed” that Ukraine’s neutrality meant “unilateral disarmament.” Instead, it wanted to preserve the US-led militarization of Ukraine as a de-facto NATO proxy on Russia’s border – a project that has led to Ukraine’s unilateral decimation.
The former US official also claimed that White House officials debated Putin’s “intentions”, and questioned whether he was really interested in making peace. “We didn’t know if Putin was serious. We couldn’t tell on either side of the fence, whether these people who were talking were empowered.” Yet the same US official believed Putin was “salivating” at the prospect of peace. The Times also acknowledges that the Russian president appeared to be “micromanaging” the talks from Moscow – which would seemingly bolster the case that he was indeed serious.
Two Ukrainian negotiators also told the Times that they saw the Russians as serious, with one noting that Putin “reduced his demands” over time. For example, after initially insisting that Ukraine recognize Crimea “as an integral part of the Russian Federation,” Moscow dropped that request.
Accordingly, as Ukrainian negotiator Oleksandr Chalyi later admitted, the two sides “managed to find a very real compromise” and “were very close in the middle of April 2022… to finalize the war with some peace settlement.” Putin, he said, “tried to do everything possible to conclude [an] agreement with Ukraine.”
The two sides indeed made so much progress that the Istanbul Communiqué’s final item foresees the possibility of convening a meeting “between the presidents of Ukraine and Russia with the aim of signing an agreement and/or making political decisions regarding the remaining unresolved issues.”
The Times, conveniently, does not mention [UK Prime Minister Boris] Johnson’s visit, nor the West’s open refusal to provide the security guarantees that Kyiv sought to underpin an agreement with Russia. Just as NATO proxy warriors have not been prepared to accept a neutral Ukraine in exchange for peace, US establishment media is not yet prepared to acknowledge their decisive role in sabotaging an early opportunity to end the war.
The great irony that Russia’s primary stated objective has not been to subject Ukraine to Russian domination as Western leaders have misleadingly claimed but rather to make Ukraine neutral, sovereign and independent outside of either America’s or Russia’s sphere of influence/military bloc is lost on most Western policymakers. Meanwhile, the Biden administration desires to keep fighting the war indefinitely to preserve the gains of the CIA backed Maidan coup in expanding America’s liberal empire into Ukraine which would seem to be a much more expansive goal than Russia’s more limited objectives. The administration’s principal objective in prolonging the war is to make Ukraine a permanent US military protectorate as dependent on the US for its security as possible given that were Western military assistance to dry up it would be forced to accept Russia’s demand for neutrality.
Putin’s March 2022 offer to withdraw all Russian troops from Ukraine’s pre-war controlled territories in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality and demilitarization remained on the table until late September 2022. At that time, Russia annexed four Ukrainian oblasts and offered a permanent cease-fire and peace agreement along the current line of control which was Putin’s standing offer until June 14th of this year when he demanded Ukraine withdraw from all four of those oblasts in exchange for peace.
Each time Putin’s peace offers have gotten worse for Ukraine, however, no Western policymaker or national security analyst can credibly claim Putin does not want peace or they had no idea what Russia’s peace terms were. Biden, Zelensky and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson were unwise to reject Russia’s Istanbul peace agreement at the beginning of the war. They were further mistaken in rejecting Putin’s September 2022 Korean-style armistice offer along the line of control and they are foolish now to reject Putin’s latest peace offer which he outlined on June 14th as Russia’s peace terms will only worsen with time as Ukraine begins to run out of troops necessary to stop Russia from overrunning much if not most of eastern Ukraine and partially surround Kyiv again. On the other hand, there has not been a single serious, viable peace offer presented by Ukraine or the West to Russia since April 2022. Not one. Yet Biden and Zelensky continue to falsely claim, in an exercise in cognitive dissidence, that it is Putin, rather than themselves, that doesn’t want peace.
Biden’s Never-Ending Military Escalation Spiral
In virtually all prior nuclear superpower conflicts between the US and Russia during the Cold War, US Presidents chose diplomacy to resolve potential conflicts that they knew had the potential to escalate to the nuclear level. The most notable case of this was during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when President John F. Kennedy chose to provide more concessions to the Soviets than the US received back, pledging not to attack Communist Cuba, thereby renouncing the Monroe Doctrine for the first time in nearly 140 years while also withdrawing US nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy. He did so in exchange for the Soviets withdrawing the nuclear missiles from Cuba in order to save the lives of tens of millions of Americans who would have perished in a nuclear war with Russia. Similarly, when the Soviets crushed freedom fighters in Hungary in 1956 and when they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson wisely chose not to respond militarily in recognition of the spheres of influence agreed to under the Yalta Agreement at the end of the Second World War, refusing to send so much as a single bullet to help either enslaved nation defend themselves against an onslaught by the Red Army. Not even President Ronald Reagan made any attempt to liberate East Germany militarily even though it was positioned in the heart of Central Europe.
President John F. Kennedy meeting with Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit in June 1961. When faced with the prospect of a nuclear war over Soviet nuclear MRBM’s deployed in Cuba, JFK chose to negotiate a diplomatic agreement with the Soviets to avert a potential nuclear exchange and save the lives of tens of millions of American citizens.
Since the war in Ukraine began nearly two and a half years ago, Putin has been doing everything he can do to limit the war in Ukraine both in terms of severity and duration, while also trying to contain the war to Ukraine to prevent it from spreading to a full-scale war between Russia and NATO in accordance with the terms of an agreement with the US back in November 2021. In contrast to Putin’s surprising strategic forbearance in refusing to retaliate directly against NATO countries for their provocative proxy strikes on military and civilian targets deep inside Russia, the Biden administration, has disregarded all the Cold-War era nuclear guardrails, and has abandoned all the lessons of the Cold War, as to how to keep the nuclear great power peace. They have been engaging in what amounts to a diplomatic temper tantrum over Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine that has persisted over the past nearly two and a half years now, refusing to discuss a peaceful diplomatic solution to a war being waged on the farthest fringes of Eastern Europe being fought over whether Ukraine should return to being a neutral power or not.
The administration has continued to escalate its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine over the past year authorizing the transfer of longer-range missiles to Ukraine and authorizing their use against targets using US targeting data provided by US military and intelligence personnel who are likely assisting them in firing the missiles. Until recently, Biden honored the terms of its November 2021 agreement with Russia to only allow Ukraine to use US weapons to attack Russian forces in territories it annexed from Ukraine in exchange for a solemn Russian pledge it would not attack any NATO member states. However, in late May, Biden made the decision to violate the terms of the administration’s November 2021 agreement with Russia setting guardrails for an upcoming Russo-Ukrainian War, by authorizing Ukraine to use long-range US missiles to strike anywhere inside Russian territory that Ukraine claims is being used as a staging area for a future attack. This decision crosses a huge Russian redline in the process, presumably relieving Putin of having to keep his reciprocal pledge not to directly attack NATO member states.
The Biden administration has publicly stated that its motivation in wanting Ukraine to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian is to attempt to eliminate Russia as a peer competitor even though the US has no discernible interest in weakening Russia at all, let alone risking the deaths of over 250 million Americans to do so. After the Ukrainian cluster munitions attack that killed four Russian civilians and wounded 140 more on a Crimean beach, the US Ambassador was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry and was told, not that Russia might retaliate to this US backed strike on Russian civilians but that it would retaliate against the US for this attack. As Dr. George Beebe, who served as a national security advisor to former Vice President Dick Cheney, has stated, the administration has proven completely oblivious to Russian warnings that the cumulative effect of US escalatory actions could cause Russian leaders to feel compelled to escalate to the nuclear level to force the US to cease its attacks against Russia. In a recent article in Time magazine, he warned:
“A key question now being debated within Russia’s foreign policy elite is how to restore America’s fear of nuclear escalation while avoiding a direct military clash that might spin out of control. Some Moscow hardliners advocate using tactical nuclear weapons against wartime targets to shock the West into sobriety. More moderate experts have floated the idea of a nuclear bomb demonstration test, hoping that televised images of the signature mushroom cloud would awaken Western publics to the dangers of military confrontation. Others call for a strike on a U.S. satellite involved in providing targeting information to Ukraine or for downing an American Global Hawk reconnaissance drone monitoring Ukraine from airspace over the Black Sea. Any one of these steps could lead to an alarming crisis between Washington and Moscow. Under the circumstances, mistakes and misperception could prove fatal even if—as is likely—neither side desires a confrontation.”
Russia has many options available to it to retaliate including counterspace attacks that destroy or disable US satellites, major cyberattacks against US infrastructure, a Russian backed terrorist strike against the US homeland or kinetic attacks against key US substations that could bring down part, or even all, of the US electrical power grid for a few weeks or more. Putin might even decide to covertly transfer supersonic Club-K container nuclear cruise missiles to Communist Cuba, presenting the US with a fait accompli in what would amount to a Second and far more serious Cuban Missile Crisis played out in 2024-25.
But perhaps the most effective way that Russia could retaliate would be with a low-yield nuclear demonstration air burst above the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Even worse, the first sign that the US has crossed Russia’s nuclear redline might end up being a mushroom cloud above NATO HQ in Brussels. Russian media is reporting that there is evidence that Ukraine is trying to make a ‘dirty (radiological) bomb’ for a false-flag operation for which Russia will be blamed. This is the same accusation Russia made in October 2022 when US intelligence was warning there was a 50% chance that Russia would use one or more non-strategic nuclear weapons against Ukraine to force it to capitulate and force the Biden administration to de-escalate and accept a peace agreement on terms dictated by the Russian Federation. Accordingly, this suggests Russia may once again be seriously considering nuclear escalation in Ukraine to force Ukraine’s surrender. In April 2022, Russia’s vast arsenal of non-strategic nuclear weapons, numbering 35-70 times more than the US has, is Putin’s trump card to swiftly win the war in Ukraine at any time he chooses, likely by October. Biden would immediately de-escalate to avert a nuclear exchange.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressing a joint session of Congress on December 21, 2022. Ironically, Zelensky was elected as Ukraine’s President on platform of peace with Russia yet his personal ambition for perpetual political power as well as his desire for further self-enrichment have caused him to support a policy of indefinite war and military escalation with Russia instead.
The Ukraine NATO Membership Conundrum has a simple answer. Knock it off…
A letter signed by sixty national security experts called on NATO members not to offer Ukraine a bridge to NATO membership at the upcoming NATO summit which was held from July 9-11th in Washington, DC., warning it would backfire by incentivizing Russia to continue fighting its war against Ukraine and perhaps even lead to the outbreak of a Third World War between Russia and NATO. Despite the fact that French President Emmanual Macron has revealed, the public US commitment to NATO membership for Ukraine to be a well-constructed farce, stating that the US is one of two major countries that have consistently opposed Ukraine’s NATO membership behind the scenes, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has since announced that Ukraine’s path to NATO membership is “irreversible,” but that it cannot join until the war has ended and it has successfully defeated Russia. This statement is a recipe for endless war as Russia’s legitimate demand that the US issue a written guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO even though this is the key concession necessary to end the conflict and along with it the increasing death and destruction in Ukraine.
Legendary reporter Seymour Hersh has revealed that the Biden administration blocked promising Ukraine-Russia peace talks late last year that could have ended the war on mutually acceptable terms to Moscow and Kyiv. As noted in this article, Seymour Hersch reported that General Zaluzhnyi was attempting to negotiate a deal with Russia in which Russia would not object to Ukraine NATO membership so long as there were no allied troops or bases in Ukraine in return for Ukraine’s recognition of Russian control of Crimea and the other four annexed oblasts. Hersch also reports that Zelensky fired Ukraine’s most popular General Valerii Zaluzhnyi as Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in February allegedly for trying to negotiate a peace agreement after Biden threatened to hold up $45 billion in US aid if Ukraine didn’t end its covert peace negotiations with Russia. At the time of his firing earlier this year, it was reported that not only was Zaluzhny running far ahead of Zelensky in Ukrainian presidential polls but there were rumors that he was mulling a potential military coup against Zelensky so he could institute an immediate cease-fire and armistice with Russia to prevent any additional Ukrainian territory from being conquered by Russia and to save hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers from having to die in an unwinnable war.
Forging a Grand Bargain Between the US and Russia requires a sincere and honest desire for dialogue that leads to Peace. Nothing else will do…
Sumantra Maitra, who serves as Director of Research and Outreach, at the American Ideas Institute, wrote an excellent article in The American Conservative entitled a “A Vision for NATO.” In his article, he calls for the US to conclude a grand bargain with Russia which I have been arguing for since 2009 to enable the US to neutralize the Sino-Russian military alliance and effectively remove Russia from the grand chessboard between the US and the PRC, thereby weakening Communist China and radically revising the international order in America’s favor. Since 2003, I have argued that the US should significantly reduce its military forces in Europe and Asia to reduce its threat profile to Russia and China in the hopes of getting them to stop viewing the US as the main enemy and getting them to focus more on each other as potential threats to further divide and disrupt the Sino-Russian military alliance.
In this article, Maitra suggests the core elements of a potential peace deal ending the war in Ukraine which could help transform Russia from a Chinese military ally against America into a neutral state:
“The Russian foreign ministry’s core conditions [for NATO expansion] were that Moscow might agree to enlargement as long as there were “no deployments of nuclear weapons or allied combat forces on the territory of new member states.” Both conditions were immediately agreed upon by NATO and the U.S…Russia is a reactive, not a revanchist power…
The history of NATO–Russia relations was not etched in stone, and it could have been altered several times by a grand bargain with Moscow, the glimpses of which were visible throughout…
If a country is an inherently reactive power, then realism dictates that there are ways to achieve a grand bargain with that country. A Russia satiated and relatively neutral in the European balance, similar to her post-Napoleonic posture, would be a net benefit for an America seeking to shift its gaze to the east as a peer rival emerges…Imperial overstretch is as much a reason for great power implosion as all-out war. Both need to be avoided. By any plausible metrics, NATO in its current form is an ever-pressing burden on American shoulders. It need not be. If a grand bargain between Russia and a dormant defensive NATO helps Washington focus more on the rising dark clouds in the east, then that’s a good compromise. To reach that stage, drastic and original measures might be necessary.”
It is noteworthy that Russia’s core conditions for the first NATO expansion in the 1990s have not changed in the last three decades when Russia demanded “no deployments of nuclear weapons or [Western] allied combat forces on the territory of new member states.” The US agreed to those demands and respected them until the July 2016 Warsaw summit when Obama decided to deploy 5,000 combat troops along Russia’s borders for the first time. Even as late as immediately before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was declaring that US troop deployments to Poland, Romania and the Baltic states were only temporary, not permanent in furtherance of this long-time understanding. After the war began, Putin stated he didn’t have a problem with Finland and Sweden joining NATO so long as allied combat troops were not deployed and allied military bases were not set up there. Accordingly, it is possible that Russia might agree to Ukraine becoming a formal non-NATO ally provided these Russian core conditions were agreed to in writing by the US and its NATO allies particularly if it was agreed to as the centerpiece of such a grand bargain between Russia and NATO.
Maitra also recently wrote a book entitled “The Sources of Russian Aggression: Is Russia a Realist Power?”, which serves to further advance his convincing thesis that Moscow, far from being the revanchist power Biden claims it to be, instead views itself as a champion of the poor, the weak, the underrepresented, and it wishes to bring back a new balance of power, and thus the book received glowing reviews from most all foreign policy realists.
Russell Vought, who serves as President of the Center for Renewing America wrote: Sumantra Maitra’s book attempts to address a simple but timely question: when does Moscow choose war, and when, in a similar situation, does Moscow refuse to pull the trigger. This question is of paramount importance, as on that hinges war and peace in Europe and American overstretch in that theater. Studying Russian reactions in three different historical case studies in light of four different variables, Maitra argues that Moscow is a status-quo power and only resorts to aggression when her perceived core strategic and geographic interests are threatened but otherwise lacks the will and capability to be a continental hegemonic threat, even when Russia is and will remain a localized irritant.
The central argument is important, different from the hyperbolic literature of our times, and provides some actual confidence building measures to the Euro-Atlantic strategic community. One hopes that this book not only in the Pentagon and the State Department but will also be read in the halls of the Congress and might influence the Congress to return to a classical, detached, and prudential Washingtonian grand-strategy towards Europe.
Yoram Hazony, who serves as Chairman of The Edmund Burke Foundation also offered high praise for the book. Indeed, from where most of us sit, Russia looks to be an aggressive expansionist power. But Sumantra Maitra’s new book turns the tables on this view. Amassing a battery of sources on Russia’s reactions to NATO’s eastward expansion and the US and EU-backed “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia — Maitra presents a disturbingly strong case for seeing Russia as having been pushed into anti-Western belligerence by a reckless liberal internationalism that just didn’t know when to stop.
Maitra notes that Russia, rightly or wrongly, views the US and NATO as the revanchist power attempting to expand NATO 1,100 miles eastward since the end of the Cold War and views itself as a reactive, status quo power defending the balance of power in Europe. Given the fact that NATO has doubled the number of its member states over the past quarter century and has expanded its territory by eighty-six percent after Russia disbanded the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself while withdrawing all Russian troops from those countries, it is understandable that they feel that way. While Maitra did not explicitly specify it in his article, for a comprehensive peace agreement to succeed along the lines he is advocating would have to be minimally acceptable to Russia likely along the lines of Putin’s most recent peace proposal while also being minimally acceptable to proponents of the war in Ukraine as well.
For those who argue that a comprehensive peace agreement with Russia is not possible while Putin remains in power, it should be remembered that Russia offered very comprehensive draft mutual security agreements with the US and NATO in December 2021 in a very sincere attempt to avert the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Sadly, both the Biden administration and NATO leaders rejected these mostly reasonable agreements in their entirety. One of my next articles will focus on a review of the specific provisions of Russia’s draft mutual security agreements to determine which are in Western national security interests and the few that would need to be revised for the Western powers to agree to them.
A grand bargain with Russia might also include a full US military withdrawal from Eastern Europe restoring the pre-July 2016 status quo perhaps as part of a Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) II Treaty that is a potent idea which was championed by Trump and many of his advisors. The idea would be to transform Russia from a revanchist to a happily satisfied, and secure power, thus removing any incentive for Russia to attack its western neighbors ever again. With the Russian threat to Europe ended, the US could transfer leadership of the NATO alliance to the UK, France and Germany and a newly elected US President could withdraw all our ground troops from Europe to refocus on the threat from the People’s Republic of China. In fact, recent media reports suggest that might be exactly what President Trump is planning to accomplish in a second term.
In his June 14th address President Putin again called for the establishment of a new security architecture in Europe that recognized the security interests of all states including Russia to ensure international peace and stability as it proposed most recently in December 2021 with draft mutual security treaties with both the US and NATO which could be used as a basis for negotiations for a grand bargain between the US and Russia. Accordingly, the U.S. should come to an agreement with Russia that if it agrees to a modern day Reinsurance Treaty and pledges to remain neutral in the event of the outbreak of a potential conflict with Communist China over Taiwan, which the U.S. would nevertheless do everything it could do to avoid by implementing a new strategy to counter China though entirely peaceful means, the U.S. will rescind all remaining economic sanctions on Russia, and provide a written guarantee that Ukraine will never join the NATO alliance.
During his address, Putin also appeared to express interest in restoring “good neighborliness” with Ukraine, likely in reference to Russia’s 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership with Ukraine. He appears sincere in his desire for the restoration of a lasting peace, friendship and partnership between Russia and Ukraine as was the case before the CIA-backed Maidan coup overthrew democratically elected Ukrainian President Yanukovych. Accordingly, it is very possible, if not likely, that he would support a renewal of this treaty with Ukraine after the war has ended along with a re-establishment of robust, mutually beneficial trade ties.
As part of such a comprehensive peace agreement with Russia, western NATO countries would join the US in withdrawing all of their troops from eastern Europe in exchange for a Russian military withdrawal from Belarus and the Kharkiv region of Ukraine. Such a mutual security agreement could permanently end hostilities between NATO and Russia long-term by recognizing Russia’s legitimate security concerns in Europe, thereby ending the specter of a nuclear Third World War between NATO and Russia, which today is greater than it was even during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 while effectively serving to neutralize the existential threat posed by Russia’s military alliance with China.
Yours,
Dr Churchill
PS:
Notable Excerpt:
“”In December 2021, Biden rejected Putin’s offer to guarantee Russia would not invade Ukraine in exchange for the US issuing a written guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would never join NATO. Trump stated Russia would never have invaded NATO if he had been President implying that he would have guaranteed Ukraine would never join NATO. In contrast to Biden’s stated strategy of fighting an unwinnable war to the last Ukrainian, Trump has repeatedly argued for ending the administration’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine as quickly as possible both on national security and humanitarian grounds with his statements that “we have to stop the killing in Ukraine.” In September 2022, he even offered to serve as a Special Envoy to lead a US delegation to meet with the Russians to negotiate an end to the war to prevent the outbreak of a Third World War that would likely quickly escalate to the nuclear level. During the debate, Trump again promised he would end the war in twenty-four hours after becoming President by negotiating a peace deal in a face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Late last month, it was reported by Axios that two of President Trump’s top military advisors, Lt General Keith Kellogg (USA Ret) and Fred Fleitz, who served as Chief of Staff to National Security Advisor John Bolton, briefed him regarding a laud worthy, yet straightforward cease-fire proposal he could use to implement his pledge to end the war immediately after he is inaugurated President. The plan reportedly calls for the US to pressure Zelensky to agree to a permanent cease-fire agreement and begin negotiations for an armistice or peace agreement ending America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine with a just and lasting peace that would represent a “win-win” outcome for Ukraine, Russia, and NATO or at worst a Wilsonian “peace without victory” for all parties to the conflict. “”